The Brimstone Wedding [181-142-066-4.6]

By: Barbara Vine.

Category: Fiction Mystery

Synopsis:

The clothes of the dead won't wear long. They fret for the person who
owned them.

Unlike the other residents of Middleton Hall, Stella is smart and
elegant and ii control. She keeps her secrets to herself, revealing
nothing of her past. Only Jenny, her young care assistant, seems aware
that her heart harbours a dark, painful mystery. And only she can
prevent Stella from carrying it to the grave.


Last printing: 05/31/02
`;38+' Jacket photograph of churchyard by Simon Marsden The Marsden Archive
Author photograph by Paddy Cook

ISBN: 0-2750-670-86611-3

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London w8 577, England Penguin
Books USA Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

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M4V 332 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New
Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
England

First published 1996

13579 10 8642

First edition

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[SBN 0-670-86611-3 (trade paperback)

Many of the superstitions in this novel come from A Dictionary of
Superstitions by lona Opic and Moira Tatem, for whose knowledge and
expertise I am very grateful.

The clothes of the dead won't wear long. They fret for the person who
owned them. Stella laughed when I said that. She threw back her head and
laughed in the surprisingly girlish way she had. I was telling her Edith
Webster had died in the night and left cupboards full of clothes behind
her, and she laughed and said she'd never known anyone as superstitious
as me.

Her granddaughter's here now, I said, handing her things out to everyone
who'll take them. You know what they say, as the body rots the clothes
rot.

Is that what they say, Genevieve? Who are they?

I didn't reply. She was teasing me and didn't expect an answer. But I
like it when Stella calls me Genevieve, because though I'm Jenny to
everyone else, always have been since I was born, I was christened
Genevieve. My dad called me after a vintage car in a film, if you can
credit it, and to most people it's a bit embarrassing, but the way
Stella says it it's got a pretty sound. Of course Stella has got a nice
voice, what you'd call a beautiful voice, even though she's old and past
having a nice anything really.

I told her some more about Edith, how Sharon found her at seven o'clock
when she went in with her tea and how the granddaughter was there within
the hour, though she hadn't been so conscientious about coming when her
nan was alive, I'm not a specially tactless person or insensitive and
I'd have stopped if I thought it upset Stella hearing about another old
lady dying. But I could tell she was interested. The truth, I suspect,
is that Stella thinks of herself as quite young compared with Edith, who
was ninety-four, she thinks she's got a long time left yet, and that
she's one of those cancer patients who'll live for years.

She's been at Middleton Hall for six months. We all look after all the
residents but we each have three in our special care, and

Stella is mine along with Arthur Harrison and Edith. Now Edith's gone I
suppose I shall get someone new but not someone who needs a lot of care,
I hope. That's not because I'm not a hard worker, I'm on my feet most of
my eight-hour shift at 3.50 an hour, which is hardly brilliant and
Arthur's always ringing his bell for me, but the fact is I don't want to
have to give less time to Stella. I like her, you see. I actually like
her, and that's not something I can say about Arthur or Maud Vernon or
any of the rest of them. I'm sorry for them, I want to help make their
lives as pleasant as can be, but as for liking, they're past all that.
It's as if they've gone into a twilight world where they've forgotten
everything, don't really know where they are half the time and call you
by the names of all their relations until you remind them you're Jenny.
But Stella is different. Stella is still a person in the land of the
living. The other day she said to me, I don't think of you as a nurse,
Genevieve. I think of you as my friend.

I was pleased. I suppose that was because she's what my nan would call a
lady, in a different class from me anyway, but all I said was she was
right not to think of me as a nurse, I'm a care assistant, I've the
experience but no qualifications. She smiled. She's got a nice smile,
her teeth are all her own and quite white still.

I came here because of you, you know.

She always says that. It's silly of course, it isn't true, but it amuses
her to say it. Her son took her round a good many residential homes in
Suffolk and Norfolk for her to choose the one she liked best.

I was in the lounge with Edith when they came in, and Stella's regular
joke is to say she took a fancy to me and decided on Middleton Hall
because I worked there. It wasn't the -house or the grounds or the food
or the private bathroom that decided her, but me.

And I was right, she said. It's made all the difference to me to have
you here.

She likes me to talk about the village and my family, and God knows
there are enough of them, and I told her about my mum and Len the lover
and his mother who inherited a fur coat from her sister which fell into
rags the first time she had it on. I was telling her about holes
appearing in a dead woman's clothes as if the moth had been at them
when, to my surprise, she reached out and took my hand. First she
squeezed my hand and then she held it quite lightly. She must have held
it for about five minutes before giving it another squeeze and releasing
it. Then Lena put her head round the door and made faces at me the way
she does, so I got up I didn't leap up, I wouldn't give her the
satisfaction and when I looked at Stella I saw her wink at me.

She winked at me and she smiled and for a moment you could see what
she'd looked like when she was my age. I hope she'll show me some photos
of herself when she was young, I'm quite curious to see them. I said she
hadn't got anything nice left any more, but that was a bit sweeping,
that wasn't exactly true. Actually, she's wonderful for seventy. Her
skin isn't all that wrinkled except round the eyes and her eyes are
still a strong bright blue. Of course her hair is white but it's thick
and wavy and she'll never wear a wig like some of them do. Sadly, she
won't live long enough to have to. She always dresses nicely, in a dress
and stockings and proper shoes, and I don't know why it should but that
irritates Lena. Behind her back, and not always behind her back, she'll
refer to her as Lady Newland, or the duchess', and grin to take the
sting out of it. I suppose she'd rather Stella got herself into a -track
suit and cardigan like most of them do.

I can't explain why, but I think people ought to take more care of
themselves when they get older, do the best they can. Stella likes me to
manicure her nails and set her hair and I'm happy to do it.

So you can see she's rather special. If I'm her friend, she's mine,
though so far I don't know much about her, while she knows plenty about
me: how long I've been married, for instance, that I've lived at Stoke
Tharby all my life, that my husband's called Mike and he's a builder, my
mum keeps the pub and my dad lives in Diss, and a whole lot of other
things. And if there's one thing she doesn't know, the biggest thing in
my life really though it shouldn't be, I may even tell her that some
day. But all I know about Stella is that she had to sell the -house she
had in Bury Saint Edmunds to afford the fees here, and of course I know
about her children because they come and visit. Well, children one's my
age and the daughter has teenage kids of her own.

Bury is about twenty miles south of here, beyond the Breckland and the
country we call the plou. She sold up when she got too tired and too ill
to be on her own any more and having someone to look after her had its
attractions. It's what I've read somewhere is called a social
phenomenon, the number of residential homes there are these days, and
the hundreds of old people who fill them. And nearly all of them have
had to sell their -houses to find the fees, thus robbing their
descendants if you like to look at it that way of what they might have
inherited.

It goes into the pockets of people like Lena. Still, Middleton Hall is
one of the best of them, a manor -house once, with beautiful grounds,
gardens with flower beds shaped like hearts and diamonds cut out of the
lawn, cypress hedges and yew hedges, a lily pond and great stands of old
chestnut trees. I will say for Lena, she loves animals and we've got two
labradors here and three cats that are supposed to be so good around
geriatrics. Mind you, for what they pay a week they ought to have all
mod cons and pets and gourmet food, to say the least. It was quite a
surprise to me to see Sharon serving drinks to the residents before
dinner the first day I came, dry martinis no less, that you read about
in American books, with Japanese rice crackers and macadamia nuts in
little dishes. But why not? I hate to see old folks treated like kids.

Stella has one of the nicer rooms here, and with a view all the way
across the meadows to the river and the woods beyond. Her room has
french windows and she can step out directly on to the terrace and the
lawns if she likes, though she seldom does. Of course she goes into the
lounge with the others and she's always there for her pre-dinner drink,
it's always gin-and-something that was so fashionable when she was
young. She usually has her dinner in the dining room, though at her own
table, she won't share, she's rather reserved, but she spends a lot of
time in her room, reading books, watching television and every day she
does a crossword puzzle, one of those tricky ones that I can't even get
started on.

All the rooms have a single bed and a clothes cupboard, a coffee table
and a couple of armchairs, and some of the residents bring in pieces of
their own furnitchure. Stella has brought a desk. It's walnut with a
complicated grain and very highly polished. She must polish it herself,
because I'm sure Mary doesn't. She has her photographs and her books and
she's hung some pictures on the walls. There's nothing mysterious about
the photos, there's one of Marianne that looks as if it was done for her
agent to send to TV prodjucers or whatever they do, and one of Richard
in a black cloak thing and those hats they wear at universities, and
there's another of Marianne's children when they were little and before
they went in for black leather and more rings in their ears than on a
curtain pole. Any picture of Stella's late husband is what you might
call conspicuous by its absence.

I don't know what his name was or what he did or when he died or
anything about him and that's what I mean by mysterious. Stella is a
mystery. She never talks about her husband, never even mentions that she
had one. I could add that she never talks about the past at all and
that's quite amazing in a place like this because the past is the only
thing most of them talk about. It's their sole topic of conversation.
And for some of them, Maud Vernon for instance, it's the distant past,
it's as if the world stood still after 1955. The other day she asked me
if chocolate was still rashioned.

But Stella lives in the present and that's what we talk about. We talk
about what's been on the news and what's on telly, new films that have
come out, though niether of us are likely to see them till they're on
video, whether skirts are going to be six inches above the knee or a
foot below it, what's happening in the village and what's happening at
Middleton Hall, and we talk about what I've been doing or as much as I
let her know I've been doing. She says she misses me on my days off and
I have to admit that I miss her. The truth is she talks about herself
very little, so why is it I'm beginning to get this feeling she wants to
talk about herself a lot? Because of the way she sometimes looks at me,
summing me up? Because of her abrupt changes of subject, as if she'd
meant to make a sudden confession? Perhaps it's more on account of the
sentences she starts to speak and then breaks off, smiling or shaking
her head.

I get to work at eight, which is fine with me as I'm an early riser and
when Mike's away, as he mostly is in the week on this new job, there's
not much to do at home. It's only a couple of miles from the village to
the nursing home. The first thing I do when I get there is pick up the
post. The papers and the post are left in a metal box with a lid that's
fastened on to the back of the sign at the gates that says Middleton
Hall: Residence for the Elderly', with, for some unknown reason, a
picture of a badger at one end and a bluebell at the other.

In the post box are always a whole bundle of newspapers but not many
letters and postcards. Some of the old people never get a letter and to
get more than one a week is rare.

On the morning of Edith Webster's funeral, which incidentally was the
13th of the month, there were just three envelopes in the box, two for
Misses Eileen Keep, which is Lena's real name, and one for Misses S.M.

Newland. Of course there was the usual stack of papers as well as
Arthur's Economist and Lois Freeman's Woman's Own. The letter for Stella
was in an envelope made of thick brown paper, about five inches wide and
maybe a foot long. It was thick, as if something stiff was folded up
inside it. I thought I knew what that something was and I didn't much
like it.

The dogs came leaping out to meet me the way they always do, jumping up,
and Ben, who's a bit forward, tried to lick my face. The care assistants
don't wear uniforms the way proper nurses do, just white nylon overalls
over our ordinary clothes, but I was dressed for Edith's funeral, so I
pushed the dogs down and got quite severe with them. When I'd put my
overall on and trainers on my feet and laid out everyone's newspaper
marked with their names on the table in the lounge, I went along to
Stella's room with her letter.

She was up but not dressed. Sharon or maybe Carolyn had brought her
breakfast and she was sitting at the table in her dressing-gown. Stella
has a black quilted satin dressing-gown with red satin binding round the
collar and the cuffs. It's really what my mum calls a -housecoat. She'd
obviously had her bath and her hair Was combed but she looked a bit
washed out, the way you do in the mornings when you're her age. If she
hadn't done her make up yet she'd painted her nails, and they were dark
crimson. I wish she wouldn't and I wish she wouldn't ask me to do it as
she sometimes does. It looks ugly on old hands with purple veins, but I
can't tell her. It's not something even a friend can tell you.

There's no roughness in Stella's voice and it doesn't sound old but like
the voice of a clever girl at one of those fancy private schools who's
had no experience of life and no hardship. It sounds untouched, if
that's possible. She said, Good morning, Genevieve, the way she always
does, and smiled at me and asked me how I was, and I said what I always
say, asked her if she'd had a good night and how she was feeling.
Although I'm supposed to leave it in the lounge along with the other
papers, I'd brought up her Times and I handed it to her with the thick
brown envelope.

It's funny how when people are really anxious to look at something their
faces don't light up or their eyes get narrow the way they do on telly.
What they do is go blank. Stella's face went absolutely expressionless
when I put that envelope into her hands. I had the feeling she wanted to
tear it open and because I was there was forcing herself to go about the
business of un gluing the flap very slowly and methodically.
Indifferently, really. Stella often makes her own bed but she hadn't
that morning, so I busied myself with doing it. I turned my back on her
to pull up the fitted sheet, but when I went round the other side I saw
that she'd taken whatever it was out of the envelope and it was lying in
her lap.

I say whatever it was but of course I thought I knew what it was. I'd
known from the moment I picked it out of the post box. The only thing
that comes in an envelope like that and is on stiff paper like parchment
is a will.

Stella had apparently satisfied herself that all was well, that it was
what she thought it was, and now she felt able to postpone taking a
further look at it. She laid one hand over the top of it and asked me if
I was going to Edith's funeral. I said I always did if it was one of my
own, but I didn't want to dwell on that. I wished there'd been some more
tactful way of saying it. Still, Stella only nodded.

Why aren't you wearing black, Genevieve? You're quite conservative in
some ways, you know, and I was sure you'd be wearing black.

I could have told her the truth, that I hadn't got any black, but that
would only have made her embarrassed, so I took off my overall to show
her my denim jacket and skirt and said what was also the truth. Blue
protects. It's a lucky colour.

I might have known there was a superstition there somewhere. So you need
protection at a funeral?

You need protection everywhere all the time, in my opinion, but I didn't
say that. I told her about my nan wearing a necklace of blue beads to
keep away arthritis.

And does it keep it away?

She's never had an ache or a pain in her life, I said, knowing that
would make her laugh, because maybe my nan wouldn't have even if she'd
never worn the beads.

Stella did laugh, but not unkindly. In my family we all respect the
powers that guard us, my nan and Mum and my sister Janis and my brother
Nick and even my dad, though he denies it. But if refusing to change
your sock if you've put it on inside-out and blaming your troubles on a
green car aren't superstition, I don't know what is. Still, it's not a
word we like. We prefer to talk of supernatural powers or the weird.

Stella hadn't noticed the date, I suppose, or wouldn't have thought much
about it if she had. It made me feel I needed special protection, I
needed luck that day, for I needed the good thing to happen in the
evening. And unless I took steps what chance did I have on the 13th?

When I'd finished the bed, I collected up Stella's washing for the
laundry. She always folds everything and puts it in the laundry bag so
that it's no trouble. Something unusual that morning was that she was
watching me, and watching me intently. I sensed it even when I wasn't
looking at her. I began to have a really powerful feeling that any
minute she was going to break through the barrier and say she wanted to
talk seriously to me. I was growing more and more uncomfortable by the
minute. I went into the bathroom and replaced the towels with fresh
ones, touching Wood all the time, the underside of the counter, the
roller the toilet roll was on, even Stella's wooden-backed hairbrush.

When I came out she'd turned the will over, or turned a page of it over,
and she looked up at me and smiled.

I didn't want that to happen, what I knew was going to happen. Let's
face it, in these places old people are always being well, manipulated
is the word, I think to remember the nurse or the carer in their will.

In the years I've been at Micjdleton Hall I've seen it time and time
again, I've seen Lena herself try it on with at least two of the
residents. Maybe she succeeded with Edith, we shall see, but she was
always talking to her about disposing of one's money to do the maximum
good and remembering those who had been of real service in the evening
of one's days'. That, and telling her she could have her solicitor come
to Middleton Hall if she wanted to, just say the word. I've seen enough
to make me resolve to have nothing to do with it. It made me shiver to
think there were some who'd say I only spent so much time with Stella
because I was after her money. It made me sick to think I might have to
face up to the fact that perhaps I had if I was in that will. So I was
going to take care I wasn't in it. I was going to get fierce and maybe
rude, and of course I didn't want that, I dreaded that. But why else
would she have got on to her solicitors to send her the will? And who
else would be a what-d'you-call-it, a beneficiary, but me that only the
day before she had called her friend? So I didn't smile back at her. I
asked her if she would like the french windows open, it was going to be
another hot day, and she just nodded and said yes please.

Opening those windows, I hung on to wood. I pressed my fingers into the
wood, scared to take them off, and I thanked my stars, my guardian
angel, that I'd put on blue.

Stella said, Genevieve?

Yes? I said, sounding really gruff.

Do you know how pretty you are?

What a shock! You see how touching wood works. Something had deflected
Stella from that will and what she'd intended to say. The powerful wood
had turned her purpose and my blue clothes had protected me. Of course I
didn't answer, I didn't know what to say.

ii Not pretty, she said, no, that's the wrong word. Beautiful. You're a
beautiful girl, Genevieve.

I'm not a girl, I said. I'm thirty-two.

She laughed. Her voice was as sweet as honey and innocent as milk.

That's very young, though you don't know it now. It's a pity you don't
know it. She sighed, I don't know why. Sit down a minute, Genevieve.

I mustn't be long, I said, which is not what I usually say when she asks
me to stay for a bit. But I had my eye on that will. It seemed to be
getting larger. I could almost read This is the last will and testament
of ... on it. We've got a busy morning, I said, on account of me and
Lena and Sharon all going to the funeral at two.

Is your husband in London this week?

Coming back on Friday, I said.

What exactly are the builders doing?

I told her about the three big -houses on the edge of Regent's Park that
were being gutted and turned into luxury flats. She wanted to know where
the men stayed, if it was a hotel or a hostel, and I told her it was a
B. and B. in a place called Kilburn. It's been going on for weeks now
and they don't expect to be finished till Christmas.

You must miss him.

The funny thing is that I did in a sort of way. You can't understand how
I did in my sitchuation, how I could love one man and miss another when
he was away, but I was half-glad I missed Mike. On the other hand, I
hated to be a hypocrite. I just couldn't sit there and tell Stella I
longed for my husband, I couldn't wait till Friday. She was looking at
me in a really penetrating way, and I thought, how can I tell her? It
was crazy thinking I could tell her, even that she was the one person I
could tell. What does she know? Married, widowed, got these two kids,
she's so old. She'll have forgotten what sex is, even if she ever liked
it, and lots of her generation didn't.

Then she gave me a shock.

You told me once you wanted to have children, she said. Is there some
reason you can't? Perhaps I shouldn't ask. If I've been impertinent you
don't have to answer.

Nobody had ever, not ever, asked if they'd been impertinent to me
before. It made me laugh. I couldn't help it. Her eyebrows went up and
she made a funny little cautious sort of smile. I had to say something,
so I said, You know how it is, you leave it so long, I mean, thirteen
years with us, you just keep putting it off. Don't want to lose your
freedom, I reckon. You think to yourself, OK, one day, there's plenty of
time, but there's not really, is there?

No.

Nearly everything I'd said wasn't true. The truth would have taken half
an hour to tell and I didn't know what reception it would get. I stood
up and as I did so she slipped that will back into the envelope.

It was quite a relief, I can tell you. I said, I don't suppose you'd
want to come this afternoon, would you?

To Edith's funeral? She sounded surprised, as well she might. I'd only
asked to get off the subject.

There's a spare -seat in the car. You wouldn't have to go in the crem if
you didn't want. It's going to be a lovely day and the crem's got
beautiful gardens.

The crem? she said.

It took me a second or two to understand she didn't know what that was.

The crematorium, I said, though it's a long word to get one's tongue
round.

She shivered. You know how sometimes when you're cold you hunch your
shoulders and give yourself a shake, you do it purposely, I suppose it
must make you warmer. Stella didn't shiver like that but as if something
from outside affected her and made her body first jump, then tremble.

Why on earth didn't she choose burial?

I don't know, I said. I didn't even know if she had chosen or if Lena
had made that decision. Cremation's more hygienic.

Stella said, quite violently for her, It's horrible!

I expect that's a matter of opinion, I said. We can't all feel the same.
So you won't come then? You could sit outside in the shade.

I don't think so, Genevieve. The garden here is quite beautiful enough.

She didn't say it but I knew it was because she doesn't like being in a
car. She'll go in one for necessity. I mean, she had to when she came
here for instance. The nearest train's at Diss and that's ten miles
away, so she didn't have a choice. But she'll never go in a car for
pleshere, I don't know why not, perhaps she gets car-sick. I wouldn't
ask, it's not my business.

My nan says that blood must always be shed at a funeral. If it isn't the
dead person's ghost will walk. Well, I know there's a lot in these
things, I know you've got to protect yourself and others in this life,
but there are limits. It turned my stomach after my grand ad funeral
seeing a big cut on my nan's hand where she'd let her blood to stop him
walking.

Still, having said all that, I had my doubts after we'd watched Edith's
coffin slide away and the chapel curtains close. It's a small thing
really, but not so small if you don't do it and then something bad
happens. So while Lena and Sharon were sort of leaning forward in their
-seats and covering up their faces to say a prayer, I unpinned the
brooch from my jacket lapel, took a deep breath and stuck the pin into
the ball of my thumb. It only hurt for a second. A big bubble of blood
came welling out.

We all got back into the car and it was as hot as an oven on mark seven
djue to having been locked up in the full sun for three-quarters of an
hour. Sharon sat in the front beside Lena and I was in the back, which
was no hardship to me, as Lena drives like a madbrain. Mike calls where
Sharon was sitting the suicide -seat, and my dad calls it riding
shotgun. Whatever you call it it's the most dangerous -seat in a car,
yet car-sick people usually feel ill through sitting in the back. Maybe
Stella was once in a car accident and that's where she was sitting, in
the suicide -seat.

Going to the crematorium we'd taken the by-pass but coming back Lena
drove us through the village. Through Stoke Tharby, I mean, my village.
She took the road that comes into the High Street by the pub and when I
saw where she was going I realized we'd have to pass the -house. It's
called Rowans but for some reason well, I know the reason I call it the
-house.

Lena came over the brow of the hill and down the other side at a good
sixty. That's crazy, because the road is too narrow for two cars to
pass. Her car's too old to have -seat-belts in the back, so I held on
tight to the -seat in front and if Lena didn't like that she'd have to
lump it. I was glad I'd pricked my finger at the funeral and I was glad
I'd worn blue. There wasn't any wood to touch in the back of Lena's car,
only plastic, plastic everywhere. Lena said it was exhilarating driving
fast and she couldn't wait to get her new car that would do over a
hundred with ease, and I knew she meant when she came into whatever
Edith had left her.

We got to the bottom without mishap. By a piece of luck there hadn't
been anything coming in the opposite direction. Sharon doesn't come from
round here, she commutes from Norwich, so Lena started pointing places
out to her. That's where Jenny lives, she said, the council estate,
though in fact the council has sold off all the -houses including ours
and everybody calls it Chandler Gardens. Everybody but Lena, that is.

She showed Sharon the church, Saint Bartholomew's, and the rectory and
our village hall. She'd slowed down to a snail's pace. They were
thatching a cottage and she wanted Sharon to see. I used to hear about
people well, lovers getting a big thing about the place or the -house
the person they love lives in. Like that song in My Fair Lady about the
street where you live. I used to think that was crazy, how could you get
that way about bricks and mortar? How could it be that a place like that
looks bigger and brighter and more important than all the places around
it? I didn't believe it, I thought it was rubbish. I know it's true now.

And he doesn't even live there. It's a weekend cottage, but he and his
wife don't even come every weekend. Of course he comes mid-week to see
me, and once we met here. But why does my heart beat so hard just when I
see the -house? Why does my mouth go dry? I have to hold my hands tight
to stop them shaking. If you rescue a bird and it dies in your hands,
your hands will shake for ever. Stella wouldn't believe that but it's
true. That's how I feel when I look at the -house, Ned's -house, as if
I'll shake for ever.

It's not a very nice -house, it's not really old and it isn't thatched.

Mainly it's made of wood and joined on to the brick one next door. Lena
wouldn't look twice at it and she didn't. So why does the sight of it
stun me more than any palace would? Why am I turning round and
practically kneeling on the back -seat to go on seeing it till it fades
from view? Lena would have forty fits and so would Stella. My thumb has
healed where I stuck the pin but the blood was shed. Tonight, if I'm
lucky, oh, I must be lucky, he'll phone me and say when we can meet.

I was gazing back at the -house and nearly fell on to the floor when
Lena took the turn too fast. If she knew we were coming into the major
road she gave no sign of it. The High Street was lined with parked cars,
the way it usually is, but I think Lena was looking at it with
half-closed eyes.

Picturesque, isn't it? she said. A wee bit chocolate-boxy, but that's a
detail. It won the best-kept village in Norfolk contest last year,
didn't it, Jenny?

The year before last, I said.

And there's the quaintly named pub, the Thundering Legion. Now I wonder
where that strange name comes from?

I didn't enlighten her. As a matter of fact I don't think even Mum
knows. For years she thought the Roman soldier on the sign was a woman
on account of him wearing a leather skirt. It was Ned told me who else?
Lena pointed out the Weavers -houses and Sharon craned her neck to see,
but I shut my eyes and held between my fingers the luck-bringing fern
leaves I'd picked as we came out of the chapel.

When you deceive people you make fools of them. You make them act
stchupidly, act as if things which are aren't and things which aren't
are. And that's what fools do or people who are mentally disturbed and
we look down on them for it or if we're unkind we laugh at them.

There's a film my friend Philippa's got on video about the sinking of
the Titanic. It was a long time ago, eighty or ninety years, and in
those days men used to treat women as if they were fra'jile creatures
that had to be sheltered from unpleasant or horrible facts. In the film
the men never tell the women that the ship will sink in an hour and
there aren't enough boats. They keep saying, we'll be a bit late getting
to New York, and so the women are ignorant of the true facts and look
complete fools. They say it's so bad for the children to wake them up,
and should they cancel a hairdresser's appointment.

All deception is like that. The deceived person asks if you're ill or
tired when you won't make love to him. You didn't hear the phone when he
phoned last night because you weren't there but he's been deceived and
he says maybe we should have a bedside extension, you can't always hear
it ring when you're upstairs. Unless you're a complete bitch you don't
let yourself think he's making a fool of himself, but the thought is
there deep down. It's the beginning of contempt. I hate saying these
things and I hate doing what I have to do, but I do have to do them. For
a while. Until something changes.

Mostly, I don't lie to Mike. That is, I don't make untrue statements.

I just don't tell the whole truth. When he comes home and asks what I've
been doing, I tell him everything but that one thing. But I'm not such a
lost soul that I don't know that's lying too, that's deliberate
deception. One thing, I resolved I'd never let

Ned come to our -house that's half Mike's -house. I've been to his once.

It was dark and I was careful but next day when I went in the Legion
with Mum's shopping she was alone behind the bar, they'd only just
opened, and she said, Shirley Foster saw you go in Rowans last night.
She gave me a narrow look. I said you'd popped over with their eggs.

Mum keeps a few bantams, so I reckoned that was all right. OK, I'll
remember, I said.

You want to watch your step. She was very cool. She's had two husbands
since my dad and the second one caught her in bed with Len that she
lives with now, so she's not likely to lecture me on morals.

Don't you even think of having Prince Charming to your place. Myra
Fletcher'll have it all over Norfolk by next day.

I didn't know what to say. Mum's all right and she'd never say a word or
drop a hint to a soul, but I couldn't confide in her. I couldn't say, I
love him, I have to see him, we have to meet, because it's like food and
drink, and without him I'd starve to death, because she'd laugh. She'd
give one of her great belly laughs and tell me he'd got it made, hadn't
he? A wife and kid in Norwich and a girlfriend in the country who's got
to be discreet because she's married too. No expenses but his petrol,
can't even take you out for a drink. Oh, I know what she'd say and she
wouldn't believe me if I told her it wasn't like that, that he feels
just the same as me, that I am all his life and without me he'll die. I
can just imagine her comment on that. How old are you, Jenny? Are you
thirty-two or are you fifteen?

Since then we still meet down here but not at his -house and of course
not at mine. He drives down mid-week and because it's summer time and a
lovely summer I find places for us to go that most people don't know
about, hidden places in the fen and the woods. We never see another
soul. Farm workers aren't out in the fields like they used to be when I
was a little kid, it's all machines now, and people don't go for walks
any more. The countryside is empty and in the summer evenings we lie in
the long grass or in a clearing among the trees and make love.

Hardly anyone builds haystacks these days, the hay gets rolled up in
those swiss roll shapes, but the thatchers do, they grow the
old-fashioned long corn for roofs, and last week I found us a haystack
with an opening like a room inside. The summer evenings are long and
warm and I try not to think about what will happen when winter comes.

I didn't say any of this to Mum, of course. I changed the subject. But
as I was leaving she came after me and made me put on her quick thorn
charm. Thorn is supposed to be lucky because they say Jesus was born
under a thorn tree, though I've lived in the country all my life and
I've never seen a hawthorn growing inside a stable. Mum's charm is a bit
of carved wood you hang round your neck on a thong and not very
attractive but I kept it on to save me and Ned from the Shirley Fosters
and Myra Fletchers of this world. I was still wearing it next day and
Stella remarked that it looked interesting'.

That started me off again wanting to tell her about Ned and me. It would
be a great relief to talk and there's no one to talk to. And when she
mentioned Mike and wanted to know if he was going to be away from me for
another week, it was on the tip of my tongue to say something. What
stops me? I think it's something innocent in her eyes, almost childlike.
She's not childish, I don't mean that. I've never heard her say a silly
thing or have any sort of tantrum. But her voice is soft with a really
youthful intonation, simple and genuine I mean there's no side to her,
and those clear blue eyes look at you as if they don't know what secrets
are.

I don't say anything to her because I think she'd be shocked. The world
she's lived in hadn't room in it for love affairs, I suppose I'd better
say adulterous love affairs. Stella is the most refined person I've ever
come across. Dainty is the word my nan would use to describe her. It's
almost as if she's not quite flesh and blood but a porcelain doll, if
they ever make dolls that don't look like little girls but like old
women. She covers her mouth when she coughs and wipes her lips with a
tissue with rosebuds printed on it. And yet none of that seems to go
with those long crimson fingernails of hers. When I look at them they
give me a shock. It's such an odd picture: the wavy white hair, the
touch of face powder and blusher, pearls round her neck, the floral silk
dress, and lying in her lap those gnarled old hands with
sapphire-and-diamond rings and blood-red nails.

Then there's the gin she drinks and the cigarettes she smokes when she
gets the chance. She's often told me about her smoking, how she'd smoked
forty a day since forever, she'd started when she was seventeen.

Somehow it went with the red nails, though not with the sweet voice and
the blue eyes. I've seen enough old Hollywood films on video to know
just what she must have looked like in the forties, with her blonde hair
in long curls and a cigarette in a holder. But I was a good bit taken
aback by what she said.

That's why I've got lung cancer now, but they didn't know it was bad for
you then. Everyone smoked. And the few that didn't well, they were the
greenhorns.

I had to ask her what that meant.

Ninnies. Silly people. Not sophisticated.

I was clearing up her breakfast things and I came round to the bedside
table for the cup she'd had her morning tea in, when I saw the long
envelope containing the will. It was pushed inside the book she'd been
reading. I was wondering where the will was, if maybe she'd had a
solicitor come while I was away on my day off, I was hoping it had gone
and we'd heard the last of it. The next time she spoke it was so softly
I had to ask her to repeat what she'd said.

I said that I don't regret smoking. I enjoyed it. I don't know how I'd
have got through some things without a cigarette.

There wasn't much I could say, so I just smiled and opened the french
windows for her.

If I had my time all over again I'd smoke again, even knowing what I
know.

It's just as well you do feel like that, isn't it? I said.

She gave me one of her very direct looks. No, I don't regret it.

There are some things in my life I regret, some things I regret very
bitterly, but not that.

Is Richard coming to see you today? I said. It was a bit of a stchupid
remark but I reckon what I was doing was veering away from dangerous
ground. And anyway, he often came on a Monday.

I hope so. Perhaps this afternoon. I've had a postcard from Marianne in
Corfu. It's by my bed, have a look at it. Talk about lulling me into a
false sense of security! And while you're over there, would you pass me
that envelope, please, Genevieve? The one inside the book.

I passed it. What choice did I have?

I'd better get on, I said. Arthur wants wheeling outside, it's such a
nice day.

Someone else can wheel him, she said and she took the long envelope in
her hands. Sit down a minute, Genevieve.

Out came the long folded-up sheets of paper again. I was thinking I
probably didn't have the strength to say no, to say, please don't leave
me anything, for I thought as I always do of Ned and me and how money
surely would somehow help us.

Stella held up the paper and said, Do you know what this is?

I said gruffly, Is it your will?

My will? Good heavens, no. Have a look. These are the deeds of a -house.

It was a relief. Temptation had come and I had faced it. I'd known I
couldn't have resisted, but I was glad not to have to try. I put my hand
up to the thorn charm and held it for a moment. She must have thought me
stchupid because I didn't know what the deeds of a -house were and the
first one she handed me meant nothing. It was done in sloping
handwriting with loops and flourishes, a bit the way my grand ad used to
write. I started reading it aloud.

This conveyance is made the twenty-ninth day of July, one thousand nine
hundred and forty-nine, between Thomas Archibald Wainwright of Palings,
Hemingford Grey in the County of Huntingdon, Royal Navy (hereinafter
called the Vendor'), of the one part and William John Rogerson, of ...
She interrupted me. Yes, I've read it. Have a look at this one.

It was typed and looked a lot more modern, though the date was only
fifteen years later. Stella didn't seem to want to hear it so I read it,
or part of it, to myself. On the outside it said:

W.J. Rogerson Esq. to Misses S.M. Newland, and under that, Conveyance of
freehold property known as Molucca and sitchuate at Thelmarsh in the
County of Norfolk. Inside was much the same stuff as I'd read aloud,
only this time the Vendor was this William John Rogerson and the
Purchaser was Stella.

It's a -house I bought in 1964, she said, and her voice had suddenly
become serious and quite heavy. She might have been talking about some
very important step she had taken, one of the most important of her
life. Perhaps she was. She raised her eyes from the other papers she was
holding, looked at me and looked away. This is just between you and me,
Genevieve. It's not ... she hesitated and seemed to be looking for the
right word common knowledge.

What was I supposed to say to that? I handed back the deeds. She put
them into the envelope with the others. Would you come upstairs with me?

Pardon? I said.

I want to show you something.

Stella can walk quite well. She can't go fast because she gets
breathless, but there's nothing wrong with her legs, she's not arthritic
like Maud or Gracie. I offered her my arm but she shook her head. The
main staircase at Middleton Hall is wide and quite shallow, but
difficult to climb because the treads are made of polished wood and
there's no carpet. It used to puzzle me why there wasn't a carpet and
then I realized it's because Lena doesn't want the old people nipping up
and down stairs. It suits her better to have them go slowly, clinging on
to the banisters, or, preferably, staying in their rooms or the lounge
so she knows where they are. Stella kept to the side and held the
banister. Seeing that old hand of hers with the young girl's red nails
clutching on to the slippery wood made me feel sorry for her again. And
I felt angry with Lena for not having a chair lift.

Considering what they all pay, surely she could find a few hundreds for
one of those.

Stella had to stand still at the top to get her breath. I hadn't had the
faintest idea where she was taking me because I'd forgotten that it
wasn't all residents rooms up here. But at the end of the passage is a
room that's called the upstairs lounge. The trouble is that no one in
the upstairs rooms ever seems to use it. They're iether too decrepit to
leave their rooms or else they prefer to risk the danger of the stairs
twice a day for the company on the ground floor.

The upstairs lounge is quite small, with a three-piece suite in it and a
few odd chairs all facing the telly. But the telly's black-and-white and
the picture jumps about. The best thing about the upstairs lounge is the
view: you can see for miles. Stella led me over to the window and we
stood there looking out across the meadows and the fen, as far as the
Little Ouse that becomes the River Waveney at that point and is the
county boundary, with Suffolk on the other side. It was a warm day but
clear, and you could see the horizon, it wasn't blurred with mist as it
often is, or blackened by smoke as it used to be at this time of the
year. The sky was a pale blue with a lot of high cloud and the landscape
out there was the way it always is in late summer, fields of green where
the beet grows and fields the colour of blond hair where the corn has
been cut and fields which look full of white sails fluttering that are
the goose farms. The hedges are rows of dark tufts separating the
meadows but the fen beyond looks blue, a soft cloudy blue.

D'you remember, I said, how they used to burn the fields at this time of
year? Sometimes you could hardly see the sky for the clouds of smoke.
And the air was full of black bits.

She looked at me, a blank look as if she didn't understand.

The farmers, I said, after the corn was cut, they set the fields on
fire. They first started doing it just after World War II, my grand ad
told me. They were asked to leave a six-foot break between the straw and
the hedge, but they didn't have to and lots of them burnt the hedges
too. It's stopped now, this is the first year they're not allowed to do
it.

Her head was turned away. I don't think she'd been listening. Now look
straight ahead, she said. Do you see that church tower, the square
tower?

That's Saint John's, Breckenhall, I said.

I don't know about that, Genevieve, but I'm sure you're right. Now look
to the left of the church tower, Breckenhall Church as you say, and come
down a bit and you'll see a white -house. It looks just like a plain
white square. Do you see it? Go to the left a bit more and you can just
make out something brown with a red roof.

I can see it, I said. I was going to say that I could see it clearly,
not just make it out, and then I realized the difference was in the age
of our eyes. A square -house with a red roof. That must be on the Curton
road.

It is. That's my -house.

A freehold property, I said, sitchuate at Thelmarsh in the County of
Norfolk

That's it.

Did you come to Middleton Hall because you could see your -house from
here?

Rather the reverse. I mean, if I had known, perhaps I wouldn't have
come. She laughed, a little nervous laugh. Even though you were here ...
The laugh again, embarrassed maybe, or just shy, anyway, not happy, I
came into this room one day, I don't remember why oh, yes, someone said
there was a bookcase with books in it, only there wasn't and I looked
out of the window and I ... I thought it was my -house, you understand.
Then I asked Richard to bring me in a map, the appropriate sheet of the
Ordnance Survey.

She talks like that, very precise and correct. I don't suppose she's
made a grammatical error in all her life. Sometimes it's as if she's
reading what's already written down.

Of course, I told him I wanted it just to get my bearings. He has no
idea I've ever been here in this part of the country before, and nor has
Marianne. They know absolutely nothing about it.

She was leaning on the windowsill, gazing out at where her -house was.

Her shoulders lifted and seemed to shiver just a little, though maybe I
imagined that. I asked her if she'd like to stay alone there for a
while. I had to get on, I really did, and I thought she might like to be
alone. With memories. With something. She turned and it seemed to me
that her face had aged.

Perhaps I will. For a little while, she said, but when I got to the
door, as I opened it, she changed her mind. No, I'll come. I'm just
wasting time, I haven't got much, and I can't say looking at this view
gives me a great deal of pleshere.

This time she took my arm. From her expression, uneasy or perhaps just
indecisive, I thought that she was going to say something startling,
something that would really astonish me, make some statement about this
-house with the red roof out on the Curton road. But all she did was ask
me why I had mentioned the stubble burning and when I explained seemed
dissatisfied with my answer. We made our way along the passage,
necessarily walking slowly, Stella clinging to my arm. I felt her nails
dig into the muscle, I'd be bruised there later, but I didn't say
anything, she didn't know she was doing it. Then she shocked me because
what she said was so unexpected, though I should have been used to the
way she suddenly changed the subject.

There was some music I liked on my radio this morning, Genevieve, and I
thought what a pity I can't manage to hear that again. Do you think
there's some way I could rehcord music that I like?

I said of course she could, she could get a tape rehcorder. You could
get little ones, it didn't have to take up a lot of space. She nodded.

She would ask Richard or Marianne. And another thing she wanted was a
reading stand, a frame that would hold a book when she was sitting up in
bed. She talked about how her arms got tired and her hands got cold if
she had to keep them outside the covers. It was ridiculous, she said,
she knew that, to have cold hands in August, and a hot August at that.
We came round the corner to the top of the stairs where there's a
gallery and you can look into the hall below. Richard was down there,
talking to Lena's husband Stanley. It looked as if he had just come in.
Their backs were to us and they hadn't seen us. Richard is lanky and six
feet tall and Stanley's one of the fattest little men I've ever seen, so
together they were quite a sight.

Stella is usually delighted to see her children. She calls them 'darling
and is very welcoming, so I was surprised when she didn't call out to
him but clutched my arm even tighter. She whispered to me, Genevieve,
not a word to Richard about my -house.

I just looked at her.

He doesn't know, you understand. He doesn't know and Marianne doesn't
know I own that -house.

I won't say anything, I said, and I felt a bit stunned.

She'd tell me but not them? To tell you the truth, I did wonder for a
moment if she'd started wandering in her mind. It's sad when that
happens but it does happen to cancer patients if the malignancy gets
into the brain as well. On the other hand, I had the evidence of the
deeds, and anyone could see she was totally compos mentis (as Lena
always says) when she went up to Richard and gave him a hug and told him
how well he was looking.

Richard isn't a bit like his sister except in being tall and thin. He's
very fair, the sort of person whose hair would have been white when he
was a child, and he's got blue eyes. Stella told me he's a doctor, a GP
in a group practice in Norwich. He wears the kind of glasses that have
no rims and they give him a stchudious look, but his face is quite
boyish and when he smiles he looks eighteen. He's lovely with Stella and
he makes me think, if I ever have a son and if I ever get old I hope my
boy will be as nice to me.

He'd brought her pink lilies and gypsophila. I found a pink china jug to
put them in and when I took them along to her room she and Richard were
sitting talking, he was holding her hand, and the deeds in the envelope
that she'd left on the desk were nowhere to be seen. Sharon took their
coffee in, I had to see to Gracie, my new old lady, so I didn't have a
chance to check out where those deeds might be, but I kept thinking
about what she'd said. That her children didn't know she owned that
-house, that it was a secret. And then I remembered the date on the last
deed; 1964. She'd owned a -house and kept it a secret for thirty years'?

Gracie's not like Stella. She's an old grey lady, heavy and sad. A
stroke has pulled her face down on one side so that her plate doesn't
fit properly any more and she's very self-conscious about it, won't talk
if she can help it and hardly eats. She's always pointing to her mouth
to excuse herself. If she's got any children, or even a niece or nephew,
I haven't seen them yet. Nobody thought of making an appointment with a
dentist for her to get her plate fixed, so I did that on her own phone
in her room and I've arranged to drive her into Diss on Friday. Lena
didn't like that, it was taking too much on myself, she said, but she
wasn't going to cancel the appointment I'd made, she's too much in awe
of doctors and dentists to do that. She calls Richard Doctor every other
word.

Off and on throughout the day my mind kept going back to that -house of
Stella's and once I went up to the upstairs lounge to take a look at it
from the window. In front of it was a field full of the white shifting
shapes of geese and behind it the darkness of the fen. Ned and I had
been there once, to that bit of fen I mean, and walked in deep among the
dogwood and the meadowsweet, I remembered it now, exactly where the
-house was. I think we'd even remarked on it as we passed, that it
looked forlorn, as if no one had lived in it for years.

Richard came out just before Sharon took Stella's lunch in. He asked me
how I thought his mother was and I said, fine, as well as she could
possibly be in her condition.

Is there anything I should be getting for her, Jenny, that I've
forgotten or she doesn't like to ask for?

He's a very nice man. He's thoughtful, like a woman. Well, some women.

She said something about a tape rehcorder, I said.

To rehcord some music? Yes, she does love music. Chamber music, you
know, small delicate stuff I like the way he understands that I do know,
that just because I'm a carer in a nursing home I'm not an utter moron.
I should have thought of that, he said. I've got a little rehcording
device she could have. But no, on second thoughts, it would be best to
buy her a combined rehcorder and player, wouldn't it?

It would really, I said, and to bring her some tapes of that stuff she
liked.

I'll remember. She's not a great telly addict, is she?

She likes a good play, I said, and she's like me, she likes the old
movies.

All the best people do, he said. And he thanked me for my suggestion and
said goodbye very nicely, so that for a moment I

thought never mind what Stella asked me, I ought to tell him. I ought to
run after him and tell him. There might be something all wrong there
somewhere, and if Stella died, if Stella died tonight, which could
easily happen, there'd be those deeds and that -house and no one knowing
anything ... But I didn't. I watched his car go, a surprisingly
low-slung sporty car for a doctor, but he drove it gently, not with a
spurt and a surge and a leap forward like Lena would have.

I was djue to go off at four. Ned was coming from Norwich and I was
meeting him at seven, and when that's going to happen I can't think
about much else. He fills my mind and if I didn't watch it I'd go about
in a dream. But I usually try to spend the last half-hour of my stint
with Stella, in her room talking to her, or in the lounge if she's in a
lounge mood.

Arthur was having his nap and I'd found a quiz show on the telly for
Gracie and they'd both had their tea, so I tapped on Stella's door at
twenty past three, but she wasn't there. I found her in the lounge all
on her own and if you'd seen her there as I saw her without her seeing
me, you'd never have thought she was some poor old thing dying of
cancer. I'll tell you what she looked like, she looked like a lady
waiting for her lady friends to come to tea. She was sitting in an
armchair with a magazine on her lap but she wasn't looking at it, she
was looking out of the window at the green garden and the butterflies on
the buddle bush. Her chin was resting in one of her hands and the other
held her wrist so that the blood had run down out of those veins and the
hands looked smooth and young. The hairdresser had been round and given
her a shampoo and set and she was wearing the dress I liked best, blue
silk with cream-coloured coin spots. The very pale stockings she always
wears that would turn some women's legs into tree trunks were fine on
hers that are smooth and shapely.

The tactful cough I gave made her turn round. It was a lovely smile I
got, the smile that Richard gets and I get but I don't think anyone else
does. She had blusher on her cheeks that she calls rouge and a little
blue shadow on her eyelids but she never makes the mistake poor old Maud
does of painting on a slash of crimson lipstick. Stella's lipstick is
pale rose pink and I think she puts it on with a brush.

I was hoping you'd come, Jenny, she said.

I said I always did if I got the chance and I sat down beside her and we
looked at the butterflies, counting ten small tortoise shells seven
peacocks, a red admiral and another one Stella said was a comma. She's
knowledgeable about things like that, nature, wildlife. She said she'd
like to see a swallowtail and she's heard you only see them in Norfolk,
maybe she'll see one here.

Before I die, she said. Perhaps I'll see a swallowtail and die happy.

I'd no answer to that.

I don't suppose I could have a cigarette, could I, Genevieve? I'd love a
cigarette.

Better not, I said. You're not supposed to smoke anywhere in this
building. The thought of it made me giggle. Certainly not in here.

Certainly not when you've got lung cancer. But it's rather silly, isn't
it? It's too late now, the harm's done, it wouldn't matter any more.
There's another red admiral. It's got such a pretty Latin name, Vanessa
Atalanta ... She turned away from the window and looked at me. I want to
ask you something. That is, I want you to do something for me, if you
will.

I will if I can, I said, but I had the feeling, I don't know why, that
this would be no small thing.

You must say if you don't want to.

All right.

Genevieve, if I give you the key and tell you exactly where it is, will
you go to my -house and have a look at it and tell me tell me what sort
of state it's in?

You mean that -house on the Curton road?

Yes, that one. It's called Molucca. I believe Captain Wainwright who
owned it before Mister Rogerson was a -seafaring man and had been to the
East Indies. She smiled at me and said gently, Would you do that for me?
Go and look at it and tell me what you think?

Yes, I suppose so, I said and, because that didn't sound very gracious,
Of course I will, Stella. I hesitated, I didn't know how to say this,
but I had to try. Stella, wouldn't it be better for Richard to do this?
Couldn't you tell him about the -house and ask him to go? He's so nice,
he won't mind, will he? He won't be cross or upset or anything.

She liked me saying her son was nice. She went a little pink. I want you
to do it, Jenny, she said. It's best for Marianne and Richard not to
know. Not yet. If this doesn't sound too melodramatic, not till after
I'm dead. Her eyes turned away from me but not to the window, to look at
a blank wall. It embarrasses me, she said very quietly. I'm sorry, but
but it's not the sort of thing one would want one's children to know.
Will you go there for me?

I'll go this evening, I said.

Oh, and Genevieve? You will drive carefully, won't you?

It was about seven miles away by road. Much nearer, of course, as the
crow flies. Stella and I had probably looked over no more than a mile or
two of countryside from that upstairs window. The road took me out of
Tharby and past Thelmarsh Mill, it's absolutely straight and all the
hedges have gone, a Roman road, where the thundering legion marched up
the eastern side of England. I went through Newall Pomeroy and followed
the sign for Breckenhall. I was almost sure I knew the precise spot and
I was right. The road was narrow, straight and flat, and the -houses
stood well back from it, first the white one that Stella had seen dimly
and I had seen clearly, then, about a hundred yards further along, her
-house.

The white -house had a garden with a fence that separated it from a
strip of field, then the road, but the fen came right up to Stella's
-house, up to the walls and che front door. The fen had spread itself
across the field in gorse and wormwood, nettles and rose and elder, and
pushed in over whatever garden there once had been, so that the -house
now stood in the midst of it. Along the left side had once been a -track
beside a ditch full of bulrushes and hemp agrimony, but this path was
overgrown with thistles. Ned says the seed heads on the willow herb look
like wool spun on a distaff. They were everywhere, their white fluff
blowing.

It was a dull, warm evening. The sun had quite gone. I drove the car a
little way up the thistly path to get it off the road. It's very silent
around here when all the birds have gone to roost and even the cackling
of geese has stopped. If you know our countryside you'll understand how
still it can be in the evenings, how soft and hushed, almost as if it
were listening for something. The fen has big trees in it but mostly
it's like a forest of bushes, the water not far below the surface, and
all the reeds and rushes, the hazel and the dogwood, moving very
faintly, whispering and shuffling. When all else is quiet you can still
hear the trickle of water.

I was very aware of all this as I approached the -house. It was the only
one I'd ever seen that was actually in the fen, or that the fen had
taken over. A mountain ash had grown from a seedling right up against
the front door, its berries the same colour as the red clay -tiles on
the roof. Four windows looked back at me. They were shaped like windows
in a church with pointed tops, but the glass in them was clear, not
stained. The front door was inside a little porch with a peaked roof and
on the left-hand side was a garige made of black weatherboard. It was a
flint -house, the walls were of uncut flints that look like pebbles from
a beach, but these pebbles came from the stony ground. My nan's mother,
when she was young, used to get paid a halfpenny a basket for picking
the flints out of the fields so that they wouldn't blunt and buckle the
plou. The ones on the walls of Stella's -house were brown and grey and
white and nearly black, all mixed up but closely matched for size and
arranged in neat parallel rows.

Up above the font door was a whitish plaster oval, that builders like
Mike call a plaque, with Molucca written on it, surrounded by a wreath
of leaves, all done in pargeting. I had to trample down the nettles to
get to the door, I didn't want to get my legs stung. Cobwebs covered the
front door, one with a dead hornet caught in its threads. The key turned
quite easily in the lock. I wondered I'd never thought to ask how long
it was since anyone had been in here. Not thirty years, of course not,
but twenty? Inside, the hall was papered in a silvery pattern with faded
blue flowers and there was a blue runner of carpet on the dusty wood
floor. It was airless but without any smell. The front door closed
itself behind me smoothly, not creaking or sticking.

I was in the sort of -house you'd expect from the outside, a room on
iether side of the front door, a passage down the middle, a kitchen and
another room at the back, stairs going up along the right-hand wall.

You get to know the ages of -houses if you live round here and I thought
this one must be about a hundred and twenty years old.

The first room I went into was a sort of sitting room. It was on the
right and it was quite big and furnished like well, how am I going to
put it? Let's say the way the middle classes and the weekenders furnish
their places, the way it's done by the people my nan used to call the
gentry, but not by us. By that I mean that they don't have new
furnitchure but what they think are antiques or at least old stuff, and
they have their chairs covered with fabric called chintz and rugs from
India and old china. Stella's was like that. It was a pretty room, like
a picture in one of those magazines about -houses that you look at when
you have to hang about in the medical centre. I wonder what my
neighbours would say if I furnished my place like that?

There were china plates up on the walls and paintings of flowers and
fruit, but the largest picture was a portrait of a woman. You could tell
this was a picture someone had painted in oil paints, it wasn't
reprodjuced or photographed or made by some other pro-cess. It must have
been a yard wide and two yards long. The woman had dark hair and a pale,
pretty face, she was dressed in dark pink silk, low cut and with a stiff
full skirt, and there was a double strand of pearls round her neck. In
her hand she held a single pink rose. The canvas had just been pinned
round a wooden base and there was no frame around it or glass to cover
it. I don't know what there was about it that gave me the feeling that
the painter had loved the woman in the picture, had been in love with
her, perhaps the tender care with which he'd done her mouth and put the
light into her eyes.

The bits of silver that were standing about were dark brown with
tarnish, a silver bowl had a deep blackened dent in it, and the brass
had turned black. Someone had left love-in-a-mist and sweet peas in a
vase, though the water had long dried up. The flowers were dead as if
they'd died a score of years ago, so that you felt they'd fall to dust
if you touched them. In the bookcase were a lot of books. I like books,
which surprises some people. I like handling them as well as reading, so
I took one out and saw that the paper was yellow and smelt sour. Dust
was everywhere, blue on the wood surfaces and fluffy grey on the
upholstery, puffing out of the curtains in a cloud when I tapped them
with my finger.

There was just as much in the dining room. You couldn't tell what colour
the table was, the dust on the surface was so thick, like a fluffy cloth
that had been laid on the wood. I opened the sideboard and found it full
of framed pictures. Someone had taken them off the walls and stuffed
them in here. Now I knew that fact I could see the pale squares where
the pictures had hung.

There were paintings of children and animals, nice enough but I didn't
pay them much attention. At the bottom of the stack was a photograph of
a man and a woman standing close together. It wasn't that old. I mean,
it had been taken in my lifetime, maybe in the sixties. The woman's hair
made me think that. It was dark hair back-combed, with two side bits
curling on to her cheeks. She was the woman in the oil painting and she
was wearing the same pink evening dress. That seemed strange to me, for
they were obviously outdoors, the background was a cliff or rock face,
but she was in a low-cut silk dress and he was in jeans and a check
shirt. He was tall and thin, fair and with the sort of face that looks
as if he'd always be laughing. Smiling came naturally to him and you
could see the lines his smiles had left behind. The odd thing was that I
felt I'd seen him somewhere, even that I knew him. And that was
ridiculous because I don't meet many new people, as you can imagine.
Besides, it's a sad fact that if he looked like that when I was a baby
he wouldn't look like it now.

I went on upstairs where there were three bedrooms. Heat rises, they
say, and it was very warm up there. The dust was even worse.

Downstairs had been fully furnished but upstairs only the front bedroom
had any furnitchure in it, a double bed, a wardrobe, a dressing table, a
couple of chairs, all of it Victorian stuff. The bedcover was of
patchwork, hand-stitched, I should think, in various shades of blue and
red. I pulled it back in a cloud of dust and saw that the sheets were
still on and the pillowcases. The summer had been warm but when I put my
hand inside the bed the sheets felt damp, a chill against my palm.

I'd been wondering how they heated the place, there were no radiators,
only fireplaces, but in here was an oil heater, the really old-fashioned
kind like a black funnel on legs.

As I've said, the other two bedrooms had no furnitchure in them. They
had no carpeting on their floors. It was as if the people who'd lived
there had said, there'll never be anyone here but us, we'll never have
friends to stay, so why furnish those two rooms? The bathroom was
old-fashioned and a bit grim the way the kitchen was, very much in need
of a re-fit. Another oil heater, the panel kind, was pushed up against
the wall. I tried one of the basin taps but of course the water had been
turned off years before.

I was thinking I'd explored the whole -house, and at the same time
wondering what I'd explored it for, what I was supposed to find out,
when I noticed another door out of the kitchen apart from the one that
led out into the garden into the fen, in fact. That door, the other one,
must be to the garige. It was locked.

I opened a couple of drawers to see if I could find the key but they
were empty apart from linings. This particular newspaper was The Times
and the date on it was 1965. Nothing very surprising in that. It was
then that I looked at my watch and saw that it was six-thirty. I was
meeting Ned two miles away at seven, so I had a long while, but
something happens to your sense of time when there's a treat in store
for you in half an hour. You have to prepare yourself, you have to be in
the right frame of mind. For me that meant being there first, enjoying
the waiting, watching for his car to appear on the road. You can see so
far along these roads where the legion marched, you can see for miles.
It was a marvelous experience for me to sit and watch the cars coming,
not many, there's not much traffic, and hope and long, be disappointed,
hope again, and then at last see his car, see him.

I left the -house and shut the door behind me. I don't know why I walked
round the garige, perhaps because a whole half-hour was too long to get
to Thelmarsh Cross and then have not ten but twenty minutes to wait. The
fen was trees here as well as weeds and bushes, hazel and rowan and a
maze of white willow. I had to push my way through a thicket to get
round the back. There was a small window in the rear of the garige and
if you see a window you have to look through it, don't you?

A car was inside. Gariges are for keeping cars in and what else would
you expect to see in one? Not, though, in the gariges of empty abandoned
-houses. This car was red and a Ford Anglia, a few years older than me.
I knew that because my dad once had exactly that model, with a grid like
a wide downturned mouth and the rear window turning inwards in a
Z-shape, only his was dark blue. This one's tyres were flat. It was
thickly covered with dust. I wondered if Stella knew it was there.

I went back to my own car and drove by a roundabout route to Thelmarsh
Cross, through Breckenhall and Curton and past the garige my dad used to
have a part share in. Curton village street is wide but the back lanes
are narrow with high hedge banks and you can't go fast. If you do more
than about twenty miles an hour you can go head-on into someone coming
the other way, which happened to my brother when he was seventeen. The
other person wasn't hurt but he broke two ribs and his left arm. It
suited me to go slowly, to while away the time.

Thelmarsh Cross was one of our regular meeting places, but as I sat
there in the car I thought that maybe we shouldn't meet there any more.

It was too open, the place where the two roads crossed sheltered by
woodlanu on only one quarter, the rest exposed. I suppose we'd chosen it
because there were no -houses and because no one in a car would choose
to pass this way going to or coming from Tharby. But you can never
really bank on that sort of thing. It may be true for some people that
danger adds spice to a love affair, but I don't need it, ours isn't that
kind of love affair, and if danger means the chance of being found out,
I'm afraid of it. I'm afraid of the consequence of that, never seeing
him again.

So I sat there, watching the cars come down the long white road. There
weren't many and mostly it was empty. It was silent too until someone in
the distance fired a shotgun and the plovers in the field took to the
air in a cloud of rustling wings. I saw a car like his, same make, same
colour, come over the hill, and I felt my heart turn over. Of course
it's not your heart, it's a nerve pulling at your stomach or your gut. I
put my hand up to the wooden charm and held it. The car wasn't Ned's, a
woman was driving it, and it was no one I knew.

When he did come, two minutes late, it wasn't from that direction at
all, but along the other road and I wasn't prepared, I didn't see him
until the car drew up alongside mine. We looked into each other's faces
and we both smiled. In that moment, for me, there's no past and no
future, just the present, the absolute here and now. He drove deeper
along the -track into the wood and I followed. We stopped when we knew
the cars would be hidden, under the trees.

At those meetings, at first, we never talked much. We put our arms round
one another and held each other tight and kissed. It was always like
that. Out of doors, in the warm summer air. We kissed as if it was the
first time, as if it was that night all over again when I gave him the
love charm, and we had our first kiss in the open air, in the dark.

After a while he said, Where are you taking me?

A place in the wood, I said. A hidden place. I found it when I was a
child.

No more haystack?

They've taken it away to thatch Fletchers roof I took his hand. We
walked along hand in hand. I love you, I said.

I know, he said. I need you to love me. If you'll only say the word, one
word, I'll leave Jane and come to be with you.

We had had this conversation before and we would have it again. For
ever?

For ever, as far as I can tell. Yes, for ever. Why not? I'll burn every
one of my boats for you, Jenny. I'll poison the wells and sack the city
and come over the river and burn my boats.

Then I must be careful not to say that word by accident, I said and I
was clutching the charm till my hand hurt.

We'll live in the cottage and make a big scandal. He's got a lot of
imagination. Your mum will have to give up the Legion. The Bury Free
Press will interview me and take pictures. But we'll be in bliss.

You know I can't.

Because of Hannah?

No, you can't because of Hannah. You know that, don't you? You know you
can't.

I know, he said. Well, I think I know. But there has to be a way.

There's always a way, isn't there? No, I said, to avoid saying yes.

So we lifted aside the branches and went into the little sheltered
grassy place and made love on the warm dry ground.

*

When I told Stella I'd been to her -house she blushed. I used to think
old people couldn't blush but they can, just like anyone else.

She was in her room, having her mid-morning coffee, and I sat with her.

It was Maud's day at the hospital for her radiotherapy, Arthur had been
taken out by his son, and I hadn't much to do, having settled Gracie in
front of a video of The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. I expected Stella to
ask me all sorts of questions about the -house but she was a bit
subdjued, she seemed more embarrassed than anything. The blush died away
and she gave me a long, curious look as if I'd changed from the woman
she knew into someone else, as if seeing her -house had in some way
altered me.

Don't you want to hear about it? I said at last.

It was a strange answer she made. I suppose I must.

Shall I just tell you, then?

The word isn't one I'd usually have associated with her but she looked a
bit sulky. A bit like a child who's had a disappointment. I didn't
believe you when you said you'd go there so quickly, she said.

If you'd rather not talk about it, Stella, it doesn't matter. It was no
trouble going there. We can forget it. I looked round the room for
inspiration. I see you've had another card from Corfu. Is your daughter
having a nice time?

Don't humour me, please, Genevieve. I'm not in my second childhood. She
had never spoken to me so sharply before, she had never spoken to me at
all sharply before, and I was taken aback. I wouldn't have guessed that
voice could have a hard edge to it.

I'm sorry, I said.

She was straightaway remorseful. Oh, Genevieve, I'm the one that's
sorry. I shouldn't speak to you like that. It's just that one of the
things I like about you is the way you don't talk down to me the way the
others sometimes do. It's a very common attitchude to old people, it's
as if when you get to seventy, no matter what sort of a person you are
or how much intelligence obviously remains to you, you're to be treated
like a child. Especially if you're in a home. There's no more speaking
to you as if you're a rashional being, you have to be cajoled and and
bullied and lied to. She drew breath, she gasped throatily, her face
flushed again, more darkly this time. Please don't change and become
like that. It would be too much. I couldn't I really couldn't bear it.

This outburst shocked me. It was so unexpected, it was such obvious
evidence of how upset she was. I wanted to put my arms round her and
hold her until the fast beating of her heart slowed. But that would have
been disaster. That would be to do just what she had warned me against.
All I could do was apologize and wait for her to make the next move.

Stella, I'm sorry, I really am. It was clumsy of me but it was because I
didn't know what to say. I dared the next bit. I don't -well, I don't
understand your attitchude to your -house, so I'm sort of in the dark, I
don't know what to say or do.

She looked down, shaking her head a little. The cough she gave reminded
me she had, after all, got cancer of the lungs, she was dying of it. She
put out her hand, covered mine and squeezed it. Tell me, then.

There really isn't much to tell. It's all OK there. Just dusty.

I suppose the fen has grown up right against the walls, has it?

Yes, but it looks all right. There's a mountain ash with berries on it
by the front door.

She closed her eyes briefly. How strange. How strange it all is. After a
little hesitation, she said, Did you look in any of the cupboards or
drawers?

It's a weird thing, but maybe because I have to lie about Ned, or not
tell the whole truth, I've become specially careful not to tell lies in
other areas of my life. Still, I wanted to lie then. There was no reason
for me to have looked in that drawer but nosiness. You don't like to
have to admit to being nosy, it puts you on a par with Shirley Foster. I
told myself I couldn't afford to be, proud and said yes, I did, I'd
looked in the sideboard and found some paintings and a photo of a man
and a woman.

Old people are always saying they know how much they've changed but they
don't really. They don't know that the face they had thirty or forty
years ago isn't just a younger version of the face they've got now, it's
utterly different, it might be a different person. And that's why Stella
looked disbelieving when I talked about a woman'.

She even smiled, shaking her head.

Didn't you recognize me, Genevieve? I was that woman. I suppose it's my
hair turning white

A bit of belated tact made me say quickly that I'd thought it was her.

In fact, it hadn't crossed my mind. For one thing, I don't know why, I'd
always supposed she'd been blonde. A change of subject seemed in order
and I told her about the car. Having started off truthfully, I kept it
up it's amazing how you can get into good habits if you try!

and I said I'd tried to unlock the garige door but couldn't find the key
so I'd done the next best thing and looked through the window.

Your car's still there, safe and sound. It'll soon be vintage.

She didn't smile. Not mine, she said. Not my car. But it doesn't matter.

Here's your key back, I said.

She seemed to flinch from it. I expect that was my imagination. No, you
keep it. I want you to hold on to it. Some explanation for that was
called for and she said, after a moment's hesitation, If I do decide to
sell someone should have a key for the agents ... She made it sound like
some vague future possibility, but she had no future, she only had
months.

Do you want me to phone an agent for you? I said.

Not yet. Perhaps not at all. I don't know. I really don't know why I
asked the solicitors to send me those deeds. She cleared her throat.
It's not as if I needed deeds.

You can send them back. It's easily done.

She didn't answer. She said, like someone making small talk, My husband
was a solicitor. Did I ever tell you that?

She hadn't told me anything about him. Was that in Bury? I said.

In Bury. It was a family firm. His grandfather started it. They were
called Newland, Newland and Bosanquet. Later on they changed it but
that's what its name was when I first worked for them. Solicitors always
have ridiculous names like that, don't they? My husband's first name was
Rex, which I thought sounded like a dog when I first heard it.

I was his secretary, that's how we met. He was twenty-two years older
than I. That's too much, Genevieve. Is Mike older than you?

I was afraid to get on to me. Mike was just six months older, I said,
and then, Was it Newland, Newland and Bosanquet who I had to -search for
the right word who acted for you in the, with the, buying your -house?

It was a very strange look I got then. That would hardly have done.

Oh dear, no. I used some people in Ipswich. Don't you think we've talked
enough about me for one day? I seem to dominate all our conversations.

She was chatty and bright, her voice clearer, the throatiness gone.

Sharon put her head round the door, then came in and took the coffee
tray. Stella waited till she'd gone, looked down at her red fingernails.
How did you meet your husband, Genevieve?

I didn't exactly meet him. I'd sort of always known him. You do in a
village. We went to the village school before they made one big school
for all the villages at Thelmarsh.

He was the boy next door?

Not exactly next door, I said. Near enough. I was the one who was
blushing then and I hated it. I could feel my face go burning red.

Stella had her eyes on me and a look had come into her face of deep
sympathy, of deep understanding and kindness, though why she should have
thought I needed those things I don't know. We went to the upper school
together and I stayed on into the sixth form. He left at sixteen. We
were going out together by then. He wanted to do a City and Guilds
building course to get the qualification. Why on earth was I going on
like this? This wasn't what she'd asked me. I just blundered ahead. But
he had to start earning. He's a good earner. We got married when we were
both nineteen. I looked up at her, right into her eyes. But please don't
say it's romantic, don't say that.

I won't, she said, and her hand which had slackened held on tightly to
mine.

We're going to have our thirteenth wedding anniversary this year. It was
never romantic. I looked away, out through the window at the garden and
the roses shedding late summer petals. And now I don't know what will
happen because I'm in love with someone else.

Village life seems strange to townsfolk and no one really knows about it
till they've lived it. It's the only life I've ever lived but I've
talked to enough people and read enough books to know it's different.

We, the people, in a place like Tharby, are like a big family. There may
be four hundred of us but everyone knows everyone else and everyone uses
first names. You'll have been at school with all your generation and
your parents with their generation and your grandparents with theirs.
You'll marry the boy next door, as Stella put it. Take my mum, for
instance. It doesn't sound very country village-ey to have had three
husbands and a live-in boyfriend, but my dad and the one after him were
both Tharby boys and Len the lover's got a small holding at Tharby
Heath. Her third was the only outsider and he came from Eye, which is
hardly a foreign land.

Lots more people go away than they used to, they can't find -houses to
live in for one thing, but fresh people don't come in. Not our sort,
anyway. Some come here to retire, but they keep themselves to
themselves. It's not too far from London for commuters, for the truth is
that some will commute from anywhere to anywhere, but there aren't many
of them, and there are only two sets of weekenders. Even in these days
Mister Thorn up at the hall gets called the squire, and not always with
the tongue in the cheek.

I've said we're a family but you have to remember families are where
most of the trouble starts in this world. We don't all get on, far from
it, but I reckon we'd all stand together against an enemy. Still, I
expect they said that in Bosnia and look what happened there. Anyway,
for good or ill we all know each other better than we know anyone else,
we know whose mother someone is and who's niece to this one or
brother-in-law to that one. That's the sort of thing we never make
mistakes about. More important, we feel comfortable with each other.
Going to a country-music evening in the village hall like the one where
I met Ned, you know just who will be there, you needn't feel shy the way
you would going to some gathering in Bury or Thetford, it'll be the same
old faces and the same people you sat in the classroom with when you
were five.

Except that, this time, Ned and Jane were there.

The purpose of it was to raise funds for something, probably the church
bells. I don't know how it can cost a hundred thousand pounds to re-cast
some old bells and hang them up in the belfry again, but that's what
they tell us. So we're always having music evenings and dances and bingo
and car-boot sales to raise money for the bells. It was a Saturday and
Mike was home. We got there a bit early. Mike gets everywhere early,
he's one of those obsessively punctual people. He put on a suit but I
refused to dress up. Isn't it crazy to wear a dress for country music?
If I'd had them I'd have liked to wear cowboy boots and a jacket with
fringes but I hadn't, so I settled for a good pair of Levi's and a
checked shirt.

My sister Janis was there and my brother Nick with his girlfriend Tanya.
Mum had left Shirley Foster in charge at the Legion and was doing the
drinks. She looked a bit like she came from Nashville herself, did my
mum, in a miniskirt and leather jacket with a ten-gallon hat. Janis had
told her to stop wearing miniskirts, it was the limit at her age, and
when Mum said she was only fifty-three and her legs were thirty years
younger, Janis said, It's not your legs, it's your face, which was
unkind, but Mum didn't seem to mind and she went on wearing short
skirts. A lot of Mike's relations were there and Philippa, who's been my
best friend since we were given our names together at one of the vicar's
mass christenings. Even my dad turned up with his girlfriend Suzanne,
who's younger than me. Everyone was there, including the Thorns and one
of the retired people called Lady Something and all the commuters and
the weekenders who've bought the mill.

They stuck together, of course. They always do. Mister Thorn called Mike
over and got him to move two tables side by side and all the chairs so
that the nine of them could sit together. He called him over as if he
was a servant and when he'd done it he didn't thank him. I ought to be
used to that sort of thing, I've seen it all my life, but I still don't
care for it, and if it was me he'd asked I like to think I'd have the
guts to say do it yourself. But maybe I'd just do it meekly, like Mike
did.

When the other weekenders came in I expected them to make straight for
those tables. I hadn't seen them before, not many of us had seen them,
and we all stared, some of us openly and some with a bit more
discretion. The woman was tall and thin, about thirty-five, with a thin,
pointy face, one of those foxy faces, and a mass of ginger hair.

I mean ginger, not red or carrots or auburn. She wasn't pretty and she
was very plainly dressed in black linen trousers and jacket with a white
T-shirt, but she was easily the most elegant woman in the room.

The man was Ned.

Mister Thorn got up when he saw them and so did the couple from the
mill.

I couldn't hear what was said, they were obviously introdjucing
themselves and inviting the new people to their table, but not
succeeding. A long time afterwards I asked Ned how he'd got out of
sitting with the squire and the rest of them and he said he'd told them
the truth, that he'd cause too much disturbance. Their daughter wasn't
well, and though they'd left her in bed with a sitter in the -house he
wouldn't feel easy if he didn't go back and check up on her a few times
djuring the course of the evening. The truth, or half of it.

I did a pro-gramme last year about people like James Thorn, he told me a
lot later. The subject was the remains of the squirearchy and we called
it The Rich Man in his Castle.

From the hymn, I said. I'm proud of myself if I can keep up with Ned.
From All Things Bright and Beautiful .

I didn't think things would have been too bright and beautiful for me if
he'd remembered who I was.

But that was in May and the country-music evening was February. It would
be ridiculous to say that I fell in love with Ned the first moment I saw
him. You only do that if you think love is just going to bed with
someone. When I saw Ned I did have an immediate reaction. I thought,
what must it be like to live with someone like that, to see his face on
the pillow when you wake up in the morning, to know that he's yours?

Well, he got to be mine. In a sort of way. If anyone ever is anyone
else's. A month later I was fathoms deep in love, but not then. Not
then. Like the rest of the village, I turned my head to look at Ned and
Jane, to see what they would do. And what they did was come up to us.

Ned said afterwards, a long while afterwards, that he and Jane were used
to going up to people at parties and introdjucing themselves. They were
trained to it. In their jobs she's a casting director they were always
meeting new people. They couldn't afford to wait to be introdjuced, they
couldn't stand about in silence (like Mike and I would have) waiting for
someone to take pity on them. He said he saw me and 'liked the look of
me', those were his words, and the rest of us, that is Philippa and her
husband Steve and Janis and her husband Peter, they looked all right,
about their own age. It never occurred to him that we weren't his class
and if it had I don't think he'd have cared. We were a better bet than
the squire and the snobbish couple from the mill and so he came up to us
and said, Hallo. I'm Ned Saraman and this is my wife Jane Beaumont.

I could see they were all digesting that, thinking fast. It's not
exactly the usual thing for married women in Tharby to have different
names from their husbands.

We've taken the -house called Rowans, he said.

I was the first to hold out my hand. I wanted to find out what his hand
felt like, the touch of it. He had a firm handshake has, I suppose,
though I've never shaken his hand again. I'm not really a shy person but
I found myself shy with him. Women are, I think, with men who attract
them. Mike wasn't shy and Steve wasn't. They started giving advice about
Rowans, though niether Ned nor Jane had asked them for it, all about how
it must need rewiring, and how it was twenty years since that tiling job
had been done on the roof, it was Steve's uncle who'd done it, and all
the problems there'd be if a proper damp course wasn't put in. Janis
wasn't to be outdone and was reeling off the names of people who'd
deliver their papers and do their dry-cleaning.

Philippa, on the other hand, was as silent as me. I could tell what was
passing through her mind, I often can, she was thinking the same as I
was, that this was the first time in her memory, the first time to her
knowledge, that people like that (Nan's gentry) had ever associated with
people like us at one of these dos. It was the first time we'd ever seen
that kind of people act as if we were all the same class.

As soon as there was a break in the conversation Ned looked at our
glasses and asked if he could get us another drink. It was only Janis
and me that wanted anything and we both said white wine. Jane spoke for
practically the first time.

Right, darling, go and see what the superannuated Dolly Parton can come
up with.

There was a sort of embarrassed hush. I didn't know what 'superannuated
meant then but I knew it wasn't polite and I was angry.

Ned began to make his way over to the bar Mum was running and I caught
up with him.

I said, Excuse me.

He turned round and smiled. He's very tall and he had to bend a bit to
talk to me. His eyes are a clear very dark grey with black round the
irises. Jenny?

You ought to know that you have to be careful what you say about people
in this village to other people. I mean your wife ought to. I didn't
speak loudly or crossly. I tried to keep my voice calm.

Everyone's related to everyone else. The whatever-she-said Dolly Parton
is my mother.

He stood still, taking it in. Then he said, I'm truly sorry. I'll tell
her.

I knew I'd gone bright red in the face. I went back to the others.

They were all talking nineteen-to-the-dozen about wine, the merits of
French against Australian Chardonnay, that sort of thing, all except
Jane. Jane was looking bored. When she found out what she'd said I
didn't think she'd care much. Just as Ned came back with our drinks the
music started. It was Len the lover on the guitar, Paul Fletcher on the
tenor sax and his cousin, another Mike but from Curton, on the drums.
Philippa's sister Karen started singing Stand by Your Man in a passable
Tammy Wynette imitation, and we all sat down.

A couple of songs later Ned said he'd nip back and see how Hannah was.
Hannah's mother didn't show much concern, I thought, but perhaps I was
feeling a lot of resentment still. I watched him go.

When he got to the door he turned round, saw me looking and put up his
eyebrows. I smiled and he smiled back as if he was relieved. Then I went
over and talked to Dad because it pleases him so much. He's never got
over his guilt at splitting up from Mum and leaving us kids and he is so
happy if one of us treats him like a real father.

After I'd fetched Gracie back from the dentist, I went to find Stella.

The day before I'd been off and the day before that was when I'd told
her about Ned. Confiding in someone, the way I'd confided in her, ought
to make you like them and want to be with them. It doesn't. It's as if
you've poured stuff out of your heart into some container, you've got
rid of it, and all you want is to throw it away and never come near it
again.

That was why I had to find her and get rid of that feeling, get the
awkwardness over. I knew I'd feel deeply embarrassed in her company.

Well, I should have thought of that before I shot my mouth off, not
punish her for listening and letting me talk. She'd been so patient and
I'd told her so much, all about how I didn't see Ned again for nearly a
month after that country-music evening until we met by chance in the
village shop. All the details of what had happened next.

That same Saturday I was walking past his -house and there he was in the
front garden trying to prune roses. I say trying because he didn't have
a clue, he was just nipping the tops of the twigs off. So of course I
took over and did it for him and he asked me in for a cup of tea. I
won't say I'd have refused if I'd thought Jane wasn't there, but she
wasn't, she'd taken Hannah to her mother's, and we had the tea and sat
talking.

I'd lived thirty-two years in this world and I'd never talked to anyone
the way Ned and I talked. There's Philippa, of course, we talk, but not
much about the big things of life, more about shopping and what we're
going to make for supper and old movies, which are her great passion.
Ned and I talked about what we believed in and what we wanted and hoped
for and what life should be. All that had been shut up inside me. I'd
thought about it, I thought about it all the time, and I'd put it into
words in my own mind, but never uttered it. He fetched my thoughts out
of me just by talking and later on he said I had fetched things out of
him he'd never told another soul.

Stella listened to me while I told her all this, how at first I thought
I'd found a friend, that him being of the opposite sex didn't matter, we
could still meet when he came down at the weekends and there needn't be
any sex involved, she listened and she said she understood. She
understood only too well, she said, that you could fool yourself along
those lines and what a shock it was when you found out you were fooling
yourself.

So I went looking for her. She wasn't in her room or in the lounge. I
thought she might have gone up to take another look at her -house across
the fields but she wasn't in the upstairs lounge iether. Stella didn't
much like sitting about in the open air, she had to have a reason for
being outdoors and the weather being fine wasn't sufficient. I smelt the
reason before I found her. She was on a stone -seat behind the high
cypress hedge and she was smoking a cigarette.

That could have given me an opening line to cover my embarrassment.

Lena would have made a big fuss, would have behaved as if Stella was ten
and caught smoking in the garden shed. But what was the point? She was
dying anyway, poor Stella, and might as well have a bit of pleshere
before the dark.

When she saw me she smiled and held up the cigarette in a film star
gesture, her fingers extended. She reminded me of Bette Davis in one of
those old films.

Are you going to scold me, Genevieve? I have to have a cigarette
sometimes. I may as well tell you I occasionally do when no one's
looking.

What you do is your own business, I said, and if it was a bit brusque
that was my way of getting over awkwardness.

Wild -horses wouldn't drag out of me who gets my Silk Cut for me.

Not Richard, I thought. Not the doctor. Marianne. I'd have done the same
for my mum. Lena wouldn't set any wild -horses on you, I said, 'but
somehow she'd see to it you didn't get any more. So be careful.

She blew smoke out through her nose. I'd never seen anyone do that
before except in films. She was very pale and it wasn't only djue to the
powder she put on. The colour was draining out of her. Even her
blue-green eyes were fading. Her lips parted and a thin cloud of blue
smoke emerged and hovered. She waved it away with one hand.

Genevieve?

I looked at her.

Would you go to my -house and bring me back the photograph you found?

Any time will do. If you're ever up in that area, if you could just go
in and pick up the photograph.

Stella, I said, how long is it since anyone lived in that -house?

She didn't have to think back or calculate. Twenty-four years.

Twenty-four years?

It's quite a long time, isn't it? She considered. And not to say lived,
Genevieve. Twenty-four years since anyone has been there. The look on my
face amused her and she smiled. I paid the rates, of course. I mean, it
was rates and then it was poll tax and then council tax. But I paid up.
Oh, and I had the roof seen to. Those flint walls are very tough and of
course they don't need painting.

You never had tenants in? I asked her, and, when she shook her head, Why
on earth didn't you sell?

This was a bit strong for her. I'd spoken more directly than I usually
do and she retreated a little, withdrawing into her shell.

I didn't want to.

It's easy for people like me to resent people like Stella. Money is a
daily issue with us. We find it hard enough to pay the council tax on
the one property we own or the building society owns and when someone
like her talks about easily and thoughtlessly paying tax on a -house no
one lives in, that she can't be bothered to let and just doesn't feel
like selling, we don't take kindly to it.

It was mine, Genevieve. I had the right to keep it empty if I chose.

I bought it myself, with what my father left me when he died in 1963.

My husband didn't pay for it.

How to tell her that wasn't the point? Not to tell her, of course.

She was so pale and, suddenly, so thin, growing transparent and skeleton
leaf-like as she sat there holding up the end of her cigarette between
red fingernails.

You can sell it now, I said. I'll handle it for you, if you like.

I know you would.

She stubbed out her cigarette on the bench, took a tissue from her
handbag, wrapped it in the tissue, and put it into the bag. It was all
very precisely done, fastidiously done, and when the operation was
completed she rubbed at the blackened place with the toe of her navy
court shoe.

Once she was standing up, holding on to the back of the -seat, and
puffing a bit at the effort it had been, she said breathlessly, If I
were to sell the -house, Genevieve, there would be this advantage, that
Marianne and Richard would never have to know. There would just be
rather more money to inherit than they expected.

Would you like to take my arm? I said.

Thank you. I think I will. You're too polite to ask me why I don't want
them to know, aren't you? I may tell you one of these days. But not now,
not today. The thing is, Genevieve, I'm afraid to sell it.

I looked at her. We were walking along the path, by the herbaceous
border. The lawns fall away from there in green terraces and then
there's a plantation of old chestnut trees. She clung to my arm, walking
slowly. The smell of cigarette smoke clung to her, mingled with the
White Linen perfume she always wears.

Oh, not afraid because there's something there I don't want anyone to
find. It's all too long ago for that. She shook her head. At least, I
think so. There were never any letters and only that one photograph. Her
need to express herself seemed to have conquered her breathlessness and
she was speaking in a steady normal voice, quietly but cheerfully. I
suppose I say I'm afraid because I feel all that should be left alone
and hidden, left in peace instead of brought out into the open I mean,
not have the fen cleared and the lawn mowed, perhaps the -house
converted in some way or another, builders there. And I can't bear to
think of my things, my furnitchure well, thrown out or sold for
practically nothing. They get those men in, don't they, who clear
-houses for the price they get from a junk shop? I've seen the signs in
shop windows, -houses cleared at no extra cost . I know it must seem
ridiculous to you, but I don't feel I could bear it.

I said it didn't seem ridiculous and just as I was going to say
something about not to sell if she didn't want to and trying to think
how to say tactfully that she wouldn't know what Marianne and Richard
thought anyway, not after she was dead, a dog came bounding out from
among the chestnut trees and raced across the lawn towards us. It was a
white dog with black spots, a Dalmatian, and I recognized it as
belonging to Lena's sister, who must have called to see her. Stella drew
back a bit and held on to me more tightly but this dog is a real softie
and wanted more than anything for me to stroke its head and talk to it.
Stella wanted to know why I had my fingers crossed.

It's lucky to see a Dalmatian, I said. Cross your fingers and make a
wish. Go on.

She did what I told her, though she looked doubtful.

Don't tell me your wish, I said, and I won't tell you mine but we'll
tell each other if they come true. How about that?

I'd wished of course for things to come right for Ned and me, though I
didn't see how they could. You can't be like my dad, have a child and
then walk out and leave her. The only thing that would make that
possible would be Jane dying, and why should she die? She was a normal
healthy woman of thirty-seven and likely to live another fifty years. I
didn't want her to die and that wasn't what I'd wished for. In fact, I'd
made a mental reservation and added on, but not at the price of Jane
dying'. I could just imagine the remorse I'd feel, the endless guilt, if
I'd wished for her death when I stroked the spotted dog and crossed my
fingers and it had actually happened.

Stella and I went back into the -house, meeting Lena as we crossed the
lounge from the french windows. Lena took one look at Stella and said in
the way she has when she's trying to be funny, And how does Lady Newland
find herself today?

Stella said quietly she was quite well, thank you.

You know, those shoes of yours aren't a brilliant idea, Stella.

The heels must be two inches high. It's vanity, isn't it, dear? That's
what it all boils down to, vanity.

I'm afraid I only have these sort of shoes.

And the budget couldn't run to a pair of trainers like the other ladies
have? Think about it, dear, it's for your own good.

Halfway up the stairs Stella said something about how you ought to be
allowed to wear what you like if you were paying what she was. Four
hundred pounds a week it is, though she didn't say so. She was brought
up, she once told me, not to mention money, and though she's got over
that she doesn't like naming specific sums. I think you ought to be
allowed to wear what you like if you're not paying too, if you get it on
the NHS, it's something Ned and I talked about, freedom and dignity, but
I didn't want to get into politics with Stella.

She was breathless by the time we reached her room. She sat down and
said, Richard phoned to say he's bought me the tape rehcorder. He's
going to bring it in on Saturday. The swiftness of her change of
subject, and not only that, gave me a shock. What did you mean,
Genevieve, by not at the price of Jane dying?

Did I say that aloud?

She gave a little nervous laugh. I'm afraid you did. It doesn't matter.
I don't even know who Jane is.

She's Ned's wife. I turned my face away. It was the wish I made I mean,
I don't wish for her death so that I can ... I know what you mean. And
he doesn't iether, does he?

I was mystified and at the same time becoming uncomfortable. We've never
discussed it. She's young and healthy. Why should she die?

Stella's answer was another laugh, but the kind that you'd think was a
sob if you were only listening and not looking. She said very quickly,
too quickly, Have you ever heard of Gillda Brent?

She was staring straight ahead of her.

I don't think so, I said carefully. Should I have?

Stella went on. You tell me you like old films. You're always making
videos of them. She was an actress in films. A British film actress.

I'm sorry, Stella. I've never heard of her.

Then do you know anyone who might have. A do they call them movie buffs?
A movie buff?

There's my friend Philippa, I said.

She had gone very red. You don't do athletics at her age but that was
the impression she gave, of someone who'd just tried to run a race or
climb a hill and had failed.

You could ask her, she said. Ask her about Gillda Brent.

Stella had been writing, using an old-fashioned fountain pen, marbled
blue, with a gold nib. The result was like someone who knew nothing of
Arabic attempting to inscribe it. Or, as Richard, as a precocious
adolescent, had once said, like spiders copulating.

She took a deep breath, or as deep a breath as she was able to take.

Once again she turned her attention to the instructions that came with
the tape rehcorder, but this time she persevered. She took the covering
off one of the new cassettes, an operation that required the use of her
nail file to split the transparent paper. It was something to have
discovered how to open the machine. The cassette went in satisfactorily
at her third attempt.

Footsteps passed along the passage outside her door. Stella screwed up
the piece of paper on which she had been writing. She put the cap back
on the fountain pen. Then she went to the door, listening to the silence
for a moment before reaching for the only upright chair the room
contained. She put the chair against the door, its back under the
handle, holding it in place. This activity took away her breath and she
had to sit down again.

After a few moments, when she thought she could summon an adequate
voice, she pressed the red button on the rehcorder and began to speak,
tentatively at first.

I am speaking, she said, into a machine that describes itself as a
cassette rehcorder and computer data rehcorder, whatever that may be. I
have never done this before, and I can't yet tell if the device is
working or not. I shall stop now and try to play it back.

I am speaking, said the rehcorder, into a machine that describes itself
... Stella listened to her own voice and thought how much lighter it
sounded than she had expected. It sounded light and precise and
old-fashioned and old. She was still vain, she thought, even now.

Dying, actually dying, she would probably still care how she looked and
sounded. She closed her eyes briefly, then pressed the red button and
began again.

My purpose, she said, is to set on rehcord something that no one knows
but me and which should be known, a question that unless I answer it
will be left unanswered for ever.

A more obvious way of doing that would be to write it down. I have made
an attempt at that but the results didn't please me, not only because,
after all, I'm not a writer, but also because my handwriting is not
particularly legible. The alternative would have been to have asked
Richard for a typewriter instead. No doubt I can still type perfectly
well, but what reason could I possibly have given for wanting a
typewriter? A lot of writers, or so I'm told, speak their words into a
microphone and have a secretary transcribe them. No one will ever
transcribe mine, but one or two may listen.

Writing, though, is a silent activity. You can do it surreptitiously and
hide it. I think I've read somewhere that Jane Austen did that, slid her
writing under a book she pretended to be reading when someone came into
the room. It's possible that one of the people here, pausing outside my
door, in innocence or deliberately to listen, can hear my voice if not
what I'm saying. Fortunately, in one way, I'm no longer able to speak
very loudly. I don't really mind if they do hear a continuous murmurr
from inside. They will only think I'm talking to myself and that won't
surprise them. Everyone in here except Genevieve takes it for granted
the residents have softening of the brain or are dropping into a second
childhood. I have put a chair under the door handle to stop anyone
coming in. If I can. Needless to say, as if we were children using a
bathroom, there are locks on the doors but no keys available to those
inside.

There. I've succeeded. And now that's done I'm wondering how to begin.
I'm still testing, really, and I'm going to play it back again.

My purpose, she heard, is to set on rehcord something that no one knows
but me ... The door is secured, the tape rehcorder is working, and I
feel I must waste no more time. For, though I'm going to tell Genevieve
a lot about myself and a good deal of the background to this story,
there are many many things that, while I can speak them aloud in
private, I know I can't actually utter to another person. And perhaps I
don't have much time to utter them at all. So I'll begin by explaining
why I sent for the deeds of my -house or with the obitchuary in The
Times. No, I won't. I'll begin with Genevieve.

Richard and I must have visited at least ten of these residential homes.
What was I looking for, beyond comfort and attractive surroundings and
some sort of proximity to him? Someone who wouldn't patronize me
perhaps, someone young and pretty and honest. One person among those who
would look after me that I could talk to. If I don't know what I was
looking for I know what I found. She would probably say that fate
directed me to her. Yet I had never met her, never thought of her since
that day, but when I heard her name ... Misses Keepe, Lena, isn't a bad
woman at heart. Basically she is kind-hearted, and she runs this place
with efficiency and yes, consideration. But she is insensitive to other
people's vulnerability, or perhaps I should say she believes
vulnerability shouldn't be allowed. Her sense of humour, which I'm sure
she believes she has in abundance, is the banana-skin kind. It's
concentrated on making others look foolish or, rather, on finding those
areas where they differ from the common run and pointing out the
peculiarity. I, for instance, have to be given a mock title because I
dress as I've always dressed and wear make-up and don't have the local
accent. But this this propensity of hers, served me well that day
Richard and I walked into the lounge on our exploratory visit. She might
be in the habit of calling the carer who was sitting there with a
resident Jenny the rest of the time, but here was her chance to expose
someone's sensitive place to Richard and me.

This is one of our care assistants, Jenny Warner, or Genevieve, if you
like a real mouthful.

The day I can never forget for long came back to me, and the smell of
smoke and the tiny glass cuts on my hands. I could almost see the blood
on my fingers. But I looked at her, I was intrigued by her. In the
beautiful face was something of a face from long ago, a tilt of the eye,
a colour in the cheek, a curve of the lip.

I said to Richard as we got back into the car, I think that's the place
for me, don't you?

Simply on account of Genevieve? That was only part of it. How did I know
what sort of person she would be? That I would even like her? I might be
wrong, that Christian name might have been a fayvorit in the Waveney
valley thirty years ago. The truth was that I was tired of looking for
somewhere to live. To die. Every time we went out I had to suppress my
fear of riding in a car. I was tired of these toothy, smiling matrons
heaven knows what they call them these days their waiting lists, their
patronizing ways. Middleton Hall it would be, for good or ill, by
destiny, or far more likely, by chance.

She stopped the rehcorder. I am digressing, she thought. I must keep to
the point. Rex used to complain of how I let the association of ideas
spoil my train of thought and he called me a mistress of the non
sequitchur. She pressed the red button.

Seeing the obitchuary was a shock, she said. I don't know why I even
looked at the obitchuaries page, I don't usually, just the front page
and an article or two before I turn straight to the back and the
crossword puzzle. But that day in early August I happened to open it at
the obitchuaries page and saw his face looking at me from a small
photograph, his youthful face as he was when I first saw him. I gasped
and it was quite a loud sound I made, like the breath one draws after
crying. His name, in upright black type, jumped out at me and seemed to
dance on the air in front of my eyes, It wasn't a long obitchuary. I
have it almost by heart. Oh, yes, it's still possible to learn something
by heart when one is seventy, the memory doesn't fail in all ways. But I
won't repeat it now. What would be the point? If I keep this tape and
anyone ever listens to it, if he or she wants to know more, the
obitchuary exists, it can be found in some archive or other or in a
newspaper library. Richard would know, but do I want Richard or Marianne
ever to hear any of this?

The writing was impersonal and cold. It described him as a painter and
illustrator of children's books, notably the well-known Figaro and
Velvet series. His portrait of Edwina Mounthatten was named as his
best-known work. The writer followed this statement with an underhand
remark about the picture finding no favour with its subject and the
artist therefore receiving no more commissions from that quarter. But I
won't go on. I am already doing what I said I would not. It is the last
sentence which is responsible for my speaking now, and that I must
repeat from memory.

He was married to the film actress Gillda Brent in 1949 and they
separated, though were never divorced, in 1970. She survives him.

That is how I know that no one knows.

The other day I tried out the name on Genevieve but it meant nothing to
her. I knew then that I was going to make this tape or series of tapes
and it was an effort for me to say Gillda aloud. It is an effort now.

Gillda, Gillda, Gillda. Of course it gets easier as I persist ... With
Genevieve I felt frightened, embarrassed, shy and distressed all at the
same time. But I spoke it and the name meant nothing to her, just as his
name would mean nothing. I shall play back the tape now.

It works, she said. I have done it. Like most people of my age I have a
deep distrust of these so-called modern conveniences. And that is not
because they are modern or we are old-fashioned so much as because we
have lived in this world a long while, at some time or other have
experimented with the latest gadget and usually found it inadequate. I
am glad my tape rehcorder functions properly, as much as anything
because it was Richard's present to me.

The subconscious acts in strange ways. When I played the tape back I
saw, I heard rather, that I had never uttered his name. I suppose, I
know, that I couldn't bring myself to speak it aloud into an empty room,
even though there is no one to hear it and never will be if I erase the
tape as I very likely will. Inside my head I can say it over and over
softly to myself, but it seems that my lips will not actually form the
consonants nor my tongue make the sounds.

Will I ever be able to say it to Genevieve? Am I going to try? And if I
am, is it because she is the only possible person to be the recipient of
my what?

My confession.

I'm not doing it for Genevieve, but I am doing it because Genevieve is
here and because of a child's face seen twenty-four years ago.

Stella stopped the rehcorder and into the silence poured an overwhelming
tiredness. She held the screwed-up paper in her hand but when she fell
asleep her fingers relaxed and it fell to the floor.

Mike never proposed to me. I wonder if men do in real life as against in
books and films. Does anyone really say, Will you marry me? We were
walking up the hill one evening and he pointed over to Chandler Gardens
aftd said, We ought to put our names down if we're going to have one of
them when we're married.

I wasn't surprised. I took it for granted too. It wasn't mentioned again
for a few months but by the end of that year everyone was talking about
us as an engaged couple and Mum was thinking about our wedding
reception. We used to make love in the back of Mike's car, an old yellow
Triumph Herald, parked in the pine plantations behind the Legion. That's
all right when you're eighteen but I wouldn't do it now. You know you're
not a girl any more when you can say you're too old for something.

Mike wasn't the first boyfriend I'd had, he was the third, and I hadn't
even liked the others much, they were just people to go out with when
you're afraid of the other girls seeing you without anyone. The main
reason I got married was to get away from home. Mum was married to her
second husband, Dennis, then but she'd got a relationship going with a
chap called Barry from Breckenhall and the atmosphere was scary, what
with Barry sneaking in when Dennis was on nights and Dennis drinking
more than he should have and the endless fighting. Mike is placid and
calm and even-tempered. He never has a row, he'll just say, Let's not
get on to that, go out of the room and shut the door. He's not a talker
or a reader, come to that. Most of the time he's at home he's doing
something to improve the -house.

So am I saying I got bored? I don't know. People in our village don't
expect to talk to the people they're married to. The women expect their
husbands to spend their free time in the garden or doing some DIY. Mum
never talked to my dad or he to her, she never talked much to the rest
of them iether, they had plenty to do together without talking. I never
thought of being bored till I met Ned, or, rather, I thought boredom
equals marriage, you can't expect excitement.

Because we never talked much, Mike didn't notice the change in me. That
was how it came about that I hardly had to lie. If I was a bit more
silent than usual he probably thought it was because I was getting
older. In the country people start getting old when they're young. I
don't know much about other people's sex lives does anyone? but I knew a
bit about Philippa's and Janis's and they both said the excitement had
gone out of it long ago. After her second child was born Philippa and
Steve didn't do it for months and now they hardly ever do. She even
talks the way my nan does, as if she'd never enjoyed it and it was
something to put up with, and I've had to remind her of what she was
like once, crazily in love and not able to stop herself touching Steve
and fondling and kissing him all the time.

Mike was away so much that the weekends were the only opportchunity, but
often weeks went by without him touching me and I sensed that the times
I said no he wasn't bothered. Before I met Ned I even used to wonder how
Mike and I were going to have a family, the way we went on. I once said
to Janis, what was marriage for, what was the point of it if you had no
kids and hardly any sex and you never talked except to say tea was ready
and ask what was on the telly. Janis being Janis said that was immature
and typical of me. Marriage was a partnership, a commitment, and for
making a home together.

When we first thought we could be friends I used to meet Ned in the
Legion and of course Mike and Jane were there too. It all looked as if
it happened by chance but in fact it was the result of some careful
planning on my part. Until Jane got bored, that is, and stopped coming.
She didn't like Mum having a juke-box and a space-invaders game, not to
mention -horse brasses and china gnomes on shelves in the alcoves.

English country pubs used to be marvelous until they got fucked up with
Muzak and kitsch, she said.

Mike got the look on his face I know so well. It creases up his forehead
and pulls his mouth down at the corners when he hears that sort of
language from a woman.

I get enough of that on the site, he said later. It's one thing hearing
it from brickies. She's supposed to be an educated woman.

So he stopped going to the pub too, and for a while Ned and I had a
couple of drinks there alone together on Saturday nights. He'd go in
there at about eight and I'd just turn up with shopping I'd got for Mum
or to fetch my eggs. Then one Saturday she said to me, leaning across
the bar and whispering, You may have the hots for him but you don't have
to write it all over your face.

Apparently I needed my mother to tell me when I was in love. I knew then
that I wanted him to be in love with me, to love me back. Well, I had a
remedy for that. I don't know why I'm ashamed of it, I shouldn't be,
because it worked. It was a charm that's been working for centuries.

Three or four years ago my nan gave me something to bring back Mike's
love. It sounds crazy, doesn't it? Preposterous. I didn't know his love
had gone, still less if I wanted it back again. But Nan had noticed the
way he was, she noticed in the village hall at her eightieth birthday
party. I suppose he was off with the boys as usual or at any rate not
taking much notice of me. It was a love potion she gave me that she'd
made herself, she called it a philtre, or sometimes an elixir, brown
liquid the colour of tea in a little bottle that had been a Cointreau
miniature.

Mike never got a taste of it. Perhaps by then I was indifferent as to
whether he wanted me or not or perhaps I didn't believe it would work.

But when you're in love you'll try anything. Knowing no one ever drank
miniatures in our -house, I'd kept the bottle in the back of our
sideboard, so the next Saturday I got it out and went down the Legion at
eight.

I don't know to this day if Mum saw me put it in Ned's half of Abbot. I
did it while he'd got up to talk to Misses Thorn who was nagging him for
a donation to the bells fund. My heart was thudding when he came back.

He drank the Abbot and had another and then, instead of saying as he
always did that he'd have to go and leaving me there, he just looked at
me and said, Coming?

I followed him out and it was dark as pitch. He took my hand and led me
a little way down the narrow lane where the hedges are high. Nan's
elixir makes the man who drinks it love the first woman he sees and I'd
had twenty minutes of terror lest the first woman had been Myra Fletcher
or even Misses Thorn. But it was all right. It had worked. In the dark
that my eyes were getting used to I saw his face transfiggered.

He put his arms round me and kissed me. He said something but I don't
remember what it was and I don't remember what I said. We kissed and we
were into love, we were lost.

I never told Mum anything. She just assyumed. She took it for granted it
was magic too, her own mother's magic. Nan had done the same for her
when she met Dennis, though I can't say hearing that pleased me.

Magic, she guessed it was, and something else.

No doubt about it, we're a good-looking family. She laughed. You've got
a better figgere than I ever had, girl. Easy to tell what he sees in
you.

I wanted to tell her that it wasn't for the way I looked that Ned wanted
me, he loved me, that magic only started things off, but that would have
meant admitting too much. I wasn't going to admit anything.

Going back alone to my empty -house I thought about what she'd said, I
sat down and thought about it for a long while. She hadn't said any
more, hadn't touched on what I could see was in her mind, but she'd been
thinking: what else but her figgere and her face would a fellow like
that see in Jenny? He's educated, he's been to Cambridge University,
he's in television, and what's she? A Tharby girl who's got no
qualifications in anything and was a home help till she got that care
assistant's job at Middleton Hall. It stands to reason it's just one of
those physical things, he fancies her like mad, and no wonder.

Mum knows a lot about sex but she doesn't know much about what goes on
in people's minds. She only knows about love in terms of bed and only
about bed in terms of a bit of fun. But what Ned and I have isn't fun,
it's good and sometimes it's grand, and sometimes it's awe-inspiring and
then it frightens me. For what will I do when it's past and gone?

That was back in April and luckily for Ned and me it was a warm April.

The day I was walking with Stella and we saw the Dalmatian was the 6th
of September and you could feel autumn in the air. Ned was coming down
on the Thursday and I was praying for a fine evening, not cold and wet
as it's been since Saturday. But that Tchewsday I walked round to
Philippa's about seven with a couple of videos I'd done for her, knowing
they'd have finished their tea and the children would soon be off to
bed.

Philippa lives in one f the Weavers -houses. There are a row of them,
half-timbered places with no front gardens and steps up to the front
doors. Silk weavers lived in them when they were first built in the
i6oos. Everyone thinks them very wonderful and when you see a picture
postcard of Tharby it's usually of them. But I don't know, I think
they're a bit dark and grim with their tiny windows and the plaster
you're not allowed to paint. I asked Ned why it was that everything over
two hundred years old was supposed to be beautiful and he laughed and he
said he didn't know, he'd never thought of that before but I had a
point. The way he likes the things I say, the way he agrees with me and
sometimes says I make him see things with new eyes, that would convince
me if I needed convincing that it's not just for the way I look that he
wants me.

The seven-year-old and the five-year-old were both in bed and Steve was
out helping his father get the potato crop in. I gave Philippa the
videos I'd made, they were Steel Magnolias and Dangerous Liaisons, and
she gave me The Young Lions and The Anderson Tapes. Not that I'm likely
to get around to watching them, I'm not film-mad the way she is, and I
only do the videos for her because she can't watch one and rehcord one
at the same time. Her -house isn't big but it has lots of rooms, all of
them tiny, and we had to sit in the one where the television is because
she was halfway through watching John Wayne being a captain in the US
Cavalry. She couldn't video it, she was already videoing Hi-de-hi on BBC
I, so we sat there drinking Diet Cokes while the soldiers fought the
Indians until twenty to eight and it was over.

Will you do On the Waterfront for me on Thursday if I do The Paleface
for you? I want to do The Trials of Rosie ONeill myself and I can't do
that and the Marion Brando. And I can't sit up that late to actually
watch iether of them because the kids get me up at six.

Philippa's life is as complicated as if she was juggling a marriage, a
job and a couple of love affairs but her affairs are with video tapes
and her job pro-gramming the VCR. I said I'd rehcord anything she liked
and nearly added I'd be out on Thursday evening, stopping myself just in
time.

Have you ever heard of someone called da Brent? I said.

Philippa looked at me as if I'd asked if she'd ever heard of Marilyn
Monroe.

Baling comedies, I said. Is that right?

Of course it is. Everyone knows that. Not just Baling comedies. She was
in a lot of war films. HMS Valiant and The Skies Above Us.

Tell me something I'll have seen.

I'm just amazed by the films you haven't seen, Jenny. Let's see. The
Wife's Story?

I've heard of it.

Well, it's on next week, so I'll video it for you. It'll be a change to
video something you really want to see.

What did she look like? I said.

Blonde, but face a bit like Joan Crawford's. Great legs. Why d'you want
to know?

Why did I? Stella had only asked me if I'd ever heard of her. I suppose
I thought that if I found something out Stella would tell me more and
that would have some connection with herself.

There's a woman at the home who knew her.

Did she? Did she? said Philippa, and her whole face lit up. It's her
dream to meet a real actor or actress, and if she knew how well I knew
Ned she'd want me to ask him to introdjuce one of them to her. But she
doesn't and she won't. Did she know her well?

I've no idea, I said. When I find out I'll tell you.

I've just remembered something, she said. Wait there, as if I was going
to jump up and run away.

She came back with a little book in her hands. In fact it was a
cigarette-card album. I don't know if you've ever seen those things
well, you may not ever have heard of cigarette cards. There used to be
one in every packet of cigarettes and it would be a picture of a foot
baller or a bird or fish or wild flower, anything you can think of. You
collected the set of thirty-six, say, and stuck them in an album. I'd
seen them before because my nan has a whole lot of them that my late
grand ad collected. The one Philippa showed me was of film stars. It was
nearly full, only one missing, the space being for someone else I'd
never heard of, a woman called Corinne Luchaire.

They didn't seem quite like photographs, more drawings that had been
coloured in. The one of Gillda Brent showed a girl who looked, as
Philippa had said, a lot like Joan Crawford but not so -I don't know
what the word would be, positive maybe, dynamic. Her hair was rolled up
in front and hanging down behind. She had blood-red lips and eyebrows
plucked to hairlines. Underneath, where you slotted the card in, was
printed on the album page: Gillda Brent, born London, 1920.

Real name Gwendoline Miranda Brant. Blonde hair, green eyes. Films
include: HMS Valiant, The Skies Above Us, The Fiancee, The Lady in Lace,
The Wife's Story, Seven for a Secret, Lora Cartwright.

They were all sort of supporting roles that she had, Philippa said.

She was never the star. No, I tell a lie, she was the star of The Wife's
Story, but I don't reckon it was much of a box-office success.

She never made a film after the mid-fifties. Perhaps she should have
gone to Hollywood but I suppose no one asked her. i

It was then that it came into my head that Gillda Brent might have been
Stella. The age was wrong, Stella hadn't been born till 1923, but she
could have been lying about her age. I hadn't seen her birth certificate
and I don't suppose Lena had. Her maiden name could have been Brant and
as for the name Stella, you can call yourself what you like, I wouldn't
wonder at anyone not liking Gillda. Mum's real name is Doris but she
hates it and everyone's always called her Diane. Stella's daughter
Marianne is an actress and actresses often have children who are
actresses. I was thinking of Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, of Maureen
OSullivan and Mia Farrow.

What happened to her? I said.

I don't know. She just disappeared. The heyday of British films was
over. I reckon there wasn't any work for her. Maybe she got married to
some rich tycoon.

For the first time since the first time, Ned and I met that Thursday
without making love. It wasn't just cold, it was pouring with rain. I
waited for him at Thelmarsh Cross, feeling miserable and worse than
that, feeling guilty because it was raining as if I'd made it rain and
wondering how he'd react when I told him it was no good, I wouldn't do
that in the backs of cars.

The marvelous thing was that he already knew, he knew it would be
impossible, and he didn't mind. He was fastidious about that sort of
thing too. I got into the passenger -seat of his car and we kissed, a
long sweet kiss that only ended because I heard the water splash sounds
of a car approaching from Curton. I broke away from Ned and looked out
of the window and saw that it was the same car I'd seen last time and
the same woman at the wheel. It was probably my fancy that she slowed
down as she passed us.

I thought you wouldn't come, I said, because there's nowhere we can be
alone.

We are alone, he said.

Not alone the way I want us to be.

Jenny, we don't want each other just for the sex. Does it matter so much
if we have an evening or two now when we sit and talk?

We stayed there for a while and then he drove the seven or eight miles
to Newall Pomeroy where there's a little pub, not much frequented, by
name the White Swan. The licensee let us sit in a room at the back
called the snug, but it was more than we dared even to hold hands.

People kept coming in or at any rate putting their heads round the door.
Ned talked some more about liking just to be with me, enjoying sitting
and talking, and how about coming to the filming with him next day? He
knew it was my day off. They were doing a profile of an artist who lives
in Wells-next-the--sea.

I won't pretend it didn't make me happy to be asked. I'd be there with
him, the prodjucer, and I'd meet the cameramen and all the crew, the
director and perhaps even the artist. We'd eat together and drive to the
different locations together and everyone would know who I was and why I
was there. It was Ned's way of starting to make a public commitment to
me, his way of presenting me to the world and saying: this is my
girlfriend that I'll be married to one day. Sad really that I couldn't
do it.

Why can't you, Jenny?

Because Jane will get to know.

She's going to have to know sometime. I'm not planning on being a
bigamist.

No, she isn't going to have to know, Ned. And you know why not.

Hannah is why not.

He started to argue but I said there was no way round that, and there
wasn't. Because Hannah wasn't just a little girl of five who needed both
her parents. She was a little girl of five with asthma. She was on
corticosteroids and uses a nebulizer. That was why Ned had kept going
back to Rowans from the village hall that night, because earlier in the
day Hannah had had one of her asthma attacks. And when she had them, for
some reason it was her dad that she wanted with her. It was not unusual
for him to get up four times in the night to see to her.

Yet he could say, Marriage comes with an escape clause these days.

When you go into it you know that if the worst comes you can get out of
it.

Not when the worst is a child with asthma.

It wrenched the heart out of me to say these things, to stand up and
resist him when he looked at me like that and pleaded with me. He had
such a beautiful, sensitive face, the mouth so soft when he kissed me
and so firm when he spoke, his blue eyes so direct. The hand that held
mine was brown and long-fingered and cool. He had long taken off the
wedding ring he wore when first we met. It was hard to deny him, it was
hard to be always saying no. And when I looked out at the rain streaming
down the windows, at the dark already closing in, I thought how likely
it was there would be no expression of love between us for many months,
and it frightened me. I felt as if I was putting him to a test. Would he
go on loving me when I couldn't make love to him and all we could do
when we were together was talk?

He was driving me back to where my car was at Thelmarsh Cross and
talking about the filming again, trying once more to persuade me to come
to it, when we came slap-bang up against a tractor, parked under a
dripping hedge. Not quite slap-bang, for we didn't hit it. Ned braked
just in time and the car jumped and shook, jolting me forward in the
tight band of the -seat-belt. I don't know why that reminded me of
Stella unless it was because she had warned me to drive carefully along
these lanes, but one thought leads to another and that led me to Gillda
Brent. And he had heard of her, he'd once even tried to get her to take
part in a film he was making.

It must be all of fifteen years ago, he said. I was just starting out. I
was twenty-three and working in casting. I came upon a photograph of her
and got on to her agent. The photograph was old then, probably twenty
years old. But I thought it was the sort of face that would wear well.
Good genes or good bones. Your face is one of those, Jenny.

What was the part you wanted her for?

She was sixty by then. It was someone's mother who had been a famous
actress in her day. Gillda Brent's face was the face I held in my mind.

I asked if she had played the part.

We couldn't find her. Her agent said she was still technically on his
books but he hadn't been in touch with her for nearly ten years. She'd
disappeared, was the way he put it, which seemed rather too dramatic. I
think that that only meant he'd had no offers for her in that time. But
even before that although he didn't quite say so jobs had been thin on
the ground. She'd never worked in television.

I told him who I thought she was and where she was. Ned said he'd like
to meet her. I didn't commit myself to anything, I was going through
feelings I always had just before parting from him. They're a mixture of
misery at having to separate, coming loneliness, a great inner emptiness
and, yes, unsatisfied desire. Even when we've made love the unsatisfied
desire remains. Only being with him night and day, living with him and
sleeping beside him night after night would end that. And this could
never happen.

Remembering what Stella's reaction had been when I obeyed her too
promptly, I took my time telling her what I knew about Gillda Brent. It
was Monday before I told her what Philippa had said and what I'd got
from Ned.

The weekend had been long and dull. Mike went to Norwich on Saturday
afternoon to see the Canaries play at home and in the evening he went on
with what he'd been doing that morning, refitting the kitchen and
painting it, but in such a way as to cause me the minimum inconvenience
in the week to come. He's lived with me all these years but, despite all
evidence to the contrary, he still believes I spend most of the time I'm
at home in the kitchen. That's what women do. Bless him, he calls it my
kitchen, he's doing up my kitchen, and it's his way of showing his love
for me, it's the only present he knows how to give me.

We had Sunday dinner with Mum and Len, an hour with my nan in her
bungalow afterwards, and tea at Janis's. In other words, the usual way
of getting through two days with no work to fill them.

Going off back to London was a relief to Mike on Monday morning. Of
course he didn't show it, it wasn't blatant, he gave me a kiss and said
he'd miss me, but when his mate Phil came to pick him up ten minutes
early he was all ready and raring to go. He jumped into the car, he was
listening to some tale of Phil's and laughing so much he forgot to look
back, still less wave goodbye. The fact is that Mike, like a lot of men,
best enjoys the company of men, he's happiest with his own sex, and when
we go to those village hall dos he always ends up at the bar end with
the men he went to school with. He even did, eventually, the night I
first met Ned.

When I got to work Stella was in her room finishing her breakfast. But
no sooner was I inside admiring the new tape rehcorder on her desk than
my bleeper started, letting me know I was wanted in Arthur's room.

Arthur had got his sciatica back, and by the time I'd given him a
massage and made an appointment with the physiotherapist it was
mid-morning and time for everyone's coffee and biscuits. Stella, for
some reason, was the last to get hers. I found her in the lounge on her
own, reading Sunday's newspaper, which seemed to me a bit sad, though it
shouldn't have as Monday's had arrived as usual and were waiting on the
table in the entrance hall.

It seems strange to me now that I could have been so naive. I had a
silly sort of smile on my face as I said, She was you, wasn't she?

Gillda Brent was you.

She didn't laugh. She turned to me a grave troubled face and said, What
gave you that idea?

I don't know, I just thought ... Well, the age was nearly right and you
were so mysterious about it. I just thought she must be you.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, Jenny. I can see you've put in some
re-search, but I was not Gillda Brent and she was not me. She added
rather oddly, I wish she had been.

Saying that brought the colour into her face, or something did. She put
the paper aside. She picked up her coffee cup and sipped from it in a
weary sort of way, as if she didn't much care whether she had coffee or
not, as if it was something to do to pass the time.

I was never anything, my dear. Just a secretary for a while and then a
-housewife and mother, as Gillda never tired of reminding me.

She gave me a bright smile and quickly switched it off. Her eyes went
back to the paper, though she didn't pick it up again. I thought she was
ending our conversation as she sometimes did by simply being
indifferent, by shutting off all interest and retreating inside herself.

I was going to take myself away, I had plenty to keep me busy, when she
said, as if I'd asked a question, Her father was quite a well-known
Shakespearean actor called Everard Brant. Of course she was on the stage
from a young child. I believe she was actually in The Tempest as a
sprite or something, or perhaps that was A Midsummer Night's Dream.

That's how she got into films, because her father was who he was.

Did she have any connection with your -house? I said.

She seemed not to hear me. By the time I knew her she'd finished with
films. She was forty, you see, and being forty then wasn't what it is
now. Forty was middle-aged and no one wanted middle-aged film actresses
except to play someone's mother and Gillda wasn't that type at all. Oh,
no, she'd finished with films or films had finished with her.

But she never forgot. She never let anyone forget what she'd been.

I'd never have thought Stella could be bitchy and the way she was
talking surprised me. It made me feel uncomfortable, so I repeated my
question about the -house, just to deflect her, not because I really
cared. Stella gave me an odd look.

None at all, she said, and, seeming to think better of that, she had
nothing to do with it and yet she had everything to do with it. She only
went there once and that was on the day of her death. She spoke with so
much determination that I could hardly believe it when she looked up at
me, her voice changed, her tone quite wistful and nervous, and said, The
person who told you about Gillda, did she say anything about what
happened to her?

It was two people, I said, but I'm not sure I know what you mean, what
happened to her.

I mean, did they say she was did they say she was dead?

We didn't talk about that, I said. I didn't know you wanted to know. You
didn't say.

She had such a look on her face that it began to frighten me. It was as
if her face had suddenly got much thinner and the features had
sharpened. Her cheeks had flushed, a different, duller colour than the
rouge. She put out her hand and took hold of mine. It wasn't done
affectionately but as if she was in need.

Does it matter, Stella? I said. Do you want to know if she's dead?

Oh, I know, I know. Of course she's dead. She's been dead for
twenty-five years. It's not that I want to know. I want to know if
anyone else knows.

A fit of coughing seized her. It's a horrible dry cough she has and
there's nothing you can do for it. She recovers by herself eventually
and lies back, spent, in her chair. That was what happened and I was
still holding on tight to her hand when I heard the door open behind me
and someone come in. Stella saw her over my shoulder.

She dropped my hand and whispered, Don't say anything about this in
front of her.

It was Marianne, back from Corfu.

She's always polite and nice, calling me by my name and asking me how I
am. That over, she threw her arms round Stella the way she does and
launched straightaway into a breathless account of her holiday, how
wonderful it was and how awful, how dire that's a fayvorit word with her
the friend's -house they stayed in and how fantastic the weather, how
appalling the journey, the kids behaviour, the food. She's always like
that. She calls everyone darling, even me.

I didn't stay, though I hung about just long enough to take in her
appearance. She must be forty-one or -two but I don't think she looks
any older than me, she's really beautiful, slim and willowy, with
strong, regular features, and long chestnut hair. Her skin was tanned a
rich golden colour and she hadn't a line on her face. I thought of what
Stella had said about Gillda Brent being middle-aged at forty.

Marianne made me realize how times had changed.

She unloaded gifts from Corfu and duty-frees all over her mother's
chair. Stella wasn't tired any more but suddenly twenty years younger,
opening her presents and laughing with delight.

Married people sleeping in a double bed together is a strange business.

Any bed-sharing for a couple who've been together a long time is
strange. Yet I'm sure that that never occurs to most people. When I
first started thinking about it if I'd been happy doing it I don't
suppose I ever would have it suddenly seemed to me one of the oddest
things in life.

It isn't as if those same people sit close to each other and hold hands
all their lesher time or sit in -seats side by side in a restaurant. In
fact, though I don't often go to restaurants, when I do someone else
will always take care Mike and I don't sit together. It's not supposed
to be correct. And in their own home a couple will face each other
across a table, not sit in adjoining chairs. But at night they share a
bed. Visitors from another time or another planet wouldn't believe it.

To them it would seem like a survival from olden days, from the Middle
Ages.

In the old Hollywood movies couples have single beds. That makes me
wonder if the custom nearly died out in the thirties and came back again
for some reason. But what reason? Not for making love, most of those
couples never do that, and not for warmth these days. Besides, in our
double bed Mike and I never touch each other. But we go on sleeping side
by side in that four-foot-six bed and if I asked him why and why not
make a change, I know he'd think I'd gone mad.

Double beds should be for new lovers. I need one to share with Ned, for
it's only when love is fresh and urgent that a big warm shared bed is
right. But all I'm getting now is a pub snug and promises of his
devotion and that he'll never change. We kiss and kiss and he asks me to
come to Norwich and spend my day off with him and every time I say no,
his home ground is too dangerous. I said no once more last time we met
but I did promise to watch television the next evening and see a film
he'd made. It's another way of getting close to him, though not the way
I want.

Your judgement, what Ned calls your critical faculty, doesn't work very
well when you're looking at something that's been made by the person you
love. I couldn't tell you whether Ned's film was good or not.

Normally I'd be bored watching a pro-gramme about an old man's memories
of Norfolk railways, but of course it was Ned's production so I kept
imagining him being there and arranging this and that, choosing this set
and that location. His name on the credit titles, Prodjucer, Edward
Sara-man', made my heart jump as it always does when I read it anywhere.

A film was on next and the film was The Fiancee.

I was on the point of turning it off. Black and white is disappointing
when you're used to colour and I'd picked up the remote to switch off
when I saw the name Gillda Brent come up on the screen, well below the
stars, John Mills, Googie Withers, Bernard Miles. Coincidence, I
thought, but it wasn't really. I expect all her films come up on TV from
time to time, only I never noticed them before Stella told me her name.

The story was set in World War II and it was about a woman turning up at
a great mansion in the country, the kind of place only aristocratic
people live in, and telling the couple who own it she's their dead son's
fiancee that he got engaged to just before he was killed on a bombing
raid over Germany. Googie Withers was the fiancee and John Mills the son
who turns out not to be dead after all. Gillda Brent was his sister, a
suspicious-minded girl who thinks the fiancee is a fraud from the first
time she meets her.

She must have been about twenty-five when it was. made and she was very
good-looking. But I was reminded of what I'd first thought when I saw
the drawing on the cigarette card. It wasn't a face to remember, it was
a face to be confused about, and it changed a lot as she spoke and moved
and the way the light fell on her, so that sometimes she looked like
Joan Crawford but sometimes like Veronica Lake or even Valeric Hobson. I
don't know about her acting ability. Ned says you didn't have to be able
to act if you were in films in those days. Her voice was one of those
voices they all had, upper class, clear, ringing, and if you heard a
woman speaking like that now you'd cast up your eyes.

It was something to tell Stella about next morning but by the time I'd
seen to Gracie and got Arthur into his chair it was past nine and she
was on her way to the hospital for her radiotherapy. Stella is dying,
there's no hope of saving her life, but her breathing problems can be
relieved, and though she keeps saying there's no point any more and to
let it go, she still has Pauline drive her into Bury once a fortnight.

Unlike Lena, I don't snoop around the residents rooms while they're out.
Half of them, certainly the ones who still have their faculties like
Sidney and Lois, and yes, Stella, would get their children to move them
elsewhere if they knew about Lena reading their letters and looking in
their address books. But when I picked up Stella's breakfast tray, the
linen napkin with the tiniest trace of lipstick on it fell off on to the
floor. I bent to pick it up and saw something white under the bed.

It was a screwed-up piece of paper. Maybe it had been there for days or
maybe only hours. Mary's a good cleaner when it comes to surfaces but
not too great on sweeping under things. I shouldn't have read what was
written on the paper, should I? I mean I shouldn't have looked, because
I could scarcely read a word of it. And that's really why I looked and
went on looking, scrutinizing it, because at first I didn't think it was
English or even written in the kind of letters we make. It was more a
pattern than a piece of writing, a photo of a piece of lace or a child's
squiggles seen in a mirror. The only words I could make out, and that
with difficulty, were Gillda and something that might, or might not,
have been disappeared'.

I screwed it up again and threw it in the waste basket. Sharon caught up
with me as I was leaving the room and said to watch out for Lena because
she was in one of her foul moods.

She's not getting Edith's money like she thought she was, Sharon said.
Not any of it. Edith left it all to Action Aid and the Lord Whisky
Sanctuary.

Lena fetched Stella back a bit before lunchtime. She gave me one of her
grins that aren't smiles. When she was a child people didn't take their
kids to dentists much, which is why she never had a brace and her upper
teeth stick out.

Lady Newland's been moaning all the way back about my driving, she said.
Much too fast for her ladyship, apparently.

She says these things in a comedienne's voice and with a bright smile,
as if that makes every offensive remark all right. Stella was tired, but
she had some spirit left. She sat down in the lounge, looked up at Lena
and said, I am not the widow of a knight or a baronet.

You what?

I'd prefer you to call me Misses Newland, but since that seems too
difficult or too formal, Stella will do.

It took courage for her to say it and the effort made her breathless.

Lena looked at her open-mouthed.

We're all on first name terms here, I hope. Misses, indeed. That would
be too formal these days. Oh, definitely. You have to go with the flow,
Stella, remember that, you have to go with the flow.

Stella didn't cry until Lena had gone and then it wasn't noisy crying,
just a tear from each eye running down her cheeks. I sat down beside
her, in such a way as to shield her from Maud's view. Maud was by the
french window, craning her neck to get a good look and an earful if
possible. So I whispered. Stella isn't hard of hearing but Maud is.

You don't want to let her get you down. She's crabby because she hasn't
come into Edith's money.

Stella tried to smile. Did she expect to? Oh, dear. It's not her, Jenny,
it's well, I'm tired and sometimes sometimes I feel bad about things.

This'll cheer you up, I said.

On the way in that morning, walking across the grass from the parking
place to the back door, I'd found a four-leaved clover. For the first
time for days it wasn't raining. I'm like Mum, when I walk over a field
or through grass anywhere I always look down at the clover in the hope
of spotting a four-leaved one. They're not as uncommon as you might
think. I found one back in July and gave it to Ned to bring him luck
with the film he was making in France. He wore it in his buttonhole till
it was dried up and unrecognizable. But this time I'd done what I often
do, pressed the triune leaf between two bits of paper. I'd meant to keep
it for myself but Stella's need was greater than mine.

What is it, Genevieve? A shamrock?

It's a four-leaved clover and about the best luck-bringer you can think
of.

Better than spotted dogs? she said.

Much better. I'm used to being teased about my protection beliefs and I
don't mind. I don't suppose you do mind if you're confident your faith
can't be shaken. You put it inside a book and press it and it'll last
for years.

She was smart today, the way she especially is when she has to go out
somewhere. Her generation dressed up to go to the shops, let alone for a
hospital appointment in town. She had on a flowered dress and jacket and
pearls round her neck, fine pale stockings and cream-coloured court
shoes. Lena in her green cardigan over a shocking pink -track-suit why
are -track-suits and shell-suits always pink or purple or emerald green?

wouldn't have liked that much.

Stella seemed indifferent to the four-leaved clover but she was tired
and she'd been through a lot that morning, so I found the book she was
reading and slipped it inside like a bookmark. I thought she'd want a
sleep but when I'd put a blanket over her knees and was halfway to the
door she put out her hand and said, No, Jenny, stay with me a while.
Tell me, did you watch the film last night?

The Fiancee? I said. I wanted to see what Gillda Brent was like. It
wasn't very good, was it?

I didn't watch. It was so late. She corrected herself. That's not the
real reason. I saw it years ago, when it was first made. And then again,
at a cinema with her. With Gillda, I mean. She used to like me to go to
the pictures with her and see her in her films. I don't think I could
face it now. Well, I wouldn't even try. The little laugh she gave had a
tinny sound. I couldn't bear to see her.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. You said she was dead. What did she
die of?

I thought she wasn't going to answer, she took so long about it. First
she hung her head and put one hand up to her forehead. But she took that
hand down with the other hand and forced it into her lap as if putting
it up there had been a sign of weakness. Her chin went up and I thought
her lips quivered a little before she spoke.

She died in a car crash.

What, soon after she stopped making films?

Years and years after that, Stella said. You notice I said she died in a
car crash, not of a car crash. I don't know quite how she died.

I was bewildered and must have shown it. I shouldn't have told you that,
Genevieve. You mustn't repeat it to anyone at all. You won't tell
anyone, will you?

Who can I tell? I said. My world isn't exactly full of people who are
longing to know how some obscure old film actress met her end. I don't
know anyone to tell.

No. I suppose that's why I've told you as much as I have. But that
friend of yours, the television man?

It's unpleasant the way we have no control over our blushes. My face
felt fiery. I won't say anything to Ned.

Good. That's sweet of you. I know I can trust you, Jenny. I'd like to
tell you things about my life, I will tell you one day, but I have to be
allowed to choose what I tell. Do you understand?

It was that one day that struck me. Stella wasn't going to have a 'one
day and part of her mind knew it as well as I did. But I suppose we're
so in the habit of talking about what we'll do one day and 'next year
and sometime that when a limit's been put on our lives we forget we
haven t a future. She changed the subject quite abruptly.

You haven't been to an estate agent, have you?

I said I wouldn't do that unless she asked me.

No. Of course you wouldn't. It's just that so much is taken out of one's
hands in here and so many people treat one as if one is in one's second
childhood. I mean, I wouldn't have been surprised to find my -house was
already on the market and droves of people making offers. My face must
have shown her how unjust she was being. She put out her hand and
touched mine. No, you're different from the rest of them, Genevieve. You
wouldn't do that.

And Richard is different, I said.

She seemed surprised. You're right. He is.

Stella, I'll go to an estate agent any time you like, I said, but as for
droves of people making offers it's been empty for all those years, it's
very dirty, it's quite dilapidated looking. It'll be quite hard to sell
the way it is.

The tired look came back. Do you mean it's going to need repairing and
redecorating?

It's going to need cleaning up first. I don't know why I said it, I
don't know why I made the offer. It's not as if I like that kind of work
or am much good at it. The most likely explanation is that I saw it as a
way of spending my day off that was not sitting at home wishing I was
with Ned in Norwich and reproaching myself for having scruples.

Would you like me to clean your -house, Stella?

The 13th. Not the best of days to undertake any enterprise. Mum's
wedding to Ron was on the ijth and look what happened to that marriage.

But I didn't have much choice, my day off fell on that day, and anyway I
couldn't think what could go wrong a fatal attitchude when it comes to
ignoring signs and portents, as anyone in our family will tell you.

I set off early for Molucca, just after eight, and along with the spray
polish and sink cleaner and cloths I had the sense to take the Dustette
with me. It works on a battery which was essential in a place where the
electricity was turned off. Mike gave it to me last Christmas and I said
it was lovely, taking care not to point out that it was him put most of
the mud on the carpets and made the crumbs at mealtimes. As it turned
out, taking a Dustette and two J-cloths to clean up Stella's -house was
like trying to climb Everest in a pair of trainers and carrying a can of
Coke.

It wasn't a nice day but grey and windy, though maybe it would have been
worse to have had the sun pouring in to show up more of that dust.

I don't know what dust is, what is it, that fine grey powdery stuff?

It's not something you ever see anywhere else. I mean, it's not crumbs
or hairs or fluff, it's not lint off your clothes or fur off animals,
it's not ash or iron filings or wood shavings. It's dust and it's made
of nothing and comes from nowhere to cover everything everywhere. I
suppose that if all the people in the world died of some plague and just
the buildings were left, in time they'd be hidden under a layer of dust.

I started in the living room. I opened the window, which was no easy
task in itself, and I shook the rugs out on to the grass. It was like
the desert storm in Lawrence of Arabia. The oil painting of Stella when
young I dusted carefully with a soft cloth, removing the grey film which
had dulled the pink of her dress and the gleam of her pearls. I worked
on all the furnitchure, shaking my cloth out of the window. By the time
I'd dusted all the surfaces and brushed the upholstery, got all the dirt
on to the carpet, and sucked it all up, the battery had run out on the
Dustette.

Something I hadn't noticed the first time was that there was a deep dent
in the wall facing the fireplace, as if it had been struck a blow hard
enough to tear the wallpaper. And when I got the silver polish out and
started cleaning the silver. I saw that there was a dent in one of the
bowls. It looked as if someone had once thrown the bowl at the wall,
damaging both. I cleaned all the silver until I couldn't bear the smell
of the cleaner any longer or the feel of the grainy pink powder on my
hands.

The kitchen and the bathroom should have been easier than the living
rooms because they had no carpets. But they had no hot water iether, and
I hadn't the means of heating it. Still, I managed to get the worst off
the sink and the basin and half-shifted the ring round the bath. The
windows were easier because the stuff to clean them comes out of a
bottle, not a cold trickle from a tap.

At twelve I stopped for a bit and ate the sandwiches I'd brought with
me. Though I'd failed before, this time I could clearly see Middleton
Hall far away in the distance beyond the brown ploued fields and the
white goose fields. It made me think about Stella and wonder what went
on in her head, what was the reason for being so mysterious about Gillda
Brent and what she'd meant about telling me everything one day'. Gillda
had been to this -house once, she'd said, and had died in a car crash.
Was that why Stella didn't like going out in cars and hated fast
driving, because of the way Gillda had died?

All the women in our family see ghosts from time to time. Mum has seen
most. She regularly sees the Man in the Grey Suit who walks across the
bedroom that's above the saloon bar. The Thundering Legion was once the
court-house and jail and a murderer spent his last night of liberty
there, pacing that room, before being sent to the Assizes and hanged.

Janis saw her friend's spaniel and touched him a week after the dog had
been put down, and as for my nan, in the days when she worked for Mister
Thorn's father at the Hall, she saw the Brown Lady twice, on three
occasions heard the voice that calls out, Elizabeth, Elizabeth! and
smelt the gunpowder smell untold times. That was why I wouldn't have
been surprised to have turned round from that window and seen Gillda
Brent standing there. She'd have been grey like the dust, grey like she
was in the black-and-white film, and maybe wearing the long evening
dress in which she'd looked so beautiful in The Fiancee, an
off-the-shoulder gown with a draped bodice and the skirt a sweep of
trailing chiffon, her long blonde hair grey and her face, that was like
so many different film-stars faces, carved in marble.

I turned and there was no one there. And I had to admit the -house
didn't have that feel about it, that unmistakable, haunted feel when you
sense all the time that someone is watching you and where the air is
full of tiny whisperings and unexplained sounds. All I felt about
Stella's -house was that it was waiting for something. Perhaps only for
someone to live in it. I went into the bedroom and started cleaning in
there, with a broom and a dustpan and brush this time. After I'd got the
worst of the dust swept up, I took down the curtains. There was nothing
to be done with those curtains but take them home with me and see if I
could get them clean or if they'd fall to pieces in the wash.

Between the door to the furnished bedroom and the door to one of the
empty bedrooms was an airing cupboard. The linen inside felt damp but it
wasn't growing mould. I knew I'd have to come back and finish, it was
impossible to get it all done that day, so I took out a pair of sheets
and four pillowcases and spread them out on chairs in front of the
window for the sun to air them if we got any sun. Then I stripped the
bed and put the bedclothes in a pillowcase to take home with me and
wash.

Down in the kitchen again, I wondered what Mike would say if he saw it.

The thought made me laugh to myself because Mike is a regular fusspot
about things like that. He'd probably start on that kitchen
straightaway, pr ising out chipped -tiles and screwing on loose handles.

The first time I was there I hadn't looked inside the fridge. Its door
was shut. If you go away and leave a fridge with the power turned off
you should always leave the door open or the dampness inside will grow
mould. When that happens, no matter how much you clean and air it, the
mouldy smell never goes away. I opened the door and looked inside,
prepared for the worst.

Mould had been there and a fungus like grey velvet but that was long
ago. Nothing remained now but dust, more dust that covered shapeless
lumps of what had once been food but which now couldn't be identified as
more than a branch of something, a wedge of something. Except for one
item on which the dust didn't lie: a bottle of champagne.

Bollinger, the real stuff, with gold paper round its top and that sort
of gold net they decorate the bottles with. It was lying on one of the
shelves among the grey ghosts of food as if it had been put there to
chill, but the celebration, or whatever it had been bought for, had
never taken place.

Opening the broom cupboard I noticed something else I hadn't seen when
I'd been there the first time. There was a row of cup hooks on the back
wall and on every hook hung a key, six in all. Some must have fitted the
locks on interior doors. The biggest fitted the back-door lock and
another slightly smaller one the door into the garige. I unlocked that
door and went into the garige to have a look at the red car.

There it rested on its flat tyres. It wasn't locked and there was no key
in the ignition. I opened the driver's door and got in, leaned across
the driving -seat and had a look round. The side pockets were bare and
the glove compartment was empty. Nothing was on the back -seat and
nothing on the floor. When Stella told me that Gillda Brent had died in
a car crash I'd had an idea it might have been in this car, I'd thought
that perhaps she'd crashed this car and after that someone close to her
had never wanted to see it again and got Stella to store it. But the
only marks on the car weren't the sort a crash makes. They were burn
marks. The car was dusty, coated in a layer of dust that had never been
disturbed since it was put in there, but when I wiped that away I could
see that the body work was singed all over the boot and around it and
above the rear wheels. Its red paint was blackened and in the worst
parts bubbled so that in places it had flaked off to show the grey metal
underneath.

I pulled up the boot lid. The tools were inside, and the spare wheel.

There was something else too, a square scarf in emerald-green chiffon,
rumpled, loose, looking as if someone had dropped it uncaring on the
boot floor. I took it out. It may have lain there for twenty-five years
but it was quite clean and it still smelt of something, a very stale,
musky perfume. Green is a colour Stella never wears, very wise in my
opinion as nothing could be more unlucky, so the scarf couldn't be hers
unless her tastes had changed. I took it into the kitchen and hung it
over the back of a chair.

The sight of it hanging there carried me back sixteen years to something
I'd hardly thought of in all that time: Janis and me divining for our
true loves in the kitchen at home on Saint John's Eve. We'd performed
the prescribed ritchual, laid the table with a supper of bread and
cheese, then taken off all our clothes and hung them over the backs of
two chairs. I had a green skirt that my dad had given me, to defy Mum I
suppose, and that's what I hung over the rest of my things. We left the
back door on the jar and went upstairs, waiting and listening for the
men to come.

I was frightened when I heard the footsteps, much more frightened than
Janis was, though she was younger, and at first I wouldn't go down, I
wouldn't even look over the banisters. But she got hold of my hands and
dragged me and we found Peter in the kitchen, eating our supper and
drinking a Coke he'd got out of the fridge. She swore she hadn't invited
him, she hardly knew him then apart from being in the same class at
primary school but seven years later she married him. So was he her true
love?

As for me, no one came. Not my boyfriend of the time, not Mike, not Ned
of course, casting his shadow before him. I put it down to the green
skirt and I've never worn green since. The scarf, the colour and the
square shape of it, brought all that back, but I left it hanging on the
chair, not knowing what else to do with it.

Then I remembered the photograph I'd promised to fetch. This time I
could see the woman was Stella, but the man no longer seemed like anyone
I knew. The stony, cliff-like background now plainly appeared as what it
was, the flint wall of Molucca. Over the years the happiness in the
picture was still radiant, the charge between the man and the woman, the
heat of love.

It made me think of Ned. I was walking down the passage to the front
door, I'd got my hand on the discoloured brass knob, when a thought came
to me. Why shouldn't Ned and I use this -house on the cold, dark winter
evenings? We had nowhere else to go and it would be months before the
spring. I had a key. No one would know.

Why shouldn't we come here to Stella's -house?

A year ago I wouldn't have dreamt of doing something like that without
asking permission. I've said that doing one wrong thing has made me more
conscientious in other areas of my life, but it isn't true. When it's
love in question and being alone with the person you love,
considerations of morality and decent behaviour disappear.

Love is all and it justifies everything. That's what I tell myself and I
don't listen to the cold, quiet inner voice that says otherwise. Love
doesn't listen to it iether but puts forward very convincing arguments:
Stella had entrusted me with a key, she was happy for me to clean the
place, if she decided to sell she would let me handle the selling of it.
I was practically the caretaker. To spend a couple of hours there once
in a while was taking it one step further, that's all.

Stella made no mention of the -house when I saw her in the morning.

Perhaps she had forgotten or else she could think of nothing but being
taken out somewhere by Richard. This was odd in itself. With her fear of
cars, Stella only goes in them for essential journeys: to her
radiotherapy, to the dentist. She didn't tell me where she was going but
she dressed up for it in the blue spotted dress with her cream linen
coat over it and she was wearing all her rings, the engagement ring with
the sapphires and the eternity ring that's a hoop of diamonds which she
wears on her other hand.

Richard arrived at nine-thirty. He was wearing a suit but a lightweight
one, made to look quite casual, and carrying a parcel. I saw him from
the window of Maud's room. He walked over from the car park to the front
door the way he always does, lively and brisk, looking as if he enjoys
life, yet as if he thinks a lot too. He's not one of those
happy-go-lucky, easy-going people whose heads are empty.

Thinking seems to make us sad as often as not, and it's rare to find a
clever, sensitive person who's also carefree. That reminded me of Ned,
as so many sights and thoughts do, and made me think of his frequent
sadness and the frustrations of his life.

The reading stand Stella had asked for was on the bed when I went into
her room after she and Richard had gone. That must have been what was in
the parcel. Stella had left her book on it, the place marked with the
four-leaved clover I'd given her. I was the one it had brought the luck
to, though, and on the ijth. As Mum always says, those four-leaves are a
powerful charm.

It was a lovely day at last, the rain all swept away into the North
-sea, and I was walking back from settling Sidney in his chair under the
mulberry tree, when Richard came down the steps from the front door. He
hadn't had Stella out for long.

Only as far as Diss, he said, though I hadn't asked.

Was she all right in the car?

She was fine. He smiled. I drive very slowly when she's with me.

I'm a menace to everyone else on the road. They all hoot at me and
Mother says how noisy the roads have got, nobody ever used their horn in
the old days.

That made me laugh. He'd said it very kindly and lovingly, not in Lena's
way which is to send up the old folks. I asked if Stella had had her
morning coffee out, because it was almost midday, but he said they
hadn't stopped for that, he had taken just a few hours off and now he
had to get back to the medical centre.

Mother had some business to see to. I took her to the door and came back
for her after an hour.

I said it was a long way for him to come when one of us could have taken
her, I could have taken her.

I know you could, he said. I'll remember that next time. He hesitated.
It's very strange, isn't it, this car phobia of hers. It started when I
was a child. I can remember when I was a little boy of six or seven I
loved tunnels and a big treat was for her to take me and a friend and
drive us through the Dartford Tunnel and back. It must have been a bore
for her but she didn't complain. She was quite a dashing driver, and
very stylish.

Her fear of cars started soon after that? I said.

I've always connected it with my father's death, though he died when I
was six and I'm sure we did that Dartford Tunnel thing after that.

Anyway, Dad didn't die in a car crash, he died in a train. Well, he was
taken ill in a train. He died in hospital.

Did your mother just stop driving?

Yes, but a good while later. I can't remember when and it's not the sort
of thing I can ask her, though I don't quite know why I say that.

A bit of a mystery, isn't it? I must be off. I've got a surgery at one.

Stella must have brought her children up on her own then, a boy of six
and a girl of what? Fourteen? Fifteen? It gave me a surprise. I had
thought of her as being widowed perhaps five years before. But Richard
is the same age as me, which means his father had been dead for
twenty-six years, or as they always say in the papers, more than a
quarter of a century. I wondered why he couldn't ask her the reason for
her car phobia, but he seemed not to know the reason himself, only to
know perhaps that he would be approaching an area Stella always kept
private.

She stayed in her room for the rest of the day and in the afternoon she
had a long sleep. I looked in once and saw her lying on the bed, wrapped
in her black satin dressing-gown, her eyes closed and her breathing
steady and peaceful. On the dot of four I left, called in at home to
pick up the clean curtains, and at the village store in Curton bought up
their entire stock of candles. If I'd done that in Tharby it would have
made for talk. Your Jenny was in here, Diane, and she's cleaned me right
out of them decorative candles we got in for Christmas. What's she want
them for, then? Her and Mike've never had their electric cut off, have
they? But I doubt if a Tharby woman has ever set foot in the Curton
shop, though it's only four miles distant.

I never had since I was a child and my dad used to take me across the
road and buy me Maltesers.

Having re-charged the Dustette battery overnight, I did a bit more
cleaning. I even managed to heat up some water on the oil stove, though
it was a slow pro-cess. The curtains had faded in the wash and were
raggedy round the hems, but they looked a lot better than they had done.
I hung them up. A day of sunshine had dried the sheets I'd spread out. I
made up the bed and when the kettle boiled at last I put in a hot-water
bottle.

It was a fine evening, though autumnal. But autumn is the prettiest time
in the fen when the dogwood turns dark red and the elder fades to
yellow. The old man's beard was a mass of silky grey hair and the willow
herb underneath it white like goose down. Long tree shadows fell in
stripes across the grass in front of the -house and the setting sun was
a glitter behind the darkness of the woods. Everything was still and
windless, and there was a fresh greenness in the grass and the wild
plants from all the rain, like a false spring. I picked some sprays of
mountain ash berries from the tree by the door and put them in a blue
china vase. Tomorrow, I thought, I'll strip our garden of dahlias and
chrysanths before the first frost gets them and bring them here and fill
the place with flowers.

Before leaving I went round the back and had another look at that car
through the garige window. I don't know why, but now I liked the -house,
now I had done so much to the -house and made it better, I didn't like
that car being there. It was the flaw that spoiled the whole, as Ned
once said about something quite different. It was the maggot,
plum-coloured and wriggling, you find inside the Victoria plum that
looked perfect on the outside. I told myself it was only an old Ford
Anglia, it couldn't hurt anyone, it probably wasn't even drivable. It
was no more important than the rusty hulks of cars you sometimes come
upon in the depths of the fen, dumped long ago and overgrown now with
wild hops and brambles.

Springing surprises isn't always a good idea. Janis and Nick and I had
planned a surprise for Mum on her fiftieth birthday. She knew something
was going on and she let us blindfold her and walk her to Nick's car,
didn't say a word when we drove her round and round to put her off the
scent, but she wasn't too pleased when she found herself in the village
hall and a hundred of her friends and relations waiting for her, singing
Happy Birthday to You. You see, she'd worked it all out and she thought
the surprise was going to be a show in London, in the West End, Miss.
Saigon or Les Miserable, and a night afterwards for her and Len at the
Strand Palace Hotel. All that driving around made it worse because she
reckoned we were taking her to the mainline station at Diss.

So I knew it was a risk arranging a surprise for Ned, but I couldn't see
what could go wrong, and in the event nothing did. He was all amazement
and appreciation. The scent of the flowers I'd brought took away the
musty smell and the evening was too mild to bother with the oil heater.
I'd put blue candles with gold stars on them on the dressing cabinet and
a red sugar stick candle on each bedside cabinet.

He once said he liked Australian Chardon-nay, so I'd got a bottle of
that and kept it cool by running cold water over it in the sink. While I
waited for him to come I washed and polished Stella's crystal glasses I
had found in the sideboard.

He was a bit early, which was good because it meant I didn't have to
wait and worry. And when he came in and put his arms around me I felt
that this was how it would be every evening if we lived together. I
showed him round. I showed him everything except the two empty rooms and
the car. It was as if the -house belonged to me and I was offering it to
him.

I hope it takes your friend months to sell, he said.

Only months?

It isn't going to be many months before you and I are living together,
when we're beyond needing borrowed -houses and he put out his finger to
the flame that made a glow by the bed Christmas candles in September.

That made me smile but it embarrassed me too because when I bought the
twisty red candles I hadn't noticed that the pattern on them was holly
leaves and mistletoe. Still, I liked him always saying we'd be together
one day, we'd have our own home, even though I knew we never would. It's
what women say and then complain because men don't. Men say, let's enjoy
what we have, or, let's not waste time making plans at least, according
to Mum they do. With us the roles are reversed, he talks of permanency
and I try to live in the present.

He wouldn't drink the wine, he said we didn't need wine, and maybe he'd
have a glass later. It's love, he says, that turns him on. He needs
nothing else. Tell me you love me is what he says, and telling him that
is no hardship for me. I loved him more than ever that evening.

He held me against his body in Stella's warm, soft bed, all the length
of him and all the length of me, folded into each other and fitting each
other so closely, and took his mouth from kissing me and said, It's been
so long, Jenny. Don't let it ever be so long again.

He is a lean brown man with long bones and flat muscles. I like the
silky dark hair on his head, almost black, and the two peaks of hair on
the nape of his neck. No, I love it. I love the smell of him, which
doesn't come out of a can or a bottle and isn't sweat, but the smell of
skin and hair and nails. His teeth taste of minty water and his tongue
is clean and smooth like a live fish. When I tell him these things he
says I'm like whoever it was wrote the Song of Solomon in the Bible.

Behold, thou art fair, my love; thou hast doves eyes within thy locks.

I never said that, I said. I don't even know what it means.

And you never said my hair was like a flock of goats or my neck a tower
of David, but you've got the general idea.

Would you mind if I said those things? I said.

I don't mind what you say, Jenny. You can write poetry to me if you
like. If you love everything about someone you don't mind.

Did Nan's love philtre do all this? Would he have loved me anyway even
if I hadn't slipped that powerful charm into his drink? I'm glad I
didn't risk it, I didn't leave it to chance, and I'll bolster it up when
I can.

He closed his eyes. I held his head on my shoulder and gently stroked
his hair but when he was asleep I knew he would sleep only briefly I
slipped out of bed and found his clothes and put a fern leaf I'd kept
from Edith's funeral into his left shoe. For if a woman does that, Nan
says, without fail the man will love her marvellously.

The remission Stella was having, djue to the radiotherapy I suppose,
went on right into October. She still had secret cigarettes in the
grounds of Middleton Hall, sitting on a stone bench and wrapped up in
her thick winter coat, and she still claimed to dislike cars, though she
went out a couple more times for rides with Richard. According to
Pauline, she still ventured into the dining room for her evening meal,
asked for her gin and tonic, her glass of wine and sat alone at her own
table.

Marianne came from London to see her. She arrived in her boyfriend's car
with the boyfriend, a very tall, rather fat man, and the teenagers from
Stella's photograph, Jean-Paul and Kelda. Those two don't speak to their
nan but sit about sullenly or else explore her room, picking up books or
looking inside her desk. They were on their way to stay with a friend of
Marianne's who has a big -house called Something Grange near
Sandringham. Though an actress, Marianne never seems to have any work
and she has friends living in mansions and castles all over the place
who all want her to come and stay.

Stella hadn't said any more about selling Molucca. It's funny how when
we worry about having not confessed something, we try to make up for it
by telling the person something else, some other semmi-secret thing. Ned
says it's what psychologists call displacement. I wasn't going to tell
her Ned and I had spent three evenings in her -house and had made love
in her bed, I wasn't going to say a word about the scarf in the boot of
the car, because then she'd think I'd been prying. But I did tell her
about the champagne.

It had an effect on her I hadn't anticipated. She spoke like someone
who's got a stammer, like someone with a stammer who can control it
after muddling up the first few words.

Genevieve Genevieve, did we really leave that in the fridge? It -it
can't be. After so long? Oh, Genevieve.

Who's we', I thought, but of course I didn't ask. I don't suppose it's
drinkable now.

I don't know, I don't know. Isn't wine better for keeping?

She looked very pale and shocked, so I told her the tale of how when
they were doing some restorations at the Legion, Mum found a bottle of
port pushed into an old bread oven behind the fireplace. Someone must
have put it there to warm and then forgotten it, so it had got warm and
cold and warm and cold for about a hundred years. It smelt fine and Mum
and the -workmen thought they'd have it for their tea but when they drew
the cork it tasted like a mixture of vinegar and paint.

Before I'd finished I could tell Stella hadn't been listening. Her eyes
glittered. They had a feverish look. Genevieve, she said, I must have a
cigarette. I'm going to have a cigarette.

It would have been less against Lena's rules if Stella had taken all her
clothes off and gone running down the passage to Arthur's room. I said
it was risky, I said that if she'd had a shock I'd gladly fetch her a
nip of brandy.

I hate brandy, she said and she got a cigarette out of her bag and lit
it. She closed her eyes and drew in the smoke. In fact, she'd smoked it
all and stubbed it out before Lena smelt it and came in.

Lena pulled a tissue out of Stella's box. She picked the cigarette end
out of Stella's saucer, wrapped it in the tissue, and picked up the
saucer that was full of ash and streaked with wet brown stain. Of course
she couldn't say much to Stella. Stella was paying her 20,000 a year.
All she could do was stage a coughing attack and open Stella's window as
wide as it would go. I was to bear the brunt of it, as I knew I would.

She got me outside and had a real go at me. I was spending too much time
with Stella; if Stella wanted a private nurse she had better make other
arrangements. And as for that cigarette! You'd have thought she'd caught
poor Stella putting cocaine up her nose.

It's so disgusting in one of these old crumb lies Wouldn't you think
that a person who has brought herself to the brink of death through a
vile habit would at least have the sense to give it up now?

That was about as illogical as fitting a smoke alarm after your -house
has burned down, but I didn't say so. I didn't say anything much beyond
being sorry. I knew Lena wouldn't sack me. She'd been advertising for
more staff for months and had only had one reply and that was from a
woman of seventy whose last job had been gutting fish on the beach at
Lowestoft. People don't want to work with the elderly, they don't have
the patience, they can't cope with deafness and loss of memory, let
alone incontinence, and besides, there's no money in it.

But I was discreet about going back to Stella. In fact, I waited till it
was going-home time. After that I'd be just one of Stella's visitors,
free to stay and talk as long as I liked. Usually when I go in she's
reading the paper or doing the crossword or listening to a concert on
the radio, or she's got her latest book. This time she was just sitting.
She'd closed the window and she was staring at the treetops and the
white sky. When she heard the door open she turned round and smiled at
me and put out her hand.

I got you into trouble, Genevieve. I'm so sorry. Was it very awful?

She spoke as if I was a little girl at school, perhaps her little girl,
who'd had a telling off from the head teacher. It irritated me a bit
because sometimes I felt in an odd way older than Stella, older in
experience, older in life. I was still thinking of her as having been
sheltered from everything, a protected woman who'd never had to earn her
own living, and what she said next what she said quite unexpectedly just
confirmed that.

I want to tell you something. It's about my -house. I bought that -house
when my father died. He left me his -house, that was all he left me, it
was all he had, and I sold it and bought Molucca. It was something of my
own, you see. I had nothing of my own, everything was my husband's, even
the -house we lived in in Bury was entirely in his name.

I didn't know you could do that, I said.

You could and can. Plenty of men had the -houses they shared with their
wives in their own name. Rex wouldn't have considered putting the -house
in my name as well. Of course he left it to me, it was mine when he
died, but I'd had Molucca for five years before he died.

I don't suppose he minded you having it, did he? I said. I mean, it was
your money if your father left it to you.

I don't know if he'd have minded, Stella said, and she gave a little
laugh. Her laughter is very sweet and warm, though growing hoarse these
days. He didn't know.

He didn't know, I thought, and your children don't know ... But why?

It was private, Genevieve.

I tried to picture how Mike would react if my dad died and left me his
-house. Well, my dad doesn't own a -house and he wouldn't leave it to me
if he did, but one can still imagine.

Didn't he want to know what you did with the money?

She didn't answer. You don't know what it was like when I was young,
Jenny. My children don't know what it was like. I didn't have a bank
account. My husband did, of course, but it wasn't a joint account. He
gave me the -housekeeping money every month and an allowance for myself
but it was very small and most of it got absorbed in the -housekeeping
anyway.

But for nine years till Richard came along you only had Marianne, I
thought. You never worked?

People always say that. Her voice held a weary note. That was what
Gillda said. People don't realize it's very hard work making a home and
looking after a child and entertaining one's husband's friends. I had
very little help, just a charwoman once a week. I was expected to give a
dinner party single-handed at least once a fortnight. No one but a wife
would do that sort of work and not get paid for it. Besides, my husband
wouldn't have let me take a job.

It seemed a good idea to get her off the subject, but I couldn't help
thinking of what my nan says. If work was such a good thing, the rich
would have kept it for themselves.

So you bought Molucca?

For 4,000, she said.

These days it would fetch 60,000, yet she'd held on to it and paid
council tax on it, and she was the one talking about getting no wages
for being a -housewife.

That was what your dad left you?

He left me his -house and when it was sold it fetched nearly 5,000. I
needed some extra to pay the charges to the estate agent and the legal
fees. I had to buy furnitchure. She rested her head back against the
cushion, tired from so much talking and tired too perhaps from her long
day. I'll tell you something about myself when I was young, she said.
I'll tell you tomorrow.

When I walked into the -house the phone was ringing. I expected it to be
Mike and it was Ned. Sometimes it's such happiness to hear his voice
unexpectedly but such a shock too that I have to sit down before I can
talk to him. And there are times when my voice won't come, or comes
hoarsely, because for some reason I'm seized by fear.

He wanted to tell me he had to go to Denmark on Monday. They were
filming in Copenhagen, something about how to make a modern city in the
European Union without losing the old style of the place or spoiling the
skyline with tower blocks. He'd be away four days and he wanted me to go
with him.

I'd told him I had holiday owing me and Lena'd said she'd like me to
take some of it soon. There was no reason that he could see why I
couldn't go, Mike would be away in London as usual, by the sound of her
my mother would cover for me, and he thought it likely I'd never been to
a foreign country.

Oh yes, I had, I said, I'd been to Mallorca and Tenerife. I didn't say
the first was for our honeymoon and the second our tenth wedding
anniversary, both fixed up as surprises by Mike.

Mallorca and Tenerife aren't foreign countries, he said. They're tourist
bedrooms with beaches. You'll love Copenhagen, we'll stay at the
dangleterre, and I'll take you to Tivoli.

Of course I couldn't go. I couldn't dream of it. There were all the
usual reasons, the film crew talking, Jane finding out, Hannah, lying to
Mike about where I was, and one other reason. I had never thought of it
before and I didn't say anything about it to Ned, but I knew that if I
spent whole days with him and slept beside him all night, if I did this
for days and nights, it would be worse for me afterwards, it would make
our separations more painful and our final parting, whenever that came,
like death to me.

Don't ask me that kind of thing again, I said.

My voice must have sounded gruff and cross. It was all I could manage
because I longed so to laugh and gasp and say, yes, oh yes, please. And
when he rang off he was cross too, disappointed, and telling me I was
unreasonable.

Till the week after then, he said. I'll phone.

I went upstairs and lay on the bed and cried. Mike came home about an
hour later. I heard Phil's car and then the front door and I

was up splashing my face with cold water, but if it was still puffy Mike
didn't notice. He'd bought me a new kind of cheese grater from a special
shop in Soho and a hundred grams of Parmesan in a lump so that I could
make pasta taste more like it does in an Italian restaurant.

The London work's stopping by the end of the month, he said. It'll be a
relief to be done with all this travelling. And I reckon you'll be glad
too, won't you, girl?

Of course I will, I said, and I wonder what it does to you, saying these
things, not lying about what's happened but denying your innermost
feelings. It must eat you like rust corroding metal.

I thought of building us a conservatory, Mike said. What d'you reckon?
On the back of the dining room, maybe fifteen foot long. It'd keep me
busy in the evenings.

I sat down with the dictionary. An encyclopedia and Chambers Dictionary
are what keep me busy in the evenings as I look up long words and try to
learn about unknown things. It's my way of keeping up with Ned, who is
cleverer than I am and knows so much more.

PART TWO Stella was born in London, or about ten miles outside it
rather, in a place called Wanstead. Her father worked for the Customs
and Excise and her mother was a minister's daughter. They had a
semmi-detached -house off an arterial road called Eastern Avenue.

I expect you went to a coed school, didn't you, Genevieve? she said.

I didn't know what she meant and I was still puzzled when she explained.
As far as I knew, all schools were mixed-sex but for a few places like
Eton, and I think they have girls now too.

They were quite a rarity when I was a child, Stella said. But I went to
one, so I was used to meeting a lot of boys. I wasn't one of those girls
who leave school scarcely knowing any boys.

She was nearly sixteen when World War II started and her parents were so
frightened of bombs that they sent her away to stay with an aunt in
Bury. The aunt was really her mother's cousin and Stella was fond of her
and had spent holidays in her -house in Churchgate Street. Before she
left London she'd just passed her School Certificate, which was the exam
they did not just in the days before GCSEs, but before O Levels.

They transferred her to a school in Bury and she stayed there for two
years and passed another exam called a Higher.

I didn't want to leave London, she said. Well, what I mean by that is I
didn't want to leave my she hesitated my friend, my best friend.

Our school was evacuated, I could have gone with our school, they went
to the Essex coast somewhere, but my mother wouldn't have that. She
thought I wouldn't be properly looked after. Really, she meant I
wouldn't be properly supervised -chaperoned, I suppose.

I'd assyumed the best friend was a girl but I was wrong.

Alan, his name was Alan. Stella spoke awkwardly, rather as if that
speech impediment I'd noticed before had come back. Alan Tyzark. She
moistened her lips as if the effort of saying it had made them dry. He
wasn't the boy next door iether. The little light laugh she gave sounded
forced. His parents lived in Snares-brook, not very far away.

We were, Alan and I, I mean, we were inseparable. Only we had to be
separated.

She told me all this while I sat with her the week Ned was away. I broke
in sometimes to ask her questions, like to explain about the School
Certificate for instance, but mostly I just let her talk. After she'd
repeated it a few times she got to be able to say Alan's name as easily
as she said mine.

They thought it was homesickness that troubled her, but it was Alan she
missed more than her home. She only wanted to go back to London if he
was there, but he was in Maldon. They were niether of them much good at
writing letters. She was allowed to have Christmas at home and so was he
and they managed to meet. But it was the last time.

The last time for ever? I said.

The last time for years and years. Twenty years, Genevieve.

The following summer the bombings began. Nearly a year had gone by and
she was used to Bury, she was happy enough and she'd made new friends,
her memories of Alan were starting to fade. By the time she'd done that
next exam, there was no question of her going back to London. It was
coming up to the most dangerous time and no one went back to the cities
unless they had to. Besides, if she was still a bit Alan-sick she was
over feeling homesick, she even sometimes felt she liked the aunt and
the aunt's husband better than her own parents, who had never shown her
much affection. They'd often written to her at first but now letters
came further and further apart and when she heard that her mother had
been killed in an air raid she didn't feel much. Her father came to see
her and talked as if Bury was her permanent home and she'd want to think
about getting a job there.

The aunt persuaded him to pay for a secretarial course. There was a
place just off Saint Mary's Square where you could learn shorthand and
typing and office management and Stella went there for a year. At the
end of it she got a diploma and a job with a firm of solicitors.

They were Newland, Newland and Bosanquet, and the younger Newland was
the man she was to marry one day. He was the younger but he wasn't that
young. The old man was over seventy, apparently you can go on being a
solicitor for as long as you like, and his son was forty when Stella
first went to work there. She wasn't working for him though, but for the
partner called Bosanquet, Anthony Bosanquet. And she was going out with
a boy.

His name was David, and, can you believe it, Stella had to stop and
think and rack her brains to remember his surname. She didn't remember
it, not then, but had to go on with the story without it.

How did you meet him? I said.

Not at school. Mine was an all-girls school. His mother was Auntie
Sylvia's best friend. She had a draper's shop and she was the manageress
and David's sister served behind the counter. Oh, what was their name?
I'll think of it in a minute. We were on clothing coupons, of course,
and you had to use them for material as well. The only things that
weren't rashioned were blankets and that sort of thing.

I used to make all my own clothes and I made myself a blue coat out of a
baby's cot blanket and lined it with an old sheet of Auntie Sylvia's.

I got my first pair of nylons from David's mother's shop. I think that
was when I developed a clothes sense, Genevieve. When there's hardly
anything to buy, and no choice like there is today, you iether give up
or learn to be discriminating. You learn good taste. And you learn to
look after your things.

He wasn't Alan. I compared him with Alan all the time in my mind. I know
you shouldn't do that sort of thing, it's not fair, but I couldn't help
it. Beside Alan, or what I remembered of Alan, David was dull.

But David admired me and that always goes for a lot with a girl, don't
you think? He liked being seen about with me. He was the first person
who ever told me I was pretty. It wouldn't have crossed Alan's mind. I
wish I'd a photograph to show you, Genevieve, but Marianne has them all,
and it's useless asking her to bring them here, she'll only forget.
Anyway, the next thing was David was called up, he went into the R. A.F
and I only saw him when he came home on leave.

Some people would say my life has been dull but it's been a rave
compared to Stella's. To the early part, that is. At least I had
boyfriends before Mike, I used to go out somewhere every night, and home
might have been uncomfortable at times but it was never boring.

And if you had a boyfriend in my teenage years, that was before AIDS,
you went all the way with him as a matter of course. Not so for Stella.
She and Alan had never even held hands. She'd been going to the cinema
with David and for walks and round to his -house for six months before
she'd let him kiss her. If there'd been anything more he'd have lost
respect for her, he wouldn't have wanted her afterwards.

She seemed sure of that, men really were like that, and perhaps they
were, but can there have been such a big change in less than fifty
years?

With David gone nothing happened to her at all. She lived at home with
Auntie Sylvia and listened to what she calls the wireless and read books
from the public library and made her clothes and unpicked old sweaters
and used the wool to knit up new ones. Auntie Sylvia did home per ms on
her hair and she wore it in sausage curls all over her head.

It took her fifteen minutes every morning to put her make-up on,
foundation and rouge and lipstick, loose powder from a box and then more
lipstick, and her eyebrows that were plucked drawn in with a pencil.
That was the only eye make-up they used. No shadow, no mascara, no
liner. It's funny because that's the only make-up my sister Janis ever
does use, she always does her eyes no matter what the rest of her face
looks like. Stella said she would never have set foot outside the door
without her make-up on, not even to go down to the shop on the corner.
The girl who worked in the chemist was a friend of hers and used to save
her a lipstick or a bottle of nail varnish when they got their quota in,
she'd keep it under the counter for her till next she came in. She
actually queued up once for something called Creme Simon and they sold
the last jar to the woman in the queue ahead of her.

And all of it was for Auntie Sylvia and Uncle Whatshisname and David's
sister and Mister Bosanquet. You could be as beautiful as Stella had to
think about this as beautiful as Margaret Lock-wood, she said, but what
was the use if you never met any young men? They were all away at the
war. David came home on leave and asked her to get engaged but for some
reason she wouldn't.

Didn't you fancy him then? I said.

She surprised me by giggling, the sound a young girl makes. I never
thought about that, Genevieve. I don't know if I did or not. It was the
draper's shop, I think, that put me off. He was going to go into the
shop and I well, you'll call me a snob and perhaps I was. I knew these
shop people but I wasn't one of them. My mother's father had been a
minister, a Methodist, you know, and my father was a civil servant, if
not a very important one. Marrying David would have been a retrograde
step.

It made me wonder what she must think of me. My mother's father was a
cowman and my dad is a motor mechanic when he's anything. But the truth
is she doesn't think about me like that, she doesn't see me in that
light.

You said no?

I said no, and next time he came home he brought this WAAF with him that
he'd met and they got married on his next leave. Oh, Jenny, I've
remembered his name! It was Conroy. He was David Conroy and his sister
was Mavis. Of course I always called his mother Misses Conroy and you'll
think this very funny, but when we first met David called me Miss.
Robertson. It was the same in the office. I was Miss. Robertson and of
course the partners were Mister Newland and Mister Bosanquet and even we
girls, the secretaries, we called each other Miss. This and Miss. That.
It was the custom then. You can see why I'm not always happy about the
way it's all Christian names here. I mean, I know times have changed,
but it's still a shock when the boy who mows the lawns calls me Stella.

She told me all this in four sessions over two days. Of all the
residents at Middleton Hall she had been the one who never talked about
the past, but now she'd begun there was no stopping her. It obviously
pleased her to have the chance to talk but she got tired as well and
sometimes she started coughing. And I had to keep a look-out for Lena.

Whenever she caught me she took the opportchunity to send me off to
wheel Arthur in or out or massage Lois's leg or find a video for Grade.
It must have been malice, or maybe jealousy, that made her determined to
keep me away from Stella, I can't think of any other reason. You'd think
she'd have been pleased that one of her residents had found a way to be
happy, but Lena doesn't want people to be happy, she wants them to be
dependent on her. That's why Maud is her fayvorit now Edith's gone. Maud
is always telling her how good she is. She calls her a 'latter-day
saint', God knows where she got the expression, and says that if there
were more like her the world would be a better place.

Lena laps it up and I expect Maud is being lined up as the next maker of
wills in Lena's favour.

It was Wednesday afternoon and time for me to go home when I got
Stella's next instalment. I was a bit preoccupied, thinking of a
surprise for Ned who was coming home from Denmark next day fool that I
was! and though I was sitting there and apparently listening I missed a
whole lot of the beginning. I suppose it was about those Conroys and the
office because she suddenly said something that got me listening again.

Mister Bosanquet died. He committed suicide.

You don't know what to say when someone tells you that.

He hanged himself. His -housekeeper found him hanging from a beam in the
garige roof. Old Mister Newland said he had a rifle, why hadn't he used
that, and Rex, my husband that was to be, he said it was because of all
these shortages and he couldn't get the ammunition. I heard them
laughing about it.

She was quite calm but it shocked me. Where her generation are shocked
by sex, it's things like that, a thick-skinned way of being uncaring,
that gets to mine. It had me wanting to make the sort of face you make
when you take the lid off my nan's wheelie-bin before the dust men come.

Didn't they like him? I said.

Oh, it wasn't so much that. It was that they found out he was a how
shall I put it? Rex called him a queer. That was his word. A lot better
than saying pouf like my future father-in-law. Homosexual, I suppose
you'd say. Remember that was years before the Sexual Offences Act was
passed, the one that made sex legal between consenting adults in
private. Oh, Genevieve, don't look so surprised! I worked in a
solicitor's office for six years, you know, and one is bound to pick up
a little law in that time, not to mention developing an interest in the
law. I suppose that if I'd been born twenty-five years later I'd have
been a solicitor myself.

Anyway, poor Mister Bosanquet had been caught with a boy in a caravan
the boy lived in. The police phoned him and told him they were coming to
see him and why they knew him well, of course, he was always appearing
in court, and I think they were gentle with him but that was one court
appearance he was resolved never to make and he was dead before they got
there. I don't suppose you can understand what a terrible scandal it
was. I think it would be comparable today to hearing that someone you
knew had killed a child. People were outraged. They pointed me out in
the street because I had been his secretary. I suppose it was silly of
me but I thought I'd lose my job over it. I thought I'd get the sack
just because I'd been associated with Mister Bosanquet.

I didn't get the sack. They made me Rex's secretary. It was quite a
promotion for me because old Mister Newland was going to retire at last
and Rex would be the senior partner. He had a nephew who'd come into the
business and someone else was made a partner and they gave the firm a
new name: Newland, Clarke and Newland. Of course the main motive was to
get rid of the hated name Bosanquet.

Just because he was gay? I said.

What a ridiculous term that is, Stella said sleepily. She'd leaned back
her head and closed her eyes . The Victorians used to call prostitchutes
gay ladies. In my day that word meant light-hearted and happy.

I was afraid I'd overtired her. It's at times like this that I can see
how thin she is, when she's relaxed and her face slackens. Where her
cheeks were full a few months ago there are folds of skin now and her
eyes are sunk in deep powdery hollows. The hand lying in her lap was
like a bundle of ropes, the nails still bravely painted the colour of
the top coat Len'sjust put on the Legion's front door.

A pity it's not Richard but Marianne who's got those photographs. We all
know a Marianne. They mean well, they promise to do something, they're
really enthusiastic, but they don't do it. They forget. And then they
apologize, they're full of remorse, and they promise again, and the same
thing happens. Marianne would never bring those pictures and I'd never
see the young Stella in the dresses she wore when she was engaged to Rex
Newland, the New Look with long skirts and peplums, or the full-skirted
cotton frocks with nipped-in waists and tight belts.

I'd never see Stella in high-heeled shoes with thongs crisscrossed up
her legs like Roman sandals or wearing costumes and felt hats and twin
sets. I'd just have to imagine.

Driving home I went the way that took me past Rowans. Since we'd been
using Stella's -house I'd got over my feeling about Ned's weekend
cottage, it had stopped being the -house, I hardly associated it with
him any more. For one thing, he and Jane and Hannah hadn t been there
for weeks, it was always raining at the weekends, which makes Ned say
that God was a Tory. He even talked of giving up the cottage, they only
rent it and the lease is up in December. There seemed some point in it,
he said, when staying there meant a chance of seeing me, but now our
meetings depend on that no longer.

I expected to see Rowans as it usually was, all the windows shut and the
front grass in need of a mowing, but there was a car on the drive,
Jane's car, and Hannah's wellies standing on the step to dry.

Half-term, I thought, or perhaps she only went to a nursery as yet. I'd
been intending to go round the Legion in the evening, see Mum and have a
drink with some of the regulars, but I changed my mind. Jane might be in
there and I didn't want to have to talk to Jane.

The next day was my day off and I was going to drive to Stansted and
meet Ned. He'd sent me two postcards while he was away, one with a
picture of the Little Mermaid on it and the other of a statue of two
people blowing long tubular musical instruments. The writing on them was
disguised, meant to look as if they'd come from a girlfriend in case
anyone but me saw them. One said he'd been to a bar called the Song of
Songs which was heated entirely by oil stoves, the fire risk was
horrendous, and the other was about buying red Christmas candles with
holly and mistletoe patterns. He'd signed both Edwina'. I thought they
were silly but they made me long for him. The Christmas-candle card said
he'd be at Stansted on this flight that got in at five and as soon as he
had the chance he'd phone me. I looked up the Little Mermaid in my
encyclopedia and learned a bit about Hans Andersen.

Stansted isn't that far from here. I drove down to Bury, then Bury to
Long Melford, Long Melford to Haverhill and down the Mn. I'd got
Stella's -house all prepared for us, with more flowers in the vases and
more wine and I'd bought the sort of food he liked and I was getting
used to, Italian focaccia bread and pate and a mad-sounding French
cheese called Terroir, peaches and bananas and Greek yoghurt. I got to
the airport half an hour early, that's the way it is when you're in
love, you're always early for meetings, always laying up half-hours of
excitement and longing and fear and disappointment for yourself.

I'm not used to airports and I didn't really know what to do but I
caught on to the telly screen thing that tells you when flights are
expected and when they've landed, so I went to the gate where there were
lots of men, hire-car drivers I suppose, standing around holding up
cards with people's names on them and the names of companies and I
waited behind the barrier. I'd been there ten minutes and the sign was
saying the baggage from the flight from Copenhagen was in the hall when
I saw Jane crossing the arrivals area, holding Hannah by the hand. All
in a flash I understood. She'd stayed the night in Tharby because it was
that much nearer Stansted than Norwich was. She'd arranged to meet Ned.
Probably she always did when he went abroad.

I didn't stay. For a split second I weighed it up, whether it was better
to see him and have him see me and pass me by, or better not to see him
at all. I think that what decided me was my feeling for him. I didn't
want to embarrass him, have him be forced to decide whether to
acknowledge me or pretend to ignore me. So I went back to my car before
the first people started coming out of customs. It was my own fault,
wasn't it? It was me that had been the fool. He wasn't to blame and nor
was Jane. If I'd said yes to all the times he'd begged me to leave Mike
and let him leave Jane, I'd have been the one with the right to meet him
off the plane, I could have held up one of those cards and written Ned,
I Love You', on it.

Well, not quite. But you know what I mean.

Maybe they stayed the night in Tharby. I don't know. I didn't go down to
see. I went round to Philippa's and we watched a video of Brief
Encounter, her choice. Of course I'd seen it before but a long time ago
and when it started I thought I'd identify with the characters and see
it as my own story', if that doesn't sound too mushy and daft, but it
was too old, it was made too long ago for that. The people just seemed
silly with a lot of pointless moral scruples. I couldn't really
understand why she wouldn't sleep with him in his friend's flat and I
didn't believe in her being put off because she thought it was sordid.

All right for Stella, I thought, but it's too old-fashioned for me.

Rex Newland asked Stella to marry him when she'd been working for him
for six months. He'd taken her out to dinner three times and then he got
his mother to invite her to their -house. They had a big Georgian place
on Angel Hill. Stella said she thought he was being kind to her because
her uncle had died, Auntie Sylvia's husband that is. It surprised her
very much when he pressed. He'd never kissed her, he'd never even said
anything very personal to her.

She didn't know what to say, so she asked him why. He said she was very
beautiful and she knew how to dress and she had the manners of a lady.
And then, while she was staring at him, he said, I'm using the words
Stella used, I want to go to bed with you so much it's killing me, and I
know you won't unless I marry you first.

Times have changed. People must have changed too. If anyone had said
that to me I'd have given him a clout round the face. Stella said it
decided her. Can you credit it? It decided her. She said it showed real
emotion, it showed he had real feelings. And, besides, the words excited
her, they made her shiver, they made her wonder what it would be like,
going to bed with such a passionate man.

Also, though she wouldn't have married for money, she liked no the idea
of marrying someone who had it. She didn't know Rex Newland was mean.

All she could see was the big -house he lived in and the Lagonda car he
drove, and she knew the business was flourishing. Marrying him wouldn't
be a come-down but a leg-up. On the debit side was his age.

He was twenty-two years older than her. And then there was the question
of why he'd never been married before.

People didn't get divorced much then and Stella said that, in any case,
she wouldn't have wanted to marry a divorced man. She had genuinely
thought he was a widower, she seemed to remember from before she worked
for the firm, while she was still at school, seeing him in Bury arm in
arm with a woman, and was rather surprised to learn that he'd never been
married.

Did you ask him why? I said.

I couldn't do that, not then. We weren't on those sort of terms.

He wasn't gay, was he?

There's no doubt she doesn't like that word. Of course he wasn't,
Genevieve. There was another reason but I didn't find out what it was
for a long time.

k was incredible what she did. She asked him to let her have the weekend
before giving him her answer. It's like something out of a Victorian
book, isn't it? A far cry from Janis saying to Peter in front of Mum and
Nick and me, I've fallen pregnant so we'd best get married three weeks
on Saturday. Stella said she thought of nothing else that weekend. She
consulted nobody. On the Monday she told Rex Newland she'd marry him and
he said she'd made him the happiest man in the world. They weren't
engaged for years the way a lot of people seem to be now but got married
a month later. The wedding was in the cathedral which wasn't a cathedral
then but just a church and Stella made her own wedding dress.

Not that anyone would have known, she said.

What did he look like?

Who, Rex? She seemed surprised by the question. Marianne looks like him,
she said, and then began describing a man not a bit like Marianne. He
was tall and rather heavy, you know. Not in stout, that came later. He
was handsome, very handsome, with a mane of dark hair going grey and
rather large features, big nose, full lips, dark eyes, a very sensual
face.

I wanted to ask if she was in love with him really, if she fell in love
with him after they were married, but I didn't quite like to. She seemed
to read my mind and answered the question I hadn't asked.

I was never in love with him. Sometimes I thought I nearly was and then
he'd do something that put me off him.

What sort of thing?

Oh, something brutal. I don't mean he was ever cruel or violent to me,
he never was, but oh, something in the way he'd talk to lower-class
people, as if they weren't people, you know, and the way he was with
animals. He hunted, of course, and I didn't like it, but hunting was one
of the most important things in his life. I mean, he'd be kindness
itself to his dogs, we had two spaniels trained to the gun, but he was
capable of picking up a wounded hare and throwing it to the hounds and
laughing about it. I hated that.

I knew the type. We get them in the Legion if the meet's been on Tharby
Green. I've seen young kids come in, girls of fifteen, with fox's blood
plastered on them and proud of it, the huntsmen laughing about how they
dug the poor creature out.

He hadn't any time for sensitivity or imagination, if you know what I
mean, Genevieve. I don't think he ever read a book. The only music he
liked was Gilbert and Sullivan. He was very witty and charming, of
course, there was that. He'd tell me about all the cases he had,
divorces and so on, and things that came up in court. Things like well,
indecent assaults, and what they called carnal knowledge then, he'd
describe all the details to me, I think it excited him. Strange, really,
because I never heard a word of that before we were married, but as soon
as we were he acted with me as if I were well, Auntie Sylvia's name for
it was a bad woman.

There's a lot of complaining about the way the world is today and a lot
of talk among the elderly about the good old days, but I have my doubts,
I reckon things are better than they used to be. I couldn't be doing
with the way Stella had had to live. I'd rather go on the streets in
Norwich's red-light district.

But I was happy enough, she said. I really didn't have anything to
complain of.

Stella smiled and paused. I had the impression there was something she
was hesitating about telling me and that that was probably to do with
her sex life. She hadn't touched on it and I realized that she wasn't
going to. Not at this stage, at any rate. Another feeling I had was that
I wasn't the first person she'd told this story to, for all her earlier
reticence and apparent unwillingness to talk about the past.

She got tired, of course, and sometimes her voice grew hoarse, but how
can I describe what I mean? it was as if she'd rehearsed for this
performance. She'd rehearsed once long ago and now she was nearer being
word-perfect.

Pauline came in with Stella's tea and put up her eyebrows when she saw
me there, long after my going-home time. Stella ate a sandwich and
nibbled at a macaroon. She's been eating a bit better, though it's made
no difference to her weight and she's beginning to get that transparent
look.

I thought she'd finished talking for the day and I really hoped she had
because I didn't want her overdoing it. But suddenly she began telling
me of her and Rex's hopes for a child and how she'd had a miscarriage
and then another. Of course, she said, it wasn't just a child Rex hoped
for, it was a son. They'd been married five years when Marianne was
born, on the Queen's Coronation Day, June 2nd 1953. Stella had spent
most of the pregnancy in bed she was so afraid of losing the baby, and
after Marianne was born she was rather ill for a long time.

She didn't say ill in what way but I gathered it was mainly post-natal
depression.

Rex had no patience with illness. He was disappointed in getting a
daughter. The combination of the two and a -housebound wife sent him
back where he'd been all those years when she'd wondered why he hadn't
married: to the woman she'd seen him with in the town when she, Stella,
was still at school, the woman she described, as if Rex had been a king
or a dictator, as his mistress.

She meant his girlfriend, his lover. Our history teacher at Newall Upper
told us King Charles II had had a lot of mistresses, and that was the
last time I'd heard anyone use the word. A dog or cat can have a
mistress and Misses Thorn used to say to Nan that she was the mistress
of the Hall but an ordinary man having one made him sound far from
ordinary. It made me see Rex Newland as very grand, with a cloak and a
sword, and the mistress hanging on his arm, wearing a crinoline.

But of course it couldn't have been like that. I made what I thought was
an intelligent guess at the mistress's identity.

IO Ned and Jane and Hannah spent that weekend in Tharby. He managed to
phone me between the time I got home from work and the time Mike got
back and he said he had to see me, it was urgent.

Immediately frightened, I asked what was wrong.

Nothing's wrong. I just want to see you. I haven't seen you for ten
days, so it's urgent. Isn't that reasonable?

The only possible arrangement was the four of us meeting in the Legion
on Saturday night. Mike wouldn't have gone if I'd told him Jane was
going to be there and I don't suppose Jane would have if she'd known
she'd encounter the whole clan of us: Mum and Len, Janis and Steve, Nick
and Tanya and, of course, Mike and me. Jane was wearing the same clothes
she'd worn to meet Ned at Stansted, a narrow trouser suit of navy blue
silk with a white shirt. Her red hair was up in a neat French braid.
It's easy for me not to think of Jane when I don't see her, but now I
look at her and wonder if he ever touches her, if like Mike and me they
still share one of those married people's double beds and sleep each on
an extreme edge of it, or if, because he is obliged to stay with her, he
acts the same loving husband she has always known.

We never speak of it and I would rather not know. Mum says men always
tell their girlfriends they've stopped sleeping with their wives and get
caught with egg on their faces (her words) when the wives fall pregnant.
Rex Newland was that sort of man by the sound of it and probably told
Stella all sorts of lies.

You could see Jane didn't want to be with us. One of the teachers from
UEA was there with her husband, sitting at a table in the corner, and
Jane kept looking over in their direction, hoping to catch their eye.

But when he'd bought our drinks Ned sat down next to me, between me and
Steve, and reached for my hand and held it in my lap, between my thighs
in fact, until I couldn't stand it and pushed his hand away. No one saw
and no one saw our legs pressed close together except Mum. She's blind
to all sorts of things but when it comes to sex there's no escaping her
eye.

She beckoned me over. On the face of it her motive was to give me a
bowlful of crisps for our table. You thought of having them rods
inserted, have you? she said.

I hadn't the faintest idea what she meant.

They're the latest contraceptive, guaranteed a hundred per cent. They
stick them in your arm, like planting bulbs. Because if you've got two
fellows on the go you want to watch it. The Green girl that's Jill
Baleham's niece, she was on the pill and she still fell. You've only got
to have diarrhoea the once and that pill can go right through you.

Mother, I said. It's not often I call her that but she knows that when I
do she's said enough.

I felt like throwing the bowl of crisps at her. I took them back to our
table. Mike was talking about the building site in Regent's Park and the
work soon coming to an end. Ned didn't look at me but the very fact that
he didn't spoke what was running through his mind. I was sick with
nerves. The dry white wine Mum's been serving lately takes the roof off
your mouth, you could clean sinks with it. Janis said, right out in
front of him, that she wished Peter'd get a job that took him away four
evenings out of seven. She wouldn't be lonely, she'd like it, at which
Peter said two could play at that game, and Jane, with a look of deep
boredom on her face, got up and walked over to the UEA teachers table.
They said something to her, she answered and they all got up and left
together.

Ned made excuses for her but you could see the others were offended.

And Mike of course had all his worst fears confirmed. Five awkward
minutes went by and then Ned said he'd better go home. The Norwich
people were friends of Jane's and she'd obviously taken them back to
Rowans for a drink.

We all stood up. He managed to whisper close to my ear, Please let me
see you on Monday night, please, and that told me the fern in his shoe
had worked.

Then a strange thing happened. As the door closed behind him the other
one swung open, the front door that's painted the colour of Stella's
nails, and the woman who'd passed me twice in her car at Thelmarsh Cross
came in. She's a bit older than me, blonde and good-looking, and now
there was more of her on show than her head and shoulders, I could see
she was a bit overweight but in an attractive way. I recognized her at
once and I could tell that she recognized me, but we didn't smile at
each other and we didn't look for long. We both turned our heads away in
the same moment.

It was Gillda Brent, I said.

Stella frowned. What are you talking about?

The mistress.

She was quite irritable with me. I wish you wouldn't do that, Genevieve.
I wish you wouldn't keep guessing at things. That's the second time
you've done it. It most certainly was not Gillda. Gillda had quite
another sort of part to play in my life but I hadn't even met her then.
Rex's mistress was called Charmian Fry.

She was a single woman who had never been married and who had never
worked for her living iether. She came of one of those county families,
gentlefolk. Her father had been a High Sheriff and one of her brothers
was Lord Lef-tennant of the County. There was family money and she had a
private income. Those families always own several -houses and she lived
alone in one of them, a big -house near Stowupland. You wonder what
people like that do with themselves all day long, don't you? Stella said
Charmian hunted and shot, she gardened and she made pots out of clay for
planting things like geraniums in. She went to sherry parties and she
went out to dinner. It doesn't seem to account for a life, but she had
Rex. No doubt he took up some of her time.

They'd known each other since he was twenty-one and she was eighteen.

Much later, when she no longer cared, Stella asked him why he had never
married her and he said it was because some women were for marrying and
others were not. This didn't seem to depend on appearance or class or
what Stella called reputation, it was just something he knew at a
glance. Or so he told her. And it was true, she said, that she couldn't
have imagined Charmian as anyone's wife, still less as a mother.

How did she find out about Charmian? I forgot to say that, didn't I?

Her father-in-law told her. He was in his eighties and dying and a bit
mad too, I shouldn't wonder. He must have been mad or wicked to say a
thing like that to a young woman who'd just had a child after an awful
pregnancy, his own daughter-in-law too, just because she was ill and
always pale and always weak.

If you don't give him what a husband's got a right to expect, he said,
you'll drive him back into the arms of Charmian Fry and a little bird's
told me he's there already.

The rest came out. The old man wasn't at all unwilling to tell. It was a
revelation to Stella and a terrible shock. Nothing in her life had
taught her that men and women could behave like that. She had read about
it in books, of course, but a husband's unfaithfulness could never
happen to her or any woman she knew. It was impossible that a woman who
sat down to dinner in her -house, who kissed her cheek and called her by
her Christian name, could secretly do those things with her husband
Stella thought of as sacred to marriage and a marital duty, even if not
particularly delightful. It was impossible but, and she was obliged to
face it, real and true.

Becoming used to it, bitterly accepting, she still could scarcely
understand how a man, any man, could prefer a gaunt black crow of a
woman with a face as dark as leather and long black hair going grey, to
herself. Sometimes she would see Charmian in Bury, arrived in her old
shooting brake to do her shopping, and across the street, unsmiling, she
would raise one arm in a salute. Then Stella turned and stared at her
own reflection in the glass of a shop window, her pretty face and
figgere, her carefully chosen or carefully made clothes, and at Charmian
distantly behind her in dirty worn tweeds and a man's felt hat.

Rex did come back to me, Stella said. Whether he actually gave her up to
come back to me is another matter. I had another miscarriage. It was a
boy, it was far enough along to tell that, and of course he was
dreadfully disappointed.

She kept remembering, she said, she couldn't help it, those words of his
when he'd asked her to marry him about wanting her so much it was
killing him. It was beyond her understanding why he'd said that.

Hadn't he meant it, even at the time? Or had he meant it at the time and
only then? Had she been a disappointment to him? Was there something
wanting in her appearance, her manners, her voice, her social graces? At
that time she spent a lot of time in front of the mirror in her bedroom,
studying her appearance, trying out ways of improving it, talking to
herself as she stared, listening to the sound of her own voice.

I thought it must be because I still hadn't given him a son. I didn't
much like having babies, Genevieve. Of course it's worth it all for the
child you get at the end, but suppose you get nothing at the end?

Stella was looking penetratingly at me. Then she closed her eyes and let
her head slip back against the cushion. I thought she had finished for
the day, and I was about to get up and creep away, when she opened her
eyes suddenly and stared at me. She put her hand out, reaching for mine,
and I held her hand, giving it a little squeeze.

I've just remembered the purpose of all this, Genevieve, she said.

It was to explain to you how I came to buy my -house.

Was it? I said.

Certainly it was. Just that. I didn't mean to go into so much detail. I
feel ... I fear oh, I mean, there are things I've told you I shouldn't
want my children to know.

They don't know about their father and Charmian Fry?

I believe Marianne may have come near the truth. Richard was much too
young. I'd much rather they knew nothing and of course Marianne can't
know. It can only be conjecture on her part.

I couldn't help thinking of my dad, who lived with one woman after
another after he split up with Mum, got married again, got divorced, and
now has a live-in girlfriend two years younger than me. No one's ever
tried to keep all that from Janis and me and Nick, it wouldn't have
crossed their minds. It must be a generation thing or maybe, more simply
and what it more often is, a class thing.

You see, Genevieve, Marianne was very well aware there was a mystery
attached to her father's death. Well, not his actual death. He died of
heart failure, cardiac arrest.

In a train, I said, and wished I hadn't, for she sat bolt upright, all
six and a half stone of her, her free hand fluttering. The other let
mine go abruptly.

How did you know that?

I tried to speak in a casual sort of way, offhand. Richard told me. I
don't remember why.

She relaxed a little. These spasms of excitement she has wear her out,
and the first sign is the pallor that creeps into her face.

Well, of course he does know that. And it isn't quite true that Rex died
in a train. He was taken ill in the train. He died in hospital in Bury.

He'd been visiting Charmian Fry. This was years later, the end of the
sixties, and she had moved from one family -house to another rather
smaller one, this time in Elmswell which has a station on the branch
line that runs from Stowmarket to Bury. Perhaps she chose to live there
for that reason. Rex had given up driving by then, he drank too much to
drive and he ate too much for his health. He was sixty-seven and too old
and too fat to have been doing what he had been with old Charmian. They
found him collapsed and in pain, slumped in the corner of a first-class
carriage when the train drew in to Bury. The return part of a ticket
from Bury to Elmswell was in his pocket and the hospital people gave it
to Stella with the rest of his effects after he was dead. So she knew
where he'd been. He'd wanted Charmian so much it had killed him.

Marianne was fifteen. She knew Charmian lived in Elmswell and her father
had been returning by train from there when he died. Stella was sure she
made no connection between these two facts. She asked no questions. She
had loved her father and she mourned him, ignorant of the life he had
led. Stella's own attitchude was that Rex could have kept a harem of
women in Elmswell and visited them every night and she wouldn't have
cared. She wouldn't have wished him dead but it was a relief when he
died. All that was important to her as far as Rex was concerned at that
time was to keep his doings a secret from her children, to have them
believe a happy marriage had ended that night and left their mother a
sorrowing widow. Djuring those years between the boy she had miscarried
and Rex's death, the most important thing of her whole life had happened
to her. She hastened to tell me that she hadn't meant Richard being
born, joyful though that was. She meant something quite different, she
said, her eyes closing again, that ghost of a smile still there as she
slipped into sleep.

I was still sitting with her and I'd taken her hand in mine again, when
there was a tap on the door and Richard came in. I put my finger to my
lips and he tiptoed across the room and sat down carefully so as not to
disturb Stella. We sat there together for ten minutes or a bit longer,
not speaking but smiling at each other sometimes, until at last I got up
and whispered to him that it was time for me to go.

The cat that belongs to Sandra next door was torturing a greenfinch it
had caught at my bird table. I managed to rescue it, it was a beautiful
bird with bright yellow feathers in its carkey-brown wings, but it died
in my hands.

If a bird dies when you're holding it your hands will shake for ever. I
buried the poor bird in our rose bed and my hands shook so much while I
was doing it that I was frightened. I thought I might be left with a
palsy like my grand ad who had Parkinson's, but the shaking stopped
after a few minutes. Mum doesn't know all the answers with her omens and
her portents. But as I was getting ready to meet Ned I remembered that a
dead bird also means a death in the family.

The sun had come out by the time I reached Molucca. It was going to be a
fine evening. The sunshine was that gold colour you only see on autumn
evenings, its rays long shafts of amber light. The trees in the fen were
turning from green to yellow or brown and the dogwood to pink and
crimson. Mountain ash berries, dropped by birds or half-eaten by birds,
lay scattered over the doorstep. I was careful where I put my feet so as
not to tread berries into the carpets, for they make stains like blood.

We're djue to put the clocks back on the coming Saturday and that means
that next week it'll be dark by this time. The candles would be needed,
not for romance but for lighting our way up the stairs and keeping us
from stumbling into furnitchure. Autumn is mild, the mildest for years,
yet every week it gets colder, the oil heaters doing less and less to
warm the air and burn away the damp.

I'd replaced those Christmassy candles with yellow ones and brought
-house plants in pots instead of cut flowers. While I was waiting for
Ned I had a look at the pictures that had been in the sideboard along
with that photo Stella had wanted. They were much nicer than the insipid
ones up on the walls, paintings of children with animals, or drawings
rather, filled in with paint. There was one of a girl and a boy with
kittens and one of the same boy with a tortoiseshell cat that had a coat
like a Persian carpet. I wasn't feeling very kindly towards cats that
evening but I could see how appealing these were. The interesting thing
was that they seemed familiar. I'd seen those pictures somewhere before,
though I couldn't think where. Each of them was signed in the corner
with a name I couldn't read, an initial A, then a full stop and a T
followed by a squiggle.

It wasn't for me to rearrange Stella's -house for her but I couldn't
help thinking these pictures would look much nicer up on the walls than
those blue-and-mauve washed-out things of moorlands and rivers. I was
holding one of them up to cover one of the pale squares on the wallpaper
when Ned's headlamps flooded into the room. The light poured across her
portrait, her lively pretty face and the pink dress and the rose in her
hand.

He was full of loving apology, so sorry, sorry, sorry for what had
happened on Saturday night. Hannah had been taken ill and their sitter
was about to phone the Legion just at the moment Jane walked into the
-house. It was as well he went home when he did. Hannah was wheezing and
gasping and crying for her father and Jane had given her the drug she
uses but in the end they had to take her to casualty. It frightens him
when Hannah is like that, he can't think of anyone or anything else.

How can he tell me these things about Hannah and still believe he can
persuade me to take him from her? He wants both worlds.

I'm not educated like he is or sophisticated in his way, but I know
better than that.

Do you love me? he said when I was in his arms. Say you love me, darling
Jenny, say you love me.

I can hardly speak when he says these things to me, I can only whisper,
and my voice came out on a gasp, I do, you know I do.

But I need you to say it, I desperately need that.

Other men aren't like him. They're frightened of that word. He needs it
all the time. Like some need music playing or the spice of fear or a
woman who'll dress like a whore, he needs to love and know he's loved.

It was eleven when I got home but the phone was ringing in the dark
-house. I expected it to be Mike and he'd say he'd been trying to get me
all evening, but it was Janis. Her voice was solemn and strange and she
had to clear her throat before she could tell me.

Our dad had died.

He'd seemed so fit. I could hardly believe it. Janis said he'd been at
home in Diss, cleaning this old Alvis he'd bought. A customer was coming
round to take a look at it with a view to buying. Dad was polishing the
chrome on the bonnet when he shouted out at the sudden pain in his arm
and shoulder. Suzanne came running out but he was dead before she got to
him, he'd fallen down dead of a heart attack.

That was at five, much about the time the bird died in my hands. I was
more awe-struck than afraid, and that feeling, of the strangeness of it
yet of the certainty of so clear an omen, distracted me from grief. It
was in the small hours that I woke up, remembered at once and cried for
the loss of my dad who had been loving and kind until he went away from
us long ago. To my mind too there was something wrong in not being able
to mourn him properly, to cry along with Mum, in a home I knew and had
shared with him. Alive, he'd been parted from me since I was eight, and
dead he was Suzanne's.

In the morning Stella had a visitor with her, not Richard or Marianne
but a middle-aged woman according to Pauline, so it was the afternoon
before I saw her. It's always so with Stella, when you think she's only
interested in her own affairs, that she's wrapped up in herself the way
most of the residents are, she surprises you with her thoughtfulness.
When I came up to her in the lounge, sitting by the french windows, she
saw at once that something was wrong. She put out both hands to me.

What is it, Genevieve?

I told her. Most people don't really care, do they? They pretend to
sympathize but they're not involved, they're embarrassed more than
regretful. That's why I was so surprised by Stella's attitchude, by her
sudden pallor, the concern in her voice.

But he must have been quite a young man.

He was fifty-five.

I'm so sorry, she said, as if she'd known him. I'm so very sorry.

We sat in silence for a while, looking out into the garden where there
were still flowers on the huddle bush and still a few last butterflies,
a tortoiseshell, a painted lady.

I shall never see a swallowtail now, Genevieve, Stella said at last.

Will there be flowers at your father's funeral?

I said I'd already phoned the florist and ordered a spray, but I didn't
know when the funeral would be or who would arrange it. Jahis had been
seven and Nick only three when Mum and he separated. Ages had passed
since any of us had been involved with our dad beyond seeing him maybe
three times a year and sending a Christmas card. And there came into my
head the thought of Hannah. If Ned left her things would be like that
for her. Like me, she'd be a one-parent person and when he died someone
else would decide whether or not he had flowers. Stella seemed to be
pondering. Then she turned to me.

My father's funeral was in January and it was very cold. Richard was
nine months old and I left him with Rex's niece -well, his nephew
Jeremy's wife. That was she who was here this morning, by the way, that
was Priscilla. I thought I'd have to go alone to London for the funeral,
Rex wouldn't come, said he couldn't take a day off for a mere
father-in-law I only met once , but she hesitated, then brought the name
out very selfconsciously Alan came with me. She gave me a sideways
glance. He met me on the platform at Bury and came up with me in the
train.

The Alan who was your friend at school? I said.

The very same.

You'd met him again?

Instead of answering, she said, You've never heard of him? Alan Tyzark?

I shook my head. Should I have?

No, not after all these years. Perhaps not even then. He was an artist.
A painter. When you were a child did you have any of those books called
Figaro and Velvet!

As soon as she said that I remembered. That was where I had seen those
pictures before, in a book that someone, my Auntie Rita I think, gave me
for my birthday when I was seven. A girl and a boy and their cats.

Middle-class children, not like us, children who lived in a big detached
-house with both parents, a dad going to the office and a mum who stayed
at home, and who had a pretty velvety tortoiseshell cat with magical
powers. I liked the magical powers, that at any rate meant something to
me.

Alan Tyzark illustrated those books, Stella said.

He'd come back into her story out of the blue, simply someone who had
been at her father's funeral. He was a very funny man, she said. He gave
you the impression he was amusing without trying to be. These days
they'd call it laid-back and they'd call some of his humour black
humour. I was feeling very low in the train that day, not because of my
father, I hardly knew my father any more, but for well, other reasons,
and Alan set himself out to entertain me, to amuse me. He turned a
horrible day into a day out.

He'd made a plan for the day. We would get the funeral over, then he'd
take me out to lunch, there were things he wanted to show me in London,
a -house with an interesting history, a statue in the park, a monument,
then tea at the Ritz. I'd never known anyone like him. I'd never known
anyone who thought about these things. I must have known him for four
years then because we we renewed our acquaintance in 1959.

I didn't know what to say. Was he good at art at school?

I suppose he was. He took art for his School Certificate, but so did
most of us. He used to draw animals, I remember that.

And you just met him again?

He was Gillda Brent's husband, you see. He'd married Gillda. She looked
away from me, back at the sprays of purple flowers, now brown at the
tips and drooping, a single red admiral with a ragged wing clinging to a
stem. He did a terrible thing. She seemed to be talking to herself.
Well, we did a terrible thing together. I tried not to stare. What did
she mean? That she'd slept with him? When she turned back she had put on
a face of sympathy. Genevieve, we shouldn't be talking about me, we
should be talking about your father. Tell me about him.

The important thing about my dad was his passion for cars. He loved cars
the way some people love animals, dogs or -horses. If it had been
possible to breed cars he would have. It was sad really that he never
had the money to drive the ones he wanted. He was doomed to selling them
to people he knew would never value them the way he did. Even the Alvis
he was polishing when he died was soon to be someone else's. I told
Stella some of that but she's old and ill and what Ned calls her
attention span wasn't very long any more. It wasn't her fault that she
nodded off and was asleep before I'd finished. And she'd never told me
how she came to buy her -house.

Next day she was feeling better than she'd been for weeks. She said it
was the sunshine, it was the little bit of summer we often get round the
third week of October, but it's more likely to have been the
radiotherapy. I'd already wheeled Arthur outside and Stella said she'd
sit on the terrace for a while, outside the window where she watched the
butterflies. It's rare for her to sit in the open air and without her
book or her music.

I'll tell you how I met Alan and Gillda, shall I?

She doesn't realize I can't spend all the time with her that she'd like
me to. Or, come to that, I'd like to. She's like most people who haven't
worked for their livings, or haven-'t for a long time. They don't
understand what a job means, that you can't just take hours off when you
want to.

Stella, I'd like to stay but I've got a lot to do.

All the years when you're young and middle-aged and young-elderly you
hide the way you feel. You smile and pretend you don't mind when people
are late or won't stay or change the subject or show they're bored. But
children aren't like that. They protest about these things and sulk and
get angry. Maybe you know when a person's really old by the way
childhood protesting and anger have come back.

Stella said quite sharply, Oh, all right, Genevieve. I don't suppose I'm
very good company any more.

It's not that, you know that. I have to work. I'll come and sit with you
at four, shall I?

She said what I'd known she would. If I'm on my own. I may not be, I may
have a visitor.

But of course she was alone, as she mostly was. Radio Three was on and
so was her rehcording machine. A woman's voice was singing, clear and
very high, I suppose it was opera. I expected her to put a finger to her
lips but instead she did something she'd never done before. As I came up
to her chair and put out my hand she took it and, pulling me towards her
with surprising strength, kissed my cheek. I kept silent, I didn't have
to be told, and on an impulse put my arms round her, hugging her close.
The music stopped and almost at the same time the tape clicked off. I
stood up and looked at Stella. There were tears in her eyes.

What is it? I said.

Nothing. Just the music. And I'm sorry I was so hateful to you this
morning, Jenny.

I said to forget it. You were going to tell me about Alan Tyzark.

You remembered his name!

I sat down on the bed and took hold of her hand.

Her eyes were fixed on some distant point. When I'd spoken I fancied she
flushed and the colour was still in her face. She had to make several
efforts before she spoke, she seemed not to know how to begin.

It was as if she had the same difficulty talking about this man in a
normal way as I would have when speaking of Ned.

Eventually she spoke boldly, but she had to clear her throat several
times first.

It was ages before I knew who it was that had come to consult Rex. Rex
told me, of course, but he always said Gillda Brent and her husband. I
suppose I thought he must be a Mister Brent. Even when Rex referred to
him as Alan I didn't make the connection, I just thought of him as Alan
Brent. I didn't know my Alan had become a painter, you see.

Gillda Brent and Alan Tyzark had consulted Rex Newland about recovering
money owed by a film company to Gillda. The company was no longer in
existence in its old form, it had collapsed, and Gillda Brent had never
been paid for the last two films she had made, The Wife's Story and The
End of Edith Thompson. Or that was what she said.

It took a long time but eventually Rex was able to recover quite a lot
of the money, about , 2,000, which doesn't seem much, but remember this
was 1959. Rex had had a good many meetings with the Tyzarks by then.

They lived in Tivetshall Saint Michael, a village near Pulham Market, in
a farm-house called Saint Michael's Farm. Niether of them seems to have
been doing any real work at this time. They were living on what came in
from what they'd done in the past and on the occasional bit of money
they inherited. Alan's father had died and left him a few hundreds.

Gillda lost three aunts in quick succession and all of them left her
money and some quite valuable objects, Stella didn't say what. But you
wouldn't have guessed they were quite poor. They were a well-dressed,
stylish and attractive couple.

Rex asked Stella to invite them to dinner. It was always the way with
him. Anyone new he met and thought was good-looking or amusing or from
the right background had to be asked to dinner. I wonder what I'd say if
Mike came home and told me he wanted me to cook a meal for four fellows
he'd met on the site and their wives too. It's pointless speculating
because he wouldn't. Rex seems to have taken it for granted. He
presented her with a guest list, including Charmian Fry. I don't know
why she didn't throw it at him, let alone said yes. But of course Alan's
name was on the list, his full name, and that's how she came to know who
it was.

I didn't say a word to Rex. I didn't give anyone a clue Alan and I had
known each other before. It was twenty years, after all. But I don't
really know why I didn't. And when he came I didn't. I shook hands with
him, I behaved as if we'd never seen each other before. And he must have
taken his cue from me because it wasn't till we were at the table,
sitting next to each other, that he well, he told me he recognized me.

Charmian came to the party, dressed in a floor-length grey lace evening
dress with holes that might have been in the pattern of the lace or made
by moths. She explained that the dress had been her grandmother's, she
had found it in an old trunk. With a loud laugh, in her loud county
voice, she said it was a real find and that it would last her out.
Gillda Brent stared at her in astonishment but, when Charmian came
close, drew away from the smell of camphor.

Gillda herself was very beautiful.

She had the sort of appearance, Stella said, you only have when you've
been taught how to dress and make up. You only see it in actresses and
mannequins I mean models. Gillda's make-up was terribly professional and
she had don't laugh the cleanest hair I'd ever seen. I don't think women
washed their hair as much then as they do now, once a week was quite
enough. Gillda's hair was golden and shoulder-length and do they call it
squeaky clean, Genevieve?

There was a shampoo ad that used to, I said.

She had a green dress on in the style they called the sack , it was the
latest fashion, falling straight from the shoulder to the knee. She was
tall and thin and she had just the same legs as Marlene Dietrich. Her
manner well, what can I tell you? She seemed so self-confident, she
called me darling the second sentence she spoke to me. I'd never met an
actress before. Of course I got used to her, I came to accept her, but
that first time I think I'd have gazed at her the way she gazed at
Charmian if- if it hadn't been for Alan. Alan made everyone else fade, I
suppose.

At the table he sat between Stella and the niece by marriage who had
been to see her the day before, Priscilla Newland, then a girl of
twenty-six. He still had the face of a schoolboy, Stella said, young and
cheeky. His hair was brown and not as short as most men wore it then and
his eyes were a light clear brown. He grinned at her and said, We're
making a conspiracy of this, aren't we?

Do you mind? she said.

No, I like it. Let's keep it that way. Don't you love secrets?

She had never thought whether she did or not. He looked at Charmian in
her dirty dress and with her long grey hair and said, Have much of a
coven round here, do you?

Stella said she'd never felt like laughing about Charmian before, she'd
always seen her presence in their lives as a tragedy, but suddenly,
because of what Alan said, Charmian became ridiculous to her, an ugly,
elderly joke whose hold over Rex must be through some obscene secret
ritchuals. She said what she had never before said to anyone, had
scarcely admitted in actual words to herself, She's my husband's
mistress.

When she had said it she was frightened, although her voice had been a
whisper, and she put her hand over her mouth. It was what a schoolgirl
does, she said, the kind of behaviour Rex hated to see in her. Alan
said, Double, double, toil and trouble, and made a face, an
eyebrow-raising, looking-down-the-nose face. Then he said, We won't mind
them. Let's pretend they're not there, they've gone off to hell on her
broomstick, your old man riding pillion, and Stella found herself saying
she wouldn't mind if she had someone like him to talk to about it. She
was overcome by her own daring, she blushed, and then she laughed.

She had a marvelous evening. She couldn't talk to him all the time but
it made her feel good just knowing he was there. It was like having a
wonderful unexpected present, but better than that. Stella said that for
the first time in her life she felt as if she was with the person she
most wanted to be with in the whole world. At school it hadn't been like
that, it had been simple friendship, and now that experience seemed
shallow to her. The years had enriched what they had, though they had
spent them apart. Djuring the evening she several times caught his eye
and he smiled at her, once he winked, and before he and Gillda left he
came over to her alone and whispered that he was happy. That was all, he
was happy.

But you know, Jenny, she said, the way we order society, he couldn't be
my friend. That was what I thought I wanted but a married woman can't be
friends with a married man.

I knew it well.

It was Gillda who became my friend. I often wonder how many women make a
friend of a woman because it's her husband they really like. And that's
the only way to get to see him. Even then you'll only see him when you
see her or when all four of you are together. It's better than nothing,
that's all.

Didn't you like her?

She thought. After all these years she still had to think about it. I
don't know. I suppose I did at first. The point was, she seemed to like
me. She rang me up next day to thank me and asked if she could drop in
and borrow some book I'd mentioned I'd read and said I'd lend her. That
was the beginning of our friendship.

You often saw him? I said.

Alan? If I went to Saint Michael's Farm to see Gillda I'd see him. They
were always coming to dinner and we were always going to them. I was
never alone with him. For one thing, in the afternoons I'd have Marianne
with me. I must have been very silly, Genevieve, because I didn't
realize what was happening to me. You see, I'd never been in love
before. Apart from my little girl, and that's different, I don't think
I'd ever loved anyone before. The best I'd had was just finding someone
quite nice to be with.

When we became lovers at last, it was like a whole new world. You hear
about born-again Christians, I was born again, I became a different
person, I understood about being happy, that it was something positive,
not just an absence of unhappiness. But that was quite a long way off in
1960. It was all still to come. It was long before I began to make
arrangements for us.

She was tired now but there was a question I had to ask. I said, Did you
ever think you might marry?

Her look said I'd asked something no sensible person would have thought
in doubt.

Of course I did. We did. Especially after Rex was dead. I told you I
always took an interest in the law. By the end of the sixties they were
talking about new divorce laws. It looked as if divorce might be
possible by mutual consent or even because just one party wanted it.

Her eyes had closed. She spoke sleepily. We were going to be together.
When I was a girl people were horrified by a couple living together
without marriage, if a woman did she had to pretend to be married and
wear a ring, but all that changed. It changed so fast, Genevieve, it was
quite amazing. I would have lived with him and not worried at all.

I couldn't follow the logic of it, if there was any logic. If Gillda was
dead, you could have married, couldn't you?

Of course we could, she said and she fell silent, closing her eyes.

II Red and white flowers mixed together were the worst possible omen,
Janis said, and she wanted the wreath of carnations and petchunias our
cousin's wife from Thetford had sent kept off Dad's coffin. Otherwise
there'd be another death. She wasn't convinced that I'd made things
better by picking a head of purple clary out of the hedge and poking it
in among the carnations.

It was a good thing Mum wasn't at the crem to see it. Dad's second wife
Kath wasn't there iether. In fact it was a poor turnout, no relatives
but Janis and me, not a single friend, and Suzanne in deepest black
standing in the rain and crying. Dad's former partner in the garige
business sent a wreath of yellow chrysanths and ivy in the shape of a
bull-nosed Morris, but he didn't come himself.

It was because of the flowers that I wouldn't tempt providence further
and meet Ned on Hallowe'en, the day he suggested. All Saints', the next
evening, wasn't possible for him, so it had to be All Souls', November
2nd, which is a funny sort of night in my opinion. Philippa's Katie was
born on All Souls and she has always been a strange one, not needing
much sleep, not afraid of the dark, a night bird. Some say it's when the
dead come back and walk, Nan swears she's seen old Misses Thorn in the
churchyard on All Souls', picking the moss out of the letters on her own
gravestone, and I didn't feel too happy going alone into Stella's dark
-house.

The clocks had gone back and it was light by six in the morning but dark
by six at night. I took a torch with me and that got me into the hall
where the first candles were. Candlelight isn't a very reassuring sort
of light, it quivers and streams and leaves great spaces of dark, and it
makes you wonder if people in olden times were ever wholly free from
fear in the night. Candles were all they had. It's a horrid thought, the
wick burning down and consuming the wax but having no other and no light
switch, nothing to alter the deep black darkness.

I lit one candle after another and went upstairs, carrying one in each
hand. The light that is bluish and goldish, shimmering and somehow cold,
travelled a little ahead of me but not very far. Walls of darkness
turned into rooms with little squares of grey where the windows were. It
was mild for November but still cold. For once my longing for Ned and
the happy excitement I usually felt was overcast by the grimness of this
place without light or heating. I felt the isolation of it out in the
fen and I felt how easily a primitive kind of fear comes when
electricity isn't there.

Stella had told me some more by then, but not yet about how she came to
buy the -house, though I'd guessed it was to have a place in which to
meet Alan Tyzark. I was thinking that night, in the dark, of what she'd
said about the terrible thing he'd done. The difficulty was she hadn't
said any more, I didn't know whether I wanted her to say more, but I
couldn't help thinking that maybe he'd done whatever it was here in this
-house.

I started my heating going in the bedroom and set up candles on the
tables and the chest of drawers. To pass the time I opened doors and
drawers, but the cupboards were all empty, and I wondered if they had
always been so, for this was a -house kept for some other purpose than
living in. A -house that was not a home but a refuge from the world, a
place to be secret from other people's eyes, a shelter from the storm.

I savoured a word I'd found in the dictionary and used it for this
-house: a try sting place. A try sting place for one pair of lovers and
now for another.

Stella's wardrobe was a huge piece of furnitchure, mahogany I suppose,
on short curved legs with feet like the paws of a lion. The little
golden keys turned only with difficulty, but I got the doors open and,
instead of emptiness inside, the cavernous dark mustiness I expected, I
found summer clothes hanging up on a rail. They were so like Stella, so
essentially Stella, that they could have belonged to no one else: a blue
cotton dress and a pink one, film clothes from the early sixties, a
silvery-blue shot-silk raincoat that would have been useless in the rain
but glamorous in a car on a wet day.

Pushed to the far end of the rail, on a hanger that jangled like a bell
when I moved it, was another dress. I fetched my torch and shone it into
the dimness and on to the tight waist, the full skirt, the low neck.
Cream-coloured, with a pattern in blue and rose, it was a dress that was
absolutely Stella's except in one respect. It was dirty. It made me
realize that I had never seen her anything but immaculate, untouched by
the frowsty shabbiness of age. I was sure she had always been like that,
fastidious, dainty, the sort of woman whose clothes were always at the
cleaners or in the wash. But this dress was covered with black smuts.
There was a grass stain on the back of the skirt and something that
might have been blood on the front. I examined it curiously in the light
of the torch and saw the brown smear of a burn mark on the hem, a
singeing of the material, and then I stood back and looked at the whole.
Dirty though it was, soiled and ruined by a careless iron perhaps, it
was like a dress to wear to a wedding, a bridesmaid's or even a bride's.
But the bride had dug a ditch or lit a bonfire.

Ned's car lights flooded the bedroom and died away. I closed the
wardrobe doors and put out my torch. I watched him get out of the car
and stand for a moment, looking up at the window. He could see nothing
but the candle's faint glow, he couldn't see me, and I had the pleshere
of watching him unseen, his face unguarded and full of longing and hope.
I ran downstairs towards the candles in the hall and opened the door as
he put his hand to the knocker.

Beyond the range of the heater, the air in the bedroom was damp and our
hands were cold, in spite of the mildness of the night. The sheets were
aired but they felt as cold sheets do, damp and stiff. Gooseflesh on
gooseflesh and the turn-off of icy fingertips on anxious skin. We grew
warm in time and our mouths were never cold but afterwards I thought,
and I believe he thought, if it is like this now how will it be in the
depths of winter?

It was ten-thirty when I got home and Mike was still working on the
replacement of our dining-room window with french doors, before the
building of the conservatory. This was his first week at home after the
long months of work on the Regent's Park site. I had told him, with many
misgivings, that I was doing overtime at Middleton Hall, and he had
accepted this, he hardly seemed to hear what I'd said. He trusted me. On
the other hand, if trust is a positive thing, an act of will, Mike
hardly seemed to know it was called for, he hadn't thought about it.

He greeted me with, I haven't heard a word about the planning
permission.

While he was away I had scarcely realized how bemused I always was on
coming back home after a meeting with Ned. It hadn't mattered then if I
was in a daze, dreaming and remembering. I could sit down and close my
eyes and give myself up to remembering our sexual plesheres and the
happiness of love. With Mike there I had to talk. I had to respond.

Fortunately, he didn't want to know anything about Middleton Hall or
what had happened there, he wasn't interested, and I was relieved of the
necessity to lie. But I wondered, as he speculated about the time the
planning committee might take to make up their minds, how much lying I
could bear to do. Would the day come when self-disgust clamped down and
made it impossible for me to invent excuses and prodjuce alibis? Of
course it would, and it wasn't far off, but I didn't know it.

But I was aware even then that I had begun thinking very differently
about Mike and our marriage and our home. I looked at this man,
thick-set, tallish, surely handsome still, and thought that I knew him
utterly, I knew him inside-out, yet I didn't know him at all. I had no
idea what went on inside his head, under that thick dark curly hair. It
couldn't be nothing but -house improvement and planning permissions,
could it? Once, years before, when he had come home from work and I'd
said he looked tired, he had turned to me and said, Building work is
hard, it wears a man out. It makes you old before your time.

And I had felt such a rush of love and pity. I took hold of his
calloused hands and so many strange thoughts went through my mind, how
he did this because it was all he'd been able to do, how he'd never been
given the chance to get qualifications, it was all earn, earn, earn. Go
out and earn at sixteen, start at eight in the morning and get overtime
till dark if you can. I put my arms around him because he was afraid of
hard labour wearing out his youth.

But that was the only thing I'd ever remembered him saying to me about
his feelings. Not a word, ever, about love or need or being frightened
or sad. Sometimes when I'd talked about having children he'd barely
looked at me, he'd said without raising his eyes, That's up to you, and
another time, We've got a nice home together and you know what bringing
kids into that would mean. And now, in the evenings and at the weekends
which might have been for lesher, he went on doing the work he'd said
would wear him out and make an old man of him. He was beyond my
understanding.

It was partly Mike and having to lie to Mike and partly knowing that
whatever marriage was we didn't have it any more that started me on
re-thinking my refusal of Ned. I mean my saying no to Ned when he talked
of going off and living together. After all, Nick had been even younger
than Hannah when my dad left. He hadn't gone to his funeral, he said he
hardly knew him, but has that affected him for the worse?

The truth was you can't tell how living with just one parent will hurt
or not hurt a child. Lots of nasty people I know grew up with happily
married parents living together.

Then there was Stella's -house. Not just that it was cold and dark but
that the day was coming when it wouldn't be available at all. I might so
far transgress as to use it now without asking but I knew I wouldn't
dare do that when, on Stella's death, it became the property of Richard
or Marianne. We would have nowhere to go and my fears of losing him
would come back.

It's a meshere of how far the corruption pro-cess had gone that six
months after I'd sworn I'd never take him away from his daughter I'd
begun thinking of ways round that. Having said I'd never lie, I'd begun
lying. I was trespassing on someone's property. I was acting out the
words Ned had once told me and counting the world well lost for love. Or
perhaps just decency well lost for it.

Had it been like that for Stella? I watched her while she slept and
tried to see, when she couldn't see me looking, the young and beautiful
woman who had fallen in love with Alan Tyzark. My eyes tried to put
flesh on her fra'jile bones and peachy skin on that withered face, to
make the white wool hair glossy brown, but I could only see an old woman
wasting away, her closed eyelids walnut shells, the blue veins almost
breaking through the papery skin. And when I took her hand, knowing
she'd soon wake, I noticed something that gave me a shock.

She'd stopped painting her nails. Her yellowish corrugated nails were
the way nature made them for the first time since I'd known her.

Stella told me that Gillda Brent liked to be with her and wanted her for
a friend because she saw her as an inferior. Ironically, as it turned
out, Gillda never regarded Stella as a threat. Yet anything in the
nature of a threat was what she most feared and what made her the
neurotic person she was. Her failure as a film actress she seemed to see
her career not so much as having failed as been ruined from outside was
djue as she saw it to the jealousy and envy and bitchiness of other
women. Women had always had it in for her. She thought of herself, or
said she did, as exceptionally better-looking than any other woman, more
striking, more stylish, more charming, and so as not to seem impossibly
vain, she spoke of this as a burden she had to carry through life. In
other words, beauty was a liability.

She saw Stella as a pretty little thing'. In fact, little thing was a
pet name she applied to her, though Stella wasn't particularly small and
at the time she first met Gillda she was thirty-six. Gillda decided that
Stella was a country girl without much education or experience. In
Gillda's eyes, she had never worked for her living or seen anywhere
beyond Bury, had never read a book or been to a theatre. But the point
was, Stella said, that Gillda made a person for her to be, just as she
made a person for herself to be.

Somewhere, underneath, the real Gillda must have existed, but what she
was and where it was Stella never discovered. She didn't explain what
she meant by the end'. Only twice before that did she have a glimpse of
reality. The Gillda she saw, or who was presented to her, seemed always
to be playing a part, striking an attitchude, speaking in a false voice,
expressing feelings she had decided were appropriate, not what she felt.
A surface had been created, she said, like a mask or a veneer. Whether
Gillda had always been like that or whether she had learned it as an
actress she couldn't tell. It was as if she had never really stepped off
the set. Her life was a long-endjuring film script.

She spent hours telling Stella of her experiences as an actress and in
films, the celebrities she had known, the glamorous locations she had
been to, the famous restaurants and clubs to which she'd been taken by
distinguished or handsome men. She hinted at lovers with famous names.

As their friendship developed, she did more than hint and told Stella
scurrilous tales of adventures in hotel rooms, hiding from jealous wives
in wardrobes, and of huge presents of jewellery and furs made to her. Of
Alan she spoke in a way Stella, even then, wouldn't have dreamed of
speaking about her husband.

You know, little thing, everyone who was anyone said I must have married
him because he made me laugh. But that was only half the reason. I don't
know if I dare tell you the reason, you're such an innocent little
thing. You always make me think of someone at an old-fashioned girls
boarding school.

Stella was always willing to listen to anything about Alan. She must
have been the way I am when I'm in the village shop or the Legion and I
hear Ned's name mentioned. But she didn't reply. It was amazing, she
said, how little she actually spoke when she was with Gillda, no more
sometimes than a dozen words in two or three hours, and Gillda never
seemed to notice. She was a monstrous egotist.

Promise you won't be shocked, darling? So many of the sweet men who'd
been in love with me were so much older well, it's inevitable, isn't it?
Young men haven't had time to achieve anything or make any money.

And I wanted a young man, I wanted a virile young man. I happen to think
bed's pretty important and Alan well, if I say Alan is spectacular in
bed, will you even know what I mean?

She didn't know. It was a phrase she'd read in books, that was all.

But Gillda didn't want an answer from Stella, or no more than a yes' and
a smile. She never did. In her eyes Stella was a mouse who was lucky
that one man, even a man who everyone knew was sleeping with that old
witch Charmian Fry, had liked her enough to marry her. More than that,
Stella said, in the on-going movie that was her life, she had cast
herself as the heroine and Stella merely as the heroine's friend.

And Stella, though often wondering how she could bring herself to do it,
suffered Gillda for the single benefit that came with her. She let her
take her shopping in London, to the hairdresser's in Ipswich, to the
cinema, to the occasional charity performance Gillda still got asked to,
for the sake of seeing Alan before or after these visits. The Tyzarks
had one car between them at that time, so if Gillda wanted to visit
Stella and Alan also wanted the car, he would drop her off and collect
her again. This was what Stella had begun to live for, seeing Alan in
ten-minute snatches once or twice a week.

She thought she could exist on that for the rest of her life. She'd put
up with the increasing horror of Gillda's company, of Gillda's unending
talk of celebrities and feuds, clothes and jewels, adulteries and
intrigues, if bearing it made seeing Alan possible. She'd endjure
Gillda's artificial manner, the pose that seemed more and more to be
hiding a real person. And there were always bonuses when he went to see
a film with them, there were the foursomes at dinner in one -house or
the other, drinks on the sunny lawn in Bury or tennis on the nearly
derelict court at Saint Michael's Farm. In private, inside her own head,
she conducted long conversations with him, she called them imaginary
dialogues, in which she told him everything about herself and her life
and he replied in that way he had, taking a light-hearted and optimistic
attitchude to even the saddest things, and eventually confessed to her,
serious by then, that he loved her.

This went on for nearly two years.

In some ways, of course, Stella knew more about Alan than Gillda did.

She knew about his childhood, for they had been inseparable friends from
the age of eight to sixteen. She had known his parents and the family
home, the things he liked to eat and the games he played. Gillda filled
in the gaps for her, the twenty years of separation. After school he had
been to the Slade School of Art. Then he was called up into the army.
The commission to illustrate the Figaro and Velvet books came just after
the war when he was twenty-six and struggling unsuccessfully to be a
portrait painter. He and Gillda met when he was commissioned to paint
her portrait for a film she was in. It was Lora Cartwright and the
picture was supposed to hang on the drawing-room wall in her
film-husband's film--house.

The totally mad thing was, Gillda said, that in the end the portrait
wasn't used. They never shot a single scene in the drawing room.

Stella asked why not.

Need you ask? Gillda said. The star didn't like it. She was madly
jealous of me from the start and she couldn't bear it that my portrait
was being painted and not hers. But Alan and I had met and fallen in
love. It was love at first sight.

What happened to the portrait?

They weren't going to waste that, were they? Not when they'd paid for
it. So far as I know it's still hanging in their offices in Wardour
Street.

After that Alan had painted Gillda many times, head and shoulders,
full-length in the grey gown she'd worn in The Fiancee, even a nude.

That nude hung in the living-room at Saint Michael's Farm. There are
nudes and nudes, Stella said, and I know what she meant, something like
the difference between a shot for a body-lotion commercial and a photo
in Playboy. The picture of Gillda naked showed her pubic hair. She
wasn't absolutely unclothed but wore high-heeled shoes and, hanging
between her breasts, a long string of pearls. Gillda was always drawing
people's attention to this picture. It embarrassed Stella when Marianne
was there, she wanted to tell her daughter not to look but of course she
couldn't do that. Gillda would strike an attitchude in front of the
painting, asking Alan if he remembered her sitting for it, and implying
they needed many sessions because the temptation of her naked body was
too much for him.

They had been married for nine years and those years had seen a gradual
decline in their lifestyle. At the beginning they had lived in the West
End, Half Moon Street I think it was, and Gillda had made her last two
films. The Wife's Story was about a husband's infidelity, and The End of
Edith Thompson was a thriller about a real-life murderess or a woman
they thought was a murderess who was hanged for killing her husband.
Gillda played the wife in the first one and a prison wardress in the
second. The character was a sympathetic wardress, and like Edith a
married woman in love with a younger man. But this part made Gillda
madder than anything in her career. She talked about it as if taking it
had been the biggest mistake of her life and every opportchunity she had
had to make the most of it had been sabotaged by the actress playing
Edith. The casting director had said she told Stella this as an example
of the incredibly ignorant things people said to her that he had picked
her because she had an unmemorable face. They insisted she wore glasses
and flat shoes.

No more parts came after that, not in films that is. Gillda said she
wasn't surprised after what had been done to her appearance by the
actress and the director, who she knew for a fact were having an affair.
Not much radio work had ever come her way and when she was offered a
part in a serial she turned it down. Gillda never said much about this.
She implied that she'd had to say no because she and Alan were going to
the north of England where he'd been commissioned to paint some murals
in an old chapel. Alan told Stella what really happened.

The part was a woman who was supposed to have been injured in an
accident that left her with one leg shorter than the other. You couldn't
see that, of course. This is radio we're talking about. That only made
it worse for Gillda. She said it would damage her reputation because
people would imagine her as a freak with one of her legs only half
there. If you're waiting for the pay-off here it is. The serial was
Misses Dale's Diary. We'd have been set up for life.

As it was, they weren't set up at all. Alan had bought Saint Michael's
Farm and for some reason put it in his wife's name. Stella didn't know
why and she felt she could never ask but she guessed it was a fear that
he might have to go bankrupt. A woman, then as now, can't be held
responsible for her husband's debts, though he can for hers.

That was to make trouble for us, Stella said. If it had been his -house
or even half his -house, things would have been easier. You see, he had
nothing except the royalties from Figaro. And the books went out of
fashion. He always said they couldn't stand competition from Orlando the
Marmalade Cat. I suppose there's a limit to how many children's books
about cats the market can stand. He went on painting, of course he did,
and he was redjuced to doing some rather well, humble jobs for money.

That was later, though. Alan showed few signs of money worries in 1961.
One day, having returned to the farm with Gillda, Stella witnessed a
terrible row between them. She had no idea how they felt about children,
to have them or not to have them, for Gillda had never mentioned it. But
a few days before Marianne had been with them, Gillda talking to her as
she often did about becoming an actress she always said Marianne had the
potential to be an actress, and Stella didn't much like this, the child
was only eight and that evening at the farm Gillda suddenly said to Alan
in her presence that she wanted a child like Stella's daughter.

Alan said, Why should it be like Stella's daughter? Or are you planning
to make up to old Rex?

Gillda told him not to be so disgusting. It's your child I want.

This is a new departure. You've always been scared of having a baby.

I never said that!

In Stella's world married couples didn't talk about such things in
public or even in front of one friend. She said she must leave, it was
time she went home. Alan offered to drive her. This had never happened
before. If she was without her own car it was always Gillda who took her
home, and the thought of being alone with Alan for half an hour filled
her with joy. She jumped up.

No, sit down, Stella, Gillda said. I want a witness to this. Did you or
did you not say that we couldn't afford children and that they were
enemies to something or other?

Any great enterprise, said Alan. Yes, and hostages to fortchune and all
that jazz. But only because you said you have a low pain threshold and
having babies hurt. Come on, Stella, let's go. This is no fit subject
for your ears.

I said no. Gillda's voice was rising by octaves, Stella said. It's a
crime to deny a woman a child. There are some religions in which a man
can be divorced for that.

What religions? The Zoroastrians?

You make a joke of everything. Gillda had begun to shout. Suppose I stop
using my cap? What then? I can have a baby and you can't stop me.

Alan shrugged. I can think of a way.

The mention of the cap had started the blood rushing to Stella's face.

Gillda began to act the part of a furious woman. It was The Wife's
Story, even to the dialogue.

Look at her blushing. You always upset my friends, that's why I never
keep any friends. She won't come here again. I shall die friendless and
childless. It's so unfair. Doesn't it ever occur to you how lucky you
are to be married to someone like me? I mean, look at you, you're just
an ordinary man with a baby face. People turn round in the street to
look at me. Any man would want me. Stella, don't you think it's
outrageous he won't give me a child?

Stella didn't answer. Through all this she still felt that Gillda was
acting. This was just another part she was playing. She didn't want a
child, she was the last woman on earth to be a mother, she wanted to act
a scene, that was all.

Say something, Gillda said in a ringing, stagey way. She went up to
Stella and stood over her. Say something, little thing. Haven't you got
an opinion? Have you lost your voice?

It was this unprovoked attack which made Alan say what he did. Face it,
Gillda, why don't you? You've missed the boat. Forty-one's too old to
have a first child.

He must have known what effect this would have on her. She never told
her true age. She let it be thought she had made her first film at
sixteen. Stella thought she was younger than herself, no more than
thirty-five, she'd given no real thought to it and didn't care, but it
broke through the veneer. It destroyed the pose and the real person came
out. Gillda began to scream at Alan. She picked up an ashtray and threw
it at him. He ducked and it struck a mirror, breaking the glass.

About the unluckiest thing that could happen, I said.

What, breaking a mirror? Maybe. It made a fearful mess. She threw some
more, the book they wrote phone numbers in and a vase. He was laughing
by then. I thought Alan could laugh at anything, though I was wrong
there. He threw a cushion back, it hit her in the face, of course it was
soft and it didn't hurt, but she fell over and lay on her back kicking
and screaming. I'd never seen anything like it. I didn't understand then
that she could only sustain the acting and the fa-sard by sometimes
having an explosion like this one. She was like a volcano that's a quiet
mountain but has to erupt every so often. Her eruptions were a safety
valve that opened up when some sort of pressure of frustration and
unhappiness got too much for her.

What had she got to be unhappy about? I said.

Oh, Genevieve, you must never ask that about anyone. A lot of people
would say that to be in this world is to be unhappy.

I didn't say anything. I thought I knew, you see, and my conclusions
weren't Stella's.

Everything was behind her, Stella said. Her career was over and she
couldn't do anything else. She'd no children. Every day made her a
little less beautiful, it must have been so in the nature of things. I
expect money would have been a compensation to someone like Gillda but
she had no money. She was bored, she had no interests. She never cooked
or did -housework, the farm was filthy. Isn't it strange how a woman can
emerge immaculate, exquisite, from a dirty hole like that?

But she could. It's no wonder she was unhappy and oh, she was, she was.

Alan picked Gillda up off the floor. He gave her some brandy. She didn't
speak another word but buried her face in the sofa cushions.

Then Alan drove Stella home.

It was about twenty miles. Niether of them spoke. Stella thought of how
she had longed and longed to be alone with him for half an hour, just to
be with him, and now she was she had nothing to say.

But I had this awful thought, Genevieve. Of course it was impossible but
I thought, why don't I just come out with it and tell him? Why don't I
just say, I love you. I just want you to know. Not to do anything about
it, but just for you to know I love you.

Did you say it? I said.

No, I couldn't. But while I was thinking like that he asked me.

Asked you what?

She looked down at the hands in her lap. Richard's coming in a minute,
you know. It was one of her abrupt changes of subject. She put up her
hands and held them out to me.

You've stopped using nail varnish, Stella, I said. Would you like me to
do your nails for you?

No, thank you. I don't like it on my old hands any more. Do you know
what Rex once told me? He said wearing red nail varnish came from the
harem. The women painted their nails red to show the sultan, their lord
and master, you know, that they were having a period and weren't
available. I don't know if it's true but it stopped me varnishing my
nails for ages. She reverted to Alan as if there had been no break in
the story. Alan said, Are you in love with me, Stella? It was a funny
way of putting it, wasn't it? I blushed, I was horrified. I started to
ask him whatever gave him that idea and then I didn't see the point. It
was too late for pretending. So I just said, Yes, I am.

Alan said, What a relief. I thought you must be.

He didn't behave like anyone she had ever known, yet he was still the
boy she'd known. The more she was with him the more she saw how little
his nature had changed. He said, I'm very much in love with you and have
been for ages. I suppose I was when we were at school but people aren't
supposed to be able to be in love at fourteen.

Juliet was, Stella said.

That proves it then, he said. I thought it might go away but it won't.
The time seemed to have come for a declaration.

He hadn't stopped the car, he hadn't pulled into the side, he just kept
on driving and, necessarily of course, not even looking at her.

We have two alternatives, he said. We can never see each other again and
somehow fix that with Gillda and Rex, not too difficult probably, I
don't think they like each other much, or we can be lovers.

Personally, I'd much prefer the latter. How about you?

Yes, said Stella.

Yes to the second alternative?

Stella said yes again, very much more firmly this time.

Good, he said. I'm sorry to sound so businesslike. It's because we've
only got ten minutes left. As soon as I have more time I'll say to you
some things from the fullness of my heart.

Stella was silent for a moment or two. She was looking at the door and
seemed to be listening. Then she said, I was very happy that evening.

I was happy for a long time. I trusted Alan, you see, and I was right to
trust him. We met soon after that and he did tell me those things.

But we had nowhere to go where we could be alone. He sometimes managed
to come to me in the afternoons, but very seldom. Still, I was happy.

Of course I was guilty and ashamed about Gillda and because I arranged
it that I saw her less and less, I saw Alan less and less too.

Someone tried the door handle and Stella looked up. Is that Richard? I
went to the door but there was no one there, just Lena at the other end
of the corridor. Rex had had some sort of disagreement with Charmian. I
don't know what it was but if I had to guess I'd say she'd been pressing
him to leave me now that Marianne was older and he'd refused. Anyway, he
came back to me. It had happened before, those times when he'd come back
to me. They never lasted.

But you let him come back? I said.

She sighed. I was his wife, Genevieve. It's different for you. It's
different these days. Rex kept me, he'd given me a home, I don't like
talking about these things, but it was he who earned the money,
everything was his. I couldn't say no to him, it wouldn't have been
right. He came back to me and that was when he gave me this ring I wear,
my eternity ring.

She held out her right hand. I was a bit embarrassed. It sounded like a
financial transaction to me: sleep with me again and here's two thousand
quid's worth of jewellery.

The following year, she said, Richard was born.

The door opened and Richard came in. My ears are burning, he said. He
went up to Stella and kissed her. You said I was born.

What else have you been saying?

He was smiling, he hadn't heard, but Stella had gone white. Oh, darling,
nothing, nothing. Do you know you're exactly the same age as Genevieve?

Exactly?

Well, your birthday's April the i2th and Genevieve's is April the 24th.

I knew I must be older.

Stella has this amazing memory for people's birthdays. If she forgets
everything else she remembers your birthday. I bet she knows Maud's and
Arthur's and Lena's as well as mine. I got up to go but Stella kept
tight hold of my hand for a moment.

Rex had longed for a son, she said. He was so proud of Richard.

Mother, said Richard, but a lot more kindly than when I say Mother' to
Mum.

PART THREE The whistling shocked me, the unknown tchune, its clarity,
but above all because darkness had come. I'd seen no lights, I'd been on
the stairs.

I opened the front door and Ned was there, a yard from me, suddenly in
my arms. He'd been whistling, he said, because he was happy. Go three
times clockwise round the -house to undo the ill-luck, I said, but he
only laughed and wouldn't do it.

The fear of what he'd done or what he might have brought about stayed
with me. While we were in bed, the only warm place in the -house, I
forgot about the whistling, I forgot everything, but I remembered later.
Sometimes I tell myself that all these precautions of Mum's and my nan's
are nonsense and not for somebody like me, young and living at the end
of the twentieth century. And then I see how death follows a ringing in
the ears, and the dangers that come to a person who's broken a branch
from an ash tree or helped another to salt. I haven't the courage to
give up these things in this world that's such a hard place.

Something can go wrong and I'd look back and think how it could have
been avoided by touching wood or keeping a crooked coin under your
pillow.

So I watched and waited for the ill effects of Ned's whistling in the
dark and I didn't have long to wait. The first thing was Philippa
getting a flu bug. There was a lot of it about, Shirley Foster had had
it and the whole Baleham family, and Philippa's Katie who brought it
home from school. She went down with it on the Thursday evening and the
Friday was my day off. The kids were on half-term, so I collected them
and brought them back to my place. But first I carried the TV up to her
bedroom and when I went back with Katie and Nicola at five Philippa was
sitting up in bed watching The End of Edith Thompson, black and white,
made in 1954, with Joyce Redman as Edith Thompson and Gillda Brent as
the prison officer.

I gave the girls their tea downstairs, took a casserole out of the
freezer for Steve and went back up to Philippa.

Is it any good? I said.

Philippa wouldn't look round. They're going to hang her in a minute.

On the screen Gillda Brent and Joyce Redman were sitting in Edith
Thompson's cell and Gillda was holding Joyce Redman's hand. Wearing
glasses and with her hair screwed up under a cap, Gillda looked
uncannily the way she was supposed to, an ordinary dull woman without
much character. She could never be ugly, she could never be anything but
good-looking with those regular features in that well-proportioned face,
but she could easily be made forgettable. Basically, she was much
better-looking than Joyce Redman but it was Redman's face that would
stay with you and Gillda's that would fade once you switched the TV off.
This was what Philippa did immediately Edith Thompson was taken off to
be hanged and the credits started to roll. She put the remote under her
pillow.

I think it's made me feel worse. Would you get me another jug of water,
Jenny? I'm supposed to keep drinking. They said Edith and her boyfriend
planned to kill her husband but Edith didn't actually do anything. It
was the boyfriend stabbed him. Edith wrote a lot of letters about
putting powdered glass in her husband's food.

I'll just get your water, I said.

When I came back with it she was lying down. They hanged her for that.
They wouldn't now, would they? They'd put her on probation or give her a
holiday in a theme park. Can you imagine plotting with a man to kill
Mike?

No, I said. No, I can't.

Do you think people do plot with lovers and whatever to kill their
husbands or wives?

I said I didn't know. It made me uncomfortable talking about it as if I
was somehow guilty myself, as if I was being reminded of events I wanted
to forget. I told her I'd be back in the morning and do her shopping if
she wanted me to, but she said Steve would be at home as it was
Saturday. Mike would be home too.

He worked on the conservatory all that Friday evening. The planning
permission had come through and he was excited about that. It struck me
that there wasn't much difference between the excitement he was feeling
at being told he was allowed to build a glass room twelve by twelve on
the back of his -house, and the excitement I felt at meeting Ned.
Perhaps it would be more to the point to say that he seemed to me
happier at the prospect of building this conservatory than he had ever
been on our honeymoon. He whistled while he worked. He sang. He ran out
of things to sing and put on Radio One.

When he'd worked since six on Friday before until six on Saturday with
six hours off for sleeping and half an hour for eating, I suggested we
go down to the Legion for a drink. He didn't want to, he wanted to work
through till eleven, but he agreed, though only to stop me going on my
own. Mike is only thirty-three but he doesn't think women ought to go
into pubs on their own, not even when their mothers run them. He says
it's not ladylike, which is the word his father used and his grandfather
before him.

The first person I saw when we got in there was Jane Saraman, or
Beaumont, as I should say. It's one thing for your heart to miss a beat
when you see your lover, but when you see his wife? I suppose I thought
he must be there too. He wasn't.

Ned's filming in Cambridge, she said, as if I'd asked. I've come down
with Hannah and my mother.

It may not be ladylike but when I'm in a pub I offer to buy a round of
drinks like anyone else. Why not? I earn too. I've got the use of my
legs and strength in my arms. Besides, Mike wasn't going to offer her
anything, I could see that in his face, the sullen look he'd put on as
soon as he saw her.

Thanks, she said. I'll have a Perrier with ice and lemon.

It beats me why people go into pubs to drink water. Len was behind the
bar, telling everyone that Mum had gone down with the bug, and making a
silly joke about how he'd opened the window and in-flew-Enza. I got a
white wine for myself and a half of bitter for Mike and Jane's fizzy
water. Mike looked at his drink as if it was a bottle of champagne I'd
put in front of him, blinking his eyes and staggering back. He winked at
Ken Foster and said the wife must be flush and to make the most of it
for it wouldn't last. I asked Jane how Hannah was.

Her eyebrows went up. She's not so bad.

I remembered, too late, that my sole knowledge of Hannah's condition was
supposed to be based on snatches of overheard conversation. I tried to
cover myself, but even then I was thinking that this is what deceit
does, these are the humiliations in which it involves you and the
innocent one.

I hoped, I said, she was getting better, though I knew she wasn't.

She spoke in a hard voice. It's pollution that causes it. My guilt I
suppose it was that made me hear an undertone of accusation, even a
double meaning. She's best in the country air. Jane is one of those who
can smile with her lips while her eyes stay dull as stones. I'd like us
to get a place in France, where you can be sure of the weather,
somewhere in the south maybe. In any case, we're giving up the cottage
next month. The lease runs out and we're not renewing.

Ned hadn't told me. I remembered, suddenly and quite vividly, his
whistling in the dark, his refusal to perform the antidote. Were these
the effects of it?

Weakness took hold of me, I wanted to sit down, but there was nowhere to
sit. It was pathetic, but I needed her to comfort me, her reassurance. A
look of deep boredom had taken over where that cool smile had been. Then
suddenly I understood. He was tidying up, he was setting things in
order, because he had sensed the change in me, the gradual coming round
to his point of view, that we should leave and be together.

I think I see the people I'm meeting, she said, indicating the pair from
the University Ned had said were her friends. She put her glass down on
someone else's table. Thanks for the drink.

When she'd gone I started wondering if he'd tell me. Perhaps he
wouldn't. Perhaps he was waiting to see what I'd do next, and meanwhile
he was ridding himself of encumbrances like the cottage, even buying
somewhere in France for Jane to use with

Hannah. And Hannah was getting better. She'd need her father but not the
way an ill child would. Over my shoulder I kept glancing at Jane.

She was talking and laughing with the UEA man the way I'd never seen her
talk and laugh with anyone before. The woman sat by, silent and placid.
It wasn't too far-fetched, was it, to think Jane might be having an
affair with this man? After all, that wasn't necessarily his wife or
partner with him. It could be his sister or just a friend.

Mum says a woman who's having an affair with a married man always does
that, tries to convince herself his wife is unfaithful. It makes her
feel less guilty, you see, if what's sauce for the gander is also sauce
for the goose.

Have I said too much to you, Genevieve? Stella said.

It was the following week and we were sitting in the lounge. I looked up
at her and asked why she said that. She could trust me. I wouldn't tell
anyone. She shook her head and smiled faintly. The day was wild, the
windows rattled as a west wind blew, and we watched it tear the yellow
leaves from the chestnut trees. The lawns were ankle-deep in fallen
leaves. The gardener Stella complained about because he called her by
her Christian name was cutting back plants in the flower beds that the
first frost of the winter had turned black.

I've had a few bad moments, thinking I'd told you too much. You must
have been well, not shocked but ... Astounded, Genevieve?

I'm married, I said. I'm having an affair with a married man. I thought
I'd told you too much.

It didn't interest her. Perhaps she had forgotten. If it's any
consolation, telling you has been a relief to my mind. There's no one
else I can tell, you see. You're a very good listener, did you know
that?

I told her I'd seen The End of Edith Thompson on television, or seen
part of it, and she gave me an intense look. Then she reached for my
hand and held it.

I think it's quite common, she said, a couple plotting together to kill
the man's wife or the woman's husband. There are always cases in the
newspapers.

Are there? I said.

She sighed. Perhaps no more than any other dreadful cases. We notice
things that are close to what preys on our own minds, don't you think?

I nodded. I could agree with that. Tales of love attracted my attention
now I had a love affair of my own, just as engagement rings had when I
got engaged, and estate agents ads when we were moving into our -house.
But did that mean Edith Thompson preyed on Stella's mind?

She changed the subject swiftly.

My father died when Richard was nine months old, she said, and when you
were nine months old too, Genevieve. She smiled, proud of her memory.
You've just lost your father and I'm sure it's gone deep with you. You
used to see him even though he didn't live with you. But once I'd left
my parents home I never saw my father well, not more than once or twice.
He'd never seen my baby. He hardly knew Rex. He'd only once been to our
-house, that was five years before and he didn't even stay the night.
But he left me his -house.

I was married to a lawyer and I knew a bit about wills but do you know
it never occurred to me that my father might have done that. A letter
came from a solicitor in London. It was a piece of luck for me that it
was a Saturday when it came and Rex was still in bed. Of course I was
always up hours before the post came. Richard was such a bright lively
baby, he never let me sleep after six in the morning. Oh, Genevieve, I
don't know to this day what came over me, but I thought to myself, why
should I ever tell Rex anything about this? He won't ask, it won't occur
to him to ask, and I'll keep it to myself. And I did.

You didn't tell him? I said. You didn't tell your husband your dad had
left you his -house?

I didn't. I never did.

But why? I said. What was the point?

She gave me a sidelong glance. For a moment she looked less old, less
ill. It was a place of my own, wasn't it? I'd nothing of my own. It was
my independence.

I just nodded, though it seemed very strange to me.

You couldn't do it nowadays, she said, not with the amount people use
phones. I mean, those solicitors and then the estate agents would have
been bound to phone and if Rex was at home he'd have answered and it
would have all come out. But phoning from London to Bury was a trunk
call, it was something you might do in an emergency. Everyone wrote
letters.

So you managed to keep it a secret?

I kept it from everyone but Alan, she said, I told Alan. He loved
secrets.

Her love affair with Alan Tyzark had stopped while she was pregnant and
for a long time after Richard was born. But he was always there, a
presence in her life, and they often met for just an hour or two. He
would call for her and take her for a drive with the children. They
dared not even kiss for fear of Marianne's watchful eyes. Then, one day
when Richard was about a year old and Stella was in secret negotiations
to sell the -house she'd been left, Rex said it was time she had some
permanent help in the -house. She should have an au pair and he had
found her one. She was Danish, adored children, wanted to perfect her
English. Au pairs were coming into fashion then, in Stella's world they
were the answer to what you did when you couldn't get servants. But at
first she was suspicious of the idea of Maret.

It must be a scheme of Rex's to get himself a young girl to sleep with.

That was what she thought. That was how she thought of him, a man who
lusted after women and was always hunting them. And the fact that Maret
turned out to be the reverse of Stella's idea of a nineteen-year-old
Danish girl, being squat and dark and not at all good-looking, for a
while didn't alter that conviction.

But it was his guilt over me that made him engage Maret, it was
compensation for his infidelity. And then I realized something I'd never
quite understood before, Genevieve. He wasn't a womanizer. He was quite
monogamous, only his fidelity wasn't to his wife, it was to Charmian.
There was no one else in the world for Rex but Charmian.

He'd gone back to her and they'd started off again before Maret even
came. And somehow that hardened my heart. Do you know what I mean? I
could have endjured a succession of young girls who meant nothing, but
not this old woman who meant everything. I think I lost all feeling for
Rex then.

Why did you stay?

She repeated what she'd said before. It wasn't like it is nowadays.

If I'd tried to divorce him I'd have had to prove adultery and I don't
think I could have done. I'd have had to employ private detectives and
even then a man of sixty-two calling on a woman of fifty-eight, an old
friend, wouldn't have been evidence. Then there was my own adultery.

That wouldn't have helped me, that would have made it worse. And I had
the children. It wasn't like it is nowadays. Rex might have turned on
me, divorced me and got custody of my children. I was afraid to try,
Genevieve. I just wanted a little independence and the chance to be with
Alan. Having Maret was a great help, but we still had nowhere to be
alone together.

Her father's -house was sold by the end of that summer and the sum of
money it realized was just under 5,000 after the legal fees and the
estate agent had been paid. She opened a bank account. She had her own
cheque book and it made her feel rich. At first she had no ideas of what
to do with the money. Why do anything with it? The time would come when
a purpose would suggest itself.

With Maret in the -house and Richard too young even for nursery school,
Stella couldn't allow Alan to come there. Once or twice he took her to a
hotel. But this was awkward and difficult, deeply embarrassing for
Stella. They had to pretend to be married, pretend to stay the night yet
pay in advance. And Alan couldn't afford hotels. They were in love, they
were as close as two lovers could be, but she wouldn't have dared offer
to pay a hotel bill.

One day, driving back to Bury from a roadside motel, she saw a cottage
with a For Sale sign outside. It was on a main road, ugly, exposed to
the winds that swept the Breckland, but it gave her an idea.

She said to Alan, I shall buy us a -house.

Just like that? he said, and then he said, When?

Before winter comes. When we find one we like.

Whichever is the sooner, he said.

The -house must be halfway between Bury and Tivetshall Saint Michael,
within easy reach of both, in rather a remote place, standing alone,
oldish but not ancient, not too big and at the right price. They
discussed endlessly their requirements: a garige to hide a car in from
passers-by, a little garden, a -tiled roof, not thatch, no neighbours, a
big bedroom with a view.

By a small miracle, Gillda was off to spend two weeks with a friend in
the south of France. Stella and Alan went -house-hunting and before
Gillda came back they had found the flint-walled -house with the red
roof called Molucca.

I walked Stella back to her room. It might have been easier to have
carried her. I'm sure I could, she's so light. She sat in her chair and
put her feet up on a stool.

I was so happy at that time, Genevieve. Her voice was soft and rather
sleepy. For the first time in my life everything was going right for me.
I'd been in love with Alan for four years but I seemed to fall in love
with him again. This time it was deeper, it was more intense. I was
forty, and it wasn't like it is nowadays, forty was middle-aged. But
Alan made me feel young. I'd never had any real pleshere1 don't quite
know how to say this ... From sex, d'you mean?

Yes, from sex. Stella closed her eyes. She didn't want to meet my eyes.
I'd never had pleshere with Rex and I couldn't even imagine what it
would be like. I mean, if you don't like doing something you can't
imagine doing the same thing but liking it, can you?

Like ironing with the latest thing in steam irons, I said. I hate
ironing.

She smiled a feeble smile. So you could say, why did I ever want to to
make love with Alan if I didn't like love-making? I don't know the
answer to that, Genevieve. But I'm sure I'm not the first woman who
didn't have any pleshere but thought she could have if she was with
someone she really loved. And the first time the first time with Alan
well, it was quite different. She looked at me. I'm sorry, it's rather
embarrassing talking about these things. I was just trying to make you
see that I loved him, I loved him in every possible way. And when we had
the -house to go to, it was wonderful. It was romantic.

I would go over there in the late afternoon. Maret was at home with the
children. As for Rex, he and I were leading quite separate lives by
then. He never asked where I was if I wasn't at home and I knew where he
was so I didn't have to ask. He probably knew about Alan, or he knew
there was someone, but he didn't care any more.

I was proud of my -house. It was mine, you see. You saw the deeds, in my
name. That meant a great deal to me. I had such fun furnishing it.

Alan and I had very little money but you could find amazing bargains in
the antique shops and at sales in those days. He had the originals of
the drawings he'd done for his children's books and we had them framed
and put up on the walls. I always kept the -house full of flowers. I
cleaned it myself, I had to. It was the only place I'd ever enjoyed
cleaning.

Waiting for Alan I'd dress up. I'd put on a beautiful dress and
jewellery and do my hair carefully. I'd take an hour doing my face and
my nails. She looked away. All to be un tidied and spoilt when he came
and we we kissed and embraced and made love. A little light laugh and
one of her changes of subject. People didn't drink wine the way they do
nowadays, they only drank it at meals, but I kept gin and tonic and
angostura and vermouth and sherry there. I often cooked us a meal. I
used to watch for Alan's car from the bedroom window and long and long
for him and be sick with fear if he was five minutes late. Oh,
Genevieve, can you imagine?

Only too well. Apart from the fact that it was warmer then and the drink
was different, there didn't seem much to choose between us.

It was wonderful having a place to go to and a - a bed of our own. I
suppose you'd say we played -house. We played at being a couple, at
being husband and wife. One evening, when we were having a drink and I
was in an evening gown and for some reason he'd put on a suit, we were
sitting there with the table laid and food cooking, and it was just as
if we were waiting for friends to come to dinner. He said, This is our
dress rehearsal for being married.

You meant to get married, then? I asked her.

She didn't answer but only reached for my hand. Since that first time
she put her arms up to me, we've been giving each other a kiss when I
come in the morning and when I go in the afternoon. Every time, the body
I hug seems more brittle and birdlike and the heart to flutter more
rapidly. I used to wait for Stella to make the first move but now I kiss
her as a matter of course and when she's in my arms give her a squeeze
that I hope she knows is loving. I kissed her then and her cheek felt
hot as if she was still blushing for what she'd said.

Ned phoned soon after I got home. He was very casual about the move from
the cottage, it didn't seem important to him, they'd never meant to take
the place on for more than a year. Did it matter? I said no, it didn't
matter, in a way it was better for us not to run into each other in the
pub or the shop.

He was impatient with all that. When shall I see you?

Tomorrow if you like.

Of course I like. It's the one thing I like in an un likeable world.

A lover can't say better than that.

That night, while Mike was putting in the glazing bars, his meal on a
tray on the crate they'd come in, I sat down with a glass of red wine
and the encyclopedia to try and learn something about modern art. But I
didn't get very far. I had a talk with myself instead. It was like two
people talking in my head, one arguing for and one against. I was so
young when I married I'd never thought about marriage, I'd never
considered whether marriage should be something permanent, something
sacred if you like, or if you ought to dissolve it when you'd nothing
more to say to each other. One of my voices told me I should try to keep
the marriage going and the other said what was the point when we'd
nothing in common and there were no children.

And then the two of us inside me discussed Ned and Jane and Hannah. One
said a woman with a conscience would never forgive herself for splitting
up a family and taking a man from his child but the other said that
people did it all the time, it was commonplace. Even out here in a
country village people did it all the time. My father had done it and my
mother had done it twice. Times had changed since Rex Newland and Stella
had to behave the way they did, keeping empty marriages going at all
costs, sneaking off for secret meetings until love itself at last wore
out. Philippa had told me that of all the kids in Katie's class at
school less than half lived with their own mother and their own father
who were married to each other. And then I thought of having Ned's
child. It might be that by this time next year I could have a baby that
was Ned's and mine.

The first voice said, Hannah is only five, she's too young to
understand, she'll want her father and Jane won't be able to explain.

But she'll come and visit us, the counter voice said, she'll spend
weekends with us, and maybe she'll come to love me. Or maybe she'll hate
me and turn her father against me. I poured myself a second glass of
wine and thought of living with Ned, of sleeping all night with him, of
waking up beside him.

All the time I was sitting there, thinking and arguing with myself, a
steady hammering came from the back room. I'd closed the door because
now the window had gone there was nothing between the dining room and
the garden but a sort of skeleton of a conservatory. It was a mild, damp
night, and there was something dismal about the misty, still darkness
and that regular rhythmic banging. When he's finished, if there isn't
any work in Norwich or London, he'll start on something else. Maybe
he'll re-fit the kitchen, it's only been done twice since we got
married, or turn the two downstairs rooms into one big room or build a
garige at the bottom of the garden. There's plenty for him to do for the
next thirty years. And when he's sixty-five and gets his pension he'll
turn to me (if I'm still here) and say we're moving to a bungalow at
Cromer, preferably a dilapidated one, so that he can take it to bits and
put it all together again.

I took my wine and went into what used to be the dining room. The man on
the steps with the hammer in his hand seemed nothing to do with me, a
workman who was building something, doing overtime long into the night.
Thick white mist had come down and you couldn't see the end of the
garden. A heap of old timber loomed through it, the French door frames
and what had once been the shed and a length of fence. My watch said
ten-fifteen.

Are you going to be much longer? I said.

He didn't stop hammering. He'd got half a dozen nails clamped between
his teeth. Give me another half-hour. You go to bed.

Can we talk, Mike?

The nails dropped into the palm of his hand. I know you're upset about
your dad. That's only `;38+' natural, time will heal that.

Not as upset as I should be, I said. It's not that. Can we talk?

Isn't that what we're doing?

I mean, have a talk. I want to talk seriously.

The hammering stopped and he turned to me with an expression of acute
irritation, his face reddening.

You know something. Jenny. I've been working all day and when I get home
I have to get started on this, I don't even have a break. I get tired.
Can't you realize that?

We'd never had a serious talk in the whole of our married life, but I'd
never noticed before.

I went upstairs. We sleep in the front but the bathroom's at the back
and I was cleaning my teeth when the frosted window was suddenly lit up
with a yellow dazzle. I went into the back bedroom and looked out of the
window. Mike had set light to the pile of timber. Because it was damp he
had poured paraffin on to the wood and it was burning fiercely, sparks
flying up into the damp dark air like rocket tails on Guy Fawkes Night.

It's sensible to think of the thatched roofs in the village when you
light a fire, but there'd been too much rain to worry about that. The
flames were leaping high and the fire already had a red heart where the
hardwoods burned slowly.

I opened the window to feel the heat. On my face the blaze was like
summer sun. The roaring was an intense, frightening sound that soon
fetched Sandra Peachey out from next door with her husband Joe in his
dressing-gown and the murderous cat in his arms. When they started
shouting at Mike I closed the window and went to bed, into our double
bed, on the left-hand side, right on the edge so that I wouldn't touch
him when he got in.

No one will disturb me, thought Stella. They think I am too tired for
anything. And so I am, too tired for anything but this. I no longer have
the strength to carry that chair across the room and wedge it under the
door. But no one will come in. After all, in a residential home they're
glad if you're resting, if you're quiet, if you give no trouble ... I am
going to say something I thought of telling Genevieve but I can't.

I can't risk her telling him. No, not telling him. Unwittingly revealing
it to him. If I were going to tell him myself I should have done so
years ago. Perhaps I shall give him this tape but perhaps I shall not.
After all, he can never find out. There is no evidence he can ever find
that would point to his well, his parentage.

I'll begin now.

When he was five, said Stella, Richard had to have a blood test. He was
a very small, thin child and some sort of anaemia was suspected. As it
turned out he didn't have it and he soon began to grow and fill out,
there was nothing wrong with him, but this test was done.

I had never known whose child he was. I supposed, and at one time hoped,
he was Rex's. After all, Rex was my husband, he supported me, he kept
the children, fed and clothed and educated them. That was how I looked
at it at the time. That was the way married women who were not
breadwinners did look at it. Still do, some of them, I expect. How
strange this is, Genevieve knows this, that it's easier for me to talk
about sex than money!

Richard was conceived at the time of one of Rex's returns to me. In the
crucial month I must have had sexual relations five or six times with
Rex and just once with Alan. That sounds very disgusting, uttered like
that. I shall stop the tape and play it back.

It was even more disgusting to hear than to say. No one should behave
like that, but some women do, some women don't have much choice. I told
myself that the baby must be Rex's, I persuaded myself of that.

The other possibility frightened me but I kept thinking of those
figgeres, the five or six times and the one time. It haunted me.

Instead of thinking with happiness about the coming baby I thought
always of whose child it was. Every morning when I woke up it was my
first thought. But the strange thing was that when Richard was born I
stopped worrying, I almost ceased to think about it.

Babies are interesting the way they look and the way they change.

Priscilla's Hugo looked a lot like my father-in-law when he was first
born, at three months he was the image of his mother and when he was
twelve he looked like a photograph of jeremy taken when he was a child.

Richard looked like me for the first five or six years of his life. His
hair was fairer and his eyes were lighter than mine but they had the
same features. At that time I hadn't realized that Alan and I were
ourselves rather alike to look at, not twin-alike but as a brother and
sister might be. If my child looked like me he must also look like Alan.

Then came the blood test. Richard's blood group was B, not rare but not
all that common, about 6 per cent of the population. Rex and I had both
at one time been blood donors and I knew we shared group A. It might not
be DNA fingerprinting but it was sound enough. Richard couldn't be Rex%
son.

Twenty years later, at least twenty years, I was reading an article in a
newspaper about why women miscarry and came upon a theory, or perhaps
something more than a theory. It suggested that families of children all
of the same sex might not be that way as a matter of chance.

Suppose the man carries some faulty gene that only affects boys and is
so damaging that it kills the male foetus when it's, say, three months
old. Then the mother would conceive girls and boys but carry only girls
to term. I thought about that. All the babies I miscarried that were old
enough for their sex to be known had been boys. Suppose that was a fault
in Rex and not in me, in Rex's genes. He who had so much wanted a son
could never have had one, no matter whom he had married.

My boy, the boy to whom I had given birth, was Alan's son, not his.

I wish I'd read it when Richard was small. It would have made me feel
less guilty. I had over a year of guilt and fear before Rex died, guilt
that he had a cuckoo in his nest, fear that he would find out, that he
would see. For Richard was beginning to look like Alan. He was changing
and starting to look like Alan, or I thought he was. It may have been my
knowledge of who his father really was that made me think like that, but
I believed I could see a physical change and that everyone must soon see
it too.

If I had been aware of the gene theory then I might not have felt so
bad. After all, I had given Rex the son he could never have prodjuced.

He loved Richard and was proud of him. It might even be that he stayed
with me instead of going off to Charmian because of Richard. At the
time, though, that only made me the more afraid of what the effect on
him would be if one day he looked at his son and saw Alan.

Rex died. The day I found Charmian's body in the barn and Alan took me
back to the -house and lay there holding me in his arms, on that day I
told him. I had to get back, I couldn't leave Richard with Priscilla for
the evening. I had to go back and fetch him and take him home. The
conversation we had, I remember it word for word. I got off the bed and
sat with my back to Alan and said, He's yours, Richard is your son.

Yes, I know, he said.

I can't describe how casually he said it, how lightly. I might have told
him it was ten past five or the sun had come out. You know?

Sure, I've known since he was a few months old. Same turned-up snout, or
retrousse nose, as they say. He's got your eyes, I've always been glad
about that.

Why didn't you tell me?

Why didn't you tell me, my dear? It was your secret.

Oh, Alan, are you glad?

He got up and came round the bed. He put his arms round me and held me
tight. It's the best thing in my life, he said, after you.

Yet you were content never to mention it, have him accepted as Rex's?

Would you ever have asked?

I've been waiting for you to tell me for nine months. It was nine months
since Rex's death. Come to think of it, we could have had another one in
that time.

You're terrible, I said. You're awful. It was what I always said when he
made his bad-taste jokes. Shall we ever tell him?

He thought about that one. My head was on his shoulder and he held it
there lightly, his thumb moving against my cheek.

Yes, he said at last, but not yet. Not until we're all three living
together or until Gillda sees, whichever is the sooner.

It made me want to be with him more and I think it made him want to be
with me more, now that we had said to each other what we both secretly
knew, that Richard was our son. An illicit affair seemed oh, I don't
know, inappropriate. I needed some dignity in our relationship, and more
than that, openness, propriety I suppose, a love and a bond that all the
world could see. The three of us together, Richard and his parents.

I am feeling rather better today. A remission. Talking into this machine
comes most easily first thing in the morning, when I am freshest. This
the last tape I shall make and destroy. I regard it and its predecessors
as practice, as rehearsals for the real thing. The next one will be the
real thing.

It is true that driving a car has unpleasant associations for me. So
does fire, though only in the sense of cremation. I have left
instructions that I am to be buried. But it is the plou that troubles me
most, or troubles me on some deep, barely conscious level.

My lips, now, as I speak of it, grow stiff. Forming the word and
uttering it is for me as it is for some people to speak the name of the
creature they are phobic about: snake, spider, rat. Once or twice it has
been the answer or part of the answer to a crossword puzzle clue and as
I have written it in something has contracted inside me and a shiver has
run up through my body.

When I have a bad dream that is what my dream is about. The strange
thing is that it is never the modern machine that I see, the actual
machine that gave rise to all this, but the hand-held or -horse-drawn
implement. I don't know why this should be. I can only recall once
seeing such an object, and that was in a museum of bygones. I have seen
pictures, of course.

Alan sometimes called me his star. My star because Stella means a star.
Once he quoted someone and, telling me to look at the stars, said he
wished he were the heavens so that he might look at me with many eyes.
Last night, before I went to bed, I looked at the stars out of this
window as I often do. I saw Charles's Wain up there, that some call the
Big Dipper, and Ursa Major and the Plou. The shape of it, the
configgeration of stars, is the shape of the thing in the museum.

The effect on me was to dream of a man plouing, an old man in medieval
dress, pushing the plou through a stony field, only the earth he turned
over was ashes and the flints that came to the surface were bones. And
when he came close to me I saw that his face was Alan's face, grown old.

I have dreamed that a good many times before I sat at the window and
looked at the stars. Dozens of times in the years that have passed.

Twice since I have been in here. The plouman usually has Alan's face but
not always. It was another man that I saw trudging through a field of
bones last time I dreamed it, a different face, one I've seen only once
before but have never forgotten. That was the only time it printed
itself on whatever screen of memory figgeres in our dreams.

I believe it performed this operation because I had been sitting with
Genevieve talking for longer than usual that day.

The sooner I strip that from the tape the better.

Maud was to Lena what Stella is to me. I realized that when Maud was
dead and I saw Lena's face swollen with crying. She'd sat up all night
with her, being the daughter Maud never had, holding her hand to keep
the life in till death got too strong and prised them apart. Even if
you're running what Ned calls a granny farm, even if you're money
hungry, you can still have your affections. I thought what a
contradiction a person's character can be and for some reason it
frightened me.

You'd hardly credit it, Sharon said, but she's got a waiting list of
wrinklies queueing up to come here. Hope we get another old boy, the
women piss me off.

The undertakers car was outside when Marianne arrived. She came on her
own, driving a Volvo Estate. As she walked up to the front entrance the
undertakers men came down the steps with Maud's body on a stretcher
covered up in black.

I was on the steps too and I thought she was going to drop. I went
quickly up to her and took her arm.

It's not ... ?

It's old Misses Vernon, I said. She died in the night. Are you all
right?

Oh, Jenny, I'mjine. You are kind.

Marianne may be a bit neglectful and a bit scatterbrained but you can't
help liking her. It's nice when people remember your name. It's nice
when they talk to you as if you're old friends and don't have any side
or give themselves airs.

I haven't seen Mummy for a month, she said. It was nearly two but I
didn't say so. I've felt so guilty. I was doing this TV commercial in
Ipswich and I said to myself, Marianne, you'll be an utter bitch if you
don't take this chance to go and see Mummy, it's only a matter of
whizzing up the A14. And then when I got here I thought I was too late.
Of course it was my guilt distorting things, darling. I'm such a fool!

Looking at her then I had some idea of what Stella had meant by saying
she was like Rex. Of course I'd never seen even a photograph of Rex
Newland but Marianne's large dark eyes and quite heavy dark eyebrows
didn't come from Stella. They make an interesting contrast with her hair
that isn't actually dyed even if it isn't naturally quite that red-gold.
And her nose is a bit hooky, aquiline I think they call it, while
Stella's is a neat little straight nose even now. She was wearing jeans
and a white shirt and big silver earrings. It reminded me of what Stella
had said about the way actresses look, their way of doing their make-up
and their clean hair.

I walked her along to Stella's room but I didn't go in with her. The
long package she was taking out of her bag I guessed was two hundred
cigarettes. Marianne was the secret supplier Stella said she'd be
tortured about before she'd confess.

Lena had asked me to sort out the few pitiful things Maud had left
behind her for the relatives if we could find any. She couldn't bring
herself to do it, she said, and for once I didn't dislike her. I suppose
I'd discovered she was human like everyone else. When I'd done that and
taken Lois for a walk from one end of the -house to the other and back
she's supposed to have a bit of daily exercise I took Arthur his tea and
carried a tray along for Stella.

The room smelt of smoke though they'd opened a fanlight. Seeing Stella
almost every day, I suppose I haven't noticed the deterioration in her
the way an occasional visitor would. Marianne caught my eye behind
Stella's back and made a face of exaggerated distress. I asked her if
she'd like a cup of tea but she shook her head and mouthed that she'd
have it in a minute, she'd have it outside. She put her arms round
Stella and started saying goodbye, she'd come back in a week's time, so
I left them and walked slowly back down the passage.

Marianne came running after me.

Oh, Jenny, isn't it dire! The change in Mummy! It was such a shock, I
can't tell you.

I know, I said. But she's not in pain. Her brain's very clear. And she's
not muddled in her talk, she can talk as well as ever.

Can I speak to you for a moment?

We went into the lounge. Carolyn was in there with tea on a trolley and
no one to give it to but Gracie, who had fallen asleep in her armchair
with one of Lena's cats in her lap. Marianne sat down by the french
windows. I don't think she knew she'd picked Stella's fayvorit chair,
the one where she always sat to watch the butterflies. I fetched her a
cup of tea and one for myself.

You said her brain's very clear, Marianne began, but do you think
there's anything preying on her mind?

All the things she tells me, I thought, and for some reason doesn't want
you to know.

What sort of thing?

I don't know how much you know about her, darling. Marianne looked
-searchingly into my face. Her big dark eyes fix themselves on you and
seem to see into your soul. Does she ever talk to you about my father?

She mentions him. Sometimes.

Does she talk about the way he died? I mean, where he'd been before he
died?

I don't know why I denied it, why I shook my head.

She's never got over my father's death. Oh, yes, don't look like that,
darling, I'm sure of it. She's never got over it. Let me tell you about
it. It can't matter now, it's all so long ago, but you needn't tell her
I told you. He had this long-standing relationship with another woman,
you see. I was only fifteen but somehow I knew, I'd known for quite a
little while. Terribly precocious of me, wasn't it? I was like Amanda in
Private Lives, my heart was always jagged with sophistication.

Perhaps you have the faintest idea what she meant. I haven't.

I'm sure Mummy never knew about it. She's so trusting, Jenny, she's so
innocent. He went on the train to see this woman he'd given up driving
by then and coming back he had a heart attack. If he hadn't been alone
in the carriage well, it's no good talking about what might have been,
is it? They found him when someone got into the carriage at Bury and
they took him to hospital but he was dead when they got there.

Mummy should never have been allowed to know where he'd been. They
should have had the sense to lie to her. It was this stchupid doctor
asking her if she knew where he'd been and telling her about the ticket
in his pocket that did the damage.

You knew all that, I said, at fifteen?

Not really. No, I didn't. I sort of pieced it together afterwards. I
mean, when I was older. But I did know about Charmian that was the
girlfriend and that she lived at Elmswell and he'd been there, and Mummy
didn't know that. Not at first.

How can you be so sure?

Marianne spoke almost triumphantly, Because of the result, darling, the
effect on her. She was so absolutely devastated. She couldn't have been
like that if she'd known all about the affair beforehand.

Look, Marianne, I said, I'm not a psychiatrist. I mean, I'm not even a
nurse. I'm just a carer. I don't know why these things affect people the
way they do: I'm very ignorant really.

You've been kind to Mummy, darling, that's all I know. You've been more
like a daughter than I have.

It's awful, isn't it? The words that come into your head and almost into
your mouth are the ones you're always hearing on TV or reading in
magazines, I'm only doing my job. Of course I wasn't such a fool as to
say them.

Instead I said, You mean she was what you said, devastated, when your
father died?

Not immediately. That was the strange thing. But perhaps it's not so
strange, Jenny. Do you think shock delays things? It was months before
it seemed to hit her. I mean, more than a year maybe, eighteen months, I
don't know.

I asked her what she meant. What convinced her Stella was in such a bad
way? She didn't answer directly.

Of course it was Mummy who found Charmian, but you know all about that.

I'm sorry?

Don't you know the story? I'm afraid I rather treat you like one of the
family, Jenny. I take it for granted you know our family history as well
as we do. Charmian shot herself. With a shotgun. I don't know the
details, I've never known. It was quite a long time after Daddy died,
months, but it was because of him. She couldn't bear life without him.
Mummy found her.

Your mother found her? You mean found her dead?

She went to her -house. She'd been jealous of her for years, she really
disliked her, but I think she got to like her after Daddy died.

I suppose she was sorry for her. Anyway, she went there and found
Charmian dead in one of the barns. That was the beginning of it, I
think. But I was so young, Jenny, and I had my own friends, and I was
desperate to get to be an actor. There must have been so much I didn't
see. But I know that before I went away to drama school when I was
seventeen she'd gone into an awful depression well, she'd just gone
inside herself. I don't think she ever really came out, or not for
years.

But that was two years after your father died, I said.

Yes, that's right, just before drama school. Mummy was depressed before
I went away. It wasn't exactly depression, it was more as if she was
well, stricken. All sorts of things she used to do she just stopped
doing. Driving the car, for instance. We had another au pair by then,
Maret had left, we had a Norwegian called Aagot amazing names they have
and Mummy just gave over the driving of the car to her. She drove
Richard to school and did the shopping. Mummy wouldn't even go in the
car. She had that friend, that actress, Gillda Brent, and Gillda's
husband, whatever he was called ... Alan Tyzark.

That's right, Alan Tyzark. Mummy used to see a lot of them. I can
remember him taking us out for drives, he liked kids, didn't have any of
his own, and she used to go about with Gillda an awful lot, but after
her depression started she never saw them. Just when she needed friends
she dropped them. The only people she had anything to do with apart from
us were the Brownings next door. I remember asking her why she never saw
Alan and Gillda, if she wouldn't drive herself, why not let Aagot drive
her over to see them, but she wouldn't.

I was at drama school for three years and when I came home for holidays
I used to try to get her interested in well, things, people. I expect I
interfered in things too much, but you know how you can be at that age,
a right little do-gooder. I even rang the Tyzarks up, meaning to ask
Gillda to come over and see Mummy but Alan answered and said Gillda was
away. He'd always been tremendously nice to me but that time, it was the
last time we ever spoke, I might have been a total stranger. Of course
it was obvious there'd been a quarrel. Mummy seemed determined to
quarrel with everyone. She didn't go anywhere, she didn't take on
another au pair when Aagot left.

She just devoted herself to Richard. Daddy had wanted him to go to prep
school, boarding school that is, but Mummy wouldn't have that. I don't
say she babied him, she didn't, but she wanted him with her. You could
say she lived for him. And very gradually she got a bit better.

We're talking about more than twenty years ago, and people didn't get
treatment for depression. They were still caught up in that
get-yourself-together thing. I can actually remember my cousin's wife
Priscilla telling Mummy, There's no one can help you but yourself,
Stella. And the result of that was that Mummy quarrelled with her.

They didn't speak for months.

Mummy did get better and she never spoke of it, you know, I don't
remember her ever mentioning my father. She absolutely never talked
about him. But now ... well, she mentioned him today. She just said,
I've been thinking about your father, and then she said, I'm glad I
married him because otherwise I wouldn't have had you. Sweet, wasn't it?
But I think his death still haunts her. It's absolutely dire, you know,
darling, to realize when your husband dies that your whole married life
has been a lie.

I couldn't tell her she'd got it wrong. I wasn't in the business of
breaking up her illusions. She went back to have another word with
Stella before leaving and as we came out of the lounge I tried to find a
tactful way of telling her not to leave it too long before she came
again.

If you could manage it in a week or two?

Oh, darling, you mean she may not ... I don't know. No one knows. But to
be on the safe side. She does love to see you. Could you come on her
birthday?

I shall be seventy-one on December the jrd, Genevieve, Stella said to me
when I took her breakfast in next morning. That's one year more than
man's allotted span, quite a respectable age once upon a time. I
shouldn't complain.

You don't complain, I said.

Have you a minute? I know I mustn't monopolize you but if you've just
five minutes?

I sat on the end of the bed.

Poor Marianne has got it into her head I'm unhappy about Rex's death.

Did she say anything to you?

She did a bit.

I like your discretion! Don't worry, I shan't ask you what she said.

Stella was in good spirits. Skeletally thin she might be, and with a new
wheeziness in her voice, but the light in her eyes was very nearly
merry.

I do love to see my daughter, Genevieve. And I must confess it amuses me
to see her get hold of the wrong end of the stick, poor darling.

Fancy her thinking I was sad because of Rex! Misunderstanding's an awful
thing, yet I suppose it's inevitable if we're ever to have any privacy.
The fact is I was so utterly indifferent to Rex by the time he died that
his death was no more to me than the man next door's would have been.
I'd probably have cared more about the man next door's, I always liked
John Browning. She sighed. Charmian well, yes, that was different.

Her merriment had been short-lived. A cast of seriousness came across
her face. She had been picking at a thin slice of brown bread and
butter, but she pushed the rest of it away and made a little face of
distaste. She eats practically nothing now. I think it's cups of tea and
milky coffee that are keeping her alive. She looked at me, then away.

Charmian, she said. I pitied her so and she'd have hated that if she'd
known. Imagine, Genevieve, she didn't know about Rex, she didn't know he
had died. He used to phone her every day, he had done for years and
years, even when ... a small almost cynical smile, her eyebrows pushing
more wrinkles up into her forehead, he was supposed to be staging one of
his come-backs to me. Every day, year in and year out, every single day
but not, of course, the next day. He was dead and she didn't know. She
must have waited for his call and it didn't come. She waited for three
days before she phoned the firm. It was his nephew Jeremy who told her.
But imagine her waiting like that, Genevieve, and growing more and more
afraid and not daring to phone his home. Oh, the nightmare, it doesn't
bear thinking of.

Receiving the news, thinking what it might mean to her, Stella had
forgotten all about Charmian. Or, rather, it had never occurred to her
to let Charmian know. She even asked herself later if, unconsciously,
she'd done it on purpose, if she'd tortured Charmian deliberately by
keeping her in the dark. I don't see how you can do a cruel act
unconsciously, if it isn't conscious it can't be cruel, but that's the
way Stella is. None of it was her fault but she was filled with remorse.
She said she was sorrier for Charmian than she'd ever been for anyone in
all her life.

She wanted her to know that for years she hadn't minded about their
affair. It was years since she had felt love for Rex. That only made
Charmian worse, reproaching her for not loving Rex who needed love so
much'. For some reason she thought Charmian would want to talk, but
Charmian only attacked her for not suggesting divorce to Rex. If she
didn't love him why had she wanted to stay married to him?

Misunderstanding, Stella said, it was all misunderstanding.

But something happened that never had before. Out of the death of the
man that had been the husband of one of them and the lover of the other
grew a relationship. Given time, they might have become friends, but
they weren't given time. They began seeing each other, they began
meeting, and after a while they stopped talking about Rex and talked
instead about the things countrywomen do discuss, the -houses being
built in the villages and the new road and how the hedges were being
uprooted and the cost of the hunt.

Because Gillda insinuated herself into most things that Stella did, she
too got to see Charmian sometimes. She would phone early in the morning
to find how Stella meant to spend her day and if it included a morning
visit to Charmian, would announce that she was coming too. Or she would
invite them both in that overbearing way of hers that Stella at least
found so difficult to defy. The three of them would talk and have coffee
and sit chatting in each other's -houses. It must have been an awkward
sitchuation, three women who didn't really like each other, Charmian
still in love with Stella's dead husband, Stella in love with Gillda's
living husband and Gillda always projecting the image she had made of
herself as somehow superior to both of them, more sophisticated,
cleverer, more beautiful and elegant.

And Stella, the little thing', was patronized by both of them. To
Charmian she was the woman her lover had married but never loved, and,
more than that, she came from the wrong background for Rex's wife. In
her eyes Rex had married far beneath him. Gillda, of course, simply
treated Stella as an ignorant greenhorn', on the way home speculating
about what Rex could possibly have seen in Charmian and making guesses
in raw sexual terms. Charmian looked such a fright', there must have
been some other reason for her hold on him', some love-making technique
or a even a well, Stella called it a physiological peculiarity'. God
knows what Gillda called it.

Why did you put up with it? I said.

I suppose I was sorry for both of them. Have you ever heard of the
mother of the Gracchi?

Well, of course I hadn't.

She was a Roman woman. A friend she was visiting spread out all her
jewellery collection, boxes of it, for her to see and boasted of it.

She called her two sons to her and said, These are my jewels. I had my
jewels, Genevieve, I had my children, and I had Alan too.

Stella thought Charmian was getting over it just as in a few years' time
people thought she was beginning to get over her own trouble. One
morning, having made a vague arrangement to call and see Charmian on her
way to Ipswich, Stella got to Elmswell at about eleven. Charmian's car
was on the drive that led, not to the garige, she had no garige, but to
the various outbuildings behind the -house.

There seemed to be no one at home, in spite of the car. Stella rang the
doorbell a couple of times and when there wasn't any answer she thought
Charmian must be in the garden. It was late summer and a fine day.
Charmian grew dahlias, she was proud of her dahlias. Stella went round
the side of the -house.

There was a great screen of cypresses, Stella said. They were very
ancient, far older than the -house. Cypress wood is almost everlasting,
did you know that? The gates of Constantinople were made of cypress and
they lasted a thousand years.

A big paved courtyard with buildings that had once been stables were on
one side of it, a dairy and cold room on the other, long disused, a
coach -house that other people would have converted into a garige with a
flat over it but Charmian's family never had. The garden beyond was
walled. Fan-trained fruit trees grew against walls of cut flints and
underneath, in the borders, were the dahlias, giants and cactus and
pom-poms, Bishop of Leandaff and King Albert's Mourning. There were
heleniums too, mustard yellow, and pink chrysanths and silvery lad's
love. Stella walked down the path, looking for Charmian, calling
Charmian. She was expecting that witch-like figgere to appear from among
the flowers, to have been bending over, to stand up and raise an arm in
that stiff salute. Coming back again between the giant cypresses that
last for ever, she looked in the stables and the dairy and then she came
to the coach -house. She -searched everywhere because by this time she
was worried. She thought Charmian might have cut or otherwise injured
herself while gardening and collapsed.

It was true that she had injured herself and true too about the
collapse. Stella found her on the coach -house floor. Although she was
forty-five years old she had never before seen a dead person, so it was
unfortunate that the first one she saw had half her head blown off. The
blood, Stella said, oh, the blood, I shall never forget it, I shall
never be rid of the sight of it.

Later on, at the inquest which she had to attend, it was told by the
people who work out these things how Charmian had done it.

She had taken a shotgun, a twelve bore, and standing up put the barrel
not into her mouth, that would have been impossible, but pointing up
under her chin, held it with her left hand and pressed down with her
right thumb on the trigger. The result was so terrible that Stella
screamed. There was no one near to hear her but she screamed and
screamed.

No one had phones in cars then, Stella said. Anyway, she couldn't have
held a receiver, she couldn't have driven her car, her hands, her whole
body were shaking. She ran down the high street, calling out, screaming,
crying that Charmian was dead, that Charmian had killed herself. She had
lost all control, she barely knew what she was doing, it was too late
for Charmian, she wanted help for herself.

The police, when they came, asked if there was anyone they could get in
touch with to be with her. She said, Alan Tyzark. She said it without
thinking. It was automatic, he was the first person in her thoughts, he
always was. In her shock, she had forgotten Gillda, and by chance he was
alone at home and Gillda was out. He came at once.

He came in Gillda's car, Stella said. I was at the police station,
drinking a cup of tea. They were very kind to me, very considerate. I
was watching for him from the window and when I saw this red car coming,
this red Anglia, I thought, oh, no, it's not him, it's Gillda.

That was her car you see, the Anglia, not his, she'd bought it
secondhand a few months before.

A red Ford Anglia? I said.

He had a Rover, a grey one. They were both quite old cars, they couldn't
afford anything newer. I thought it was Gillda in the red car but it
wasn't, it was Alan on his own. He put his arms round me, he didn't care
about anyone seeing, and he said, I'm going to take you to your -house.
I thought he meant my home in Bury, but he took me to our -house where
we always met, he took me to Molucca. We stayed there all day. We lay on
the bed not for love-making, I don't mean that he just held me and we
lay there side by side until the evening. He'd even arranged for
Priscilla to look after Richard. I don't know how he explained it to
Gillda, I don't know why he had her car and she had his, I don't know
what he said to her. It was weeks before I spoke to her again.

Stella, I said, that red car, is that Gillda's car in the garige at your
-house?

She gave me one of her sidelong looks. It's the expression of a child
who's accused of doing something naughty but not very bad and still
doesn't quite want to admit it. Guilty but amused, slightly annoyed.

What if it is?

I thought you said Gillda died in a car crash.

I was telling you about Charmian. She wrote to me, you know. She sent me
a letter. Well, she sent it to my -house, care of me, it was really to
Rex. She wrote it to Rex who was dead. It was her version of a suicide
note.

Charmian must have gone out to post the letter that morning or perhaps
the night before. The envelope was postmarked the date of her death and
it arrived at Stella's on the following day. Her handwriting had always
been unreadable and she typed everything on an antique typewriter that
belonged with the -house. She had typed simply, I cannot live without
you. I have tried but the days are too long. It was signed right at the
bottom of the sheet with that scrawl of hers that was Charmian but might
have been anything.

Stella knew she should pass it to the coroner. But she wanted to show it
to Alan first. He looked at it and then at her and said, My own
sentiments. They're playing our tchune.

You won't kill yourself though, she said.

How do you know what I'd do if you died?

She said she shivered when he spoke those words. What shall I do with
her letter?

Nothing, he said. Let me take care of it. And he asked her if she really
wanted to see that in the papers, an admission that Charmian had been
Rex's lover.

She didn't. She believed that was his reason for suppressing Charmian's
letter. That was what she believed then.

I don't want to break the law, she said.

He laughed. Why not? he said. Go on, be a devil. It's out of your hands
now, anyway. I've got it. I'll put it in the archives.

You haven't got any archives, she said.

I have now.

All that took a good deal more than five minutes in the telling.

Stella's voice was hoarse and her skin had lost all its colour.

You have to take it easy, I said, and I took the tray from her and
covered up her knees with the blanket.

That was the beginning of it, she said. The note that Charmian sent me,
that was the start of it.

The start of what? I said, but I got no answer.

When you're in my sort of love affair, unlike Stella's, you don't get
much of a chance to talk to the person you're in love with. For one
thing your meetings don't last long, it's all snatched moments, and for
another the time is mostly taken up with making love. I tell myself that
there'll be time enough to talk when I'm with Ned all the time.

Every day I came a step nearer to deciding I will be with him all the
time, though I'd said nothing to him then, at the end of November that
is, I'd said nothing to Mike, I'd made no arrangements, it was still all
in my head.

But we'd got to following a routine at our meetings in Stella's -house
and there was a little space for talking in it. It had been the mildest
November since rehcords began and would have been cold only if the month
was, say, September. But it was cold enough. I'd get the place warmed up
as best I could before he arrived, I'd take a bottle of wine with me and
have it opened and breathing, the candles lit, the bed fresh and warm.
And after we'd made love, necessarily under the heavy covers that was
when I began longing for the freedom of light, of nakedness exposed and
liberty of movement and hands and mouths after that we'd lie with our
arms round one another and talk a little. I never have much to tell him,
only some small anecdotes of my day. After all, my life isn't exciting,
or rather, he's the excitement in my life.

But plenty happens to him, he's always meeting the clever and the
famous, and he always has stories of what he's done and plans to do.

The next time we met after Stella had told me of the hidden letter, he
would have been happy, I think, not to talk at all. When we finish and
there's that high moment, that shared wonderful thing when my mind
breaks open, I cry out into his mouth that's covering mine. And he holds
me for a long time after we slide apart. He holds me and strokes my
hair, he kisses my shoulders, he puts my head to rest upon him. He never
moves away and turns his back. Sometimes we whisper to each other for a
little while and he gets up and fetches the wine for us to drink. That's
the time we talk, for we often make love again and we aren't like other
lovers, we haven't all night at our disposal.

But that time it was me fetched the wine and poured some for him and
some for me in Stella's crystal glasses that she and Alan Tyzark once
used. And when I walked round the bed with the glass in my hand I saw
that he was asleep. I love to watch him sleeping, for his face is lovely
then. He looks very young and gentle. But I grudge him sleep because
that's when he goes away from me. So I drank my wine and watched him and
when he stirred I said his name and touched his face and kissed him. He
woke very quickly, sat up and smiled at me.

I wanted him to tell me about his work, what he'd been doing, and he
began to talk, telling me about the re-search for a pro-gramme he's
making about some old Norfolk families. It was mere chance, I suppose,
that I asked him how one could find out about birth and death dates, how
did you do it and was it easy. I'd never thought about it before, that
there must be some central place where everyone's birth, marriage and
death is rehcorded, I imagined it was all in church registers. But Ned
said no, they were kept in some place in London and that was where he
would be checking the dates of these family members.

And then I thought I'd ask him to do something for me. Before that I'd
never actually asked him for anything, I'd never said to him, would you
get this for me, or would you do that? Yet it's what people do when
they're together, isn't it? You could call it dependence on each other
or you could call it support. It seemed to me the mark of our closeness,
our absolute partnership, that I could say to him, would you do this for
me?

When you're doing that, would you find out something for me, the date of
someone's death?

Of course I will, he said, if I can.

He looked so happy to have the chance to do it, I wondered why I'd never
asked before. It's Gillda Brent, I said.

The actress? Didn't you tell me one of your old ladies knew her?

He's got a good memory. I'll do my best. When did she die?

About twenty-five years ago. Isn't that near enough? It's all I know.

Was Brent her real name?

I remembered the cigarette card collection. I told him it had been Brant
and her married name was Tyzark and she was around fifty when she died,
if that would help. Now we'd begun on it I wanted to talk some more, to
tell him something of what Stella had told me, of Charmian and her love
for Rex Newland. Lovers always want to talk about love, don't they? And
Charmian's plight, her hopeless suffering, had struck some chord in me,
though I'd never experienced anything like it and hope I never will. But
it wasn't what Ned wanted.

Let's not talk any more about these old people and death and old,
unhappy, far-oft things, he said, and he took me in his arms again,
saying, Tell me you love me, Jenny, tell me you love me.

On the Saturday that was Stella's birthday I was coming out of the
Legion where I'd taken Mum's shopping when I saw the removal van outside
Rowans. It wasn't a big one, it was about the size of a Land Rover, and
they'd hired it themselves. The place was let furnished and I don't
suppose they'd had much of their own stuff in it.

It gave me a shock to see Ned. It always does when I see him
unexpectedly, and the shock isn't a pleasant one when he's doing
something that's so definitely with Jane and Hannah. What he was doing,
carrying out a cardboard box of books and putting it in the van, seemed
utterly to exclude me. The books weren't mine or half mine, I didn't
even know their titles, and for a little while he didn't know I was
watching him. Jane came out and said something to him and he replied and
I was suddenly filled with such a longing to speak to him and have him
look at me that I almost cried out. I didn't but I called hallo and they
both turned round.

He said, Hallo, Jenny, how are you? as if I were Mum or. the woman next
door. He couldn't help it. What else could he do, but it stunned me and
I seemed to see his face on the pillow, his eyes closed and his lips
half-smiling in sleep.

I thought it would be impossible for me to speak but I spoke. I dare say
my voice sounded normal. I asked them when they were moving and Jane
said this was their last day here.

We've found a place in Southwold. Hannah does so love the -seaside.

It didn't matter to me. It made no difference to me, I'd only twice been
in that -house and, whatever had happened, I'd never have gone there
again. And they wouldn't be in Southwold, not all three of them, not
together. Jane and Hannah might be but Ned would be with me.

Muttering something about having to get on, she went back into the
-house, and Ned turned to me such a look of naked blazing love that even
I, hungry as I am, was satisfied. I whispered, Phone me, and he nodded.

Saturdays I was always off work but I was going in that day to see
Stella. Instead of driving down the High Street I took the long way
round, I didn't want to pass that emptying -house again. I didn't want
to see Ned again. If that sounds insane, it's explainable. When they
were together, him and Jane, I always dreaded seeing some sign of love
or companionship or even ordinary affection pass between them, some
meeting of eyes, some intimate smile of special meaning. I never did, I
never could have for it couldn't happen, I knew Ned too well for that,
but still I feared it. I was afraid of an impossible sight that would
spoil my day, my week, my life.

Love is a frightening thing. I realize that I'm frightened so much of
the time, afraid of losing him, afraid of discovery, but more than that,
I live in fear of not being his equal, of not matching up to what he
wants, of him changing because he's disillusioned. And Stella has told
me she felt fear every day, before their meetings, after their meetings,
fear of Gillda and jealousy. Like me, she was afraid of seeing a hint of
love between Alan and Gillda. One summer afternoon she had gone to their
-house and, hearing their voices, pushed open the front door and walked
in without knocking. Gillda was picking out a tchune on the piano and he
was sitting on the stool beside her, singing words to it, they'd been
trying to remember some old song. It was nothing; it shattered her. And
how could it be nothing when she was alone and free but he was still
with Gillda?

She was afraid too of that painting, that nude. Sometimes she would
fancy the half-smile on the face was directed against her in mockery,
that the painted Gillda was saying to her, Look at me, look at my
beauty. Can you compete with that? And when they were in that room
Gillda would always position herself in front of the portrait. She had a
settee so placed that the picture seemed to rise up behind it and she
contrived to sit on this settee and put Stella in an armchair facing it.
Whenever she lifted her eyes Stella was obliged to look at the naked
Gillda in her high heels, one hand fingering the pearl string between
her breasts.

She'd supposed Alan would ask Gillda for a divorce. They had no
children. It wasn't a question of money, Gillda was much better off than
he was. She would find another man, she was always telling Stella of all
the men who were in love with her. As for the money side of it, Stella
herself was well-off. The -house in Bury was hers and Rex's shares in
the company and his life assurance as well as investments of his. It
didn't matter to her that Alan had nothing but his royalties from Figaro
and Velvet and a dodgy income from selling pictures in pubs.

Didn't I tell you that, Genevieve? she said. It was all he could do.
He'd started painting landscapes and getting landlords to exhibit them
for sale. Well, not only landscapes. She looked ashamed.

Pictures of dogs and cats and girls faces and women in crinolines.

And he did drawings of Norfolk villages for Christmas cards.

I told him the money didn't matter, I had enough for both of us, but he
hated the idea of me keeping him. And he said Gillda would never divorce
him as the law stood. She'd have had to name me and he wouldn't have
that.

They'd heard, or Stella had heard through Jeremy Newland, that there'd
be a major change in the divorce law in the future, it was already being
talked about. Irretrievable breakdown would be grounds for divorce after
you'd been separated for two years and you both consented, or after five
years if only one consented. And it did come in. Mum and Dad were
divorced like that, there wasn't any problem about them both consenting,
and Mum got her divorce from number two like that as well. It's called
the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973, though I should think Divorce Causes
Act would be more appropriate. But for Alan Tyzark it was still a long
way off in 1969. Stella said she didn't care about being married, she
wanted him just to come and live with her.

Alan wouldn't do it. He said she didn't understand how Gillda would
behave. Gillda would make their life hell.-Saint Michael's Farm was
hers, entirely hers, and if he went to live with Stella Gillda would
start divorce pro-ceedings, name Stella and take from him everything he
had. Already, he said, Gillda suspected him. Once or twice when he'd
gone to a hotel in Ipswich with some of the paintings he'd done, she'd
followed him. He went out into Crown Street at nine one evening and saw
her car parked on the other side of the road. She had cast herself in
the role of her own private detective.

Richard's car was in the car park and so was Marianne's. That made me
think I needn't have come, not when she'd got her own children, but I
had a present for her and a card and I didn't have to stay long.

Sharon was in the hall, fiddling about with something behind reception.

She always comes in on Saturdays. She beckoned me over and whispered in
a dramatic way.

Maud left Lena fifty grand, how about that?

I didn't know what to say.

Three times that to the cats and donkeys but fifty K's pretty brilliant
if you ask me. Stella'll be next on her list, you see if I'm not right.
She's in there now with the family, sucking up so's you could vomit.

But Lena came out of Stella's room just as I turned the corner in the
passage. She was flushed, she looked a bit bemused; I suppose she'd only
got the news that morning, and instead of telling me off for being too
friendly with a resident, coming in on a Saturday and so on, she gave me
one of her toothy smiles and actually opened Stella's door for me.

I'd have knocked first but no one seemed to mind me just walking in.

Stella had six birthday cards on her desk and two on a bedside cabinet.

There was a marvelous new dressing-gown lying on the bed on top of its
tissue and pink glazed paper wrappings, a quilted thing of patchwork in
different sorts of gingham and rosebud patterns. But Richard had brought
her a set of books, A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell. I
looked at her and at those twelve books and thought, that'll be the last
you'll ever read, and somehow I could tell from his expression, his
smile and his sad eyes, that he was thinking the same.

I handed over my card and the two cassettes I'd been into Diss to buy.

I don't know anything about music but I'd remembered that Richard said
she liked chamber music, so I'd consulted Ned about that and he'd
advised me, a Dvorak Serenade for Strings and a piece by Boccherini.

Stella took the presents from me, caught my face in her hands in a
surprisingly strong grip, and kissed me. Her wrinkled face is as soft as
silk and as powdery as an iced cake.

My card was put on the desk with the others, the cassettes beside her
player.

They want to take me out to lunch, Genevieve, Stella said. I've told
them I hardly eat anything but Marianne says we can have nouvelle
cuisine.

Marianne put her eyebrows up at me. She's strong enough to go, isn't
she, Genevieve?

If she wants to, I said.

You know I don't like cars, Marianne.

You do as long as I'm not driving, Richard said. Marianne can drive at
twenty-five miles an hour and I'll sit in the back with you and put a
black bag over your head.

They argued a bit more but I could tell, and perhaps they could too,
that Stella really wanted to go. The car was the stumbling block but not
such a great obstacle when Marianne assured her the restaurant they were
going to was only three miles away and a new one, opened the previous
spring. Stella put on her cream wool coat, picking a hair off the collar
with an expression of distaste. One glove on and one off, she slipped
the bare hand into the crook of Richard's arm, not so much possessively
as with a kind of shy affection.

I followed them out, driving behind them for maybe a mile and then
turning off down the Tharby road. My shoelace broke as I was getting out
of the car. We wear trainers for work, white ones, and the laces don't
last as long as the shoes. I'd noticed my left one fraying for the past
week but I'd done nothing about it, mainly because Diss is the nearest
place I can buy replacements. It's bad to break a shoelace, something to
do with Saint Mark bursting the latchets of his shoes when he was
travelling to Alexandria, though why that should make it unlucky I don't
know. But it left me with a sense of foreboding.

Mike was putting the glass in the conservatory windows. He had Radio One
on very loud. When he saw me he said, Sorry, I'll turn it down. I won't
stop for my lunch. Have to get the glazing done before the bad weather
sets in.

Bad weather never really does set in, does it? Not in this country.

It's just as likely to be as nice or as nasty in December as it is in
June. We hadn't had any rain for a week, which is what I suppose he
meant, and it was unnaturally mild. He's doing this conservatory for me,
or that's what he says, he says it to everybody.

Come and see the conservatory I'm doing for Jenny.

That means I'm his reason for building it and his excuse. It works with
others and it works with me.

No time for that, he says, I've got Jenny's conservatory to finish, or,
to me, I'm doing this for you, so have a bit of patience, will you?

I've never asked for a conservatory. In fact, I don't want one. It will
only make more work and I've got enough already. I can't grow -house
plants, our garden is full of the buried corpses of African Violets that
have died on me. I shall never set foot in the place, I shall never
clean it or polish those windows. So what am I waiting for? What word
has to be spoken or trigger pulled? It's as if I'm waiting for the
conservatory to be finished, to replace me in Mike's life.

It would be there but I would be gone.

Stella had been very tired after her drive and her lunch. She was
brought back at three-thirty and had fallen asleep in her chair even
before Marianne and Richard had gone. Carolyn said she was still asleep
when she brought her dinner and of course she hadn't wanted anything to
eat. On Sunday she'd have liked to stay in bed all day but Lena doesn't
encourage that.

This is a residential home, not a hospice, she said to me. If they're
bed-ridden and want nursing they're in the wrong place.

Coming into a fortchune only sweetened her nature for a couple of days.
I found Stella up but still in her nightdress with the new dressing-gown
over it. The cereal and bread and butter on her tray were untouched. She
was drinking China tea.

Marianne calls this a robe, she said. I think dressing-gown may be an
old-fashioned word. It's beautiful, isn't it? I'd like you to have it
after I'm gone.

The clothes of the dead don't wear long. They fret for the person who
owned them ... Marianne may want it back, I thought, it must have cost a
hundred pounds.

Of course I will, I said, if that's what you want.

I shan't go into the lounge again.

Not today, d'you mean? I said.

I mean, not ever. I'll stay in here. I'm best in here. She added
mysteriously, I have plenty to do in here.

I asked her if she'd like me to help her dress. Would she like me to
give her a bath? I always bath Gracie, though God knows what Lena would
say if she knew. Stella shook her head, then she laughed. It was good to
hear her laugh.

I haven't come to that yet. I'm just tired. I shall sleep and I'll be
better later.

She was too. The human spirit is amazing. It's wonderful how people can
rally if they fight. I realized that day that Stella had begun to fight.

Someone had moved her chair so that it was in a new place by the french
window. From there she could look whenever she wanted to at the outside
world, green lawns, leafless trees now, a low blue horizon. She turned
round when I came in at four, beckoned me over and although she had
already greeted me that morning, caught my face in her hands the way she
does and kissed me on the left cheek and the right. That White Linen
perfume she uses came off her warm skeleton body in waves. She felt
almost feverish, and energy was coming from her like electricity.

Three months ago I remember thinking how reserved she was, how she kept
all her past life to herself. And now she talks all the time. It's as if
she'd picked up the two or three stones that dammed a stream and the
water flooded through the gap. When she drew back and released my face
from those electric hands she began to talk almost at once. She talked
as if there were things she had to say before the time ran out through
the hour-glass and there was no sand left in the top.

I kept hold of her left hand in mine. Her voice and command of words
seem to grow stronger as her bodily strength fails. I said that was the
beginning of it, do you remember, Genevieve? Charmian's letter was the
beginning. And then the next beginning, the next step really, was when
we all went to the cinema together to see The End of Edith Thompson,
Gillda and Alan and I.

As soon as one of her films was djue to appear at a local cinema Gillda
had to go and see it. She had seen it many times before, Alan had seen
this one three times and even Stella had seen it once. But they had to
go and see it again. It was on in Ipswich. All the way there in Alan's
car they had to listen to Gillda talking about the making of the film,
the way she was treated by the director, his ceaseless criticism of her
performance, his insistence on her wardrobe being of the dowdiest kind,
the star's malice towards her.

You know the story. They called each other darlint , not darling , I
don't know why. She put powdered glass in her husband's food, or she
said she did. She wrote it in letters to Bywaters and they were used
against her at her trial. It was Bywaters who stabbed Thompson in the
street near where he and Edith lived, but Edith was hanged for it as
well.

I've only seen the end of the film, I said.

Never mind the film. It isn't very good. I only mention it because it
was the next day that Alan started what he what we -called the Killing
Gillda Tease.

At five-fifteen on Thursday August 16th, 1969, Alan made his first
Killing Gillda joke. Stella said the date was written on her memory more
distinctly than her wedding or her children's birthdays or the date she
first met Alan. There was only one date in her life more clearly
rehcorded and that was yet to come.

I don't understand, I said.

No, I don't suppose you do. I don't understand it myself now, why it
seemed funny at the time, but it did. He just said in that casual way of
his, in one of those throwaway lines of his, he said, Let's do it, let's
kill Gillda.

It was a joke, wasn't it? I said. I truly didn't understand. He wasn't
serious. It sounds like a game.

Of course it was a game. She was suddenly quite heated. She was almost
cross. We did play games, he and I. I told you we played -house, we
played at being married. We even dressed up once to look like the
parents in the Figaro and Velvet books. Once we made ourselves look like
Mister and Misses Darling in Peter Pan.

I'd almost lost her. I tried not to stare.

Mister and Misses Darlint, she said and she gave her throaty laugh. The
Killing Gillda Tease was just another game we played.

You played?

I did it because he did, she said, and she had begun to sound very
weary. I'm ashamed of it now. It was silly and childish.

Childish?

All right, worse than that. Perhaps children wouldn't play that game.

Do you know what folie a deux means?

I shook my head. French wasn't very successfully taught at Newall Upper
School. I did just about know it was French.

It means madness for two, double madness. It's when two people who are
close encourage each other to do something terrible, each one eggs the
other on. A couple committing murder, for instance.

Bonnie and Clyde, I said. The Moors Murderers.

She gave the dry little laugh that ends in coughing. Once that was over
she performed one of her sharp shifts of subject. She closes one drawer
in her mind and opens another. It's usually accompanied by a bright
smile.

He wanted to paint my portrait, she said.

Wanted to? He did paint it. It's hanging up at Molucca.

He said it in front of Gillda. We had all been to the pictures to see
Seven for a Secret and what do you think? the character Gillda was
playing actually called another woman little thing . She had even got
that from a film script. Alan was sitting between us and I turned to
look at him and he turned to look at me and we both burst out laughing.

We shouldn't have, should we? It was unkind and Gillda wasn't pleased.

And when we got home to my -house and they came in with me, Alan
suddenly said he'd like to paint my portrait. She turned viciously on
me. Marianne was there, all eyes and ears, of course. Gillda said some
awful things. Perhaps I deserved them what do you think, Genevieve?

Perhaps all women in our sitchuation deserve those things, I said.

She hadn't expected that answer. Did she think I was going to make
excuses for her and me? She pursed her lips and was quiet for a moment.
Then she said, Gillda said to him, Isn't she a bit old? as if I weren't
there, and, You once told me you only wanted to paint beauties. She was
being revenged for my laughter in the cinema and revenged on him for
his. He wasn't much of a painter, she said, he could manage puppy dogs
and pussy cats and women with beautiful faces but he hadn't the talent
to catch an ordinary middle-aged woman's likeness. Marianne, bless her,
piped up and said, I think my mother's beautiful, and Alan said he could
paint her, for if what Gillda said was true, to catch her likeness would
take no talent at all. Marianne loved that but Gillda didn't. She said
that whoever Alan had in mind to paint, he wasn't doing it in her
-house, and just to remind him it was her -house.

They went home after that, he and she, that was the pattern, that was
what always happened. Of course it did, she was his wife. When he did
paint me at last it was the following June, at Molucca, when the roses
were out. That's how I came to be holding a pink rose in my hand.

Painters these days don't expect a sitter to pose for them more than
once or twice. They use photographs. But Alan wanted a perfect likeness.
Besides, he never worked on the picture except when I was there. Stella
lifted up her hand and looked thoughtfully at it as if she held a
flower.

It was while I was sitting for him that the photograph you found was
taken. A couple came to the door to ask the way. They were lost. That
had never happened before, I don't think we'd ever had any callers
before. Alan told them how to get to Breckenhall and then he asked them
if they'd take our picture. I expect they thought we were quite mad. The
man stared at me in my pink silk dress and my pearls, but he took our
picture, the two of us out in the front garden, looking into each
other's eyes.

She sighed. Closing her eyes for a moment or two is sometimes the way
she indicates the subject is to change. How old were you when your
mother and father separated, Genevieve?

That took me by surprise. I was eight.

He left her?

She chucked him out, I said. He'd got someone else, a woman called Kath.
He'd promised to give her up but one night when he was late home again
and he'd been seeing her, Mum said it was the last straw and to go and
not come back.

She gave him the keys to the street, said Stella, and when I looked
mystified, It's what they used to say a long time ago. We'd say, show
him the door, or give him his marching orders. Was it late August?

Early September?

I believe it was, I said.

Ned's re-searcher had found no rehcord of Gillda Brent's death. I must
be a fool, I thought Ned would -search through the rehcords himself, but
of course he wouldn't, of course there must be other people to do that.

You didn't tell me the time of year, Ned said, so she looked through the
whole of 1970. She wasn't there. I thought we should do a proper job for
you and I got her to go through The Times obitchuaries too.

Her obitchuary would have been in the paper? I said.

Yes, why not? She was a well-known actress in her day. On the strength
of The Fiancee alone they'd do some sort of write-up. Only they didn't,
so she didn't.

Didn't what?

Didn't die in 1970. After all, I spoke to her agent in 1979. I don't
think she's dead at all. I've a feeling I'd know. I would have read
about it and it's not something I'd have forgotten. Maybe it's worth
investigating. It could make one of those unsolved mystery features.

You know the kind of thing what became of Gillda Brent? The Lady
Vanishes, something like that.

In the bedroom the air was a cold mist. Our mouths were warm but not our
hands. Our fingers felt each other like ice cubes run over the skin. It
wasn't the love-making of summer, the languor and the long slow
all-the-time-in-the-world, holding each other loosely because sweat
broke too easily. In a few minutes it was over, it had to be, so that we
could hug each other for warmth and watch our breath making white
streams of fog over one another's shoulders.

December, it was only December. I thought, I have to make up my mind
before Christmas and before Stella dies. Before the weather gets
unbearably cold. Before I lose this -house. No one could make it up for
me. Asking him was useless, he would only tell me not to think, that
thinking was fatal, but just to leave and come to him.

The tapes Stella had made she wiped clean. She told herself they were
useless for her purposes, mere self-indulgence, an excuse for saying
things she thought she would never say aloud. So much had been
suppressed. Over the years so much had been battened down. Telling it at
last was therapeutic. The effect was similar to talking to Genevieve but
with greater freedom and therefore greater relief.

At least it has helped, she said to the rehcorder, it has emptied those
things out of my mind, but the tapes are clean now and my words lost.

Or can they ever quite be lost? If you write something down and destroy
what you've written, cut it to pieces or burn it, and if you have no
copy, those words you wrote are gone for ever. But it isn't the same
with the spoken word, or so I have read. Sound is never lost, it isn't
absorbed by the ears which hear it, but flies on into space, perhaps
beyond the earth's atmosphere and out among the spheres. Once a word is
uttered it becomes indestructible and everlasting. My words are out
there, flying on and up, even maybe heard by mysterious beings on other
planets.

But all that is fantasy, something I have no time for now. I shall make
three more tapes. I shall shut myself up in here, making believe I'm
more feeble than I am, so that I have the chance to speak in peace.

The first one I shall play back to myself to test my voice as much as
anything, for in making the rest I shall need all the strength I have
remaining. I want to sound sane, a good witness, not an old woman
sinking into senility and derangement. I want my hearer to be convinced
of the truth that I tell, whatever she may decide to do with it.

It is Lady Macbeth who asks the powers or the spirits Genevieve would
know about that! asks the murdering ministers to unsex her, to come to
her woman's breasts and take her milk for gall. That made us giggle at
school which is very likely why I remember it. But it's what I want now
that I am near my death, to shed the meek, gentle womanliness that
everyone has ascribed to me all my life. Alan said I was the most
feminine creature he had ever known. Yet it was not a feminine thing I
did or helped to do, not a sweet, womanly thing. If I can't be masculine
I must be Lady Macbeth.

Here begins the first tape.

It was all a joke, wasn't it? Genevieve said. She wanted to believe that
and I am not in the business of disillusioning her while I'm still
alive. What happens later is another thing. I must take my chance on
that. She wanted to believe the Killing Gillda Tease was a game, as I
too wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe it very much and I did.

When we made jokes about poisons and greasing the stairs and a little
push over a cliff top, I made mental reservations. It was as if I
thought, it doesn't matter what we say to each other, he and I, so long
as I say to myself, it's all nonsense, he doesn't mean it, it's a game.

Yet, in spite of our illicit affair, we seemed to have kept a kind of
innocence that folie a deux was spoiling. I was aware of this but unable
to say so to him. Gillda and I went to the -seaside together one day,
only to Dunwich where the cliffs are hardly high, but high enough.

We walked a little way on the cliffs, it was a beautiful day, and the
thought came to me that I could push her over. It's hard to credit what
I actually thought, that I'd be able to go home to him and tell him I'd
killed his wife, he'd be so pleased with me, it would make him love me
more.

I didn't touch her, of course I didn't, but I told him what I'd thought.
I wanted to amuse him, to please him. He said, Why didn't you?

He'd been telling me of some poison he'd read about in the paper, how
well it would work. I might ask the same of you, I said. Why didn't you?

The pale cast of thought, he said. You know, that stuff that gets in the
way of resolution.

If you talk about something enough, if you get used to it, it can become
real. And for him it was real, he was serious about it. It wasn't a joke
to him. Or it was no longer a joke. When the overt joking had virtually
stopped, the real possibility had been growing in his mind. I understood
that, that was what frightened me, but it was still a shock when he
showed me Charmian's letter. I had forgotten its existence. A
psychologist would say I had suppressed the memory of it, I'd blocked it
off. Seeing the letter again frightened me, knowing he had actually kept
it as he had said he would. In the archives, as he had put it.

I'd forgotten what it said and I had to read those words again. The
first time they hadn't meant much to me but now when I read them they
seemed to me desperately pathetic and sad. Of course my memory has never
let me forget them again. I cannot live without you. I have tried but
the days are too long.

How about faking Gillda's suicide, Alan said, and making it look as if
she left this note for me?

It was absurd, of course. It would never have worked. The words were
typed. I suppose Charmian had typed them because her handwriting was
unreadable. The signature certainly was, a scrawl which might just as
well have been Gillda as Charmian. Except that Gillda didn't write like
that, her signature was quite legible, and she didn't own a typewriter.

Alan hadn't left her, she wasn't living without him. Oh, there were a
host of other objections but I need not go on. For that was not the
point to me, none of that was. All that mattered to me was that he had
reached a stage in the tease where he was serious. The joke was over and
this was the real thing.

Yet the temptation for me was to go on with the joke, to laugh it off.

The possibility that a man would think of killing his wife for my sake,
to be with me, was too much for me. It was too far removed from any
world I had ever known. Films and books were part of that world but not
the life I led in the place I lived in, a middle-aged widow living in a
suburb of a country town.

I didn't want to talk about it. I didn't want to go on as we were. I
don't know what I wanted well, for Gillda to die I suppose, to die a
natural, quick, painless death. Is there such a death?

I didn't want to talk but I had to, I made Alan talk about it, and then
I said it must never be discussed again, there must be no more jokes.

More than that, there must be no more serious intent. I thought I'd
convinced him. I thought I knew how I'd convinced him. It was by telling
him that talk of killing Gillda was changing him, corrupting him, making
him into a different man from the man I loved.

It was summer, the time of the portrait. The time those people came and
asked us the way, the people we had asked to take our picture.

After they had gone I went back to my chair and took up the pose again
with the rose in my hand. Alan started laughing.

He was rather sinister, didn't you think? The photographer from hell.

Did you notice his pointed eye-teeth? He means to drive her into the fen
and strangle her.

Don't, I said.

Oh, come on, darling. It's some strange woman I'm talking about, not
Gillda. Luckily for justice and the triumph of the law he's left his
fingerprints on your camera.

I dropped the rose. I got up and came close to him.

Will you like it, I said, if it isn't Gillda this kills but my love for
you? Because that's what will happen. It wasn't true, I thought then
that nothing could have done that, but I said it. I said it again. It
will change you. It will change you into someone else, the kind of
person who could kill his wife, who could really do that. And if that
happens I won't love you.

The look on his face was one I shall never forget. Better say at this
stage of my life that I never have forgotten it. He went pale. He looked
like a child who has lost something it dearly loves and is incapable of
understanding the explanation given for that loss. Richard looked like
that when his kitten was run over in the street outside our -house. It
is an expression of such bewilderment and helpless pain that it breaks
your heart.

After I'd played this back I played Genevieve's present to me, the
Boccherini lovely and so civilized, just what I needed. The music came
through on the tape, an exquisite contrast to what went before.

My own voice sounds surprisingly strong. The moments of hoarseness can't
be helped. This, as I said at the beginning, is the test tape. I shall
destroy what I have said in a minute but first, because the more I talk
of these things the easier it is psychologically easier, I mean, not
physically I have a few more things to say about that summer.

Something about the way the farmers were tearing out the hedges in those
days, uprooting ancient hedges and burning them. Because I'm not a keen
walker and I don't at all care for sitting in the open air, having a
picnic for example, many people have thought I am not interested in
nature. In fact, natural history has always been an interest of mine. It
was one of the many I shared with Alan, for we had a lot of tastes in
common, the same books, the same pictures, the same music, the same
attitchudes to life. We loved the wild flowers of the fen and of the
Suffolk coast. Both of us hoped to see a swallowtail one day. We hated
autumn and winter and loved the summer.

Niether of us ever walked if we could go in a car. We even liked the
same food and we hadn't known each other long when we found we both had
a fayvorit drink that had already by then gone out of fashion. It was a
pink gin, gin and angostura bitters. Does anyone drink that now?

Could you go into an hotel, for instance, and ask for a pink gin? And
would they know what you meant?

The games we played, that we both liked to play, they were innocent
games. Even Mister and Misses Darlint had a sort of simplicity about
them and a sweetness. The dressing-up was really for a rehearsal,
practising for an ideal, not to titillate tired appetites. We weren't
tired, our love was fresh, and every love-making like a young couple's
first excitement.

But I have wandered off the point and now I can't recall what the point
was. Perhaps there was no point, perhaps I was only talking for
practice. But I'm tired now, anyway, and have practised enough.

Tapes are better than life. You strip off the words and make them new
and afterwards it's just as it was before you said those things. You
don't have to live for twenty-four years with certain acts and words,
for you've wiped them away. They have flown away to the planets on
invisible waves.

Someone sent Gillda a card with Now you are Fifty on it, an unsigned
card. The picture on it was of an oldish smiling woman with waved silver
hair, holding a bunch of flowers. Stella, of course, had sent her a
card, the kind that makes no reference to the number of the birthday,
and she was surprised, almost shocked, when Gillda showed her the
unsigned one. She had expected her to conceal this landmark in her age
or to lie about it, to stay forty-nine for the next ten years. But
Gillda showed off the card, just as she showed off the two anonymous
letters that had come.

Printed words had been cut from a book, not a newspaper, and stuck on to
cheap notepaper. One said, Your husband has another woman', and the
other, Alan is in love with a woman who is well known to you'.

Stella wondered why they were shown to her, why she and Priscilla and
Jeremy and even Marianne were shown that birthday card and those crude
letters, why they were flaunted.

Stella began to look suspiciously at those she thought she could trust,
at her neighbours, at Aagot, the new au pair. Then, when interest in the
letters seemed to have died down, Gillda confessed to Alan that she had
sent them herself. She had bought the card, the ugliest and most vulgar
she could find, and she had composed the letters herself, cutting the
words from one of the Figaro and Velvet books Alan had illustrated. The
book was taken down from the shelf and she showed him the mutilated
pages.

Because it was a children's story, the range of words available to
Gillda was limited. He told Stella that she boasted of her
resourcefulness, she was very proud of finding husband and woman', words
that occur rarely in children's books. Why then had she chosen that
particular book? Because Alan was on one of the early pages where the
illustrator was named. And perhaps too because he valued it and spoiling
it would hurt him.

Of course he asked why had she done it. Why send letters to yourself?

What was the point?

It was a way of telling myself the truth, she said.

I remember now, he said to Stella. It came in one of her films.

It's the classic domestic-thriller sitchuation. A woman she played was
receiving anonymous letters, only they were sent by an enemy. He
laughed. I've always said Gillda's her own worst enemy.

Stella couldn't laugh. Any hint of madness affected her, as it does most
people, with fear. Alan, as always, joked about it.

That book was a first edition, he said. I told her to use Country Life
next time.

But Gillda's own cryptic reply stuck in Stella's mind. It was a way of
telling herself the truth. And Stella began to understand. Gillda lived
in a world of role-playing, of so much acting and pretence, that it was
not enough for her to know the truth, the reality, she had to see it
written down. But even the writing down, the black-and-white of it, had
to be a fake, had to come out of second-rate cinema. Because that was
the only truth she knew?

Gillda still dressed well in the old glamorous clothes, the dramatic
film-star dresses. The blonde hair was dyed now but it was still long
and thick. The figgere remained slender, if by now more string-like than
willowy. When she told Stella that Alan had become indifferent to her,
that they no longer made love, she struck a pose under the painting,
leaning backwards, her head flung back, her long hair streaming, her
breasts thrust upwards and her arms hanging.

He'll never leave me, she said. He can't. The -house is mine and so is
most of our income. He really hasn't got a bean.

She said it dramatically and, bouncing forwards, threw out her hands.

She leaned towards Stella in the confiding way she had, her head on one
side, her neck stretched out. Her large blue eyes bored holes in
Stella's face.

Any fool who took up with him would have to be rich. But no one like
that would look at him, what do you think?

Stella wanted to defend him, to say that any woman would want him, but
she dared not. When her opinion was asked or she was directly questioned
she always felt that Gillda already knew and that she was testing her,
interrogating her, laying traps. The woman you know of the letter was
herself and Gillda was waiting for her to admit it.

Sometimes, in frank detail, she would describe to Stella the methods she
considered using to get Alan back'. What did Stella think? And then she
would fling herself down on the battered settee opposite Stella and
inquire of some invisible non-existent third person what was the point
of asking advice of someone so sheltered and innocent.

Yet always Stella waited for the direct challenge and tried to prepare
herself.

It's you, isn't it?

The greatest surprise was when Gillda revealed that it wasn't Stella
but, of all women, Priscilla that she suspected.

When he was coming to me or to Molucca, she thought he was visiting
Priscilla. She and Jeremy lived near Ixworth. It couldn't be me because
in her estimation I was too old. Priscilla was only in her late
thirties.

Gillda judged people like that. Men wanted women because they were young
or beautiful or both. Women looked for husbands who were rich and lovers
who were good in bed'. She wasn't young any more, though she admitted no
loss of beauty, but she told Stella she was confident Alan would stay
with her because she held the purse strings'.

One day in the spring Gillda invited herself to lunch. She knew
Priscilla and Jeremy were coming with their children and John and Madge
Browning. I was happy because Alan would come too. I can't remember what
the occasion was, perhaps just Easter Saturday, perhaps Richard's
birthday, though I would have had a children's party for that. Aagot
cooked the lunch, she was an excellent cook, and after that, much later
when we were having tea, Gillda made a terrible scene.

She had been staring at Priscilla throughout lunch and afterwards. In
her innocence, Stella had -seated Priscilla next to Alan with Gillda
opposite and Gillda kept her eyes fixed on Priscilla, leaving her food
untouched. She had some sort of anorexia, if you can be anorexic at
fifty. Nobody knew about it then, it was just losing your appetite
because you were worried or ill. Stella thought Gillda was starving
herself to stay thin and in fact she had got thinner and thinner, you
could see the lines of her ribcage through her clothes. She always wore
very tight clothes and that Easter she was in a bright green silk dress,
very short, with a wide black belt cinching in the waist. Her beautiful
strained face was brightly painted and her gold hair was
shoulder-length.

She hardly spoke. The terrible thing was, Stella said, that no one
seemed to notice. She alone noticed, perhaps because she was so alive to
everything Gillda said and did at this time, but the others were happy
to talk among themselves and possibly they were glad of Gillda's
silence. After all, Gillda had become a great bore, she could only talk
of the world of film in the forties and fifties, what this actor said to
that actor, and the famous people she'd known -most of them
half-forgotten by then and of her own triumphs and, worse, the way she
had been misunderstood, passed over and victimized. Probably she had
always talked like that but people put up with it, were even happy to
listen to it, when Gillda was young. _

It was about four in the afternoon when Gillda broke her silence and
broke her staring. Marianne and Priscilla's daughter Sarah had made tea
and brought it in with a simnel cake. Gillda shook her head at the cake
as if it really did contain the poison Alan used to joke about giving
her. She waited till Priscilla had put a small square of cake with
marzipan into her mouth and then she said, Tell me where you and my
husband have been meeting.

The extraordinary thing was, Stella said, that she recognized the line.

She and Gillda had been to Sudbury a few days before to see The Skies
Above Us. Gillda was playing the wife of an Air Force bomber pilot who
suspected her young sister-in-law with justification of being in love
with her husband, and when she confronted her those were the very words
she used. Because of that, for a moment, Stella thought it must be a
game. She thought Gillda was quoting from the film in order to start
talking about the film.

Priscilla knew nothing about film. She never went to the cinema.

What? she said.

Gillda said it again, just as she did in the film. Patricia Roc, who's
the sister-in-law, breaks down and confesses everything, promises never
to see the pilot again and in the end everyone is made happy by the
wife, the Gillda character, getting killed in an air raid.

But Priscilla wasn't going to conform to any of that. She said very
quietly to Gillda that she simply didn't understand. Gillda replied by
more quotations from the film, a whole speech of accusations. Then she
came back to reality, to real people or what she thought was real. She
knew Alan and Priscilla were lovers and had been for years and she
wanted it to end. But Jeremy should know the truth and Priscilla's
children know what their mother was. It was time too that Stella's eyes
were open to reality and she understood the kind of people she had
invited to her -house. Priscilla and Jeremy could do as they pleased,
but for her part she would forgive Alan and take him back if the affair
stopped now.

Priscilla behaved with great dignity. She apologized to Stella, she was
sorry this had happened to spoil the day, she would phone her next day.
She said to Jeremy, We'll go now, and to the children, Get your coats.
Don't argue, please. We're leaving.

Alan had said nothing throughout all this. Stella had said nothing.

When they spoke of it afterwards to each other they agreed that there
was nothing they could have said. Alan, of course, could have denied it.
There was no truth in that particular accusation, but no denying that he
was constantly and consistently unfaithful to Gillda. It was just that
Gillda had got the wrong woman. And for that reason, because Stella was
the right woman, she too had felt unable to speak in anyone's defence.

When Jeremy and Priscilla had gone Gillda began to scream. It was the
scene at Saint Michael's Farm about the child she couldn't have all over
again. She threw and smashed two ornaments of Stella's, she lay on the
floor. You are supposed to slap people's faces in these circumstances
but no one slapped Gillda's. Marianne stared, appalled, then went away
upstairs. Only Richard seemed unaffected. He continued to read the book
Madge Browning had brought him, sitting on the floor in a far corner of
the room.

But all that came later, after months of Gillda constantly raising with
Stella the possibility of Alan's infidelity. Stella tried had been
trying for years to see less of her. For one thing she felt guilty about
taking the role of friend while she was having a love affair with
Gillda's husband. For another, she had begun deeply to dislike Gillda.

You could leave her, she said to Alan. We could sell this -house and go
and live with Richard in my -house. We could live on my money. It would
be ours, yours and mine.

Oh, she hated talking about money but she did to Alan. She had to. She
held out Richard as an indjucement because she knew Alan loved him. He
loved children. Wasn't he an illustrator of books for children?

You should have let me kill her, he said.

It was said so well, so laconically, Genevieve, Stella said. Just as
someone else might say, you should have let me oh, I don't know, close
the door, make a phone call. I couldn't be angry. I couldn't help
laughing.

Did you ever think of just stopping seeing Gillda? Cutting yourself off
from her?

I did try. Even if I'd stopped being friends with her I'd still have
seen Alan. Our relationship no longer depended on chance meetings, they
were just a bonus. But Genevieve, you're the person you are, aren't you,
you can't change yourself radically no matter how you want to. It wasn't
in me to tell someone who'd been my friend I didn't want to see her
again, tell her to go, break off with her. I can't be rude sometimes
I've wished I could. And then I was the well, the guilty party, wasn't
I? Being rude to her, breaking with her, would have seemed like adding
insult to injury. Can you understand that?

They lived twenty miles apart but Gillda was always dropping in'. She
often seemed to come at the time Richard arrived home from school.

Stella wondered if she purposely came at that time. Sometimes she was
terrified. She fancied she saw her staring at Richard. Gillda had long
ago given up saying she wanted a child of her own. Now she said she
didn't like children. She had always been subject to mood swings and her
present mood or her pose was that she disliked children, children were a
newsance. A drag, she called them. She often said she was in sympathy
with Herod who killed all the little boys in Bethlehem. And then she
would smile as if a smile and a pat on Richard's shoulder made things
all right.

Going out to tea in some country hotel had become a fayvorit thing to
do, or finding some cinema where one of her own films was showing.

She'd go into the cinema very self-consciously, smiling and nodding to
the woman selling tickets and the usherettes. She was like a celebrity
at an airport, certain everyone would recognize her, and that
embarrassed Stella because she was sure no one did.

Richard had of necessity to be left behind. You can leave him with the
au pair, Gillda said, as if he wasn't there. She always pretended not to
be able to pronounce Aagot's name. You need a break from that child.

And then she would stare at Richard, the way a child stares at another
child before making a terrible face, curling up its nose and sticking
out its tongue. Gillda didn't make the face, she just looked as if she
was going to. Stella always hugged Richard when Gillda spoke about him
unkindly. She'd take him out of the room to Aagot and then come back and
ask Gillda not to talk in that way. It took the summoning up of courage
to speak like that to Gillda and the suppression of all those guilt
feelings. For what right had she to reproach Gillda for anything?

She had taken Gillda's husband from her, and worse, had made a game with
him of killing her, talking about her in the worst possible terms behind
her back, furthering her husband's disloyalty.

Richard was such a mother's boy, Gillda said. He needed a father,
someone to take him to cricket matches and show him how to kick a ball.

It was always these cliche ways of being a father that Gillda seized on;
mothers were for hugging and kissing, fathers were for outdoor sports.
She smiled at Stella in a particular way she had. It was as if she'd
learned at acting school that this was what you did when you wanted to
seem rueful and pitying, put your head on one side, lifted your
shoulders, raised your eyebrows and smiled. She'd done it several times
in Lora Cartwright. It was a pity, she said, that Stella was unlikely to
marry again. A pity for her and for Richard.

That was more than even Stella could stand and she asked Gillda what she
meant.

Oh, you know what I mean, little thing, Gillda said. He may need a
father but a man would only take on a teenage girl and a little boy if
he were madly in love, and that's not likely, is it?

At my age, do you mean?

That among other things. I know you don't care how you look or I
wouldn't say it, but you've never laid claims to much in the beauty
department, have you?

Short of telling her they were no longer friends, she didn't want to
know her, there was nothing Stella could have done. I would have said
those things, and Mum would have said a good deal more, but Stella
couldn't. She took the coward's way, pretending illnesses, previous
engagements that didn't exist. Once she even pretended to be out when
Gillda called, ashamed of herself because she had to make Richard
pretend too, hide with her upstairs in a bedroom. She said she crouched
on the floor and covered up her ears so that she couldn't hear Aagot
telling lies to Gillda at the front door.

Were you still playing the game? I said.

The game?

Killing Gillda, I said. Did you still talk about that, pretend about
that?

Oh, that, she said. It mystifies me that policemen and lawyers think
they need a machine to find if a person is telling the truth. The face
itself and the tone of voice are lie-detectors. That was all over. It
was only a joke, Genevieve, and never a very funny one.

She had never talked to me for so long. She wanted to go on but I
wouldn't let her. I fetched her blanket and covered her up. Her hands
were cold so I rubbed them between mine before tucking them under the
cover.

Philippa and Steve had been out for a meal on their wedding anniversary
so she had had to choose between rehcording -seaforth and Postcards From
the Edge. I did the one she didn't, which was how I came to take the
video of the third episode of -seaforth round to her at eight.

Steve had gone down to the pub. She had the TV on, she always has the TV
on, and was watching Peter OToole in Stunt Man while she wrote her
Christmas cards. I hadn't even thought about Christmas cards, I hadn't
done any Christmas shopping. Mike was doing a job in Yorksher the
following week, he'd be away for four nights, so he'd said he'd be
giving any Christmas parties and family gatherings that might be going a
miss and he'd work on the conservatory right through the holiday.

Be thankful, said Philippa, he's got something to keep him occupied.

Keep him out of mischief, you mean?

You said it, not me. Don't suppose he gets into mischief, does he?

I don't know, I said, and I don't care. I'm leaving him.

She actually turned off the telly. I told her about Ned then. I told her
how he'd wanted me to go away with him from the first and how for a long
time I'd refused. She listened, she nodded, but I could read it in her
look, her eyes: fancy a man like that wanting someone like you.

Well, she could understand the wanting, but not the wanting for ever. I
knew it, I'd wondered too, but I'd come to accept it as one of life's
marvels, helped by the love philtre and the ferns in his shoe.

When are you going to tell Mike?

Next week, I said. When he gets back from Yorksher. You can keep it dark
till then.

You bet, she said. There's one of your Gillda Brent's films on tomorrow,
two p.m. you'll be at work, so d'you want me to video it for you? The
Skies Above Us, 1945, black-and-white and dead boring, frankly.

Mike was doing the glazing when I got back. He stopped for five minutes
and gave me a lecture on thermostatic bars. They're window catches
filled up with oil which make the windows open automatically when the
sun shines and heats the oil so that it expands. The floor -tiles would
be coming next week, special ceramic jobs from Italy in ecru and ivory
and black. He won't be here so he'd like me to arrange to be at home and
take the delivery in. I said all right, because it was easier than an
argument, and I

didn't want him to say that again, about him doing it all for me so the
least I could do was open the door to the -tile man.

Ladybirds are lucky creatures and this winter lots of them have taken
refuge indoors. Do they find places to sleep in till spring? I don't
know but I'm careful not to harm them. Mum told me she only had Nick
because of harming a ladybird. Of course she wouldn't be without him now
and she was thrilled to have a boy after us girls but it was a blow to
her at the time. She trod on this ladybird by accident and instead of
burying it, stamping on the grave three times and reciting Ladybird,
ladybird, fly away home, she just sucked it up in the Hoover and that
same night she fell for Nick.

I found twelve ladybirds in my bathroom that morning and another five in
Stella's. The trouble is you don't know what to do for the best in the
wintertime. Still, there was no frost on the ground, so I took the five
ladybirds tenderly in my hands and put them out of Stella's window into
a dry cosy spot under the scimmia bush. There's a poem my nan used to
say that I've remembered all my life, more than I can say for the ones
we did at school.

This lady-fly I take from off the grass, Whose spotted back might
scarlet-red surpass. Fly, Lady-bird, north, south, or east or west, Fly
where the man is found that I love best. He leaves my hand, see to the
west he's flown, To call my true love from the faithless town.

That made Stella laugh. It was the laughter of pleshere, not at
something funny. How clever you are, Genevieve! Where does that come
from?

My nan, I said. I didn't know more than that. I was thinking about the
man I love and how he was my true love that I'd call from the faithless
town, whatever that may mean. Maybe one of the ladybirds I'd saved would
fly up to Norwich and find him.

Stella was still in bed and wanted to stay there, but Lena had said she
had to get up. She could have a lie-in but staying in bed wasn't good
for her and anyway Marianne had phoned to say she'd be along in the
afternoon.

No reason why you shouldn't stay there till just before your lunch, I
said.

The pain is beginning, she said. Do you know, I've not really had any
pain till now.

What could I say? I sat on the bed and took her hand. Her grip was still
strong but she'd cut and filed down her once-sharp nails. She looked
into my face the way she's begun to do, very -searchingly as if she's
testing me, even as if she wonders about trusting me.

Genevieve, have you still got the key to my -house?

It's funny how you feel yourself blush. When I was a kid and we used to
have coal fires I'd put my face close to the flames and feel the heat on
my skin. Blushing is just the same feeling, a flame heating the skin.
She was looking at me, watching my face get red, I expect. I nodded. I
thought she'd ask for the key back.

That's all right, she said. You hold on to it. As long as I know where
it is.

I knew then that I had to tell her. It was inside me, the guilt of it,
swelling up and bursting to get out. For an instant I was a child again,
back at school, owning up. I'm sorry, Miss., it was me, I did it. I took
a breath.

Stella, I've been going to your -house. To Molucca. I mean, me and Ned
have. We've been meeting there. I should have asked you, I know that, I
honestly don't know now why I didn't. Well, I do know. I thought you'd
say no.

You've been going to my -house?

We had to have somewhere to meet. I'm sorry, Stella, I should have asked
you.

She smiled. Her hand gave mine a squeeze. I'm glad.

You're glad?

I like to think of happy lovers being there. We were very happy when we
were there, Alan and I. There was only one occasion when we were there
and we weren't oh, tremendously happy.

I felt a chill. That's always the way I react to an omen. But once you
weren't?

Once we weren't. The last time. You must have been very cold there.

I told her about the oil heaters. I told her how I'd cleaned the place
and put flowers everywhere.

I was going to have central heating put in. But it would have meant
builders and a lot more people knowing the -house was mine. It was still
a secret place, you see. But I think I would have had it done that
autumn. She hung her head.

She does that more and more often now. The autumn after the summer I was
telling you about. Only time stopped and we never got there.

You must have got there, you're here now.

Stella gave her thin ghostly laugh. Barely. But I must hang on for a
while longer. She laid her head back on the pillow. She spoke softly. Do
you believe you can fight death?

For a while, I reckon, I said. Not for ever.

No, certainly not for ever. But you with your strange beliefs, I fancied
you might have ideas about keeping death at bay. She smiled at me. Never
mind. Do you remember the day we saw the dalmatian and you said to make
a wish?

Of course I remembered. Mine's coming true now, I said. How about yours?

Genevieve, you said we must have got to the autumn well, we did, but not
together. After Priscilla there was one woman after another that Gillda
suspected, all their friends and neighbours not that they had many. She
talked to me incessantly about the evidence she had against Alan, all
those absurd things like lipstick on his handkerchiefs and blonde hairs
on his jackets. It was all made up or at any rate it was all in her
head.

Why not you? I said.

'[ was too old, just as I was too old to have my portrait painted. She
said as much. Oh, much later when she confronted us. Why her? she said.
Why not some young girl? Men loved young girls, you see, men only loved
beauties. That was the world she lived in, you see, the world of ... B
movies? I said.

She smiled. If you like. It went on all summer, Gillda talking about
Alan's women. She turned him into a monster, much as I had turned Rex
into one. Yet I've never known how much she really believed herself, if
it wasn't just another scene in the dramatic scenario she had to make
for herself. Instead of a life, Genevieve. Instead of a life. I
sometimes thought she'd divided her existence into these phases, youth
that was glamorous and exciting, marriage to the man who was madly in
love with her, now middle age when he strayed and she fought to get him
back. It was as if she was saying, this is woman's lot and I have to act
it out.

The part of the wronged wife she'd played that in so many films, the
words came naturally to her. I don't think she knew where it came from
when she said she had given him the best years of her life and he'd cast
her away like an old shoe. She just said it because that is what wronged
wives say in bad films, so therefore it was what she had to say.

When she followed him in her car, she was only doing what the woman did
in The Wife's Story. She even told him about it, she boasted to him
about it, how she'd followed him to Norwich and gone into a coffee bar
to wait for him. She'd sat at a table by herself, she said, and everyone
had been staring at her. Someone came up and asked for her autograph.
She was distraught with grief, hardly knew what she was doing, and she
told the autograph hunter she was going to kill herself.

Alan asked her if she realized she'd just described the climax of The
Wife's Story to him but that made her start screaming and overturning
the furnitchure. That was something she just couldn't take, having her
acting exposed for what it was. Poor thing, poor Gillda.

I think I must have been looking at Stella in amazement, or at any rate
in a very bewildered way. At last I said, I don't really understand why
he didn't leave her. What was there to stop him just leaving her?

But he did leave her, Stella said. He did in the end.

He left her and came to you?

Oh, yes.

Why didn't you say so before?

I don't know. I meant to. He left her for me. But that's the end of the
story, Genevieve. I mean, that's the end if you like.

A happy ending, I said, though that wasn't the way it felt.

Why not happy? You know what I wished when we saw the dalmatian? I
wished for a happy ending.

It's always clear when she intends to say no more. She cuts things off,
terminates talk, calls a stop. She reached for her tape rehcorder and
put in a cassette. She smiled, taking hold of my arm to stop me getting
up.

Maybe I can get to like classical music the way she does. I educate
myself with my dictionary and I try to learn new things all the time for
Ned's sake. I'm trying to learn to read good books, appreciate art, so
why not symphonies and operas too? A thin tinkly tchune filled the air,
unfamiliar, difficult stuff if you're used to country and western. I
listened for a while, making an effort to understand. Then I gently
removed Stella's hand, gave her a kiss and went off to see to Gracie.

When I next came along Stella's corridor a good many hours had passed
and it was already dusk. No light showed under her door. Perhaps she was
asleep. Then I heard her voice, low, conversational, yet a steady
monologue. Unlike so many of them here, I'm not a listener at keyholes
so I only paused momentarily. Something cautioned me not to open the
door or even knock.

But when I asked Stanley, who was in the hall ready to take the dogs
out, if Stella had a visitor he shook his head. A Misses Browning had
come in to see her but was gone by twelve.

Stella, alone, had been talking to herself.

Philippa had dropped the video of The Skies Above Us through my letter
box.

The bath was full of ladybirds. I wondered what it meant and phoned Mum
to ask but Len answered and said she'd gone round to Nan's, so I picked
all the ladybirds up in a silk scarf, put them in the flower bed and
covered them with fallen yellow oak leaves.

Then I made myself a cup of tea and watched The Skies Above Us, another
one of those dramas about the Royal Air Force, the Battle of Britain and
women waiting at home for missing Spitfire pilots. Gillda Brent, who was
one of the waiting wives, looked more like Joan Crawford than I'd ever
seen her and her clothes were pure Hollywood, tailored suits and fox
furs with little faces and tails, veiled hats and stilt heels for a
bunch of women who were supposed to be dressing on clothing coupons.

It was uncanny hearing her say those things Stella told me the real
woman had said: I've given him the best years of my life, and, Why her?
Why not some young girl? About ten minutes before the end she asked the
flight lef-tennant's wife, who was played by Glynis Johns, Do you think
you can take him away from me?

But she had. Finally she had. And Gillda had run away and disappeared
from their lives. All those ideas for killing her were over, they had
never been real, anyway. Not really real. They had i: never meant them.

Stella and Alan had lived together in the -house called Molucca and
Richard had lived with them and learned to think of Alan as his father.

They kept a bedroom for Marianne when she came home ,! for the holidays.
Gillda had left Alan her car when she went away and he and Stella had
kept it. They only needed one car, so they sold theirs and kept
Gillda's. They were happy.

I expect you know about the theory of the parallel universe? Ned told me
about it once. It's about what might have been or what might have
happened if you'd taken a different road to the one you took. That
alternative is going along at the same time but in different space from
what's happening in your life. For instance, there's one universe with
me in it living with Mike all our long lives and another, the real one,
for me and Ned. That's how it must have been for Stella and Alan, and
their real universe hadn't been the one I've imagined, but an ugly
parallel of chaos and destruction and a living unhappily ever after.

i8

All I know of making statements to the police is what I have read in
detective stories, but I doubt if I could make a statement without
someone there to question and prompt me. So I'm going to talk until I
have said it all or until I'm too tired to go on. Whichever is the
sooner, as Alan used to say.

There is a purpose in all this. Its purpose is to tell what happened to
Gillda Brent, who was also Gwendoline Brant and then Gwendoline Tyzark.
I shall soon die but I don't want to die and leave her alive, or at
least officially alive, which as far as others are concerned amounts to
the same thing. For no one is really dead unless death is rehcorded,
registered, rubber-stamped as we used to say computer data'd now, I
suppose. So Gillda is not dead and will never die, will have eternal
life, unless I or Alan speak, and Alan is dead.

I rehearsed those last few sentences. Well, as a matter of fact, I wrote
them down and read them aloud. I shall not do that any more but just
talk as the words come.

In the summer following their father's death, both my children spent a
fortnight's holiday with my next-door neighbours Madge and John Browning
and their two sons in a cottage they took in south Cornwall.

It was the first time Richard had ever been anywhere without me but he
enjoyed himself with his friends from next door, who went to the same
school as he did. He wanted to go again when the Brownings took the
cottage in 1970 and was very happy to be invited. I was very happy too
no, I don't quite mean that. I wasn't happy to be separated from him,
I'd have done nothing to encourage him to go if he hadn't wanted to, I
wouldn't have thought twice about it. But he did want to go, he was
longing to go, and this meant I'd have two weeks with Alan, something
wonderful and unprecedented, for Gillda was also going away at almost
exactly the same time. She was visiting her friend in the South of
France as she did most years, though not usually in the height of
summer. Marianne, at seventeen, no longer wanted to spend her holidays
with me, that was only natural, and though she'd been invited wasn't
much inclined for a holiday in Cornwall with two middle-aged people and
three little boys for company.

It was August. Marianne went off with three girlfriends to the Costa
Brava and Mallorca on August the 2Oth. They were to be away for three
weeks and though this worried me a little, I thought I could trust
Marianne to be sensible; she was quite mature for her age in some ways.

And of course she came to no harm, she had a marvelous time, it was her
mother who came to harm. On August the 25th, the Brownings came and
fetched Richard to take him with them to Cornwall. You see how I
remember these dates as if I had written them down and memorized them.

But they were never written down.

Gillda went away, or said she was going away perhaps I shouldn't have
said that, but still, why not? I'm not in the business of creating
suspense, I'm only telling a story that is grim enough without suspense.
She went away on August the 28th, she left Saint Michael's Farm in her
car, a red Ford Anglia, the model that was made in the early sixties I
think, with a bonnet like a wide down-turned mouth full of teeth, a grin
like a piranha's. I always saw it like that. Perhaps I saw it like that
because it was her car, I don't know.

The next day Alan and I went to Molucca. We went there to be together
for the rest of our lives, though I didn't know it then.

We had been planning it for weeks. It was our main topic of
conversation, the thing to drive away talk of killing Gillda. It was our
new game, what we would do, what we would eat, which days we would go to
the -seaside and which we'd stay up all night and stay in bed all next
day. The Killing Gillda game was over, the complicated insane methods we
thought of and in which we collaborated to dispose of her, all these
stopped and instead we played -house again. I suppose you could say we
played at honeymoons.

Most pairs of lovers in those circumstances would go away to a hotel in
a holiday resort somewhere or go to Paris. I couldn't have afforded that
I had my children's education to think of I couldn't have afforded it
for both of us and he couldn't pay his share. He'd reached a point when
he only had the income he made from selling landscapes in pubs at ten
pounds a time and drawing cat pictures for birthday cards. But apart
from that we both wanted to go to Molucca. It was the place where we had
always met, the only place for the past six years, it was the scene for
our being married game. All the things the two of us had collected
together were there, our books, our rehcords, our pictures. We kept
clothes there. The crockery and cutlery, the linen, were ours, bought
together, bought specially for us for that -house. We'd cooked our
fayvorit food in the kitchen and the utensils we'd used were all there.
Our fayvorit drink was in the sideboard, gin and angostura, and our
fayvorit white burgundy in the wine rack. You see, when we were together
we never made do with the second-rate. We ate and drank the things we
liked best, we did only the things we liked best, we were complete
hedonists.

The one thing we'd never done was spend a night together. Ridiculous,
wasn't it? We'd been lovers for ten years and we'd never slept side by
side for a whole night in the same bed. I longed for that and so did he.
The previous year, with my children both away, we'd often met at
Molucca, but Gillda was at home, watchful, checking on his movements,
already suspicious. There was no question of his staying away overnight.

When you're in love you want to see the person you love in every
possible circumstance, in all possible sitchuations, performing every
action it's possible for a human being to perform, to see him when he's
aware of you and when he's unaware. I'd seen Alan asleep but never by
night, never in the darkness of the night, never seen a dream make him
smile or an anxiety make his eyelids tremble. I'd never seen him wake up
in the morning. I didn't know if he was a hard or an easy waker, if he
lay there slowly surfacing or if he jumped out of bed, as alert first
thing in the morning as at midday.

We meant to spend all those nights together, ten of them if we were
lucky. Part of the game was talking about those nights, how we would
start the early evening with the right sort of dinner and the right sort
of drinks. We planned what I'd wear and even the things we'd say.

We knew that Gillda wouldn't be back till the end of the second week of
September, nor would Marianne, and Richard wasn't expected till
September the 8th, two days before his school term began. How I remember
those dates! I could have made a statement to the police after all. Even
Aagot had gone away. Not home to Norway but to be with her boyfriend who
was at Durham University and had a holiday job in Newcastle. I even lent
her my car to go in. It wasn't entirely altruism. She couldn't have gone
without free transport and free petrol.

As it happened Alan and I never did have our ten nights together, not
one night together. For we didn't even have one. We never did. We never
came to sleep side by side in the same bed for a whole night.

That's not to say we didn't pass a night together, we did, two long
nights together, the longest I've ever known. Well, that is what I am
going to talk about.

Whichever is the sooner turns out to be my voice. You can hear how
hoarse I've become. I will do some more tomorrow.

Alan came down from Tivetshall Saint Michael to fetch me in his car, the
old grey Rover that he'd had ever since I'd first known him. It was
eleven in the morning, August the 29th, and very hot. We'd planned to go
straight to Molucca and have our lunch there, then out for a drive to
the coast perhaps. We were going to have dinner out, in some nice hotel,
a romantic dinner in a lovely place, because after that was going to be
our first night together. I believe he'd done a lot of work he didn't
care to do to be able to afford that dinner.

You'll think it absurd the way I was dressed. But people's clothes were
more formal in those days, and I well, I think I was a lot more formal
than some others. I suppose I still dressed in much the same way as I
had in the fifties. Those were the styles that suited me, dresses with
tight bodices and tiny waists with wide belts and full skirts,
stockings, high-heeled shoes. I didn't possess a pair of trousers. I
never wore sweaters or cardigans.

When Alan came to fetch me I was wearing a cream-coloured cotton dress
printed with pink and blue flowers, high-heeled cream patent shoes, a
diamond watch, pearl earrings. The dress was very low-cut and
off-the-shoulder and I wore a double-strand pearl necklace. My hair was
turned under in a short pageboy, back-combed and lacquered. A woman
wouldn't dress up as much as that to go to a dinner party these days,
would she? Marianne goes out to dinner in jeans and an Indian shirt.

I don't know why I've talked about the clothes I was wearing, it seems
irrelevant, but it wasn't, not really. If it were possible to make
things worse, the way I was dressed made things worse. I didn't have any
more well, suitable, I suppose that's the word suitable clothes at
Molucca, just more dresses and more court shoes and the kind of raincoat
that's more for show than it's waterproof, a shot-silk thing, silver and
blue, you may even have found it there in the wardrobe. Are you
surprised that I remember all these details, that I remember everything?

It was very hot. We had all the car windows open but there was no wind,
not the least breeze. The farmers were taking advantage of the stillness
to burn off the fields. There was always a risk unless you were very
careful of setting hedges alight but that risk was much increased in
windy weather. A day like this one was a godsend to them.

A pall of smoke hung over the horizon, a thick pale grey that quite
obscured the blue of the sky, and into this greyness spires of darker
smoke rose as from chimneys on winter nights.

The idea was to kill weeds, I believe, rather than plou them in.

Plouing took place after the burning. I suppose there must have been
fields where the farmer or one of his men remained behind to watch the
pro-gress of their fire, but I never saw any. I only saw the flames
running through the lanes between the stubble, the whole field alight
and the smoke pouring off it in black clouds, untended, unwatched,
filling the air with a stifling, choking darkness. Scraps of charred
stalk danced in it like swarms of flies. We closed all the windows. I
already had black on my hands, powdery yet greasy fragments that smelt
like dead matches.

We stopped once to buy food and he bought a bottle of champagne. I don't
think we saw a soul apart from the shop man on that drive up over the
Waveney to Curton. We followed one car for a while and met two.

The countryside up here was very remote twenty-five years ago.

Unspoilt, they called it. Suffolk was the second least spoilt county of
England, and that must have gone for the borders of Norfolk too. But
you'll know that, you'll have heard it from your mother and grandmother.
There were places where you could drive for twenty miles, look across
empty fields and woods, see perhaps three farm-houses and half a dozen
cottages in all that distance. The Breckland was still a wild, strange
place and the fens still lonely and silent.

The rolling smoke was behind us when we reached Molucca. The sky was
blue over the fen behind the -house and we could breathe the air without
inhaling charred remains of barley. It was utterly quiet. Birds only
sing at dawn and before they go to roost, not at midday. We could be in
that -house for hours without a single car passing along the road beyond
the long grassy space.

Once inside, would you have expected us to go straight to bed? We were
past that stage, though we might have done if, like the previous August,
we had only the daytime. But we thought we had ten nights. No, by then
we thought we had a lifetime, because as we entered the -house Alan said
to me, This isn't a holiday, sweetheart. This is for ever. I'm never
going back. I've left her.

He took me in his arms and kissed me. I kissed him and hugged him and we
danced.

The years between then and now began on September the 1st There was
August the 2pth and the next day and the night that followed and the
next day, and then twenty-four years. I don't suppose I saw it like that
at the time but that's how I see it now. At the end of those years.

These days they would call what I had a clinical depression, a term I've
learned from Richard. I would have treatment, drugs, therapy,
counselling. Then, I had nothing. I drifted through grey days, from
which all the light had gone.

I am not asking for pity. Whom anyway could I ask it of? No one will
listen to this. And I deserve no pity, though Alan does. I

had my children. He had no one. His predicament was terrible but I could
do nothing to relieve it. The thought of him, his name, memories of him,
paralysed me. Even if I'd wanted to and of course I wanted to I could
not physically have lifted the phone or dialled his number. I did write
to him. The letters were never sent. How do I know that the same was
true of him? That he too wanted to phone and tried to write?

I know it, that's all.

Because this wasn't one of Gillda's films, we hadn't broken off
immediately and dramatically. Gillda said I knew nothing of life but I
know it isn't like that. We met the day before Richard came back, not at
Molucca but at an hotel, a place where we had sometimes been to eat.

We sat in the bar, not drinking our familiar fayvorit but he whisky and
I some vermouth mixture. It was as if we each set out to do things
differently from the past.

Events hung between us but they could not be talked of, we had each
silently acknowledged that. How strange that there should be nothing
else to say. We who had had so much to say, so much in common that we
talked all the time we were together, had nothing to say. There are
couples who can be together in companionable silence but we had never
been among them. The silence that descended on us was not companionable.
It was nothing, a blank, that as it lasted filled with a kind of panic.
Because we scorned small talk, or rather had kept it for others, knowing
it was not for us, we rejected it now.

It was not that we wanted to talk of her or what had happened, but that
what had happened had driven away everything else. Some people boast of
living in the present, but if you try it you will find it's not
possible. We were trying it, blotting out the past because it was too
outrageous, unable to imagine a future, living in the here and now. And
we discovered there was no present, only an emptiness that if you
tumbled and fell into it would drive you mad.

I wanted him not to touch me, not even touch my hand, and if he felt
differently he gave no sign. We drank our drinks and said we had better
be getting back. To what? To two empty -houses. Before we parted he
said, in a tone made artificially light and casual, I'll pop over on
Saturday, shall I? I'd like to see my son.

The way he talked to Richard when he came to our -house I recognized as
a farewell. To me his words, though to the child only friendly and
interested, were loaded with the sadness of last times. And when Richard
had gone out into the garden on his own he said to me, It isn't going to
work, is it?

No, I said.

It was lovely knowing you, he said. It was the best thing I ever had. I
don't suppose you want to kiss me and the funny thing is I don't much
want to kiss you. That's the way it goes, I suppose. I won't hang about
here any longer. Say goodbye to Richard for me, will you?

Once Richard was back at school I drove over to Molucca. I was very
nervous about driving, I was terrified. The -house was in a mess. I
cleared up, I emptied ashtrays and washed glasses. There were some
flowers in a vase but they were still fresh and I couldn't bring myself
to throw them away. They were love-in-a-mist, there's an irony for you.
For some reason did I think I would go back there again? - I took Alan's
drawings off the walls and put them into the sideboard. The photograph
of us that the man who came to ask the way had taken I took out of its
frame and put with the drawings.

I switched off the refrigerator and opened the door but I didn't look
inside. There was ham in there and a piece of cheese as well as the
champagne. It seemed unlikely to me that I would ever drink champagne
again. I went upstairs to find the dress I had worn that day and the
next night, I intended to fetch it and take it to the cleaners, but the
sooty sulphurous smell of it when I opened the wardrobe door made me
nauseous. I pushed it along the rail to the far end and shut the door.

Before I left I went into the garige and looked at Gillda's car. No one
would come looking for it. I knew that as well as I knew that this
-house was mine and my name was Stella Newland. No one would need or
wish to look for it. Of course if I had it moved away or otherwise tried
to dispose of it, that would be another thing. If, for instance, I tried
to sell the -house. But I wouldn't sell the -house.

I drove home. That night I was ill, that was the start of an illness
that was like a protracted flu. When I recovered I told Aagot I would
never drive again.

Other people should have made things easier. They made them worse. It
seems to me that everybody I knew asked me if I still saw Alan and
Gillda. Where were they? Why did they never come? Why did I never go to
them? By everybody I suppose I mean Marianne well, mainly Marianne.
Since the scene at Easter Priscilla had behaved as if Gillda didn't
exist, as if she had never existed. Jeremy took a slightly different
attitchude. He congratulated me on getting rid of Alan and Gillda, those
rackety people'.

One day Madge Browning told me she had encountered Alan in Diss. He was
waiting at the bus stop. She hadn't asked him why he had no car and she
hadn't asked after Gillda, but he told her all the same. Gillda had left
him and gone to live in France. It upset me terribly when she told me
that. Not about Gillda going to France, not that, he had to say that,
but just that she had seen him and talked to him and oh, I don't know.
That was when Marianne interfered. She phoned him, asked why he had
dropped me, what sort of a friend was he? I was ill and I needed him.
Please to come as soon as he could. It's ironical really. I think, I
really think, she hoped to marry us to each other, she was matchmaking.

I have hardly ever been angry with my children. She was terribly taken
aback at my anger. Poor little one, she meant well, she was only
eighteen. Of course he didn't come, he knew better than that, he no more
wanted to come than I wanted to see him.

I never saw him again. I haven't seen him since September twenty-four
years ago. It would be nice if I could say I've thought of him every day
and never ceased to love him but I can't say that because when I have
thought of him and tried to recapture my love for him I can only
remember the burning fields and a green scarf and blood on the grass.

And these things blot out the good memories the way smoke blots out the
sun.

The next two tapes I make will be what is it Marianne says? for real.

Yes, the next two will be for real. I shall label them and ask Richard
to see that Genevieve gets them after I am dead.

Perhaps they will be lost and she will never hear them or perhaps she
will use them to rehcord something without knowing the words they
contain. So be it. I am not inclined to write cryptic messages on them.
She will listen or she will not.

I only feel that for reasons which will become clear, of all people on
this earth it is she who should be told. This is a dramatic and
fatalistic way of looking at things, I know that. It is my way of giving
some meaning to life, a pattern prescribed by destiny, that is all.

And what is she supposed to do then?

I paused, I stopped. Footsteps hesitated outside the door and then
passed on. I asked what she was supposed to do. What she likes.

Something or nothing. Whatever she likes.

I was moving into the country of last times. It's a strange place and
being in it gives weight to everything you do. Mike had gone off to
Leeds and I'd given him the last kiss I'd ever give him. For the last
time I'd said I'd be seeing him on Friday, I'd walked down to the bottom
of our garden for the last time, thrown out the last dead flowers from
the wall vase. As for Stella, she'd eaten her dinner in the dining room
for the last time, maybe done her last crossword puzzle, smoked her last
cigarette.

But I felt no nostalgia for the home I was soon to leave, I'd lost all
interest in it, I never wanted to be there. It was just a -house Mike
and I had bought on a mortgage, not because we liked it but because it
was all we could afford, not in a place we chose but the only place we
knew. Most of the people I know lived like that, not in the way they
wanted to live but in the best and most prudent way they could manage.

I wondered if that expedient way of living, that economical, obligatory
way, was going to change now. To change for good.

My -house, mine and Mike's, had been djue, soon, to feel like a small
and cosy prison, with two inmates and two prison officers, so I was
going before that could happen. I was going while I still could and when
I had a reason. Work was where I wanted to be, not in that -house, so
I'd told Lena I wouldn't take my day off, I'd swap with Carolyn.

Again, as I came up to Stella's door, I heard the murmurr of her voice
from inside. There was no one with her, she was talking to herself. It
was rather eerie, like one of the women of my family speaking an
incantation. Only in Stella's case there were no pauses for a candle to
be lit or sulphur cast into the ring. My fingernail scraping the wood
before I knocked was enough to alert her. Her silence was as sudden as
an explosion. I could almost hear her jump. She must have expected to
see Lena or Pauline when had I last knocked? for I found her sitting in
her chair clutching the new patchwork dressing-gown about her, her
expression quite guilty.

The old, lovely smile stretched her wizened face. She put up her arms.

I kissed her and she managed a feeble hug. That, too, was a last time.

She hated to complain, she said, but the pain was bad now. Lena had
agreed to call the doctor. That's who she thought it was when I knocked.
Did she want me to stay and talk? She shook her head, her eyes
half-closed. I left her. I don't know why I broke my rule and, coming
past her door an hour later with Gracie's tray, put my ear to one of the
top panels of the door. Stella wasn't asleep, she was talking again, and
although I couldn't make out the words they sounded far from a
description of her symptoms to a doctor.

Next morning, when I went to her room, she was in bed and something
about her colour and the way she was lying told me she wouldn't get up
that day.

Her face was beginning to change. The dying get a certain look a few
days before they die. The eyes stare, the flesh falls. I sponged her
face and hands and combed her hair. She wanted me to sit with her and
for once Lena didn't object. Her right hand crept out from under the
sheet and clasped mine. It was no longer a strong grip that she had.

The fingers were weak and not quite steady. But after a while she was
able to sit up against the pillows and talk. She asked me about her
-house, if I'd liked it, if I with what she called my superstitious ness
had sensed unpleasant things there, forces, elements. I was able to tell
her I had nothing but good feelings, a sense of happiness, comfort and
peace.

Not a faithless place, Genevieve?

That reminded me of the ladybird poem and calling my true love. After
she was gone, would anyone ever again call me Genevieve? I held her hand
but she said no more. That was the last time Stella talked coherently to
me, for the pain started to get bad and in the afternoon the doctor gave
her morphine. Her voice altered, gravelly and thin, she said, relying on
my understanding, He left her and came to me. My children don't know
that.

I won't tell them, I said.

I wish I could have got over ... She tried again. I wish I could have
reconciled yes, reconciled myself ... There were tears on her eyelids or
perhaps it was just her eyes watering.

Next morning there was no question of breakfast. Sharon felt she'd been
very successful in getting her to have a sip of tea.

She's starting to let go, she said to me. It won't be long now.

Richard was with the other doctor in the lounge. I felt what I'd never
felt before, a kind of awe about Stella, that maybe I shouldn't just go
in there the way I always had. Stchupidly, I thought I ought to ask
permission. The approach of death changes your attitchude to all sorts
of things. I listened outside the door, breathed in the silence, I
knocked and getting no answer, not even a whisper, went in.

She was sitting up in bed, her eyes open, staring at the door.

Marianne, she said, is your father coming?

That gave me a shock though it shouldn't have. I should have been used
to wandering minds and mistaken identities at Middleton Hall, not to say
faulty memories. But Stella was different. Stella had been so
clear-headed and so precise in her speech.

Her skull showed under the parchment-like skin. I went up to the bed and
kissed her. She said, Thank you, darling, that was nice, and then,
You're off tomorrow, aren't you? I hope you'll have a wonderful time.

It's no use arguing with them when they're like that and it's no use
being embarrassed. You have to play along. I said I was sure I'd have a
wonderful time, and that at any rate was true. Every moment I've ever
been with Ned has been bliss.

Your father and I went to lona on our honeymoon.

She'd never said that when she told me about marrying Rex and maybe it
wasn't true. The morphine discovers all kinds of dreams and false
memories buried in the mind. I wondered what she'd call the real
Marianne, the actress, the woman with the long reddish hair. The door
opened and Richard came in. As soon as I saw him I thought, she'll take
him for Alan, she'll think it's Alan come back. But if she did she gave
no sign. She gave him her glorious smile, she was still capable of that.
I got up to go and she said, You won't be able to move your car, Gillda.
The garige will have to do that.

Richard looked at me. That's all right, I said. I won't try.

I met Marianne in the passage. She clutched my arm, said, I'm not too
late, am I?

Mum has second sight, of course, she really can foretell the future, not
to be wondered at when you remember she was my nan's seventh child and
Nan was the seventh child too, or at least the seventh to grow up.

People don't have seven children any more and maybe that's why Janis and
I don't have Mum's gift, so it was strange how in that moment, when
Marianne said that to me, I knew exactly when Stella would die.

Friday, I said. It won't be till Friday.

How do you know, Jenny?

I just know, I said.

Marianne was wearing green, a dark green coat over her black pants and
sweater. It made me shiver to see it. Of course I don't believe what
they used to say, that it's because the fairies wear green that it's
unlucky, that they don't like mere mortals to be seen in it. But I've
known too many instances of ill-luck following the wearing of green to
doubt. Whoever bought a green dress, my nan says, that didn't have to
buy a black one afterwards? When Mum married Dennis she wouldn't even
have green vegetables at the wedding reception, not a lettuce leaf on
the table. If green is worn, love is down, they say.

Marianne made me go back with her. She put her arm in mine. We stood
there and watched Stella's hands plucking at the bedclothes. That was
something I'd seen often enough before but no one has ever given me an
explanation. Why do the hands of the dying hop and creep like crabs
going sideways along the edge of a blanket and the hem of a sheet? Her
eyes were shut but her hands worked, a pianist playing on a cloth piano.
Marianne asked me why but I had to whisper back that I didn't know, only
the dead know. She and Richard stayed all day with Stella and they were
still there when I left for home.

The phone was ringing as I let myself into the -house. I wonder if the
time will ever come when the sound of Ned's voice doesn't send a thrill
through me and raise the hairs on the back of my neck. I want that time
to come, I want that to happen, an ordinariness, an acceptance, I want
to take him for granted, because that will mean I've had a lifetime of
getting used to him.

He said, Tomorrow evening, Jenny?

I've got something to tell you, I said. We can talk about it tomorrow.

You've found somewhere warmer for us.

You could put it that way, I said. We won't be going to Stella's after
Thursday, that's for sure.

You're very mysterious.

No, I said. No, I'm not. There's no mystery. It can all come out in the
open now. Listen, Ned, I'm going to do what you asked me, I'm going to
leave Mike and come to you and we can be together. I'm sorry I wouldn't
do it before, it was stchupid of me, I shouldn't have kept you waiting
like that, you asked me so often. I've been such a fool.

It was a lovely sound, his sigh of relief. Have you told him?

Not yet. I want to be with you first.

He began saying something, his voice very tender and sweet, but the
doorbell was ringing. I could see the shape of Janis through the frosted
glass, her piled-up hair-do and her huge earrings.

I love you, I said, I have to go now. I'll see you tomorrow.

Janis had run out of tea bags she was down to her last one, and the shop
shuts at four-thirty. I gave her twenty out of my packet of PG Tips and
she started telling me a long tale about how her friend Verna had been
combing her hair by the open window, had twisted the combings round her
finger and put them outside and a magpie had flown off with them in its
beak.

What, in December? I said.

That makes it worse, she said. It's been so mild. I mean, you don't
expect it. Not for them to be making nests. She got this really bad
headache straightaway. What d'you reckon? Mum says she'll die within the
year, but not to tell her, there's nothing she can do.

She wanted to see the conservatory, so I took her into the dining room
and showed her Mike's work.

You are lucky, she said. Steve can't open a tin without getting tetanus.

I wandered round the -house while I was waiting for the -tile man,
wondering what to take with me and what to leave behind. None of our
wedding presents, I didn't want any of them, Mike could keep the lot.

I'd take my books and my Chambers Dictionary but not the music centre or
the CD player and the telly was too big to carry. Thirteen years.

Mum would say it's because it's thirteen years, because we've just
passed the unluckiest anniversary, the one she has a special name for.

The first is your Cotton Wedding, the second your Paper Wedding, five
years is a Wooden Wedding, twelve years Silk and Fine Linen, everyone
knows twenty-five is a Silver and fifty a Gold well, thirteen years is a
Brimstone Wedding.

Maybe because it's explosive or because it's hard and dark like a
burning stone, which is what brimstone means. I'd never asked Mum and I
was thinking of ringing her up to find out when the man came with the
-tiles. And when he'd gone, though I'd only left there a bit more than
an hour before, instead of ringing Mum it was Middleton Hall I phoned.

Pauline answered. No, Stella was just the same, very feeble, weak as
water, sleeping a good deal of the time, but that was from the doctor's
morphine. Marianne had gone but Richard was still there. They were both
staying at the hotel in Thelmarsh.

Mike phoned just as I'd put the receiver down. He wanted to know if the
-tiles had come. I was glad he didn't say what he would have done once,
that he missed me and he'd be glad to be home again, because if he had
I'd have felt guilty. I just thought of telling him on Friday evening
and I did wonder a bit how he'd react. By asking me if that was the
gratitchude he got for building my conservatory, I suppose.

When he'd said goodbye and not even that he'd see me on Friday, I
started speculating about various women in the village who'd be after
him once I'd gone and wondering which one he'd take up with. It wouldn't
be long, I was sure of that.

The first thing I heard when I got in, on Thursday morning was that Lena
had caught Stanley's flu bug. She'd had the sense to go to bed and not
spread her germs about. Stella was alone. As I kissed her I felt her
cheek turn to me, but that was the only sign of consciousness she gave
for a long while. For the first time of being with her in that room,
perhaps because it was also the first time of silence and rest, I
thought of the secrets locked up inside her head, moving in there,
whispering unheard.

I'd been there half an hour and was thinking I couldn't stay much
longer, I had Gracie and Arthur to see to, when she opened her eyes and
said, Darling?

Yes, Stella?

What did you do to her?

She said it, not strongly, not loudly, but so clearly it surprised me.

Was it Alan Tyzark that she thought she was talking to? And did she need
some sort of denial from him in order to rest?

Nothing, I said. I didn't do anything.

She turned her face away. It wasn't exactly a snoring that she made,
more a heavy strangled breathing. She had passed into a deep sleep.

But there was a chance she would wake just as quickly. I sat there
watching her, hoping she would wake but not daring to be cruel enough to
will it, glad in a way I hadn't inherited Mum's powers to fetch the
words out of her.

Richard arrived in the late morning, then, after about an hour, Marianne
came with her children. The older one must be seventeen because when
they'd been five minutes with their grandmother he drove the pair of
them off in the Volvo. I went in once. Stella was conscious. At any
rate, her tired eyes were open and there were traces of tears on her
cheeks. Marianne wiped her face very gently with a tissue. I thought I'd
never see Stella again, though I was wrong there, and in saying goodbye
to her, just the usual words I always spoke when I was leaving for home,
I tried to speak in a more solemn and final tone.

Goodbye, Stella.

I kissed her and her cheek quivered. Marianne laid her hand briefly on
my arm, the green sleeve on my blue. The room was darkening by then and
before Richard got up to switch on the bed lamp I fancied I saw the
figgere of a woman standing silent and waiting between the window and
the wall. My nan would have named her as Death, come to keep her
appointment with Stella, but when the light came on I saw it was only
the way the curtain had been carelessly pulled, catching at the corner
of a picture frame.

Perhaps I shouldn't have gone. Someone I loved and had grown close to
was about to leave this life, she was on her deathbed, and I was off to
enjoy myself. Is that a strange way of putting it? Not really, not when
you understand being with Ned was the greatest true enjoyment I've ever
known.

I could say that Stella had her son and daughter with her, that she was
slipping out of consciousness, anyway. Her room was no place for me
while they were there. Yet I could have stayed in the building, sat in
the lounge, waited in case I was needed. Come to that, I could have
swapped with someone on the night shift. Once I would have, if it had
all happened a year ago, before I met Ned, before I loved him.

For it's love that was responsible, love that overcomes your better
nature and casts all those fine feelings of friendship and duty and the
other kind of love, loving-kindness, to the winds. It's so urgent, it's
so demanding, a force like a gale that blows you over or a wave of the
-sea that throws you on to the shingle, you can't resist and you don't
want to. I wouldn't have resisted the pull of love for Stella's sake and
I wondered if I would have for my own nan or even for my mother, or, if
I'd had one, for my child.

That's not to say I wasn't guilty about leaving. I was ashamed of going
and I fancied Lena looked at me strangely and Carolyn gave me a sidelong
glance. But I left and closed the front door and went down the steps
where the cold of night was closing in. Abandoning Stella bothered my
conscience but to give up seeing Ned, that was unthinkable, there was no
future on the other side of it.

Frost turned my windscreen into a bathroom window patterned all over
with fern leaves. They made me think of the ferns in Ned's shoe that
would draw him quickly to me. Our meeting would be another last time,
the last time we would meet in a cold borrowed -house and make love in
someone else's bed.

Ned was djue at seven. By that time I'd lit twenty candles and the two
oil stoves and the -house was full of that familiar but never exactly
acceptable smell of wax and paraffin. Some people associate certain
perfumes with their love affairs, or the scent of wood smoke or the
bouquet of a wine. Perhaps it's because I'm not one of their sort,
because I'm ordinary and working class, that my love will always be
remembered when I smell burning oil, the poorest, cheapest fuel of all.

I wasn't thinking like that while I waited for Ned to come. I wasn't
afraid of anything. They call it a low self-image, what I used to have
and what in her different way Stella had, but in my case he had done
wonders for that. By loving me he had made me love myself. He had made
me think something of myself, know that I look good and I have more
brains than people give me credit for, that I'm as worthwhile a person
as anyone else.

I waited for him, sitting close to one of the oil stoves, holding my
hands spread over the grid on the top of it, only my hands and face
warm, a chill seeping through the rest of me. But even that didn't
matter much because it was the last time, because the coldness of this
-house and my struggles to warm it would soon be things for us to look
back on and laugh about.

The curtains are never drawn till he gets there. When he comes I draw
them to enclose us from the outside world. I'd wrapped myself up, blue
jeans, thick blue sweater, blue shawl round me, all blue to counteract
Marianne's green, I suppose, though what I was saving from harm I don't
know. It was too late to save Stella. Protecting him, I reckon, from the
hazards of the road, the ice and the freezing fog, twenty-ton trucks
coming in the other direction. From his own mistakes, like whistling in
the dark. As for me, for once I thought I needed no protection, I was
safe, home at last.

I got up once or twice to look for him from the window. It was dark out
there but the darkness was clear and glittering and when a car passed
its lights showed the frost on the hedge and a line of it like white
paint on tree branches. I suppose I watched ten cars pass. I know I did,
for I counted. I watched for headlights to flare and swing blindingly
towards me as he turned his car off the road and up the path to the
-house.

It didn't happen. He didn't come. He'd been late before, he had much
farther to come than I did, and it wasn't always easy for him to get
away on time. I think the latest he'd ever been was twenty-five minutes.
No, am I still deceiving myself that I didn't count?

Twenty-seven minutes it was, not twenty-five. After twenty-eight minutes
I started getting frightened.

Time passes so slowly when you're waiting. It goes so fast when you're
with the man you love that it seems as if you're not talking about the
same thing, as if there are two kinds of time, one for happiness and one
for fear. The time passed more slowly than I'd ever known it while I
waited at that window. Each second was like a single drop of water that
you watch fall from a tap.

And outside there was nothing. There was no movement of any kind, only
the empty road and the wide fields running away into darkness. In the
stillness I seemed to see the frost itself descend on to the grass and
the hedge, first a wetness, then a glitter. An owl called into the
silence and at the sound shivers ran down my body, for its cry is an
omen of the approach of some dire calamity. I could hear my nan saying
those words as I waited there, just as she had spoken them to Janis and
me as children when we heard the owl's shriek at night.

There were so many things that could have happened to him, there are so
many, for I still don't know. A car crash, some accident at work, some
action on Jane's part, something that she had done or said or he had
that I don't know, that no one has told me. But my worst fear was for
his safety, his life. You see, nothing would have stopped him coming to
me, nothing ever did, and what but some terrible thing could have
stopped him coming to me on this special evening when we had our future
to talk about?

When you're in a sitchuation like that you think of the awful things
that have happened to other people you know or you've heard of. I
thought of Charmian Fry saying goodbye to Rex Newland, then waiting and
waiting for him to phone her. He never phoned and he never came to her
again because he'd died in the train. Suppose Ned had died at the wheel
of his car? I looked back over the day that was past and tried to think
what I'd done that was changing fate. Gracie had spilt salt and I hadn't
taken a pinch and thrown it over my left shoulder. I'd dropped a glove
and picked it up myself.

I stayed there at Molucca till nine. It was ridiculous staying so long,
for they were long those hours, they were the longest two hours of my
life. I paced the -house, I walked up and down the stairs more times
than I know, I went out into the cold and walked to the road, looking
this way and that in the blackness, as if I could bring him by my will
and my peering into the dark. I wrung my hands, I'd never done that
before or seen it done, but it's what you do when you're worried out of
your mind, it's what you do in despair when you say, God, God, God help
me!

When I'd blown out all the candles and turned out the wicks and the
smell came stronger than ever the way it always does, I stood in the
darkness with candle grease on my fingers. I wanted to howl aloud but I
was ashamed to do that even though I was alone and the -house stood
there alone. The owl cried for me, screeching from a tree in the fen.

When I opened the front door the cold air swept in and it was as if it
mocked me. It made my eyes water or else I was crying. I stumbled out to
the car.

It was crusted all over with frost and I scrubbed at the windscreen with
newspaper till my hands were numb with cold. I shouldn't have been
driving really, not in the state I was in. I just wanted to get
somewhere, anywhere, as fast as possible. It was lucky for me that's one
way of putting it that because it hadn't rained for so long there was no
ice on the roads, only the thick white glitter of frost. As I put my key
into the front-door lock the phone started ringing. It made my hand
shake, it made me fumble with the key and I was terrified it would stop
before I got there. I knew it was Ned.

It wasn't. The voice was Richard's.

I'm so sorry, Genevieve, I know it's an imposition to phone you at this
hour. But my mother has asked for you. She's talked to us a little;
she's perfectly clear in her mind but she's very weak. I remembered
something I often forget, that he's a doctor. She may have to have more
morphia quite soon. It's as if she summoned up all the strength she has
left to ask for you.

I'll come now, I said.

It was strange how that phone call brought me back to earth, to reality,
and a realization that it's mad to pace a dark icy -house at night,
waiting for someone who obviously isn't coming because he can't come.
It's crazy to work oneself up to howling point. I did what I should have
done hours before, dialled his home number in Norwich.

Phoning him at home is the last thing to worry me now. Isn't he already
more mine than hers?

I got his voice on the answer phone It's the first time I've ever heard
his voice giving that message and I don't like it. I put the receiver
back before the beep sounded, I got back in the car and drove to
Middleton Hall.

The big heavy man who is Marianne's boyfriend was sitting in the lounge,
smoking a cigar. Lena would have killed him if she'd known.

I've read enough magazine psychology to wonder if Marianne picks the
type her father belonged to.

Stella's room was insufferably hot, about as great a contrast as you
could get to the temperature of the -house where I'd been. It smelt as
if someone had dropped and broken the flask of White Linen so that the
perfume vaporized into the air. Richard and Marianne were sitting one on
iether side of the bed. Stella was unconscious. She was breathing
harshly, her mouth open, she'd reached the stage when you begin to count
breaths, for each one may be the last.

Marianne put out her hand, took mine and squeezed it. She got up and
took me into the far corner of the room. Oh, darling, I don't think
she'll speak again. She asked me to tell you this. I wrote it down, I
don't know what it means.

Nor do I. Marianne had written on a leaf torn from a block, There is
nothing in the -house or the garden.

Did you try to get hold of me earlier? I said.

Richard tried at seven and again at eight. But, darling, you've a right
to go out, you couldn't be expected to stay in for this. Don't, please,
feel you have to ... No, I know.

There is nothing in the -house or the garden. Why tell me? Why not one
of her children?

I shouldn't stay, I said. You'll want to be alone with her.

The sweat was streaming off me. Marianne had got hold of my hand again.
In spite of being halfway to a witch, my nan reads the Bible a lot. The
days of our age are threescore years and ten, she says, and then adds a
bit of her own, think yourself lucky if you get a bonus.

The days of Stella's age were threescore years and eleven. It doesn't
seem very old these days. I said that aloud but as I spoke a sound came
from the bed that's unmistakable if you've ever been at a deathbed. The
rattle that's the body expelling its last breath. It's awesome, that
sound. No matter how many times you've heard it, it still sends a shiver
through you. The last breath rattled out of Stella's poor, fallen,
shrunken mouth and she was still.

Richard sighed. He looked at his mother, he nodded at me, and I nodded.
Marianne put her head down on her arms and began weeping. I went up to
Stella and touched her, felt the lifeless pulse, the waxen skin and
under my breath I whispered goodbye. More than ever I wanted to kiss her
then, but that was for the family to do first.

I went out of the room to fetch someone. Stanley was at the desk in the
hall. I told him and walked away, ignoring his questions. My own terror
had come back, filling my head with frightful images, turning me cold in
that hot stuffy place. I met Pauline going off duty, told her Stella was
dead, and then I went into Lena's office to try and phone Ned again.

PART FOUR 2O

Being here is still strange, yet it's more like home than anywhere I've
ever lived. Another thing is that I'm more alone than I've ever been.

But that has to be, that is the only way I could bear what has happened
and what it has done to me. It's only when you're alone that you can cry
in the night without someone asking why.

The drive to Middleton Hall takes fifteen minutes instead of five and
it's further to the shops. I wonder sometimes what I'd have done without
this place, how I'd have coped. Rented a room, I suppose, got myself
somewhere in Diss, a bed-sit with breakfast and find your own evening
meal. Because, after it was over and I knew there was no hope left, I
couldn't have stayed with Mike. I couldn't have made the best of a bad
job in that way. Philippa didn't see it like that.

It's just as well you never said a word to Mike, she said. You can go on
now just as if nothing had happened.

She meant well.

Even as she spoke I was thinking of how that would be, living with a man
I'd no feeling left for and hiding from him all the feelings I had still
for the man I'd loved. I went to Mum first of all. That's what you do,
isn't it, when your marriage breaks up? You go home to mother.

She didn't want me, she said as much, but she said something else too,
that I had to come to her, she understood that, because a daughter's
home is always her home even when she's nearly reached her third of a
century.

I didn't know then where I'd go. I couldn't think of things, I couldn't
make plans or do anything beyond going mechanically about my work. I'd
been blasted, you see, shot to pieces. My young body felt old and broken
and my mind floated free but full of him, nothing but him.

The day after Stella died was a Friday. So I was wrong about that too,
with my clairvoyance and my wise-woman ways. Perhaps I made that
forecast because it's well-known Fridays are unlucky, most accidents
happen on Fridays, and it's not a day for starting any new enterprise.

Old Mister Thorn that my late grand ad worked for would never begin the
harvest on Friday and the men went along with that. I used to feel that
way myself though I've changed now, but that Friday when I woke up it
was to an awful sense of dread and foreboding.

Before I left for work I phoned Ned's home and the answer-phone was
still on. I'd never phoned him at work and the thought of doing it
frightened me. I suppose I'd read too many books and too many pieces in
magazines about the unhappy consequences of phoning one's married lover
at his work-place. Besides, the way those people talk unnerves me. But
fears of this sort matter less and less after a time, everything like
that is overcome by the terrible anxiety and the need to know. I think
then, that morning, I'd have forced my way into a private hospital and
past security guards and pushed his family aside to get to his bedside.
For that's what I thought it was by that time.

I thought he was lying injured somewhere in hospital.

I phoned the stchudios on Lena's office phone as soon as I got in. It
was too early and they had their answer phone operating too. There was
no point in leaving a message. What could I say and who would bother to
call me back? As I passed across the hall on my way to the stairs the
undertakers came down the passage with fat Stanley trotting after them.
They had a body covered up in black on a stretcher, Stella's body. I
stood and watched them carry her away. If she'd still been alive I
thought I'd have asked her what to do, I'd have asked her for help.

By the time I'd got Gracie up and taken Lois down to the lounge in the
wheelchair she's got now and read the business part of the paper to
Arthur, it was after ten. The dogs were padding about but there was no
sign of Lena. Sharon was in the office. She went away quite meekly when
I said I wanted to make a private phone call. I'd lost the number and I
was looking it up in the directory when I saw Richard go past the window
on his way to his mother's room. I dialled the stchudios and asked for
Ned.

They wanted to know who it was. I hadn't thought they would or I'd have
made up some important name. Charmian Fry, I could have said, it would
have been appropriate, for I was in her shoes, not knowing and afraid to
know, but needing to know above all else.

It was ages I waited while music played, that Greensleeves tchune we'd
sung at school. Alas, my love, you do me wrong To cast me off
discourteously, For I have loved you, oh so long, Delighting in your
company. Funny that I remembered the words after fifteen years.

Another voice came on and said Ned Saraman wasn't in today. It was so
cold and crisp, that female voice, that it paralysed me, it stopped me
asserting myself. Could it take a message, it said, would I leave my
name? I left my name but I didn't ask any more. I couldn't. At least I
knew he wasn't lying injured somewhere or did I know that?

I tried his home again and again got the answer phone I told myself I
had to be strong, however hard that was, I had to think of a way of
finding where he was. You must keep calm, I kept telling myself, sit
down and take deep breaths and think. Think it through. Find somewhere
to sit quietly for five minutes. I went down the passage to Stella's
room. Richard was in there. He was standing by the window holding up a
copy of The Times. I apologized, I said I'd go away.

No, don't. Please stay. I came to collect my mother's things.

All bedding had been stripped from the bed. A big suitcase lay open on
the mattress.

Look, this is last Saturday's, Richard said. She didn't finish the
crossword.

That was a sign, I said. She always finished it. Would you like me to
pack her clothes?

That would be a great help.

The blue dress with the coin spots, the flowered dress and jacket, the
cream wool coat ... I folded them the way my nan folds things, laid face
down, the left side turned in, then the right, the sleeves parallel and
flat. I took a deep breath. I said, May I ask you something?

As soon as I'd said it I knew he thought I was going to ask for
something of hers to wear. As if I would. The clothes of the dead don't
wear well, they rot as their owner rots ... Yes, of course. Anything.
After all you did for my mother.

It's nothing like that. If you wanted to find out where someone was, I
mean how to get hold of him ... I explained. I was discreet. I spoke, or
I think I did, as if Ned was someone I slightly knew, someone who'd once
rented a cottage in our village. It was important to speak to him. I
made it sound as if for business reasons.

I'll do it for you, he said. He didn't ask if I'd like him to or if that
would be all right. He just said he would, and he picked up the receiver
on Stella's bedside phone.

I didn't want to be there. I wanted to hide myself so that I couldn't
hear and then come back and find all was well, Ned was on the other end
of the line, Ned wanted to talk to me. I couldn't hide myself, I had to
be there. But I could touch wood. I stood there while he dialled,
holding on with both hands to the edge of Stella's walnut desk, feeling
the wholesome grain of wood, the healer.

Richard has a voice like Ned's. It's the kind that comes out of a public
school and Oxbridge and say what you like it does impress people, it
speaks to them of authority and know-how and control.

Hearing him say Ned's name was the strangest thing, like being in a
dream where people do things they'd never do in life and speak
confidently to those they've never met.

He asked for Ned and I could hear the music playing, not Greensleeves'
this time but The Lincolnsher Poacher'. They can't know much about
music, the people who arrange these things, if they only put on tchunes
that I recognize. I started to hold my breath, waiting for Ned's voice
to take over from the music. But I couldn't hear any more. I could only
hear Richard.

This is Richard Newland. Yes, Doctor Newland.

Silence. Murmurrings.

I'm not getting any response from his home. Murmurrings. Well, get me
someone who does know, will you?

It was strange how my mind went empty then. I seemed to be suspended in
nothingness, hanging on to the wood of the desk as if it supported me in
space. I could see nothing but the white walls, the open case, and
Richard's back, thin like a boy's, the shoulder blades standing out
under his jacket. In the suitcase the blue dress was on top and the coin
spots began to dance, waving and jumping before my eyes.

Richard said, Yes, and, I see, and, When will he be back?

The coin spots rushed and tumbled. I pulled away from the desk and leant
on the bed, looking down into the red whorls on the pink mattress cover.
The whorls shifted and twisted as if it was them doing the pounding in
my head. Richard put the phone down and turned round. I made myself
stand up.

Are you all right? he said.

Yes, of course.

He's gone away on holiday, he said. Skiing somewhere, they said.

Innsbruck. No, Interlaken. Back on January the 3rd. Was it important to
get hold of him?

I couldn't speak. I couldn't even shake my head more than an inch each
way. I made myself walk round the bed I walked stiffly, like a robot and
took another dress off the hanger. My heart felt as if it wasn't beating
at all, just as I wasn't breathing.

Everything stops for Christmas for so long in this country, Richard
said. It's usually two weeks when in other places they have a couple of
days. People here take it for granted the whole system shuts down for
Christmas and no one's going to need them or try to contact them.

Thank you, I said. Thank you for phoning.

I wrapped Stella's shoes up in the pages of The Times and put them in on
top. The jewel box I tucked into a corner.

Richard said, She wanted you to have the dressing-gown Marianne gave her
for her birthday. Please take it.

She'd only worn it once, I said.

He misunderstood me. It's as good as new.

I must have had a wild look about me. Or my eyes were blazing. Anyway,
he took a step back.

Are you sure you're all right, Jenny?

I'm fine, I said and I closed the lid of the suitcase.

He picked up the tape player and the half-dozen tapes in the little
plastic box Stella kept them in and thrust them into my arms. She wanted
you to have these. It was her wish. You mustn't say no. You did so much
for her, you were much more than a carer, you were her friend. She loved
you.

I know, I said, and I went away, hugging the tape player and the
patchwork dressing-gown because I couldn't talk any more.

Hearing it like that was a shock. It stunned me. But you're never in
that state for long, you have to start thinking again, and very soon I
was thinking of reasons. By the afternoon I'd come to see what must have
happened. He'd told Jane what he intended, that he was leaving her for
me, and Jane had made a terrific scene. She'd insisted he come away with
her and Hannah, probably that holiday for her and her daughter had been
arranged for months, and she'd made such terrible threats that he'd no
choice. For instance, if he didn't come she'd see to it he never saw
Hannah again.

There are a lot of holes in that theory but I didn't see them at the
time. I didn't want to see them. I didn't want to ask myself how any of
that could have stopped him phoning me. My theory depended on Jane being
a monster, someone like Gillda Brent, though I'd no grounds for
believing she was.

Mike came back in the evening and went straight to work on the
conservatory. I phoned Ned's home number again but I'd have been
surprised if I'd got anything but a rehcorded voice. I wasn't surprised.
Drinking has never been the answer for me, or I thought it hadn't, but
I've never been in a state like that before, as bad as that, so much in
need of an answer. Once I'd have asked Mike to stop work and take me
down the Legion but that was long ago, or seemed it. I went by myself.

It was bitterly cold and a little snow was falling. It must have been
falling all day, for there were drifts of it underfoot, only I hadn't
noticed. If the flakes are sharp and there's a wind blowing, the snow
stings your skin like needles. The Legion always looks cheerful on a
winter's night, the lights orange behind the diamond panes and a big
lamp up on the wall shining on the swinging sign of the Roman soldier.

Mum was behind the bar and Janis with her, helping out. Mum was telling
a man I'd never seen before how to get rid of mice. Have you got a bit
of paper? OK, now write this: I adjure all you mice to leave this place
in a trice ... He started writing on the inside of his cheque book.

Go hence over the river and betake yourselves to the mill and there eat
your fill. Now begone and let my -house alone. Have you got that?

You copy that out and pin it up on the wall and you'll never see another
mouse.

Rhyming mice away wasn't new to me. It was what Mum always advised and
the same for rats. It doesn't work, I don't know why I hadn't seen that
before. Well, I had but it hadn't registered. I think that was the
beginning of giving up on charms and omens for me, that evening, an end
to superstition. Perhaps that was the real beginning of the end, that I
could call it superstition, which was the word other people used.

The man who wanted to be rid of mice seemed satisfied. He wandered off,
presumably to spread the news of this amazing vermin repellent. I went
up to the bar and asked Mum for a gin and tonic.

What brings you here? she said.

There are a lot of people's mothers you couldn't say this to but mine
isn't one of them. I looked her straight in the eye.

Despair, I said.

It's like that, is it? Where's your ever-loving husband?

Making that smashing extension to their -house, said Janis. I should be
so lucky.

Mum wouldn't say a word about Ned in front of her, but I could see she
guessed. She twigged is the way she'd put it. Len came in and she
rounded on him. I told you not to put them red things on the bar what
d'you call them? Poinsettias I told you not to put red flowers about.

Just because it's Christmas, so what? Everybody on this earth but you
knows red flowers are an evil omen.

Maybe it was that which made me ask for only pink and white flowers when
I phoned the florist in the morning. I was ordering a sheaf for Stella's
funeral and I didn't know what to put on the card so in the end I
settled for Love from Genevieve'. Mike was laying the floor -tiles with
Radio Norfolk full on playing Patsy Cline hits, I Fall to Pieces and
After Midnight', highly appropriate. I kept thinking, Ned will write to
me, he'll write to me from this Interlaken, wherever it is, or he'll
phone me when he can get to a phone alone. And then I thought, suppose
he doesn't, suppose I have to wait till January the 3rd, I can't wait
that long, I'll go mad.

By six I was back in the Legion. They'd put up the Christmas decorations
a week in advance. Paper chains and the gilt chains I swear Mum wears
for a necklace the rest of the year. No red flowers of course but a lot
of holly, the thorn less kind. It would be if the holly that comes in at
Christmas is smooth-leaved the woman of the -house will be master for
the year. Mum wasn't there, only Len. I asked him where she was and he
said she'd be in later, which was a comfort as I'd decided to ask her
advice. If I could get her alone I was going to ask her what to do.

I took my gin and tonic back to my table. Sooner or later someone was
bound to come in that I knew. There were just four people in the bar
besides Len and me. I didn't know whether I wanted to talk or not.

What I wanted was for the drink to work and make me forget what I was
going through. I wanted oblivion, then a stumbling home and a deep
sleep.

It was then that she came in. The blonde woman whose car had twice
passed along the Curton road when I'd been meeting Ned, who'd been in
the Legion that evening when we'd all been there and Ned and Jane too.

She came in alone, stopped for a moment and looked around her.

She's called Linda, but I didn't know that at first, Linda Owen. I still
hadn't shed my superstitious ness though I'd started calling it that,
and I noted with a kind of dismay that under her fake-fur coat she was
wearing a bright green trouser suit. A bright green and russet coloured
scarf was round her head and the snowflakes glittered on it.

The snow had started since I got there.

She looked at me and said, Hallo, though we'd never really met. Len
served her a glass of medium white wine and she took it to a table in
the farthest corner from mine. For some reason I couldn't take my eyes
off her, and with that urge to look at her came a feeling of the deepest
foreboding. The green she was wearing seemed to be an act of malice
against me, of course it couldn't be, it wasn't, but it felt that way.
It was as bright as a traffic light or day-glo on a road man coat. Len
turned on the telly behind the bar and I nearly cried out. The screen
was filled by brightly coloured figgeres skiing, red and blue and orange
against the white dazzling snow. Linda Owen picked her glass up off the
table and walked over to me.

I watched her approach. Our eyes met. She'd taken off the scarf but
hadn't combed her hair. It was untidy, a lock of it drooping over one
eyebrow. She put her hand on the back of the chair opposite me and said,
You don't know me though we've seen each other a few times.

Yes, I said.

My name's Linda Owen.

Jenny, I said. Jenny Warner.

You may think I'm speaking out of turn but there's something I want to
say to you. Can I sit down?

I nodded.

Are you still seeing Ned Saraman?

A split second before she said that I expected her to say it. I don't
know why unless it's Mum's gift coming out in me. A funny way to put it,
isn't it? Seeing', seeing someone. Funnier than going out with' really.
It means sleeping with, making love to, loving, being in love with,
adoring, but it doesn't mean seeing at all. That's the last thing it
means, if seeing is seeing into someone's heart and knowing his
thoughts.

Another funny thing was that suddenly I didn't know the answer to that
question. But I nodded and said yes and why did she ask. I wasn't angry
with her, I wasn't offended, I didn't feel any of that.

I saw you meet him, she said. I saw you twice. And then I saw you in
here with him. Look, you mustn't take this the wrong way, but I could
see it in your face, how you felt about him. I should have said
something to you then but I didn't have the nerve. I've only got the
nerve now because well, you're here on your own and I'm half an hour
early for my date.

Said something about what? I said. My lips were stiff.

You know where you met him, at Thelmarsh Cross? That's where I used to
meet him.

What do you mean? I said.

A woman called Rosie Ferrell was before me, she said, and they couldn't
meet in Thelmarsh because she lived up in Shering-ham and the one before
her, I don't know where she was or where they met.

It isn't true, I said. He'd never been unfaithful to Jane before me,
he'd told me that again and again. And if it is true oh, I was pathetic!
if it is true, it's me now, it'll always be me. He loves me.

It wasn't exactly pity in the look she gave me. Sympathy perhaps. At any
rate, it was a kind look and it wasn't contemptuous. You'd better have
another drink, she said. Come on, I'll get us both another drink.

Mum had just come in. She was got up in her fiercest gear, the way she
is on a Saturday night, especially the Saturday before Christmas, a
black miniskirt, tight as a bandage, a royal blue T-shirt, sleeveless,
with The Thundering Legion printed on it in gold and under that a
Gossard Wonderbra which is the last thing she needs. She gave me a look
and put up her eyebrows. I don't know what was going on in her head but
she served Linda and said, That's on the -house, love.

Oh, really? Thanks a lot.

She's my mother, I said. Look, you're wrong about Ned. I shouldn't talk
about it, not yet, but we're going to move in together. He's leaving his
wife. After they come back from wherever they've gone.

It's private till then, but since you asked ... Jenny, she said, he
isn't going to leave Jane, he'll never leave her. He'll never leave his
daughter. Oh, that asthma isn't as bad as he makes out but he won't
leave her. He doesn't want to leave them.

Jane suits him.

I was tired of saying she was wrong. I said, I told you it was private,
I shouldn't talk about it. I'd said that before too. I said something
new. I know you mean to be kind. She didn't say anything.

Ned said he'd leave Jane for me any time I said the word. I couldn't
imagine I'd ever repeat that to anyone but it's the truth. I wouldn't do
it, not for a long time, I thought it was wrong, but in the end well, I
gave in. A thought came to me that I liked the first for quite a while.
She was jealous. He'd left her for me. I couldn't quite say that. It may
be a bit hard for you to take, I said, but he really loves me. It's the
real thing with me. It's different.

She didn't laugh. I think that's to her eternal credit. She's a nice
woman is Linda Owen. Believe it or not, we've got to be friends and we
see quite a lot of each other. After all, we've a lot in common. She
didn't laugh, rather the reverse, she looked miserable.

Listen to me, Jenny. He does this all the time, it's his thing. She
knows and she puts up with it because she knows he'll always stay with
her. They take a cottage somewhere for a year, it's usually about a
year. Two years ago they took one in Breckenhall. I'm in the Post Office
there, that's what I do, the Post Office counter in the village shop.
Before that was when they rented a place in Weybourne, up on the coast.
I don't say she likes the way he goes on but at least she always has
some idea where he is.

I don't see what this has to do with me, I said.

He asked me to go away with him, Jenny. He always asks the ones who
won't. He knows they won't before he asks, they're the ones with a sense
of duty, the ones who're set on not breaking up their marriages or
upsetting their kids. I've got a daughter that my mum takes care of in
the day. He knew I wouldn't uproot my daughter, take her away from Mum
and her pre-school. He was safe with me till I changed my mind.

What do you mean, I said, changed your mind?

My daughter got to be five. I said I'd be able to take her away now she
was changing schools. I'd go with him. He'd said he'd get a flat in
Dereham mind you, he'd said that a good while before. Just as a matter
of interest, when did he last ask you to go away with him?

I couldn't remember. It was a long time and that was what made me
suddenly turn cold. I drank some of my gin, but it tasted like
disinfectant. When had Ned last asked me? Months ago, just about the
time we first met in Stella's -house. I hadn't noticed, I was so in love
I hadn't noticed.

Instead of answering, He asked you that too? I said.

I'm sorry, Jenny. I'm over it now but it's going to take you a while, I
can see that.

There was a wildness starting up in me, in my head. It was like when you
say you don't believe something you know you do believe. It was
something that couldn't be happening, an outrage. Later, a lot later, I
looked up outrage in the dictionary and it said: a gross or violent
injury; an act of wanton mischief. It said a lot of other things too but
those will do to be going on with. A gross and violent injury was inside
my head, pushing to get out and scream aloud.

But he asked me, I said. I sounded like a child. He asked me.

Suppose I'd said yes?

You did, she said. You did in the end.

And look what happened.

She didn't say that. I did, to myself, in my head, while I was staring
at her, trying to hate her but not able to. I thought then of something
I hadn't faced at the time, that phone conversation last week when I
told him I'd do as he asked, that we'd be together. He hadn't answered.
Not really answered. He'd sighed and I'd taken it for a sigh of relief.
I'd said meet and talk about it at Stella's -house. And he hadn't come.
He hadn't phoned, he hadn't come to Stella's -house, he'd put his answer
phone on and gone away skiing with his wife and child. Because that was
what he always did, or something like it, when 'they agreed to leave and
be with him.

She spoke gently. To do him justice, if that's the word, he's like some
women who can only do it if they think they're loved. And if they think
they're in love. He can't get it up unless he's saying, I love you, I
love you. It's sick. He's sick, poor thing. He's a pervert with a fetish
and his fetish is love. But that doesn't make you care any the less,
does it?

He picks the sort he thinks won't make scenes. And if they do, Jane can
handle it. She's had plenty of practice. I went to Norwich and told her
about him and me and much good that did me. She knew already.

If you come to think of it, a man's got a big advantage if his wife
knows and loves him enough to put up with it. What can he lose?

I jumped up then.

I don't believe it, I said. It's not true.

It's true.

It still wasn't credible. Not a real thing like the conservatory was or
Stella dying or Richard giving me that tape player. It was the dream of
the kind you don't know is a dream and when you wake up it takes a while
to realize it didn't happen.

Saying He loved me was stchupid and humiliating. I still said it, over
and over. Pride's the last thing to go but it goes. He kept asking me to
say I loved him, I said, and I knew I was describing the kind of man
she'd described.

Did he find a place for you to meet? she said. I mean, a hotel or
anything? Or was it all done under a hedge? I'm sorry, but it was the
same for me.

I borrowed someone's -house, I said.

You did, yes. Sure. It has a familiar ring. Did he ever take you out for
a meal? Did he ever buy you a present? I bet he offered to take you
abroad with him, that's easy, all done on expenses, and he'd have a
double room anyway. But did he bring you any duty-frees?

I stood up. I wanted to overturn the table the way they do in films.

Mum was reading my mind. She lifted up the flap at the end of the bar
counter and took a step through. I felt my head drop forward and a
gagging in my throat.

I'll get you a drink, Linda said. I didn't really get the last one.

No, I said. It doesn't help.

Oh, yes, it does.

My knees felt weak and I sat down again. I don't want a drink.

I didn't think you'd take it so hard, she said.

She turned round and waved to the man who'd just come in. He was just a
man, youngish, fair and heavy-set, her date, the kind who goes straight
up to the bar wherever he is.

I don't want to leave you, she said. Will you be all right? I can tell
him it's off for this evening. I'm not that keen on him. I could take
you home.

It's all right, I said. I'd quite like to be alone. I have to be alone
to take it all in.

I'm sorry, Jenny, she said. I'm very sorry.

If I'd cast myself in roles like Gillda did I'd have been the village
maiden betrayed by a sedjucer. But roles take no account of true misery,
of living humanity. I was dazed and numb. I was silent. Pain made me
clumsy, I dropped a cup and broke it, I tripped over a rug.

When I picked myself up a grazed shin made me start crying and break the
silence.

Mike didn't notice. He was still doing the -tiles. I cooked the lunch
because I've always made a roast on Sundays and we ate it, facing each
other across the table. Or he ate it. I picked at the food and pushed it
about but he didn't notice. He wasn't even reading the paper or reading
the instructions on the -tile pack, he was silent and preoccupied with
his conservatory, his head full of it. To him it was a thing of dreams,
a crystal palace, and if he'd been able to talk to me about it in those
terms, as of a vision and a creation, perhaps it wouldn't even then have
been too late.

Before he went back there he did speak. My face was wet with tears and
he asked me if I'd got a cold. When it got to three-thirty I went round
to Philippa's.

People talk about the country as if it's always beautiful. The ones who
don't live in it, that is. There's something awful about an East Anglian
village on a Sunday afternoon in winter, something grim. The surrounding
land is grey and shrouded in mist. The village street is long and
straight, the -houses are low and the trees are low while the sky is a
huge lid, dull and dimpled like pewter. At four-ish the lights will come
on but that's not for half an hour and meanwhile the low -houses are
dark and all -sealed up, the windows dull and blind except for the eye
of a TV screen glowing behind them in a corner.

There's never anyone about but all the cars are there. They line both
sides of the street nose-to-tail, some shiny and new but most the other
kind. You can't live in Tharby without a car but that's not to say you
can afford anything better than an old beat-up banger.

When a person speaks of car world you think of somewhere like Los
Angeles, of tangled freeways and spaghetti junctions and gleaming limos
slipping over suspension bridges. But this is the real car world, the
English countryside, where you can't move without a car, where the bus
runs once a week and the trains have disappeared. My dad knew what he
was doing when he collected cars and lost his soul to the
internal-combustion engine. Not long ago I read a letter to a newspaper
from someone who said we all ought to give up cars. To save the world,
the environment, the ozone layer. But he lived in the middle of a city
and could walk to work or take a bus, it was easy for him to talk. In
Tharby you're a prisoner without a car, it's the first thing you think
of when you're seventeen, learning to drive and somehow acquiring a car.

There was a Christmas tree in Philippa's front window but its lights
weren't on. She came to the window when I rang the bell and I think one
look at my face told her. The telly had been on, she'd been watching a
video of It Happened One Night, but she turned it off without asking. We
never kiss and we didn't then but she put out her arms and I went into
them and we held each other. We hugged each other for a long time, just
quite still and close, and she didn't pat my back like people mostly do
when they hug someone.

Katie and Nicola came in and stared at me. I told Philippa all about Ned
and how I loved him and what he'd done, though I could still only half
believe it. Or I couldn't face it. Confronting it hurt so much I
couldn't attempt it without crying aloud. But I told her the best I
could bear to. Seeing my tears, Nicola started to cry, and for some
reason that made me think of Janis and me when we were small.

Philippa put an arm round her and an arm round me. It was then that she
said that about it being just as well I'd never said anything to Mike
because now I could go on as if nothing had happened. She didn't
understand. How could she? You mustn't expect people to understand, I
know that now. If they listen and they're kind that's the best you'll
get and that's a lot.

I'm going back now to tell him, I said.

But where will you go? she said. Why do it now?

Because I want to be free to cry in the night, I said, and I can't do
that with him beside me.

As soon as I'd said it I thought it was funny and I started to laugh.

Philippa looked shattered. She didn't know what to make of me and who
can blame her? I didn't know what to make of myself. By this time it was
pitch dark outside and lights were on. The Legion was a fine sight, the
old fir tree outside hung with fairy lights and a big holly wreath on
the front door. Luckily Mum's red phobia doesn't extend to lights and
she had A Merry Christmas to All Our Patrons up in scarlet neon on the
half-timbering.

I walked home and told Mike I was leaving him.

He wouldn't take it in. For one thing he wouldn't stop working. I tried
to get him to stop by saying I wanted to talk to him, I had something
very important to say. It was no use. He said he'd made up his mind to
get the conservatory done by Christmas and this was his last chance till
Friday.

He went on trowel ling on the mortar between those -tiles and while he
did it he kept saying there must be something wrong with me, always
trying to get him to talk, to stop working, to do something else,
anything else but what he was set on doing. Why had I said I wanted a
conservatory if I wasn't willing to let him get on with it?

I'd had enough. I said I'd never asked him, it was all in his head. He
didn't answer. He said marriage was give and take, had I forgotten that?
And was it something called PMT I'd got? The fellows on the site said
their girlfriends got it and a real pain in the tit it was.

Of course that made me laugh too. No wonder he thought I was going mad.

I didn't think I could just walk out without explanation, so I went
upstairs and packed all my clothes, everything I had, into three
suitcases. I brought them downstairs and put them in the car. He was
still working, whistling happily. I said, I'm leaving you, Mike. I'm
going now. I've tried to tell you but you won't listen.

Don't be silly, he said.

I'm going to the Legion, I said. For the present. I don't want anything
from you. You can keep the -house. I don't want any money.

He thought I was joking, though I must have sounded grim.

Take the washing machine, he said, but leave me the car.

It's my car, I said.

It was. And in car world I needed it almost more than a -house. Mum was
about to open, putting out nuts on the bar top and mince pies because it
was nearly Christmas. She wasn't pleased to see me, she didn't exactly
make me welcome but there wasn't any question of her saying no. I'd
never lived there, I was married before she took the Legion on, so I put
my cases in one of the spare bedrooms, the one at the back with its
windows looking across the fields. Sitting on the bed I thought, what a
lot I'll have to tell Stella. I could tell Stella about Ned and somehow
I knew she'd understand where Philippa hadn't understood. And then I
remembered Stella was dead. I started to cry and I couldn't stop, though
I wasn't crying for me but for Stella that I was never going to see
again and never talk to.

Her funeral was on the Wednesday. We all went, Lena and Stanley, Sharon
and Pauline and me. The florist had got my order wrong on two counts.
She'd made the wreath with red and pink flowers and put In loving memory
on the card. I minded about the words being changed but red carnations
among the pink chrysanths didn't worry me. What could happen to me worse
than had already happened?

It was the first burial I'd ever been to. People nearly always choose to
be cremated, don't they? Stella had specially asked to be buried, and
her children, unlike so many, respected their mother's wishes. We sang
When the day of toil is done, When the race of life is run', and trooped
out through the rain to the graveyard. Marianne broke away from the
boyfriend, came up to me and took my arm, which pleased me, I don't know
why, because I could sense she did it more for her own support than
mine.

The grave was a deep pit lined with synthetic green stuff on to which
the rain pattered. In the distance I could hear winter thunder rumbling.
The vicar said all those things about ashes to ashes and dust to dust
and a woman that I think was Priscilla Newland threw a handful of earth
on to the coffin. Marianne didn't throw earth and nor did Richard. They
asked us back to the hotel for a glass of sherry but Lena said with a
bright smile, No, thank you very much, duty calls, and that went for all
of us.

Carolyn had been holding the fort, as Lena put it, back at Middleton
Hall and she'd received our new resident. That was worse than the
funeral, nearly as bad as seeing Stella die, finding a newcomer in her
room. It was a man, which no doubt pleased Sharon. He's eighty-one, an
ex-Brigadier, former Master of Foxhounds and reader of books on World
War II. I think he's brought his whole library with him. What kind of a
family must he come from that he's moved into a residential home just
before Christmas? One thing I could be sure of, he doesn't care for Lena
calling him Tommy.

I was late leaving and didn't get back to the Legion till six. Mike was
in the bar with an Abbot in front of him. As soon as he saw me he began
haranguing me. When was I coming back? OK, I'd made my point but the
joke was over now and it was time I came home. He'd meant to finish the
conservatory by Christmas but how could he when I had him down at the
Legion arguing every night?

If I'd ever thought in the past how it would be if I left my husband,
the last thing to come to mind would have been that he'd fail to take my
departure seriously. To this minute I don't know if it was cunning on
his part that made him adopt that line, or if he just didn't understand;
if he couldn't take it in because the idea that I could actually
contemplate leaving him was incredible.

It's difficult to handle, that attitchude. I didn't know what to do. I
went upstairs to my room, but he came after me and stood outside banging
on the door and telling me to stop my nonsense, to put my coat on and
give him the car keys and he'd drive me home. It had been the same the
night before and the night before that, only he'd varied it on the
Monday by saying he was sick of waiting to get his tea cooked and on the
Tchewsday by asking me if I didn't want to see what the floor looked
like now he'd got the -tiles down.

There's nowhere to hide in a pub. I'd tried going round to Janis the
evening before but he'd followed me and banged on her door. So I went
out in the car. It was the only thing I could do and not be followed.

I drove around for half an hour, not knowing where to go, sitting in a
lay-by for a while until a man passing me in a van hooted and flashed up
his lights. You can drive forty miles in this countryside and use up a
lot of petrol and still only waste an hour. There was only one place to
go and I went there. I drove up the wet and muddy -track, parked the car
and sat there in the dark for ten minutes before I went in.

Stella was dead and I had no business to be at her -house any more. Once
I was inside I realized that what I was feeling was surprise -surprise
that the lights weren't blazing and Richard and Marianne in here
discovering the place for the first time, marvelling, wondering why
their mother kept her secret for so long. But not on the day of her
funeral. No, I could understand that. They would come tomorrow.

I lit the candles and took one upstairs with me to light my way while I
fetched the oil stove. This would be my last visit to Molucca. Down in
the living room I had no sense of waiting for Ned to come. I had only
once waited here for him, I had always been up in the bedroom, watching
from the window, and we'd seldom if ever set foot in this room together.
The cold was just the same, though, the cold that had been the most
memorable thing about those last days of my love affair and could serve
as its symbol. I sat on the floor up against the heater, holding my
hands half an inch from its black-painted cylinder. Why can't I be angry
with him, I thought, why can't I hate him? Why is it I can only ask over
and over, why, why, why?

The -house began to fill with the smell of oil. Pink paraffin isn't
supposed to smell but the truth is it smells just a bit less than the
blue kind. Another thing to remind me of my love. One day, I thought,
when I have a -house of my own, I'll have any kind of heating but oil, I
won't even have an oil tank in my garden.

There's nothing in the -house or the garden, Stella had said, she'd made
them write it down for me. Sitting on the floor, warming my hands, I
tried to think what it meant, but I got nowhere. The truth was I could
think of nothing and no one but Ned, though imagining him in that
holiday place skiing, laughing with Jane and Hannah, the sharp
snowflakes glittering on his hair, was the bitterest pain. I thought of
him unwillingly, because I couldn't help it.

When it was nearly ten I wound down the heater wick and blew out the
candles. I had to drive back the way I'd always driven when I was happy,
when we'd made love and my mouth felt soft from Ned's kisses and my skin
warm. I drove past the -house he'd rented, its windows deeply dark.
Inside the Legion it was very noisy and the air unbreathable with smoke.
Mum said Mike had given up on me at nine-fifteen and taken himself back
to Chandler Gardens.

Dennis was the same, she said, speaking of her second husband. Round
here night after night, couldn't let things be, I'd find him in the bar
regular as clockwork and I was married to Ron before it stopped.

That wasn't you, Diane, said Len, that was the beer he come for.

But, as it happened, I didn't see Mike again till Christmas Eve. He
walked in the minute Mum opened at ten-thirty, said he was going to his
parents for Christmas unless I'd changed my mind and was seeing sense at
last, and this letter had come for me. He held it out at arm's length as
if it smelt.

You won't believe anyone can be such a fool but I thought it was from
Ned. I don't get many letters. Who is there to write to me? All my
friends and relations live round here. Junk mail comes and bills come,
but not letters and hardly any postcards. So I thought it must be from
Ned. The blood went into my face and my heart jumped and I thought, he
wouldn't do to me what he did to Linda Owen, he loves me, how could I
doubt him, he can explain it all, oh, forgive me, Ned ... How can you
think all those things in the instant it takes to receive an envelope
into your hand from another hand? You can.

You can dream too of everything being made well again, of love
strengthened, mistakes set right, misunderstandings explained, all in a
tiny flashing moment.

The postmark was Diss. The address was typed and so was the name, Misses
G. Warner. I felt the sun go in. That was just what it was like, the
light put out and the dull grey weather coming back.

Have a good Christmas, I said to Mike. Tell your parents we've split up.

Tell them I'm getting a psychiatrist to see to you, he said.

I went upstairs. I took the letter over to the window to open it and
catch some of the gloomy light. It was from a firm of solicitors in Diss
and started Dear Misses Warner. I couldn't take it in at first, it
didn't seem to make sense. What was that sentence doing in there, those
old-fashioned words I'd first read aloud to Stella back in August? The
freehold property known as Molucca and sitchuate in Thelmarsh in the
County of Norfolk. I'd repeated that line as we stood upstairs at
Middleton Hall, looking across the fields, corn-green and goose-white
and blonde like cropped hair. I read it again and at once all was clear.

Stella had left me her -house.

Marianne and Richard might have been expected to mind but it was Lena
who minded. How she found out I don't know. I didn't tell her. I was
going to say that you can't keep secrets in a place like this and then I
remember how successfully Stella had kept hers.

It was on the 2nd of January, a Monday, the day everyone has off but not
carers in residential homes. The minute I got in Lena sent Carolyn to
fetch me to the office.

She was wearing a new -track suit, a Christmas present from Stanley I
guessed, purple velour with a yellow cardigan over it. There was a dog
sitting on iether side of her, each of them brainwashed to be as fierce
as a labrador can. Dobermanns or Rottweilers would have been more her
kind of dog. Unfortunately for Lena the one called Ben started thumping
his tail the moment I came in.

Congratulations, she said. Not that it took much effort, did it?

Like taking Yorkie bar from a retard, that must have been. A little kiss
here, a little bit of hand-holding there, and lo and behold you're a
woman of property.

I didn't say anything. I didn't mention Edith and Maud, the latter-day
saint and the Bible readings. Jobs are hard to come by and I need mine.

It's the son and daughter I pity, said Lena. Their nest egg they must
have been counting on snatched away by a ... by a ... Cuckoo, I wanted
to say but didn't.

A predator, said Lena. I don't think she knows what it means. That
charming Doctor Newland. I expect he and his sister will bring a lawsuit
to upset the will. She gets these expressions from American cop shows.
It's only what anyone would do in their place. I shall be happy to
testify old lady Newland went wobbly months ago.

You must do as you think best, I said.

One of the first things I'd done after I'd got that letter was contact
Richard and tell him I couldn't take the -house. I phoned Marianne and
told her I couldn't take it. They both insisted. They said no one would
live in it if I wouldn't. They didn't want it. What could it mean to
them when they hadn't even known their mother owned it?

I don't suppose I'll ever see the place, Richard said, unless you invite
me round for a cup of tea.

It was to the solicitors he and Stella had been that day when she
dressed up and forced herself to go in his car. She'd told him she
wanted to make provision for me in her will but not what she'd be
leaving me. They were surprised about the -house, he and Marianne,
probably a lot more surprised than they let me see. Innocent people who
have led blameless lives don't own secret -houses. They must have
wondered, they must have been afraid to find out.

I stood in front of Lena, waiting for her to sack me. One of the dogs
got up, came over and started licking my hand.

Sam, she said, stop that! Her eyes lighted on me and then were cast up
to the ceiling. Well, don't stand there, she said. Tommy's waiting for
his breakfast. Call him sir, why don't you, and maybe he'll put you down
in his will for all his war memoirs.

That was that. Not another word. It was my day off on Wednesday and I
moved in. Marianne and Richard knew I'd nowhere to go, you see, and if
the family approved the solicitors had no objection. Mum promised not to
tell Mike where I was. Of course there isn't a chance of keeping my new
address dark for long, not with Len knowing it and Janis knowing it,
niether of them being much renowned for discretion. Philippa would let
herself be tortured, like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man she said,
before she'd say a word.

The strangest thing was having the electricity turned on. I lit the
boiler and real hot water came out of the taps. I ordered coal and lit
fires in the fireplaces. But I couldn't sleep in that bedroom, though I
did try. The dream I had was of Ned lying beside me and holding me in
his arms, saying it was warm at last, why was it warm? I woke up to the
empty bed and in the morning I dragged it and the rest of the
furnitchure into one of the back bedrooms.

That magic day, the 3rd of January, when he'd be back from Interlaken,
was past and gone. I didn't fool myself he'd tried to phone me at home
and given up because I wasn't there. If you want someone you find her.

You phone her at work, you go to the -house where you used to meet, you
inquire at the pub her mother keeps. You don't just give up. You aren't
indifferent. Unless that's what you want, to get rid of her, as easily
and as straightforwardly as he'd got rid of me.

Under Stella's will I'd inherited not just the -house but all its
contents. Everything in it became mine. Did that include the red Ford
Anglia in the garige? The idea of consulting solicitors unnerved me, I'd
heard their charges could be astronomical, but Richard's advice was
free. I told him that according to his mother the car had once belonged
to Gillda Brent. He traced it through the car tax office and found the
owner or keeper I believe they call it registered as Misses Gwendoline
Tyzark.

I can just remember her, he said. Marianne liked her but I didn't.

She frightened me. For some reason I confused her with Cruella de Ville
in A Hundred and One Dalmatians. I even thought she'd want to make me
into a fur coat.

So whose car is it now? I said.

Hers, I suppose.

Your mother said she was dead. Perhaps the car had better just stay
there for the time being.

He suggested I advertise for her in the papers and I did phone one of
them to ask what it would cost. Forty or fifty pounds, they said. I
didn't have that kind of money, money was very tight for me, and the
chances are no one would answer the advertisment anyway. But I thought
about Gillda a lot. It was a kind of game for me too, not a Killing
Gillda but a Keeping Gillda Alive, the purpose being to distract my
mind.

That of course wasn't really possible. When you've loved someone and
lost him the way I'd loved and lost Ned it's not just love and sorrow
that fill your mind but a terrible bitterness and resentment. A sort of
indignation, maybe outrage is the better word, that anyone could deceive
you so and delude you so, tell you such lies, debase you so.

For if I once said that Ned made me a good self-image with his love,
what did that do to me when I knew he'd never loved me? He'd just used
me to feed a sort of sickness he has that makes him want women to love
him, any women, so long as they're nice to look at and young, so long as
they'll keep telling him they love him and listen when he says the same
to them. All the things Mum said and Philippa implied about him wanting
me for my looks and my body were true. And if they hadn't said anything
about him being a love fetishist that was because they didn't know
someone could be.

So if I wasn't to go mad or have a breakdown I had to have something
else to turn my mind to. It was as if I had developed a switch in my
brain that I pushed down when my thoughts went to Ned. It switched off
Ned and switched on Gillda. Or that was the idea. It didn't always work,
it often didn't work, or it worked for a while and then Ned and what
he'd done by-passed the switch, came back and drove everything else
away.

But when I was in Gillda mode, as people who know about technology might
say, I thought about her leaving Alan for another man, which is what
some people said she'd done, and the more I thought of it the more
peculiar it seemed. For Stella had never mentioned any other man in
Gillda's life apart from general admirers. Had some man suddenly come
along and swept her away? Stranger things have happened but I found it
hard to believe. And if she had gone away with a lover to France, surely
that would have been just what Stella and Alan had wished for.

In that case there would have been no problem about divorce and no
threat from Gillda if they lived together. They would have married
eventually.

Not only had that not happened, but Stella and Alan had stopped seeing
each other. Marianne said her mother's depression, her reluctance to
drive a car, her handing over of everything in the -household to Aagot,
had already been going on for some time by the autumn of 1970. That
sounded as if she'd broken things off with Alan in the summer, even in
the August which was the date she'd originally told me Gillda had died.

It was obvious to me that her unhappiness dated not from anything to do
with Rex but from her break with Alan.

But where was Gillda? Dead, Stella said. There was no rehcord of her
death. Can anyone die and there exist no rehcord of her death? I could
think of one way that could happen. It came to me in the night. I was in
bed in the bigger of the back bedrooms at Molucca, asleep but suddenly
awake for no apparent reason, my first conscious thought for Ned, as it
always is, though I pray it won't always be. I operated my switch into
Gillda mode and immediately those last words of Stella's came into my
head: There is nothing in the -house or the garden. They had been
meaningless, those words, but they weren't now. Their significance leapt
at me, crystal-clear.

It was spring by then and getting light early. I got up and looked out
of the window across the fen. The trees and the underbrush weren't yet
green but golden-brown with new buds, the dogwood stems crimson, the
willows pale yellow. An unearthly pre-sunrise light lay on the fen, the
blue pearl light of dawn. The first birds had started, the sounds they
make more like a conversation than a song. I drew my gaze back and back
until I was looking down into the garden, for garden it was by then, no
longer a wilderness indistinguishable from the fen which over the years
had crept in and embraced it. From the first weekend of living there I'd
worked in the garden, clearing, digging, planting.

That too had been a way of taking my mind from Ned.

By March it was a garden again, with a proper lawn and flower beds and a
path. I understood what Stella's words meant: that Gillda was dead but
her body was not buried in the garden here nor concealed somewhere in
the -house, under a floor, in the back of a cupboard. If that is what
the message meant, it could only have meant one thing. Why had Stella
thought I'd anticipate anything so monstrous? Because of the Killing
Gillda Tease I might have thought it more than just a game?

Dying, she recalled of course that she had left Molucca to me, and her
first need was to reassure me that I could live there without fear. And
it was possible I'd have come to think that way if not told otherwise,
would have fancied bones beneath the soil that I worked on with my hands
or some charnel thing packaged and bundled, poked into a cellar hole.

Knowing me then, Stella would have expected an even more horrid effect
on me, that I'd see her -house as haunted and sense Gillda's ghostly
presence. She was not to foretell the future and understand how my
superstitions were to desert me and along with them all those old
beliefs in the supernatural that I'd grown up with, ghosts and spells,
omens and magic. For they've gone, or I've lost them just as some
churchgoers lose their faith. Instead of protecting me as they promised
they'd let me down and I lacked the Christian's consolation of saying my
god knew best, he moved in a mysterious way, for my god was no more than
blue clothes and ladybirds and four-leaved clovers.

But later that day, or maybe that week, I did go all over Molucca inside
and out, -searching for signs and clues, for evidence of Gillda's fate.
Some clothes still remained in the wardrobe. That was the single piece
of furnitchure not removed from the bedroom Ned and I had used. For one
thing it was too heavy and for another I didn't know what to do with
Stella's clothes, the two dressing-gowns, the summer dresses, the
beautiful bridal dress with the smut marks and the stains and the burnt
hem, that silvery-blue over-feminine raincoat. I tried the pockets but
Stella wasn't a woman to put things in pockets. She was not a woman to
write things down iether. If they exchanged love letters, those two,
they burned them once read.

I looked through all the books but found only one piece of paper
inserted among pages. Tucked between the flyleaf and the cover of
Figaro's Great Adventure was a shopping list and the writing might have
been Stella's or it might have been Alan's. I had no way of knowing.

Envelopes, matches, gin, one of them had written, to-martoes, lettuce,
lamb chops, Weetabix. That didn't interest me but the children's book
did. I'd forgotten how lovely Alan Tyzark's drawings were. I know
nothing about art and I can't describe anything from a technical point
of view, but they looked to me like the nicest photographs you could
imagine yet with that small something more, a grace or spirit that the
camera can't give, a colour and a texture prettier than life. And I
thought to myself that the man who could make those drawings, so tender
and so delightful, and my Stella who was gentleness itself, could never
have done the terrible thing I sometimes suspected, were incapable of
any terrible thing at all.

I began to think I was keeping Gillda's memory alive solely for my own
distraction and the time had come to bury her as perhaps she had never
actually been buried. Then, some time after my thirty-third birthday in
April, and Richard's thirty-third birthday ten days earlier he took me
out to dinner to celebrate both I was looking through the TV listings in
the paper and saw Ned's name and Gillda's side by side.

It frightened me, that conjunction. There seemed to me, for all my
renouncing of occult things, something almost devilish in it. And I
couldn't make out what it could be, this pro-gramme advertised as an
exploration of a film star's vanishing into thin air. How could he know?
If, as it seemed to be, this was Ned's own brainchild, where had the
idea come from and what had attracted him to it? Then I remembered. I
had. It had come from me. Once, in this -house, on a shivery evening of
love and icy hands and gooseflesh, he had told me of the re-search he
had done for me and used the phrase which is the name of a film and
perhaps a book too for all I know, the phrase that had become the title
of his production, The Lady Vanishes.

I watched it. As I've said, I'd left our TV to Mike. When I wanted to
watch something I went to Philippa or Janis. That evening I saw not
having a TV as my excuse for not watching Ned's pro-gramme but I
couldn't hold out, I couldn't think of anything else all day, all the
time I was giving Arthur his bath and cutting Tommy's nails and reading
to Gracie I was thinking of that pro-gramme. Not because of Gillda, or
only a little because of her. The reason for my preoccupation was pretty
pathetic. I thought there was a chance of seeing Ned. I thought he might
have done one of the interviews himself or be there to introdjuce it or
speak the commentary. Even Ned doing a voice-over would be something,
just to hear his voice again.

Stchupid, wasn't it? Stchupid and pathetic to want to see him and hear
him after what he'd done to me. I kept telling myself that and I held
out all day, I wouldn't watch it, I'd banish it from my mind, I'd press
the Gillda switch. The trouble was, when I did that, it brought me back
to the pro-gramme because it was as much hers as his. So in the end I
gave in, phoned Philippa and said could I come round and watch it with
her.

I picked her rather than Janis not only because she's my friend but
because if I'd gone to Janis's it might have got back to Mum, which I
didn't want. Mum's been frightening in her anger against Ned, like a
lioness whose cub's been hurt wantonly, and she's been tough with me
too, tearing me apart for being such a fool when she'd warned me over
and over. She wanted to put a spell on him and his family, something
done with a five-pointed star drawn inside a chalk circle. It wasn't my
anger but my laughter that stopped her, my laughter that turned suddenly
to a storm of tears.

I'd rather have watched the pro-gramme alone than in Philippa's company,
than in anyone's company, but you can't ask someone whose -house you're
in if they'd mind leaving you on your own. And in the event Ned didn't
appear, he was only there in the credit titles, just a name that used to
make magic and now made misery and a kind of painful embarrassment.

But at the start I didn't know whether he'd appear or not and I
suffered, fidgeting and nervous, wondering what Philippa must think of
me, hoping I'd be able to stop myself gasping or crying out if his face
were suddenly to fill the screen.

It was only later, long after it was all over and I was back at Molucca,
that I was able to think about what I'd seen and assess it.

Ned, or Ned's team, had started from the standpoint that film stars who
were icons, I think that's what he called them, icons, could fade from
the public consciousness more easily than other famous people. Unless a
star was a Garbo or a Hepburn, or unless her films had become cult
movies, she could disappear without trace. That was what had happened to
Gillda Brent, born Gwendoline Brant.

The name Brant sounded foreign, maybe German, which wouldn't have been a
good idea in those days, so Brent she became. She had called herself
Gillda not after the Rita Hayworth film as many thought that wasn't made
till 1946 but after a character in an opera.

I knew some of that. The first surprise was when the commentator said
that Gillda's husband Alan Tyzark was dead. He had died two summers
before at his home in Tivetshall Saint Michael, Norfolk. It made me
shiver to think he'd still been living there after all those years, yet
he and Stella had never met. Had she known he was dead? I asked myself
if she'd begun to tell me her story because she knew he was dead,
someone had told her or she'd read a death announcement. Another
discovery, another surprise if you like, was that Saint Michael's Farm
stood empty, couldn't pass to anyone else, even supposing there was
anyone, couldn't be sold or even let, for Gillda Brent appeared to be
still alive. At any rate no rehcord of her death existed in this country
or in France, where rumour said she'd gone.

Her agent had tried in vain to get in touch with her in 1972 and again
in 1976. A cousin in India and the friend in France had written to her
over the years but received no replies to their letters. Saint Michael's
Farm was an isolated place, its nearest neighbour a cottage half a mile
down the road. An interviewer had talked to the people from the cottage,
a couple who'd lived there for thirty years. They used to see Gillda
Brent driving her red Ford car along the lanes, the woman spoke to her
once when she went to Saint Michael's Farm collecting for the Red Cross,
but they hadn't seen her since, they hadn't seen her for twenty years,
maybe more than that. The people in the village said she'd gone off with
another man, and the post mistress claimed to have that from the
-horse's mouth, Gillda's own husband. Whatever the truth of it, Gillda
had vanished, as if absorbed into the desolate countryside where she had
lived.

They'd been very thorough in their re-searches, even finding the
portrait Alan had painted for The Wife's Story that was the occasion of
him meeting Gillda. It was still hanging on a wall in a room in Soho,
though the offices were now owned by a company that made television
commercials. They showed it on the screen, Gillda in a green evening
gown, looking very young. No one said what had happened to the nude, it
wasn't mentioned.

I didn't think much of that, Philippa said when the pro-gramme was over.
I reckon I could have made a better job of it if I'd had his education,
the bastard.

It's funny how people think it helps, calling someone you love names,
insulting them, just because they've hurt you. Still, it's loyal. It's
well-meant. I value my friends more now that I have no lover.

No doubt it was a silly thing to do but I drove over to Tivetshall Saint
Michael on my day off, just to have a look at the empty -house. On the
way there I had this feeling that perhaps a lot of other people would
have had the same idea from watching The Lady Vanishes and I'd find a
dozen cars parked in the lane and crowds with cameras scrambling to get
a look through the windows. But there was no one.

If you look on a map you'll see great empty spaces in this part of
Norfolk. The countryside is very deep there and the road between the
cottage and the farm thickly wooded. A long avenue runs up to the
-house, a straight sandy road with lime trees on iether side. I drove
through the open gateway, planning excuses to give to anyone who stopped
me, but no one did. The -house was just as it was in Ned's film but
shabbier and more dilapidated and wretched-looking. I remembered what
he'd once told me, that everything looks better in photographs,
everything looks better on television than in life, except maybe people.

No one had weeded the garden for years. The lawn had been cut, but by
someone who didn't care, you could tell that, someone who sat on the
mower and drove it round and round while smoking a cigarette and
listening to a Walkman. It was years and years since the -house had been
painted. The roof needed re-tiling. A drain pipe was hanging half off
the side wall. I looked through a window but what I saw inside made me
so sad I had to turn away. It was squalid in there, like the interior of
one of those junk shops that abound in the little towns round here, dull
brown furnitchure, mostly broken or scarred, rucked-up carpets, pictures
and mirrors stacked against the walls, ugly ornaments, their colours
grimed by an accumulation of dust.

The effect was depressing, yet it was a beautiful day, the sun shining,
the sky a soft blue and the hedges green with new leaves on the quick
thorn Whatever time and neglect had done to Saint Michael's Farm they
hadn't been able to destroy the narcissi that nodded in the long grass
or stop the cherry trees breaking into white blossom. From the woods I
could hear the mechanical thrumming a woodpecker makes when he bores his
beak into the bark of a pine tree, drilling for insects. It came back to
me then, the fanciful theory that it was this countryside which had
absorbed Gillda and hidden her away for ever.

It was soon after the film and my visit to Saint Michael's Farm that
Mike wrote to me, asking for a divorce. I was relieved, I never thought
he would, he'd said so many times and so determinedly that he'd never
want a divorce, and I feared I'd have to wait five years before being
free. But now he wants to be divorced on grounds of irretrievable
breakdown, as soon as we've been apart for two years.

He's met a woman he knows can make hint happy as I never could. Mum had
told me all about that, though I could scarcely believe it, because it
was no one new or exciting but only Jill Baleham's niece, Angie Green,
the one who got pregnant though she was on the pill. She's moved in with
him, Janis said, her and the baby, and they have all their meals on an
Ikea table in the conservatory. Well, I hope they'll be happy, I don't
wish him any harm.

The worst pain of losing Ned, and the way of losing him, is beginning to
go away now. Sadness is still there and loneliness but the knife whose
point used to go in and make me gasp at the pain, that's withheld and
just grazes the surface. I still think of him all the time but I no
longer cry in the night the way I told Philippa I must be alone to do.

Some of the things Linda Owen told me about have helped. If I know he
has this need to be loved and a need of his own at least to pretend
love, my own humiliation is less bad. He may have deceived me but he
deceived himself too. He was never one of those who tell lies to ensnare
a woman. Perhaps he told no lies at all, for when he said those things
he thought they were true. I try to think of him as someone with a
sickness, an invisible illness, that I was able to heal for a little
while. And though he lives in my mind, his face imprinted there and his
words rehcorded, I know it won't always be so. I can imagine a time
coming when minutes will pass by and then hours when I don't think of
him, when the words he said to me, such as wanting me for a lifetime and
loving me whatever I said or did, won't come back to me. Maybe the time
will even come when I'll be able to say, I haven't thought of him at all
since yesterday.

Meanwhile I have to make myself a life. Middleton Hall is a dead end,
there's no future in being a care assistant, and the pay is worse than
an agricultural worker's. It hardly mattered when I thought I'd give up
work to have children, but that isn't going to happen now, or not as far
as I can see or imagine, so I've decided to take a nurse's training and
become a real State Registered Nurse, not one of those half-mesheres. In
fact, I've applied and been accepted. I'm starting in September.

It was a wonderful thing Stella did in leaving me this -house. Finding
accommodation, that worries so many people, is one problem I don't have.
And it's through her that I know Richard, who has been and is being a
true friend to me. Philippa visits, though she finds it hard being
deprived of the telly, so mostly I go to her. Mum has been good to me
and so have Nan and Janis, treating me like a poor wounded thing who can
be nursed back to health with kindness and white magic.

Linda Owen drops in sometimes to take me to the pub, the Swan at
Breckenhall, not the Legion, and we go out drinking like a couple of the
boys. We talk about cars like men do and shopping and running expenses
when you own your own -house but we never talk about Ned, that subject
is taboo. My year with him has taught me a valuable thing though, that
it's no use trying to make yourself into something for other people. If
you do that it has to be for yourself. I'm ashamed of myself when I
remember studying the encyclopedia and looking up words in Chambers
Dictionary, not to mention learning about classical music, all to
impress Ned, and maybe that's why I haven't played a single one of those
tapes Stella made and passed on to me along with the player.

She was insistent I take her player, as if she hadn't already done
enough to provide for me. If I'd known beforehand I'd have explained to
her that I didn't need it, I've got a Walkman that I've had for years,
though never used much. But when you're alone a lot, as I am, you need
to hear voices or music, you need something to break the silence or you
start wondering if your ears still work.

These summer evenings I walk in the fen a lot, taking the path that
starts at my garden gate and winds among the willows and the alders and
meadowsweet, passes into clearings where water lies and reeds grow, and
back again into the quiet woodland. I never see a soul, no one goes
there, it is all so silent, so still, that you could hear a water beetle
skim the surface of a pool. It was there, one evening last week, that I
saw a swallowtail.

Another item in my inheritance was Stella's butterfly book. I looked it
up and found that it's the only one of that species in Britain with
tails suspended from its lower wings. Wonderful wings they were, yellow
and black and red in patterns on a wide span. It alighted on a flower of
the fumitory and stayed there, basking in the evening sun, its wings
spread, then fluttering a little before they fanned out again.

I'm a fool, I know, but I thought of Stella who so longed to see a
swallowtail and never would now and it made me start to cry. That was
when the silence of the fen began to trouble me and as I made my way
home I remembered people I'd seen walking about in Bury or Diss with
headsets on and a Walkman in their pocket, and I decided to try it.

So next day, and that was the day before yesterday, I bought myself a
pack of batteries on the way home from work, put two in the Walkman, and
for the first time since she died had a proper look at Stella's tapes.
For some reason I thought she'd rehcorded a lot, but she hadn't.

Eight out of the ten tapes are blank. The other two aren't labelled with
the titles of pieces of music, but wouldn't be much use to me if they
were, as the only pieces I know by name are Nessun Dorma and the Water
Music. Stella had simply printed Tape 1 and Tape 2 on their labels,
otherwise giving no clue to their content.

May as well start at the beginning, I thought, putting Tape 1

in the Walkman, though by then I was wishing I'd stretched my budget and
bought the Emmylou Harris Luxury Liner I'd seen in the battery shop. But
Stella's music would at least break the silence as I wandered through
the fen.

It was a very warm evening, utterly windless, and all about me was the
staleness of late summer, seed heads instead of flowers, tired leaves
hanging from unmoving branches, nettles worn out and stretched to six
feet in height but still capable of stinging. I suppose I was nervous
about starting the music, afraid of the sudden assault of something I
might not understand or appreciate breaking on my ears. I put my thumb
on the start button but I didn't press it until I was in the heart of
the fen. There, in a clearing, where drought had dried up the pools but
the grass was still green, cropped short by rabbits, I sat down on a
fallen log and pressed the Walkman button.

There was whirring and a sound like the waves of the -sea and then
Stella's voice, sweet and very clear. It gave me such a shock that
coldness passed right through me and broke on my skin in gooseflesh.

Stella's voice said, This is the first tape. The second follows. They
are both labelled.

I stopped it. I turned it off. After I'd taken a deep breath and
another, counted to ten, told myself to be sensible, I started it again.

This is the first tape. The second follows. They are both labelled.

Dear Genevieve, I am inclined to begin this as I would begin a letter,
but I am speaking, not writing. I have had plenty of practice in
speaking into this device. Does that surprise you? I think I have given
you a lot of surprises one way and another. Once you thought nothing had
ever happened to me, I could see it in your face, but now I feel that
maybe you will think too much has happened to me.

When we last talked, the very last time, you told me your wish was
coming true. Of course you meant you were going to be with the man you
love. You meant he was going to leave his home and join you. I'm glad
for you and I hope you're very happy now. I told you that in the end
Alan left Gillda to be with me. What I didn't say among so many other
things was that he didn't tell me this until we were together at
Molucca. We had come for a ten-day holiday while my children were away
and Gillda was, or was supposed to be, in France. Driving us to the
-house, he decided. We had talked and talked of it, on and on, for
months well, for years. He decided quite spontaneously, he said. One
minute, inside his head, he was going on holiday with me, the next he
was committed to me for life, never to be separated.

He told me so as we closed the front door behind us.

This is for ever. I'm never going back. I've left her.

I'd been going to prepare lunch for us, something light, sandwiches
probably, but suddenly niether of us felt we could eat. He put the
champagne in the fridge. That was the champagne you found, for we never
opened it. We should have drunk it warm, as it came from the car.

We kept falling into each other's arms, we were drunk on nothing. Then
he made us pink gins to celebrate while the champagne was cooling. We
danced ballroom dancing, Genevieve, do you know about that? we danced
with the glasses in our hands. We waltzed without music.

He said, Just before we went into that shop, I thought, what the hell am
I playing at? I'm not on holiday, I'm on life. I'm never going back. So
I bought the champagne. Mean of me, wasn't it? Not to discuss it with
you, not to ask, just to decide. Do you mind?

You knew me, I said. You know me. Why would I mind? It's what I've
always wanted.

So we waltzed some more. We tangoed from one end of the room to the
other and Alan sang When They Begin the Beguine'. He had given me
another drink, a glass of wine this time, when I heard the car.

It was a rare event, a car passing. A car coming up the drive was almost
unknown. By then we were sitting on the sofa with our arms round each
other. I stood up to see. I saw the piranha face before I saw Gillda. It
seemed to be charging me, that red body, that snarling mouth with bared
teeth in a scarlet face. But it didn't charge me. It stopped precisely
next to and parallel with Alan's grey Rover. We are a couple, it seemed
to say to me, we belong together, we shall always be side by side. I
made a little sound and put out my hand, feeling blindly behind me to
touch him.

One's first thought is to hide. There is no hiding, of course. If we had
thought of that, anticipated this, we would not have left the car there,
opened the windows, sat in this room together for anyone passing to see.
Hadn't we picked a -house with a garige to conceal a car if we needed
to? But we wanted to hide. I even said to him, Hide!

Alan didn't panic. I might have known he never would. He said, You mean,
hide you or hide the car, whichever is the easier, and he laughed. He
actually laughed. He said later that there was nothing else to do.

Gillda got out of the car and slammed the door as hard as she could.

It's strange what you notice. I noticed for the first time her unnatural
thinness, that she was bones and a hank of hair. She had green trousers
on and a black sleeveless blouse with a green chiffon scarf knotted
round her neck, black sunglasses that hid any expression, green sandals
with stacked heels. She stood there a moment, looking at the -house. I
don't think she could see us.

Alan said, We may as well open the door. She'll only break in if we
don't.

We both went to the door, but he went first. He opened it. She walked
in. She didn't say a word. She pushed past us and went upstairs. We
could hear her in the bedroom overhead, checking on our cases, I
suppose, looking for our night things. Alan got hold of my hand,
squeezed it and dropped it again. We didn't speak.

Gillda came downstairs and walked into the living room. We followed her.
She looked round her and round again, like someone who had come to buy
the place. She said to me, I suppose this -house is yours?

I nodded.

It wouldn't be his, would it? He never had two halfpennies to rub
together.

I found a voice. It's my -house. I bought it six years ago.

You mean that poor devil your late husband did. What did you do, save
the money up out of the -housekeeping?

That line came straight out of Lora Cartivright. Hearing it repeated
now, word for word, made me shiver.

Alan said, Why aren't you in France?

Good question, she said. I never intended to go to France. She looked at
me. I followed him here last week. I didn't know it was you. I mean, why
you, for God's sake? I thought he'd at least find someone presentable.
The coup de grace was planned for today. She sat down, looked at our
glasses. Give me a drink, please.

Alan went to the dining room and brought back gin and sherry and the
white burgundy and a bottle of tonic and more glasses on a tray. She
didn't say any more until she'd had a drink, quite a hefty drink. Alan
gave me a stiff gin and poured one for himself.

Gillda said to me, I thought you were my friend.

That too came from The Wife's Story, but was none the less true. What
could I say? Not that I was sorry, I wasn't sorry. But that statement of
hers, remark, reproach, whatever you like to call it, cut me to the bone
in spite of having been written by a scriptwriter long ago. I shrugged,
I shook my head. She turned to Alan.

Why her? Why not a young girl? She's nearly as old as me and God knows
she looks more.

It didn't require an answer. It was said to cause pain. Probably it too
was from a film, but one I hadn't seen. She began to talk then. I can
remember much of it, though not all, but I shan't repeat it. What would
be the point? She held out her glass for more gin and Alan re-filled it
and poured more for both of us. We were all drinking while we talked,
drinking as I at least had never drunk before.

But, you know, the absurd thing was that there wasn't much she could
say, there was very little with which to threaten us. She tried. She
told Alan she would never divorce him, that would make things too easy
for both of us. She would tell Marianne and Richard what I was and what
we had done, and tell our friends and neighbours, Priscilla and Jeremy
and other relatives. More than that, she would bring an action against
me for enticement. I always wondered how she even knew such a thing was
possible, or had once been possible.

I wish you'd take off those glasses, Alan said.

She took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were red, and I mean not just the
eyelids, her eyes were bloodshot, the whites scarlet round those blue
irises. She looked like one of those photographs where the flash has
turned the subject's eyes red and staring. Alan lined up three
wineglasses on the tray and filled them with the white burgundy. I
couldn't have drunk any more gin but I could drink that.

And yet the worst of it was over. At first it had been a shock,
stunning, appalling. Now that she was there and talking, uttering
threats that seemed to me empty enough, wasn't it even for the best that
she had found out? I didn't put this into words, not even in my mind,
but that was the general impression I had, the way I tended to feel. I
felt hope. Yes, I did. Of course it was partly djue to the drink, it was
euphoria, but when Gillda began to insult me, calling me stchupid and
nai've and ignorant, an underhand schemer like a schoolgirl who is also
a sneak, when she asked Alan what on earth he saw in me, I didn't mind,
I knew it would make him despise her and love me more. I had absolute
faith in his loyalty and his love. And I was right to have. That wasn't
misplaced.

Alan said, She was a schoolgirl. And then, She was at school with me.

She put her hand up to her face. I don't understand, she said and she
went a dark red colour.

It came out then. She had never known and it made her angrier than
anything else. The obvious things are not the worst betrayals. Perhaps
that was how she saw it, his knowing me before he knew her, my knowing
things about him she could never know. As her anger mounted she began to
shout, finally to scream and while she screamed to grab and hurl
everything within reach. She broke two glasses against the wall. She
flung the empty wine bottle and it went sailing through the open window
and hit the bonnet of Alan's car. Alan watched her, keeping out of the
line of fire, but doing nothing to stop her. He knew her rages, that
they burnt themselves out quite quickly, dissolving in tears.

A lot of our small ornaments got broken that afternoon. There's probably
still a dent in the wall where Gillda threw a bowl at it. That was the
last thing she threw before she started to weep and sob. I don't know
what Alan felt. I felt the most terrible guilt. For the first time in my
life I wanted to put my arms round Gillda and comfort her. It would have
been or have seemed the height of cynical hypocrisy. But it didn't
change my feelings towards him. I wanted him for myself, for ever, for
my husband, to be a father to Richard, for everything.

I must stop now and rest before continuing. I may not be able to do any
more until tomorrow.

We all remained sitting where we were. The gin bottle was empty. After a
moment or two Alan got up and went to the dining room. He came back with
whisky. There was no more gin. I had never told him what to do or what
not to do, I had never said to him, don't do that, don't have any more
to drink, and I didn't say it then. I trusted him. I thought he knew
best in every sitchuation. If he needed another drink, he needed it, he
knew best. I put my hand over my own glass. He half-filled his. We had
all been chain-smoking. The two ashtrays were piled high with butts.

Gillda stopped crying. It was always like that, as if she had cried all
the tears she had. Alan had never said he was sorry or that he would do
his best to make things easier for her and I understood that he was
offering her no more to drink because she would have to drive home. I
have said I felt hope and now I was feeling almost happy, I was pleased
with the way things had gone. I won't say God forgive me for feeling
like that because I have been punished for it, or for something, for
everything. I have been punished for twenty-four years.

It was a tremendous relief that I felt when Gillda got up and said she
was going. Then she said to Alan, I want you to come with me, please.

It was as if she had forgotten all those threats, the separation, the
enticement. She was taking him back with her, to forget, to start
afresh.

I shall never speak to you again, she said to me, that goes without
saying.

I nodded, accepting.

I'm not coming with you, Gillda, Alan said. I've left you. I'm with
Stella now. One day I'm going to marry Stella.

She ignored that. You've drunk yourself into a stchupor, haven't you?
she said. Just so that you couldn't drive.

Perhaps he had. He persuaded her to leave. After a storm such as she had
been through she was usually quite meek, he could make her do what he
wanted. We had eighty cigarettes when we first arrived at the -house, he
and I, and eight or nine were left in the second packet. He lit one for
her, gave her the rest. I could tell he had drunk too much but only by
the faint slurring of his speech. He said, I'm not coming now, Gillda,
but I will come. I'll come to you later but Stella must come with me. I
will never again be separated from Stella. Do you understand that?

She didn't answer. It sounds absurd but we both went outside with her.

We were like a married couple in our own home seeing a guest off the
premises. On the doorstep, where you say a mountain ash now grows, on
the doorstep which was covered with broken glass and china, she turned
to me, gathered saliva in her mouth and spat. Her spittle struck me on
the cheek and ran down my face.

Who am I to make a fuss? Who am I to say I hadn't deserved that? At the
time it horrified me. I cried out. I shrank away from her, gasping. A
fool, wasn't I? I had led too sheltered a life. What had ever happened
to me but finding Charmian Fry's body? Gillda had been right when she
called me innocent, when she called me little thing'.

Alan took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped my face. He did a
strange thing, he did what my own mother used to do when I was a child,
licked the handkerchief and wiped my cheek. I saw it as a symbol. How
many people would you do such a thing as that for?

Gillda went to her car. I stayed where I was, my face feeling as if it
had been splashed with poison, Alan's kind action no antidote. He took a
few steps towards her car. She got into the driver's -seat, put in the
ignition key. And then, oh then, it happened, the beginning of the
terror, the thing that opened the way to all the next events. Or,
rather, did not happen, for Gillda's car wouldn't start. She turned the
key and pressed down the accelerator, over and over, too many times, and
it wouldn't start.

I don't know why. The heat? The age of the car? The battery was flat,
though I didn't know that then. The car had brought her to Molucca and
then, while she was inside, the battery had died.

Alan tried to start the car and failed as she had failed. I stood on the
doorstep, watching. It was half past four in the afternoon. All that
time we had been in the -house, listening to Gillda, not defending
ourselves, drinking. The hours had passed and in that time the blue sky
had become overcast with smoke. Beyond the fields on the other side of
the road I could see a black column of smoke streaming upwards.

It was hotter than ever. Alan got out of the car.

It's not going to start, he said. I'll drive you home and we'll phone
someone to see to your car. He turned to look at me. Stella comes too.

No, she said.

Stella comes too. You can walk, if you prefer. It's only eight miles.

Put her in the back, said Gillda. I'm your wife. I go in the front.

I said that of course I would sit in the back. It made no difference to
me. That wasn't true, it did make a difference, it always had when the
three of us went anywhere together, Gillda beside Alan, I in the back,
but I told myself it was the last time. In future I would always sit
beside him.

My mouth was dry. I went out to the kitchen and I drank some water.

Vanity remains, stays alive almost to the end, and I looked at my face
in the mirror, patted my hair, put on more lipstick. That word she had
used to me, presentable', that rankled. We would do our daughters a
service if we brought them up not to care how they looked, if we broke
all the mirrors, yet I brought my daughter up to be as vain as I. We
locked up the -house. I got into the back of the car and Gillda into the
front, into the passenger -seat, the way it always was. There were no
-seat-belts in those days, or rather, there were, some cars had them,
but their use was not compulsory. It was more than ten years later
before you had to wear a -seat-belt by law.

Drunk driving wasn't looked on the way it is now. I remember Jeremy
going to Sweden on business and coming back with tales of people afraid
to have a single glass of wine before driving, of someone he'd met whose
brother-in-law had gone to prison, or a labour camp, for driving over
the limit. As far as we were concerned, we thought we were safe to drink
as much as we wanted so long as we didn't have an accident.

John Browning boasted that he had once driven all the way to
Peterborough with one eye shut because he'd drunk so much he had double
vision. It didn't worry me that Alan would be driving after drinking
half a bottle of gin and some whisky as well as wine, I didn't think
about it.

I suppose I would have said I had more important things to think of.

Almost at once, within half a mile, we had driven into the kind of
atmosphere there must have been in industrial towns on hot days in the
last century. And this was the countryside in 1970. It was caused
through stubble burning but for a while we couldn't see any smoke. We
couldn't see the sky iether, for the heavy overcast. A dense hot fog
hung, still and brooding, over the fields and woods. The air smelt like
a smoke-filled room.

There was no traffic. That's not quite true. Of course there was some,
but I think we passed no more than one car before the accident happened.
Alan was driving very fast. That is, he was probably driving at no more
than fifty miles an hour but that's fast on narrow roads that run
straight for a quarter of a mile and then inexplicably turn a
right-angled bend. He wanted to get Gillda home fast, he wanted to be
rid of Gillda. As we passed through Curton he had to slow down a little.
In the heat and under the choking smoke its inhabitants seemed all
asleep. I didn't notice the garige at the end of the village street,
Curton Cars Ltd, the last building in the street. I noticed nothing but
Alan and Gillda sitting side by side and the countryside travelling
past, hazy, flat, still.

As soon as Curton was left behind he speeded up again. No one spoke have
I said that? We sat in silence. No one had spoken since Gillda said she
was Alan's wife and I was to go in the back and I'd said I would. I
remember her long blondish hair with the silver threads in it hanging
over the back of the passenger -seat, and the scarf she wore showing a
harsh emerald green between the strands. I remember watching Alan's
hands on the steering wheel. I wanted him to touch me, I ached for his
touch. It was hours and hours, before Gillda came, since I had felt his
hand on me, his mouth on my skin. We were never together without
touching and the deprivation made me feel rejected and hungry.

He drove very fast round those bends and faster on those long straights.
The car bounced over a humpbacked bridge that crossed a stream and
Gillda gave a thin shriek. He must have been driving at more than fifty
when the smoke rolled across the road in front of us. It came suddenly,
a dense black cloud, almost horizontal, pouring over the hedge,
engulfing the car.

Have you ever experienced that? Do you know what it's like? From inside
a car you rely entirely on sight, on the visible world, and when it's
taken away by a shattered windscreen or a sheet of cardboard blown
against the glass you're as blind as if your corneas had gone.

That cloud blinded us. It blinded Alan. It blanked out the windscreen as
surely as a coat of grey paint. I felt him flinch, I felt the -seat in
front of me jerk, and the reflex of his foot slamming the brake, the car
leaping and buckling. But I don't remember the crash itself, only the
bang, the huge explosion that wasn't in fact an explosion but the noise
of violent impact. It was the loudest sound I have ever heard.

The car doors flew open. Do I remember that or did he tell me? I don't
know. Somehow, from some instinct of protecting one's own and oneself,
but also from that desire I had to touch him, a split instant before the
impact, I had flung my arms round him from behind and held on. The -seat
was between us, a buffer between us, but still I held him as hard as I
could and he said I saved him from the windscreen or the steering wheel
piercing his chest, he said I was his -seat-belt. I don't know. How do I
know?

Perhaps I did in fact save him from being thrown out of the car when the
doors were flung open. There was no one to hold on to Giida. That was
the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes, that Gillda wasn't there,
that Gillda was gone, the passenger -seat was empty. But I did nothing
at first, I didn't ask him. I held on. I pushed my face into his neck
like an animal nuzzling. There was some feeling in my mind of staying
there for ever, of being there, clasped together, closing our eyes,
sleeping even. I could feel a pulse beating in his neck and hear his
harsh breathing.

He said my name in a voice that was a vibration without tone.

Stella.

I moved my face. My mouth was wet with his sweat. When I withdrew my
hands I saw that they were covered with blood and that made me whimper.

That is what you do when you've been in a car accident, you shake and
make frightened sounds. You can't control your lips, they quiver and
wobble. Your whole body trembles. My hands were covered with innumerable
tiny scratches and my fingers were the same colour as my nails. The
noise of the crash was still in my head, repeating itself and
reverberating like the sound of big guns firing over and over.

He got out of the car, he staggered and then righted himself, and came
round to the back and made me get out and then he put his arms round me.
I was crying by then and uttering cries but I had to stop, I made myself
stop. Alan wiped my hands with the handkerchief he'd used to wipe
Gillda's saliva off my face. His were bleeding and blood was running
down his face from a cut on his forehead.

I said, Where's Gillda? My teeth were chattering.

I don't know, he said.

The smoke had passed. The air hung heavy with hot smoky fog. In front of
us loomed through it a huge farm machine, a combine I suppose or a
baler. It had been parked half on the road and half on the grass verge
and Alan had gone into the back of it. The car was pushed into the
yellow iron slab that was its rear end as if it had been welded there,
its front wheels lifted off the surface of the road, its bonnet stove in
like a crushed tin can.

Since that single car had passed, there had been no other. But one came
then. If the driver saw us he didn't stop, though Alan tried to flag him
down. He turned back to me with clenched fists and swore. I don't think
I'd ever heard him swear before. When the van from the garige in Curton
came it seemed like coincidence, an amazing stroke of fate, but it
wasn't really. The garige man was on his way home, he always passed at
that time, at five.

But it wasn't yet five when Alan stood there cursing, his fists
clenched. I said, We must look for Gillda. We must find Gillda.

The verge was wide, twenty feet wide, with trees growing on it and
behind was a ditch and the hedge. We found her lying at the foot of a
tree in the long grass. I say we but it was Alan who found her. I
gritted my teeth and clutched one hand in the other. He knelt down
beside her, looking into her face. She opened her eyes and muttered
something. I couldn't see a mark on her. We had all escaped injury by a
miracle.

Or so I thought. It was absurd I suppose, what I said. Gillda, are you
all right?

Her eyes were fixed on Alan's face. She said something but I couldn't
make it out.

She'll be all right, he said. She'll be fine. Let her rest there for a
bit and she'll be fine.

It was grotesque, only I didn't see it like that at the time. He knew
her, he knew about these things, he knew best.

She had only been thrown a few yards out of a car. The green scarf was
still round her neck. Then I saw the blood on her hair, seeping from the
back of her head, brownish and wet on the blades of grass.

Alan, I said, I think she hit her head against that tree.

He didn't look at Gillda, he looked at the tree. It was just a tree, I
can't remember what sort, if I ever noticed. The bark was dark brown and
rough. I couldn't see any special marks on it but it was all over marks,
that was its texture, to be covered with scars as if a hundred people
had been hurled against it.

All this time I was shaking, though it was subsiding a bit. I was coming
back to reality, to practicalities. My hands had stopped bleeding. I sat
down on the grass. I was wearing stockings and high-heeled shoes and
there was a ladder in one of my stockings. It's strange how you notice
these things. I was thinking about Charmian and how I'd behaved then,
ridiculously, like a stchupid child, I'd run down the street screaming.
I said to Alan, One of us will have to walk back to Curton and phone for
an ambulance.

And then the van came. It was red and it had Curton Cars Ltd printed in
white on the side of it. There was no question of this driver not
stopping. His window was open and he waved at us, made a thumbs-up sign.
He pulled into the verge on the other side of the combine, got out of
the van and came over to us.

He was in overalls, a tall, good-looking man, much younger than we were,
perhaps thirty. He looked at the wreck of Alan's car, the bonnet crushed
in, welded to the great steel bulwark of that combine, its front doors
blown open, and then he looked at Alan. He asked the question that
changed everything. Afterwards I thought of him as a messenger from
fate, a not quite human character from a Greek play, someone come to
give us a choice and offer us an answer. But he was an ordinary man,
smiling and sympathetic at the same time. I was relieved to see him.

He asked the question.

Just the two of you, was it? he said.

A simple casual question. I nearly denied it. I nearly shouted, no, no,
we were three, there was someone else, there was someone who's been
hurt. I didn't. He wasn't talking to me but to Alan, to the man. I was
the woman, taken for granted as the passenger, not the driver, someone
who it was assyumed, would know nothing. Besides, I was used to leaving
things to men's decisions. What did I know? I could drive but I barely
knew how the internal-combustion engine functioned. He repeated what
he'd said, more gently this time. He must have thought we were in shock.

Just you two, was it?

Alan shut his eyes, opened them, said very quickly, Yes. Just the two of
us.

I don't know how I kept silent. I held my hand over my mouth. My fingers
were all over scratches and I tasted the blood. The garige man was up by
the wreck by then, walking round it, examining it.

I ask because whoever was riding shotgun he looked at me must have been
thrown out, taken quite a header.

Alan said, My wife.

For a moment I thought he was going to tell him about Gillda, show him
Gillda, but it was me he meant. I was his wife.

You were lucky. He looked at the blood on Alan. Cut yourself shaving,
did you? And he winked.

Alan smiled. It amazed me, that he could smile. He said, I've got a lot
of hair on my hands.

They both laughed. They laughed knowingly the way men do, all boys
together, the conspiracy of men is what Marianne calls it.

No need to call the fuzz, then? Not if there's no one hurt.

No, said Alan.

Better not if there's no necessity.

Alan said no again. He said it thoughtfully. It was as if he was
learning, taking advice, catching on. He was like someone who knows a
certain amount of a foreign language but needs to listen carefully when
it is spoken to catch the hidden meaning. He was thinking, following the
garige man's movements with his eyes. And then he had moved from where
he was standing, he re-positioned himself so that his body kept Gillda
from view. No one in the road could have seen Gillda where she lay, deep
in the long grass, but he was making doubly sure, screening the hidden
woman.

It was then that it registered with me, how silent she was. Why didn't
she cry out, moan, whisper something? A little breeze, the first of that
day, ruffled the leaves of the tree above her. I looked away.

The garige man said he would go back to Curton and fetch his stuff, a
pick-up truck and a towing bar. He'd be ten minutes, if that. Alan
remained standing where he was until the van had gone. There was
something in his face I'd never seen there before, something
calculating, assessing his chances maybe, I don't know. He said, I'm
going to move Gillda out of the sun. She ought not to be in the sun.

I was a grown woman, I was a middle-aged woman of forty-seven. Why
didn't I insist on fetching an ambulance? Why didn't I point out the
absolute imperative of telling the police? I don't know why. I didn't
know then. Blame it on shock perhaps, on what had gone before the
accident, the accident itself, on the amount I had drunk. I seemed to
have no strength, no will. I was aware of more smoke billowing over us,
of coughing and looking at my hands that were smeared with blood,
blackened with burnt barley, of another car passing but not stopping, of
Alan bending down and lifting Gillda up in his arms.

He carried her into the shade. But there never was much sun, was there?
Was there really much difference between the smoky gloom under that tree
and the shadow of the hedge? Now where he had laid her she couldn't have
been seen except by someone specifically -searching. He asked me if I
would be happier sitting in the car. It would at any rate be more
comfortable. I shook my head. I said to him, You said there were just
the two of us?

It was a strange reply he gave me. As far as I'm concerned there are
just the two of us. And then he said, You know, I'd never have thought
of that if he hadn't suggested it.

What do you mean? I said.

I was about to start bleating about Gillda being injured and calling an
ambulance and fetching the police and God knows what. And along he came
and put that splendid idea into my head, that there were just the two of
us.

He gave me a cigarette and lit one for himself. I sat on the grass and
hugged my knees. I sat there in my fussy dress and high heels and laid
my head on my knees and shut my eyes. I had a raging thirst, the result
of drinking, I suppose.

Alan had gone away from me. I lifted my head once and looked round for
him but I couldn't see him anywhere. I could see only the road and the
tall grass and that tree with the wounded bark. I closed my eyes again
and saw the redness of light through the lids. And still the garige man
didn't come. Water was what I wanted, a long long drink of water, and
then sleep. A pulse was throbbing steadily inside my head.

Ages passed. I suppose it was about ten minutes. I opened my eyes and
got to my feet. I looked up into the tree and saw Gillda's sunglasses
caught on a branch. There was blood on my dress by then, but it didn't
show among the flower pattern unless you knew. I reached up for the
sunglasses. Alan was kneeling beside Gillda. I couldn't see Gillda, the
grass was too long, more like hay, tall grass with tall plants in it,
wormwood and thistles and tansy and willow herb. He got up and came to
me and said, Don't scream. Cover your mouth. She's dead.

I stopped for a while. I had to. Someone came in with my coffee while I
was talking. The trouble is I no longer have the strength to prop a
chair under the door handle. It was only Sharon and she thinks I'm an
old madwoman, anyway. What could be more natural than for me to talk
gibberish to myself?

She has gone and I can resume.

We were there at the roadside, waiting for the garige man to come back.

Alan knelt down in the grass beside me. He took hold of my hands.

She's dead, he said again. And abruptly, Do you want to see?

I shook my head. I couldn't speak.

He was very pale. His eyes were so bright I thought there must be tears
in them. The enormity of what he had said was too much for me. I could
only stare at him.

He said, I can hear the beating of your heart.

Oh, she can't be dead, I said, she can't.

Darling, you must keep calm. He was quite calm himself. Listen.

Here's our garigiste, he said. Trust the French to have a word for it.
Once again he took my bloodied blackened hands in his bloodied blackened
hands. Don't speak, sweetheart. Be struck dumb by shock, will you? Leave
it to me. It's best.

The garige man was cheerful and reassuring. He kept saying what a lucky
escape we'd had. I don't think he could understand the way I was
behaving, as if I'd suffered more than shock in the accident, more than
a few scratches to my hands. He eyed me the way men eye women who are
'making a fuss', indulgently, making allowances but with a level of
contempt.

He told Alan, who I'm sure hadn't even thought about it, that he knew
who the combine belonged to, he could give him the name. Then he
fastened but it's no use my trying to describe what he did, I don't know
the names for these things, the tools, the techniques. What it amounted
to was that he managed to pull the car off the combine and tow it behind
his truck. While he was doing this he didn't speak to me at all. I don't
mean he was rude. It was just that I was a woman, so could know nothing
of these things, men's things.

We got into the truck with him. In the front, in the middle of the
windscreen, a -horseshoe was hanging, suspended on strings tied to its
ends. He saw me looking at it and he winked.

It's up that way to stop the luck running out.

He didn't call Alan anything but he called me ma'am and once he referred
to me as your wife'. I let it pass. I didn't say, I'm not his wife, and
Alan didn't say, she's not my wife.

Cheer up, ma'am, he said to me. It's not the end of the world.

Let's see you smile.

He didn't see me smile. I had begun to shiver. We left the wreck of
Alan's car on the garige forecourt in Curton and went into the office
and the man said did I want a cup of tea.

I have to call him the man because I never heard his name. I don't think
Alan did. What difference would it have made? There was a photograph on
the desk. I sat there and looked at it while he made tea for us. It was
of two little girls and a baby boy and when he came back I asked him if
they were his children. He seemed pleased to be asked, he told me their
names. I said his older girl must be about the same age as my boy. It
was just small talk, something to avoid speaking of the accident.

Alan asked him if he had any jump leads. I didn't know what jump leads
were then, I didn't know what he meant, but the man said of course he
had, and when we'd drunk the tea he drove us home to Molucca. He'd get
on to the farmer who owned the combine if we liked, he said, but Alan
said no, he'd do that.

Gillda's car was outside the -house. Qf course it was, but I had
forgotten about it, I had forgotten it wouldn't start. The garige man
lifted up the bonnet, prodjuced the wires they called jump leads and
connected them to the Anglia's battery. I went into the -house and
started clearing up the mess, the litter of bottles and glasses and
cigarette butts. It was something manual to do, a mechanical activity
that needed no thought. When I went back Gillda's car engine was running
and Alan was in the driver's -seat with his foot touching the
accelerator.

The man said, Tve got the same model myself. It should be OK. He held up
his hands and said, Fingers crossed.

I can see him now, on that hot dusty evening, holding up his crossed
fingers. He was our fateful messenger but we were also his. He got into
his van and drove away, home to those children, I supposed, till Alan
set me right.

I got into Gillda's car next to him. Hundreds of times I'd sat there in
the past, going out to tea with her, going to the cinema but I'd never
been in it with him before. Alan started talking as if nothing had
happened. The garige man had told him that thanks to us he'd be late
home again. He had laughed and winked but he was serious. His wife had
told him this was his last chance. If he was late again he'd had his
chips', she was throwing him out, so since he'd be late anyway now he
was going to keep a date he'd made with a woman called Kath and get home
really late. Might as well be hanged for . sheep as a lamb, he'd said.

Why are you telling me all this? I said.

I thought it might amuse you.

I asked if he was going to phone the police or if he'd like me to do it.
My voice sounded cold and hard. He looked into my eyes and shook his
head si owly, as if by that shake of the head he was trying to make me
understand many things. He lit two cigarettes in his mouth and gave me
one.

No one's phoning the police, he said.

We must, I said.

We can't. Think ala out it, sweetheart. We told the garige man no one
was hurt. We- let him think you were my wife and there had been just the
two of us in the car.

I said stchupidly, shifting the blame, He suggested it.

So? We didn't have to do it, any more than he had to stop for us. You
know, I actually thought of saying, She's not my wife, but I couldn't.
It made me think of that joke about the man who can't make love unless
he keeps saying to himself, She's not my wife, she's not my wife. I
thought if I said it I'd start laughing.

One of the things I loved him for was his lightheartedness In that
moment I hated it. We didn't tell him Gillda was hurt, he said. We
didn't even tell him she was there.

But Gillda's not just hurt, I said. She's dead.

All the more reason. What would you say to them? That we had an accident
and Gillda was thrown out but we didn't mention it to the chap from the
garige who came to pick up the crash car. We didn't mention it because
she was dead by then and anyway, this lady is not my wife and I was
drunk. Is that what we'd say? And if not what would we say?

I said we should have got the police straightaway, we should have got
the police and an ambulance, before having the car moved. Why hadn't we?

Because the garige man came up with this idea, he said. A godsend. A
friend in need. A Good Samaritan, one of those who hadn't passed by.

I'd better keep the car going, he said. I didn't know what he meant.

In case the battery goes down again. When you're ready, we'll go.

Go where? I said.

To fetch Gillda.

I nearly screamed. I would have done but I clapped both hands across my
mouth.

That's why I had that chap fix the car, he said.

We drove back. I was beginning to know that stretch of road very well.

The combine was still there. The only mark Alan's car had made on it was
to remove a few inches of yellow paint from its rear. Everything was the
same, the grass verge, the hay and the weeds that were six feet tall,
the hedge behind, the trees. Did I expect it to have changed?

Only the sky and the air had altered, the smoke nearly departed, evening
sunshine pouring through the haze.

This is the first side of the second tape.

Alan edged the car right up on to the verge. The ground was dry and
hard. He turned the car so that the rear was to the hedge. A truck
passed by, then a motor bike. A car came in the opposite direction. By
chance we had come back there in Curton's rush hour, such as it was.

Alan opened the boot and took out two deck chairs, that he must have
fetched from the garige. He set them up on the verge with the picnic
table between them and put a bottle on the table and a packet of
cigarettes.

It's curious how, when something like this happens to you, you move very
easily into the well, scenario is Marianne's word the scenario of a
detective story. You become aware of things that up till then have
belonged only in books. I said to him, If you do that anyone who sees us
will remember we were here. They'll remember seeing picnickers.

There won't be anyone asking, he said. It's for now not the future that
I don't want to attract their attention. He put out his hand and
indicated the deck chair, Won't you sit down? I did as he asked.

Want a fag? he said.

We each had a cigarette. We sat side by side admiring the view, yellow
fields where the corn had been cut and black fields where the stubble
had been burnt. A police car went by, and the driver raised one friendly
hand in a salute.

I'd always been amazed by those people who drive out into the country
just to sit by the roadside. We were those people now. Lovers don't
behave like that but married couples do. Who would have guessed we were
guilty lovers? We were smoking and drinking wine at a picnic table on a
warm evening, and in the ditch behind us was his wife's dead body.

When the traffic came to an end and the last car had gone home, we put
one of the deck chairs back into the car and we put the table inside in
the back. The other deck chair we used as a stretcher.

Alan took her head and I her feet. There were grass seeds in her hair.

We laid her on the stretcher, carried her to the car and tipped her
gently into the boot. She was very light, I doubt if she was more than
seven stone. I looked just once at her dead face. The green scarf was no
longer tied round her neck but lying across her chest. Even then I was
sure that when she got into the car the green chiffon was at her throat.

We put the deck chair in on top of the body and closed the lid. I have
described that in a very matter-of-fact way, but that was not at all how
I felt. While I helped Alan move Gillda's body I felt unreal, as if in a
dream. I would wake up and find myself on the sofa with my head on his
shoulder, our dance over, the wine gone to our heads. But I believe this
is the way all people feel when called upon to do some act that is
utterly alien to their normal life, as if translated into nightmare.

Not a single car had passed while we did this. All was still and silent.
We drove back to Molucca. Alan opened the garige doors and put Gillda's
car inside, Gillda's body inside in Gillda's car. As we went into the
-house I noted that it was the exact time we had booked the table for
our romantic dinner. He said, I'm going to have a bath and then a hair
of the dog. How about you?

I don't know, I said. I don't know what I'm going to do.

He said conversationally, as if nothing had happened, They used to think
eating a hair of the dog that had bitten you would cure the bite.

Did you know that, my star?

The last person you would have expected me to think about then was
Richard. But I did think of him, down there in Cornwall, enjoying
himself, on the beach all day most probably, and now having his supper,
soon to go to bed. I thought how terrible it was for him to have a
mother who could do what I was doing. When Alan came downstairs, bathed
and his hair washed and in clean clothes, I was still where he'd left me
and on my third cigarette.

He had never seen me look the way I must have looked then, dirty, my
hair untidy and full of smuts, my hands bleeding, my bare legs
scratched, my dress filthy with corn smuts and earth and blood. The
sight of me made him laugh.

Oh God, sweetheart, you should see yourself! The little match-girl.

Misses Guy Fawkes.

He seemed quite restored. He was cheerful, his old self. I said to him,
When I was sitting there, before the garige man came back, and you were
kneeling beside her, what did you do to her? Did you do anything to her,
Alan?

He was laughing again. What do you mean?

She was only thrown a couple of yards out of a car. Perhaps she hit her
head against that tree and again perhaps she didn't. Would someone die
of that?

She did.

Alan, I said. Did you ... ? But I couldn't ask him.

The words I hadn't used are those you read in books or hear someone say
on television. They have nothing to do with real life. You accept
hearing them said, you even expect to hear them said in the course of a
play or a film, but not in an ordinary day to day existence. In ordinary
life they are grotesque. One would laugh at them, the scornful way one
laughs at cliches.

I hadn't said them but he knew what I'd tried to say. He often knew what
I was thinking, the precise words of my thoughts. But he was smiling, he
was cheerful, he answered me cheerfully.

Of course not. Of course I didn't.

You were alone with her, I said, job, for a long time.

I've often been alone with her for a long time, he said. Too long.

That's been the trouble.

He picked up the phone and dialled the number the garige man had given
him. I heard him start talking to the farmer who owned the combine. He
was very polite, apologetic, hazarding a little joke about an
irresistible force meeting an immovable object. I went upstairs and had
a bath. Whatever happens, I thought, tomorrow I'll go out and buy myself
a pair of flat sandals. I hung up my beautiful dirty dress in the
wardrobe and put on another. I combed my hair and I thought about making
up my face and asked myself, are you mad? But I did make up my face, as
I'd have made it up if I'd been going to my own execution.

When the man who worked the guillotine lifted up my head there would
have been rouge on my cheeks and lipstick on my mouth.

So I went down again, dressed the way other women dress for a party or a
wedding. Alan was sitting there, drinking tomato juice or, more
probably, a Bloody Mary.

Vitamin C is never wrong, he said. And then, Nice chap, that farmer. He
asked us over for a drink. I said I'd ask you and call him back.

You said what?

A joke. He said to forget about his machine and there was nothing a lick
of paint, I quote, wouldn't cure.

What time is it? I said.

Two minutes past eight. We've missed our dinner. The problem would have
been getting there. Of course we do have a car but, on the other hand,
we don't exactly have a car. Remember the people whose grandmother died
in Spain.

What people? I said.

I must have been the only person in England who had never heard the
story about the couple driving their grandmother over the border from
France into Spain. The old woman dies and they put her body in the boot
of the car to take her back into France. They leave the car for ten
minutes in the town square while they have a drink and when they come
back the body has gone, never to be found. But you've heard it, over and
over probably, along with the other apocryphal stories about the cat
eating the chihuahua and the human tooth in the hamburger.

It didn't seem funny to me. I said to Alan, How can you?

He shrugged his shoulders. I'm hysterical. Ignore me, he said. Is there
anything to eat?

Only what we meant to have for lunch, I said.

I remember every word of that conversation, trivial though it was. All
the time I was wanting to ask that question again but I was afraid.

After a little while he left the room and although he hadn't said I knew
where he had gone. I watched him back Gillda's car out of the garige. He
came in and said we were going out to eat, to the hotel in Thelmarsh,
the White Hart. They did meals and they went on serving until late. I
looked at the car, at the boot of the car, and he said not to worry
about that, he'd seen to that, though on the whole what had happened to
the grandmother in the story might be a blessing for us.

While we were out I tried to talk to him as if nothing had happened. I
talked about Richard. I talked about my -house in Bury and where we
would live, there or at Molucca. After a while my voice tailed away, he
hadn't said much anyway, we both fell silent. I couldn't eat but he
could. He ate his way steadily through three courses and he drank a lot.
It was a warm, sultry night. The sky had cleared and through the White
Hart's window you could see a host of stars. I said and it was very
unlike me, I wish we could walk back.

He still joked. He tapped his glass. We may have to. When he'd paid the
bill, he said to me, Why did you say that?

Say what?

Say back and not home ?

I don't know, I said, though I did know.

I drove us back, going slowly. I put the car into the garige. She was
wrapped in a plaid car rug lying up against the left-hand wall. It was
then that I thought, when this is all over I will never drive a car
again. The time was nearly midnight as we entered the -house. We went
upstairs and lay down on our bed. I said to him, Did you do anything to
her?

His speech was thick. D'you mean, did I kill her?

Yes, that's what I mean.

Of course I didn't.

Alan, please tell me the truth.

I didn't kill her.

I took off my clothes and put on a nightdress and a dressing-gown,
washed my face and combed my hair. Not looking at him, I said, If you
didn't do anything to her I couldn't say kill - why can't we tell the
police? Why can't we have her taken away?

He had fallen asleep. I lay down beside him for a while. I felt as if we
were refugees, strangers fleeing from some disaster, and because niether
of us had anywhere else to sleep we were obliged to lie on the same bed.
I thought about what had happened and I understood the answers to my
questions. If we were going to tell someone we should have done so at
once, from the beginning, and we would have if the garige man had not
presented us with a way out, had not advised us how to pro-ceed.

He was not to blame, we weren't obliged to take his advice, but it had
been given and we had taken it. From then on we had let him call me
Alan's wife and the farmer do so too, for all I knew. We had sat on the
grass verge in deck chairs having a picnic for the Curton rush-hour
traffic to see. We had moved Gillda's body. We had gone out to dinner in
Thelmarsh in her car. Her body lay some twenty feet from us now, on the
garige floor. It was too late to tell anyone, too late for anything. I
got up and went back downstairs and lay on the sofa where I finally did
sleep. I slept till the birds began and the -house was full of the sound
of their singing in the fen.

It was strange, we met but we didn't speak. We went about the -house,
tidying up, making coffee, getting something to eat, but it was a long
time before we said anything. Eventually he said, Do you really want to
know why?

No, I said, I know why.

He smiled wanly. Good for you. He had the most appalling hangover.

I think I need to sleep some more.

It was hot again and there was more smoke in the air, though not as much
as the day before. I lay on the lawn at the back of the -house, not
sleeping, staring at the sky, wondering how normal ordinary people
passed the time, what did they do all day, what was there to do?

Somewhere about the middle of the day Alan came out to find me.

You know what we're going to have to do, don't you? he said.

I think so.

Come into the -house.

We sat down opposite each other in the living room.

I think I know how to do it, he said. Have we plenty of oil?

I stared at him. He might have been talking some obscure foreign
language.

Paraffin, I mean. Have we plenty?

Five gallons. It's in the garige.

He said he'd go out and get some more. Then he told me what he planned
to do, what we must do. I said nothing, I just sat there, shaking my
head, but in wonder and horror, not saying no.

Petrol too, he said, or is that too dangerous?

We had no phone at the -house. There had never seemed the need for it.

While Alan was away I walked down the road in my high heels to the
nearest call box, it was nearly a mile, and used up all the change I had
phoning Madge Browning to find out how Richard was. For some reason I
had this premonition that while I was at the -house, doing and
contemplating these dreadful things, a more dreadful thing had happened
to him and he was drowned or terribly injured in a fall. But he was fine
and happy and, indoors for an hour for lunch, came to the phone and
talked to me, telling me about the farm and the animals and the beach.

The day before I'd promised myself to buy a pair of sandals, but I
didn't. It no longer seemed to matter if my high heels broke or my feet
blistered. Alan had returned before I got back. His face lit up when he
saw me and he seized me in his arms, he had been so worried, anything
might have happened to me, his world collapsed without me.

Where had I been? I told him. I let him hold me. Then we sat at the
dining table and ate some of the food he had bought. We drank a bottle
of red wine and we slept, but not together.

It was strange, the way this wasn't discussed but taken for granted,
that I would lie on the bed upstairs and he on the sofa. I slept
heavily. When I woke up the sun was setting. I went into one of the
empty back rooms and watched it set behind the fen, an angry orange-red
in a dusty sky. Alan wasn't downstairs. I went into the garige. He had
the car boot open and Gillda's body back inside it.

The green scarf was nowhere to be seen. I remembered how it had been
knotted round her neck when she came to the -house -yesterday, was it
really only yesterday? but when we lifted her body to bring it here the
scarf lay loose on her chest. I shocked him, he didn't expect it of me,
that I would bend over the body, that I would touch it, and examine the
neck. She was cool and stiff. There was no mark on the neck, the dark
strangle line that you read about in crime books, that wasn't there.

He knew what I was looking for. I saw it in his eyes, but he said
nothing. He put the paraffin in the boot and the two cans of petrol he
had bought and a pile of newspapers that had accumulated over the years.

Put on your dirty dress, he said.

What?

You're going to get it dirtier.

He closed the boot lid and got into the car and reversed it out of the
garige.

The tape ended there and I have turned it over.

I only remember one thing he said before we got into the car and that
was, I did my reconnaissance while I was out. I think I know a place.

It was nowhere, miles from anywhere, the end of the world. Perhaps, by
now, a few -houses have gone up in the area and perhaps more hedges have
come down. Then it was remote, distant, uninhabited. The fields went on
and on, with here and there green woodland to separate them or the pale
line of a winding lane. And some of the fields were black where the
stubble had burned and some were already ploued after the burning, brown
and ribbed and spotted with white and grey pebbles.

But now it was dusk and there were no lights from -houses or lamps.

There was no moon or none yet risen. The countryside began to lose its
colour, it was no longer green and earth-brown, it was all shades of
grey and the black of the burnt fields. But why do I bother to describe
it? What does it matter now?

Alan knew where to go, light or dark, dusk or day. He had found the
place some hours before. He turned the car down a -track that was an
avenue of limes and backed it into the field he had chosen. The limes
walked in pairs up the shallow hill and the -track between them was a
double rut of dry baked earth. There was no gate, just an opening, and
boards laid over the ditch. Recently, the day before very likely, the
field had been burned. And the farmer, perhaps because the time had
seemed right, while he had his fire, had uprooted part of a hedge to
enlarge his field. An ancient hedge it had been, of oak and hawthorn,
maple and rose, elder and dogwood. A welter of half-burned logs lay
still smouldering at the edge of the black stubble, limbs of trees and
twisted roots. Smoke came out of their joints and gnarled growths in
little thin trails. The fire, Alan said, had been raging when he came
this way earlier in the day.

You told me once that farmers were supposed to leave six feet between
the burning and the hedge, but he hadn't done that. He had meant to burn
the hedge. A tree stood with its branches like burnt arms, the leaves
still on them, shrunk and curled and black. A leaf fell as I stood
there, spiralling down, stiff as a piece of rolled paper.

We began with the newspaper. I laid the fire among the ashes the way I
used to in Auntie Sylvia's -house, screwed up newspaper first, then
wood, then a log or two. Logs were everywhere, and wood chips, too, on
the grass, in the gouged-out pits where the hedge had stood for five
hundred years. Some were burnt but most were raw wood, wounded and
splintered by the axe. Alan poured on paraffin and then we laid Gillda's
body on the pyre.

Not far away, down in south Suffolk, is a place where they burned a
living man in the sixteenth century. There's a monument to him now. He
was one of those martyrs condemned to death by Mary Tudor for refusing
to be a Roman Catholic. I wonder how long it took to burn him. Of course
there was no compulsion on those people to destroy the body. But what
happened to it? No one ever says. No one tells you. Perhaps, like us,
they kept the fire going for many hours. It took us hours, it took all
night. To burn a body is easy. To destroy a body by burning is a long
and laborious and terrible task.

I tried not to look until it no longer looked human. And that happened
quite soon. I couldn't stop myself from smelling. the smell. I tried. I
held my nose, I turned away and retched into the ditch. When I came back
I looked. I told myself this was another log lying there, an ordinary
log that had been an oak branch, only a particularly cumbersome one. The
smell changed and became sulphurous, the bitter, choking stench of
brimstone, the burning stone.

Alan had brought a bottle of gin. We drank it, directly out of the
bottle. I'd been sick but perhaps it was because of the gin that I was
never afraid, that I never expected a car to appear suddenly behind us
in the lane or see the blue lamp of a police van or a troop of angry men
fanning out across the meadow. We took nips of gin. The raw fire of it
running down our throats comforted us and gave us strength to work on
feeding the fire, keeping the fire going. Once, and once only, we turned
to face each other and closed together in a strange, mindless embrace.

We let the flames die, with a long branch we raked at the cinders and
the ashes, and, when it cooled, piled on more fresh wood, surrounding
that log that was no log with more wood. Alan made a petrol bomb. He
filled the gin bottle with petrol and wadded the neck of it with his
handkerchief and told me to stand back.

I've always wanted to make a Molotov cocktail, he said.

He lit the wad and threw the bottle. That was when the rear of the car
was burned. Petrol doesn't flame like paraffin. It explodes. I should
have known that. Everyone who understands the principle of internal
combustion knows that, but there were many things I didn't understand
before that night. Gillda's pyre went up with a roar, the flames leaping
into the sky and bringing a moment of broad daylight.

Niether of us was hurt, though Alan's eyebrows and the front of his hair
were singed.

We knew, both of us knew, that we must never say, that's enough, that
will do, it's not good but it will do. There was no discussion. We knew
what the other was thinking, for each of us had the same thought: there
must be absolute destruction, total reduction to an unidentifiable mass.
A point had to be reached where we were satisfied, when what we had come
there to burn was changed into burnt wood and blackened stones.

It was daylight before that happened. It was the grey dawn that comes
before the sun rises. The place where we had worked all night looked now
much as it had when first we came, charred logs from an uprooted hedge
smouldering on a dozen square yards of ash. We were exhausted, we were
drunk and filthy and sick and nearly mad. Alan drove us back, the car
weaving all over the road. The awful thing, one of the awful things, was
that we didn't speak but we weren't silent. He was groaning, making
sounds like someone in intolerable pain, and I was crying without tears,
a dry sobbing. But what does it matter how we were? It's self-indulgence
to go on.

At my -house we slept, he upstairs this time, I on the sofa. I gave up
the bed to him, he had worked so hard. His hair was burnt and his hands
were blistered. I watched him fall on to the bed face-downwards, but I
don't think I could physically have brought myself to lie down beside
him. Later in the day, when we had once more been through our bathing
and changing-clothes ritchuals, we went out into the garden and sat on
the grass. It was very warm and very dry. In the distance I could hear
the sound of machinery, a farmer taking advantage of the weather to
harvest or to plou. My head ached and I expect Alan's did.

He was nervous, in a way I had never seen him. We would have to go back,
he kept saying, we would have to go back and check. He couldn't remember
how we had left things. Had we really destroyed it all?

I want you to tell me, I said, what you did between the time that garige
man went away and the time he came back again?

You mean, after he'd told us what to do, don't you?

I made an impatient gesture. I'd never done that to Alan before. I'd
never before put up my arms at him and shaken my hands from the wrists.

After he'd told us there were just the two of us. He looked at me as if
I were a stranger. You mean, did I kill her?

Yes, that's what I mean.

I've told you I don't know how many times that I didn't. I did nothing.
What matters now is how we left things last night. This morning, I mean.
I mean this morning. I can't remember, I drank so much.

I can remember, I said. Everything was destroyed. We knew we couldn't
stop till everything was destroyed.

I still want us to go back.

I went up to him. I crawled up to him on my hands and knees and squatted
in front of him on the dry grass and said, Tell me the truth. Did you
kill her?

For God's sake, he said. She was going to die. That blow to the head,
that was fatal. I untied that scarf she had on. I held it against her
face, against her nose and mouth, just for a moment, a second, I don't
know why. I said to myself, you can't do this, what the hell are you
doing, and I took the scarf away, it was fifteen seconds at the most, it
was no time, I took the scarf away and she was dead.

Out in the garden I sat on the lawn in a deck chair and wondered if it
was the one they'd used as a stretcher to bring Gillda's body home.

He hadn't killed her, had he? She'd have died anyway. I've got that
green scarf here with me now, I've put it across my own face and pressed
with my hands against my face, and it hasn't stopped me breathing. It's
thin and transparent, you could tie it round your face to protect
yourself against smog and still breathe normally.

On the other hand I'm not ill. I'm a lot younger than Gillda was and I
haven't been injured in a car crash. No doubt, too, his hands were
stronger than `;38+' mine are, but I still think you couldn't smother anyone
with that scarf.

Then why did he put it over her face and hold it there? Why did he?

Because his intent was to kill her, it must have been. He was afraid
she'd recover, so he put the scarf over her face to kill her and then he
thought better of it, almost immediately fifteen seconds is immediately,
isn't it? he took the scarf away. And she was dead. So did he kill her
or did she just die? And if he meant to kill her ... ? Oh, it's too deep
for me, I can't untangle it, I don't know.

I listened to the second side. It's just half of the last side and then
it stops.

I remember everything very clearly. I remember every word and gesture.

Everything is clear-cut, precise, distinct, cut with a sharp knife.

When he had told me what he had done I asked him to repeat it, and he
did repeat it, rather sulkily, like a child. And I listened, the stern
parent, weighing up the pros and cons of punishment. But before he could
say it, I said it.

All right. I wanted it too. It wasn't just you.

She would have died anyway, Stella. I don't suppose I even hastened her
dying.

From the moment that man asked us if we were just two we both hoped
she'd die, we wanted her to die.

God knows, we'd played it often enough, he said. It hasn't been much
like the Killing Gillda Tease though, has it?

As we were driving back to the place of the burning I knew it was all
over between us. He knew too, but he wouldn't let himself believe it.

He kept saying to me that we had to stay together, we must support each
other. In case questions were asked. In case the work of destruction had
not been complete. If fragments were found, bones, teeth. She had been
his wife and he was talking about her bones and her teeth. In case the
police came, he said. We must present a united front.

No one was burning stubble. The burning was ended and the air was clear.
The sky was white, a roof of very high cloud, no sun, no wind.

It was theist of September, the end of summer, the end of everything.

And I saw it as an approach to absolute finality, termination,
apocalypse.

The nearer we got to the place the more the dread I felt increased. It
was as if something awaited us there. I don't mean the police or some
sort of -search party, I don't mean any officials or arm of the law. I
mean retribution. I've never had any belief in the supernatural but I
was afraid of unearthly agents, angels of vengeance, principalities and
powers, of justice personified in unimaginable forms, waiting for us.

I even said to him, Let's go back.

We can't go back, he said. We've come to see. We have to know. I want to
sleep at nights.

It was so quiet. All the way we had met no cars, followed or been
followed by no cars. When a pheasant ran across the road in front of us
with a shriek and a rattle of wings I cried out and clenched my hands.

As we approached the place we heard the tractor, the steady mechanical
throb that is as much a part of the countryside in autumn as the
neighing of -horses must once have been and the clatter of their hoofs.

The noise deterred us and Alan slowed the car. We crawled the last bit
along the narrow road.

No avenging angels, of course. No one waiting at the gate to summon us
before some bar of justice. Alan parked the car up on the grass verge.

He put out his hand to take mine but my hands were clasped together
against my chest. We looked into the field and he was silent but I made
a little moaning sound. I whimpered like a puppy. Alan stared.

The field which had been black was brown, the signs of burning gone, for
all fifty acres of it were going under the plou. He had wasted no time,
that farmer. His stubble was burnt, his hedge uprooted and burnt, and
now the plou was turning and grinding and burying the burnt cornstalks
and the ash and the cinders.

He was nearly finished. The tractor was turning for the last time at the
top of the field where the hedge had gone. He came slowly down the slope
close to the lime avenue, lumbering like a heavy animal or a tank. He
seemed to be coming straight for us, inexorably, our retribution. But I
could see him in the cab, smoking a cigarette, an ordinary middle-aged
man with a red face and receding fair hair. His smoke drifted from the
cab, a wispy ghost of what had been.

Alan drove on a little to avoid being seen. We parked a hundred yards up
the road. In the rear mirror we watched the tractor and the plou come
out of the gate and turn laboriously on to the road. We watched.

He was going home. To a waiting wife and a great farm-house tea and his
children perhaps, to his family and his friends and peace and good
things. He passed our car and raised a hand to salute us.

Alan turned the car and drove it up the lime avenue as we had done the
night before. He backed the car into the field over the boards across
the ditch. We got out. There was nothing black any more, not a trace, no
coal-like roots and branches. The earth here was a rich chestnut brown,
soft as breadcrumbs, not many stones to ring against the plou-shares. It
was ploued in parallel lines, expert and even, like knitting, like the
ribbing on a garment. There might have been no burning, all signs of
fire were gone, absorbed by that soft brown crumbly soil, drawn under
and hidden for ever.

Alan said in a conversational way, When they'd burnt Carthage they
ploued over the site so that no one would ever find the remains.

I stared at him, I asked him what he meant.

Gillda's our Carthage.

We put the car away into the garige. Gillda's green scarf was in the
boot but I left it there, I didn't know what else to do with it. I had
had enough of burning. Alan tried to take me in his arms, and when that
failed he tried to take my hands. But it was no use. It was not that I
didn't love him, but that I was no longer fit for him and he was no
longer fit for me. That was all.

I seem to remember that we ate something, standing up in the kitchen.

We drank some gin, not pink gins but the neat spirit in water glasses.

I told him nothing about my feelings, I didn't explain. He said, I can
never be a widower now. Because Gillda's not dead, is she?

I asked him what he meant.

How can I tell anyone she's dead? How could I, if I wished to, prove she
was dead?

But why would you?

The -house I live in is her -house. Any money is hers. My car is a wreck
but I can't use hers. Hers is in France with her. He looked at me. I can
never re-marry.

Of course I understood then. It made me shiver.

She's gone, he said, but she'll never be gone. She's more dead than I
ever wanted her to be, but she's more alive too.

There was silence then, a long heavy silence.

We'd better go home, I said at last.

Where's home?

It should have been Molucca but it wasn't, not any more. Gillda had been
there, Gillda had lain there dead. To me the place smelt of ashes.

I spoke to him politely, as if he were John Browning or one of
Marianne's friends.

Will you drive me to Bury, please, before you go back to the farm?

He shook his head. His glass was empty and he re-filled it.

I told you, I can't use her car. I can't risk anyone seeing me in it.

It's supposed to be in France. I can't risk it ever being seen. He drank
the glassful and for a moment shut his eyes. There's a bus from
Thelmarsh. God knows when it runs. I'll walk to the stop and wait for
it.

So he did. He went into a call box on the way and phoned for a taxi for
me, the Thelmarsh station taxi. He hadn't told me he would, he simply
did it. Anticipating my wants was something he was good at, he was a
thoughtful man. The taxi came and I locked up the -house and had the
driver take me back to Bury. It still wasn't dark, it was only about
eight. I cried on the way home, thinking of how kind he was to me,
getting a car for me as a matter of course.

There isn't much more to say. I am tired and my chest hurts. You mustn't
think we never met again, that we parted then and there for ever. I
suppose we saw each other twice more, once at my -house and once in a
restaurant. We had dinner, we thought we could manage something, some
reconciliation. But we couldn't. The fire was between us and the plouing
over of the site, that and the fifteen seconds he had held the scarf
over Gillda's face. I dreamed about it a lot, and the dream went on for
years, not about the scarf or the fire but the plouing, everything drawn
under and churned into the depths by the turning plou shares

Oh, well. It was a long time ago. I have wondered sometimes about folie
a deux, those couples who conspire to kill someone, a wife or a husband.
They seem to face each other afterwards, to live together, to go on
loving. How do they do it? How do they forget and adjust? How do they
lie beside each other at night and eat their meals opposite each other
and laugh and talk and have a social life?

I abandoned him, but he abandoned me too. He looked at me as we were
leaving the restaurant and said, Why did we do it? I can't remember, can
you?

And when I didn't answer, he said, Blame it on thegarigiste. I saw him
once more and then never again.

Richard is coming in a minute. We're going out for a drink to the White
Hart at Thelmarsh and I'm going to tell him about my nurse's training. I
think he'll be pleased. The tapes in their ordinary black cases are on
the table in front of me and the woman in the portrait seems to be
looking at them, her eyes cast down. What am I going to do with them?

Not tell Richard, not tell Marianne. God forbid. Not give them to
Richard.

They were left to me with a purpose. Or at least for a reason. Because
it was my father who made it happen, wasn't it? The man who said to
them, Just the two of you, was it? was my dad. It was my dad who advised
them, put the idea into their heads, put them off telling the police,
showed them a picture of his children, of his daughter with the unusual
name. And if he made things happen to them, so they made things happen
to him. It was recipro-cal fate (I haven't pored over my Chambers
Dictionary for nothing). If he hadn't come along just then things would
have been quite different. He'd have got home early as he'd promised and
Mum wouldn't have chucked him out and he'd never have married Kath but
have stayed with us and I'd have been with him when he died. Maybe. And
maybe not.

For I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in destiny or patterns in
life but in chance and that what happens is what you do yourself. I
shall pull out the tapes, unravel them and burn them. Somehow it seems
my right.

This evening I was going to give Richard the clothes Stella left in this
-house, but I've changed my mind. He won't want them and I do.

It's spitting with rain and when we go out I'm going to wear Stella's
silvery coat. It's very pretty, it's come back into fashion.

The clothes of the dead wear as well as any others. Why didn't I see
that long ago?