Undercurrents by Frances Fyfield.
Back Cover.

SOMETIMES THE ANSWER ISN'T
IN THE FACTS. SOMETIMES IT'S
IN THE EMOTIONS.

Henry Evans met Francesca Chisholm while backpacking
around India. He loved her, but when her father died, his
refusal to change his travel plans caused her to leave without
him. It is a decision that has haunted his adult life and why
twenty years later he has decided to find her. But what he
discovers is not what he expects.

Francesca is in prison for murdering her five-year-old son.

The verdict was never in doubt. Francesca confessed to the
killing, to pushing her son off the pier to drown in the dark
undercurrents of the sea. Henry can't believe it, and so he
decides to discover the truth, even if it is only to understand
why she did it; even if it aggravates those who have only just
come to terms with the atrocity . . .

'Fyfield at her best'
SALLY BEAU MAN.

'Compelling -- disturbing -- but always elegant'
MINETTE WALTERS

Frances Fyfield is a criminal lawyer, although
she now only practices part-time. She lives in
London and in Deal, by the sea which, aside
from her love of London, is her passion. Her
previous novels (most recently Staring at the
Light) have garnered acclaim and awards, and
have been widely translated.

Also by Frances Fyfield
A question of guilt
shadows on the mirror
trial by fire
deep sleep
shadow play
perfectly pure and good
A clear conscience
without consent
blind date
staring at the light

and writing as Frances Hegarty
the playroom
half light
let's dance

frances fyfield.
Undercurrents.

WARNER BOOKS.

A Warner Book
First published in Great Britain in 2000
by Little, Brown and Company
This edition published by Warner Books in 2001
Reprinted 2001
Copyright  Frances Fyfield 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, without the prior permission in writing of the
publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious
and any resemblance to real persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
ISBN 0 7515 3028 X
Typeset in Plantin by M Rules
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Warner Books
A Division of
Little, Brown and Company (UK)
Brettenham House
Lancaster Place
London WC2E TEN
www.littlebrown.co.uk


To Jill and Robin Stockwell,
with love from your Fyfield cousin


acknowledgements
Thanks toDr Ben Lloyd for information generously
given on the subject of hemiplegia. All mistakes
or inaccuracies are my own. Thanks also to John
Granville of the Prison Service for answering questions
so fully, and to Stephen Marriott, George
Woolford and Senta, for being there. And finally,
thanks to Joyce, for the song.


Happy the man whom the truth instructs not
through passing words and figures -but in its
own self, just as it is. Our opinions are often
mistaken and our vision dim. What is the point
of much hair splitting about the recondite and
the obscure, our ignorance of which will not
even be mentioned in the judgement?
Thomas a Kempis.

Prologue.

splish, splash I can hear the sound of quiet waves. The
water heaving gently and the mewling of seagulls. A hot
summer on the beach.
Someone took the shawl and someone gave it back.
There are strange courtesies in this place and more tolerance
than I could ever have believed, just as there are
features of my own behaviour I could never have believed
either. Although I do have a certain status, I have had to
give up any illusion of being in control, and I have to
limit talking, making this a substitute. It is my chance to
rationalize. At least I'm alone in my own room.
My father taught me a command of words but being
articulate can be treacherous. There is always the point
when one might say too much. If I told them everything,
they would hear a noise of words, but they would not
listen. I see their point entirely; I can't even find it in
myself to resent it. Why should anyone listen when guilt
makes us produce such a tissue of lies? Whatever we say
in here is far more likely to be lies than truth. We are
bound to lie; it is almost a duty, to avoid the tyranny of
conscience. But we rarely steal. Someone brought back my
shawl and I felt absurdly blessed. When I talk, I talk
about nothing as if I were at a party, minding my manners.

I miss the sea most of all, which is a terrible reflection
when I think about it. I should miss the children most. I
should have been far more exclusive in my affections in
order to be a better mother. There are no excuses; only
guilt, but I do,I do . ...
Miss the sea, most ofall...
Francesca Margaret Chisholm

chapter	one.

someone should have advised him against a February
arrival. He knew what winter was like at home; cold
and sharp and dry, manageable even in eight degrees
below, but somehow he had not associated an English
coastline with any notion of a serious chill. She had
never described it like that. There had been mention
of bonfires and brisk walks; of a breeze stinging the
eyes when admiring the sea from the battlements of a
castle, descriptions augmented by a memory of
Dickens and picture postcards suggesting a modest
covering of snow or a comfortable blanket of fog outside, all cleverly orchestrated for no other purpose
than to make the fireside welcoming and the hot toast
delicious. The sort of kindly cold which was a home
designer's asset, purely to act as a contrast to a comfortable
room.
Outside the station, the wind tore at his coat like a
mauling dog. The rain skittered in the eddies of wind
to scratch at his face and hat. His suitcase was ballast,
lifting from his shoulder and leading him in a sideways
sloping sprint across the carpark. It defied the
mild sense of triumph he had felt in alighting from
the train at all, beating the challenge of the antiquated
door as the carriage lurched to a halt in front of a sign
so obscure he could scarcely read it. warbling, a
name like a dowdy bird. Doctor Henry Evans,
poetry-loving scientist, with impeccable transatlantic
credientials and comfortable North American
lifestyle, felt himself unfairly fooled by the weather
and did not enjoy the sensation of being outwitted.
He congratulated himself briefly at the same time for
that level of preparation which was his own hallmark.
He had purchased a map; he had listened carefully to
telephone instructions and he knew precisely where
he was going.

Rain, spitting at him with renewed vigour. You
can't miss it, squire. Straight down the road by the
station until you reach the sea; turn left. Big hotel,
squire. Nelson stayed there long before they built the
pier. Henry had enjoyed the train, dirty though it
was. At least he could open the window and breathe.
He hated to be inside those capsules of transport
where he had no control.

And he craved his first sight of the sea. His was a
land-locked heart, in love with gentle ocean sounds.
He could see it in his mind's eye, calm and dark,
moody with moonlight and full of inspiration. The
shops on his route were small and, in the shuttered
darkness, less than quaint. He noticed a deserted
cinema with posters of films he thought he might
have seen a decade since, a forlorn wine bar with
single occupant, the closed premises of a post office
apparently doubling as a pharmacy and a florist's
without flowers, but apart from a couple of illuminated
signs, the only significant lights were the
Belisha beacons where the road dipped into a pedestrian
crossing before rising towards the sea. The
yellow globes winked at a lone woman who waited as
if needing some extra sign which would give her
licence to cross an empty road. She was followed at a
distance by a big, black dog, which did not seem to
belong. Henry nodded and said hi. There was no
response, reminding him of another feature about the
natives he had encountered so far. They were not so
much rude as preoccupied at any given time. They
would not ignore the outstretched hand if you waved
it right in front of their faces, but any gesture not initiated
by themselves required repetition before
gaining acknowledgement. They were not unfriendly,
he decided bravely, simply undemonstrative and destined
to lead him into a deliberate and useful
heartiness through the means of their natural reserve. You have to learn to come out of your shell. Henry. No
one else is going to winkle you out. He was trying to
remember what a winkle was.

The road which had dipped by the crossing rose to
meet the seafront and its attendant sounds. He had
forgotten the mad gust of the station carpark on his
way thus far, relatively sheltered from the wind and
the rain which struck him now with a series of staggering
punches so hard and mean he yelled and
grabbed at a railing. The shout was shoved down his
throat in a lungful of icy air; the wind struck at his
arm; the railing was sticky wet to the touch. As he
staggered back into a doorway, his nose collided with
the glass and he was suddenly eye to eye with another
poster on the far side, depicting ice cream piled high
in a fluted glass, topped with a cherry and set against
a summer blue background. The wind howled round
his head; he was glad of the hat and while on another
kind of day he might have laughed at the ice-cream
poster for its sheer incongruity, the wind was pummelling
his back. The sea was an insane chorus of
animal roars, followed by the vicious hiss of angry
water clawing at stones, clattering and snarling in
frustration; then the next crash, boom, hiss, a battle
of sibilant fury, counterpoised by the deep bass of
echo.

Henry pulled down the hat, levered himself out of
the doorway remembering the directions. Turn left;
he had done that. Cross the road; he would do that
now. He saw the dog again, maybe a different dog,
trotting along the opposite pavement. You can't miss
it, squire, only building this side of the road. Nelson
stayed here. He remembered his own frisson of excitement
at the mere idea of staying in a place where
Nelson had stayed with Lady Hamilton, no less. He
could visualize a hip bath in the middle of the room, a screen with strewn clothing, the lady deshabille, the
hero reclining on a chaise-longue with his glass of
port, replete with conquests. Thick curtains, blocking
the moon... The wind had a fit of kindness and propelled
him across the road, unscathed. The sky was
luminous; spray hit his face. The bulk of the hotel
loomed before him, unlit and forbidding and as he
drew nearer, other sounds began to compete. Voices
shouting, machinery humming.

There was candlelight in the reception area, lulling
him into a sense of welcome. He sighed with relief;
then the alien nature of the noise and the intensity of
the draught chilled him again. A massive desk was the
only furniture, old and solid above a rich red carpet
which squelched beneath his feet like a claret
coloured bog. He stepped forward carefully, the
weight of his case suddenly unbearable. There was a
bar down those stairs, described in the brochure as a
select venue with views of the English Channel, currently
occupied by persons wearing rubber boots,
sloshing through inches of water. One man detached
himself from the rest, waded towards the narrow
passage where Henry stood and proffered the pile
of cushions he carried. It seemed an odd kind of
offering.

'Get out of the way, will you? What do you want?'
'I have a reservation . . .'
'You want a room? In here? Oh, that's rich, you
know, really it is. There's someone wants a room!' he
shouted back down the stairs, to the sound of answering
laughter.
'The Nelson suite, in fact,' Henry said apologetically.
The sound of breaking glass came from beyond
the stairs and the din of the sea seemed closer still.
The man's laugh choked on itself. There was a whiff
of whisky on his breath, but nothing else about his
face to show he was anything other than distressingly
sober.
'Haven't you ever seen a fucking flood? Come back
next week.'
'My suitcase .. . my room . . .'
'Next week.'
'But where should I go?'

As he spoke, Henry felt he was reciting the most
regular and plaintive line of his life. Jet lag was no
excuse. He knew he had uttered these words many
times before and he sounded, to his own ears,
demanding and childish. He should be doing something
- rolling up his sleeves, responding to the
situation, making himself if not useful, at least acceptable
- but he was suddenly overcome with exhaustion,
rocked with a cataclysmic disappointment. For twenty
years he had postponed a visit to romantic England
and he did not want disillusion now. He wanted his
own optimism, weakened in the long reaches of the
night, tested in that damn train with its vandalized
toilets, further damaged by a town which was shut at
eight in the evening, for Chrissakes, deafened by the
racket of that poisonous-looking sea. And wet feet
and a suitcase with a life of its own, getting heavier by
the minute but unputdownable on this filthy damp
floor . . . how could he help? This was the end of the
line and it was he who needed help.
'Where could I go?'
'Oh, for God's sake, anywhere but here.' The man
brushed him forward. Henry could not move. He was
weighted by feet which seemed to have grown larger
and heavier and he knew he was wearing his mulish
face. The man pushed past him and squelched his
way to the desk.
'Here, hold the bloody torch, will you?'
'The what?'
'The torch, you cretin.'
'Oh, you mean the flashlight. Sure.'

A torch was something which carried flame. It illuminated
a barbecue on summer evenings and was an
emblem of peace in the Olympics. He held the flashlight
while the man leafed through an address book,
his movements radiating irritation.
'Probably all full. Too late, you were the last. Ah
yes, of course. Wait a minute ...' There was a gleam
of malice in the eyes, caught in the flash. Henry felt
himself intensely disliked and bridled at the unfaimess
of it. The man was eyeing his coat. He should have
smiled himself, commiserated, done something,
cracked a joke. A clever, diplomatic person would do
that.
'There's only one place for you. And that hat,' the
man added, snapping the book shut and shoving
Henry towards the door. 'The House of Enchantment.
Lovely place,' he added in a voice rich with irony.
'The what?'
'The House of Enchantment. That's what they call
it. Look, you aren't prejudiced, are you? Homophobic
or worried about ghosts or anything like that? It'll do
fine.' This time, he was pushing Henry, hard. 'Go
right. Follow the seafront for about a hundred yards.
No 196 and a half. Keep left and keep counting. You
can't miss it, squire. Princess Di might have stayed
there. All we ever had was fucking Nelson.'

Henry and his suitcase were back on the road. He
pulled up the collar of his jacket. It was a special jacket, soft grey leather with plenty of pockets, lined
with fur, an Understated piece of casual luxury and he
was glad of its warmth. He turned left and walked on
the seaward side. On his right, the sea growled and
crawled and boomed. On the other side of the road,
he could make out the irregular contours of houses,
some dark, some illuminated, all impervious to the
weather and the carnage inside the hotel. The patent
indifference of those lit windows was oddly comforting.
The suitcase, weighed less by clothes than the
vitamins, minerals and therapies he found so vital to
his health, felt like an ungainly rock bouncing sharply
against his back. His hat (deerstalker with flaps,
Sherlock Holmes style, purchased in a hunting store
and sartorially ridiculous anywhere else) suddenly left
his head like a bird in flight and he watched by a
streetlight as it flung itself into the waves and danced
for a split second in the foam. There was nothing he
could do about the hat. The beach was steep, the
waves high and he was cold to his bones. It was only
a hat, he could not even keep a hat and the hat seemed
an emblem of his own ineptitude. He was lost.

The contours of a huge wall loomed on one side.
There were no houses along here. He passed the wall
and the houses resumed. She would have called them higgledy-piggledy. He counted slowly, eighty-one,
eighty-two, eighty-three, before the numbers reverted
to fifty. He attempted to whistle to forestall the
ignominy of tears, tasting salt on his lips. He had
come all this way to find a woman and that made
him five times the fool.

The House of Enchantment stood on a corner at the
highest point of the road facing the sea. The room
was elegantly, if heavily furnished. The only touch of
modernity was the TV screen, which showed a series
of silent, summer images. Peter Piper sat in an armchair
inside the bay window of the first floor sitting
room, holding the dog in his lap and pointing out
features of the seascape, namely the crests of the
retreating waves and lights in the distance. 'Now look
there, Senta, that one's probably some kind of tanker.
It isn't the lightship. Love the way it's all lit up, like a
Christmas tree, don't you? Static, ain't it? My, oh my,
they must be pleased to see land. Might make them
think they could swim for shore. I bet they're wishing
they were right here, with us, instead of out there,
with them. Do you think we'll ever get anything to
eat? Tim's being a horribly long time with it. A man
could die before he gets any food round here.' He
fondled the soft fur of the dog's ears. 'One more,
dearest, only one more.'

He took a walnut from a dish and Senta took the nut from his fingers, daintily. She held it between her
paws, cracked the shell with her teeth, delicately, and
consumed the fragments of kernel with a precision
which amazed him. 'One of these days,' Peter said,
fondly, 'you'll be able to sweep up the pieces, too.
We used to get Harry to do that, didn't we? Make him
exercise his hands, poor darling Harry.' He got up to
stoke the fire with a log and several chunks of old
wooden flooring. It seemed wasteful to put such good
wood on a fire, but it was free from the skip and anything
they could gather or garnish for nothing was
used. Scavenging was an art form, a challenge, an
integral part of the way they lived. The fire spluttered.
There was always that crucial point in the
tending of a fire: the making of the decision to refuel
it, lower the temperature, heft the fuel. Part of the discipline.
'By ritual, so shall you live,' Peter murmured
to the dog, handing her another walnut. 'I'm so glad
you're alive. I'm so glad there's no one else here but
ourselves. Who cares about money?'

He went downstairs. The dog followed. Condensation
dripped from the landing window, he pulled
his cardigan across his chest. Rooms were warm
enough; stairwells and corridors were freezing; contrast
was good for health. He must remember to put
hot bricks in the beds. House bricks hidden inside
envelopes of fur, constructed from an ancient coat of
his mother's, were an invention of which he was particularly
proud. They were also perfectly true to the
spirit of the age in which they wished to live, and
unlike the conventional hot water bottle, did not leak.

There was a long, rather grand flight of stairs from
the first floor to the ground. The dining room was to
the left of it, lit with a fire. From the kitchen beyond, traversed by another chilly corridor, there drifted the
smell of curry. The table was set with a white linen
cloth; three places laid this evening, he noticed.
Sometimes Timothy went mad and laid it up with
crystal and silver for five or six, and Peter knew they
would be eating the excess of the meal in another
form the following day, but tonight his deference to
either ghosts or other guests was limited to one,
placed to the left of an artful arrangement of twigs
and leaves in front of the seat nearest the fire. They
always ate in style: Tim insisted. Food, he said, was
far too important to treat with disrespect. There had
been a tricky spell when Tim had been determined to
raise a pig and a few chickens in the back garden.
Considerations of neighbourly relations had prevailed,
but he still nurtured hopes of raising an
ostrich. At least a month's supply of low-fat meat. If
we had livestock, we would have to hide them, Peter
had murmured, and I do so hate deceit, don't you? It
might be feasible to keep an ostrich indoors in a
house of four floors, to say nothing of the cellar. A
house which was ideal either for hiding people or
leaving them in perfect peace, and that included the
paying guests. Once they were up in the attics and the
second floor, no one would know they were there,
but Peter said an ostrich would make a noise on the
stairs.

Or interfere with privacy. Timothy adored the
guests, but he did tend to go over the top in his concern
for their comfort. He believed that anyone who
came to the door arrived by divine intervention. Peter
never liked to mention it, but he had the strange feeling
that some of them thought they were not so much
being made at home as seduced, and that would
create entirely the wrong impression. They were there
because they were needed.

Tim's evening apparel varied according to whim and
whichever of his motley collection of charity shop
clothes was clean at the moment. It was part of the
rituals governing their lives that clothes were changed
before dinner, although this did not mean that
evening dress as such was de rigueur. It simply had to
be something that had not been worn all day and it
could never be shorts or a swimsuit, even if they
intended to bathe after dining in the height of
summer in the sorts of temperatures currently difficult
to imagine. Peter had donned the tweed suit
which almost fitted over his ample chest, with an
unbuttoned shirt beneath, revealing the least colourful
of his tattoos, the ensemble complete with pristine
white socks and training shoes. Timothy, in celebration
of a vaguely Eastern style of meal, wore a heavy
cotton jellaba which swept around his ankles and to
save himself from tripping over its voluminous length,
the folds were hitched in at the waist with braided
yellow furnishing cord, bright against the scarlet of
the cloth. With his slender height and hooked nose,
he looked like a misplaced cardinal. Homemade
bread and salad was placed on the table; spinach
leaves, Peter noticed with salivating approval, in sufficient
quantity for a small army. Then the doorbell
rang.

Clanged, to be more precise. It was an old school
bell attached to a spring, activated by a prominent,
salt-rusted handle pulled from the outside. The oldest
devices were the best. Peter eyed the empty place setting
at the table, beamed approval to Timothy, who
tutted in response and consulted the watch hanging
round his neck.
'He's cutting it a bit fine, isn't he? It's eight-thirty
already and I'm starved. Supposing he wants a bath
first?'
'Well, he can't have one, can he? The food won't
wait.'

The House of Enchantment was the one Henry
could see, standing out from the others as he walked
towards it, prominent because it had pointed turrets
on the roof, like something out of a fairy tale. The
details were obscured in darkness, which was some
kind of mercy, because he was already thinking,
trying as best he could to distract himself from heavy
feet, a foreboding, the ever present sense of being a
fool after all, and a mounting depression which
boomed inside his skull to the same tune as the
waves. He was struggling for composure and counting
the numbers of the houses, gazing at the front
doors as he passed and imagining what something
with such a name would look like. He knew as soon
as the turrets loomed into view that he didn't want it
to be that one. He wanted something more homely,
looking as if it were made of gingerbread, big enough
to accommodate a landlady who might serve hot
soup, as a minimal compensation for being frustrated
in an attempt to dwell in a suite where Nelson
might have dallied with Lady Hamilton. A little bit of
conventional kindness would go a long way. He
could feel tears gathering behind his eyes again,
decided it did not matter if he cried. The rain had
pasted his hair to his head; he was showered with
spray. Julius Caesar was supposed to have landed
somewhere near here. He could not think for the life of him why an Italian would bother.

What a house. Painted black, as far as he could tell,
with a studded door two steps up from the street.
Another fear assailed him as he yanked at a handle
marked bell. Supposing there was no room here,
either? Don't think of it. Go back to that station, back
on to that slow, slow train. Dover was next. Go to
France. Go. He had always maintained an option to
retreat. There was the sound of a bell clanging, followed
by furious barking.

The door heaved open with a creak. A vision stood
before him, head to toe in scarlet, smiling but slightly
impatient, like someone interrupted at an important
task and too polite to mention it.
'Oh, come in, come in, come in. Foul out there,
but better presently, oh yes. Come in.'

The door closed behind him with a thud. He was
propelled to the newel post of steep stairs leading
upwards for ever and ever in a rising tide of polished
mahogany, the hallway extending way back to foreign
regions, tapestries on the walls and gas lamps in
sconces, flickering, and an appetizing set of smells.

The priestly vision was helping him off with his coat,
tutting at the rain on it, admiring the texture; the suitcase
was lifted from his shoulder. Before he had
uttered a word, he was handed a towel for his hair, his
tears, whatever it was that soaked him last and he felt
suddenly weightless.
'We have to eat now, or it spoils. I mean now. Have
the seat by the fire and take your shoes off, I would.
This way. Peter, pour the wine.'

More gas lamps in here, a fire warming his back.
The wine was purple, glinting through heavy crystal.
He remembered to raise to each companion in turn
before swallowing. Christ, that was good. The bread
passed on to his sideplate was nutty and warm; the
salad stung the palate with an aftertaste of pepper; the
plate was whisked away. There were two elegant
tureens in the centre of the tablecloth; he gazed at the
rising steam, drunk on the smells. Tweed suit and
cardinal helped him to food as if he was a baby
unable to help himself, murmuring encouragement.
'Plain rice, I'm afraid. Always better with hot food,
we find. Have plenty.' He did. After a second helping, interrupted by minimal conversation, 'Have you
come far? America. Oh yes, that far. Is it warmer
there? No. Don't mind if Senta sniffs round your
ankles, do you?'
'No. I have a dog at home.'

That last remark, slurred through a mouthful, was
a lie dictated by politeness. He did not have a dog; he
did not have anything he would like to have except
sufficient money, but he had always wanted a dog
and did not want to cause offence. The lie was a way
to be accepted. He had noticed the dog in passing, a sweet little puppyish brindled sheepdog which was
given the same food at the same time but led off to eat
in a separate corner out of a separate bowl, for which
mercies he was grateful. Plates, dishes, tureens disappeared
as miraculously as they were presented. Henry
could not remember if names had been exchanged. Yes. Timothy. Peter. Henry. Weird. No last names, no
mention of payment. Tomorrow would do.
'So why are you here. Henry?'
'Oh ... Me? I'm a pharmacist. Work, but that's not
really why I'm here. I like castles, I guess. I don't
know why I'm here. Been all over the world, but never
to England. My father died, I needed a change of
scene and . . .' Those tears were back, pressing
against the back of his eyeballs, just when he was
almost dry all over. He tried to get his toasted feet
back into his shoes; he felt for his handkerchief and
could not find it.
'You need sleep. Henry. Loads of it. You can't talk
now. Come along.'

He was bemused, unnaturally obedient. He could
have been led upstairs to a masochistic brothel for all
he cared, although such a thought did not enter his
mind. Henry did not have that kind of imagination.
There seemed to be a mountain of stairs. A swish of
the cardinal's cloak, an attic room, reached only when
he was out of breath. One of them was carrying his
suitcase, the other his shoes and the leather jacket
bought for the journey, both men chattering explanations
like soft-voiced starlings.
'. . . Afraid the only bath is at the back of the
kitchen . . . We'll leave the lights on ... Water hot
again, soon.'
'. . . the loo's on the landing . . . your loo, that
is ... Peter, you forgot the bedside light ah, there it
is . ..'
'Towels are here ... you switch off the electric fire
over there. We'll make you a proper one tomorrow.'

The fire defied his own notion of antiquity. Two
electric bars glowing like parallel fireflies, creating a
patch of warmth extending towards the bed but not
quite reaching it. And such a bed. Not large, not even
a queen size, but high off the ground; if he fell out of
that in the night, he could break a leg. Henry's tired
eyes noticed the series of bedspreads which were
strewn over it, greens and blues with the shimmer of
silk, giving the bare room its only opulence. His companions
fussed a little more and then retreated. It was
as if the whole of the world retreated with them and
the silence they left behind was quite complete.

You can't talk now. The words held an echo. When
would he ever be able to talk? He had been unable to
talk freely for more years than he could remember, or
not the kind of talking which was communicating.
He never quite knew what to say, except to his father.
All these years of saying little, as if he had some kind
of impediment that made him incapable of expressing
what his brain was telling him to say. A kind of scold's
bridle, the curse of the shy man. He liked the easily
opened window; he liked the bedspreads, stroked
them, and despite the chill of the room, he was suddenly
intensely grateful to be in it. It occurred to him
that he had been churlish to these two bizarre men;
that he had failed to express or even to feel gratitude
for the fact that they had so obviously responded in
double quick time to a call from the flooded hotel,
and that he ought to feel grateful also to the man who
had made the call enabling his hosts to be so charmingly
ready to receive him. And then, as he peeled off
his clothes and tried to remember where on the way
up the stairs was the bathroom, deciding everything
could wait until daylight, everything, including judgement,
he realized the man from the hotel would never
have phoned, would have forgotten his existence as
soon as he was out the door . . . Nothing mattered.

Dressed in his underwear and his now dry socks,
shivering, but only a little, he moved to the window.
The moon shone on the water in a calm, silver pathway.
The sea looked as if it was trying to efface itself, nibbling at the pebbles of the beach with discreet,
foamy bites which teased the shore, eating at it with
the quiet determination of the dog with her separate
bowl of food. The whole of it had a poetic tranquillity,
a normality he found reassuring and enough to suppress
the conclusion that none of this was normal, or
anything like. He looked at the door of the room, suddenly
and irrationally afraid that he had been locked
in. He did not know why he should begin to imagine
such a thing and experimenting with the quiet latch
showed him he was wrong. An eccentric household
was all. Nothing here to worry a stout heart. He took
off his socks, got into the bed, relishing cool linen
sheets and heavyweight blankets. He wanted to be
pressed into sleep, ironed into unconsciousness, but
just as he stretched to feel the parameters of the high
bed, his feet touched warm fur, and he screamed.
There was an animal in here.

Henry flung back the covers and roared towards
the door. There was silence from the landings below,
he looked down the open stairwell and saw light.
Foolish to scream at some cat. What was he, a child?
He held the bedside lamp aloft like a weapon, and
examined what it was his feet had found. 'Get outta
here,' he ordered. The thing did not move. He
touched it tentatively, then grabbed it angrily. He needed this bed. The fur was hot; a sick animal. Then
he felt the contours of a brick, picked it up, turned it
over. A brick in a pocket of fur. Ingenious. He got
back into bed and twiddled his toes against it. Began
to doze.
Woke with the moonlight in his eyes and his
armpits sticky, convinced yet again that the fur at his
feet was alive. Hearing her laugh at him and tell him
there was nothing to be afraid of. Wide awake now,
with a sudden urge to take a shower, trying to
remember what either the cardinal or the tweed suit
and tattoos had said about showers. There wasn't
one; there was a bath, next to the kitchen. He was hot;
his passion for hygiene had been subsumed by
exhaustion and now he felt dirty. He put the socks
back on, took a towel and set off to explore.

Down, down down . . . Looking towards the
gaslight in the hall, he stopped on the third landing,
arrested by sound. There was the lightest possible
patter of feet, coming from a room he had not seen.
The figure, tall but slight with a mass of pale hair,
stood on the landing below, indecisive for a matter of
seconds, paused as if the last flight was just too much,
then slid down the final banisters in a flurry of white
gown. There was an almost imperceptible thump in
the landing. The figure blew on both her hands,
flexed her fingers briefly and disappeared.

Henry's warm feet had taken root in the spot. He
seemed to have stood where he was for an hour, while
the feet grew cold again, before he continued down
the stairs, clutching his towel, rubbing his eyes with it,
trying to dispel the illusion of what he had thought he
had seen.

There was a fine Indian shawl draped over the
newel post. It was incredibly soft to the touch, as soft
as the fur in his bed. It could have been Francesca's
shawl; the one he had given her. Or the one at the
bottom of his suitcase he had bought as a gift. From
the depths of the house, he could hear the sound of
running water and singing. Feeling awkward, Henry
Evans went back to bed.

The fur was still warm. He moved it level with his
heart.
Don't talk now.


It is always warm in here. As warm as a hospital, or a
baby's bedroom. I always loved children, which seems a
trite thing for a teacher to say. Before he died, my father
discouraged teaching as a choice of career because he said
it would wreck my perception of childish innocence and
stop me from being able to play. I was preparing to follow
his advice (I usually did and he was usually right) when he
died. I've been yearning for his advice ever since. It seems
so short a step from being the one who was given the wise
advice to being the one who is relied upon to provide it.

I wonder what he would think of me now, and I think
I know. We all hark back to childhood here; it is consistently
and often accurately blamed for everything. Not in
my case, except insofar as it gave me the burning ambition
to provide for other children the same sort of security
that was given to me.

We would sit by the window, my cousin and I, attempting to learn verse. There are things worse than
learning verse, my father said. Harry might not have
been able to do that; he liked the sea and he wanted to
learn to fish. I tried to teach him nursery rhymes, the old
fashioned, meaningless kind, because I love things which
do not change, like the sea.

There was an old woman who swallowed a spider
That wriggled and wriggled and wriggled inside her;
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly,
I don't know why she swallowed the fly.
Perhaps she'll die.

Nursery rhymes make me think of birthday teas and I
must not. I've been warned that anniversaries are dangerous;
they loosen the tongue with grief. And this is
supposed to be a record of my thoughts, to prove that I can
still think of other things. I must NOT venture into facts.


chapter Two.

He first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him, liked it not and died.

henry woke with these words being muttered to him
from a far distance of memory. A very compact
poem, but one which moved him unbearably. He
tried to see if it would work the other way round; she first deceased, etc., but it did not. The sounds which
confused him, along with the words he could have
sworn he heard whispered in his ear, were those of a
cacophony of seagulls and the irregular heartbeat of
the sea, echoing through his room, dragging on the
shingle in a series of sighs, drawing him towards the
window.

The window stood out from the roof in a small
bay made for one, angled against the slope of a turret,
so that when he stood inside the frame of it, he felt
part of the sky. The gulls wheeled round his head,
quarrelling and screaming so close that he ducked
automatically, convinced it was he who angered them.
There was a streak of guano on the glass, blurring the
sight of the watery sun. It was paler than pale egg
yolk, opaque, almost no colour at all. He lived with
such artificial colours, the bright primaries of packaging
and pills, colours made for noticing and
remembering. Not like this. Cloud moved across the
egg yolk sun. The sea itself was too vast to contemplate,
the horizon melted into mist. Henry looked
down towards the ground. It was not nearly as far
away as he felt it was.

There was greater comfort in looking down than
looking up. The vastness of sea and sky made him
feel small, while the activity on the ground made him
feel human. There was a jogger in a red fleece, varying
the muscles deployed in his exercise by jogging
backwards on the broad pavement opposite the
House of Enchantment, flanking the sea. The jogger
stopped moving, breathed deeply, hands on hips for
a second while he surveyed the sea before stretching
his legs, placing them one at a time on the low wall of
the parapet and bending his torso towards his thigh.
Good boy. Henry applauded. A woman with a posse
of chattering children and a baby in a pram passed by
the jogger, oblivious to anything but her own amiable
instructions. She slowed the pram to avoid a couple
with two yapping dogs, one small and piebald, one
large and tan, overexcited, pulling at the lead, dancing
in tail-thrashing frenzy. The jogger continued his
stretches. Another runner appeared from stage right.
A child sat, waiting for a bus, hugging herself into her
coat. A black dog was at the edge of the water, recovering
a brown, crumpled object and worrying at it.
Henry had the fleeting thought that the object might
actually be his hat and hoped he was wrong. He felt a
brief and inexplicable moment of happiness. There
were people here, after all. A backwards-running
jogger, guys keeping fit, that was normal. The dog
owners chided their animals.

The dogs made him sentimental. He should not
have lied about owning a dog, just to ingratiate-himself. The black dog, tail blurred in movement,-yapped
and growled at the water's edge, big, bold and secretly
scared. Henry scratched his chest and smiled encouragement.
When a big wave came in, the dog
retreated, barking defiance. Know how you feel,
buddy. We all have to bark, whether we mean it or
not.

Then, from stage left, came a strange figure, walking
so fast he could compete with the jogger. He was
tall and thin and nothing seemed to fit, a suit and
coat hanging from his frame like a series of scarves.
Business attire, if you happened to be a funeral director,
Henry thought; a rabbi on a bad day, some
distraught unorthodox, orthodox Jew, smoking, talking
to himself, looking at nothing but the inside of his
own skull, forgetting in between furious drags on the
cigarette that it was lit at all. How could anyone
smoke in that breeze? His hair stood on end, black,
like his clothing, the skin of his hands alabaster white.
He strode past Henry's line of vision, arms waving,
cigarette unsteady, engaged in a debate with an invisible
adversary, a client, a confessor, maybe mouthing
words of admonition and advice, so earnest he was
laughable. Henry smiled again, engrossed in the view;
then sensed the presence of breath other than his
own, misting the window. Someone standing level,
closer than the seagulls.
'One tends to spend a lot of time staring out of the
window,' Timothy was saying with a sigh, pointing at
the figure below. 'He's barking mad, that man, but
frightfully clever, you know. Where do you want me
to put this?'

He was carrying a delicate tray of fragrant smells:
coffee, sweet scented toast, a hint of silver pots under
a large, stiff linen napkin. Henry had the irrelevant
thought, hung over from a similar one of the night
before, of how odd it was for a house to possess such
fine crystal and silver, such elegant china cups and
not have central heating. Speaking for himself, he
might have sold it all and turned the proceeds into
warmth. Timothy was dressed in heavy cords, boots,
shirt, sweater and cardigan, relatively normal and a
comforting contrast to the outfit of the night before,
despite the yellow cap which was squashed on his
head at a rakish angle. Behind him strolled Senta the
dog, carrying a newspaper in her mouth which she
dropped at Henry's feet.
'Oh, I didn't expect breakfast. That's nice of you.
Should have been up sooner, I guess.' He forced a
laugh, suddenly full of the shyness from which
exhaustion had preserved him the evening before.

'It isn't breakfast, it's simply toast. Breakfast is
another matter altogether, has to be ordered. Actually,
it suits us quite well if the guest stays put until Peter's
sorted us out downstairs and done the fires, at least.
Such a mess. We though we might go shopping after
that. Would you like to come with us? We could, you
know, sort of help you get your bearings.'
'Is there a shower?' Henry asked.
'No, we told you, didn't we? Only the bathroom
behind the kitchen. Free at the minute and plenty of
hot water. Eat the toast while it's warm, won't you?'

For a moment. Henry thought Tim would stand
over him until he had eaten the toast and drunk the
coffee, in the way of an anxious parent with a picky
child. Or leave the dog to ensure cooperation, but
Tim merely adjusted his cap and departed, holding
the door for the dog to lead the way. Henry could
hear him whistling until he reached the second landing,
and then the sound died away.

He steeled himself for the journey down. Slightly
breathless from the long climb back. Henry was
reflecting that the room where he had just taken a
shallow and hurried wash was probably the most
archaic bathroom he had ever seen. A bath the size of
a family coffin, taps equally grand, a washbasin of similarly vast proportions, plumbing which sounded
like thunder, and an outside temperature reminiscent
of the Arctic. He was left clean but hardly refreshed
by the effort of buttoning his shirt with numb fingers.
The action of choosing items from his suitcase
(neatly folded cashmere sweaters, scientifically
packed: Henry was meticulous about clothes) worried
him. Did he really want to walk into town with
these guys?

He sat on the high bed, buttoned his cuffs and
thought about it. Told himself he wasn't a homophobe, had nothing against gay guys, not really. He
just didn't happen to know any; they didn't move in
his kind of circles, or if they did, they didn't shout
about it and stuck to their own clubs. He did not quite
know the code. All he knew was that he didn't want to
be counted as one; didn't want to walk into this funny
little town in the company of a pair of oddly dressed
men and have people think he was of the same persuasion.

Henry looked out of the window again. The
road by the sea stretched into the distance, culminating
in a crazy pier. He did not know which way was
shops, could not remember his rehearsal of the map,
or which way he had walked in the disorientating rain.
He took a handful of pills from his enormous wash
bag, swallowed with a shudder.

Yes, he needed a guide. He was not in a state to be
fussy, or to preserve an element of his own kind of
snobbery; he needed to be led. Is that what it is,
Henry? You are a snob, you know. He closed his eyes
for the sound of her voice. Francesca Chisholm, with
the cut glass British accent, talking about living in a
castle and calling him a snob.

'He first deceased; she for a little tried  To live without
him, liked it not, and died', Maggie Chisholm recited.

That was not the way it was supposed to be, especially
if the he in question was not actually dead. She, being an emancipated creature of the twenty-first
century, might have pined for a bit, but then she
would think of the compensations, such as freedom,
and then she would get on with it. She would realize, after a while, that life was more than an emotional
vacuum; that is what she would do. There would
come a point when she stopped sitting in her rented
room late at night writing him recriminatory letters
which were always addressed to herself. She would
never seek to rely on men and she would sink herself
in her work. Only that, at the moment, was difficult.

This office where Maggie sat was remarkably free
of comforts, which in the normal course of events
she would not notice since comfort was not a priority,
but in the cold lack of light of a February morning, a
lumpy seat was no aid to concentration already
impeded by just that tiny touch of hangover and the
presence of a number of cardboard files which felt
damp to the touch. In another era, she would have
insisted on changing things, shouted or murmured
disapproval, assumed an air of authority, whichever
seemed appropriate to seek an improvement in her lot
or the state of her chair, but this was not the place, or
the time. She signed a letter with a flourish, wincing
at the sight of the typing with the faint letters and the
occasional misspelling, corrected by her own fair
hand in the same blue as her signature. Margaret E
Hooper, her married name, used professionally, the
signature sloping over the page towards the bottom
left corner, as if it too, was on the run. That would do
for now. Nobody would notice her absence for an
hour. Part-time jobs were not important. She was
killing time; she did not want to do anything that carried
weight. What she really wanted at this point in
her life was a lifelong contemplation of the sea, doing
absolutely nothing.

Maggie lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rise
and descend in an unequal battle with the cold air of
the room. Bugger you, Philip, why did you leave me?
Why, oh why, oh why?

He could have been a help, but now she had no
choice. She would go to the pier. The sinking pier
was good for the soul, because it was rotting. From
start to end, it was the same length as the Titanic. She would shiver and chill and postpone awkward
things, eat breakfast at the caff, back within the hour.
She bolted from the back room to the front door,
pulled it behind her with full force. It was a large
door and the slam reverberated through the building,
making her departure less than circumspect. She
paused to wipe the brass plaque with the sleeve of her
coat; the thing was a disgrace, but then, so was a door
to a solicitor's office which was so difficult to open
and close in winter that it required the firm application
of a boot or shoulder to deal with the warp. Not
the kind of behaviour to be encouraged amongst the
ranks of those in desperate search of legal advice, precisely
the category she wished to avoid. Ten in the
morning, the place far too populous for her liking; too
many familiar faces in this street. She was born and
raised in this town, escaped it, came back ignominiously
and did not, at the moment, want to be
acknowledged. By anyone.


The slam of the door caught his attention, briefly.
Henry was delighted with the High Street. A
butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, Timothy was
pointing out to him, a fishmonger, plus all those
other things so useful to mankind, or perceived to be
so, such as Dixons for televisions, a delicious shop for
linens and a greengrocer with yellow milk and white, free-range eggs. In absolute pride of place in Tim's
eyes were the thrift shops, four or five of them, each
described enthusiastically to Henry's mystification, as if they were more important than anything else.

Supermarkets? he muttered, not really familiar with
the idea of anything else, and already, by the time it
took to draw level with the slamming door, both
charmed on the one hand by the row of disparate
shops, puzzled by the thrift shops in particular and
irritated with the time it took to get around them all.
By the time they reached this point, Henry was giddy
with gossip and information. The slow passage, with
long commentary on the buildings, each fulsomely
described down to the last occupant, was accompanied
by bewildering pauses, when all he wanted to
know was Does this street run parallel to the sea? Where
is the castle where she lived? Where am I? How can I get
back? He patted the map in the top pocket of his
immaculate jacket. The map was difficult to detect
but he needed to know it was there, reassure himself.
He had, after all, come here to find himself, and even
in his slightly disorientated state, suddenly wanted to
be by himself. Again, he felt ill mannered. It was a
cheerful, bustling street, a complete and reassuring
contrast to the desolation of his limited view of the
place the night before, and it was not raining, but still
he was impatient.

'And there's the church,' Timothy was saying,
grabbing his arm and pointing out the obvious structure
further down the road with an urgency which
suggested it was about to fly away. 'Well, one of the
churches. There are rather a lot...' They had drawn
parallel with a narrow building on Henry's right,
dwarfed by its oversized front door and a tarnished
brass plaque fixed to one side.

chisholm, lawton and cooper, Commissioners for
Oaths. It was the name chisholm which caught his eye
and held him transfixed, a reminder, as if he needed
one, of his real purpose. Not the real purpose, he
told himself angrily; not the real purpose at all, he was
here to earn his living, to see a part of the world he
only knew by-proxy, to be a tourist, but all the same, the hidden agenda which had underpinned it all came
up and slapped him when he saw the name.
'What's one of these?' Henry said, stabbing a
finger at the sign. 'Commissioner for what?
'What? Oh, lawyers, to you, I suppose.'

Henry cleared his throat, which was suddenly constricted.
'Are there a lot of people called Chisholm
around here? I mean, is that a common kind of
name?' He was trying to sound as if the question was
not urgent. Peter shook his head, in mid-flow.
'A few of that name,' he said cautiously.
'I think I'll just go in here.'
'Why?'

Henry shrugged. Peter was offended, but his
offence was minimal. He rallied and smiled brightly,
'Well, don't forget to take a walk on the pier, before
you come home.'

Home? Did they think he was going to stay there?
With that bathroom?

Peter and Timothy linked arms unselfconsciously
and waved him on. Henry hesitated before he applied
force to the handle on the door and went in. A pencilled
sign, pinned to a wall, told him to bear left. He
stood, uncertainly, wondering why he had done as
he did, wishing he had rehearsed something to say,
feeling a touch defensive. But lawyers were lawyers:
there was no task a lawyer would not accept, however
frivolous. They were the ones with the local and long
distance knowledge, and as far as the lawyers Henry
knew were concerned, the customer was always right.
The client did not exist who was turned away, unless
he had no money. Henry's disorientation, which was
becoming habitual, like that of someone wandering
around with a mild dose of flu, increased as he stood
there trying to decipher the source of a clack, clack,
clack noise, interrupted by the tring! of a bell.
He turned into a room lit by the window, the light
penetrating on to the two tables, where two large
females sat, hammering away on stand-up-and-beg
ancient typewriters big enough to dwarf the size of
their formidable bosoms. He had a dim memory of
his father typing on one of these infernal machines
when he was a child, putting into it the kind of
manual effort which would be useful for mending a
road. He looked on in amazement. The nearest
woman, with a bleached frizz of hair and a comfortable
face, stopped work and whipped off her
spectacles.
'Yessir. What can I do for you?'

It was a ratatat command, in tune with her neighbour's
continued typing, accompanied by a smile
which informed him at once how she could strong- arm him out the door, or welcome him in, depending
upon his own manners.

'Could I speak to Mr Chisholm?'
'Dead these fifty years, but if you'd like to see the
current partner, I'll see if I can raise him. Not from
the dead himself, if you see what I mean. I'm sure he's
somewhere in the building. Maybe. Can I ask what it
was about? Only Mr Chisholm's substitute might not
be the right man at all.'
'I'd rather not say. It's . . . kinda personal.'

She nodded, understandingly. The word divorce was mirrored in her eyes as she moved into the foyer
and yelled into the cavern of the stairs. 'Mr Burns!'
There was an answering, indeterminate echo. She
nodded. 'Have a seat in the waiting room. He'll be out
in a minute.' She made it sound as if Mr Burns was
unfortunately stuck on the toilet, and the length of
time a client might wait before receiving the privilege
of the great man's attention was uncertain. All the
same. Henry was grateful.

The room into which he was ushered seemed, in
the harsh light of a central bulb scarcely concealed
behind a paper shade, to consist more of metal than
anything else. One side was occupied by three massive
safes, balanced against each other, the one in
the middle acting as prop to the two, slightly smaller
versions of its iron-clad self, like ancient cousins in
three-way conversation. They smelt metallic; they
looked icy cold to the touch; they were two metres
high, leaving a stretch of yellow wall between their
heads and the yellower ceiling. The touch of green
on the metal suggested the presence of something
perishable inside. Henry turned away and looked for
a chair.

Twelve chairs, he counted, ranged round the sides
of the room not occupied by the volume of the safes,
each of a different style, a couple made of plastic
alone, two more which his untutored eye could see in
a museum taking pride of place with their frayed,
Georgian beauty, three of lesser, but refined Victorian
vintage, despite the rotting forepaw of a leg here and
there. The wooden floor dipped dramatically, nothing
particularly clean or polished; his hand encountered a
piece of extra-cold chewing gum on the underside of
the seat he had chosen. He waited. The outside door
slammed with the same shuddering reverberation
which had drawn him towards it in the first place. The clack, clack clack of the typewriters went on, interrupted by a telephone and a burst of irritated
speech. He waited. A head appeared round the doorway.

'Do come up. Mr...'
'Evans. Henry.'
'Good morning. Cold, isn't it?'

The black legs in front of him took the stairs two at
a time, and then they were in a bigger room overlooking
the street, where it was light and mercifully
warm. Not warm enough for Henry to want to fling
off his coat, but tolerable.
'American, Mr Evans?'
'Oh ... how can you tell?'
'Clothes, dear boy. Can always tell by the clothes.
Also by the way people shake their heads. Your first
visit?'
'Why, yes. Always meant to, never did ...'

His head had been nodding. Henry realized and
steadied it, immediately. His jaw had dropped, too. He
was trying to pull himself together. Mr Burns, with
the white skin, appalling haircut and ill-fitting clothes,
was the man he had seen hurrying by in his ungainly
way earlier in the morning. His hair still stood up in
tufts and his shirt, on closer glance, was frayed at the
collar. The cuffs were invisible since the sleeves of his
jacket were long enough to cover his knuckles, giving
the impression of long, thin fingers attempting to
escape over the desk. The desk itself, partner sized, had
once been magnificent, not an epithet Henry could
have applied to the man, but the leather top was worn
from red to dusty pink and looked as if Burns, or a pet
of his, devoted some of each day to chewing it. There
were two coasters, strategically positioned for the placing
of cups, a precaution against further wear and tear
which was redundant since the surface was already
pitted with circular scars and the evidence of spills.

Henry made sure his mouth was shut and tried to
look Burns in the eye, man to man, but his gaze was
distracted to above his head, where a large, stuffed
fish was posed inside a glass tank, petrified against a
background of alarmingly green weed. Burns caught
Henry's eye.
'I didn't catch it, oh dear me, no. The original Mr
Chisholm probably did. One of my predecessors
anyway, probably about 1910. It's lasted fairly well.
They existed for that kind of sport, the lawyers, just
as many of my contemporaries seem to exist for golf.
Very good golf round here. I suppose you've come to
work at Fergusons?'
'Why, yes. That was another good guess, Mr Burns .'
'Simple deduction, dear boy. You see an American
in Warbling, and he's either working for Fergusons or
being a tourist, and we don't get too many of those in
winter, unless they're insane. I suppose you're looking
for a house.'

Henry's chair wobbled dangerously. He remembered
to lean forward rather than back. There was
something delightfully disingenuous about Mr Burns.
There would have to be, for him to let himself out
into the world, looking like that.
'No, sir. I'm not looking for a house, not yet
anyway. I don't have to start at Fergusons for a week
or two yet and I don't know how long I'll be staying,
but--

'Pioneering another drug, are you? New, improved
Viagra?'

Burns laughed. People always sniggered at the
mention of the most famous drug Fergusons distributed,
Henry thought with irritation; it was like kids
discovering rude words. He waited for a few seconds,
anticipating the next question so frequently asked Have
you got any spare? - but then decided Mr Burns
was not vulgar enough for that. Henry was struggling
to equate this gargoyle with attorneys of his own
strata, beautifully suited, booted and spurred with
power hair. He leaned further forward. The chair
creaked again. The room reeked of cigarette smoke.

'Mr Burns, I'm not buying anything. Truth is, I'm
looking for someone. A woman. She was born and
raised in this area and I knew her, what . . .' he
coughed, embarrassed, '. . . oh, about twenty years
ago. We were both kids, met backpacking in India.
We were pretty good friends for a coupla months,
lost contact, you know how it goes. But I know she
came back here. She said she'd never live anywhere
else.' He coughed again awkwardly and directed his
gaze at the fish. 'I got the impression that her family
were in the upper bracket, A-grade sort of people, called Chisholm, like your firm. Francesca Chisholm.
Does that ring any bells with you? Or if it doesn't,
could you find out for me? I just thought, being an
attorney in a town this size, you're all set to know
who lives where.'

His voice trailed away. There was a sudden image
of Francesca in her shawl, passing by him in that
ramshackle bus, missing him by minutes. He had
dithered, said his stiff goodbyes, made for the station
and the train as planned because Henry could never
change a plan, and then he found the courage to do
just that, run back, intercept her before she got on
that damn bus, and say to her, either you go with me
or I go with you, right? Makes no difference, as long
as we go together. You mustn't go by yourself, you're
not fit; I love you. I'll take you home. Too late. He had
been running up the hill like a madman in the heat as
the bus stormed down. She had not seen him, but he
had seen her face at the window, crying into the shawl
round her neck. Abandoned by him, haunting him
ever since.

'I didn't go back for her, Mr Burns,' he found himself
saying. 'I didn't go back for her soon enough. I
should have. She had to come back here because her
father had died. I didn't understand. We had such
plans. I tried to change my mind, but not soon
enough. Should have turned back.'

There was a silence, interrupted by the drumming
of fingers on the ruined surface of the desk.
'Twenty years ago, Mr Evans? Twenty years? It's a
bloody lifetime.' Burns' peculiarly black, tufted eyebrows
were arched to meet the mess of his hair.
Henry's eyes wandered back to the fish in the glass
case and he encouraged himself to wonder if beasts
that size were swimming in the English Channel, like
monsters of the deep. Your mind hops about like a frog,
Henry, Francesca had told him once. It hops in a
straight line more or less, via a series of sideways jumps.
You can't sit on the fence. Henry; you'd never concentrate
long enough. As well as thinking about the likely origins
of the monster fish in order to distract himself
from his own embarrassment, Henry was also wondering
if everything Francesca had ever said to him
was pertinent and observant, or whether it was the
romantic deception of memory which made it seem so. They had laughed, much of the time; he had never
since met a woman who made him laugh so much,
but she had always seemed so much older than he.
She seemed, in retrospect, to have emerged from her
adolescence a fully formed woman, whereas he had
been a boy.

Burns lit a cigarette with all the furtive clumsiness
of a boy; the smell of it brought Henry back to the
present, made him aware he was in an old office
space which was either entirely decrepit or deliberately
eccentric, and a place where smoking was not
only a health hazard but also a fire risk. Burns looked
for an ashtray in the chaos of the desk top, failed after
a desultory attempt and absentmindedly tapped the
ash on the floor. Downstairs, the door banged; the
building trembled and settled back to a kind of
somnolence.

'What a shame you aren't looking for a house, Mr
Evans,' the lawyer resumed, chattily. 'Then I'd really
be able to help. Wills, estates and the transfer of
houses, that's basically what we exist to do, especially
houses. There's one section of the better-off population
do nothing but move house, move house, until
finally they die and the fun really starts. Bit of crime,
of course. We've got three dozen public houses in
this town, plenty of stimulants and unemployment,
bound to cause trouble from time to time. If only
they'd all go home and take your Viagra, ha ha! Less
bloody trouble all round ...'

'I don't want a house, and I don't want to make a
will,' Henry said.

The cigarette flew out of Burns' hand, and landed,
smouldering on the carpet. A few dozen others must
have gone the same way, judging from the marks on
the wood to the side of the desk. Henry winced,
watching as Burns retrieved the cigarette with surprising
grace, swooping upon it like a bird of prey,
taking a quick, desperate puff and throwing the remnant
into the fireplace behind him. Henry craned to
see where it had gone, calmer for the pantomime and
privately delighted to see the man move. He seemed
to consist of overlong legs and arms, with a narrow
torso. Burns leaned back in his chair, something
Henry did not dare to do, and laced his long fingers
together. They disappeared inside the cuffs of the
funereally black, suspiciously dusty jacket. The voice
was suddenly precise and dry.

'Of course I know of Francesca Chisholm. I
wouldn't need to be a-lawyer to know. I'd just have to
read the newspapers. But because I am a lawyer, Mr
Evans, and Miss Chisholm is a client, there's not a
single thing I have to tell you, and I may add, I'm distinctly
suspicious of your motives. If what you say
is true - which if it is makes you just another
menopausal man in search of an old romance - then
I couldn't possibly take your money to tell you what
you could find out for free in our excellent reference
library. I'm not a detective and I'm not for hire. If what you say is true, the only advice I can offer you is
to regard her as DEAD.' He was lighting another cigarette,
shrugging his thin shoulders, either seriously
cross or faking it. 'This place does not exist to make
money, Mr Evans. It exists to keep the confidences of
others, as far as possible. Come back if you need that
house or that will.'

Henry felt obscurely ashamed and furious at the
same time. 'I didn't mean to bother you,' was all he
could say. 'I'm not asking much, Mr Burns.'

He was rewarded with a radiant smile. 'In which
case, you have nothing in common with the rest of
my clients. Do you know the way out?'

Downstairs, where the temperature dropped with
each step. A sudden panic when he could not open
the door and thought he would have to ask, braced
himself as he pulled on the handle, slammed it shut.
Out on the busy street, remembering nothing else
than the fact that all the roads led to the sea. And
Francesca Chisholm might as well be dead.

Maybe he shouldn't have stared at the fish. Maybe
he should have put money on the table, but he'd got
the general idea that that wouldn't have made an
ounce of difference.

But I think I've seen her, Mr Burns. Of course
she's alive. She left her shawl on the banisters.


Maggie sidled into the room, carrying two mugs of
coffee which she placed on the worn leather of the
desk. She tutted under her breath and searched under
a pile of paperwork to unearth the ashtray, which she
placed closest to him, plucked the cigarette from his
nerveless fingers, took a quick drag, and stubbed it
out.
'You could have charged him a walk-in fee,
Edward, you could at least have done that.'
'Why?'
'I dunno. Silly suggestion, really. What was it all
about?'
'Nothing.'
'OK, I dare say you'll tell me in a minute. I just
heard you sounding a bit, well, you know, clipped.
Not like you, Edward, I mean not normally.'

She picked up the newspaper which littered a corner , sat back in the chair recently occupied by the
client and read it nonchalantly. The day before yesterday's
news was good enough. Edward Burns
gulped his coffee and scalded his tongue, patently
upset.
'Mrs Forbes says he looked a nice man,' she said.
'He's staying at the House of Enchantment, because
the Nelson wasn't up to hospitality, I heard. Smith
sent him there as his own little revenge on the world
for the fact the bar was flooded again. "The man was
wearing a silly hat and was an anally retentive little
prick." I quote verbatim.'

Edward nodded. 'I know. I was in there this morning, looking at the damage. He's quite unfit to manage
that hotel, even with us - you, rather - checking his
books and the register twice a week. He simply cannot
cope in a crisis and he takes instant, completely
unfounded dislikes to strangers. Hardly a qualification.'
'Is this American good looking?' Maggie asked,
casually. She seemed more than usually restless, moving round in her seat like a cat making a nest, failing
to catch his eye.

'Frightfully well dressed. Otherwise unremarkable.
You'd miss him in a crowd. I don't know. I never
notice things like that.'
'No, Ed, you don't.'
'He seems nice enough. Going to work for
Fergusons. But what could I say to him? He wants to
find Francesca. Says he's a long-lost friend. Met her
in India. Before my time.'

'Ah, yes. That was ages ago. Before life began or
started to end, whichever way you look at it. He might
be genuine. Nothing to suggest he's a journalist in
disguise, was there? After all, Francesca's hardly news
any more. We're all trying to forget her. As if we
could. Although we should. I can't.'

'You defended her,' he said flatly.
'Yes. To be the best of my ability, darling, to coin a
phrase. Don't frown so. Yes, you are entirely right in
your estimation of me, Edward. I may have qualified
as a lawyer but I am profoundly frivolous and likely to
remain so, but it doesn't follow that I'm incompetent.
I'm just absolutely determined to avoid
responsibility. I've done the career bit and the married
bit and I don't give a shit. No roof over my head: do
I want responsibility? Like hell I do. Sixteen hours a
week is what I do for you . . . Quite enough. The
crime around here is so boring. Get drunk, get sick,
hit each other, was it the left fist or the right. . .'
'With the exception of Francesca Chisholm. Your
cousin. Whose ancestor founded this firm.'

She sipped at the coffee, decorously. Her normally
pale face was pink from the cold.
'Francesca didn't care who defended her. Anyone
would have done. And two hours a week was plenty
enough to organize the defence of a woman who
insisted she was guilty. No debate about it and none
allowed. Are you sure, I'd say? Are you absolutely
sure? and she'd say. Course I'm sure, I was there
wasn't I, I should know. It cost twenty pence to fish
on the pier, she'd say, as if that was the whole thing
about it which surprised her. And it's the same length
as the Titanic. Don't waste money, someone else
needs it. Just get it over with for me and tell them I'm
sorry. I mean, all I did was get a man to translate that
to court as kindly as he might. I check up on her protege and her friend, small thanks for it. I bring her
reports from her own, lost world. She delegated
rather a lot of tasks and I do them.'
'Do you think you might have done a more thorough
job if you hadn't been in the midst of divorce?'
'Get stuffed, Edward. You were supervising. We
took instructions; we obeyed them to the letter. That's
all we could do. And I suppose you refused to tell that
American anything about it? Sent him away without
a word? Client confidentiality? She needs friends,
even if she hasn't got them, and he might just be one.
So what if he's a fool?'
'She doesn't deserve friends.'
'Deserve them? What's that got to do with anything?
She always says, I can't talk now, as if she ever
will. Do you know, she's been there almost a year? I
hate anniversaries. So will she. Where's he gone, that
man?'

Edward considered carefully. 'He's gone for a walk
on the pier. Listen Maggie, officially we shouldn't tell
him anything.'
'Officially,' she said, picking up the coffee mugs
and looking out of the window. Edward sighed again,
and fumbled for the cigarettes.

'He isn't good looking, you know, Maggie. There's
no real reason to bother.'
'He's just another man who fell for Francesca,'
Maggie said. 'And left her. Like they all did. Like
they all do. You're a bunch of shits, really.'
'Not all of us,' Edward said.



I treasure the shawl because it was a gift, not for itself,
however useful it is. But I suppose I disapprove of sentiment,
or sentimental gestures. They get in the way of
genuine emotion and disguise it thoroughly. I was trying
to make an inventory yesterday, of all the people I've
liked in my life. I don't mean loved, or adored; I mean
liked. There was a man a long time ago whom I adored
because he had no idea of how singular he was. I should
have kept in touch with him, but I didn't.

Those were the days when people were expendable. One
always assumed there would be someone else of equal calibre.
Wrong. Would you shoot tigers with him? my father
would have asked. Yes, but I went on to prefer the deliberately
extrovert and sociable type of male. Then there are the
people I adopted because it was so unfair that no one else
would. I cannot bear to see loneliness when I can do something
about it, but empathy with people who need you is
not quite the same thing as liking. I think that liking is a
cousin to respect, but respect is more important. Angela
was often difficult to like, but she deserved enormous
respect. I like Maggie; she does not know how generous she
is and I must not take advantage of her. I have a
phonecard. I could speak to her but I don't, it isn't fair. I
shall dribble on to paper instead, avoiding facts and dates.

Father once took us to the house of a military friend of
his, very old school. He had stuffed animal heads on the
walls. Maggie and I must have been about two feet each,
gazing at them in horror. It was Maggie who said that
the rest of the tiger was behind the wall, ready to come
crashing through as soon as we left.

And I believed her.

FMC.


chapter	three.

henry walked down the length of the High Street,
took the next left and made for the sea. A stiff breeze
raised the hair on his head and made him vow to buy
a new hat on the way back. He had noticed a shop
that seemed to specialize in what other men seemed
to wear, a strange species of cap which did not seem
to protect the ears, but he also noticed that the men
who wore hats seemed to spend most of their time
bareheaded. Into a shop they would go, and off came
the hat; if they met a woman, off came the hat, a constant
doffing of the thing, as if it was an
embarrassment. There was something else he noticed
too, in the bustle of the narrow pavements, and that
was the way that whenever they bumped into each
other, both parties said 'sorry', regardless of fault.
The word was a kind of password, a prefix to whatever
came next, 'Sorry, could you hold the door for
me . . . Sorry, I haven't got change today . . . Sorry .you bumped into me;' It seemed mandatory to apologize for taking up space.

All in all, his encounter with the lawyer was one
Henry decided he had found oddly exhilarating,
despite the accompanying humiliation, and he was
trying to work out why as he walked up towards the
sea through a series of narrow streets, remembering
to say 'sorry' to whoever crossed his path. He felt he
had got something off his chest by at least admitting 
to someone, even someone as alien as Edward Burns, 
that what he really wanted to do, above all else, was
find Francesca Chisholm. And he had done it; he had
actually made the admission to a complete stranger;
he had taken a spontaneous risk and he had not felt 
quite such a fool as he'd thought he might feel. That
was number one reflection. The next was a sense of
release that the lawyer had not said Francesca who?
Or murmured, my dear man, of course Francesca
Chisholm is alive and well, but how on earth could
you imagine she would want to renew an acquaintance
with a lousy little bore like you? And thirdly, a
sense of mild triumph which was the most difficult to 
explain. Francesca Chisholm was patently alive and 
not in the graveyard, as a few of his contemporaries 
already were as the result of rash experiments with
drugs, ambition and fast cars. He could not see
Francesca as self-destructive, but he could see her
crashing a car with the greatest of ease. She would be
impulsive with her enthusiasms; she would never be
scientific enough to know how an engine worked. She
would press the pedals and tell it to go.

How do you know that? he asked himself. You
don't know anything. You didn't really know her; it
was she who seemed to know you. What pleased him
most about the lawyer with the dead fish in his office
was what he had revealed about Francesca, rather
than what he had withheld. The woman was not only
alive, but she had made the news, done something
that made her attorney bridle so defensively. She
might be a notoriety of some kind, raising Cain, running
protest movements, leading a wild life, behaving
scandalously, or at least oddly, shocking the natives
one way or another, and he was distinctly proud of
her for that. The sense of vicarious achievement grew
with each step. You are known, Francesca; people know who you are; they talk about you. You're a somebody; you didn't become a nonentity with a dry career
like me; you stayed that bright light you were.

So bright, she could shine in the darkness, it had
seemed to him, twenty years ago. Had her beauty
been so spectacular, or was it another kind of singularity
which made her so haunting, even against the
dramatic scenery of the Indian subcontinent? Brilliant
blue skies, the almost surreal colours of vegetation
and the peacock shades of clothing against the dull
browns of dried palm fronds which cooled the village
houses . . . the vivid cerise of split watermelon; the
yellow of the daily pineapple ... He could struggle to
remember the debilitating intoxication of the constant,
visual feast it had been, and yet remember her,
dressed in dull khaki trousers and her long hair in a
twist. He could recall, with difficulty, the impact of
the Indian women, the poor in the country, the rich in
the hotels, universally exquisite but achingly untouchable.
They were removed by their eyes, dress,
language, decorum and, surely, indifference to a
large, hulking young man who went pink in the sun
and could not digest their food. The one who
watched them covertly, aware of his clumsiness and
their fragility. He should have remembered them; he
should have remembered the magnificence of the
scenery, captured painstakingly on his camera, but all
he remembered was her, the one he was never
allowed to photograph.

Henry walked slowly through the streets, seeing
nothing. He had been fragile when they had met, his
stomach recovered to the extent that he could eat
selectively and drink litres of bottled water a day. The
water supplies weighed down his rucksack more than anything else and he was too weak to sling it over his
shoulder. And he was starved for conversation, too,
after the deliberate isolation of his travels. He had
been determined to avoid the wandering tribes of
travellers with their incessant boasts of cheaper
accommodation, cheaper dope, better bargains. He
had wanted to climb hills and see unknown views,
and had almost done it; he was sick of it, and sicker of
his own indolence. Wherever he went, everyone else
was working. They worked with incessant, labour
intensive industry while all he had done for three
months was to follow an elaborate, carefully prepared
itinerary and watch them about the business of their
sweated labour. He was humbled by generosity, infuriated
by incurable poverty; he was lonely and
nervous and sick of responding to Hallo, how are
you? with the single response possible, I'm good, thank
you, in the hourly recitation of a daily lie. Coming into
the sanctuary of a shaded guest house to find her sitting
on the veranda, telling stories to children, her
instant appeal to him was not unique, but simply
inevitable. Perhaps because she liked poetry and
thought it entirely natural to carry around a volume
of verse when a packet of nuts would have been more
useful. It was a cool evening; she wore a cheap shawl
to cover her thin shoulders. He had thought, from
behind, that she was an elderly woman.

Henry had reached the view of the pier without
noticing any building he had passed, lost in memory
of another time and place, and he swore under his
breath. This was the most regular habit of his lifetime,
making journeys to foreign destinations, covering
every inch on foot and then somehow not seeing a
thing, walking around with his eyes on the ground, privately occupying another space. That was why, years since, thinking of Francesca even then, he had
stopped carrying a camera, because when he looked
at the pictures when he got home he recognized nothing,
as if he had turned a blind eye to the lens, like
Nelson to his telescope. He did not feel he had ever been there, and here he was now, just the same.

You don't really look. Henry, do you? You take an
inventory and pass it on.

Francesca had not been critical when she said that.
She had simply been curious, as she was about everything.
It was an essential part of her charm.

He had seen the pier from the window of the House
of Enchantment that morning, made himself notice
what a strange and ugly structure it was, made of
colourless concrete with stiff, spindly, jointless legs
which seemed to bow as they met the water. The pier's
legs have no ankles and no knees, the words of her
description coming back to haunt, as if they had been
as important at the time as the quality of laughter in
her voice. There were four shelters on the pier, built
into the concrete for the benefit of fishermen, and a
series of utilitarian street lamps leading towards the
low-slung building at the end, which housed a caff
and lavatories, flanked by semicircular platforms at a
lower level nearer the sea. The caff looked like some
miniature manufacturing plant, squatting on its own
industry, while the whole of the pier looked like a
benign mistake, simply a road which was intended to
go further across the sea, ending where it did, the
half-hearted beginning to a pedestrian bridge,
because someone, somewhere, has simply decided to
stop. Henry walked towards it, determined to keep his
eyes off the ground and not to think about the cold
around his ears.

There was no need to seek information: it was all
there, written on two blackboards carefully placed to
waylay the unwary at the porticoed entrance.
Selective information, Henry guessed, since the
blackboards allowed the pier's caretaker to deliver different
facts every day, changing them with a swipe of
cloth and new, laborious lettering, according to whim. This pier is exactly 882 feet, nine inches long and was
opened in 1957. It replaces another pier which got hit by
a ship in World War Two. Entrance is free, unless you
wish to fish, in which case, 20p. The wind force today is
1--2 and the sea temperature is nil centigrade.

Low. Henry huddled into his jacket, reminded
himself of the errand to buy a hat, and then reminded
himself not to keep on thinking of what he was going
to do next, but to think of what he was doing now. Walking the concrete deck of a crazy structure
unadorned with anything except the black umbrellas of fishermen, wooden benches fixed to the side walls, other walkers. It was relatively quiet; no loud music, no obvious sounds of fun, but the sound of human
chatter against the sea. He loved the openness of it
and he was hungry; memories of India made him so;
memories of never being ravenous, but never feeling
fed, causing his stomach to growl ferociously. He
blamed the sea air. From a ventilation shaft next to
the door of the structure at the end, there wafted the
forbidden, mouthwatering smell of frying bacon.

Henry forgot the view. The warmth inside was
fuggy and humid and he found himself passing a
hand over his stomach beneath his jacket, comforting
it with a circular stroke, then measuring the extra
flesh. He had been very fat, he had been gross for five
years, and in those seven years since, he had craved
the unnatural thinness which had been his in the
rucksack-carrying year. Without that weight, he
might have tried to find her sooner. He had carried
his luggage of vitamins, minerals, trace elements, supplements
over several continents, leaving this until
last. They weighed more than his baggage of water,
twenty years ago. He scanned the menu for the vegetarian
meal. There had been a sign affixed to the
entry door, announcing opening and closing times. Sometimes early and sometimes late, it said.
'Can I have the vegetarian option?'
'No call for it, squire, not really.'

There was no contempt, only patience. The tea
was the colour of rust. Henry closed his eyes, drank it
with sugar and went back to the counter and asked
for more. Then he ate bacon and egg with soft, white
toast, agonizing over each mouthful. His father would
have liked this. There was never a day when he did
not think about his father.

Henry watched the calm skyline and thought about
his father. Dead these last three months and, along
with Francesca Chisholm, occupying at least one half
of his waking thoughts as well as many of his dreams.
It was only when he thought of his father, and what
he might have inherited by way of personal worth,
that Henry Evans allowed himself to think he might
be a decent enough man himself. He looked down at
the fishing platform and noticed missing planks, the
water churning beneath. The sense of fatigue came
back.


The child looked angelic in sleep. Looking at her in
this state made Angela wince with sheer pleasure,
amazed that she should be such a graceful and placid
sleeper, no tossing and turning, no signs of distress in
her unconsciousness. She lay flat on her stomach, her
perfect hands pressed into the pillow above her head,
face on one side, displaying on the white of the linen
the dark, rich curls of her hair. A proper auburn,
Angela admired; the colour of horse chestnuts startlingly
combined not with the pale skin and blue eyes
of the traditional redhead, but a sallower complexion
which always looked kissed by the sun. And remarkable
brown eyes, above a delicate nose which was
sweeter than ever in profile like this, breathing in and
out with the minimal sound of a contented baby
animal. The lips were slightly parted; the fingertips
were lightly curled; there were no nightmares and she
was a piece of perfection who deserved to be the
centre of the universe; she deserved any sacrifice
which could be made and she would sleep for hours.
Angela turned from her, feeling satisfied. The child
slept the sleep of healthy exhaustion, fresh air, exercise, stimulation and plenty of food. She was a wiry
little thing. Not so little, and incredibly strong. She
might make an athlete; she shone at school sports
and showed a capacity to excel if only she was not so bored with it all. Difficult to get the hang of the rules. 
Why not outrun everyone else and shove the ball in 
the net, using the quickest route, even if it did mean 
going out of the ground and pushing people over?
Why obey the whistle if you were ahead? Why not use
skull, feet and fists and anything else which was
useful, even if you were only supposed to use your
hands or a stick? She was learning, though; she
learned fast. Angela smiled fondly, touched the pillow
in benediction, then touched her own hair, hidden 
beneath a rustling shower cap. Time to rinse. Twenty 
minutes maximum, or her hair would look like a bonfire in full flame once it was dry. There would only be
a slight resemblance to the rich auburn of her daughter.
Tanya had said that a girl at school had said, why
hasn't your mummy got hair like yours? The fond
and logical explanation that only half the mothers
who collected at the school gates had a colour of hair
resembling that of their children, or even their own, had failed to reassure. There were gaps in Tanya's
logic, as well as her sensitivities, and if she wanted
Mummy to have the same hair colour as herself, well
then. Mummy would fix it. Angela glanced in the
mirror and wondered if Uncle Joe would notice the
difference when she visited next; she'd take a bet on
it. Henna was such messy stuff and the application
was roughly the equivalent of shoving her head in a
cow pat of warm dung, with a not dissimilar smell
and texture. It stained where it touched the porcelain;
she had spent half the waiting time scrubbing at it,
and the towel round her neck would never be the
same again. It would be relegated to towels to be used
for swimming in summer. If they ever did that again.
Of course they would. By the end of the summer
before, Tanya could float like a cork and swim like an
eel, although eels had better understanding of the
tides.

Angela set about the task of getting the muck out
of her hair with the aid of the shower attachment,
cricking her neck at an uncomfortable angle over the
sink. All finished, and she felt a huge impatience to
get it dry and see the result. Tanya might not like it
and she might have to do it all over again, but if the
little brute said she wanted a blonde mummy next
time, that was what she would have.

No. Not blonde. That was Francesca's colour. It
might remind her.

Coffee; too early for a drink as long as it was daylight.
She looked into the refrigerator, anxiously,
checking supplies. A piece of cold chicken, a bottle of
cheap Bulgarian wine, a dozen kinds of the yoghurt
that Tanya loved, enough for a meal, later. Gone were
the days of finer foods, all ending, as they had begun,
with Francesca. When the doorbell rang, she made a
quick, furious check of the tea and coffee supply, and
hoped to heaven it was no one she owed the politeness
of hospitality. As if there was anyone to who she
owed nothing, or any time when she could refuse to
answer the door, or fail to explain why it was her
daughter was asleep in the afternoon. Because we get
up so early, see? On her way across the carpet (worn,
but subject to rigorous cleaning; must not let anyone
imagine standards were slipping) she flipped the
switch to the radio, filling the flat with the calm music
of Classic FM. Made her look as if she was in control;
relaxed; in command, not someone wating for inspection.

Maggie, looking bloody brilliant, in the way she
did. A ripe, well proportioned figure in just the right
kind of warm, lightweight coat, slimline trousers, neat 
little boots which combined practicality with a touch
of elegance, and a somewhat breathless Hello! Just
wondered if everything was all right... Bitch. Hate her.
Coming round for a sympathy fix, the sort which was
given but never solicited, making Angela feel deficient.
It was hard accepting solicitude from someone
who never seemed to need it. Angela knew what she 
was going to say before she said it; the words were
already assembled like something wrapped for the
post. Hello! Maggie, nice to see you, come on in, won't
you? the smile on the face ready glued like the stamp
on the parcel, hoping she really was just passing.

'I was just passing,' Maggie said: the way you did
when you lodged in the other direction. The just passing stuff was nosy neighbour code and it was bad
manners to be seen to doubt it. 'On my way out,'
Maggie continued. 'And I'm late already. I just
thought I'd bring you these . . .' Now this was better
already; an immediate announcement of no intention
to stay. Angela liked that kind of visitor and she
smiled with extra special warmth as she accepted the
flowers. Winter blooms, on closer inspection, snowdrops
wrapped in brown paper, not long picked and
artfully bound. Angela never knew what to do with
flowers. These were tasteful, without being edible.
'I was thinking of sending some to Francesca,'
Maggie was saying. 'Only then I remembered they
wouldn't let her have them. Don't know why.
Infectious or something, some new rule.'
'Bastards,' Angela said with real feeling. 'Bastards.'
She squared her shoulders, put the proffered flowers
on the chair by the door with a nod of thanks she did
not feel. 'I've got to dry my hair. Why don't you go
and look at Tanya? She's fast asleep, poor love.'

It was important that she make this child accessible
to anyone who wanted to see her. She must always
answer the door and behave politely, make it clear
there was absolutely nothing to hide. Maggie crossed
the floor of the living room into the bedroom with long-legged speed. Angela heard the muted ahhh of appreciation as she stood by the bed, and almost liked
her for that. No one could be all that bad if they loved 
the child. She liked Maggie all the more when she was
back within the minute, adjusting her scarf, ready for
the off without a single suggestion of lingering longer. She had a ski hat with darling little tassels bursting from the crown, poking out of her bag. It matched her brown boots, would look perfect over her voluminous, well dressed hair. There was a pale scarf at
her neck, too; she would never get cold. Sheer, naked, dislike returned. They stood by the door. Maggie had
opened it, stood elegantly with her hand on the jamb.
'Has Neil been round recently?' 
'Yeah. Took her out, Saturday. It's great she likes
the castle so much.' As if she didn't know. As if she
didn't check on Neil, too.

'Oh, by the way. There's this bloke in town, got 
here yesterday. He, hmm, says he knew Francesca 
years ago, wants to get in touch. I... hmm, well, any 
idea what I should say? I mean, I'm her cousin, but 
you were her closest friend and you, you sort of hmm,
know her best. What do you think she would want me
to say?' She spoke as if she were tossing away a careless
and purposeless question, but she was hesitant
and slightly flustered, the way she never was. It made
Angela more suspicious than ever. She shrugged,
thought of the sleeping child, and crossed her arms,
defensively, careful not to let irritation show.

'I dunno what you say. Truth's best, isn't it? Tell
him where to write to her, I would. I expect she likes
letters. She used to write enough of them. Always
writing something.'

Maggie nodded, smiled and was gone. Angela
picked up the artfully wrapped snowdrops, and after
three seconds' contemplation of stamping them
underfoot, unwrapped them carefully and found a
cup to put them in, with water, so that they should
not die. They must be prominently displayed until
they decayed. They had the fresh look of half-budded
winter blooms which would last in a cool room for
days. She would take them to Uncle Joe. The child
began to stir in her sleep and cry. Sudden sounds like
that made Angela anxious. When this child had come
to her, she had newly mended bones and scars the
healing of which she could never quite believe.

It was nonsense for anyone to believe that a woman
could not love an adopted child as much as if it were
her own flesh and blood. Impossible to love anyone
more than this. But real mothers, real, neglectful, selfish
mothers, did not have to open the door to every
knock. They could ruin their kids and no one would
know.


The cry of the seagulls woke Henry from his doze on
the pier. He was aware of a vague sensation of being
watched. A long doze which left him consulting the
time to find the day waning. The last bench had been sheltered and caught the sun; it had invited him to sit
on it, but not for so long. Tired again. He blamed the
influx of cholesterol having the same effect on his arteries as all those militants blocking negotiations somewhere in the countries of Europe beyond the horizon. He had dozed with the readiness of an old, old man, and the afternoon had struck him unawares.


His eyes were rimmed with a brittle crust of salt. He
rose stiffly, peered over the rails to the fishing platform, and saw again the broken boards and the sea, 
swelling gently beneath. He remembered the things 
he needed to do - buy a new hat, find another place to stay - and felt indecisive, fuddled by sleep and
ashamed of it. He started to walk back the length of
the Titanic towards the town, slowly. 

The shoreline met the sea in a curve. He felt, as he 
stopped, that he was approaching the rim of the   world, a newcomer to it. To the far left he could see 
the suggestion of a cliff, at odds with the flatness of 
the coast, as if marking the beginning of new, alien territory a mile away. In the nearer distance there was the squat outline of one of the castles he had 
come to see, and for a moment, recognizing it from  illustrations, he was disappointed. It seemed mean
looking and close to the ground, squatting like a
toad, instead of rising high against the sky into misty 
battlements like the castles of fairy tales, and it 
seemed sadly dwarfed by the redbrick block of flats
next to it.

Henry did not want to register disappointment, so
he let his eyes wander, away from the dun castle walls, across a fine parade of white buildings to the junction
and then to the houses which stretched out to the
right. All of them seemed to be different heights and
colours, pinks and blues and whites, red, pantiled
roofs, slate roofs and a riot of chimneys. They looked
as if they had been randomly built, each to its own
idea, and then huddled together for warmth and company,
the better to face the sea. Smoke idled from
crooked chimneypots. By the time he was halfway
down the length of the pier, Henry could imagine the
houses shuffling together to fill the gaps; he could
see greater detail; a variety of windows and widths of
frontages, brave windowboxes sporting ragged bursts
of greenery. He noticed with a curious pride that he
could see the House of Enchantment in the distance,
larger than its neighbours, with its distinctive turret
worn like a hat making it markedly different from any
of the others, although nothing was uniform. He
imagined the streets they had walked that morning
wriggling away behind this frontage into a warren of
picturesque dwellings, each with a chimney stack for
Santa Claus. The houses, from further back, looked
as if they should have been inhabited by pixies; closer
in, they had an utterly human and humane scale.
Henry found himself grinning. The splendours of
the big hotel, which simply disturbed the line of his
vision with its obtrusive presence near the end of the
pier, seemed suddenly inappropriate. Why would he
want to stay there? He felt invigorated with a peculiar
sense of homecoming.

There was a bulbous sculpture at the pier entrance
he had not noticed before. Men and boats and fish, all
of rounded shapes, were intertwined in the design. It
was metal, but weathered like stone. Henry patted it
in approval.

The breeze, which had died and, in its dying, lulled
him into sleep, sprang back into life, and he missed
the hat. He plunged downhill again, confident of his
route back to the shops and the house which he
decided to call home, for a day or two more at least, even with that bathroom. He wanted to be back there, watching the sky grow pink, looking at the view in
reverse from his high, casement window long before
dark. He noticed the details of buildings he had
missed on the earlier route . . . ah, there was the
library, but tomorrow would do for that. And then, 
turning into his path from a narrow road at the side,
he saw a tall, slender woman, walking briskly away,
her head and neck wrapped in a white scarf which
trailed down the back of her long, dark coat. He could
hear the click of heels on the pavement, louder than
any other sound, but all he noticed was the luminous
whiteness of the scarf. Some fine woollen cloth which
drifted in the draught of her movement. A peculiar
stride; it could be her. He hesitated, embarrassed and
indecisive; her stride seemed to lengthen as if she was
determined to increase the distance, and then Henry
broke into a run. What did it matter if he touched her
on the shoulder? No one could arrest him for that.

He was stiff from sitting still; the body which he
forced to run at home, for the good of its health, was
reluctant to cooperate. The exercise regime had
slipped since his father had died; everything had, and
he was wearing too many clothes for comfort. The
soft leather jacket was cumbersome. The whiteness of
the scarf tantalized; Henry felt he could reach it, at
least draw level and glance at the face before he committed
himself to a greeting. He could say I'm sorry,
but . . . , that would make it OK; then he tripped,
stumbled and fell with agonizing slowness, breaking
his fall against a wall with a jarring pain in his wrist
that made him yell. He landed heavily on one side, lay
there, winded and blind. There would be a lump on his
forehead. His heart was pounding.

The sidestreet had been virtually empty, he seemed
to recall, but now there was a crowd.
'Eh! That was a tumble! What's your hurry? Are
you all right?'
'Oh, you've given yourself a knock. Up you come.
Steady does it... There we are!'

It seemed as if a dozen hands were hauling him to
his feet. His face was level with the wrinkled, weather
worn face of a grandmother and her arm steadied
him protectively. He smiled, automatically. 'I'm
sorry .. .' he began.

She grinned back. 'I should take more water with
it, son, if I were you,' she said, and the other three 
people laughed, too, in relief. Henry felt ashamed, as 
if he had been drunk, falling down in the street like a 
bum, to be rescued by a woman a good thirty years
his senior and, at the moment, twice his strength. Perhaps if he had stunk of booze, she would have dropped him back. 
'I should get home and bathe that scratch if I were you,' she was saying authoritatively. 'Where do you
live?'   
'Down the shore. The rooming house with the
towers. That way.' He jabbed a finger. 
'I'll walk with you.' Not an invitation, a command.
And that was how Henry Evans came to be walking home, to a place he had never meant to stay, not
in the company of a woman who had haunted his dreams, but with an old lady who might have been his
mother. 

He found himself burbling to her about Francesca
Chisholm. Probably concussed; ridiculously loquacious; something to be ashamed of later. Maybe that was why he had come away, to burble to strangers in
a way he could not to friends. What friends? Which of them had ever understood his overwhelming grief
at losing his equally shy father? Take a week off,
Henry, it'll pass. It did not pass; it was a subdued
madness of grief. Go to a counsellor. Henry. No. No.
No. If I have to pay somebody to listen and straighten
me out, I'd rather die crooked; I don't want to be
straightened out. I want to talk to her. Because hers
died, too. And I didn't know what it could be like.
'Why's that?' Granny was holding on to his arm.
He forgot what it was he was saying. They were walking
on the inside pavement, with the sea, choppy but
docile, safely on the other side of the road, a presence
rather than a threat. If only he could concentrate on
where he was. He could see the turrets of the House
of Enchantment coming into focus in the distance.
The Holy Grail.

'Because she'd know what I was talking about. You
know what you talk about when you're twenty-two,
twenty-three? Your damned parents. I criticized mine,
but she was proud of hers. Loved him like mad. He
wouldn't have been so different from the age I am
now, I guess, Francesca's father.'
'So?' They were walking steadily but slowly. Her
grip on his arm had become his grip upon hers, so he
slowed even further because he did not want to stop
talking. It felt like a turned-on faucet, no, he was
steeped enough in English literature to know he
meant a tap.
'She could make me talk. And I only know now how much I let her down. Because she knew me and
loved me and then when she got the news that her
father had died, I really didn't know exactly what to
do. Like she was leaving me, you know? And I had a
plan, so I just went ahead with it. Left her to go home 
alone. No idea what she felt. No idea what she was
losing, where she was at. Now I do. I guess I just
wanted to apologize. Tell her I tried to turn round.'

'Of course you do.' Granny stopped for breath. He
looked at her for the second time. It was a fine old
face, he noticed, encouraging him by attentive silence.
'She'll have kids by now. Grown-up kids, even. She
had a way with them, you know?'

They had reached the door. For the last few steps
he had been dragging her along and in the course of
his last recitation, she had been actively trying to
detach herself gently, turning away with the cautious   consideration of a person about to sneeze.
'Are you all right?' he asked.
'Me? Oh yes, of course. You're home now. The
boys will look after you.' She took a handkerchief out 
of her pocket and blew her nose. It had been quite a  distance they had walked; Henry wanted to ask her in, 
offer tea and a ride home. But it was not his house 
and he did not have a car. She might live miles away.
His manners were all adrift; he had talked nineteen to
the dozen; he did not know if there was something he
ought to do, like offer money or something; he could
not even tell if he were dealing with rich, poor or
middling. Confused, he was failing to notice the hardening
of her tone. She was standing with her hands
thrust firmly into her pockets, with something to say.

'Francesca Chisholm let that son of hers be looked
after by poofters. Poor little sod. What are men like
that doing looking after a child?' The last word was
almost spat. Then Granny controlled herself. She
patted his arm and attempted a smile.
'Eh, don't listen to me. You seem a nice enough
man. You take care, now. No more falling over, eh?
Not unless you're really pissed. No need otherwise, is
there?'

'You've been very helpful.. .'
She pulled on the doorbell and hurried out of sight
before it was answered. He watched her go.


The hallway was richly warm and colourful as he
stepped inside; the brindled dog yapped a welcome
and sniffed at his trouser leg. Tim was dressed in the
voluminous jellaba, this time held at the waist by a
bulky sash of green silk. There were spectacles
pushed back into his hair and he was waving a ladle.
'Oh Senta, do stop. He knows you're pleased to see
him. Aren't we all? Come in. Henry, come in. We
were worried about you; thought you'd got lost. No
sightings of you for hours. Did you enjoy the bacon
and eggs? Oh dear, what have you done?'

Henry was a medium-sized man (Henry Evans,
Mr Normal, he had once heard himself described) while Tim was tall, staring down at the lump on his
forehead with great concern. 'Not fighting, I hope?'
Tim questioned. 'Not so soon? Peter!' he yelled in a
voice surprisingly deep and loud. 'Come and take
over!'  

The pair of them stood and surveyed him in the
gaslight of the hall. Dirt on his trousers, lump on
head, slight grazes on hands. They seemed to come;
to an unspoken conclusion, sealed by simultaneous
nodding. 'Hot bath, don't you think, Tim, while you 
get on with supper and I deal with his clothes?'
Another nod. Henry was frog-marched down the corridor, through the kitchen, into the bathroom he
had loathed this morning, but which was now comfortingly
warm. Tim turned on taps with a greater
skill than Henry had managed when he'd secured' this morning's trickle. Water gushed into the bath
with the force and noise of an angry fountain; steam 
rose. 

'Put your jacket and keks outside the door when  you're ready,' Peter said. 'I'll press them. And when you're lying in the bath, try and keep this pressed
against that swelling. It'll bring it down.' He handed   Henry a wad of damp white muslin, smelling sweetly
of lavender. 

Henry did as he was told. This had become more   than habitual. Handed clothes through a chink in the door, somewhat shyly, felt them plucked from his   grasp and the door closed. Sank into a deep bath and
held the muslin wad to his forehead. The room was
clouded with steam; it was like bathing in a mist,
floating free into profound warmth. From the
kitchen, he could hear the radio sounding the
hour . . . beep, beep, beep . . . followed by the echo of
big Ben: This -is Radio Four news, overlaid with conversation.

It occurred to him that he had never in his life been
administered to by men, with the exception of his
father when he had been a very small child, before
they both grew into their gruffer courtesies, and that
this sensation of being looked after, fussed over in a
fashion bearing on the intimate should make him feel
uncomfortable, and for a moment it did. The door
opened a crack; he saw the steam rush towards it,
watched as his trousers and jacket, neatly assembled
on a hanger, were left on the knob and the door shut
again. He told himself he should be deeply suspicious;
men were not kind to men, especially strangers.
It was odd, possibly sinister, but in the end, he could
not be bothered to think about it.

There was too much else. Such as why - when his
falling in the street, just when he was so close had
made enough noise to attract those passers-by - why
had she, whoever she was, failed to stop? Francesca
would have stopped. Even if she had thought she was
being chased by an enemy, she would have stopped
out of sheer curiosity.

The radio news droned on, made more important
by the perfect English voice reciting it. That must
have been where she learned to speak. From a glance
at the back window as he rose in the steam and dried
himself on a thick, rough towel. Henry could see that  it was already dark. He was beginning to like this
house. It had a pervasive influence of calm. It was
free from all the claustrophobia he feared in strange
places.



I  suppose we are profoundly influenced by the surroundings
in which we have lived. I sometimes think that
buildings are a bigger influence on life than anything else,
including people. Not that anyone here could exist without
being completely indifferent to the surroundings.
There are no views, only faces.

I must not think of the sea and yet, I do . . . miss it
most of all. Even the sea smothered in weather with nothing
but the sound of it.

I am learning new skills. It's called occupational therapy.
There is even a choice, so I've opted for the entirely
non-intellectual as opposed to the library, which was far too
obvious. I spend my days in the kitchen where the company
is not curious and there is plenty of noise to block out the
sea which I cannot hear and I have worked out who to
avoid. I have a friend in the kitchen; I like the smells.
Oh what drivel I write. Is this the best I can do? No,
but I'm afraid to do better, I must simply do more. Steel
myself for the anniversary of the day I arrived (anonymously,
thank God) at this grand hotel, and all the
goodbyes I shall have to say again.
Better to write about nothing much. Think of the castle
and the town, but not about who lived there. Including
me.
FMC.


Chapter four.

'it's very good of you to help, Maggie,' Neil said, as
he always said.
'Not at all. A pleasure.'
'I counted them in and counted them out,' he went
on. 'Just like the vicar in church. Do you know, he
keeps a running tally of his congregation, written
down in a notebook, so that he can work out "seasonal
differences"? Odd man. I would have thought it
was perfectly obvious, like it is here. The colder it is,
the fewer go out of doors. Doesn't matter whether
they want culture, history or religious solace. Or even
an excuse to wear a hat. Here we go.'

They walked through the entrance which led from
the castle's shop out on to the yard beyond, the metal
of his steel-capped shoes ringing on the stones. They
climbed the steps to the first battlement, following
the route of the tourists, past the cannons, then down
the steps and round the circular wall of the inner
keep. Neil picked up a couple of sweet wrappers
which lay on the ground, grumbling as he did so.

'When I think of what people put in their pockets,' he
muttered, 'I'm amazed they should think that a bit
more litter would make any difference. Why not take
it home with you? Who do they think cleans it?'

The complaining was a standard accompaniment
to the last trek round the castle before Neil closed
the doors for the night. Not the whole castle; that
would take half a day; simply the visitors' castle, a
fraction of the whole and floodlit after darkness as
they entered the gloom of the third bastion, past the
display and down the long tunnel to the kitchen.
There were deep, black bread ovens set in a wall,
a vast fireplace for open roasting in an otherwise
unfurnished chamber the size of a small church,
surrounded by smaller rooms with apertures in the
walls for cannons and holes in the ceiling for the
escape of fumes. Then down the stairs to the lower
level. They were in one segment of the castle's flowered
shape, five semicircular outer bastions looking
out on to an empty moat, five inner for the guarding
of the central keep. King Henry's fear of French invasion
had persuaded him to build an impregnable
fortress of cunning design. From above, it looked like an open rose built in stone, while below, any soldier
who got beyond the outer walls had to face the next
and then the next, and no invader had ever made it.
No foreigner had ever breached the safety of the central
keep, although now they came in gentle hordes to
pay their money and look.

For Maggie, there was something indescribably
touching about being inside a place which had once
housed an aggressive village of hungry fighting men
and now housed nothing other than a few of their
souvenirs. It was as if the walls could only live and
breathe with the help of occupants to warm it, and at
night closed itself down in an enormous sulk. She
knew why Neil appreciated company on the last 
round of the evening whenever he could get it, especially when they descended into the base of the third 
bastion. He might detest the tourists and love the 
place by day, but after dark he was afraid. Neil knew 
there were ghosts waiting for those prepared to recognize them, and he saw himself as cursed with that 
propensity. He saw ghosts everywhere; it made him 
an excellent storyteller, prone to wonderful embellishments for tourists, but each time he told stories 
about ghosts, he invented another and as soon as the 
creature was created in his mind, it remained in real 
existence. By now the place was teeming with them, 
especially in the runs. 

The 'runs' were the corridors at the very bottom of 
the bastions, below sea level, leading from the centre  in a curve round the base of the structure to rejoin it 
at the other end. You will pass fifty-three small windows
before you reach the next tunnel. . . count as you go.

Maggie could hear the words of the tourist audio
tape, imagine shuffling footsteps. The lights
illuminated white damp on the walls, a lump of something
vaguely fungoid she would not have wanted to
touch. He warned her to sidestep a puddle of water as
she followed him round the narrow passage. He
walked ahead, confidently, with deliberately noisy
footsteps, shoulders braced, and she knew if he had
been alone he would be whistling as loud as he could
to warm them, whoever they were, to get out of the
way. He was a good-looking man, from behind. It
was a pity he and Angela had divorced. A terrible
waste. The shoulders of him almost touched the walls
on either side in the runs. Medieval man was so much
smaller. She could see miniature soldiers, shorter than
her own five feet four inches, running around here on
the double, each ready to shove the musket through
his own window, and fire. Fifty-three to each bastion,
two hundred and sixty-five men with muskets, and on the level above, the cannons. Under siege,
they would surely have died of noise alone; now there
were only footsteps.

There were no more sweet papers, no signs of vandalism,
no missing persons. They walked up the exit
tunnel to the outer door, Neil obviously relieved, closing
the door with a satisfied clang. She wondered
what he would do if the smoke or burglar alarms went
off at night and he was the only keyholder when the
warden was away. He would hardly relish a nocturnal
visit all by himself and she supposed if he were paged,
he would call the police to go with him. They might
not be enthusiastic either; it seemed to be men who
were afraid of ghosts.

Neil gave the door an extra shove to make sure. It
was studded and bound with enough iron to keep out
an army of foreign barbarians, but spirits and ghosts
did not recognize such flimsy restrictions, and no
door would keep them inside. She was always slightly surprised at the inconsistency of his superstitions. It
seemed unreasonable to believe in the ghosts while
refusing to concede that their supernatural nature
meant they could not be confined. If they liked his
company, or simply wished to torment him, they were
surely at liberty to follow him home if they chose,
but then maybe he thought that ghosts, like burglars,
tended to stick to their own territory. They would be
uncomfortable in Neil's tiny terraced house near the
leisure centre. Like the distance across the dry moat
for a soldier facing the inner keep, it would seem like
a long way.

What were they like, these ghosts? she had asked.
Small and pale from living in the dark, he had told
her. And angry. They think everyone is an enemy.
Maybe they were prisoners here. A castle has many
uses. But then Neil was a mixed man. He's not a man
at all, Angela had said in her divorce petition. Not his
fault, with diabetes and all, poor sod. He just can't get it
up. Or only once in a blue moon.

They ascended the steps back to the battlements
on the far side and paused to look at the view.
The lampposts on the pier were lit, ten pairs of them
like benign sentinels, delineating the length of it. There
was a slight mist, blurring the lights and making the
glow from the caff blur at the edges. Saturday night
was party night. Out to sea, Maggie watched the
hazier, moving lights of a ferry on the horizon, passing
far beyond the lightship. The effect was jaunty.

'Doing something nice tonight, Neil?'
He hesitated. Sometimes he was overwhelmingly
talkative, a real confessor, but not consistently. On
one day he had told her all about the ghosts in great
detail, and then never mentioned them again. Or, he
would talk about Angela and himself, sometimes with
a fury of indignation which made her wonder about
his uncertain temper. She only bloody well stayed with
me so we could look like a pair and adopt... or. Poor
cow, can't blame her, can I? Anyway, she helps me out
here sometimes, and Tanya loves coming here. Knows it
as well as I do. Can't complain, can I? The frankness
with which he revealed anything depended upon
drink consumed, the place he was in, the weather
conditions, the state of his incipient depression, not
necessarily in that order. He could reveal more on a
crowded street corner than in a closed room with the
lights off, she would take a bet on that. The battlements
were ideal, he felt free up here and it usually
loosened his tongue.

'Well, it could be a terrific evening. Could be a disaster.'

'A woman, then,' Maggie stated,
'How did you guess? You psychic or something?'
'Me? Get on with you. Obvious, isn't it? Nothing is
the recipe for triumph or disaster except an evening
out or an evening in, for that matter, with a woman.'
She shrugged. 'Or a man, in my case. Same difference,
same--'
'No. It isn't the same. It never is the same for a
man like me. You don't know what it's like. I can
fancy a woman rotten; I can sense she fancies me, but 
I never know if I'm going to be able to do anything 
about it. Variable response, you know. Chaotic, 
unpredictable response, if you must know. Deeply 
unreliable and embarrassing, made worse by emotion, if you must know. The more I want, the less I
can do. Erectile dysfunction, caused by diabetes. Try
telling a woman about that the first time you kiss
her.'
'Difficult.'
'Bloody impossible.'

They stared out to sea in silence. The ferry twinkled out of sight. The lightship was turning, slowly. 

'Only I've been to the doctor,' Neil continued without prompting. She knew better than to
prompt. 'Not for the first time, I can tell you. You've 
gotta go a dozen times to a dozen bloody quacks before you can find one who doesn't laugh. And 
then tell you to do something which doesn't hurt or
make you sick. Thank God for a gay doctor. No
sniggering.'
'So what's he given you?'
'Viagra. Only enough to experiment. What did you
think?'
'I was asking, not thinking. This girl, does she
know?'
'Know what?' Neil was defensive.
'Know what she might be in for . . .'

He shrugged. 'Not any more than I do, really.
She told me the other day how she really likes the
fact I'm such a gent, so sensitive and all that, but
wasn't it time . . .? I'm hoping she's in for a roll in
the hay with a normal bloke. That's all. And that,' he
added, banging his fist against the wall so hard that
he made himself wince, 'would be absolutely fucking
terrific.'

She smiled at him and took a small, unobtrusive
step back. There were things she wanted to know and
things she didn't, but any invitation to confidence
meant an invitation to the whole thing, didn't it? She
couldn't select what she heard and wanted to hear,
and he was a decent man, for all that. A fairly conscientious
father to a child who was not his own, persisting even when Angela tried to shut him out,
which she did when the going was good, calling him
into play only when she and Tanya needed him.
'Well bloody good luck, read the instructions on
the packet and don't take an overdose. What more
can I say?' she said lightly.

They were back in the castle vestibule, facing the
bridge over the moat, him switching off lights, fixing
the lock. The sound of the sea, so prevalent at height,
was subject here to the intermittent noise of cars on
the road. She wanted to ask him about his dog but
that was another sore point.
'What about you? Saturday Night Fever again?'
'I've got my own telly, Neil. I'll watch it on that.'

She had her own key and her own mobile phone in
this phoneless house and her entry was virtually
noiseless. The only dead giveaway would be the
smell of the wrapped fish and chips she carried or
the chance encounter on the way to the far back
regions of the first floor, above the kitchen and
removed from everything else. She delayed on the
way home, glass of wine in a pub, just to show she
was alive and well. People in pubs never asked questions
provided you asked them first - they were far
too busy answering - but if she were to keep up this
habit of social evasion, she had better get a dog. She
could hide behind a dog; a dog would signal that she
was not alone. Dogs deflected questions quicker than
bubonic plague. Dogs in this place could become
the most abiding topic of conversation. If she got a dog,
she could hide out with other dog owners and
talk of nothing else.

'Shhhhh,' she said to Senta, once inside the door.
She paused on the landing, arrested by the voices
from the dining room. The vicar, the baker, the candlestick
maker, but particularly the American saying
something in his shy accent which made them laugh
and her flee to the shelter of her own room where she
closed the door, firmly. Corkscrew, salt, pepper, TV,
all there. The rest of the world, the English Channel
included, could live entirely as it wished, provided,
until morning, it left her alone. In the morning, she
would be braver.

But the television programmes were inane; they
could not begin to hold her attention. She refilled the
wine glass and began to write the letter, all over again.

Dear Philip,
I hope all's well with you and the love affair
has lasted. I just wanted you to know there never
were any hard feelings, whatever I might have
said at the time. I really just want you to be
happy...

She took a large slug of the wine. No, I DON'T want
you to be happy. I want you to be non-existent. If I
weren't so full of funerals, I'd dream of yours, but it
wouldn't be the same, would it, standing round as the EX
partner, while some other bitch is allowed the lion's share
of the grief.

She continued: So, if you're happy, I'm happy for
you . . . best of luck darling ...
You bastard, you cold-hearted stinker. You never knew
me; you never wanted to know Me. What about Me? You
DISTRACTED me, when I should have been paying
attention to someone far more important than you. You
never helped. I needed someone who would HELP.

She blew her nose. Scribbled through the lines,
then began writing again.

Over the mountains and over the waves. Under
the fountains and under the graves,
Under floods that are deepest, which Neptune obeys;
Over rocks that are steepest. Love will find out
the way.

And then with her hand scribbling faster, fresh wine
in her glass,

I'm jilted forsaken, outwitted. Yet think not I'll
whimper or brawl - The lass is alone to be pitied,
Who ne'er has been courted at all. . .

That was much better. And there were other things to
think about. Such as what to do next. How to handle 
the next stage. Thinking of Philip was merely filling a
gap. Trying to stuff the holes in the heart.

'What an extraordinary man you are. Henry! A scientist
with an interest in the arts, a knowledge of English
poetry, you said, and a burning desire to explore
English castles! What a pleasure to have you among
us! How long is your contract with Fergusons?'
'Well, that's a question of how long is a piece of
string. I have to suck it and see,' Henry said earnestly.
'I mean I have to see if I like it; they have to see if they
need me . ..'
'Developing a new drug?'
'Well, maybe improving an old one .. .'
'He's probably doing highly secret research into
how to make Viagra work for women, or other pedigree
animals otherwise reluctant to breed,' Peter said
mildly. 'Or genetically engineering vegetables,' he
added, offering more potatoes and then wagging a
finger at the vicar. The vicar. Henry noticed, was just
as an English vicar should be; he could have stepped
from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel with his
high voice, precise gestures, half-moon spectacles and
domed forehead which would require the protection
of a panama hat in high summer. He also had an
aversion to sherry and a huge appetite for wine
shared by the rest of the guests which, along with the
mobile phone in the shirt pocket, made him differ a
little from stereotype.

Also attending the elegant dining table of the
House of Enchantment was a haughty woman who
reminded Henry of some ruined actress or other;
someone whose face had seen better days and whose
thin figure was swathed in layers of gauze. The widow
of a locally eminent artist, Tim had whispered on the
way downstairs from inveigling Henry out of his top
room. You must meet her. Don't say I told you, but
whenever she's hard up, she fakes a couple of his
paintings and says she found them in the attic. Then
there was a beautiful young man who had remained
silent, eating and drinking steadily, impervious to the
constant buzz around him. There were no pockets of
conversation; no one person of the six spoke exclusively
to another without interruption, and mostly
,they all talked at once. The effect was slightly dizzying
and Henry was enjoying himself immensely. His
second night in a new town, and already he was in the
middle of a party. Must be his charm.

'Wife and family at home. Henry? Will they be
joining you?'
'No. No.' That came out a little sharper than he
intended. There was a second's silence.
'I always think there's an ulterior motive for travelling,' the vicar went on smoothly. 'Some inner journey
of the soul which becomes imperative. Some need which nothing else can satisfy. Or why would we ever
leave the comfort of our own homes and the benediction
of the familiar?'

'Oh, fiddlesticks,' said the artist's widow. 'People
travel because it's fun. Or for very simple reasons.
My husband travelled to foreign parts because he said
the light was better. Really, it was because he was so
loathed at home. Frightful man. Me, I travel to get
away from my children. Otherwise I might kill them.'

There was general laughter at that. The widow
spoke with a fetching drawl.
'Pity Francesca Chisholm didn't do the same,' the
vicar said solemnly. He seemed determined to add a
little gravitas to the occasion. 'Poor woman.'
'Poor woman!' the widow yelled. 'Poor woman, be
damned! She had a tough time, drew a short straw
with that child of hers, but who doesn't? Every child's
a monster. Doesn't seem sufficient excuse to murder it. If it was that bad, she could have got someone else
to look after it.'

The silent young man looked up from the action of
clearing his plate and gave an exaggerated shudder, 'I
really don't think murder is a suitable subject to raise
at a dinner party,' he remarked in a melodious voice.
'Especially in front of our welcome stranger. Mr
Evans will think it happens all the time, but it doesn't,
you know. Hardly ever. Once in a blue moon, here.
Not like New York.' He smiled beatifically, inviting a
defence.

'New York's safer than London,' Peter volunteered
helpfully, covering Henry's silence. Henry was looking
peculiar, stretching his face into a reciprocal smile,
unable to speak. His throat was suddenly swollen; he
was about to choke. He nodded, speechlessly.
'How can that possibly be, with all those guns?'
the widow demanded belligerently.

Henry was feeling cold and slightly less welcome
than he had been half an hour earlier, discussing seventeenth-century
verse and castles with the vicar. The
room was warmed by a roaring fire; his face was
flushed and his feet were chilled. The bruise on his
forehead throbbed.
'What difference do weapons make?' the young
man asked, suddenly communicative, as if he had
been unable up until now to eat and talk at the same
time. 'It's the attitude to life which counts. I mean, if
you want to kill someone, you'll do it, won't you? All
Francesca Chisholm had to do was throw her baby
off the pier--'
'It wasn't a baby,' Peter interrupted. His face had a
purple tinge and he was angry. 'It was a five-year-old,
much-loved child.'

This time the silence stretched for longer. 'Sorry,'
the young man mumbled. 'Sorry, I forgot. You used
to babysit, didn't you?'
'Yes.' Tim, this time, sounding terse.
'Well, a prayer for the dear deceased, I think,' the
vicar intoned diplomatically, crossing himself and
bowing his head. 'And talk of happier things.'
'Such as pudding,' Tim said brightly. 'Will you all
hand your plates this way, please?'

There was a clatter of compliance, murmurs of delicious, a piling of forks and knives, all travelling
from hand to hand towards Tim's end of the table.
Senta the dog, banished to the hall, yapped from
beyond the door in anticipation of scraps, and in the
activity and resumption of chatter, Henry leaned forward
to the young man, swallowed rapidly and spoke
in a whisper.
'This . . . Francesca . . . Was this a long time ago?
Where does she live now?'
'Oh not very far away.' He plucked a grape from
the fruitbowl centrepiece. 'Cookham prison since last
year, actually. Good Lord, almost a year to the day.
She'll be there for life, I expect. Where else could she
be except in prison?'
'And she really killed her child? Not an accident or
anything?'

The young man picked another grape, chewed
carefully, obviously approving the taste.
'Oh no. It was all quite deliberate. She stuffed him
through a broken floorboard of the fishing platform
on the pier. Have you seen our pier yet? You must,
you know. It is quite bizarrely 1950ish. And it's sinking.'

Henry felt sick. He waited for the pudding to
arrive, and then excused himself politely.

The wine did it. Bad breakfast food, rich supper
food, fucking foreigners. French wine, purchased on
the other side of the Channel, bargain prices, better
value. They had all talked about bargains; everyone,
everywhere talked about bargains. But not in the
same breath as talking about Francesca. Not his Francesca. Of course it was wine. His chronic weak
stomach should never be treated with wine, although
it did make him sleepy. His stomach liked bourbon
and vitamins, precious little else. He might have told her that, given the chance. Hey, Frannie, remember
how I always got sick in India and you found the
Ayurvedic doctor who fixed me up? You sure were
good at fixing things ... you used all your money to
pay for those kids to go, too. That was when I got
you the shawl, because you'd given yours away. Ideal
for a backpack, a ring shawl, because it folds away to
nothing. See? You can drag all two metres of it
through a wedding ring; it floats softer than silk, but
it keeps you warmer than . . . toast, you said. And
it's far too expensive, you said. Especially since I
bought two for you, one to use an'd one to keep for
best.

Henry lurched towards the tiny toilet which served
the remoteness of the top two floors, inconveniently
situated between the two on a half-landing, just so
everybody had to travel up or down a flight. Travel
broadens the mind. Fuck travel. And you know what, Francesca, you know what I did when my father
died? I went out and bought another shawl, not for
me, just a kind of talisman to remind me I'd once
been generous. Brought it here to give you, and yes
you are right about the expense. In Boston, they cost
a small fortune.

He retched and delivered the roast lamb of a
dinner almost whole and entire into the bowl of the
toilet. Lav, lavatory, ladies, gents, netty, the heads, the
loo, the bog, but NEVER the rest room. Why do you call
it that? Ancient questions on an Indian patio. We call
it the rest room because you can take a rest in it. What?
In a loo? Nobody rests in a loo.

Henry rested. Rushed the bowl, wrapped his gown
around him and let his head rest against the ice-cold
wall of the narrow room. This was wine and travelling
and getting bummed out everywhere and it had nothing
whatever to do with grief. He wasn't having
anything to do with grief. Grief as in mourning? Grief.
He had a poor stomach, was all, and yet he was here,
sobbing like a crazy boy coming down from drugs,
sobbing maybe because he needed more, sobbing for
his father and the words of a poem she had sung him
on an evening full of fireflies. When there is no place,
For the glow worm to hide. Where there is no space for
receipt of a fly; Where the midge dare not enter. Lest herself
fast she lay. If Love come he will enter. And soon find
out his way.

Sentiment, bloody sentiment. He knew the sobbing
was loud and uncontrolled; he would have fled
upstairs if there had been any prospect of an embarrassed
eavesdropper, even the damn dog. Henry had
manners, even in extremis, which was more than he
felt he had witnessed in the English he had admired
from afar for so long. Finally he moved, stiff with
cold, made sure the place was left clean in his wake, another automatic response, and clambered into his
high bed. The fire they had lit in his room had died,
leaving a faint, residual warmth. The fur hot water
bottle comforted his feet. He had a dim memory of
looking down that stairwell and seeing the same shawl
draped over the bottom post. He took the shawl he
had bought out of his bag and draped it over the
covers. It seemed pale and insignificant beside the
silk.

It was the wine did it. Just that one glass too many.
Enough to wake her, make her restless, prowling
round her rented room, dreaming without regret of
the house she had once had and then looking at her
handwriting, looped sloppily over the page, filling it
with self-pitying rubbish and a memory of poetry
learned in school and related to cousin Francesca in
the holidays. Always seeking approval; anything to
please. Always listening to Francesca, the fountain of
wisdom, even when Francesca said, stay with your
husband, Maggie; he'll get over his infatuation and
men need forgiveness. They may need it, she
remembered shouting, but they don't necessarily
deserve it, do they? Yours left, didn't he? He left
because he couldn't stand the image of himself in
his horribly flawed child, so what qualifies you to
give advice?

Maggie did not want to think about Francesca. She
did not want to think ofFrancesca's crossing the road
to punch the boy who had thrown a firework at her,
or Francesca lending the right clothes for the occasion
and saying she looked marvellous even when she
didn't. Or Francesca encouraging her to take the
exams, or Francesca leading out the kids from the
primary school where she taught. Nor could she bear
to think of Francesca's devotion to neurotic Angela
Hulme and her adopted daughter, or of all the mess
and the shame and the obligations Francesca had left
behind. Maggie wanted to dwell on her own fractured
life and reach a point where she could start to
mend it, without creating a whole new set of complications
as she was doing now. She also needed to
sleep a whole night from start to finish and not wake
up in the middle with a raging thirst and an unaccountable
desire for a bath.

Or to find she could not get into the loo because
the man was locked inside it sobbing. Maggie listened
for a long time, troubled and disturbed by his misery,
wanting to knock on the door, but waiting until the
sound became controlled before she returned quietly
to her own room, draped the shawl over her nightdress,
grabbed a towel and went the long flights
downstairs.

Timothy was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a
cigarette, staring into space. Clean plates were marshalled
next to him. Maggie had watched the
laborious, washing by hand process; she had even
helped, and she marvelled at the industry this impoverished
pair put into the creation of an elegant and
eccentric lifestyle. It was comfortable to live here but
humbling to contemplate the effort it took, she
thoughta trifle sourly, surprised to see him there at
all, especially with a cigarette. Tim didn't usually
allow himself such luxuries: all luxuries were saved
for others or the dog.

'Any hot water?'
'A bit, maybe. I used most of it for the dishes.'
'Damn.'

He waved the cigarette. 'Vicar left them.' She sat
down.
'Good party?'
'Oh yes. Until someone started talking about
Francesca. Seemed to upset the paying guest. And
Peter and me, too.'
'Damn. Ah well. He had to know. Jumping the gun
a bit, but at least the discovery looks accidental. Is it
very wrong to use him like this?'
'No. Yes. No. I don't know what you have in mind,
you haven't said, so I doubt if you know.'

DAMN Francesca. If only people would stop talking
about her. Francesca and Harry, her boy, the
ghosts at every feast. She made unwilling conspirators
of them all.

'It's like cookery,' Tim said. 'All experiments are
fine. As long as they work. But you shouldn't use
people for ingredients.'
'No,' she said, slowly. 'Not unless they volunteer.'


The light woke him. A unique kind of light he had
never seen before, but had somehow imagined as
peculiar to the sea and part of the reason why he had
craved to live close to the ocean. It made nothing of
the fear of being enclosed. A lake was not the same.
He could always see to the other side and that limited
it in his imagination. Lakes and rivers were for
respectable traffic from bank to bank, not for the risk
of being lost without bearings, without sight of land,
drifting with the current. It was only the sea which
was suitable for high endeavour and escape.

The sky which glowed outside was luminously
white. It pressed against the windows and the glass
seemed to bulge inwards in meek resistance. It forced
his eyes open; it was like white smoke, thick, dense,
unyielding, almost brighter than sunlight. For the
second morning in succession, Henry got out of bed
and went to look.

Nothing. A vast expanse of nothing, the intensity
of the light hurting his eyes. He looked at his watch:
0700 hours. Not early by the standards of a hardworking
commuter, but all life, all movement, was
dead. Until he heard the rumble of the sea and
the more specific sound of an engine. Discernible in
the mist, a rubbish cart was at work in the road below, thump, crump, the engine revving, ready to move, a clang of metal. Henry could make out the squat
machine and take a guess at the colour. Some kind of
municipal green. It moved on, stopping a few doors
down. Henry looked ahead and then right, turning his
head deliberately to make sure there was nothing he
missed. There was nothing to see. A dense fog of sky,
descending all the way to earth, no contours, no landmarks,
no visible life, no nothing. He squinted and
peered to see if the pier would appear out of the
heavenly white murk, but there was no sign of it. The 
scene invited him to walk into a pleasant and mysterious
oblivion. There was a little excitement as he put
on his clothes and searched for the hat before he
remembered it was lost and he had not replaced it. Forgot to take the daily dose of vitamins and minerals,
or think how he might get back in if no one else was awake, tiptoed downstairs and out the front door
before the dog could bark, determined to know what
it was like to be out in this, with no one else alive.

The air filtered into his throat like a prickly thistle,
so raw and sharp it made him gasp. From upstairs,
the white mist looked warm. The cold was intense
until he started to walk, and then it was damp rather
than freezing. He knew exactly where he was going, but he was not sure why, which seemed the way it was
in this town. This was a different world, everything
about it surreal.

He walked briskly. Gradually, the outlines of the
seafront houses became less obscure; he could recognize
the occasional front door and dripping leaves in
windowboxes muted into pale shades by the mist. He
crossed the road without looking left or right. No
need; no sound, but he could see the beginnings of
the pier. Even the noise of the wallowing sea was
muted by the weight of the mist. Henry liked that. He
loved to be without barriers or walls; no sense of distances,
nothing to close him in. The monument of the
fisherman, melded gloriously with his fish and his
boat, looked like a guardian of the gate. Henry walked
on. It was suitable weather to be on an edifice like the
deck of a ship. Eyes adjusted to anything, to extremes
of light as well as dark, and the more he looked and
the less the damp air raked his throat, the more he
could see. Sinister things, like the signs attached to
the stubby lime lampposts, black with white lettering.
risk of death. no jumping. no diving. There were less
prominent signs on the bins attached below. Litter,
please place here. Before you jump. A green umbrella
and a picnic box lay abandoned on one of the
benches.

He needed to see those fishing platforms which
flanked the caff at the end. Needed to, needed to,
needed ... He remembered them from yesterday,
thinking how much Dad would have liked all that,
how he would have chatted to those ageless anglers
who grinned and got out of the way, careful to look
before they cast. He needed to see what it was really
like. See if the mist made soft.

Looking over the locked gate which led to the platform
on the left of the caff, he could see that the tide
was far higher than when he had been here last. The
slurry sea looked as if it was oiled beyond the breaking
of a wave, smooth on the surface but churning
and boiling beneath like some giant, artificially quiet,
industrial-strength washing machine doing serious
business and resenting interference. The whole edifice
was closer to the water than he remembered: the
legs seemed shorter, the sea so close it splashed up
through the broken boards. He was close enough
to see the dimensions and the mist was beginning to
break up and swirl like spun sugar. The missing boards,
visible by the gaps they made, like missing teeth in
a mouth, were obvious in their absence, but none of
the boards were uniform in size, any more than a
canine to an incisor. As the mist cleared in a teasing
way, and then rolled back in gorgeous wisps, wreathed around the iron rail he clutched for support, he could see that the floor of the platform was a patchwork of wooden boards, metal boards of different
age and size and colour, replaced and repaired
only as time and weather dictated. There was a sign:
KEEP OUT.

How would an average five-year-old boy manage to slip through one of these gaps? The five-year-old boy;
he had once been himself could not have slipped
through these gaps with any degree of ease; his skinny
shoulders would get in the way even if his hips and fat
tummy could make it. He would have to breathe and
wriggle to go willingly, which was possible in the
course of a game. You would do anything in the
course of a game or a dare when you did not want to
look a fool. Even so, it looked a struggle to wriggle
like that, with the sea almost tickling the ankles and
wood splinters but yes, a boy could do it. A boy was
like an eel, with a skin immune to the feeling of a
graze.

Especially a boy who came out here to play on a
morning like this, only when it was warm, not cold
like now. Prancing out from a nearby house, running
down the length of the Titanic, saying, I dare you!, on
a summer's day. Yeah! You go first, you older boy, then I must. The presence of an iron railing would be
no barrier at all. Henry had done that, grabbed the
swinging rope off the forbidden oak tree in someone
else's back yard, swung into terrifying space without
a single scream. Got his bruises, all right. Would have
been an awful father himself, because he would have
mollycoddled his own son from doing any such damn
thing, just like his dad didn't, and for all that, he was
still timid.

He could see it. Clutched the iron rail, forced himself
to look down. The distance was small, but the sea
was immense. The abiding fears of his life ranged
from awe when faced with open spaces and the far
more acute, claustrophobic fear of being enclosed.
Claustrophobia was the bane of his life, the devil
which sat on his shoulder, trained into submission
only most of the time. He could tolerate lifts and
aeroplanes through the application of logic and keeping
his eyes on a page, he could sit in small rooms
jammed with people and keep his eyes on their faces,
telling himself it was temporary; he could enter a long
tunnel provided he could see the other end; could kid
himself the devil had died, and then there would be a
panic so blind he could not even scream. He breathed
deeply; the air no longer tore at his throat. He felt
calm. There was an explanation. He breathed deep. It
did not hurt. Nothing could hurt here. A child had
fallen, tragically. The mist would bandage wounds.

It muffled noise. He thought he had seen that same
black dog trotting ahead and disappearing, but apart
from that illusion, had not seen a single living soul in
the fifteen minutes which had got him so far, and he
did not hear her, either. He was in the frame of mind
where he could tell himself he was the only soul on a
small planet, looking at a place where a child had slipped, until the last second when he sensed her
approach. Turned and saw her coming towards him
out of the mist. A long-limbed, swift walking person
with a pale shawl round her head, striding towards
him with a determined step. He looked around,
wildly, like a cornered rat in search of a shelter. The
footsteps, and the shape, came on.

Her to the life, with the baggy khaki trousers and
the slouching coat and the air of authority. Francesca. You've got to go home. Henry. How can you get satis faction
from being a novelty? If you want to know what you
are, Henry, you have to go home.

The very soul of aristocratic womanhood was
striding towards him, almost breaking into a gallop, the sort of woman who had always intimidated him
until he met Francesca. Taller than he remembered.
He wanted to run, but on this little road out to the
sea there was nowhere to go. He also wanted to
laugh at the reversal of tactic: the day before he had
been chasing her and now she was advancing on him
like a ghostly witch. He had a sudden impression
that she was going to walk straight through him and
hover above the platform. And then the spectre was
beside him, standing too close for comfort, staring at
him. She had Francesca's colouring, at close quarters,
a lopsided version of her features, nose, eyes,
mouth, younger than he would have imagined, older
than he dreamed, and a voice which bore slight
resemblance. She had highlighted, curly hair with
nothing sleek about it; she was statuesque and
groomed, her coat matched her shoes, she was completely
different. Francesca resisted the camera; it
made the last image of her all the more memorable.
He was frightened of this appalling facsimile, but
when she spoke, she only sounded anxious, flustered
and shy.

'Oh God, Mr Evans. You had me worried there.
What the hell are you doing out here?'
'Who are you?'
'I'm Maggie. You sounded so upset last night, all
that sobbing ... I thought . . . well, I thought you
might be going to jump. You're not, are you?'
'Of course not.'

The resemblance to Francesca was passing and
fading into nonsense. This face was pale, hers had
been as brown as a nut. The voice was so harshly
different. His recall of the face might be flawed, but
this woman was bigger and surely taller. He could
never forget standing next to Francesca and the top
of her head being level with his cheek. It was only the
stride and drifting shawl. The hair, brownish gold,
tinted, grew from a different and bigger head.

'What are you doing, then?' she demanded, stridently.

He felt faintly hysterical, reminded of his own long
suppressed sense of the ridiculous. This long-limbed
woman was seeming to suggest that anyone on the
pier without company must be contemplating suicide.
As if there was nothing else to do, such as fish,
take pictures of the mist, wait for the caff to open,
contemplate. He was about to bark back a wisecracking
response about this being a free country,
until he remembered that his motives for being here
were dubious by anyone's standards, including his
own.

'I came to see where that child slipped through the
boards and drowned.'

She gazed at him hard, hesitated, and then nodded, resolved on something. Her shoulders seemed to
slump in relief and a brief look of annoyance crossed
her face. Then she shrugged. The slightest movement
made her hair move. She had plenty of hair.
'This side. They mend each platform, every other
year.'

She led the few steps across the concrete width of
the pier until they leaned over the black painted railings
on the other side. The boards twenty feet below
were smooth and wet, solid, pale and complete. The
sleeve of her coat touched his.
'There were holes in the boards last year. The boy
got out of the house by himself, must have annoyed
her. And he didn't slip. Post-mortem results showed he
was pushed. Oh, he may have slipped initially, but then
he was shoved the rest of the way. Really shoved, no
messing about. His shoulders were dislocated and his
ribs cracked. Someone pushed him through the hole.
He was alive and bleeding by the time he hit the water.
Then he drowned, but not right away. He bled a lot.
The fishing boat picked him up, even though no one
had raised the alarm. It was this time of the morning.
She lived in the flats near the castle. Quite a change
from the castle where she used to live. Francesca must
have gone straight home, after she'd done it.'
'No,' he said. 'That is crap. Complete and utter
crap.' He was looking at the churning water, listening
to the sound of it, imagining the ice cold of its
embrace. Hitting the water, hurt and terrified. The
woman was leaning closer, speaking loudly into his
ear, enunciating clearly and slowly.
' Yes. Francesca was quite adamant about what had
happened. She confessed, Mr Evans. She insisted. The
boy had cerebral palsy, spastic hemiplegia to be exact.
He was hell to take care of, she couldn't stand it any
more. She told them how she did it. She pleaded
guilty to his murder. She insisted.'

She paused. Henry could see white fists, protruding
from her coat sleeves, gripping the black rail.
'Francesca pushes the kid through a gap too
narrow for his body,' he said, surprisingly calm as if
he were voicing a question of merely scientific interest.
'She shoves him. The kid's five years old. They're
strong. Damn strong.'

He could sense, rather than see, how she shook
her head, the curls almost touching his face.
'Not this one. Not very. He had paralysis down
the right side, malfunctioning right arm and leg. She
said she stamped on the weak side and down he went.
Gentle encouragement.'

Henry moved away from her abruptly and vomited.
His stomach was empty; the involuntary effort
produced nothing but bile.

'I did what I could for her at trial.' Maggie's unfamiliar
voice continued crisply. 'At least I got them to
leave out some of the more gruesome facts. Not that it
makes any difference in a guilty plea to murder. Life
imprisonment, regardless of the age of the deceased.
At least we don't hang people any more.'

He wanted to disbelieve her and he wanted to get
away from her. Henry began to walk back towards the
seafront. He folded his arms and clutched at the comforting
leather of his jacket. He watched his own
polished shoes putting one step in front of another
and made himself concentrate on keeping his feet
marching at a regular pace and in a straight line, realizing
as he concentrated that he was moving faster
and faster and any moment now he might break into
a run and hit something, unless he slowed down and
looked up. Heard the sound of a car on the road, and
found she had kept level with him all along. He felt
furiously inclined to take a swing at her, simply bat
her away and listen to her fall, but then there was
a dim memory of violence, so recently described,
which made him ashamed of that impulse, too. Not
that he believed a word of it. Henry had come in
search of a good woman, or at least an interesting sinner, not a bitch who killed children.

He let her take hold of his coat. She was smiling at
him and all he wanted to do was spit.
'You don't have to believe me. Henry,' she was
saying. 'You can check it all out in the library. You
never have to believe what you see. And then you can
go home, if you want.'

He was leaning against a lamppost, the pier behind
him. There was a stone in his shoe.
'You will go home, won't you?'

It sounded like a plea, but he could not guess what
it was she was hoping he might do. Henry could see
his suitcase in the hall, not today or tomorrow, but
soon. He hesitated.
'I can't believe a woman like Francesca was could
ever be so barbaric.'
'We've all had difficulties with that, Mr Evans.
Which has nothing to do with anything, does it? She believes it.'
'But I knew her,' Henry said. 'I loved her.'
'Loving someone,' Maggie said bitterly, 'has never
been a guarantee of their virtue. Not even if they
behave like a child.'



You should not be promiscuous with love. Nor even with
liking. You should not try to help everyone because you
end up letting half of them down. You shouldn't be good;
you should only be loyal and build on that, brick by brick.

Did I leave any clues as to the depravity of my existence?
No. I parcelled it all up and sent it to people who
would not look at it, everything. Those were the days
when I was in control.

It is something of a relief not to be needed. To be superfluous.
I was always so managerial. But the sense of loss
of any real role at all makes me so agitated that tranquillizers
are advised. They should stop me pacing at
this time of night rather than writing. I should have had
them in my other life, suppressed some of that bossy
energy, but if they make me stay still, perhaps I'll write
more. About anything except Harry and T.

It is so hot in here. I long to be cold.
FMC


chapter five.

there was no one walking, other than those accompanied
by dogs. Henry formed the impression of a
series of dogs leading their subservient owners on
well worn routes. The dogs seemed alert, the owners
on autopilot. Henry concentrated on the dogs to suppress
the bile which kept gathering at the back of his
throat.

It was the dogs that got the owners out of the
houses. Henry was realizing that he knew very little of
how other people lived. He would have to maintain a
twenty-four-hour surveillance, repeated at intervals
during all four seasons of the year, to get a single idea
of how they behaved, and even then all he would have
observed was public habit, peculiar enough in its own
right but not particularly revealing. You learned so
little by simply watching. You could learn how to rob
a place, but not what was in it. All he could see at the
moment was the fact that the few stalwart elderly and
early-rising occupants of Warbling, en route to the
newspaper shop, were roughly the same shades of
grey as their dogs, and all of them needed grooming.
He felt angry and sick.

'Coffee?' Maggie was saying briskly, clutching his
arm again, as if she belonged, or as if he himself was
a wilful pet. 'Awful coffee, but warm?'
'Who did you say you were?'
'I told you. I'm Maggie.' She was standing with
her hands on her hips, impatient, but not unsympathetic.
That look of annoyance again, as if she was
disappointed in him. 'By definition, a very part time
lawyer of this parish, colleague of Edward Burns.
Status: recently divorced and deliberately homeless. A
fellow lodger of yours, in case you hadn't noticed.
But I'm much more famous for being Francesca
Chisholm's cousin. Do you want this filthy coffee or
not? Or are you just going to stand there looking pale
and interesting?'

He nodded.
There was one establishment open, although
'functioning' was how Henry might have described it in a more lucid moment, but only just. A burger bar
with steaming windows, facing the road, and next to
the newspaper shop which was attracting the dogs.
There were three occupants, with faces variously
hidden behind the Mail, the Times and the Express. Beneath a sign which announced NO DOGS, he and
she stepped over the large, unleashed specimen which
lay draped over the step, eyes glaring mournfully
through the glass. When Henry sat, he could feel the
sad eyes of the dog scrutinizing him. Maggie came
back with a tray. As she sat opposite, he was wondering
how it was he could ever have confused her with
Francesca.

'Where did you get that shawl?' was all he could
ask, sipping coffee which was even worse than she
had hinted, weak but bitter at the same time. She fingered
the fine, creamy wool round her neck, with the
hint of embroidery hidden in the folds, and looked at
him in surprise, temporarily lost for words.
'Francesca gave it to me,' she said hurriedly. 'She
had several of them. They were part of her hallmark,
really. When Harry was a baby, she would wrap him
in one--'
'Harry? He was called Harry? Why the hell would
she call him Harry?'
'I've no idea,' Maggie said. 'But I doubt it was a
tribute to a long-lost friend. He was born in the
shadow of the castle, and she once lived in the castle
and a King Henry built the castle, I suppose. And we
have a Prince Harry .. .'
'Oh.' He felt foolish, even imagining there could
have been the slightest association between this dead
child and himself, some half-assed, sentimental
memory of his existence influencing her choice. Silly
thought, stemming only from Maggie's remarks
about shawls. Something he'd done right, then, giving
Francesca those shawls. She had obviously liked
them, made them into a lifelong habit, might have
appreciated the one he had brought with him. She
had wrapped her baby in a shawl, killed it...

Henry's hand trembled round the rim of his
mug. Anger. He was incredibly angry with her for
besmirching her own memory; remembered what
that other lawyer had advised him for free: better
regard her as dead. He sipped the coffee and absorbed
a smell of burning toast. There was a king size loaf of
saggy white bread on the counter; Henry shuddered.
The food he had eaten at the House of Enchantment
was the best; he had interspersed it with the worst. It
was not only his mind that was being poisoned.

'I can take you to the castle if you like,' Maggie was
saying, over-brightly. 'It's interesting if you like that
kind of thing. I presume you do, or you wouldn't be
here. I mean, you didn't come all this way to find Francesca, did you? There must be something else
about us, I mean about this place, which captured
your imagination.'

She was speaking so quickly, accelerating as she
went, that he had difficulty following, but the voice
was so clipped and effortlessly patrician he wanted to
mimic it, the way he had once tried to mimic
Prancesca's, and she his, although he had never been
able to master her ability to produce sentences as if
they were fully formed. She never said, it's kinda like
this, if you know what I mean . . . She never said I
dunno, or I just need to think about this. She had 
spoken her statements and her observations as if she
had thought about them first, even if she retracted
them later. It had seemed archaic to him then, her
articulate and entirely certain manner of speech, but
all it had been was fluent.

'Can I ask you something?'
'Certainly.'
'She told me, I mean, Francesca told me, that
when they sat around as kids, having meals and all, 
her dad would correct them if they didn't get their
grammar right. I mean, when they were three or four
he started doing that. And he made them learn poetry
by heart. Do you know if he did? Sounds like some 
kind of tyrant to me.' 

She shook her head. A stray hair floated across his 
vision and landed on the Formica table top. He stared 
at it, trying in his mind to describe the colour, 
attempting at the same time to recall some of 
Francesca's anecdotes about her father which had 
coloured his opinions of the man, made it so inexplicable that she should be so distraught at the 
late-arriving news of his death. Then he remembered 
how he had spent so much of his time slagging off
his own parent for being a reactionary jerk who
liked fishing and understood nothing. It was only
time which had altered his perceptions and allowed 
admiration to intrude.

'Did he do that?' he repeated.
She shrugged. 'Yes. I wasn't his daughter and I
was a few years younger than her. All I know is that
if he corrected his wife and daughter and yes, he was
a stickler for all kinds of protocol, even at the breakfast
table, he married it with a quite uncanny charm.
He insisted on good manners and clear speech, no
mumbling. Strict about that. Talk in phrases, child,
that's what they are for, you must make yourself understood. That aside, he taught me how to cheat at
cards and play a tune on the recorder in an afternoon.
He was a rather charismatic man, I recall, a
feature certainly inherited by his daughter. There
was nothing tyrannical about him. He was a born
teacher, like her. Could've taught pigs to fly.
Probably did.'

Henry spooned sugar into his coffee. An improvement
to the taste which he could feel, furring a tube
somewhere.

'I could tell you all sorts of things about the locality,'
Maggie went on. 'And all Francesca's people if
you want to know. They're all over the place. Over
there -' she pointed to where a dark-haired man sat
with his newspaper. 'That's Neil. He was married to
Angela, who was Francesca's best friend.' She waved
at him; he waved back, dismissively. 'Not very sociable
this morning, he'll be thinking of his fishing. And then there's - oh, I'm sorry, you're upset.' She drank
her coffee with gusto. 'Forgive me for eavesdropping
on your conversation with Edward Burns yesterday but eavesdropping is a necessary habit.'
'Yes. I can tell.'
'You've so much to see before you leave, Henry
may I call you that? You should start at once. The
castle opens at nine; Angela does Sunday mornings,
so they'll let us in early, and anyway, you've just consumed enough sugar to energize a horse. Shall we go?'

'Why not?' She was bossy, but he did not want to
be alone. Anything was preferable to that. Alone he
would slump; accompanied, he could listen, recover
his wits.

The mist had cleared into a haze and the sun persisted in adding a benign and gentle glow. Inside the
steaming burger bar, there was an illusion of warmth,
dispelled as soon as they hit the air. The February sun
cheered without heat, nothing but a teasing foretaste
of spring.

'We can walk, or drive,' Maggie said. 'I've brought my car, but normally I walk everywhere.'
'Like most people, I guess.'
'Isn't that strange for you?'
'No. Yes. No stranger than anything else. I mean it  is strange, but it doesn't feel strange,' Henry said,
thinking of the daily routine he had abandoned at
home. Into the car in the morning, back home in the
car in the evening and he remembered his fear of the traffic jams. He had not been behind the wheel of a
car in days and liked not having to think about it. He
felt incapable of hurrying, just as on the day before he
had felt incapable of running. He looked at Maggie, walking on his left on the outside of the pavement as
if she was protecting him, slowing her steps to match
his own. In the normal run of events, it would have
been he who was brisk and precise; now he felt
weighted down with dismal knowledge.

'The best way to approach the castle is from the
sea,' she was saying. He followed her down steps on
to the beach. The beach banked steeply; the sea was
close and calm. The walking was slower still: Henry
could see this heavy-footed treading over loose stones
as a punishing exercise. The shingle yielded at each
step with a crunching sound which reminded him of
someone eating breakfast cereal. It was a satisfying
noise, marking slow progress which could not be hurried.
He stopped, picked up a pebble and lobbed it
into the water. She followed suit: hers went further. Henry selected a larger, more aerodynamic stone,
flung it. This time it outdistanced hers and disappeared
with an audible plop, encouraging him to
follow with another and another. So did she. Then
they threw simultaneously and the stones entered the
water at almost the same spot and same second.

'A draw,' she said, slightly breathless, turning up
the slope they had slithered down.
'Quits,' he said. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I'll do that
whenever I'm tired. Henry thought. Come down to
the ocean and toss pebbles into it. Such a pointless,
therapeutic activity, they should make a drug to
match it.

'No one could make an exactly quiet approach to 
this castle, could they?' he volunteered through the 
noise of their steps. 'How could anyone get close
enough to take them by surprise? They'd be heard
right away.'
'And seen.'
'If I were the enemy,' Henry said, 'I'd ignore the
damn castle, get my men ashore further down the coast and come around the back way.' 
'You'd still have to get into the castle.'
'That's what bribes are for.'
'You know what. Henry? You talk like a woman.' 

They were walking the circumference of a massive wall, low enough for them to stare over the fifty feet of wintry grass which separated it from the main body of the castle. The whole edifice began far below
them, lower than sea level, and looked as if it had
been excavated from beneath the ground, discovered
complete and fully formed, exactly as it was. Henry
paused to remove a stone from his shoe and when he
looked up again, the grey-green walls of the bastion seemed higher and darker than before. The muzzle of a black cannon peeped at him over a plain parapet,
the mouth of it filled with red. It looked like a toy
placed carefully on a model, ready for someone to
play with. The wooden drawbridge was quaint and
the great iron-studded oak doors were almost beautiful
below an arched ceiling of figured red brick. Maggie
pointed out the holes in the mellow stone above.
'Those are for the boiling oil on your head if you
got this far. Did she tell you she lived here?'
'Yes, she did.'
'Well, it was true.'

And she turned into a murderess. Henry thought,
trying not to think about it. Maggie kicked the door as
if she owned the place, and as if in tribute to her
command the right side moved outwards, slowly,
pushed from behind. It was not fully opened, but
enough for a child to step through. The most beautiful
girl child he had ever seen, her face so purely medieval that in this setting, it shocked him. The skin
was white with lips so red they could have been
painted; she had enormous, unblinking eyes which
regarded him with hostility, and a mass of chestnut
curls sprang from her neat skull. She was dressed
entirely in black: black trainers, leggings, black
bomber jacket - all one, chic piece which made her
seem more like a miniature adult, although the voice
and the pout were entirely that of a ten-year-old.

'Hi, there Tanny. What are you doing here?'
Maggie's voice was full of warmth.
'I'm opening the door,' the girl said, matter of
factly. 'I'm on duty with Mummy. Only till Neil gets
in, but I might stay all day, 'cos Mummy goes to see
Uncle Joe ...'

'Can we come in?'
'Yeah.'

Another forbidding door, then a comfortable shop
area, illuminated by yellow sunlight from a window
set deep in the wall, where a woman, also with auburn 
curls, was tending a kettle steaming behind a counter, 
looking up without smiling.

'Aw, come on, Maggie . . . What the f-- are you
doing here?'
The expletive was choked back. Not in front of
the children, although Tanya looked as if she had
heard it all before and was grinning appreciation.

Henry was easily charmed by children and he
found her enchanting. The girl twitched with suppressed energy, every inch the child despite the
design-consciousness of her clothing, eyeing each of
them in turn as if to judge which would supply the 
most attention.  

'I'm just here with an early bird of a tourist,'
Maggie was saying, talking too fast again. 'Angela,  this is Henry Evans, our visiting American I was
telling you about yesterday. Henry, this is Angela Hulme, and this is her daughter, Tanya.' 

'Hallo.' The greeting from Angela was perfunctory. She did not present to Henry as a happy person.
'I want to go out, I want to go out,' Tanya was chanting, hopping from one foot to the other.
'Look, I haven't organized the tapes or turned on
the lights yet. It's too damned early for a proper tour
round. What the hell do you think you're doing, Maggie? I suppose bloody Neil lets you do as you
please.'
'I should apologise,' Henry said, spreading his
hands. 'I guess this is my fault.'
'Perhaps Tanya can show Henry the cannons,'
Maggie interrupted smoothly. 'And Mummy can
make her tea.'
'Yeah,' Tanya yelled. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah!'

Angela gave Maggie a venomous look. Her hair
glowed titian in the shaft of light, making her strong
features seem harder. Henry wanted out of there. He
liked kids although he felt so unskilled in their company
that he never sought it, but anything was better
than seeing women suppressing a quarrel. It made
the walls of the room close in and inspired him to do
something. He doffed an imaginary hat, and bowed
low to the girl, with a flourish.

'Would Mademoiselle lead on?' She laughed,
responded with a full curtsy, daintily lifting an imaginary
skirt as she put left foot behind right and sank in
a parody of a courtly lady.

'I learned that for the fucking school play. Come
on, then. I can jump over the guns.'
'Don't swear. And don't let her--' But they were
out and into the courtyard beyond. The girl ran
ahead of him, scampering up steps to the heights
while he followed with greater care, breathing slowly
in his relief. The steps were green and moist; she was
as sure-footed as he was not. 'C'mon,' she shrieked  'Come on!' Then they were out on the apron of the south-east bastion with a view of the sea. The area was encircled by a shoulder-high wall. Henry put his
toe in a gap and hauled himself up, leaning over the
top to see what he could see. The top of the wall was
so wide his arm could not extend to the other side across the paving which covered the surface, sloping away from him at a slight downward angle, slippery damp to the touch. The sky and the sea filled his
vision, but when he looked down, the bottom of the
moat was a very long way down indeed. Henry 
stepped back, hastily. 

The child, her name already mislaid, even though
he was fascinated by her face, was clearly not going to
act as a guide and seemed to have forgotten his existence except as a spectator and that suited him, too.

There was a cannon, mounted high on a blockyj standing in the next bastion. She ran towards it
scrambled up and crawled over the mechanism to the
neck. She slithered round until her arms and her legs
clutched the barrel, and moved, hand over hand,
towards the muzzle. She dropped her legs and hung
by her arms, the slender body stretched and her toes  a couple of feet from the ground. Then she dropped, ran back round the cannon and began again. It was 
like watching an agile monkey on a horizontal climb, 
but this time, when she reached the muzzle she kepq her legs locked round it, let go with her arms and
swung head down, with her hair streaming and her
hands stretched towards the floor. She looked deceptively
helpless until she curled her torso upwards,
re-embraced the metal, released her legs and
dropped, elegantly, as before. Henry was moving
towards her, a shade anxious, but clapping his
applause. 'That's great, young lady, but that's
enough, OK?'

He was about to touch her shoulder, maybe calm
her down a little, but she sprang away and ran. He
watched as she climbed the wall. She stood on the
sloping surface, held out both hands for balance and
then began to skip along. Christ. Henry wanted to
run towards her, grab her ankles and hold on tight,
but he could only watch. She skipped daintily, oblivious
to height and danger, the movements growing
faster. He thought of the small, lithe body crashing to
earth on the other side, remembered the obscenities
he had just heard about the boy called Harry, imagined
her scream on the way down, closed his eyes for
a whole second. When he opened them, she had disappeared.

He staggered forward blindly, the bile back at the
root of his throat, hand over his lips to stop himself
gagging. Felt himself shouting. Where are you? with
no idea of whether the words were coming out. He
wanted to shout. Daddy, help me!, in some half
remembered scream of his own boyhood. He broke
into a run, past the two other black cannons which
stood like silent sentinels, pointed towards nothing.
His shoe scrabbled for purchase on the wall as he
tried to heave himself up to look; the surface of the
slabs grazed his fingers and he fell back, twice. He
could feel the beginning of sobbing, thought he could
hear a whimpering, but knew it was his own, turned
back from the wall, despairing. What use was this? Help. HELP. The cannon caught the corner of his
eye, a flash of movement behind it. He turned back to
the wall. Then there was a flurry of soft footsteps
from behind him and the child was clutching at his
waist, laughing. 'Fooled you!' she cried. 'I fucking
did, didn't I?'

Henry detached her hands, twisted towards her
and hugged her tight. She struggled for a few seconds,
resisting the closeness, unaware that he held 
her thus out of a mixture of relief and fear that if his
hands were free, he might slap her out of sheer fury,
so he hung on while she twisted like an eel. Until she
stopped. Her arms crept round his neck; her clean
smelling hair tickled his face and she sighed softly
into his shoulder. Half kneeling to accommodate her
height, Henry locked his arms behind her back. He
was not going to let go of her jacket either until he got
her back to her mother and as the thudding of his
heart lessened, he loved the hug and the fact that this
little imp pressed her cold cheek against his own and
crooned into his ear as if he was everything that ever
mattered. As if he could render her world safe while
she did everything to make it perilous. They stayed
like that for a little while. She hummed a tuneless
song he could not recognize.

'We'll get cold up here,' he murmured, finally. 'And
you know, baby, you shouldn't get up on that wall.
Long way down.'

She pushed him back, her hands on his shoulders, the better to see him. Her smile was outrageous. He
felt it like a blessing; it made him want to cry.
'Why not? Neil lets me do it.'
'Who's Neil?' Ah. that Neil.
'He's my sort of daddy. He lets me play.'

He must want you dead, Henry thought. They
were walking hand in hand by now, nice and quiet.
He felt absurdly protective and in an odd kind of way, privileged.
'... And Francesca used to let me, when I was much
smaller, you know' - a wise tone had crept into her
voice, like that of an old woman talking about another
age entirely - 'but only if I had a piece of rope round
my middle and she held the other end and watched all
the time. 'Cesca was my sort of mummy, but she's
gone away for a long time. Neil says she'll leave me all
her money, one day. I couldn't give a shit, could you?'

He could feel the blood pressure begin to rise
again. He squeezed her hand, stopped the perambulation
and looked at her seriously. She began to dust
down her clothes with exaggerated care, checking for
marks, wiping them away with her sleeve. 'So why  did
she bother with the rope round the middle?' he
enquired, nonchalantly. 'Way you are with that
cannon, sweetie, you could run round these walls
without falling off. Couldn't you?'

Tanya wrinkled her nose and shrugged without letting go of his hand. Her own felt small, trusting and
cool. He was trying to think when it was that youngsters started to sweat. Not yet. He was listening.

'She said that only an idiot would fall off a wall and into a moat. She said I could break my arms and legs any way I liked, 'cept through stupidity. Being brave
is fine, she said, but being stupid isn't.'

He could hear the phrases and that authoritative voice. Tanya's vowel sounds lengthened to copy the
intonation. The battlements were colder; they were
walking slower. He tucked her hand into his pocket.

'So why do you skip round the walls?' She was ferreting in his pocket, striking gold. Chocolate. He had
no idea how it got there, could not remember the
existence of it at all. She held it up, assumed it   hers, transferred it to her own pocket and then, to  relief, put her hand back against his.

'So pleased you found that,' he said, conversationally. 'Clearly yours, because you're so clever, aren't
you? But I was asking you why you like to run around
these walls, scaring me like that. I mean, why?'
'Because I can. That's why. She could, too, when
she was little.'

' Cesca said "OK" was a lazy way with words,' she
added. 'I don't say it any more.'
'OK,' he repeated. 'That's her opinion. You don't
have to follow it. OK with me.'
'You're OK,' she said and Henry felt nicely flattered.

They had walked the full circle of the battlements
and he had not really noticed a thing, except that
after passing a few more of the cannons on the seaward
side, there was not a lot going on by way of
different furniture or scenery, and they were almost
back to where they started, only higher. His companion
had had enough of this and that, chatted beyond
her normal length, led him back towards the glazed
door marked shop/exit. From beyond it, he could hear
the intense sound of voices, talking fast and furious
without shouting. It was a sound which could penetrate
walls. With extreme reluctance, he let go of
Tanya's hand, forgave her the fright. She was a
beautiful child. He would have jumped in the moat
and let her land on him if that would have helped.

They entered the shop area with the sudden
change of temperature to which he was beginning to
become accustomed. By some odd, common accord,
they had both begun coughing as they descended the
steps. Silence had fallen. Maggie and Angela were
smiling at them both, solicitously. Henry was
reminded of the people he had seen on the beach,
awaiting the return of their animals so they could put them back on a leash.

'Hallo,' Maggie said. 'Had fun? We had tea.
Finished now. Sadly.'

Angela bent under the counter, looking for something.
Tanya, who had relinquished her hold on Henry's hand, seemed confused. Henry turned
towards Maggie.

'Guess I just got a taste of parenthood,' he said.   'Not sure I like it. Must be like one long heart attack.' 
Maggie smiled, weakly. His eyes turned to the shelves 
of the shop, pretending interest. Spotted bars of
chocolate, cylindrically shaped and wrapped in white, like a tube of coins. He remembered the feel of it in his pocket, transferred into that of the child, but he could not remember buying it. Poor kid; she pinche
it and he felt huge admiration for her sleight of hand.
He felt in his pocket for change. 'Guess I owe you ..' 
'Mummy!' Tanya shrilled. 'Mummy! He hugged me and called me baby, an' called me sweetie an' gave 
me chocolate, an' he's coming back soon, isn't he,
Mummy?' 

There was complete silence. 
Angela emerged from behind the counter. Her face
was white. 'He did what?' 

Maggie tugged at Henry's sleeve. Her other han  plucked at the batch of tourist leaflets for other attractions which she was stuffing inside her top pocket even as she spoke.

'Think we'll go now. Henry, don't you?'
'Mr Evans can come back another time,' Angela
said tightly. 'There's lots of other things for him to
see. Like the old town jail. Maybe he'll go and live in it.'

The sun had won over the haze. The traffic had
increased. Henry could hear the sound of church
bells. He and Maggie walked back to the beach in
silence. He wanted to feel the shingle beneath his feet.
They sat on a bench and looked at it.
'You have any children. Henry?'
'Nope. Never quite got round to staying long
enough with the right woman. Or asking the right
questions. You?'
'No. And I'm never quite sure what to do with
them. Especially that one.'
'She's quite a kid. I can see why her mom's protective.'

Maggie unfurled the shawl from round her neck
and folded it neatly. The morning was warmer, the
hint of spring less deceptive. She pointed towards the
horizon. 'Look,' she said, 'you can see France. That
means it's going to rain.' Her voice was sad, with a
touch of resignation.

He waited. Henry was good at waiting for information.
He had waited in lecture halls, waited on
academics, businessmen and confused pupils; he was
a patient disseminator of information and a listener.

'Tanya was Francesca's protege,' Maggie was explaining, smoothing the shawl between her
hands. 'She was adopted by Neil and Angela.
Francesca knew them, encouraged them, and finally 
they got the child that no one else would take. Not
a baby, a five-year-old with freakish colouring and a 
history of terrible abuse. Very vulnerable. Angela
and Neil parted soon after. Francesca took a lot of
responsibility, even though Harry was just a baby when Tanya arrived. I suppose she and Angela
bonded even more after Francesca's husband buggered off.' 
'Why did he go?' 
'Who knows? It was a tricky pregnancy and there
was no time for him, I suppose. Francesca always had all the time in the world for everyone. He wasn't
the only one to resent the intrusion.'
'Bastard,' Henry said feelingly.
'Aren't they all?' 

Maggie found a packet of cigarettes, proffered
them: Henry took one absentmindedly and accepted 
a light. Another bit of poison, taken to ease conversation, did not seem to matter. He had  forgotten his  vitamins this morning; the nicotine made him dizzy, 
but even with his social skills muddled by thisnew
environment, he knew that the accepting of the
cigarette was important. 

'So. Francesca's in her late thirties. She's got a job
and a sickly child and she shares a vulnerable one
like Tanya, too? She must have been a sucker for
punishment.'
'Francesca had great energy and greater spirit. Her
father had been warden of the keep. She did once live
in a castle; she was designed to take charge and hide
feelings. She seemed amazingly competent, tough. But
she wasn't, you see. She simply wasn't. She was
coming apart at the seams.'
'Then she should have come clean and admitted
she couldn't hack it,' Henry stated angrily, stamping
the cigarette with the heel of his shoe, grinding it to
shreds. Thinking of something else. She should have
ASKED me to stay with her and not to leave. Relied on
the fact I was older. She should have said she was
afraid. She should not have said, you must do what
you need to do. Henry. She should have said, I need
you.

'Yes, she should,' Maggie said.
A dog paused to sniff at the bench; The owner
stopped, too. The chain of command was obvious;
one led, one followed.

'I could ask Francesca if she'd like to see you.'
'No.'

She rose and hoisted her bag, fished out tourist
information leaflets from the inside of her jacket and
thrust them at him. 'Then you'd better go on with the
sightseeing, hadn't you? Try the jail, like Angela said.
Then you'll know what barbarous people we are.
Harry's hemiplegia was severe. In another age, he
might have been thrown off the walls. Maybe she had
some excuses.'

Henry walked. He walked first on the shingle, away
from the town, until, assisted by the returning haze, the outline of the castle was faded when he turned to
look. He walked and watched his feet slurring
through the pebbles with a satisfying sound, until his
thighs felt as if they were on fire and his shoes no
longer insulated his feet. The pebbles became larger,
the beach steeper, so that at times he was hidden in a 
stone valley, with no view either of the sea or the land. 
It suited his mood. He had passed an untidy collection
of fishing boats which looked unfit to sail with
their heavy hulls and ungainly lines; he had paused to
watch a team of men winch one out of the water and
heard it groan like a half-dead whale. Then he passed
a children's playground, listened from the beach to
the sound of high shrieking on the swings and hurried
on. He supposed a mother could tell the difference
between a howl of excitement and one of pain. And 
then he was beyond the reach of the road on beach so 
steep that the prospect of clambering back was awesome and he could imagine he was finally, completely
alone.

The coastal path above the shore took him through
flat scrubland, littered with small shrubs, flattened by
the wind. Outside of the conurbation it was a bleak
enough place; mere was nothing verdant or comforting 
about it. A mile further on, the flat land rose into a cliff,
skirting a cove, looming above it. The path ran out.
The bay reverberated with the ghostly sound of a
hovercraft crossing from England to France, a strange,
diffused, booming sound he had heard in the distance
the morning before. The sound filled the sky. He
wished he were on the damn boat, hovering or not. He
wished he had never seen this stretch of coast or
invested it with the romance she had conjured in her
descriptions. You can see for miles and miles; you can see
another country. Yeah. Only if you live in a castle
designed to kill any poor bastard who tries to get in.
Henry turned for home. That damn black mongrel
had been following him again. He shouted at it and
when it went, he was sorry.

Home. Had to stop saying that. He rang the bell,
grunted a greeting and went up to the room in search
of privacy. Flung the suitcase on the bed and did an
inventory: passport, travel cheques, tickets, the name
of the Fergusons contact, diary. Don't any of these
people know how important I am? The light began to
leak out of his room; all the documents strewn on the
gorgeous silk coverlet looked like an unconvincing statement of identity and purpose. They were so
small. He was drawn to look at the sea, so hazy, so
absolutely endless, it repelled him. Besides, the sun
had moved round, away from it. It shone through the
window on the other side of his open door. The sash
window opened easily. He put his elbows on the sill
and looked down.

There were twisted red roofs of a dozen different
contours, chimneypots, large and small trailed with
smoke; nothing he could see contained any uniformity.
He could see the worn red tiles, warped with
age, glinting windows, a medley of warm colours and
a thousand entry points for Mary Poppins. He could
see the white painted walls, the rounded gable of the
opposite house and the little alley in between. Then
he looked down into the garden of the House of
Enchantment, drawn by the sound of tinkling water.
Tropical down there. A mass of foliage in green,
some damn thing with flowers, a great bursting bush
with tiny white blooms. A small pond against the side,
catching the sun, water gushing out of a terracotta
mouth into a clear pool. A floor of old brick curving
away in a circular design, greenery between the
stones, mature, evergreen shrubs hiding the beds
from which they sprung, brilliant gentian blue in a
rockery of alpine plants in the corner away from the
pool. A curving path, leading to a pergola covered
with greenery, sheltering a small, wooden love seat
which looked as if it, too, had grown where it stood. From this height, it was a piece of perfection with a
single flaw. Tim in a boiler suit, bent double with his
bottom sticking out of a Wendy house settled square
in the middle of it all. The house was plastic, built in lemon yellow with pink shutters, lime roof and royal
blue door. It sat, as offensive and disparate as a wart
on a beautifully manicured finger, defying all standards
of taste. Tim was on hands and knees, dusting it.
Henry forgot everything else, ran down the stairs,
through the kitchen and out the back door. He passed
Peter, marshalling coal into buckets for the fires.
From below, the garden was even more impressive.
The comparative ugliness of a large utilitarian
shed and a compost container were hidden beyond
the pergola. The place was larger than it had seemed
from on high, extending further than he could see,
and even in the doldrums of winter there was colour.

'This is just great.' Henry was passionate about
gardens, read about them, viewed them and dreamed
of creating something different from his own dull
lawn.
'All our own work,' Tim said. 'Everything begged
or recycled, you know. We got the bricks from a
demolished wall, backbreaking it was; we've raised
most of the plants, and we built the pond from
scratch. We're extremely grateful for what other
people throw away.'
'But what about that  Henry pointed with trembling
finger at the obtrusive Wendy house with its
hideously artificial pink and blue. Tim's dusting and
cleaning operations were complete; he was looking at
his work with satisfaction. The plastic was conspicuously
dirt free and had none of the sadness of summer items left out in the cold. It looked prepared
for imminent occupation. 'Oh, I get it,' he said, relieved as the dog approached and sniffed at the
door of the house. 'It's Senta's kennel, right?'
'Good Lord, no. She's only allowed inside by special
permission.' The two men were looking at each
other, as if deliberating on a proper explanation that
would not offend him. Peter took charge, with Tim's
tacit agreement.
'Well, I hope you don't mind, but we do know that
you had a little chat with Maggie this morning. About
knowing Francesca, and everything, so we may as
well tell you. This is Harry's little house. He used to
play in it, you see, when Fran left him with us, and we
keep it nice for him, for whenever he wants it. He
lives in this garden, you see. Not all the time, just
sometimes when it's sunny.'

Tim nodded confirmation of this unquestionable
fact. Peter was pointing through the open shutters of
the Wendy house. 'He has his little sleeping bag,
which he was ever so fond of, and his little shawl,
which he used to chew, and his teddy, which he used
to abuse dreadfully. Always throwing it away and then
yelling to get it back. Love-hate, you might say. Of
course, we take the bedding indoors at night. He'd be
frightened outside in the dark.'

'The kid's been dead for more than a year,' Henry
said, brutally. 'Drowned, buried, cremated. Dead.'
'Yee-ees,' Tim said, considering this. 'Yee-es, you
could put it like that.'

'So his ghost comes back to play? Slips down a
damn moonbeam?'
'We knew you'd understand. Henry,' Tim beamed.
'You seem such an understanding man. We had such
a terrible time after he was killed. We really weren't
allowed to grieve, you see. There were plenty of
people thought Francesca was completely bonkers to
give him to us three or four afternoons a week, but he loved it here. We know how to nurse people, especially
little people, and we adored him.'
'You see. Henry,' Peter continued the narrative,
'there are so many people who still think that being queer means paedophile. As well as rampant, always at it, like rabbits. Instead of being an old married couple
like us who would guard a child from harm like a pair
of anxious grannies. When Harry disappeared, I tell
you, the police were round here like a shot. They
would have dug up the garden if he hadn't been
found so soon and Francesca confessed. I suppose we
should be grateful to her for that.'
'And for plenty of other things,' Tim murmured.
'Such as letting us get to know him in the first place.
He was a sweet, sweet child.'

In the day's emotional turmoil, and in his grief the
night before, Henry had not had time to contemplate
the identity of the dead child and did not want to
dwell on it. All that had mattered was the impact of
his awful demise. He got the picture: this 'murder'
had messed up plenty of lives, not least that of the
murderess; fallout still coming down. No one so far
had spoken of the child with love. Tim was weeping
openly, and Peter was patting his shoulder. 'Oh, come
inside, dears, we all need some tea,' he said. 'And
besides, in case Henry here starts seeing spirits, we'd
better show him what Harry looked like. In case he
gets the wrong idea.'

Henry wanted no such thing; the conversation horrified
him, but he could not see how to evade it. It was
he, after all, who had invited himself into the garden,
he who had failed to keep his distance, and now he
was trapped. A comfortable trap in the warm kitchen,
with the world outside clouding over and his elbows
resting on a scrubbed table and a tame dog dozing at
his feet. Tea poured from a huge, brown pot which
looked too heavy to lift but yielded sweet scented Earl
Grey, flavoured with a slice of lemon in the cup. It cut
through the clog of the day's snack diet, refreshed
him, even as the warmth of the Rayburn fortified him
for this exercise in politeness. Peter was coming into
the room carrying the TV.

'We've got a video, although I like photos better.
See what I mean? He was an angel.'
'Was there ever a suggestion of any other culprit
for the killing?' Henry asked desperately.
'Well, no. Someone had been fishing on the pier
earlier on. Left his stuff and didn't come back. And
lots of people resented Francesca. And we do have bad people here. Oh, look!'

Henry saw the head of Francesca, face completely
obscured by falling hair as she knelt behind the child
and supported him with her hands beneath his
armpits, fingers waving at the camera. She was keeping
him upright; he seemed in the act of lurching
forward. And then he ran, right arm flexed like a
piston, right wrist bent. The angle of the arm increased
as he moved. He ran like a slow drunk preserving the
arm for the next drink, a look of painful determination
on his face, mucus round his nose and a bruise on his
forehead.
'That's him at two, when we met,' Henry said
fondly. 'He was even more beautiful later. When he
learned to fall over properly.'

Henry made himself swallow the tea which threatened
to close his throat, pity at war with something
like revulsion. The child whose face he examined was
ugly. It could have been an old, old man. The face
was pinched and wizened and the smile was twisted.
Desperately unappealing, at best. Something to
smother beneath blankets and hurry through streets.
A child physically cursed, begging to be shunned.
Ugly as sin. He struggled for an appropriate response.
An image of Tanya's perfection floated across his
mind, along with the remembered feeling of holding
her close in his arms. The child in the picture looked
ready to bite and consumed with rage.

'Poor little mite,' said Tim, his voice tremulous.
'And looking at him. Henry, you have to agree, it's
very important to find out who killed him. Otherwise,
he'll just keep on coming back to his own little house.
Don't worry, though, he won't haunt you. Why
should he? He only haunts us because we don't want
to let him go.'
'His mother killed him.'
'Well, sadly and officially, yes. But he thinks there's
a question mark, he's told us so. Unfortunately, he
was never very articulate, speech difficulties, you see,
so he doesn't seem able to advance an explanation.
But he's perfectly right to express reservations. After
all, he must have known his mother better than
anyone else.'

Henry put his hands over his ears to blot out the
words. He wanted to thump the table and rattle the
teacups. He took his hands away from his ears and
laid them flat on the table in front of him, willing
them to behave. Tim patted his wrist, consolingly.
'Which is why it's so nice you're here. Henry.
We've been expecting you for ages. Someone has to
find out, and it can't be us, so it has to be you. Isn't
that right, Peter?'

They were beaming at him, as if he were a prodigal
son returned and all was forgiven and the fatted calf
was in the oven.

Henry shook his head and left them. Walked up
all the stairs to his room. The fire they had lit mid- afternoon , without knowing when he would return,
glowed softly. The shirts he had flung into a corner
had been washed and pressed. He continued his
inventory, repacked the suitcase, left it open on the
floor. He wished his battery of vitamins included a
tranquillizer.

Opened his laptop, wrote himself a note.
GET OUT OF HERE, HENRY.
NOBODY NEEDS YOU.
YOU HAVE NOTHING TO OFFER AT ALL.



Easier today. Easier to breathe and easier to write. I like
these little pills.

I could no more tell my friend in the kitchen that I was
brought up in a castle than I could fly over the moon. She
would think I was taking the piss, although if I explained
that my father was merely the caretaker, and I the caretaker's
daughter, she would find it less offensive. Initially,
she disliked the way I speak. I can't amend my accent and
although I have the family talent for mimicry, which children
love, I can't sustain it. She has forgotten about the
voice, now, which is just as well, because it's easy to make
an enemy here and she's bigger than I, as well as more
socially powerful. I think I'm forgiven the voice and the
habit of sentences because I like her, I really do and she
doesn't know quite what to do about that.

I DID grow up in a castle, although it was only the
small part in the middle, and when I was a child it didn't
feel unique. There was certainly no sneaking in or out of
it or possessing my own key. Nor was the space we occupied
either huge or luxurious, simply sufficient for the
standards of an ex-military man who put efficiency far
ahead of comfort, and a wife who found she had married
a late-blooming eccentric and gave up making decisions.

We would re-enact the Normandy landings and she
would knit. She couldn't sit and knit as well as look at the
view, because the windows were too high, so she would
stand. The keep was utilitarian and meant for soldiers. It
was a terrific place for parties and family gatherings (I
can't remember when Uncle Joe was excluded), a complete
playground, but for a houseproud wife, it was no wonder
she preferred her bungalow.

Privileged? Of course it was, if I had thought about it
at the time. I loved those battlements; I loved hoisting
the flag and I loved standing level with the sea. We
didn't repel invaders; we invited them in, especially
Maggie, but we locked the doors once they had gone. We
ruled the world, my father said, and he was absolutely
right. He didn't mean the English ruled the world; he
meant we, ourselves. The psychiatrist who saw me in the
early stages asked if that gave me a certain attitude to
life. (He was very keen on the isolation of environment
and class.)

I'm becoming wordy. I must stop.
It made me thrifty, capable, good at cooking, washing,
sewing and careless about appearances, because we did
everything and owned nothing. We were caretakers for the
next generation. I told him there were times it made me
want to live in a treehouse inside someone else's garden.

I inherited an outrageous sense of duty, but I did not
tell the psychiatrist that: nor did I tell him that, above all, it made me extraordinarily humble.
As well as arrogant and talented in manipulation.
With a craving for status in the wider community,
couldn't stand the failures of ordinary life and parenthood.
A tendency to take over and give orders. Raised
around cannons and the veneration of war; therefore
capable of violence and aggression.

I'm glad I remembered that part. He found it entirely
convincing.

FMC.


chapter Six.

in the late afternoon, just as it began to rain, Angela
Hulme drove to see Uncle Joe. He lived in a senior
citizens' home, appropriately situated next to the
golf course where he had spent as much of his life as
possible. When giving her the task of visiting this
stranger, Francesca had assured Angela that she
would know exactly which one he was. The idlest
survivor of three brothers, the only one left of that
generation and their wives. A reprobate, and after all
those years golfing and drinking gin, the one with
the face like red sandpaper. Angela had promised
Francesca and although she now owned Francesca's
car, it was a promise she often resented, because it
was another obligation. My father's surviving brother
is the only thing I have left of my father; please do this,
Angela. It was Francesca who should have been the
lawyer, the way she could persuade without it
sounding quite like an order, although perhaps being 
a teacher had the same effect. 

The suggestion was that she should take Tanya
with her, but Angela reneged on that part. They had 
tried it; Tanya liked Uncle Joe but she talked too 
much, exhausted him. It was Francesca's opinion that
it was good for the very young to have contact with
the very old, but Tanya did not belong with these
relics, although they loved to see a child. Angela did
not agree with the need to mingle with the older generation:
they had a general tendency to carp and
criticize although this hardly applied to Uncle Joe.
He was all sweetness and light, another reason for
leaving Tanya behind with Neil, because Angela
secretly enjoyed seeing him privately. There was a
dearth of adult company in her life, there was nothing
he did not understand and he was completely uncensorious. 

She drove in the Ramsgate direction, past another 
town and into the flat hinterland. The road took her 
through the vast Fergusons plant. She could have a 
job here; everyone else did. The area of the operation 
was vast, spreading over the fields like a rash, and 
even on a Sunday the carpark was full of bright, new motors. It must take thousands of sick people to make
and distribute drugs; so much everyone knew.

Maggie had told her in the castle that Henry Evans, the tourist, was going to work there; no wonder she
hadn't liked him, even before he started making eyes
at her beautiful child. What kind of idiot thought
Tanya could be bribed with chocolate? An idiot like
that. She might just tell Uncle Joe all about it. Maybe
Henry Evans knew of a drug which could make her
daughter forget everything unpleasant that had ever
happened to her, and remember only the good things, such as being born at all. Make her completely dissociate
herself from the child whose drug-sodden
parents had burned the inside of her thighs with a
cigarette, left her with a rash on her face from lying in
vomit. They should find a cure for that, these fucking
scientists, instead of finding drugs to make men
worse than they already were.

She passed the featureless buildings and began to
relax a little. She did not, in all honesty, have any
doubts about leaving Tanya with Neil. Although he
was an unpredictable man with the sexual ability of a
slug, he was a good enough part-time father to a
beautiful girl child who needed unbiased attention
with the minimum of attachment. At least Neil suspended
his irritation and was alert enough to notice
danger. Although Angela thought that Tanya could
have done without the swearing and the ghost stories,
that was fine too, because she didn't believe a word of
them, which made for a good combination, really,
what with her trusting Neil, and yet all the time thinking
he was a bit silly. That way, he undermined
nothing, which probably suited them all.

She pulled up on the Ramsgate cliff, a desolate
place in winter, fit for nothing but sheep and this
house, which was as grand as a seabitten house in
need of maintenance could be: frayed at the edges
and cancerous round the windows at this time of
year, the white paint a shade grey and flaky and the
whole thing less than ancestral. The new golf clubhouse
stood a few acres distant over rolling greens
saturated with rain. This house, which she approached
from the carpark at a running crouch through the
rain, had once been the golfers' bar. No wonder
Uncle Joe loved it. Reaching the entrance, sheltered
from the wet in the age it took anyone to answer, she remembered her resentment, standing here
with her arms crossed, obeying orders a year ago.
What business had she, coming to see Francesca's
uncle on another rainy day, only to get that bovine
nurse from an agency who said. Mister Who? I'm
sorry, I don't know the names. Oh yes there he was, the one sitting over there, with the red face and the
fine white hair. The one in his favourite armchair,
reading a paper, just as Francesca described. The
accuracy of the description and the awkwardness of the introduction started off the little game they still
played now.

'Are you Uncle Joe?' she greeted him, shedding her
coat.
'Who wants him?' he replied, just like the first time.
He sat alone in the close warmth of the foyer, looking
out through the double-glazed doors whenever the
paper dropped into his lap. She liked the fact that he
simply presented his papery cheek for a peck from her
lips. She gave him Maggie's snowdrops this time,
aware that he might have preferred sherry or chocolate,
but that was what she had and he always
protested about the gifts.

'My dear, you shouldn't have ... But how lovely to
see you. Pretty as a picture. I do like the new hair.'

Uncle Joe always observed things, looked at her
with such keen approval it made her preen a little.
She found herself wearing a skirt for Uncle Joe,
putting on earrings or a bracelet to see if he would
notice, and he never failed. 'I love that, where did you
get it?' It was part of a regular if not invariable Sunday
ritual, this slight dressing up for him, the way other
people might do for church. If she missed a week, he
never reproached her, something else she appreciated.
He said he quite understood what life was like
with children. Overall, it was one of those social tasks
she did not relish, but all the same enjoyed.

Because he wanted to listen. He preferred that to
talking, relishing stories from the outside world, delivered
for his mild commentary, especially if the
anecdotes featured Tanya. Francesca was never mentioned
after the first time, when Angela had explained
how she had come as a replacement because Fran
was otherwise engaged. He had accepted the substitution
with alacrity as well as grace - 'How lucky I am
to have you instead ...' - and if he had read about his
homicidal niece in the local newspaper, he did not
say, but then Uncle Joe despised the local paper and
only went for quality broadsheets. When she ventured
to explain what had happened, he had merely
shaken his head sadly, as if nothing in the world surprised
him any more. 'How awful for you,' was his
primary comment, 'but never mind. Very sad, but
probably all for the best'; and while Angela knew this
laconic response was hardly appropriate, she secretly
and guiltily agreed. In numerous ways, life without
Francesca's assiduous and generous assistance was
harder, but infinitely easier in other respects. At least
she was no longer there, with her tireless energy, swallowing
Tanya's affection and attention, influencing
her the way she did, and in a while, perhaps Tanya
would stop talking about her. Forget about her, as
she was managing to forget so much else.

They were left to themselves in the foyer, although
if she timed it right, one of the agency staff who took
over at weekends wandered along with a tray of tea
and a plate of the sort of tasteless dry biscuits Tanya
would have rejected. Angela wondered if the biscuits
were the choice of the staff or of the patients, who
might have been raised to regard rich tea or ginger
nuts as a treat.

'Why do you sit out here, by yourself, instead of in
the living room with the nice fire?'
'I like it here. Get away from the others.' Today he
twinkled at her.

'So cold out there. Splendidly kind of you to come
out in this. So lucky.' He settled himself. He had
tremor in the hands and virtually no use of his legs,
but he could dress himself. The clothes were endearingly
old and good and he was pinkly clean. 'How is
the gorgeous child?'
'Well, she's acting up, but what's new? I dyed my
hair to please her and she has the nerve to say she
doesn't like it...'
'Tut, tut,' delivered indulgently, smiling.
'And she still talks about Francesca. At school, I
gather. At home, even to strangers. She was doing
that this morning .. .'
'Give it time, give it time, my dear.'
'. . . to an American, I ask you, up at the castle. A
tourist Maggie brought in. I think Tanya was flirting
with him a bit, but more to the point, he was certainly
flirting with her ...'
'Really!'
'I don't want to get it wrong. I want her to be easy
with strangers, but I don't want her being familiar.
You never know with people, do you?'
'No. You never know.'
'Anyway, she's safe with Neil. I'll try and bring her
again, one of these days.'
'Oh yes, one of these days.' Not you should or you
must.
'Well, I don't know. She might be doing somersaults
in the rain. She hates sitting still. Neil manages
to make her, sometimes. Me, I have to make her run
and jump until she's worn out, but I don't always like
to do that, because she gets so fractious when she's
tired. We set up a series of hurdles on the beach the
other day, after school. She needed wearing out. She
can run along the shingle, like it was a running track.
Amazing. Sometimes I feel as if I'm exercising a great
big dog.'
'A dog!'
'Yes. Just like exercising a dog. Relentless. Needs
taking out twice a day and then feeding. She'd like to
have a dog, she says, but never mind the money they
cost, I'm not sure. To be honest,' she lowered her
voice confidentially, even though there was no one to
overhear, 'I'm not sure she has the patience. Not sure
I would, either. What do you think?'
'Dogs, yes ... dogs are good.'
'Yes, but think - if I let her out with a dog by herself,
everyone would stop and talk to her. Unless I got
a horrid dog that nobody liked. One that snapped at
everyone else but us . ..'
'Yes!'
'That would keep people away, wouldn't it? Sort of
guard dog, yes it's quite a good idea when I think of
it. But not that bloody dog Neil wanted us to have.
Do you know, this morning he was so cheerful? He's
not usually like that. He's usually tense and miserable,
he always was. He annoyed me, though. I told him
about the American making eyes at Tanya and he just
shrugged. I said there was something creepy about
him . . .'
'Creepy American?'
'Yes. Creepy. Men like that want locking up.'

Uncle Joe adjusted himself in his chair and smiled
widely at the nurse who brought tea. She smiled back.
The progress of the cup towards his mouth was tortuous.
It clattered back into the saucer. He leaned
towards Angela and tapped his nose, wisely.
'This American ... You should lock him up. With
a dog!' He laughed loudly and Angela joined in. He
always made her feel better; they often ended up giggling
like kids. She could tell him anything. He wasn't
really a chore, after all. He pushed the snowdrops to
the side of the tray, not really caring for them either
and knowing she wouldn't mind, because, really, they
thought the same way about irrelevant things. She
did not come here because Maggie would ask if she
was fulfilling the promise; she came because he liked
her and agreed with her when it seemed nobody else
did. It was lonely out there, being watched all the
time, to see if you got it wrong.

'We are better without Francesca and Harry, aren't
we?' she asked anxiously, taking two of the biscuits.
Lunch had been scanty.
'Better? Much better.'
'I'm not a bad person, am I, Uncle Joe? I'm a good
mother, aren't I?' He patted her hand and gazed at
her fondly.
'No. You're very good. Like dogs.'
He always said what she wanted to hear and
remembered nothing.

The rain came down in sheets, altering the landscape;
again to a leaden grey before the black of evening and the violence outside provided Henry with a comfortable excuse for lying still, listening to music and 
doing nothing. Then, with the rain beating out a 
steady, unrhythmic lullaby, he slept the sleep of the 
dead. Woke once to a sound and the red glow of the 
dying fire, saw the shawl where he had laid it on the 
bed, and then slept again,  He would get Maggie to give Francesca the shawl. 

That would be the end of it. 
The morning sky made him consider the pleasures
of living in a house like this where he would never need to draw the shades and could stretch, naked, in 
front of a window. Henry felt the small ridge of fat
which was forming round his middle, pinched it ruefully
and thought, to hell with it. Better be fat than
believe in ghosts; better be a porker than a nut.

He said a prayer for his father; not a prayer to any
known deity, simply an address to whoever might be
able to interpret it and pass the message on. I hope
you're OK, Dad. You might like it here, especially the
fishing, but I'm not sure I do ... It was simply a continuation
of a daily conversation, keeping his father
up to speed, seeking his opinion, not really expecting
a reply, but encouraging himself to see things with his
father's broad perspective. They had talked by phone
so regularly, it had proved a habit difficult to relinquish
and Henry had sat at his desk on many an
afternoon with his hand ready to dial before he realized
what he was doing. Waiting to chat to Dad, nothing much, just an exchange of words, sometimes
a discussion. Dad loved nothing better than a debate.

It seemed to Henry in this single moment that his
intellect had gone to sleep since his father died, submerged
in grief, loss, self-recrimination and, floating
among it, this murky sediment of sheer sentimentality
which had driven him over the Atlantic. He was
appalled to remember himself reading poetry and
crying like some juvenile, throwing himself back into
sorrow and all of it reminding him of her and how
hellish she must have felt. Making himself weep, if
only to exhaust the supply of emotion and attempt to
extract that hairball which seemed constantly lodged
in his own throat. Any woman with half a brain would
have left him; any child would have despised such
unreliable thrashing about of the type which affected
him even now. Dad would surely not like it. Henry sat up in bed with his arms clasped round his knees. That was what he was trying to remember during the
night, the lost intellect and his own dedication to scientific fact. Don't simply accept so-called facts; go to the
source before you have the arrogance to believe. He hit his
forehead with the heel of his palm. Come on. Henry.
All he had absorbed in the last couple of days was
people telling him so-called facts, chilling facts or
maybe fantasies, and why should he believe any of
them? Sure, he was going to go home, but surely not
on the basis of a lot of happy drunk dinner guests, a
crazy Francesca cousin with a possible angle to her
legends . . . Hearsay is not fact, any more than
dreams; fact has no motive or axe to grind. Fact is in
libraries and it did not become a man to forget the
disciplines so essential to his own nature.

In a new mood of virtue, Henry took his elaborate mix
of vitamins and minerals which weighed a ton in 
the bulk he had carried, a waste of space for a short
journey. He was planning the day, and that felt like
his old self before all this stuff intervened. No more
alcohol; no more fatty food; he was going to damn
well sightsee, and not let all this stuff sour him, and
he knew the way to the library. Henry felt like a
drunk experiencing what it was like not to have a
hangover, but all the same, he crept from the
premises rather than roared. There was an envelope
with his name on it, containing a key, left for him
with the coffee. Just so you don't have to ring the bell. It touched him.

Library. Old newspaper reports. The reference
was computerized, but the source was the newspapers
themselves, not yet old enough to be yellow.
They were delivered by a face he had seen in the
street.
A small boy was recovered by men on a
Ramsgate fishing boat, yesterday morning. He
had suffered considerable injury. A member of
crew reported seeing him floating on the tidal
current and thought at first he was attempting
to swim. Enquiries reveal that the dead boy
was Henry Chisholm, son of Francesca
Chisholm and her estranged husband,
Jonathan Saunders, who resides abroad. The
child had been reported missing by his distraught
mother shortly before he was
recovered. Ms Chisholm, who lives in a prestigious,
two-bed flat on Warbling seafront, told
police she had left open the door to their
apartment 'to get some air' and did not realize
the boy had gone. The boy was partially disabled,
but extremely mobile. The mother is
being treated for shock. The exact cause of
death is unknown. Police would like to contact
the fisherman who left his equipment on the
pier.

OK. FACT. He could feel fact in the pit of his stomach.
They were right. The child was dead. That ugly
little brute had passed into another zone. Mrs
Saunders has identified the body of her son. . . Asked if
she had any explanation of his injuries, she said she did
not know. And an editorial, let this be a lesson to us
all!!! Children must be attended at all times. . .

He read on, into the next day, a small piece detailing
the continuation of enquiries, and adding a moral
tone, to the effect that nationwide, the death or
neglect of children was not confined to the lower
classes, but occurred in the best and richest of families, single parenthood was a classless disease, etc.
There was a description of Francesca's flat, in the
block next to the castle, with spacious living accommodation
and fine sea views, as if this had somehow
contributed to the tragedy. Henry could not recall
the block, as viewed from the pier, as anything other
than dull and ordinary, but all the same there was, in
the article, a hint of loose-living privilege. Had
Francesca been rich? Surely not. Not rich enough to
pay for regular help, it seemed. She let her boy be
looked after by poofters. She was a primary school
teacher from an upper-class family, and Henry had
learned already that in English terms, class and cash
do not necessarily coincide. Then the day after. A
woman has been arrested in connection with . . . and
will appear at Dover Court tomorrow. It was the photograph
for the day following which caught his eye,

along with a brief description. Mother remanded in
custody for her own safety, and there she was, with a
blanket over her head, being pushed into the back of
a police car while cops with stern faces kept back a
small but vociferous crowd of screaming women
apparently intent on tearing her to pieces. Bitch, bitch,
bitch. Henry closed his eyes, imagining.

The date of the trial surprised him. Just short of a
year ago, so near and yet so far, made it seem all the
closer. The guilty plea had not been unexpected,
although there was another, moralistic addendum
about Francesca's slight virtue by refusing to deny
this terrible offence and thus saving public money.
Friends and relatives had been adamant in their
refusal to speak to journalists. Less circumspect
neighbours, mostly old and retired, said the defendant
was generally very nice. No photographs of the
boy. He had been cremated, service for family and
friends only, no pictures of that, either. There was a
brief discussion of his hemiplegia which Henry read
carefully. Then he went back to the photograph of
Francesca being pushed inside the car outside the
court. He found it unbearably moving. Without
thinking very much about it, apart from being surprised
at his own vandalism. Henry tore it out
carefully, folded it and put it in his pocket.

Then he moved to the poetry shelves, not much
patronized on a Monday morning. Looked up one he
remembered.

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness .. .
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility;
Do more bewitch me, than when Art
Is too precise in every part.

A blanket over the head could never be elegant. It
was not the same as a shawl. Why hadn't they let her
have her shawl? Why not let her comfort her own
misery?

Henry felt exceedingly old and not a little foolish to
be lurking by these shelves. It seemed to him that
poetry was the province of the very young, forced to
learn it as part of their heritage, or the very old, who 
had come to understand that nothing else lasted as 
long. It was only the slight failures in life who had
recourse to the stuff in adulthood and carried a  volume to India in a backpack, to aid the romance of   the journey. Or girls like Francesca Chisholm, whose 
father had made her learn so much of it by heart to 
give her an unselfconscious love of verse. Not always 
solemn verse; silly verse, too. The thunder God went for  a ride. Upon his favourite filly. I'm THOR! he cried. The 
horse replied. You forgot your thaddle, thilly. Henry
found himself smiling. He put back the book in his 
hand, feeling conspicuous for lurking although he
was not alone. There were others drifting round  shelves, looking vaguely shifty. Henry patted the
pocket with the torn newspaper piece. He would  throw it away, later.

He wandered out into the street and followed a 
sign to the old gaol. It was atmosphere he wanted, to
help digest facts, and besides, with the help of these
facts, he might be going home even sooner. He would have to have something to report, as well as
something to mitigate the memory of these other facts: He could not just turn round and go with nothing to remember but an old friend on the equivalent
of death row. He was a tourist, not a maudlin fool,
and the seeing of sights and absorbing of history had
always been on the agenda. He had made a plan
before he got here: he wanted to look at castles and
things he could not see anywhere else; he was damn
well going to do it.

In terms of tourist attractions, the Old Town Gaol
was unpretentious and he was the only visitor. There
was an antiquated courtroom, full of life-sized
models, eerily lit, so that the details of their dusty
waistcoats and wigs could be seen in full splendour.
This, Henry read in his leaflet, was the place for the
trial of local thieves in Victorian times. A mob had
torn it apart to rescue smugglers incarcerated in the
cells. The stench of humanity would be overpowering
enough to make the magistrate retch when the hatch
was opened and the prison below was full.

Henry went down steps to the cells, intrigued without
being fascinated, feeling that in some way he was
simply doing his duty. Sightseeing often felt like that.
He reached the barred door to the first cell and
touched the cold, rusting metal as he looked through
into a tiny room of spartan quality. Cold stone walls,
an iron bedstead, a shelf and a wax figure reclining
listlessly on a thin mattress, clutching a bible. Henry
could feel the chill of the floor rise up through the
stones; there was room to stand, but not to walk; the
width of the cell was merely the hand span of a small
man. He moved down a row with cells either side, 
each with its own model of a skeletal prisoner,
Touched his forehead and felt it sweat. NO.

There was the time with Francesca, when they had
gone to see the caves and she had led him out, gibbering
and fainting with indefinable fear, times when
he had forced himself out of the railway carriage,
careless of who he shoved, because he had known
without shadow of doubt that he would die if he did
not escape. The same, feeling now, the hot grip of
claustrophobia swelling his throat. There was something, someone small, stroking his thigh. He stumbled
forward, past more of the cells, searching for the exit
sign, scrambling up stone steps, bursting out past a startled girl at the entry desk, and into the street. He
walked with a ludicrous jerky, fast walk until he was in
sight of the sea, and once that was in range, leaned
against the wall and breathed deeply. He balled his
hands into fists to stop them shaking. The seagulls
whirled and screamed in derision; Henry looked at
them until the feeling subsided, leaving him weak.
He scrambled down to the edge of the water and
waited until the world came back in focus.

No breakfast; low blood sugar. A cup of coffee
somewhere in between the library and the gaol to
send it soaring, and then the lights and the fusty
warmth, the dust and gloom, all factors contributing
to the lack of control he recognized; all of them part
of an explanation, but not a reason and never an
excuse. He had felt the dead boy's hand brush at his
leg, pulling him back, but knew there was nothing
but a vision of Francesca, wearing her shawl, sitting in
a cell for ever and ever, unable to move, opening her
mouth to whisper, I can't talk now; I can't talk now. And he had known her.

She would never have risked a fate like that unless
she had been entirely mad. If she had been caught,
she would have lied and lied and lied.
'I don't owe you anything,' he shouted.  Nothing! Leave me alone, why don't you leave me alone?'
I'm not asking you for anything. Henry. I never did.

'If you were to remove the glass case from that bloody
stuffed fish, Eddie,' Maggie was saying to him, 'I
could throw darts at it. I don't know how you live
with it.'
'Because I never look at it. Always have my back to
the wall. What's wrong with it, anyway?'
'It looks quite incredibly smug. And it isn't a suitable
adornment for the office of a fine legal brain. It
speaks of savagery, hunting and fishing, to say nothing
of poor taste and laziness.'
'Laziness?'
'Exactly. It looks as if you're too lazy even to get up
and knock it off the wall. As well as insensitive. You
obviously don't care if the clients loathe it.'

The cigarette smoke rose from the ashtray on his side of the frayed desk. Edward looked pained, a
expression which twisted his face into a strange contortion. Any minute now, she feared he might clean
the wax from his overlarge ears, but instead he busied
himself threading paperclips into a chain then
stopped, stubbed out the cigarette and lit another.

'Clients don't give a flying fuck about the décor,
They're here because they need to be here. I don't
care about it either, but I do like a sense of continuity.
Why on earth should a place change the way it looks
every decade? Or even every century, for that matterr. I think it does them good to be in a place which  makes their own miserable living rooms look positively palatial. Anyway, we can't afford change.' 

'No,' she sighed. 'Probably not. Where were we?
He knotted the motheaten scarf round his neck,
suddenly businesslike. His black, half-fingered mittens lay on the desk, tribute to the fact that although
the room was not yet warm, it was getting warmer.

'Jonathan Saunders has not paid the maintenance for his wife since six months ago. It was all agreed
when the boy was two, you remember? A separate sum for him, capable of variation, depending upon
need, but a fixed sum for her for ten years, beginning then. Not a generous sum, but an agreed sum, written in stone. I told her to go for a capital settlement, but she wouldn't. First, she said he wouldn't wear it; he had income but small capital, second she said
didn't need a lump sum just now; she'd rather accumulate
an extra, emergency fund for the boy and that
was the only way to persuade him to do it. She banked
half the maintenance and shared the rest. I thought
she could just go on banking it for the next seven
years, and then there'd be a teeny nest egg when she
comes out and needs a deposit for something. Only
our sweet Jonathan - what did she ever see in the slimy
shit? - now writes a sanctimonious letter from Bahrain
or somewhere saying he doesn't see why he should
pay money for the wife who murdered his son and
how do we think we're going to make him anyway?'

The long speech exhausted Edward. He was the
nearest he came to fury. 'And what that fucking
maintenance could also do is pay us for continuing to
look after her interests. Supposing she changes her
mind about anything.'

Maggie was silent for a minute.
'Have you always wished she would change her
mind, Edward, or are you newly converted?'
'It's grown on me,' Edward said simply. 'But you
can't appeal a conviction on a guilty plea unless the
client asks you to do it. Especially if she's pleaded
guilty and given a graphic description to the police.
You can't. We can't. Especially me. Place runs like a
fucking charity as it is. Fat cat lawyers, ha ha ha. Still,'
he added, visibly brightening as if the last drag of the
cigarette was markedly better than the rest, 'there's
always Uncle Joe.'

'My distant Uncle Joe, too,' Maggie said. 'Who  was supposed to be dangerous to little girls. Angela
visits, not me, I never knew him.'

Edward was back at the paperclip daisy chain, pausing only to wipe his spectacles with the tail of the
red scarf.

'Visiting where? Who?'

Henry Evans entered the room without knocking.
He sat in a crooked chair, smiled at them both.'The 
open door brought in a chill and the distant sound of
typewriters. There was a moment's silence.

'Hallo, Henry,' Maggie yelled with a manic cheerfulness which made Edward jump. 'What are you
doing here?'

Henry seemed to consider. 'I tore the lining of my
jacket,' he said. 'It was flapping down the back i
thought it was someone . ..'

His voice ceased on a sigh. His glasses were misted.
He took them off and squinted, then gazed fixedly at
one point in the room after another, as if he were 
checking the contents, his eyes resting on the fish 
longer than on any other feature, his expression
registering mild distaste. His hair was windblown, adding to the slightly ridiculous appearance of a man entirely
uncertain if he were actually present, but apparently
quite at home.

'Do sit down,' Edward said, sarcastically. 'We have absolutely nothing better to do.'

Henry addressed himself to Maggie. She was
blushing scarlet. His hands appeared to be locked
into some kind of debate with the coins in his pocket.
Maybe he was unhinged.

'I went out on the pier again,' he told her. 'I guess
I really like that place. Or I did. I suppose a pier is
something you build when you don't have any cliffs
or high places, so, if you can't look down, you can at
least look across.'

Maggie was nodding understandingly. They
waited. Henry seemed to be daydreaming, relying on
their polite indulgence.

It was hopeless trying to explain things; it always
was. Henry squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the
bridge of his nose. Edward was suddenly quite content
for the man to find the necessary words while
he himself contemplated his appearance thinking
that at last, in the realms of clownish eccentricity, he
had found someone with whom to compete. The
man had stopped looking so fucking well dressed.
The thought was comforting. In the lost, intervening
two minutes. Henry was back on the pier, looking at
the beach and the fishing men with their black
umbrellas as he realized that the ghost stroking the
back of his leg was the lining from his jacket and no
ghost was about to strike him down. Thinking of
how all his life he had been wisely running away
from events and objects as well as people. The headlong
dash from the confined spaces, the slipping
away from his love affairs and relationships by
mutual consent. Thinking of all the times he
avoided confrontations, how his nickname had once
been Tortoise, how someone had once said he actually resembled a terrapin when he swam, and  how1
his mildness was not really the same thing as tolerance, nor his calmness anything more than the fear
of chaos and a cousin to cowardice. He was always
the one who left, to preserve his dignity. Henry
Evans would be the wise man who walked away to slleep through another winter. Even if he did have
the sneaking feeling that whatever had become of
her, whatever she had done, Francesca Chisholm,
who had once led him out of the caves, would not
have done the same.

'I'm not going to do it.'
'Do what. Henry?' Maggie prompted, her voice coming at him from a long distance, like his father's
gentle voice calling him into eat from the door of the
house, across the long back yard.

Garden, she would have said; you mean garden.

'I mean I'm not going home,' Henry explained
patiently, as if his meaning had been perfectly obvious. 'I mean, no, I don't buy this shit about Francesca
being a murderer. I don't even buy this shit about
anyone alive being capable of doing it, either. I sure as 
hell couldn't, I'd walk away first.'

There was the click, click of Edward's lighter, a clunk as it landed where he threw it, then the scrape of 
a match.

'... So I just want to know how she was living. You
know, who she knew, who she didn't. And if she killed
the kid, I want to know why. I want to know what was
wrong. I want there to be a reason. Maggie here could
help me. I'll pay for your trouble. Looks like you
could use it.'

'She is absolutely none of your business,' Edward
said. Henry shrugged.
'Well I've walked away a few too many times,' he
said, 'when I should have been turning back.'


Turn back? If only one could: Run away: I would.
Ah, the anniversary gets closer, casting a shadow,
eclipsing everything, making me loquacious.
They tell me that the anniversary of the day you first come inside prison is the worst day of your life. 

We didn't notice anything wrong with Harry at first 
Perhaps because there was so much wrong with us.
Having a child was my idea, it was my imperative;  I was a late starter and full of hormonal madness. I wanted
everyone to have lots of children, so that I could kno 
them and make a sort of football team one day. The fact 
that my spouse was so dead against it was something  I
dismissed as a simple case of nerves. He would fall in love
with the result, especially a girl. I should have accepted
what he was instead of assuming he would change,   but this was what I was going to do and I did it. And of
course, when you are pregnant, the baby is more important than the husband. He didn't like that; he hated  the
terminal stages when everything went wrong. It wasn't a
joyful birth and Harry was not a pretty child. He'd been 
in such distress before he was born, I could hardly expect
him to come out smiling.

The unutterably cruel thing about this kind of cerebral
palsy is that wonderful halcyon period before anyone
notices anything wrong. Harry was nothing more or less 
than a lovely, placid baby. It was when he started to
move. He couldn't sit without falling, always towards
one side, and I would notice how he made himself fall in
one direction. In retrospect, there is something so pathetic
about that, trying to fall in the direction where he could
protect himself. Then there was this odd preference for
one hand over another; I thought he was going to be left
handed and wondered where that had come from. Then
when he began to crawl, he would haul himself forward
with his left arm, drag the other, which looked funny and
sweet until it didn't stop.

There was that moment when I looked at him and
knew something was terribly wrong. It isn't a moment I
can really describe. Even then I was terrified of what
might become of him. I wanted to put him back in the
womb and tell him to stay where it was safe.

I had several books on cerebral palsy and I knew all
about it. I did clear out all the books, didn't I? And the
diaries I kept of his progress? Yes, I did, I'm. sure I did.

We had lovely times, Angela and Tanya and I, playing
with Harry. He was tough and determined, features I
love in a boy. Oddly enough, with two damaged and
utterly demanding children, there were too many crises to
notice the departure of a husband. It was as if they had
never existed. Mine must have known I would not mourn
him. Poor man, he was right to go.

And he didn't abandon us, whatever it looked like. He
came back sometimes and he sent enough money to help
us. He did love me in his own way; it was I who rejected
him.

It took me a while to realize how much he hated
Harry. Angela, too, although hate's the wrong word for it,
indifference tinged with irritation is closer to the mark. It
was another of those heart-stopping revelations, more sad
than bitter. I adored her child and, kind though she was,
she simply could not love mine.

And nor did other people. I was no longer the universal
friend, the person with time for everything and
everybody. Harry and I, we were the ones in need.
Who killed Cock Robin?

I said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow
I killed Cock Robin...
Stoppit, stoppit. . . There is no one to blame but you.
FMC


chapter	seven.

the rhyme and the tune of it ran through Maggie's
head.

Some think to lose him,
By having him confined,
And some do suppose him
(Poor thing!) to be blind.
But if ne'er so close you wall him,
Do the best that you may;
Blind love (if so you call him)
Will find out his way.

'The answer,' Henry said, 'is always in the facts.'
'No, it isn't. Henry. It's in the emotions. Trust me,
I'm a lawyer.'
'Maggie, why do I think you're playing games with
me?'

'Because you're a North American, Henry. You
don't understand flippancy.' 
She remembered this conversation from her supine
position on Laura Bains' very old sunbed, which was
an integral part of the Bain beauty clinic (I'll be the
bane of your life, ha, ha) situated halfway up Thistle
Road, on the left. Can't miss it. She was remembering
Henry, sitting in his upstairs room surrounded by papers, as he had been for the last four days except when he was out of doors making a tit of himself by his awful habit of direct and literal speech and his
equally unfortunate inability to lie. When the lightts
went out on the sunbed and the rattle of the machine stopped with a judder, she pushed on the canopy. It
creaked like the door of a tomb.
'Are you done? Get yourself over here.'
A short distance, the route between the windo
bay of a small, dark living room and the back wall,
separated down the middle by a ceiling-height curtain
of flowered plastic. Pulling on clothes as she went,
Maggie slouched from the hard couch of the sunbed
to the slightly softer and higher one of the massage couch.

'You must have bought that sunbed before we left
school, Linda.'
'So you thought you'd got used to better, eh? Something in a fancy gym in London where the top
bit went up by itself? I don't know, why do we
bother?'

Cleansing lotion was applied to her face with deft
hands. Maggie looked up to a ceiling ofArtex swimming
in whorls. On the radio a crisis was discussed in
a phone-in. Cottonwool pads skimmed the surface
of her skin.
'Thought I'd bugger off, once,' Linda was saying.
'Like you lot. Got pregnant and here I am. Was him
buggered off. All comes out the same, dunnit? No
place like home. You can burn the girl's bra for her
and she'll ask for it back. And her corsets. No good
playing high and mighty here, petal.'
'I never did.' The hands paused for a moment.
There were the sounds of a vigorous washing movement
out of sight.
'No. You never. Nor your cousin, to be fair.' A cool
astringent was applied to Maggie's chin and swept
upwards towards her forehead. 'You were such a
romantic, weren't you? Always pretending to be the
princess and spouting poetry. I never knew who you
were going to be from one day to the next. You were
bloody good fun, Maggie Chisholm. You still are,
even if you did change your name and marry the
wrong one. Didn't we all?'
'He wasn't the wrong one at the time.'
'No, they never are at the time. Never thought it
would happen to you though, not after a dozen or
more years. And it isn't enough reason to skulk
around the way you do, as if you were the only one in
that boat. You want to come out with me and the
girls. Keep your eyes shut.' 
Linda used a new pad of cotton wool to ease off the last of the mascara from
Maggie's left eye. "Stead of which, you can't settler you. Can't buy a house with your money. Live with
the poofters and now you're walking out with this
American. At least I know you still look after your
face. What does he want, this fella? Is he rich?' A
further dollop of exfoliating lotion was applied, a little
roughly. Maggie could feel a small callus on Linda's  middle finger and wondered, inconsequentially, how  it had arrived. She had a memory of a massage, somewhere in the past, given with rough hands, concentrated on the callus and kept her voice calm. She did not like people discussing Henry unless they did
so with a bit of respect. 

'I told you,' she said. 'He wants to find out more
about Harry's death. He was in love with Francesca once and he can't believe she did it.' 
'Hmmpph. So where was he when he was needed  then? Bit late, isn't he? I know what he's doing, I
heard. I hear most things in here in the end, mor 
than you do in that office, I can tell you. And there's 
plenty would tell him to let sleeping dogs alone, the
silly oaf. Not that I didn't hear a lot of theories about it at the time. About how Franny's husband wanted 
her back, made a flying visit, thought to get the poor 
little boy out of the way, took the chance when he saw  him out by himself. And then someone said it was Neil. Or Angela Hulme . . .'

'Ah, c'mon, Linda ...'
'Well, Franny had much more time for her cute
little kiddie before Harry got round to running and
mumbling, didn't she? All right when he was little,
not when he grew. Someone else reckoned it was the
poofters, but he never stopped there overnight and it
was early on a Sunday morning, wasn't it? But I
thought it was some drugged-up weirdo - we've got a
few of them, haven't we? - until she said it was her.
And then it all made sense. So I should stop the daft
bastard asking questions before someone punches
him on the nose, or worse. Stop clenching your fists,
will you? You're supposed to relax.'

Small grains of a fine, sandy substance applied to
her cheeks eased the remnants of grime from her
pores.  The effect was soporific. The room was blissfully
warm and the world outside distinctly
uninviting. Maggie unclenched her fists obediently.

'I can't stop him asking questions,' Maggie said.
'He's a scientist.'
'That's no excuse. Bugger that doorbell. She's
early.'

Murmuring in the hall. Laughter. Linda returned.
Maggie rubbed her eyes. The sunbed whirred into
life and there was the sound of disrobing behind the
curtain. The facial continued in silence.

You were such fun, Maggie. Once upon a time. Soon,
no one will talk to you at all. She counted on her fingers
as Linda massaged her neck and shoulders and
she made small, appreciative noises. A van rumbled
up the narrow street.

Get Henry the keys to her flat. . . Done it.
Get Neil to cooperate and talk to him . . . Reluctant, but I'm working on it.
Get Angela to talk to Henry . . . Impossible. She  absolutely refuses. He'll have to try and waylay her himself.
Tell him he can use the internet in the library . . .
knows that already, sniffed it out like a dog.

'He's a bit like a dog,' she murmured to Linda as
the hydrating mask began to harden round her nose.
'Who? The American?'
'Yes, a lovely big dog with a thick coat and big,
soft eyes.'
'Well, I don't know, Maggie, I really don't. You never could pick them. You always picked the dope. What's he doing now, then, while you're not watching?'
'God only knows.'
She saw her coat hanging on the hook behind the
door, with one sleeve sticking out, as if making a salute. 


It never snows here, or not for long, Maggie had  told
him. He had opened the window of his room and
caught a collection of snowflakes on the sleeve of his black jacket, displayed them to her and said, what do you call this? It had snowed for two hours, which did 
not make Maggie a reliable informant. She was a
comfortable fixture in his room, admiring the tidiness
with which he had arranged it, bringing up his breakfast
and hers, examining the snowflakes as if they
were a rare kind of insect, perching herself on the
edge of his silk-clad bed from which all the case
papers in R v. Chisholm had been neatly removed.

The world beyond the house was a dismal contrast,
entered reluctantly after prevaricating on the
way downstairs and going back twice for gloves. The
snow lay, sludgy and unconvincing on the pavements,
a nuisance so near the shore, but enough, he heard, to
block the roads beyond. Long before his damp footsteps
had traversed the quarter-mile between the
house and the church. Henry wanted to return, but
the inside of the building was moderately warm, to his
enormous relief. It looked, from the outside, as if it
should be cold. Peter was already there.

'Francesca came here regularly,' he explained,
admiring Henry's leather boots, while wishing he had
the sense to accept the offer of a pair of Wellingtons.
'Not as a believer, you understand,' the vicar interrupted
in his fluting voice, which fitted better inside a
warm and empty church than it did round a dinner
table. The voice belonged in here; it invited an echo
and the enunciation of prayers. The exaggeration of
his precise syllables seemed to have a purpose in this
space. 'More as a person, quite candidly in search of
an insurance policy. Not for herself, although she did
like the ambience, she told me, but for the children.
She bought Tanya Hulme here when she was first 
adopted and not so long after. Harry as a babe in 
arms. She was perfectly honest about her motives, 
she always was.' 
'Motives?' Henry queried. He eyed the ornate 
carving of the pulpit and visualized the priest enjoying his robes. 
'Oh come now, Mr Evans, all who seek religious 
observance have a motive. Membership of a club,
perhaps, the opportunity to wear a hat, perhaps,
peace and quiet, perhaps; the chance to observe one
another and be observed. The chance to spend an
hour in a pretty place. And we do try with the flowers,
don't we, Peter?'

Peter was arranging stems of winter foliage in a
tall vase, standing back to gauge the effect, nodding.
The church was Victorian antiquity, heavy rather than refined, but the pews were polished and the
kneelers lovingly sewn. 'I'm quite sure if we didn't she
might have gone to the Methodists for the sake of
better hymns, but she wanted the children to get used
to the idea. To gain the blessing of God in case there was one, she told me. Let them reject it later if they
wanted, she said, but not on the basis of ignorance I
quite understood. If I insisted on believers, I'd never
have a congregation at all.' 

'So now I know what she did on Sunday morning...'

'What we did,' Peter interrupted.
'But it doesn't help me much with her problems,'
Henry continued, earnestly. 'I mean if you were her
priest, in whatever form, and Harry was a parishioner,
why didn't she come to you for help? You
didn't do much, did you?'

The priest and Peter exchanged a glance of resignation.
Two persons, noticing in unison how Henry
was not diplomatic in the posing of questions.
'I did help. I put her in touch with people who
cared deeply. She'd no family left, you see; when
you're conceived by relatively elderly parents as she
was, you tend to lose them. I found her these two ' he nodded in Peter's direction - 'to help with Harry,
but there was nothing I could do about the darker
reaches of the night. Nothing. I couldn't make her
invoke the aid of a God in whom she didn't believe.
In any event, help wasn't the problem.'

He sat heavily on one of the highly polished pews,
curled one hand round the carved pommel and
stroked it. His hand was dry and chapped, grazed
with rough work, which Henry found endearing.
Peter and Timothy had hands like that; so, he imagined,
did Christ's disciples. It gave the vicar
credibility, removed him further from the alternative
image of the dilettante, dinner party guest with a fistful
of wine. Henry waited. The priest continued to
stroke the wood, as if it were a magic lamp, able to
produce words.

'The problem was that she was such a good
person. Is, or was, I don't know, but good. By which I
mean blessed with a natural virtue which requires no
outside nourishment. She wasn't good out of fear of
the consequences; she was simply good. She had a
quick tongue, all right, but she was incapable of harbouring malice. She could complain, but she couldn't retain a mean thought or harbour resentment, not to
save her life. She had a unique capacity for nurturing
others. Loving them, you might say. And if it weren't heretical, I'd say she could teach a Christian God a
thing or two about forgiveness and generosity. She didn't need to pray for them.' 

Peter coughed, embarrassed by the oratory. Henry
winced. 'So what's the problem with that?' 

The vicar heaved himself upright and clasped his
hands in the lap of his cassock. It was not a dapper
garment, and slightly grubby. 
'A person blessed with a singular and natural goodness and great sensitivity, especially if matched with a handsome face and physical agility, is a draw
for the weak and the lame. For the wicked and the 
afflicted, as well as the needy. They become indispensable. But they also repel, Mr Evans. Virtue is
difficult to endure. People resent the bright spotlight  of pure goodness. It makes them feel deficient.
Which is why,' he added, 'I myself make a good
vicar.' He grinned and Henry warmed to him again.
'My flaws and my boredom level are all too apparent.
I lack the charisma of goodness, you see. The blessing
and the curse of it. Nobody gets angry with me
when I haven't got the time. They did with
Francesca.'

Peter stepped down off the small ladder he had
mounted to reach the vase behind the pulpit. His
movements were noisy, his sighs gusty.
'This arrangement doesn't work,' he said. 'Won't
last in this awful heat.' It was an overambitious
arrangement of holly and laurel, wobbling. Henry
adjusted his spectacles and nodded.
'Yeah, it's crap,' he said. He turned back to the
priest.
'So it was goodness that made her spend so much
time and energy on Tanya Hulme and her mother.
They were a pretty inseparable foursome, I gather.
Was that goodness? And who was it good for?'
'Ah, that. That, I think, was simply love. She fell in
love with the child. And it was good for a highly
strung, beautiful little girl who needed a bottomless
pit of unreserved love to make up for the damage
done to her. If you'd seen that terrified little savage,
your heart would have gone out to her, too.'
" 'Does she come to church now?'
'Oh dear me, no. I don't think her mother wants
any influence on the child other than her own. She
may be right: consistency's the thing.'

Peter's arrangement overbalanced with a crash.
Henry moved to help him pick up the pieces.
'I think these should have stayed on the tree,' Peter
said ruefully.
'Yeah, perhaps.' Henry patted him on the shoulder,
realizing as he did so that it was the first time he had
touched him. Peter grinned broadly.

'There you are,' he said. 'We don't bite. Are you
going to be in for supper? Only we're having a musical
evening.'
'Perhaps not,' Henry said, 'But thanks.'

No one had ever mastered the challenge of heating
the castle. It was entirely natural that no one should;
it was not designed to be heated, or even to be pristine
clean, Neil remembered as he retrieved a flying
polythene bag from the legs of a cannon and hurried
back inside. The billets of the common soldiers
would never have been clean; the kitchens might well
have stunk. Where the desire for comfort had
intruded into the quarters occupied by the officers of
the military, there would have been tapestries and  hangings to forestall the draughts. There remained a  couple of fine wood-panelled rooms, superior ranks 
for the use of. The painted panels bore portraits or
photographs of heavily bewhiskered wardens of the keep from 1800 until the last was made redundant. 
Chisholm's was not only the last face, but the only one without facial hair and with the temerity to smile. Bad idea to banish living accommodation from the 
central keep, Neil thought, although he could see it
was ridiculously expensive to maintain, but the lack
of a family living at the heart of a fortress garrison
encouraged the proliferation of ghosts, who could
wander round these sombre rooms and make
obscene gestures at portraits of the masters. Up
yours, wardens of the keep; we rule now.

The castle was officially closed for the day; he was
here, checking stock for the next, sorting the postcards
and guidebooks, making it neat in preparation
for his own day off and, although he was absorbed in
the tasks, he was anxious. There were better things to
do beyond these heavy walls. 'Get laid,' he said to
himself. For ever. The weekend had been brilliant;
she was gorgeous and the future worried him
extremely. Viagra. The doctor said he was only
allowed enough for three or four experiments; after
that, the cost was private and amounted to a small
fortune. Would his stupid, uncooperative prick decide
after a while that his body had cracked the code and
behave all by itself? Would he have to increase the
amount? Would he even have enough for a week?
Where would he find a supply now his life was
unimaginable without it? Would he lose his girl like he
lost his wife?

He collected three packets of peanuts, dismissing
the slight guilt at failing to check downstairs and risk
being late; why should he? Mustn't be late for Tanya.
Angela would kill him. He hurried over the drawbridge,
pulling the hood of his anorak over his head.

There was a posse of people, huddled by the notice at
the entrance.
'Excuse me, are you open?'
Neil put his face close and breathed salty breath.
'No, mate. Closed for exorcism 

He had enough Viagra pills for tomorrow, maybe a
couple more times and that was all.

Maggie faced her shiny clean face away from the sea
and walked towards the back of the town. Slush melting
on pavements and the sky leaden. She loved it.
She wished she had no purpose other than to walk.
She reached the humpbacked bridge which traversed
the railway line. The train rumbling from the distance
looked like the Toytown Express and she
paused on the high point to feel it pass beneath her
feet, the bridge trembling slightly as the engine
slowed. There was a view from the bridge of the park
and the town, peacefully calm and pacified by snow.
The restlessness in her died. She did not want to be
on the train out of here. There was really nowhere
else to go and no one would know her when she got
there. Life was remarkably consistent.

Snow had settled in the park next to the gym club.
Indoor activities had been abandoned In favour of
the novelty and kids were outside. Snow had settled
on the grass; it layered the bushes on the borders. A
snowman had grown in the middle of the space, 
rapidly built into a round trunk of a body and the
semblance of a head too small in proportion.
Someone had provided a carrot to make a nose on an
otherwise featureless face; there were gloves on the
hands folded over the fat torso, but no ears or eyes to
give the head expression. The omissions were under
loud debate, while Tanya Hulme, lissom and chestnut
haired, hung back from the surrounding crowd.
Skinny legs poked out of an overpuffed jacket and led
to enormous, black trainer-clad feet which kicked the
snow. The best-dressed kid in town and no one
wanted to know her.

Maggie waded across the snow in her direction,
soaking the cuffs of her trousers.
'What's up, Tanya?' Maggie remembered not to
use any diminutive of her name. If you did not know
about children, you did not know what they liked,
except their own dignity, perhaps. Tanya kicked the
snow until she found the grass beneath, went on kicking.
The laces of her trainers were undone. 'Someone
else found the carrot,' she whispered, pointing. 'And
I wish it was me. I tried to get it off her, so they told
me to sod off.'
'Hmm, I see black stones, perfect for eyes,' Maggie
said, stooping to the pathway. 'And then we can have
leaves for ears, plenty of leaves. You can have my hat
for his head.'
'Why?' There were furious tears in her eyes.
'Because when you give him a face, he'll smile at
you.'

The child stared suspiciously, grabbed the stones,
backed off, guarding them, turned swiftly and ran into the crowd, offering eyes for the face. Then she
was back alongside, like a puppy. What about them
fucking ears? Laurel bushes framed the pathway: 
Maggie shook them free of snow and plucked leaves
which frayed at the tip, brown at the ends, curling
inwards. They looked earlike; Tanya grabbed them as
if they were salvation and ran towards her tribe. The
ears appeared on the head. She cantered back to
Maggie, still full of urgency.
'Your hat! I need-your hat. Pleeeeease.' Maggie bent
her head.
'Tan, stoppit,'

Tanya paused for a second to look at Neil who had
slouched to a halt beside them;, sprang away with the hat in her hand, screaming back to the group, waving
it. The hat next appeared on the lopsided head of the
snowman and there was the sound of ragged
applause. 
'Sorry about that,' Neil said. 'I'll get it back for
you in a minute.'
'Doesn't matter,' Maggie said. 'I don't like hats.
Shawls are better.'

They watched the children. By common decision,
the class had decided that the clumsy creation of their
hands was now a suitable target for destruction. They
were forming snow into solid lumps and flinging
them. Maggie's hat was the target and Tanya Was the
only one to hit it. The hat was replaced at a rakish
angle and the onslaught recommenced to the high,
shrill sound of shrieking.
'It helps to be mad,' Neil said.
'I don't think I regret not having children,' Maggie
said.
'The American you phoned about,' Neil said diffidently.
'Going to work for Fergusons. If I talk to him,
do you think he'd get me some Viagra?'
'It works then, does it?'
'And how.'
'Be careful, won't you, Neil? You've got to be careful
with any drug.'
'Oh, God, you sound just like Francesca, endlessly
caring. But could he ...?'

She flushed pink with sheer annoyance. 'Oh, I'm
sure he could. He's got a suitcase full of pills in his
room. Guards it carefully.'
'Probably peddling them to poofters. In his room?
Like that, is it, Maggie? In his room often, are you?'
'No, Neil, it isn't like that. And I don't know how
Henry Evans might help. Tell you how to get it, perhaps.
All you've got to do is talk to him.'
'Me? I haven't got anything to say. I didn't know what was going on, did I? I was always excluded. Oh,
not by Francesca; she did try and get us back
together, but by Angela. She didn't want a man near
that child.' His feet scuffed the grass where Tanya's
had cleared the snow. 'I'd no idea about Fran's life.
Only knew that Angela resented her a bit. Harry took
up time she'd given to Tan, not that she always liked
that either. Difficult to please, Ange.'

'Well, let our Henry buy you a drink. Persuadeb Angela to have a chat with him.'
'You must be bloody joking. Tell you what, school's
closed tomorrow and she's doing my duty at the
castle with Tan. Send him there, I would.' Neil closed
his eyes and thought of the plans made for his day off.
A trip to France, a meal to be cooked in the evening and ... He waved towards Tanya. 'She gets better all
the time, though. She makes me laugh.' 

The children were losing momentum; slower shots,
chapped hands beginning to bite, mothers on the
sidelines beginning to fuss until the girl alone went on
with unabated enthusiasm. The snowman withstood
the onslaught with shapeless stoicism. Maggie's hat
had disappeared. 

'I have to admit that little Harry fair gave me the
creeps,' Neil went on, frankly. 'He was like this
sponge, absorbing energy without giving very much back, as far as I could see. But then, I wasn't his dad so I'm not qualified. Never could understand how he
got to the end of the pier on his own, though.' 

Tanya was tiring, stopping to blow on her fingers  and warm them. Neil turned to Maggie. 'Whatever Francesca did for us, she took it all back. She cancelled it all out. She made herself indispensable and
then, boom . . . and then she has the nerve . . .oh
look, she's finished ... Better get her home. I want to
go fishing.'

Tanya raced towards them, waving Maggie's hat
and to her pleasant embarrassment, she curtsied and
presented it. Then she hugged her. Maggie was taken
by surprise. 'Swing me,' she demanded of Neil. She
was just the right size and weight to swing in a circle,
legs flailing, screaming as if she was tickled. He put
her down, breathlessly. 'Again, again!' she shouted.
'Enough,' he said, and she moved ahead, obediently.
'She wouldn't have done that a year ago,' Neil muttered.
'What? Hug someone?'
'No, bring back the hat.'

She left them, then, unable to bear it. She could see it
all, now. Neil, careful and responsible with a child he
could never have fathered. And herself, going
between them all, occasionally witnessed, like a ghost.
Francesca's engineer, the bit part player who never
engaged, the sort of understudy who learned the lines
someone else would always say and stayed around at
the end to pick up the pieces. Helping Henry rake
over ashes, looking for some unidentifiable bone and
knowing she had no choice.

They needed him. They needed a stranger.

Number 40 in the block, where Francesca had lived,
was reached by anonymous stairs.' Took lease here after
husband left. Friend and daughter live other side of same
building.' A prudent and convenient arrangement to
live close to friend, etc., but no one wanted to live in
it now. Can't flog it, rent it or any damn thing,
Edward Burns said. Desirable residence, ha, ha, ha.
Bloody white elephant, even with sea views. The lock
was awkward; there was the noise of a television, muffled
by walls as Henry fiddled with the key and felt
like a burglar. The interior was an enormous disappointment,
but then the House of Enchantment had
spoiled him. Warm in temperature, anonymous in
style; a big, sea-facing living room with the remnants 
of indifferent, fitted furniture of the kind she might have bought from the previous occupant, nothing
new or distinctive and all of it worn. Shelves full of
books, cupboards beneath with chipped doors and a
carpet which looked as if it had been used as a playing
field with the central area stained and worn to
the thread. A swivel chair by the window with a coffee
table alongside and a shawl folded over the arm.
Henry picked up the shawl and held it to his face.
Inferior quality, faintly musty, and he tried to remember
if Francesca had ever had a scent peculiar to
herself. Perhaps, but he had not known it; he had no
olfactory memories. She had a style, though; a definite
style; a knack even with travelling clothes and a
way of pinning her hair in a dozen different ways.

He looked at the bookshelves, found a few novels,
a shelf full of nursery rhyme books, nothing more to
indicate who had lived here, except the marks and the
scuffs and the tracks made by feet. Where were the
volumes of verse he had expected? Where were the
poets? Henry sat in the chair and looked at the grey
sky. The splendour of the sea was invisible; the level
of the window was all wrong, set too high from the
floor for anyone seated in a chair to get the best view.
The sound of the television continued, an irritating
buzz, like a fly in the room. To be deprived of a view
of the sea seemed to be the ultimate insult for anyone
who deliberately lived on the edge of it, a feature
which would drive him mad.

He stood, therefore, and paced. A sizeable kitchen
with table for eating, efficiently equipped by transatlantic
standards with cooking and chilling facilities all
of which looked beaten if not into submission at least
into overfamiliarity. A bathroom which was simply
rudimentary, and Henry was beginning to learn that
the Brits did not seem to set much store on power
showers and such. There were no ornaments anywhere. Useful objects - TV, phones, microwaves had been removed, leaving signs of their presence
such as a mark on the wall, an empty stand and small
table with directories beneath. The apartment had
been subject to controlled and authorized scavenging.

Think, Henry. Just damn well THINK. His father's
voice, the reminder of intellectual rigour, resisted.
Hey Dad, I'm thinking I don't like her much. The
woman I knew would never have lived in a place like
this. If she lived in it, you'd know she'd been there and
there's not a single sign; I think I'll go now. It's all too
ORDINARY. No, you damn well don't. THINK. Measure it out; do not do anything by halves. Look at
the shelves. Yeah, and a letter will fall out of a book.
Happens all the time. THINK. The shawl was the only
personal object left and he wondered why. It looked
deliberately placed; at odds with the lack of personality.
Henry had moved house more often than he
could count, always looking for the one with a greater
sense of space. He had seen rooms left equipped with enough furnishings to make them appear habitable
and give them some sense of scale, but never one so
completely neutralized. Only an owner could take
everything away; no one else could be as ruthless.

He sat in the window chair, but the line of the sill
across his eyes and the view of nothing but ominous
clouds irritated him, so he stood up, hands on hips,
prowling like a prospective tenant. Maggie said
Francesca had done it in the intervening days
between Harry's death and her own arrest; her apartment
had reached this state by the time she was taken
in the third time for questioning. She had not 
expected to come back. The car and the etceteras
went later, on her instructions, to specific destinations,
but the correspondence, the mementoes, the
family snaps, the Christmas cards, even the birth certificates and household bills were long gone, as well as 
most of her clothes and all of Harry's.

Not the systematic actions commonly associated
with someone rendered unsystematic by guilt... or
grief. Henry could feel dislike of her creeping all over
his skin like a mild sweat.

Maggie said all she wanted in prison were books
and reams of paper. Perhaps that's what she did in
there: rewrote her own life. If you had felt the arms of
a child wrapped round your neck in hopeless trust,
how could you harm it? He did not know; he simply
did not know. He felt unqualified to know: it was not
a desperation or a temptation he wished to share.

The sound of the television had ceased, leaving a
vacuum of silence. Outside sounds were muffled by
the double-glazed windows. In the House of
Enchantment, there were none of these; Henry had
come to enjoy the intrusion of sound. He looked
down from the living room window, preferring his
own view. Second floor, less than ideal for a child;
stairs to traverse on the way out. He could see the
castle squatting to the left and the dark sea ahead of
him.

Remembered his laptop. The scruffy library with
internet access. Cerebralpalsy .. . no typical profile for
a child of five... depends upon severity ... epileptic fits?
He could see a child crawling across the floor, with
one arm tucked beneath, hauling himself along with
the other. He had retreated to the front door with his
back to it, feeling in his pocket for the key, his shoulder
touching the painted wood. The timid knock on
the other side seemed to touch his spine. Henry stood
upright, shook himself. He had every right to be here.
He was a prospective tenant. Must have been a dozen
or three over the year. One of them left a cigarette end
in the trash can; he'd seen it.

Francesca had smoked. Mild Indian cigarettes
which were a password to conversation. That had
been her smell. Henry opened the door.

'Oh. You.'
Standing on the threshold was the granny from the
High Street who picked him out of the gutter and
told him she lived round the corner from the house.
Three-quarters of a mile from here, level walking, but still a distance. She had a lit cigarette she hid
behind her back.

'Thought it might be you,' she said, matter of factly. She walked straight through to the kitchen and 
stubbed out her cigarette in the sink. 'I live downstairs,' she said, as if that explained everything. 
'Heard you. You've never been falling over again, 
have you?'
'No. It isn't a habit.'
'One of these days, maybe. Lovely flats, these. Do
you want to buy it?'
'No.'

She moved to the window and tapped the sill. The
clouds outside and the fading light seemed to meet  with her approval. 'It wasn't like this, you know. You 
can't keep a place nice with a kid in it and she knew
not to try. But she had a ladder with cushions on it by
this window. That's where she'd sit. Reading, when
she got the chance.'
'What did she read?'
'Books, of course. She gave most of them to me.
She was forever giving things away.'

He felt a faint fluttering of the heart.
'She said they'd look nice in my living room and
she was right about that. I never thought she wouldn't
come back. Nor him, neither, poor little chap. Not
that I've got much use for books. My eyes are bad
now.' She stared at him and looked away. 'I got the
books and the poofs got the video. I could have done
with the video. I could have done without those two
kids over my head, yelling fit to bust, and all I get's a
few useless books. I miss her to death. She did everything
the wrong way round and she was smashing.
Do you want these books, or not, since you're a friend
of hers?'

He was nonplussed and nodding. She was on her
feet, leading him out, telling him to lock up. She was
a single-handed explanation of why the place could
not be sold. He followed her downstairs.
'She should have let me look after him instead of
them poofters,' she said over her shoulder. 'But I
didn't really have the strength. I can't manage that
dog, either. It keeps getting out. Harry was strong,
you see, and wilful. But I tell you one thing. He
wouldn't have gone all the way downstairs and out on
the pier by himself on a morning like that. If there was 
anything Harry hated, he hated the cold. Are you
going to come in?'

An hour later, walking home with the sea on his right, 
Henry swung his arms and let his fingers grow nicely 
numb with the cold. The chill was almost pleasant,  Granny's double-glazed flat was hotter than Florida, with a breathless, hermetically sealed, humid heat.
She was mortally afraid of the cold. The jungle temperature
of her premises made him relish it now. Her phrase echoed, 
He hated the cold, that boy. Henry knew why Harry
hated the cold. Henry was walking home with the
lining of his good jacket still torn, but his shoes clean.
Thinking of facts and why a person would abandon their books. Thinking of all the thumbnail sketches Maggie had given him and what little he had learned.

There it was again, that damn black dog, coming
out of a turning, wagging a tail at him and running
off. It fitted his mood, as elusive as fact.



Saw the chaplain today. Distracted me from the facts I
was on the brink of writing.
I always had a belief that Creation could not be random
and merely the forces of nature, although if you looked long
enough at the sea, you would doubt there was a human
logic to it. The sea might feed us, but is alien, because its
primary purpose is to feed itself and all the creatures who
live in it. A brutal regime is imposed from time to time;
there are mandatory culls of the predators and passengers.
Man is endured, allowed to harvest as well as to cross, but
if it all gets too much, the ocean shrugs him off and eats
him. As dictated by a committee ofNeptunes.

I tend to believe there are several gods; it is quite
impossible to believe in one. There's a sort of parliament
of Gods with ministries, definitely not democratically
elected and all undermining one another. There's too
much for one God to do; he had to delegate after the first
failures, break the whole thing down into dukedoms and
fiefdoms and they all formed rivalries. I can see it.
Somebody shouts I WANT TO BE MINISTER FOR
THE SEA, but he can't. His job this session is to be
Minister for Weather.

The thunder God went for a ride (I told
the chaplain),
Upon his favourite filly,
I'm THOR! he cried.
The horse replied,
You forgot your thaddle, thilly.

That was one of Maggie's. Yes, a cabinet ministry of gooses
and their delegates with thor thaddles.  
I digress. I MUST digress.
I had to say that the door was open and he took him  self off. It was what I said first and I had to stick with it  No one else in the world knew the extent of his condition  as well as I did, or his temperament. They might have done if they had read all the books and the papers I read  searching for a prognosis. That was why I got rid of the  books. I told them I went to find him, already cross with
him, and when I saw him, naughty as ever, I decided, enough was enough. I told them I had thought of it  often. When I saw his limbs swell, when I read what he
might become and knew he was not one of the mild cases.
When I saw that even at his most engaging, he was friendless.

But he did have friends, they said, and so did you. Ah yes, but not the ones I needed and he craved. He adored Uncle Joe, who were at best indifferent. He adored Uncle  Joe, who, harmless as he was by then, only had eyes for little girls. So much for family. So much for knowing
anyone. It takes such a long time and the choice is such a  gamble. I befriended Uncle Joe when he was old because  it seemed to me that to be isolated from your tribe, and in particular from children, is a fate worse than any death. 

To be old, without visitors; to have lost your reputation,
what kind of suffering is that? How prophetic. I wanted
him to avoid the fate I have made myself.

The chaplain finds me frivolous. He says I must face
facts.
FMC.


Chapter eight.

crunch, crunch, crunch. Their footsteps along the
gravel of the beach echoed loud enough to waken the 
dead. She seemed sure-footed; he slithered and she
took his arm.
'Steps up that way. Henry.'
'Thankyou.'
Maggie liked the way he consented to be led. No 
macho nonsense. The sea was unnaturally calm and
kind, kissing the stones like a flirt at a party, he said.
It was a strange description for him to use.
'This won't be haute cuisine,' she warned.
'I'm into depravity. Carbohydrates and cigarettes 
are fine.'  

Seven in the evening, blacker than a road. He did
not care what he ate. They stumbled up steps from 
the darkness of the beach in a state of merciful quiet, 
walked down an alley he had never noticed, round  
several corners he had never noticed either and into
the bowels of a building. He was not in an observant
state this evening, and she was duly grateful. She could criticize Warbling's restaurant fare because she
lived here; if he did it, she would be defensive.
'All there was was medical books,' he said flatly as
they sat. 'And the old lady confuses books with magazines,
same thing to her. Books on paediatric illness,
psychology, abuse, and two dozen pamphlets on cerebral
palsy. No poetry. No letters. What happened to
her soul?'

House wine arrived on a checked cloth. He raised
his glass to her. She waited for him to wince at the
taste, but he was entirely indifferent to the quality
and she sighed with relief, annoyed at the same time
that she should actually mind if he liked it or not.
'Children were her job. Henry, as well as her passion.
There's nothing odd about a collection of books
like that, even without Harry. She was thorough. She
would have known more about Harry's hemiplegia
than anyone else.'
'More than the prosecutor. And the so-called defensse, it seems,' he said quietly.
'We spell it with a "c". Henry. As in fence. And an
English lawyer. Henry, is not a writer of fiction. We
do not create a defensse, any more than we can write a
story. If we have a client who is responsible, intelligent
and articulate, and that's a big if, our humble role is
only that of translator.' She rearranged her knife and
fork, aligning them with the edge of the table. 'The
point of the role is to clarify the facts and the mitigating
circumstances, make all of them understandable and
sympathetic to the most unresponsive of tribunals.
There is only one sentence for premeditated murder, Henry. Life imprisonment. As a translator of facts, one does not have a great deal of scope to influence
the outcome. Especially with a client as stubborn as
that. Someone who had decided that the sentence
was necessary for her own redemption. The choice
here, by the way, is pizza or pizza.'

'A truly universal dish.' His face creased with a
smile and seen like that, it was an extremely pleasant
face, made memorable by dimples and almost mischievous.
In repose, the same face was perfectly
inscrutable. One did not know, Timothy had observed
to her, whether it was content, curious, angry or on
the verge of tears. One simply hoped for the best.
The smile was infectious and she smiled back. For
people who had spent hours in conversation, the
formality of dinner alone at his suggestion was
making them oddly stilted with one another.

'What's so funny. Henry?'
'You,' he said. 'You get so didactic. You give me
lectures. I can see you laying down the law. Only it
doesn't go with anything else.'
'Such as?'
'The dress. The hair. The eyes.'

She crossed her eyes and pulled a face.

'You can leave the eyes out of it. They're simply
genetic inheritance. The hair is tinted every six weeks.
And colourful clothes are allowed, even for part-time
lawyers. It's a nice red, isn't it? Like old bricks. I call
this ensemble my battered English rose look.'

He eyed the dress. Modestly scooped neck, simple
knitted thing with long sleeves. A row of pearls at the
neck, cheeks pink from the walk and hair blown
wilder. He looked beyond her to the door, always
checking the exit, especially in basements, like a spy,
and after that he felt relaxed, even though the day
had been depressing. There was always tomorrow
and he could not remember when he had last sat
opposite a woman as oddly glamorous as this and it
was fun, even if his attitude towards her was tempered
with profound suspicion. He really should
know her better, well enough to tease her at any rate.
'Listen, Maggie. If we'd met through, oh, say a
dating agency or a mutual friend . . .'
'We did.'
'Just say we were having our first evening alone ...'
'We are.'
'You just aren't cooperating, Maggie. I'm asking
you to use your imagination. If we were on a prearranged,
let's-get-to-know-each-other date, without
the agenda we already have and all the encrypted
information you dole out, what would you want me to
know about you? I mean, what would you be telling
me?'

'OK, I'll play if you'll play.'
He nodded. 'You go first.'
She clasped her hands beneath her chin, hiding
long fingers, fluttered her eyelashes theatrically.
'I'd give you a slightly self deprecating account of my life to date, the description carefully tailored to suit 
the occasion and leaving out the worst bits. I'd probably omit the childhood, because you wouldn't want 
to know. I'd tell you I left the small town for the sake of
a career, but I probably wouldn't tell you that I went to
find a better class of husband, who abandoned me
for a ... no.' She paused. 'No, I wouldn't say that. I'd
say I was amicably divorced, in case you should think
I was a contentious bitch who liked fighting. I'd mention
somewhere along the line that I used to like
designing rooms and cooking. Emphasis on home
comforts. By the end of my little recitation you'd know 
that I was brave, modest, capable, bittersweet and
available. Definitely available. I'd stress that as much
as cooking. And I wouldn't be wearing this dress.'

He was laughing. She teased her hair with her fingers
and looked at him soulfully, fluttering her 
eyelashes again in a parody of shy hesitation.

'I wouldn't, on considering, tell you that on my
second date with my husband, I tried to impress him
with steak for dinner in my weeny garden flat, only
the dog got it and was trying to bury it in a flowerbed.
I rescued it, quietly, dusted it down and served it up.
He ate it like a lamb and persuaded me to give away 
the dog. That should have told me everything I
needed to know.'

The order for food was written down laboriously.
Henry had an idea it might take some time to arrive.
Three other diners between himself and the exit had
the look of starved resignation. Maggie nibbled a
breadstick.

'I'd lie quite a lot. Henry. The quotient of lies to
truth would depend on how much I liked you. Your
turn.' Her face had reverted to normal: that of an
intelligent listener without an ounce of the coquette.

'Well. . .' He coughed and cleared his throat.
'No hesitations.'
'I guess I'd start with my full name and qualifications.
Tell you my status. Let you know I earned
money, had no debts, travelled a lot. Was smart.
Didn't go round with my flies undone. No sexual
problems, but not a womanizer, like them too much.
Failed relationships not the result of infidelity or
malice. And it would all be true. In a way.'

He played with the paper napkin, forming it deftly
into the shape of a hat while she watched intently.
'I'd say I wasn't so good at talking about myself and
I was kind of shy on account of always opening my
mouth to say the wrong thing. Also true. I don't like
to lie. Low onsocial skills. But I guess I might leave
out the stuff about being afraid of the dark, scared to
death of being locked in, running away from confrontations
and commitments so fast I'm out of sight.
I'd probably pretend that I wasn't quite available, some little piece of unfinished business somewhere.
I'd confess to being complex.'

'And are you?'  
'Nope. Not as far as I know. I'm just a fully paid up
coward.'

There was an uncomplicated silence, punctuated
by the sound of her teeth with the breadstick and the  murmur of conversation from behind.

'I wonder if we'd want to see one another again.'
Henry shrugged and grinned as the pizza arrived, thumped on the table in a loud challenge to digestion. 
'Probably not. Such a paragon of a woman would
destroy my confidence. If she said she liked gardening, it might be a different matter.' 

'And I,' she said, 'would be worried by your haircut and all that bloody mystique.' 

They began to eat, slowly. Henry struggled with a
blunt knife, looked at the problem logically and opted
to cut the pizza into four slices, which was easier decided than done. A portion of neoNeapolitan
cheese'n'.tomato scooted from his plate across the
narrow table and on to her lap. She flicked it to the
floor, delicately.
'Shit, I'm so sorry. Didn't I mention the clumsiness?' 
'If this was a date. Henry, you'd have blown it.'
He struggled silently, elbows flexed, then picked up
a slice and chewed it carefully. It was only another
pizza, which would go on and on being a pizza, the
way they did. He was deciding that if he was ever
going to have any preference for food, it was going to
be for a lot of different little things on a big plate,
eaten to the tune of impersonal conversation.

'I think Francesca gave away her medical books
for a reason,' he said. 'Such as not wanting anyone to
know how bad Harry was. Or how relevant his condition
was to the manner of his death.'
'There's a medical report on the file. Henry,' she
said patiently, resigned to his resumption of the topic.
'There was nothing to hide. The prognosis wasn't
good. She was desperate for him to be able to go to a
normal school and it didn't look as if he could.'
'There's nothing there about the daily details.
Exactly what he could and couldn't do. What he would, or wouldn't do. Didn't you know?'

She shook her head again. The hair danced. 'I
came back about a month before it happened, got a
job with Edward. Saw them a couple of times, but I
was so full of self-pity I didn't notice anything much.
Except how cold it was. I was waiting for spring.'
'Did you love her?' he asked, hesitantly, then
waited for her to finish a mouthful. The blunt knives
did not seem to affect her efficient dissection of the
food; there must be a knack to it. The silence went on
for so long, he was afraid he had been impertinent, or
worse, sentimental, but it was only her manners and
the length of time she needed to demolish a mouthful.

'Oh yes. Better than anyone alive. But I was jealous
of her, too.'
'Why?'
'Because she seemed to have an unerring sense of
right and wrong. Because she was loyal and good and
because everyone loved her.'

When he looked down, his own plate was bare,
hers half empty. It was another thing he noticed about
the Brits, that they ate so slowly and everything took
so long. As well as what they said not making sense.

In the House of Enchantment, the boys had left the door on the latch, expecting a late arriving guest. A
figure crept up the stairs. The dining room and the
hall reverberated with Timothy's furious playing of
the piano and Peter's voice, rising in wavering unison.

Say, gentle ladies, if love you know.
Is love this fever troubling me so?
Ees love this fe-evah troubling me so?

The figure paused on the landing, pushed open
doors, softly, a single, swift look inside enough to 
establish the negative. The room on the second floor
was too feminine, the rooms below so obviously the
domain of the resident. Another flight, panting as he
reached the top. Hardly any need for a light, with the
sky outside and the moon and the fire. The floorboards creaked; he tiptoed. Checked the clothes  
neatly hung in the wardrobe above an empty suitcase,
looked around for inspiration, tiptoed back to
the case by the desk. Emptied the contents on the
bed, switched on the light and hurriedly rifled
through them. Ginseng; acidopholus, milk, thistle, vitamin
E, iron supplement. . . Dun-coloured wrappings
and jars for worthy, indescribable goods. No familiar
blue Viagra colour; nothing to cause a flutter of
excitement. There was a rattle as everything was
scooped back and the case dumped where it was
found with a mutter of frustration.

The figure prowled round the room, looked
beneath the pillow, swearing, felt beneath the blankets
for some hiding place. His fingers encountered warm
fur, withdrew quickly, stifling a scream. Stepped
away, breathing hard, fingers in mouth. Nothing.

Then he noticed the shawl draped over the bottom
of the bed, stroked it with the other hand, thought it
felt pretty. He snatched it and went down the stairs
slowly, stuffing it inside his jacket, froze on the first
landing as the dining room door opened to a gaggle
of greetings. Then it closed again and the music
resumed.

Cold first attacks me. .. Then ardour burns..: Then
in a trice, my misery returns.

As he ran for the door, the dog inside the dining
room began to bark; the barking turned into a wail of
protest as the singing grew louder and turned into
laughter. He was through the door and out in the
cold, sweat cooling on his face, relief making him
giddy. The last bit was the worst. He might have been
forced to kick the dog. Instead, such was his fury as
he walked away, Neil Hulme kicked his own pet, then
went back to the beach to kick the shingle. He still had
enough for the week, but enough was never enough.

They walked back along the shore avoiding the shingle. The quiet was impressive and the sky was vast with stars. Henry did not know whether he wanted to peer into windows or watch the steady calm movement of the sea and she decided for him. Inside one
small house, dwarfed by a grander neighbour, a
woman sat wearing a hat and painting at an easel with
the television creating a bluish light in the opposite corner . In another room, only slightly obscured by net curtains, a man was sewing and talking, in a third, the
final stages of a crowded supper were being served. By
common accord, with arms linked, Maggie and Henry
crossed the road to the seaward side. He craved an
invitation into those rooms, to sit and belong without being asked to do anything. She noticed the details. 

'They've changed the curtains,' she said. 'And
they've got a new chair . . .' 

On the seaward side he could see the glow of thre  small pools of firelight, punctuating the slope of the
beach.
'What's that?'
'Night fishing.'

'They must be crazy.'
'Why? It isn't so cold.'

Mild, even. She was right: the temperature had
changed again into a comfortable cold. They crossed
back. From outside the front door of the House of
Enchantment, they could hear the sound of the piano
and a ragged chorus of voices, to the additional
accompaniment of Senta's barking. Where they had
linked arms, he was not sure, only aware now, as she
shed her coat in the hallway, that there was a prominent
greasy mark at the thigh level of her dress. Inside
the hall the musical row was louder, voices in competition
with instrument. He shied from it, but
Maggie was already humming.
'G'night, Henry. Unless you want to sing?' she
asked, but it was not an invitation, more of a dismissal,
as if she had had enough of him.
'G'night.'

He tramped up the stairs into his room where the
fire was lit, and he wondered again at their endless
solicitude. The perfect room for a man of his disposition;
a controllable space which seemed to be built
out of the sky. All it required was a cocktail cabinet;
he would buy sherry. From the window he looked for
the small, firefly glowings he had seen on the beach.
They were more romantic from here in the safety of
his own warmth. Dad would have been out with
them, rain or shine.

A sole man sat on the shingle with a lamp and a
campfire directly opposite the house. As Henry
watched, he stood and cast a luminescent line into the
water, the thread of it extending against the fire and 
moonlight, entering the water beyond the gentle 
waves. Henry was sleepy, but he still felt a curious 
desire to go back out, hunker down by the fisherman 
and ask him how he did it, and why, keep him company through the small hours. But the man was
totally absorbed: he would resent a stranger. Perhaps
I'll learn to fish. Henry thought. The perfect activity
for an introverted man, and on the cusp of that,
another thought. The boy didn't like to go out in the
cold. Granny said. Could not grasp with the right hand, but he was desperate to learn to fish. He was suddenly so 
shaken with pity, he could not move.

The answers lay in the facts. Henry turned on the
laptop and looked at the notes he had made before
dinner. The hemiplegic limbs are commonly smaller than
the normal ones, the dwarfing more marked in the hand.
Vasomotor changes are also common in the affected limbs,
which are colder than normal... The motor disability of
the hand in some patients may be much increased in cold
weather . . . Cold weather, then, was not good for
learning to fish. Poor little boy. Henry's concentration
was gone. The answers probably lay on the internet.

Yawning, sad, not wanting any emotional reflection to intrude upon his chronic desire for sleep, looking
for the damned sweatshirt he wore at night. Henry
noticed that the shawl was missing from the end of
the bed. Noticed without resentment or any particular
curiosity. It was missing, that was all, and he was
more concerned with the question of his own reluctance
to go back outside, speak to one of the
fishermen and ask what it took to learn to fish. They
would know about tides, things he could never discover
otherwise, and here he was, afraid of rejection
and the sound of his own feet on the shingle. Perhaps
Maggie had borrowed the shawl and he needed to
tell her she was welcome.

He moved down a landing. Silence in this impervious
house. One more floor down to the door of her
room, identified, never explored, although she had
become a familiar presence in his. A messy room, a
third the size of his own, strewn with clothes and
shoes and a dying plant. Papers and magazines and
realtors' sheets in shabby heaps; a small bookshelf
with a bunch of dying snowdrops in a vase and a
score of slim volumes of verse. A shawl, not his own,
over a bedside chair.

He drew the door closed behind him. Looked
down the stairwell for the sight of her. The sound of
the piano pulsed from the ground floor; he could
hear her singing. Such a woman, determined not to
feel. Decidedly frivolous.

In the morning, Edward Burns gazed at the fish on the
office wall and waited impatiently for Maggie. The
daily correspondence for the practice, remarkably thin
at this time of year, lay on his desk and he had begun opening it as best he could while still wearing gloves and waiting for the electric fire to bring some warmth 
into the room. He opened the post at random,
whether addressed to himself, his self-effaced, non-   descript partner on the top floor, or his part-time
assistant, Maggie. Edward took this to be a supervisory
duty as well as an aide-memoire, because if he did not read the correspondence, he would never remember
what was going on. Once read, it was placed in neat heaps for personal delivery to the relevant quarters,
apart from letters of complaint about delay, which he kept back for discussion. Delay was the
commonest complaint, treated with courtesy and ultimately, complete indifference. Things took time and
for those who complained, longer. 

Edward had perfected the art of handling a cigarette between gloved fingers, but considered it did nothing for the flavour. There were two letters which
gave him cause, if not for alarm, a sensation he discouraged, then at least consternation. Alarm was
something he saved for his son's school reports. One
letter was for Maggie, marked private and confidential, an instruction he invariably ignored. It was  a letter from her husband, stating in abject terms that
although they were now divorced, he found himself  deeply unhappy and it occurred to him that he might
have made a terrible mistake. He did not like the musical tastes and sartorial habits of his youthful
partner. She made a noise; she was insatiable, she
jeered at the onset of his baldness, probably. Edward
read most of this between the lines since the ex
husband was a great deal more circumspect and
articulate than that, but Edward had seen the aftermath
of many a separation and felt he could decode
the specifics of the regret, however subtly it was
phrased. What he could not do was predict Maggie's
response; he hoped it would be fury, but he was
unsure enough to feel a huge reluctance to pass on
the missive at all. Maggie might deem herself irresponsible,
was a lousy timekeeper, had none of the
gravitas of dedication, but if left to her own devices,
she was undeniably efficient, and he liked her. A lot.
And besides, there was this unfinished business with
Francesca Chisholm, which disturbed him and for
which the American was paying at a modest, but
useful, rate. Which led him on to the second letter.

Under the watchful, single eye of the fish Edward
read it again, this time without gloves. A letter from
that senior persons' residential home on the cliffs at
Ramsgate, stating that Joseph Chisholm's condition
had deteriorated to such an extent that his removal
from there to a nursing home was imminent. The
Director of the home wrote a neat letter entirely without
recrimination. Uncle Joe was one of several in
her establishment whose only link with the outside
world was via a solicitor, to whom application was
made for extra expenses not covered by his pension.

He was effectively her responsibility; there was no
one else to make the decision, so he would be moved
to a sister home in the same group where nursing
care was available, twenty-four hours. 'After several
months of almost speechless incapacity improvement is
not expected and distress, we hope, unlikely'

Edward Burns acted as trustee to several old buffers- without relatives, or relatives so distant and geographically removed they were meaningless. He was as
sceptical about the loyalties of blood as he was about  those of marriage and did not see why, for instance, 
Maggie should pay any attention to an uncle she had 
been preserved from in childhood and never saw since.
Blood was not thicker than water; you either liked your relatives or you bloody well didn't and it was only
affection which created a bond, after all. And there
was the other fact that Angela Hulme was deputed to visit dear old Uncle Joe, just as Francesca had done.
What the hell did she say to a bedridden old man? 
He left the Director's letter prominently displayed on the front of the strewn desk, and put the letter from Maggie's ex in his pocket. They were not luckyi
with husbands, these Chisholms. Edward himself
valued and adored his own placid wife, who kept his house as tidy as his office was not, and never bothered about odd socks.

The downstairs door crashed and the building
shook. Maggie came up the stairs, singing, horribly
ebullient early in the morning. Just as she slammed 
into his office with two cups of coffee, he made the
resolution that he would give her the letter in his
pocket at the end of the day, after she had done some
work, not before. There were two new clients for her
to see in the course of the morning: petty criminals
with drink problems, requiring to rehearse their mitigation
for the Dover magistrates next week. Edward
regarded the poverty of his office surroundings and
his practice in general, wondered if he should have
been a bank robber instead, but there was a slight
problem with temperament. He found the pursuit of
riches perfectly pointless. Catching a real fish on the
end of a line was far more of a priority and he
resented the fact that it was such a good morning for
fishing with a lousy forecast for the weekend.

'Lovely day,' she said, making it worse. He pointed
to the Uncle Joe letter. She read it swiftly.
'Did Angela mention to you that he was bedridden?'
'No. She said he ate a lot of biscuits, read the newspapers
and was rather jolly.'
'I wonder,' Edward said, with the other letter burning
a hole in his jacket, 'who the hell it is she's been
going to see?'
'I don't know. Does it matter?'
'It might.'

'C'mon, Tanya. C'mon. Isn't it nice you aren't going
to school today? C'mon. Eat up.'

Getting her to eat what she didn't want to eat, every
mother's problem. Angela shared it with the married mums and the ones who never had to go to parenting
sessions to prove they were fit for it. Do not use bribery  or blackmail. Crap. A long walk on the beach this
milder morning, Tanya chatting to the fishing people and then gauging the distance between the break" waters to run out and back, again and again. They never went on the pier any more. Tan preferred the
challenge of the steep slope of the beach. Pink skinned,
she allowed her hair to be forced into plaits. Wisps
 of stiff hair curled from the braid. She would never have
smooth hair, but it would always be magnificent.

'Finish the porridge. Then you can have chocolat
later. If you're good.'
'Any kind?' The spoon was poised.
'Any kind.' Angela sighed and patted her head
the eating resumed and the braiding was complete
So peaceful like this.

'But I like going to school. Mum. I like it. Why
can't I go today?'
'Do you, darling? Since when, eh?' The child's remark delighted her and the reaction was controlled. She had noticed the difference, of course, but it was
not quite the same as hearing her beloved daughter
admitting to a change of heart which coincided with the end of almost daily tantrums and a skull-rending
clash of wills right up to the school gates.

'I still get into trouble, but there's loads of girls
much worser than me.'

'Bet there are. Got your coat and your books and
stuff? Time to do drawing today. Shouldn't be busy.'
'We could stay at home for that.'
'No, darling, we can't.'

Angela did not say, we need the money. We need
the money from my little jobs and Neil's little handouts,
even if we've got Francesca's car and other
things she left.

'Mummy, when's Francesca coming back?'
The heart stopped for the second time. Whoever
said that having kids shortened your bloody life? The
question hadn't been asked for three whole months
and it dropped like a stone. Something must have
reminded her: an overheard phone conversation, perhaps,
when she was on the blower to bloody Maggie,
losing her temper and raising her voice. The bloody
American, why the hell should she talk to him?
Angela remembered to keep calm.
'Don't know, darling. Perhaps in the summer.'

It was difficult to envisage the summer as they
walked over the bridge to the castle entrance, Tanya
trailing, more or less pleased with the plaits and keeping
hold of one of them with her spare hand. The
other held her satchel, a labelled thing for street cred,
envied by her peers and guarded like gold. The castle
was a favourite place. In the normal course of events
she reacted to the sheer sombreness of it, and inside
the warm and cosy ambience of the shop, became a
docile creature. It was Francesca who had taught her
to climb but that, too, was in the summer. Damn you
Francesca.

In the kitchen of the House of Enchantment, Henry
watched the video, with a different attitude now that he
knew more. The boy on the screen ran with his elbow flexed, his right hand turned in towards his body and
his right shoulder held higher than his left. He had
scabby knees; the right foot tapped at the ground as if
afraid of the contact; it made Henry think of the lopsided gait of a three-legged dog although he did not
approve of himself for making the comparison. As the
boy drew nearer the camera, Henry could see that his
face was not as ugly as he had assumed on his first
sight of it, but merely contorted into a ferocious frown
of effort. When he came to a halt in close-up, a slender
arm reached across his face and wiped the mucus from under his nose with a handkerchief.

'There were certain things he could not do,'  Timothy was explaining. 'Things nobody can do if their right hand refuses to work. Such as blow one's
nose and brush one's teeth. Or make the best of
falling over. He was always a grubby little boy.'
'And he wanted to learn to fish.'
'Would have done, too. We'd have taught him,
though it might have taken a long time. We were working on the creation of a new kind of rod. You
see,' Timothy stated, pouring more coffee, 'he wanted
something he could do by himself, although Fran
always wanted him to be with other children. Pushed him to be with other children, so they could bring
him on. But he was frustrating for other children. He
wanted them, he adored them, but he knew they got a
bit fed up with him.'
'Which is natural,' Peter said. 'Children are cruel.'
'They're rehearsing to be adults,' Timothy said sarcastically.
'How could it be otherwise?'

'Have either of you seen a shawl I left lying around
in my room?' Henry asked inconsequentially.
'On the end of your bed, isn't it?' Tim said.
'Unless, of course, Harry's been in and borrowed it.
He's awfully fond of a nice Indian shawl.'

Henry could see the damn thing now, tricking out
that damned Wendy house.

Ghosts, bah, humbug. Rubbish. FACTS. He detested
whimsy, and sat in the library to read facts about
castles until the afternoon was advanced and there
was less chance of visitors. This particular castle, he
decided on the basis of his new-found knowledge and
his own estimation of the place, was simply a miniature
model for a king to play with, pretty in this light.
Inside the main entrance, framed on a wall, was the
text of a letter, dated 1842.

To the Queen's most excellent Majesty . . .
Most gracious Sovereign, we, your Majesty's
dutiful and loyal subjects, the Mayor,
Authorities and other inhabitants, beg leave to
approach your Majesty with feelings of the
most devoted loyalty and affectionate attachment.
We hail your Majesty's arrival and
fervently hope that your Majesty will experience
every degree of satisfaction and pleasure
and will graciously condescend to bear your
Majesty's sojourn here in kind remembrance.
Distinguished as this vicinity has been from
the earliest ages by the visits of eminent personages,
never did it attain to honour equal to
the present. . . That the Supreme Being may,
in His infinite goodness, continue to shower on
your Majesty his choicest blessings is our sincere
and earnest prayer...

Oh my, oh my, did they take their monarch seriously Surely someone wrote that stuff tongue in cheek? Or
did they have the committee round the table in an orgy of sycophancy? Then Henry thought of a citizen addressing a Senator in his own democracy, and the sedulousness of the letter was less surprising. Hell, he
had watched people kiss the feet of the head of the
Corporation. He went into the shop. 

'Excuse me, do you have a copy of that letter? Oh, hello - Mrs Hulme, isn't it?' ?

She was seated behind the counter as he had seen
her before, neat and hard as plastic with a look of
fatigue round her eyes. The beautiful child sat next  to
her, using the counter top to construct a cardboard
model of the building, sold in boxed form, price £5, and looking complicated. Tanya gazed at him and
smiled her heart-stopping smile, then turned her gaze
towards three teenagers who selected postcards and
murmured over the choice. They were dressed almost
identically in state of the art trainers, with unnecessary
sunglasses pushed into their tawny hair; she was
lost in admiration of their clothes. Angela Hulme took
their money and they moved through the entrance to the keep, adjusting headphones.

'Entrance is £4.50,' she said. 'You got in free last
time. And you didn't pay for the chocolate.'
'I'm really sorry,' Henry murmured, taken aback
by the steely aggression in her voice. He found it difficult
to understand. Maggie said she was a tricky
lady, but then she had been unwittingly involved in a
tragedy, brought up a child alone, and trickiness was
surely her right; still, he did not think he had done
anything to offend. Yet.

'Great place,' he said unconvincingly, placing
money on the counter. Pound coins reminded him of
a certain kind of gold-wrapped candy he had eaten as
a child. He hesitated. Small talk was not going to
work. 'I need to talk to you, Mrs Hulme, if that's possible.'
'No. What about?'

As if taking a cue, Tanya slipped the moorings of
the counter and followed the teenagers. Angela did
not stop her. There was a stool on the customer side
of the counter and Henry occupied it.

'I need to know about Francesca, Mrs Hulme. I
was a friend, oh, a long time ago, and I came here to
find her and talk about old times. Wish I'd come sooner. I might have helped. Not that I'm much of a
help-'
'There's nothing to tell,' she interrupted. 'Why
don't you mind your own business? Going round, asking questions, stirring things up. You bastard. If
any of this gets back to my daughter, I'll kill you. Bet
you don't think of her, Mr bloody scientist snooper.
What about her if she hears people talking about poor
little Harry, her best friend, just when they've finally stopped talking about him? They played together all the time . . . she looked after him . . . what do you think it was like for her when he died? Kids shouldn't have to put up with that kind of thing, especially not a kid like her. She was just turning a corner.' Her voice was rising. Henry spread his hands, helplessly.
'Please, please, leave us alone.' There were tears in her eyes. 

'OK, OK, I'm sorry. Don't tell me about him, tel
me about her. You were friends for a long time, I
know. Great friends.'
'Why the hell should that matter to you? What right have you got to ask?'
'No rights, Mrs Hulme. None whatsoever.'

She seemed to calm down, a false calm, he guessed
and just as likely the prelude to a storm. The tears
were rubbed out of her eyes with the red knuckle of
her right hand. She had no time for tears. 'Yes, we
were. Like sisters. I helped at her school.' She
laughed, bitterly. 'Couldn't stay away from kids, me.
Just liked to be close. I was trying to give up the idea
of one of my own: couldn't. She steered me - us through
the adoption stuff. It's easier if you'll take a
child rather than a baby. I suppose one of the reasons
we were accepted was because they knew she'd give
support. And she did. And then she had him. And
then her bloke buggered off. Yeah, we had a lot in
common and Tanya loved the baby. Now piss off.'

'Please ... I can't do that, not yet. You see . ..'
'You don't even know what you want to know, do
you? You don't even know what you want to find out.
You don't care who you might hurt. Even her. You're
just like one of those seagulls, picking at carrion and
shitting all over. Here's your ticket, and if you see my
daughter on the way round, don't you dare say a
word except to tell her to come back here. We close
soon.'

It was the please which unhinged him, and the
tears. She was right about one thing. Henry thought
uncomfortably as he followed the tourist path into
the courtyard. He did not know what it was he
wanted to know and her scornful observation troubled
him as he skirted the wall. OK, Henry, take the
tour; accept the reprimand; you have no right to
make anyone unhappy. Not unless you have a worthwhile, morally viable objective in mind, such as
healing the sick, bringing the dead back to life, alleviating suffering, feeding the hungry, consoling the  wounded, and none of these ambitions, dear to his
heart in the idealistic days of trailing round India, applied to his current enterprise. What did he want to
know? The satisfaction of a personal curiosity seemed a puerile excuse for causing outrage and yet he felt he already knew more than anyone else.

India: the jewel in Queen Victoria's crown; no
wonder the Mayor and the town councillors wrote
her letters like that. 

He could hear voices from the cannons and walked
in the other direction round the walls. He turned on
the audiotape and turned it off again, leaned, and
watched the pennant fly. Then he followed the direction sign into the fat body of the castle itself. Please  she had said. Leave us alone. 

The central area he entered seemed to be a series
of huge, cavelike rooms with domed ceilings, dry, 
floodlit, dusty and surprisingly warm. He stood in awe in front of a huge fireplace of mellow pink brick,
the brick beautifully designed into an arch supporting
a lintel of wood so old and pale it looked ready to
crumble at the touch. He touched: it felt as solid as
iron. He tried to imagine the dimensions of the fire
which required so massive a hearth and wondered
how anyone would get close. Where did they sit the
Queen? He wandered up a flight of steps and found
a panelled room with portraits and framed photographs,
the only furniture of any kind in the whole
place, dawdled for while, wondering why none of
these men wore eyeglasses at their age and wondering
where it was in this crazy edifice that the Chisholm
family had kept their quarters. The atmosphere
slowed him down; the quiet made him careful and he
made himself cough for the sake of sound. It was a
very peaceful place of war.

Back in the kitchen area, he consulted the map
which came with his ticket and realized it was getting
dark. He had not encountered the others except for
the sound of their voices in the distance. Not such a
miniature castle after all; it had space without grace.
He must repeat such a neat phrase to Maggie who
thought he was so dull, and quite apart from any
other consideration, the tour was incomplete. Without
the aid of the audiotape, recited by a man whose
cut glass accent reminded him of nothing more
than a peerless Hollywood villain. Henry steeled
himself for a swift sprint round the lower floors:
where they had planned to fire muskets on the enemy
from all those lime holes in the walls he could see
from the outside at the bottom of what he thought
should have been a moat. It would be darker down
there. There was floodlight in these cavernous rooms,
sconces on walls creating a warm glow on stone
which varied in colour from ochre to grey granite. For
a full, poignant, hesitant minute, Henry wished his
father was here, raising his eyeglasses from his hooked nose and saying. Will you look at that, son,  they dug up every damn quarry they could find to make
this mongrel. Even with that, Henry knew he did not
want to go down. He would read the guidebook and
pretend he had. He knew his limitations.

He turned from the larger room, marked at one angle with yet another sign WAY y OUT, a description which was, for an American of his generation, deeply deceptive for an exit sign, looking more like a sixties
description of approval: way out, man. At the top of
the slope, and the place was fuller of slopes than
stairs, as if stairs were scarcely invented, he had
noticed a great brute of a big black door. Toiling towards it, he could see a welcome patch of puffy,
grey sky and a light outside. One of those security lights which reacted to the onset of darkness by
becoming at first luminous and then timidly brighter as evening encroached, the kind of device his father
would have examined, too. Such a cute thing, he might
have said, stroking it, always amazed at how the simplest of things worked. Halfway up the slope, the door
closed. Then the spotlights went out. 

He stumbled uphill to the door and thumped on it, not alarmed, simply annoyed in the same way he
always was by the inefficiency of others. He thumped
again, creating a small, ineffectual sound against the
wood and hurting the heel of his hand on a metal
stud. Henry did not shout; it was not something he
did in response to simple mistakes; anger was something
he controlled. He just wanted out. The solidity
of the door muffled noise, but he could hear scrabbling
on the other side. He knocked again, yelling this
time EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! His voice came
back inside his ears, sounding foreign and false. Once
he stopped, he could detect an increase in the scuffling
beyond, then the child screaming, half
hysterical: 'Nooo, Mummy, no. He's in there. If he stays
in there, he'll get so cold. You mustn't lock it. Henry hates
the cold. NO. No, no no, stoppit, stoppit, stoppit. LET
HIM OUT.' And after that, with his head pressed
against the wood, Henry heard murmurs of brisk
consolation: 'Aren't you a little silly one, aren't you
just? It isn't a person, silly. That nice man went home.
I told him please go. He's deaf. That thing in there is
only one of Neil's silly ghosts.'

There was a further protest, Angela's voice shriller.
'What do you want, silly? Do you want me to be sent
away too? Is that what you want? Come on, darling.
Time for tea.'



I don't really understand the purpose of imprisonment
(except as a form of revenge) and I don't really think  I
ever did. It alters nothing. A sentence like mine is only a warning, not an education. I am not imprisoned because
I would otherwise take to the streets, killing children at random. No one suggests that my criminality is bound to
become a habit. The only child who was ever vulnerable    to me was my own son. No one is in danger from me,
except me. Or from my friend in the kitchen. She killed
her husband and she makes everyone think that's what I did, too.

I think I imagined, in a daft kind of way, that having
sentenced me and sent out all the necessary messages about
justice and condemnation, someone might say. What
really is the point of keeping a useful woman locked away, doing nothing? They would think, what a waste of money
and quietly let me out the back way. Maggie says that's 
basically what they will do, although not for fifteen years. 
It is the years that weigh on me, not the present. The only way to deal with incarceration is to take it one day at a time. Not a whole day, even: an hour, a minute. And the only way I can accept it is to remind myself constantly that
it does have a purpose even if it isn't obvious to anyone but  
me. Without that, I'm sure I should go mad. ' .

Not everything I've ever done has had a purpose.
One's aimless so much of the time, which is just as wel 
because it's when I've been my most determined that I've
been my most mistaken. Poor Harry. You deserved better.

I asked for more of the pills. Otherwise I shall scream
and cry.
Forget my stiff upper lip.
FMC.


CHAPTER NINE.


uncle Joe, Tom Cobbley and all could wait. 'Life
without you is not the same . . .' Maggie read in the letter. She put it down on the threadbare carpet of the
office and stamped on the envelope, as a substitute
for the immediate desire to tear it up. It was an odd
aspect of legal training which made it impossible for
her to destroy a letter because of its evidential value,
but she could abuse it. The paper was creased from a
working day's contact with Edward's pocket, improving the fulsome prose. 'I do not know what madness
possessed me,' he wrote, 'to imagine I could have a better
existence with someone who is so much your inferior in
every way . . .'

'Life without you is not the same,' she mimicked to
Edward, flourishing the letter at him. 'What did he
bloody well expect? He didn't want it to be the same.
And what possessed him was perfectly obvious. A bitch
with big boobs, sixteen years younger than me. He's
a cliche. A ten-foot transvestite, at least I'd have a
topic for conversation.'
'What do you think of its style?' Edward murmured.

'He hasn't got any style'.' she yelled.
'I meant the letter.'

She looked at the sentences, perfectly punctuated
and nicely turned. He had taken his time to construct
his thoughts and give his plea for a meeting the right
degree of pathos and dignity. 'I can't get you out of my
mind and I'm full of sorrow . . .'
'Rather contrived, I thought,' Edward said. 'You
shouldn't have married another lawyer. We're all
pompous farts. What are you going to do?'

She looked at him and the fish behind the desk, all
hazed in cigarette smoke.
'Drink,' she said.


Henry focused on the words. Time for tea. Quaint. He
was trembling with fury and willing it to cease as his
eyes adjusted to the gloom. A couple of dim security
lights high on the walls blinked into life within minutes
and for these he was profoundly grateful. He
had space to move; there was a mean ration of light,
sufficient for reading the large print of the direction
signs, he was not cold, and in a minute she would
come back and open the damn door. He felt in his
trouser pocket for his packet of cigarettes, lit one and
began to pace the floor, counting his steps, one, two, three. He shrugged inside the warmth of his leather
jacket and soft sweater. He would circumnavigate the 
central keep, beginning here, fifteen times, and by  the time that was done she would have come back. Or
someone would come back; there would be a night
watchman; someone.

On the seventh round of the bare rooms, kitchen
with bread ovens, mess room with fire, interconnect  ing rooms off, he began to wonder if such a thing as a nightwatchman was necessary. There was nothing
to steal except the fabric of the building, which was undoubtedly solid enough to resist larceny. The
wretched woman would come back after she hact
given the child her tea. What a strange way of
describing what must be dinner, and the thought reminded him that he was hungry. He lost count of
his circumnavigations and repetition did not
improve the view. He sat down by the fireplace and
dozed for a while. When he came round, stiff an
chilled, a dull anger began to settle into a kind of
mental indigestion, combined with boredom and a
sense of being completely ineffectual, a person who
was simply a suitable candidate for a practical joke. 

The worst that could happen was a hungry night
alone and a touch of hypothermia. He could ggo upstairs and deface the portraits, or form them into a
shelter in the middle of the room and play at camping. Pity he could not borrow their garments. It was
beginning to become colder. Then he considered the
prospect, not of the night, but the morning, when
the door would creak open and he would be seen,
abject and stupid. She might gather a crowd to jeer at
a tourist who could not tell the time; she might send
a posse of name callers to bait him like a dancing
bear in a medieval illustration. The poor, captive bear
who did not even try to bite or release himself from
his chains. Who did not consider the affectionate
solicitude of his hosts in this town enough to be concerned
about them and their possible anxieties. The
dummy who just sat there, and found a corner to urinate,
and in the middle of that friendly crowd there
would be Maggie with her metal hair and sweet, sardonic
smile and it was Maggie's opinion which
mattered most.

Time had moved on: Henry tried to recall what he
had read about the castle in the relative comfort of the
library and what he had learned from the map which
he could no longer read. None of it helped, but it
stood to reason that a place designed to house so
many men must have a dozen exits, even if they were
also designed to repel those who wanted to enter. Go
down to the level of the moat area. Henry, where you
saw all those little windows. You aren't too fat to
squeeze through, find a door, get out, and once out,
holler. Better the contempt of a single passer-by who
might throw him a rope than that of the Mayor and
the other inhabitants next morning. They would not
beg leave to approach him with feelings of devoted
loyalty and affectionate attachment.

Besides, he was sick of the sight of these particular
walls. Any other set of walls would be an improvement.
He took the downward slope from the fireplace
room, marked the runs, with enough of his sense of
humour intact to notice how uninviting this description
was. What a crass lot they are, he reflected. Way
out via The Runs. The slope was shallow, and then
became steeper, suddenly, so that he stumbled to a
halt in front of glass in a wall and a painted arrow
telling him go left. What was this? A political
instruction? He was feelingslighuy hysterical and followed
the sign.

Henry entered a narrow passageway which curved
away to his right. There were narrow windows
recessed into the deep walls and, out of habit, he
began to count. One, two ... five, six, twelve, thirteen. Some of the windows were framed in crusty metal; he
had stopped to touch, recoiling from the cold and
the dampness of the condensation. The last security
light had faded into memory. Now he touched each
window; some stood open, level with his chin, but
most of them were closed. The fifteenth window had
no glass at all and cold air breezed over his forehead.
He wanted to go back, but surely he would be round
the other side in a minute. His right foot hit shallow
water. In this lack of light, he did not know if was
encountering a flood or a puddle, and in the pause, as
he began to step carefully rather than hurry, he heard
the rustling ahead.

Loud. A furious, fluttering sound which arrested
and then accelerated the motion of his heart and
made the blood it pumped turn into boiling water.
Then a noise of furious knocking, tap, tap tap, TAP
TAP, tap tap tat, tap tap tap TAT. He looked behind
him and could not see from where he had come
around the curving wall, looked ahead and saw the
promise of another security light. The tapping
ceased; the rustling, like the frantic shuffling of a hundred
garments moving towards him, increased.
Became still, for a moment.

Henry could not see the ceiling and he could feel
the walls squeezing him. It was less of the fear of what
lay ahead than the fact that he no longer knew where
he was and did not know the way back out. Fool, fool. There were all the symptoms: the desire to smack his
head against the bricks so that at least pain could
distract; the impulse to run, moan, lie down, the sensation
of some massive blow to the solar plexus, the
acute lack of breath and the madness. The overpowering
imperative to fight, kick, beat his way out, the
inability to breathe or even to shriek. If the window
had been wide enough and the drop a thousand feet,
he would have jumped; if there had been knife, he
would use it to mutilate himself, anything to stop it. Anything. And it would not go; he knew it could not
go. Claustrophobic agony, each time a little taste of
death so full of excruciating panic, he would cut off
his hand to avoid it. Then he screamed and screamed
and screamed, tried to stumble back in the direction
he had already walked, tried to be logical, but he
could not move; panic forbade. He braced himself
against the narrow walls to get his breath, bashed his
hand against the window, stuck his fingers inside his
mouth and bit so hard he tasted blood. Crouched in
a heap in the puddle of water, he struggled for breath
and began, manically, to chew his fingernails. The
sounds were irrelevant. He could hear nothing.
Whatever he could see, was doubled. There was
fungus on the wall; it reached out and. touched
Henry fainted.

A second. Maybe an hour. Came round, deafened
by his own breathing, UHUH, UHUH, uhuh, uhuhy UHUH, and the scream coming, unable to emerge.
Apart from the thunder of his own breath, the silence
was total, a background only to UHUH, UHUH, and
the horrifying wheeze creeping out of his mouth in a
desperate, gulping sound, like his father, close to
death, ownuff, ownhuff, ownfuff, with the whole body of him involved in the effort. Henry fixed his eyes to
the patch of indigo sky visible from the high slit of
window above his head only because it was different
from the black of the wall. Forced himself not to blink
until his eyes watered from the strain. The cold of the
water seeping through his jeans began to have some
remote meaning. He was lying in cold water and he
must get up. He managed that, but the panic did not
subside. He could get himself upright and know he
was cold, was all. Then the fluttering sound began
again, came towards him and retreated. He took two
steps forward. One ofNeil's silly ghosts. Harry is here to
see you, kill you. He took one more step. The only way
forward was towards the next light. The bird struck
his outstretched arm, flew away and began battering,
pecking, fluttering at the next barred window.

A bird; a captive bird in a futile dance.
He could not quite tell what type of bird, A starling
perhaps; a tiny creature in relation to the noise it
made. He moved towards it, unsteadily. The bird
sensed him and moved to flutter madly at the next
window, and the next. His presence terrified; the loud
movement of the wings grew more frenetic. When
Henry stopped, it stopped; when he moved, the bird
moved. Once more, it forgot and flew towards him,
encountered his forehead, flew back to batter at the
next window. Gradually fascinated, Henry made himself
stay still. His breath slowed down. He watched
the outline of it, a confused, demented bullet of being.

There were open windows; he remembered them,
back there. Remembering the glassless windows
made him remember, too, that all he had to do, keeping
his eyes shut if he needed, was to turn round and
go back, one step after another and finally, even if he
crawled, he would be in the larger spaces where he  could breathe. The bird was an idiotic bird which
could not go back, only forward, instead of seeking the route which had brought it inside and using
the same route to get out. Hammering again, at a narrow
slit of metal-framed glass it would never open. How
exhausted it must be, poor, desperate thing. More
exhausted than himself. And if he had not appeared,
it might have rested. Henry could not bear the  thought that the bird might break its wings because of
his presence, or that it would kill itself out of panic,
die before morning. He was furious with pity for it  'Hush; he said softly, 'hush.'

If he approached, the noise of his boots would set
it off. He would be freakishly lucky if he were able to
catch it in his hands. He would have to catch it with something else; something to throw over it. Henry  stood as still as the walls, thinking out the problem. It
was the only problem. The only thing that mattered
was to catch the starling and set it free.

Take these chains from my heart and set me free ... She did not like his choice of music and it had not been a
successful day, or not in the way Neil had hoped.
... 
Perhaps he simply was not used to the prolonged company of a female and a whole day together was   strain. Angela and himself had never been big on outings, even when their relationship was new; ah shit, he
must not think of Angela. In the days when she had loved him, she had reassured him again and again that sex really did not matter and anyway, would
improve in time if only his temper would do the same.
There was the occasional, almost successful coupling,
and he knew how to please her but it was not the
orgasm she wanted as much as the child which
should result. He could have been a king, a millionaire
mogul, an artist, an international athlete and still
be nothing but a controlled diabetic with a low sperm
count and erectile dysfunction. Perhaps the strain of a
whole day with the new girl lay in the fact that he
could not tell her about all that; could not yet entrust
her with the worst aspect of his history, and somehow
she knew he was hiding something. Women never
did like that, but she would like it less if she knew..
One coupling achieved only-made it worse; it was the
second that counted.

It had made him a thief, and not even a successful
thief. A day trip to France, slightly marred by his
anxious hopes for the evening, and his feeling of
shame for the evening before. She sat across the table
from him in his own house, smiling at him and
admiring his cooking and drinking the wine they had
bought. Or at least she drank, to please him, because
he pressed it on her in the hope of relaxing the tension
which seemed to have developed, while he
himself drank sparingly, afraid it might interfere with
the little blue pill he was going to take, soon. Try
50mg, the doctor said. 100mg is average. It followed, in
Neil's anxious way of thinking, that 300, the whole of
the stash, might be even better. Three little pills and
bugger the paucity of supplies. All gone by tomorrow,
but tomorrow was another day and the rest of his life
could take care of itself, if only he could keep her for
a few hours.

'I got a present for you,' he said, coming back
from the bathroom. The wine and the food had
worked; she was languorous and mellow and leaned
back against him as he draped the shawl round her
shoulders. Against the background of his small, nondescript
room, she was lovely; her skin soft and warm,
and he never wanted her to think, I could do better
than this.

'I can't stay all night,' she said. 'I'll have to get back,
eventually.' She lived with her parents. He liked the eventually. It would not take all night.


Maggie passed an hour in the most anonymous  public house on the seafront, talking to old men about
their dogs, drinking a glass or three of indifferent 
wine until she decided she could do better than that, 
caught the off-licence before closing time and
exchanged cash for two bottles of chilled Sancerre 
and three packets of nuts. She hauled this booty  indoors, beaming vacantly at Timothy and Peter, who both wanted to chat but backed away when they saw
how the land lay. She went upstairs, inflicted a manic tidying up on her room in order to give herself some sense of control, and then sat down to think. There was the nagging memory of Uncle Joe, but that was
largely irrelevant, like a fly buzzing in the corner of a
room, since most of all, she wanted to savour a feeling
of triumph and read his letter for the third time. Could I please come and see you? Not what he might
have said: Why don't you come up to town and see me? He was suggesting that he make the effort to visit a
scrubby little town he had always despised. Men are
so blind, Francesca had said. I can't stand the way
they leave and then have to come back later and tear
the heart out. Look, Philip, I have a modus operandi here, Maggie wanted to say. I live a small life with
none of your entertaining; remember how we entertained,
Philip? As elaborately and generously as the
proprietors of my guest house cook for guests, Philip,
only they do it at a fraction of the cost, treble the
effort and with a genuine desire to please rather than
impress. You tried to make me into a sophisticated
clone of yourself but my favourite vegetable is still
frozen peas and I prefer the kind of man who can
enjoy an overcooked pizza and not notice. I let you
dictate the whole progress of our lives, so that when
you decided I was superfluous, I became a spare part.

She crunched on the nuts and reached for pen and
paper; the wine scarcely pleasant. He had been a wine
snob, messed and tinkered with the stuff and agonized
over labels. Dear Philip, other people have
better things to do and drink what they're damn well
given, so they can get on with talking. Why did I let
you distract me from anything that was ever really
important? Why do I waste my time on lousy
choices? She would write him a tremendous letter if
only she could find the pen, not any of the old ball
points that littered and clogged her bag, but the
fountain pen which gave some dignity to her handwriting. Oh yes, she would let him have it in words, a
verbal battering fit to shake him out of his own
peerless prose and make him feel the rat he was.
Then she remembered another of those poems she
had memorized so easily, long before the marriage
days. '

When I loved you, I can't but allow
I had many an exquisite minute;
But the scorn that I feel for you now
Has even more luxury in it.
Thus, whether we're on or we're off,
Some witchery seems to await you,
To love you is pleasant enough,
But Oh! tis delicious to hate you!

The nuts were finished and she felt a vague, nauseous
hunger, temporarily sated by another glass of
wine. They would fret about her a little downstairs,
but these locked-in evenings others were not without precedent, although they had been far less frequent,
lately. 'Oh, tis delicious to hate you!' she wrote again, noticing how the writing was not steady. The fountain
pen was running out of ink and she had no idea of
where she had put the refills. Or whether she wanted
Philip to come and see her and look at her life and
what she had made of it in fifteen months sitting in a
closet. But the one thing she did know, even as she
underlined the word, was that she did not hate him.
She had never hated anyone for longer than a day;
she did not have it in her; she might be absurdly hurt
by the slightest hint of rejection, but she could not
hate. Perhaps that meant she did not have the capacity
to love men either. Of course you do, Francesca
said, but only if they look at you. Recognize what
you are. Anything else is insulting.

That was what she was, insulted. It was too soon
for sleep; the wine was winning and by now Maggie
did not want anyone to see her in this indecisively
maudlin state. She washed, cursorily, in the upstairs
basin, thought with a token guiltiness of all the other
business of the day, brushed her hair until her scalp
hurt as much as her head ached, tidied up rigorously
and went to bed. Confused thoughts scuttling like
rats, Angela, Harry, Henry, Harry, Neil, was Neil
fishing on the beach with that dog. Henry. Pishing.
Philip and how she had glibly explained the demise of
that marriage. Not quite the success we hoped.


Not quite the success he had hoped. Not the answer
to a girl's prayer, or even a man's. A bit thorough and
brutal, if Neil remembered it right. Not as prolonged
as it might have been, although he had rather lost
touch with the passing of time. Marvellous to fuck
but not so entirely pleasant to be fucking and wondering all the time how long it could last. The 
erection, the relationship, the fierceness of her embrace which had gradually turned into rather more 
dutiful gestures of fatigued encouragement as he went
on and on, culminating in a noticeably timid curling
away from him after the final groan. She kissed him
in response to his smothering of grateful kisses and
choked, heartfelt thanking her and telling her how
wonderful she was, but it did not seem so long afterwards that she said she had to go, you know the way it is, becoming insistent about it. And when he rose, 
with difficulty, to dress and escort her the short distance, she had kissed him again, more hurriedly an  said, what nonsense, it was only a spit away down lit
streets and she would not hear of it. This was no
London, it was Warbling. She was chattering a bit,
slipping away and gathering her clobber with twice the speed of his dressing, and then, before he could
insist, was gone. She was running away. She left
behind the stolen shawl, folded over the kitchen chair. This hurried escape would have alarmed and worried
him intensely, if the symptoms did not alarm him
more. Neil lay on his bed, considering the implications of a foul headache and dizziness not lessened by closing his eyes. When he opened them, all that he
could see appeared to be tinged with pink, giving him
the impression of a mildly fluorescent evening or the
colour of the sinking sun on the sea in summer. He
blinked to dispel it, but the pink tinge remained and
when he turned on the overhead light, the brightness
of it attacked his eyes. He was trembling and his
mouth was dry.

The bleeper was going on his pager. Some bugger
was in the castle and he could not see.


The only priority was to catch the bird. It fluttered at
the next window and the sound of its fatigue was so
cruel. Henry wanted to weep. He retreated two steps, very slowly, bent down and fumbled with his
shoelaces until they were undone and he could slip off
his boots. He shed his jacket quietly; it was too heavy
to use as a snare; the little thing would be crushed to
death. His cashmere pullover, because Henry had a
weakness for fine woollens, was light and fine for all
its protective warmth. The ground was cold and
damp, soaking his socked feet as he tiptoed forward
blindly. The wall rounded to his right. He had just
made out the outline of the bird when he stumbled on
a loose brick, put out a hand to steady himself and
swore, shit. The starling came back to life, disappeared
in a smudge of black and began again the
ghastly battering of a window further round. If he
could only somehow get beyond it, he thought, and
frighten it into going back to where he knew there
were windows which were broken or open or free of
glass, perhaps it would find its way out of its own
accord. Perhaps it was better to chase it forward in
any event; they might come round full circle to the larger space where it could fly with ease or settle. And then be lost for ever and even harder to catch. Or
maybe this rounded passageway led nowhere but to
further obscurity, maybe it petered out into a pit, a
cellar, a well. Henry swallowed.

With pullover draped round his neck, he inched
forward, testing the wet ground with his stockinged
feet and keeping one hand on the wall. The starling became visible again; he felt as if it was looking at him
and waiting. He removed the pullover, remembering to breathe quietly. Up ahead there was another sound, a drip, drip, drip, and from the window he passed a
draught and a tantalizing sound of rain. The starling beat its wings and flew drunkenly to the next glass. It
would die from fear and exhaustion. Henry's feetg
were icy cold; he flexed his fingers silently. The sound of rain outside would muffle the noise of his own
progress, but only a fool would think that a starling
had senses as unrefined as his own. Three times
more, creeping forward and the bird detecting him,
but each time, he told himself, he was that small bit
closer. Then, beneath the merciful glow of a tiny light in the ceiling, which showed the gleam of moisture on
the stone of the ledge where water dripped, he saw
the starling bathing in an irresistible shallow bath of collected water in a dip hollowed by years of drips.
Henry was close enough, threw his net and followed.

Gently, gently, does it. A furious struggle inside
the garment. Keep still. He cupped his hands round
the heaving bundle he had made and cradled it, feeling,
as he began to stumble back the way he had
come, the frantic beating of a tiny heart, feared the
bursting of it. Quick. He needed both hands to keep
the captive; his feet would have to find their own
direction. He stubbed his toes and cracked his elbows,
stumbling from side to side and letting the wall, curving
to his left, lead him. He tripped on his own shoes, felt the material of his jacket in the puddle underfoot
and did not stop. Another window, another and
another, and then the blessed draught.

He stretched to push the pullover through the
narrow aperture of the window slit, gently, then shook
it. The opening was so narrow there was scarcely
room for both his hands and the stone grazed his
arms. He could feel the starling fight, thought maybe
it was stuck with its claws in the wool and he would
have to drag it back and crush it in the process of disentanglement,
not be able to see in the dark, let it
free inside this hole and have to start all over again, oh
please God, no. He shook the ends of the pullover
again, letting one hand go; then he felt it lift and fall as
the bird flew free. He strained to look and see where
it had gone, but all he could see was sky. Don't fall,
FLY, he shouted, and told himself he could hear the
sound of wings above the sound of rain and knew he
was unable to hear anything of the kind. Simply his
own breath uhuh, uhuh, uhuh. Keep moving. Hea retreated from the window and plodded on, touching the wall on his left, feeling rather than consciously noting two more windows which could have acted as escape routes, muttering to himself. They should not leave it like this, they should fix the windows and not
trap birds. Someone should check, someone should hang, and then, all of a sudden, he was back at the 
foot of the slope, moving uphill to the big room where  he found a patch of light against the fireplace wall and
slid to a heap on the dry floor. He still had the
pullover which he had trailed along behind him
pleased with himself for not letting it go, otherwise the starling might have plummeted to earth in its own  net. Absentmindedly, he drew it over his head. He was shivering. The pullover felt sticky to the touch
smeared at the front with bird excrement. A lot of it. never mind. Henry wiped it down with his hands and
rubbed his hands on his trousers. Now it was all over
him. Never mind again if he smelt a bit, the damm
bird, that silly, terrified little thing, was free and he himself was momentarily, quite bizarrely, happy.

But he was cold. He felt his feet with his filthy hands
and massaged his toes. They were sticky and sore and
wet with blood; the cold was doing him a favour  and
preventing real pain. He should go back and get his jacket and also his shoes, force his feet inside and keep
them warm. The jacket would keep him warm and hide the bird shit. But on cooler contemplation of the
whole idea, Henry knew there was absolutely no question
of going back down the slope and into that
passage. Cold be damned and everything else, the
thought was so repellent it increased his tremor.

The room was no longer warm, but far above
freezing and the woman was not going to come back.
Nobody was going to come back. There was a bar of
chocolate in his jacket pocket; there was moisture
dripping into the Runs, enough to clean his hands
and deal with a raging thirst, but none of that was
enough to make him go back. No. There were cigarettes
in his trouser pocket and a working lighter. Life
was suddenly tenable; the bird was free and the freeing
of a starling was the sole purpose of this evening
in hell. That was why he had been put here. It was all
as simple as that. He got to his feet, planned a route
(a root. Henry, not a rowt) and began to walk round
the rooms. Close to the door, another security light
winked as he crossed the beam and tried the handle.
He waved at it. Walked in wide circles and thought.
Why did she lock me in?
What had I done to deserve being locked in?
Did she know what it might do to me? No. How
could she? But she must have known I would be ...
frightened.

The child knew I would be frightened and cold. Or
that someone would be frightened and cold.
Another Henry.
Will I get gangrene?

I hope the starling can fly in the rain.
Is the desire to protect stronger than any other?
He tried to think of a silly verse, began to sing. He
had never thought much of his ability to hold a tune; 
singing was a private occupation reserved for the
bathroom, but he could always remember the words.
Was it raining when Harry went out? Who called 
for him and made him follow into the cold?


'Wake up, Maggie wake up. Wake, bloody up.' 
Peter was shining a light in her face. Or so it seemed. The mobile phone bleeped. .
'What the hell is wrong with you, Maggie, woman, 
wake up.'
'Wwake,' she said indistinctly. 'Stoppit. Fuck off.'
'Your phone, Maggie and--'
'Go 'way.'
'Answer it.'
'No. Wha'for ?'
''Answer it!'
She did, the button-pressing, fiddling-about business
automatic, even from the very centre of a bad 
dream. Peter and Timothy could not fathom how it
worked and didn't need to know. It was the only 
phone in the house and only when she was there; they
took the shrill noise of it far more seriously than she. It
seemed to whisper to them from a great distance, although she also suspected that on evenings like
these, they checked on her. She spoke to the phone.
'Bugger off.'
'Francesca, I'm dying. I think I'm going to die ...
I took too much. Everything pink, head like hell and
there's someone in the castle. Can't go.'
'Neil, slow down.' She was upright now and the
effect was painful. Not as bad as she had known, but
not nice. She saw, with a slight and irrelevant satisfaction,
that she had managed to put on a nightie
before she got into her bed, also to hide the bottles.
She could smell soap. Cleanliness is next to godliness,
and all she could feel was relief in that small
thought, followed by acute irritation. She was not Francesca. At least Neil might have remembered that.
Recalled that she was not that omnipotent person in
whom everyone confided and whom everyone
resented when she could not help; she was simply a
poor substitute.

'Taken too much Viagra. Can't see. Headache. Got
to get that American out. He's a doctor. Know what
to do. Bring him, Maggie, bring him here . . . Ah, please. Please, Maggie, please. He'll know. I know
he'll know . . . Blue pills. Pink pills to make it better.
Call him, Maggie, please.'
'He's not a doctor. He's the wrong kind of doctor,
he can't make people better. Call a real doctor,
Neil.'

'Can't. Gonna die. Help me.' The end of the call,
the contents of it reverberated around the room like
ricochets.

'Someone wants Henry,' she said carelessly, as if
she was his secretary, looking at Peter for inspiration.
Timothy hovered in the doorway and she felt cornered into good manners. They were never less than
courteous; they were, she thought briefly, the kindest
people on earth.

'They can't have him.'
'Why can't they have him?'
'Because he isn't there,' Timothy said flatly. 'He's
never come back. Two in the morning and he isn't back. He's lost.' 

Heart pounding, she went upstairs and found
Henry's room, pristine, the fire made for him leaving
nothing but a faint trace of warmth. The laptop
closed, the room all neatly stacked as if he lived in the
cabin of a ship about to set sail, instead of the way she
kept hers, like a schoolgirl, subject only to intermittent discipline. A variety of destinations crossed her mind - castle, Neil's house, Angela's flat - images of
places meeting one another in imagination like vehicles crashing at crossroads and she groaned out loud.
Bugger responsibility; SHE DID NOT WANT IT. From the door of his room, the two darling men hovered with expectancy, body language announcing, say what you want us to do and do it we shall. Maggie
sighed. Her brain was full of fungus. Alcohol was a
dead loss so far. So was freedom. It encouraged moss
on the mind and fur in the throat and had never yet
had the grace to create oblivion. Her nightie was
clean; there was an awful pride in that, enough to
give her authority. What a stupid, shallow, spoiled
brat she had always been. She had to keep calm, let
the dreadful anxiety turn itself into energy rather than
curdle into paralysis.
'I'll just get dressed,' she said. 'Is it cold, out? I'm
so sorry, darlings, we should none of us be awake at
this hour, should we?' No notion of the hour, of
course, but best to get going regardless; think of
England. 'Can you remember where I put my car,
Peter? And you really don't have to come if you don't
want to.'

'Harry's in that castle, isn't he?'
'Not the Harry you mean, but very probably, yes.
And Neil is poorly and has the key, yes. Don't know
why, but yes.'

She was back downstairs and stripping off the
nightie, finding a nasty sweatshirt and a jumper over
the top and the trainers without laces which were
nearest and the car keys which were hidden behind
something, getting the order of things wrong, so she
found herself puzzled by bare legs and feet with
shoes and no trousers. Peeled the whole lot off and
started again. Something had happened in the course
of a drunken evening without her thinking about it on
any conscious level at all. Somewhere among the
scribbling and scrabbling, she had sorted out an
outfit of trouser suit, boots and spurs, top coat et al.
of the kind fit to meet a repentant ex-husband and
intimidate him with a sense of style. Still a proper
lawyer, see? She dragged them on, lit a cigarette and  stubbed it out immediately. She just about made the   ashtray and the whole business was worse than she 
thought. They were waiting outside the door in their 
motley dressing gowns, the sweetest and, ultimately, 
most unaggressive of men. Unless she had been a  child, in which case they would have ignored the legends of ghosts and gone out with her, armed with
homemade cudgels. The very thought made her even
more tired. Peter and Timothy were greatly reassured by her uniform. She looked like she could deal with an army. 

Raining hard. Snow melted and pelting rain, desperate place, disgusting, why ever live here .. . along the front, left to Neil's, stop. Everything deathless 
with silence, making her want to shout. Rapping at his door until there was a response. The door opened
by him, squinting at her, all eyes and shame. The
pink 'at the corners of his vision had faded, the
headache was terrible, there was no one else to call, sort it, Franny, will you? I am not Francesca. My
cousin of that name lived in the castle and, as a
cousin, I came here often and I know, as she did, how
to get in. She never really relinquished her ties to it. 

She stood over Neil in his living room and reflected dispassionately that he looked worse than she felt, but
he would live. 'I'm feeling better,' he muttered. 'Sorry, sorry, sorry.' The pager, connected to the 
castle's alarm system, blinked on the table. 'It went
ages ago. I can't go in there, I can't, I can't. The
ghosts . . .'

'Call the police.'
'They'll laugh. I'll lose my job ... I can't.'
'Oh, for God's sake, give me the key. Angela
dropped it back, I suppose?' He nodded. She noticed
the shawl folded over the chair, took the key and went
back to the car. She could never have any patience
with anyone afraid of ghosts or the castle at night; it
had been her occasional playground for hide-and
seek, although she never quite knew the hiding places
her cousin had known. She tried to question her own
conviction that Henry was in there, blundering
around like a moth. I guess I might leave out the stuff about being afraid of the dark, scared to death about
being locked in. She hurried.

She left the car by the castle gate, heard the rat, tat, tat of her smart heels on the wooden bridge and felt
the rain on her face. The key was easy, the door
heavy. There were chocolate wrappers on the floor of
the shop; ghosts feasting in Neil's absence, of course,
leaving litter to annoy him, of course. Or a hurried
departure by Angela Hulme and Tanya. Maggie
swore. She should never have sent Henry here.
She took the keys to the keep from behind the
counter where they always remained, flicked the
master switch for lights, walked out into the rain
round the slippery stones to the inner door. If there
was no one to find, she would be furious, she might
be equally furious if he were there. The lights were
harshly bright. There was a man in the room below, walking a slow circle, hands clasped behind his back,
his feet in dirty socks and his sweater stained. He was singing. Then he seemed to notice that he could see,
stopped moving and turned slowly, blinking, singing still .

'Hallo,' she said.
' You may esteem him a child for his might. Or you may deem him a coward for his flighty Henry sang, and then stopped and turned and saw a woman, smartly
dressed as if for a powerful meeting, pristine in
matching clothes, shimmering in the spotlight,
mercilessly efficient. Oh, shit.



It didn't help, him disliking the cold. Didn't help that he
was old enough to experience vanity; I wonder when
vanity begins? As soon, I suppose, as a baby can see itself
in a mirror. Didn't help that his speech was affected, so
that it was difficult for him to articulate clearly because it
added to his frustration. Didn't help the poor darling
that he loved so easily, even though he scowled like a
dragon. He did that when he was concentrating to learn
things, and I always found it endearing. I always had difficulty
learning things without looking for the nearest
distraction; I understood the effort. I had the concentration
span of a sparrow until I was far older, which is
why my father always held Maggie up as an example,
because she learned so easily.

I think I imagined that Tanya might be to Harry what
I once was to Maggie: an older cousin who loved her and
would always be there, in the absence of a sibling, just as
he would be therefor her. I forgot how much rivalry and
impatience there was. I was trying to turn us into a
family, herd us into a group. I sound like a sheepdog. Of
course, it was not quite like that.
FMC.


CHAPTER TEN.


she walked down the slope towards him, aware only
of the crunch of her boots on dry stone. Her hair
shone with rain droplets, flying away as she shook
her head. Closer to him, she was aware how dirty he
was, shockingly so for a meticulous man with a passion for clean clothes and personal ablutions. 

'How does the rest of this verse go?' Henry asked
conversationally. 'Might be one you know. It's so irritating to forget.' 

"But if she whom love doth honour  Maggie recited 
tonelessly, 'be concealed from the day . . .' 
'Set a thousand guards upon her. Love will find out the way,' Henry finished, beaming with satisfaction like a child triumphing in getting the right answer. 

'What the hell are you doing here?' Her temper 
was ready to explode and her right hand itching to 
slap his face if only it were not so filthy.

'Oh, this and that. I'm a very conscientious tourist,
I have to see everything.'
'Well, I think it's closed. Henry, and we'll go home
now. Where'd you put your shoes and that jacket?'
'In the Runs, ha ha . .. down there, somewhere '
vaguely pointing.
'Would you like to go and fetch them?' The voice
was now sweet and persuasive.
'Nope.' He was shaking his head apologetically.
'Nope. Can't do that. Absolutely not.'
'There aren't any ghosts,' she said. He seemed
vaguely surprised at the suggestion.
'Of course not. But I'm not going.'

She clattered away out of sight, footsteps receding
angrily in the downhill direction of the Runs and
Henry listened, rather than watched, feeling only
slightly guilty. What did he need a jacket and shoes
for? He was doing OK as he was. A minute passed;
then the half of another, and the cold crept back
beneath his skin. One more verse and then he would
have to go and look for her in case she was lost, like
the starling. 'Some think to lose him by having him confined,
And some do suppose him, (poor thing!) to be blind.
But if ne'er so close you wall him. Do the best that you
may; Blind Love, (if you so call him,) Will find out his way.' Seventeenth century, he seemed to remember.
Footsteps coming back, slower than they went, and
there was Maggie with his jacket in one hand and his
shoes in the other, holding them both away from her
soft, camel coat as if they were contaminated while he
still hummed the song. He could just about squeeze
his feet into his shoes with a degree of pain and without any possibility of tying the laces, and he foundit
surprisingly difficult to get his arms into the sleeves of
the jacket. 'I've been thinking .. .' he said as he hobbled after her up the slope and out of the open dor,
waiting for her to fiddle with keys while he breathed in the fresher, colder air and felt the rain on his face.
'Don't think. Henry, don't. You aren't good at it.' Maggie was conscious of an appalling headache
forming like a stormcloud behind her eyes and she
was unwilling to open her mouth, least of all for discussion. She pushed Henry into her car, drove by
Neil's, posted the key through the letterbox, ground
the gears twice in the short distance back to the
seafront. Henry was still humming, not exactly at his best.

'What do you do for an overdose of Viagra?' she
asked, to concentrate his mind and deal with another,
residual worry as she watched the shiny surface of the road in the dipped headlights of her very old car. 

'You wait for it to pass, I suppose. Was it raining on the day Harry got pushed into the sea?'
'Oh for God's sake. Henry, I don't know.'

The House of Enchantment was lit like a Christmas
tree. It made Henry expect to see seasonal decorations in the hallway and he was slightly disappointed
to find there were none. The sea on the far side of the
road made soothing sounds and the rain fell. Peter
and Timothy hugged him in turn and he hugged
them back with enthusiastic affection, calmly grateful
to be delivered back like a parcel into the domain of
men and a bath full to overflowing. Soon it would be
dawn. Henry lay in his own, high bed, his feet and
hands stinging and throbbing, and he thought of the
starling. The words of the song would not go away
and what was the difference between a song and a
poem? Before sleep intervened, he found himself
entertaining the thought that Maggie had engineered
the whole episode; or Angela and her, between them.
A woman thing; teach the silly beggar to mind his
own business; show him not to interfere. The thought
drifted away. She would not have done that; they were
poles apart, those women, and it isn't all about facts
Henry, it's as much about instincts. Trust them, he
admonished himself. Instincts. And there was a last
irrelevancy . . . would he have spent so long on the
trapped bird if it had been a fat, ugly seagull instead
of a starling? Yes, of course, but it might have been
harder. And sacking would have been better to contain
a seagull beak, whereas the starling required the
softness of a shawl.

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you . .. You
look like an elephant. Go back to the zoo. Maggie woke
to the sound of continued rain and saw through one
eye the patch of grey sky which signalled another
winter day. She closed the eye and tried to calculate
the time. Raising her head to look at the bedside clock was effortful; about eight-thirty, at a guess. She could sleep again, if she wanted, but the headache clawed at
her skull and the longer she lay, listening to the rain, 
the worse were the reflections which hurt more than
the aftermath of the wine and the dull sense of shame
attendant on it. She groaned. The suit of clothes she
had worn in the early hours of the morning hung neatly on the wardrobe as if already inhabited and ready to march, a last act of discipline before she had
got back into bed. She put on her thick dressing
gown, a hairy thing in tartan, chosen for warmth
rather than elegance, shoved her feet into slippers looked out of the window down at the Wendy house in the garden, groaned again and aimed herself towards the kitchen.

Happy birthday to you ... a humming again. The
kitchen of a house had always been her favourite place, along with back bedrooms and small gardens.
Francesca had referred her to the House of Enchantment and she had never left. The choice  hadha
plenty to do with preoccupation and lethargy and
nothing to do with the fact that she might have been
able to see her second cousin in the garden, cavorting
with Peter and Timothy on the three afternoons a
week when they minded him. She had had the opportunity, she supposed, to know Harry better during
the brief interval between her return and his demise,
but she had not taken it, a fact which rankled now.
There had been in her mind the certain thought that
if she had insisted on a child, her husband would not
have left her and she did not want to pay attention to
other people's children. Nor had she wanted to cry on
the shoulder offered by Francesca, because she had
resorted to it once too often and slightly resented the
fact it was being offered again. How sad it is, she
thought, that we recoil from the people who have
helped us. They know too much. Each heavy step
down to the ground floor brought a fresh onslaught
of misery, I should have, I should have, I should have
done this, that, the other . . . I should have noticed. I
should have been conciliatory to my husband instead
of forcing him away; I should have been nicer to little
Harry, and now to grown-up Henry, and I do not
know what the fuck to do next, what the hell it is I've
started or even why.

'You should have some breakfast,' Timothy said.
'Bacon?' 
'Ugh.'
'Toast, then. Tea.'
'Stop being nice, for God's sake or I might cry.
You're so bloody kind, you're a lousy example to a
woman with a conscience. Toast, please.' Toast and
marmalade marked a point when life was tenable.
Not necessarily pleasant, but at least ongoing.

'Henry told us he stayed after closing time in the
castle and got locked in. It might have been a mistake,
he said,' Peter stated. 
'How very diplomatic of him. No one has ever
been incarcerated in there by mistake. And there's
something else I'll have to tell him, too. Bloody Neil
got in here the other night, I don't know when, and
went through Henry's room. Took the shawl on the
bed. It's in his house. What nice friends I've got.
They're all duplicitous.' 

'What about us? We're merely simple . . . what on
earth did he want?' 
'Little blue Viagra pills, I think. He may have been
convinced that Henry had a supply and that's probably my fault, too.' Timothy giggled. Senta came and
laid her muzzle on Maggie's lap, a kind, sensitive animal, born to give unconditional affection wherever it was required, or maybe wanting some of the
toast. Cupboard love, any kind of love, would do.

'If Angela Hulme locked him in, what was she
trying to say?' Peter asked, remarkably chipper for a
few hours' sleep.
'Get away from me and my child. Go home. Yank Something subtle like that,' Timothy ventured with a
wise expression. 'And, by the way, our little Harry has no opinions whatever, at the moment. It was far to
cold for him last night. He may drift in for tea.' She was silent.

A competing kitchen smell began to overpower the
toast and Tim bolted towards the oven. There were
times, especially now, when his frenetic movements
made her dizzy and wrecked the languor of the
kitchen. The results of his culinary anxiety were delicious
but the price was the hypermanic way he went
at the preparations, swinging from sink to cooker to
table, unable to go slower and gibbering en route, oh
dear, oh dear, oh dear, as if each manoeuvre might
result in starvation and disgrace. Face flushed and
spectacles misted, he produced from the oven two
perfect, golden sponge cakes which he upended on to
a cloth and reversed on to a rack to cool, where they
looked to Maggie like a pair of yellow hillocks, stolen
from another landscape. The air was fragrant with
sweetness; she swallowed the last mouthful of toast.

'What do you think? Strawberry jam, or blackberry
filling? White icing, he loathes pink. Candles, of
course.' 
'Candles?'
'Harry's birthday,' Peter said, patiently. 'He adores
a nice Victoria sponge. Will you be back for tea?'
'Oh, bollocks,' Maggie said.

The smell of cake seemed to permeate the whole
ground floor by the time she had fled to her room and
back downstairs again, pausing only to dress, wondering
for an irrelevant second quite how many hours
of her life she had spent choosing what to wear. Philip
would hate the dressing gown. Philip would be waiting
for an instant response to his letter: let him wait.
Should she wear the suit which announced her as
someone who had come to cut off the gas/electric/blood supply, or should she look benign? A pale face
in her mirror told her that all clothes were ineffectual
disguises of mood.

The rain had stopped and all such mercies seemed small. She walked to clear her head. Her car, parcked
against the sea, looked lonely and salty; the pier
looked like something erected without planning permission for no particular purpose and even from the
depths of self-recriminatory depression, she was suddenly smitten with affection for it. Story of your life
she told herself; you love useless things: high heals,
husbands, redundant castles, inconvenient cousins imprisoned for life, silly little dogs and verse. She
stopped to look at the sea, staring out to where a
ferry smoothed its way across from left to right,
going away from home or towards. The sky was breaking up into clouds and she wanted to be on
that boat.

Was it raining on the day Harry died? What did it
matter? Maggie sat on a bench, the better to postpone
the day, rose again swiftly when she felt the damp, moved on slowly. From the entrance to the pier, she would be able to see the castle and the window of her
cousin's flat and that would be the place for pausing.

Angela was likely to be at home. The seafront   deserted. The right approach was to get Angela out
of doors and into a quiet caff where she might be
inhibited about raising her voice and, in the eyes  of a
few unconcerned but gossipy members of the public,
pretend she had nothing to hide.

The new sculpture which stood on the pavement at
the entrance of the pier was only called new on
account of not having reached a certain majority. It
was, by all agreed standards, modern; therefore tolerated
after the original and inevitable protest died
down and the shiny metal of its construction
(designed to dazzle the eye in the sun) had dulled
down with verdigris and the salt that stained it. The
first protest had been forced into submission by the
surprising fact that children loved it and concluded
that the base of the thing, composed of metallic waves
and fishes, was ideal for running round in circles, hitting
the edge of the small boat in which the solid
fisherman sat with his overlarge head, clutching his
giant, fat fish and gazing at it with huge, sad eyes,
locked in a tussle of love. The whole of it was too
rounded for climbing, but little hands somehow
desired to strike and stroke. It made a satisfying
sound and was warm to the touch when the sun
shone. Small children hid behind it, playing tag in
defiance of the no running, no jumping restrictions
which applied on the pier.

As Maggie approached the statue, admiring it for
its durable surface and squat power, a head with recognizable
hair poked out from behind and ducked
away again. Aha. This was irritatingly unexpected
and more than a little shocking. She stopped and
walked forward casually, circling the statue's base
until she found Tanya, leaning into the curved spine
of a fish as if trying to rub her own back against it.
There was a deliberate nonchalance in her pose as if,
dressed in pristine clothes suitable for school and
clearly during school hours, she was simply  a detached part of an outdoor study group instead of a
truant concealing herself. There was a dearth of ten-year-olds out on streets at this hour of a term time
morning. To Maggie's eyes, Tanya was trying to make
her presence appear official, which meant having the
wit not to run away; she was anxious rather than defiant, which in Maggie's slight but regular acquaintance
with her, was rare. Neither knew quite what to say
until Maggie thought of something suitably innocuous.

'You waiting for a bus, Tanya?'
'Sort of. Only I'm early.' A swift, relieved response. '
I'll wait with you.' The child shrugged, not a confident, fuck-you, shrug, more one of resignation from
a small person who was privately close to tears. They leaned in uncomfortable silence, Maggie reaching
into her bag to retrieve Philip's letter, not because
she seriously intended to re-read it, but simply to look as if she was attending to something else. There was
nothing else to read apart from a list. The world blurred slightly, filled her with momentary fury, we all
make awful mistakes, me more than most . . . such
pathetic, self-serving ruefulness; so bloody coy. She
glanced forward and back over the edge of the crumpled
sheets towards the gravel of the beach for a full
minute, then stuffed the letter back in the bag. By
her side, she heard Tanya let out a long, tremulous
sigh of relief; Maggie followed the child's gaze to
where the flag rose above the central turret of the
castle. It was raised slowly, the flag of St George, red
cross on white background, fluttering without enthusiasm,
then lying flatly against the pole. Unseen hands
tied a rope. 'That's good,' Tanya muttered.

'It doesn't look very happy,' Maggie said, chattily.
'But I don't suppose that's the point of it. I never
quite know what flags are supposed to do.' How silly
she sounded to her own ears, gabbling for the sake of
filling a void and keeping her there.

Tanya was nodding, wiping the damp sleeve of her
jacket across her nose and leaving a trail, noticing it,
rubbing at it with the other sleeve and looking so
much happier now that she was ready to be condescending
to a pig-ignorant friend of her mother's. 'It
doesn't do anything. It only means that somebody's come in, Neil prob'ly, an' got inside, 'cos you have to
to get at the flag. So if some silly bugger was still stuck inside, he'll be all right now, won't he?'
'He might be a bit cross,' Maggie remarked,
innocuously. 'But I expect he'll get over that, people
do, don't they? It was his own silly fault, really. I suppose.'
The child shook her head.
'No, it wasn't. Mummy locked the door. I
screamed and screamed and she wouldn't listen, 
I couldn't sleep for thinking and . . .'

'You bunked out of school to let him out? Do you
want a cuppa before you go back? Coke or something, on the pier? She could not say, stay with me
talk to me, she had no right. Tanya looked longingly
back down the length of the Titanic and rubbed her
hand against the nose of a sculpted fish.

'Can't,' she said finally. 'I don't like it. It's so fucking boring. I don't like the pier. I like this, though,'
She continued to stroke the nose of the fish. 'Harry
talks to it,' she added, inconsequentially. 'He tries to
get into the boat, but he falls out, always falling. Gotta
go.' But she was not entirely certain about whether
she wanted to go, stood with her feet crossed, staring
first at the flag and then, longingly, back down the
length of the pier to where the caff promised warmth
and something sweet. The longing glance was tinged
with indecision. Don't ever mention Harry to that child,
do you hear? Don't ever do anything so cruel. The words
of a command came into Maggie's mind and she
could not remember from where, or who had spoken
them when: Angela, or Francesca, something in a fax,
written words, spoken words, blurred into a stern
command so earnest it stopped her now. All those
promises she had made.

'Shall I come with you?' she asked. 'In case they've
missed you at school? What'll they say?' 
'I'll tell them Mummy was poorly, made me late,
only I never went in, you see, only looked like I did
an' I shouldn't tell fibs, should I?' Maggie bent
towards her, suddenly longing to push the hair out of
her blinking eyes and wipe the pert nose which
twitched on the brink of a sneeze. Such a child was
not suitable for keeping as a pet although she had all
the soft, self-willed neediness of a kitten.

'Fibs are generally bad,' she said gravely, producing
a coin. 'But you have to tell them sometimes in a
good cause. You've got a rumbly tummy. Get some
chocolate on the way.'

As she watched Tanya sprint across the road, it
crossed her mind to wonder whether children only
began to trust other adults when they began to see the
fallibility of their own parents. She felt a dull thudding
in the region of her heart, wished she had taken a
chance and grilled the child and wished again she
was on the boat, which had now disappeared. No one
had asked the child about Harry, not at the time. The
child was too fragile, too damaged, and on a practical
level, no information she gave could be reliable; the
best thing to do was to encourage her to forget.

There was no answer from Angela's flat. She went
back to the comfort of the statue and watched her
cousin's neighbours come and go. Harry talks to the
statue meant Harry had talked to the statue; children
confused tenses as well as identities, or at least she
remembered having done exactly that. Maybe Tanya
meant that she liked to talk to the statue and maybe it
only meant that it was the mute companionship of the
solid man in the boat which had drawn Harry out of
doors on a cold day when it might have been raining.
She looked at the length of the pier and saw what 
Henry had meant. No little boy would cross a road 
and run so far, unless he was running away.


There were always excuses for not working. The state
of the room, the height of the chair, the need for a cigarette, food, company and a preference for fishing
'Dear Mrs Dodder,' Edward wrote, crossed that out and wrote 'Hodder': 'I am only writing this letter
because I am disinclined to do anything else. I do not
care about the proposed changes to your will necessitated by your nephew failing to send a Christmas
card. Regrettable of course, but hardly worth cancelling his bequest. Your last will and testament has 
sixteen codicils already . . . suggest you wait and see
if he acknowledges your birthday . . .' He might also
drop a line to the nephew, but such an approach
would be interventionist. Mrs Hodder had marked every item of her considerable porcelain collection
with a piece of Elastoplast on the base bearing the
name of a legatee; on good days, she dusted it and on
bad days, changed the labels. When he himself was
old and decrepit, he would do nothing but fish, topple into a river if he found himself counting the spoons.
So difficult to prioritize the affairs of others. Lawyers
were theoretically objective, treating clients equally  
from the distance of their own, mysterious qualifications,
but that only meant pretending that he did not
dislike the majority apart from the few of whom he
was fond.

In the midst of the morning's work displacement
activity by reverie, Edward removed his gaze from
the ceiling cracks and found Henry sitting on the
opposite side of the desk as if he belonged. He was
wearing the same jacket but it was shrunk and the
texture and colour had changed into something
vaguely reptilian. It made him occupy the chair as if
he was a person in a straitjacket unable to hold his
arms to his own sides. Either it had shrunk or the
man had grown. He looked pathetically grubby and
out of place in a jacket like that, but he had obviously
wielded either authority or stealth to get past that
phalanx of bosoms downstairs and in one moment of
wry observation, Henry Evans was elevated in
Edward's estimation into the ranks of clients he liked
rather than tolerated. He leaned across the desk, arm
extended for a handshake, as if he had been expecting
him to call. Henry's attempt to reciprocate was awkward
enough to send flying a pile of correspondence
which both of them ignored. There were no apologies
or awkward attempts to pick it up and Edward
approved of all economies of effort. Both settled back
into their chairs and regarded one another frankly.

'Do you ever think,' Henry asked, 'that you might
have missed your vocation?'
'Frequently, yes. But I've very little idea of what it might have been, so it doesn't cause me much distress. One always assumed that a vocation would
obviate boredom, but it doesn't follow, does it?'
'No, it doesn't. Scientists are bored; so are millionaires, I guess . . .'
'Carpenters must be bored. Policemen must be 
bored. Can't be a thinking man alive who doesn't
imagine he could be doing better or different. I shall
go to my grave mourning the fact that I haven't had
enough fun. Or caught enough fish. What can I do
for you?'

'Cup of coffee would be nice.'
Edward went to the door and bellowed down the
stairs, 'COFFEE! TWO!' 'It might work; he said, resuming his chair and the endless search for a cigarette. 'The women here don't consider it beneath
their dignity to make coffee. Perhaps you would have
preferred tea?' 
'No. Thank you. I just wanted to run througha
few facts with you.'
'I thought you might,' Edward said, immediately
understanding the subject. 'All we can ever rely on,
facts."

'I was beginning to prefer instincts.'
'Bugger instincts. They're almost as bad as principles. As soon as I hear somebody say, it's a matter of
principle, I want to scream. Likewise when they say I feel this is right, or I've got a gut instinct about that
person or this. At the end of the day, it's rarely anything
to do with guts, only money, which you don't
keep in your gut unless you're very odd indeed.'

The coffee arrived. Ineffectual coasters were produced
to guard the wrecked desktop and a plump
woman floated away in a waft of splendid perfume.
Henry struggled out of his jacket. Leaning forward to
pick up a mug would otherwise have been impossible.
'Which is why; Edward continued, 'I can't detect any
alternative explanation for the untimely death of
Harry Chisholm other than the one given. No one
else had any motive for killing him, especially not a
financial motive. If there was a cousin and an inheritance
I could see it, but there isn't. There's
desperation; there's pity for a life which is not going
to unfold well, there's a woman at her wits' end
having a moment of madness with a child who is
being naughty and there's no other motive at all. An instinctive killing. Nagged at me for a long time before
you came along. Nags me every day. My own bloody
instinct, telling me she was far too controlled a
woman to lose it like that. Or to have let that child out
of her sight.' A plume of cigarette smoke curled
towards the yellow ceiling. Henry lit one too.
Smoking was infectious.

'What I see as inherently unlikely; Henry said, 'is
this child who hated the cold going out on his own.
Was it raining, do you know? I can't find anyone who
can tell me if it was raining. Seems important to me:
less reason than ever for him to go out, more reason
for him to slip. And the woman downstairs can't remember that he ever did go out without his mother
unless someone came to take him. I know it wasn't raining when he was found, it says so in the case
papers.' The coffee was intensely good. Fuelled by
coffee like this, Henry could understand how Edward
survived a day in this uncomfortable room. He would
probably float from task to task in his own, peculiar
haze.

'Good Lord, man, the weather changes every five
minutes here or haven't you noticed? Nobody could
possibly remember. And suppose he was driven out?
A screaming row about nothing or something, an
order, GET OUT - something of the kind happens  in my house once a week. The mother being dictatorial, cruel even. You see, Mr Evans, you may have to
accept that your own blundering investigations, if
such you call them, may reveal Francesca Chisholm
in a worse light than ever. I hope you've thought of
that. By the way, what happened to your jacket?' 

'I don't think it's even mine,' Henry said. 'I was on
my way to buy another. And a hat. All those thrift
shops.. .'
'Thrift? Oh I see. I get it. Second hand.' The
slightly dreamy look of an enthusiast came over
Edward's face and it occurred to Henry to guess the
source of his ill-fitting clothes. He could see Edward throwing out the whole wardrobe at the end of each
month and starting again and the thought of doing
such a thing was appealing.

'And it crossed my mind,' Henry went on relentlessly,
'that all kinds of junk end up in thrift shops' he
did not add, such as you wear - 'and if I hunted
around, I might find Francesca's things. She threw
out her clothes as well as his and where did they go?
They had to go somewhere. This isn't the kind of
place where people throw things away.'
'Good point, but I doubt there'd be any of it left by
now. Were there any other facts you wanted to mention?
And while we're on the subject, I think our
client has faxed us from prison. I faxed her, she faxed
Maggie. She's allowed to do that. Only to her lawyers.
Old lawyers don't die, you know, they simply lose
their appeal.'

'Does she write it herself? What does she say?' He
wanted to see her handwriting. Edward scuttled
beneath the desk to emerge the other side among the
pile of spilled correspondence, clutching the shiny
paper of a fax in one hand and a cigarette in the
other. 'What does it say?' Henry repeated.

Edward adjusted his glasses, squinted at crumpled
paper. Henry? Who's Henry? he read, his mouth
forming the words which he failed to speak as he
scrunched the thing into a ball and thrust it into his
pocket. 'Says nothing,' he sighed theatrically. 'The
fucking fax machine only works on Fridays.' He
skipped round the desk and slumped back into his
chair which swivelled with a mind of its own and
spun him round so that his back was to Henry and he
faced the fish. Henry could see tufts of his black hair
above the chairback and see the curl of smoke. 
'There's something very odd going on with Uncle
Joe,' he announced. 'There seem to be two of him. I think it might be in everyone's interest if you went to
see one of them.'

Edward was far more articulate when not facing an
audience. Henry could empathize with that. 'Uncle
Joe?' he queried.
'Disgraced Uncle Joe. Whom Francesca visited
regularly. She refused to take notice of tarnished rep utations. Angela Hulme took over visiting a few months back and I wonder why? Sits and talks for
hours to someone, I'm told, but whoever it is, it ain't  a Chisholm. It's a man who picks up strangers, So you'll do very well. Do your shopping first. I would.'


There was just about enough in mis High Street to
keep a smallish mind happy. A true city sophisticate might think otherwise, but Bond Street was a long way off, in another country entirely and it was
another person than the one Maggie now recognized in herself who had agonized over which neutral shade  of carpet for which room in a branch of John Lewis
big enough to cover the whole of this row. There were exquisitely furnished houses in Warbling and, occasionally, well dressed people who did not do their
buying here, and it was when they replaced their
finery that the rest had the benefit. The richer of
Warbling (the larger houses behind the town and out
of the wind; the buildings with lawns, away from the
warren of narrow streets of mixed fortunes adjacent
to the seafront) dutifully recycled clothes, artefacts,
pots and pans, linens, redundant toys, but mostly
clothes, into the charity shops.

There was a time of her life when she would not
have been seen dead inside a charity shop and
Maggie regarded her present pleasure in their very
existence as an indicator of how much she had
changed: she loved them without a thought and so
did everyone else. It was almost mandatory to explore
them on a weekly basis; it was risk-free shopping; it
was a common denominator for the eldery retired in
Harris tweed jostling politely with impecunious
young mothers with babes in arms, each with a different
avenue to explore and nobody minded the fact
that windows would be rehung with dead Aunt
Ethel's velvet curtains, or that Jimmy went to school
in the cast-off clothes of someone two forms higher.
The same garments were unrecognizable on a different
body; they changed with a new owner. Reborn,
rejuvenated, given a lease of life, Peter said. The
shops were an acceptable aspect of change, decay
and death, but there was another thing about the
clothes. Displayed on hangers, crushed together like a
crowd trying to get out of a door, it was impossible to
visualize who might have worn them last. There
were uniformly coiffed, grey-haired ladies who wore the
stock and counted out change with great precision,
sharing the excitement of bargains. Maggie had a distinct preference for one shop out of the five, Timothy
preferred Oxfam for the towels and sheets, while she
favoured Age Concern for varied clothing and the
manager's frivolous inability to turn away any kind of
hat.


There were better things to do; she knew it, but she
could not do what she had set out to do - find
Angela - and she did not want to digest her encounter
with Tanya; she did not want to do very much at all.
It was a state of non-specific indecision, halfway to
misery and useless introspection, so she pressed her
nose to the window of the shop. Dear God, there was a swimsuit in there, draped artfully over a plastic
plant and topped with a deerstalker, dreams of winter
and summer combined. Someone would buy it to
encourage the weather to change, and if it didn't fit, It
didn't matter. Seasons did not dictate stock; winter
coats were next to summer cottons, woolly scarves
along with beads and boots marking time with sandals on the floor. Maggie loved an organized mess.
New hats, right at the back there, hats left over from
forgotten weddings and christenings and never kept
for funerals, all the more interesting for being dented.
She needed a hat like she needed a hole in the head.

She needed prayers, not a hat, but Henry needed a
hat and as long as somebody needed a hat, there was
reason to look.

Think of the devil and he arrives; never was the
saying truer than in a small town. Pausing for a
minute, she caught Henry's reflection in the glass,
standing beside her looking through the window in
perplexity, as if her thinking of him had conjured his
presence. He had noticed the dirt on his leather jacket
and was trying to rub it off. She touched his arm; the
material felt rough and ruined and his arms were held
stiffly. He smiled his infectious, forgiving smile and
she found herself smiling in return. Oh dear, what
had she done to him.

'Were you waiting for me?'
'Nope, but I'm glad you're here. I've never been
inside a thrift shop. Don't know the code.'
'Henry, you haven't lived. There is no code.'

There was a surge of warmth and a draught of
smells. From the makeshift changing room at the
back there came a bellow of laughter before a woman
emerged in a skirt which touched her ankles and
gaped round the middle. Henry could see how this
was a place where looking ridiculous and being too fat
was a cause for celebration and perhaps in this town,
the beautiful people were few and far between. He
eased himself out of the jacket which saturation or
something had wrecked to the extent that it had
changed in colour as well as in size and made him feel
fatter than anyone. His eye was drawn to the dearstalker, he reached for it and put it on his head. It was oversized for a large man and the brim descended to
his nose to land on the bridge of his glasses, so that he had to tilt his head back in order to see. A very silly person was visible in the cheval glass, looking like a retard newly released from an institution which could
have kept him in, while next to him, made a foot  higher by the addition of a large black hat with an
excrescence of veil and a broken feather, Maggie
peered at them both with her head at a similar angle.
The black hat was like a piece of broad stovepiping, the net which exploded from the top a desiccated
bird's nest. The feather had once been turquoise. 
They looked at their own images seriously and
nodded in unison. The hats wobbled. Slowly, Maggie removed her hat with a flourish and handed it to him. 
He took off the deerstalker and handed it to her. Each  donned the other hat. Sizes were deceptive. She wore
his hat halfway down her face with the peak turned to
the side, giving her the profile of a duck, while the
stovepipe sat on his crown like a saucer on top of a
cup.

'I'll take two,' Henry said.
'No sillier than the hat you lost,' Maggie said.
He handed her a scarlet beret which made her look
like a tired streetwalker in a 1950s French film, while
the blue Breton cap she handed him gave him the
look of an idiot savant. The balaclava he tried next
was so difficult he knew he was as honour bound to
buy it as never to wear it. Released from temporary
blindness, he saw Maggie, wearing a tartan cap, leaning
against the counter and shaking silently while
immediately behind her the manager was in the act of
selling Henry's leather jacket. He watched without
protest as it was carried out of the door by a man several
sizes smaller than himself and wondered why he
had ever liked it, and there was a moment as the door
closed when he seriously wondered if it was his coat
at all.

'How did you know I lost a hat, Maggie?' he asked
over his shoulder as, now well into the swing of
things, he looked at a crowded rail of unattractive and
musty-smelling woollens. There was a way of behaving
in here which would not be useful in other shops.
Here, you could treat the clothes as if they were
already yours and nobody gave a damn. 'You told
me,' she said airily, and he tried to remember if he
had.

He found a jacket: brown, serviceable and cleanly
nondescript, seven dollars and big enough for that
sum to be able to shrink with impunity. She had
bought nothing and said that was not the point. To
the side of the lady counting change and yelling comments
into the tiny changing area beyond, there was
a wodge of scarves spilling from a basket. He sorted
through them, feeling the harsh texture of synthetic
fabrics, and then his fingers encountered something
softer. Pulling at it, he saw the edge of a cream,
embroidered shawl. He felt the texture between his
fingers, thrust it back and then pulled it out again. It was old and yellowed, but still soft. Henry held it
against the light and saw the holes and a label stating £5. No wonder it had not moved: £5 was a lot in a 
thrift shop. He seemed to remember he had spent 
much more than that, even in India, twenty years ago. 
He fancied it smelt of heat, spices and dust. Maggie 
had stopped laughing and looked at him with concern. Tears stung his eyes. 'Nobody should be thrown 
out, he said. 'Nor their belongings either.' 

'Would you want them all to die with you, Henry?' 
'No. I hate waste.'
'Time we talked properly. Henry. No messing.'
'Time you stopped fobbing me off.' 
'Yes.'

The jacket felt inexpensive rather than cheap and
he felt it gave him anonymity. Now that his shoes
were broken in and his hair unstyled he could meld
into this street by the simple expedient of wearing
someone else's clothes. Maybe he would begin to
think and talk in the same roundabout way, never
quite getting to the point, like they did. People who
looked like Edward seemed to command respect,
people who looked like him certainly did not. No one
would know him now. Out in the street, the sunlight
blinded him. It ricocheted off the wet ground and
straight into his eyes. He stuffed the balaclava into his
pocket and resolved to get rid of it soon, lifted his face
to the light and sniffed in sheer pleasure at the sensation
of relative warmth. Maggie pulled at his arm and
he resisted the irritated urge to shrug her off, not
because he didn't like her close, for all her cryptic
commentary, but really, she should stop leading him
round. He wasn't a dog.

'This way,' she said, urgently.
'Which way?' And he must stop asking questions.
She pulled, he resisted, bumped into a person made
featureless by the reflected light. 'Sorry,' he said,
automatically.
'Angela,' Maggie said formally. 'How nice. I was
just coming to see you.'

The figure of Angela Hulme recoiled, shopping
bags rustling angrily.
'Oh, really? Don't bother. And don't bring him.'
She leaned forward, thrusting her face into Maggie's,
close enough to exchange breath, speaking through
clenched teeth, loud enough for everyone to hear.
'Do you know what he was doing on Sunday? He
was putting his dirty hands up my little girl's jumper,
that's what he was doing. He won't leave her alone.
He wants locking up. So keep him away or I'm getting
him arrested. Are you listening to me?'

Henry saw himself captured in a brief reflection, in
the plate glass window of the betting shop on the
other side of the road, where a posse of men were visible
only because their noses were planted against the
glass. He looked like a shifty specimen himself and
all he got was the impression of a dozen sets of cold
eyes. The urge to make a face and stick out his tongue was quick in passing. The population moving
through the bottleneck at the junction of two streets
parted like a wave against a breakwater. This time,
Henry allowed himself to be guided away. He did not
feel quite so anonymous any more.



Inside these walls, dress becomes important. 'Taking care'
with appearance is encouraged and we have our own
clothes. Taking care of washing and clothes is tantamount
to taking care of self, not letting go entirely, although the
thought is tempting. There's a sharp division in the reactions
to compliments, so that if I were to say to my friend
in the kitchen, 'You look nice', the response could be pleasure,
hostile suspicion or a denial of looking nice at all, accompanied by the explanation that the dress, skirt,
whatever are really pieces of shit. This may mirror the
generally low self-esteem: I'm not a shrink; I don't know,
but I still think a compliment is worth the risk of a slap in
the face.

There's a hairdressing salon, too, as part of the educational
programme; there are some fine hairstyles. It looks
like a regular salon, bit old-fashioned, with the difference
that all scissors and implements, numbered and coded, go
back into a safe, triple locked against the wall, at the end
of the day. Just like the knives in the kitchen, displayed
beneath bulletproof Perspex to show how the regime is
only a distant relative to normal life after all, although
the odd reactions to compliments are probably the same
when I think of it. If ever I told Maggie she looked nice in
the days of her metropolitan chic, she'd always tell me
what a bargain it was. Tanya loves clothes in her own fastidious
and possessive way, they had huge importance for
her, because she'd once been dressed in rags, I suppose.
Harry was too messy to notice.

There, I was going to write a page without mentioning either of them, but since there will never be a day when I
do not think of them, trying to evade it on paper is futile.
I was trying to resist telling the story, but it has been gnawing at me, the fact that no one knows the truth, no 
one who is ever going to tell it, I hope, and while I thought
I wouldn't mind that, I do. Each night I write a little of this, either resisting or avoiding the urge to write a literal
description of what happened... and at first I didn't do
it in case someone found it. Now I know it would make
precious little difference if they did; it would be my fantasy, but it grows and grows, this cancerous need to confess. 

It was the old rule in murder that the victim had to die within a year and a day of the crime in order for a charge to be made.  

This perpetrator has only to relive the facts on her own anniversary. 

A strange, garbled message from Edward... I do not want anyone to pry ... I cannot have them adding up
two and two to make five ... and yet... and yet, I wish  they would. 

There, I have survived his birthday and neither kissed 
nor told. I hope it will last the week.
FMC.



chapter	eleven.

'the awful thing about loss of reputation,' Henry
said, 'is the way it makes you feel a stranger to yourself.
Like this can't be you with this dirty mark stuck
to your forehead.'
'A shouting match on a street corner hardly
involves a loss of reputation. Henry,' she said sharply.
'Especially if you didn't have one to lose.'
'Well a minor form of it, then. I certainly felt disgraced.
Even you let go of me for a minute.'

Maggie was silent, acknowledging the fact. 'I didn't mean to let go of you. I was going to hit her. She's neurotic.
Everyone knows that.' Henry shook his head.
'Nobody knows that I'm a guy who fights shy of
kids,' he said. 'This kind of stuff sticks like shit on a
shoe.'
'It's a convenient accusation,' Maggie said, furiously.
'It justifies her in locking you in the castle and
it makes sure you don't go near her again. It panders
to the idea of the paedophile as bogeyman; it justifies
her calling the cops and making up anything she
wants.'
'She wouldn't want to make her daughter tell lies.'
'She wouldn't have to. It wouldn't have to go that
far. She could get you brought in for questioning,
stuck in a cell for an hour or two and--'
'No, NO.'
'... And then withdraw the accusation. The object would be achieved, wouldn't it? An hour of that and
you and your claustrophobia would be gone.'

Henry let that pass. They sat in the pier caff. Henry
had watched her walk straight through the door with the unerring sense of direction of someone who came here often and always sat in the same place, away from
the counter and the cosier area of the place. She would
always sit in the spartan summer room, with bare 
Formica tables and big metal windows showing nothing but sea. The tide was high, lapping at the fishing
platforms, echoing through the slats. Facing to the
front, it felt like being in the prow of a ship, watching
other ships and the endless theatre of the sky. With the
sun casting arrows into the waves, he could believe the
water was warm, welcoming, harmless. There was a
large brown pot of tea between them, so strongit
reminded him of the bitter tea of Ceylon. He wanted
to say as much, but resisted it. It was for the English to
discuss irrelevancies and set people tests.

She had torn an empty sugar packet into several
pieces, put her hands in her lap out of sight when she
saw him watching.
'I don't think you're right about what people think
of Mrs Hulme,' he said.' They don't think she's neurotic; you do. They think she does great, with a
beautifully turned out child, she doesn't complain.
And they'd be right, too, wouldn't they? She does a
terrific job with that kid. The kid's clever and brave
and bright. I had a kid like that, I'd be protective, too.
She's going to be a star, that kid.'

'You wouldn't go round accusing others of imagined
violations.'
'I don't know what I'd do. I don't know who I'd
love or hate or want to kill. I think I might do almost
anything to protect, wouldn't you? Especially if I chose that child, had her on trust and knew what she'd suffered
already.'
'You're very forgiving. Henry. She locked you in
the damned castle. And Tanya wanted to rescue you.'
'I'm not forgiving at all about that. Or about her
making up reasons for it. But I can't feel mad about
how anyone behaves when they feel under threat.
They're like that starling I found in the Runs, all mad
and silly.'
'And you got it out, did you?' He nodded. She
looked at him, judging him, deciding on something.
Go on, he urged her silently; be reckless, be honest.
'Look, I don't know about the Francesca you knew
once, but let me tell you about the one I met after the
police took her in. She was colder than ice. She
wouldn't let me look after her or interrupt the questioning, even when she went on saying one damning 
thing after another. She wasn't naive; she was trying  to give them no alternative to a murder charge. They
would have let her off with less, probably. To charge
murder you must prove the intention to do serious
harm. She gave them the proof. " When I went to look for him, I saw he had slipped through the boards and he was stuck. I considered what to do and thought this was the ideal opportunity to finish it all. I knew exactly what  I was doing and I knew in these temperatures he wouldn't last long . . . the suffering would be minimal. . . it was  quite deliberate..." And do you know, listening to her,  I believed her at the time. There was regret, but only 
of the most intellectual kind, I mean regret that it had
to be done.'

'I read it,' Henry said tersely. 'I read the whole of it.
The bit where she said where she was when she
decided it was inevitable. When they were on that
beach up the coast, in the summer before. The beach
where they go from the nursing homes because you
can get wheelchairs down, where she saw the cerebral
palsy sufferers who go there in the vacation, thirty
year-olds looking like old men, with their parents or
nurses, still wiping bottoms and dribbles and carrying
those skinny, twisted limbs into the sea. Some of them
blind. How people would be kind and help, once, and
then remember not to come back to the same place
the next day. How she would be an old woman with
an old child, picking up pebbles with one hand. She
would rather be in prison, she said. I might still have a
mind, she said.'

'You memorized it well.'
'Somebody had to. When you learn it like a text,
you can see the whole fucking thing is full of holes.
Completely acceptable as a thesis for a cause of death
because it has its own logic and she was so convincing.
Could be a true thesis, could be one entirely
rehearsed. She was good at learning things by heart.
Daddy taught her. But that boy didn't go out by himself.
That's the weakness.'

She stared into the remnants of the rust-coloured
tea, her hands still in her lap. She felt as if she were
being interrogated, complicit with Francesca and
ready to defend her, sick of questions and yet
resigned. This was, after all, what she had wanted.

'Why wouldn't he?'
'Francesca stopped other people asking about the
details of how Harry behaved by first giving a comprehensive
account of what happened which
effectively stopped everyone looking further and secondly,
lying about the prognosis. No one questioned
that either.'
'I did. But only later.'

He nodded approval. 'So you would know it might
not have been anything like as bad as she painted it.
He didn't have cerebral palsy in the worst form,
had hemiplegia and a normal intelligence. He might
not have turned into a cripple and I'll bet she was
believing he wouldn't. But there was no evidence that he often ran out on the pier, no evidence of behaviour patterns. Tim and Peter could have  helped, but no one asked them either. Angela pretended not to know, but of course she knew. It was all
gone, along with her clothes and the books and all the evidence of whatever therapy she used with him.
But I know that he hated the cold. The bad limbs feel
the cold more, swell, sometimes, they made him less
mobile, more embarrassed. I keep asking about the
damn rain. Rain's cold. Granny says the door stood
open most of the time, everyone welcome, but he
never went out further than the door. So what persuaded him on a cold day? To go out without his
jacket?'
'Did he?'
'Sure. No one found a jacket. A jacket might have
stopped him slipping too far through the boards . . . 
stopped the grazes, maybe. His clothes kept him afloat for long enough ... you don't go straight down.
A jacket adds weight. I should know.'
'It was sunny,' she said. 'Like today. And no one
found your hat, either.'
He placed his hands flat on the top of the table, 
daring her to present her own. She stared at the 
square tips of his practical fingers and he gazed 
beyond her artificially tinted head towards the vastness
of the sea.

'So where were you on that morning, Mrs Lawyer?
Taking the air while other folks got ready to take their
kids to school? You're crazy about this pier at dawn
and you might have been crazy about your cousin,
too. I didn't tell you about the damned hat; you
watched it go. You eavesdrop; you watch. It's what
you do. You filter and distort facts. When you've got
time left over from carrying around that damn load of
self-pity you put on your damn back. What's a bit of
hard fact going to do for you? Make your fake blonde
hair fall out?'

She rose to her feet to give the heels of her shoes
better purchase on the floor and gave him a resounding
slap with the palm of her hand. It left a red mark
on his cheek, a ringing in his ears and the echo of nervous
laughter from the counter. Then she turned
away from him and brushed the wind tangles out of
her hair with her fingers as if to announce this was
not a proper argument and she had better things to
do, merely a tiff. She looked like a furious princess
sitting with the pauper and him being insolent, too.
Sat back and crossed one leg elegantly across the
other.

Looking beneath the table with his head still
crooked from the blow, Henry could see that one foot
in a Cuban-heeled shoe was describing an irregular
circle, as if her toes hurt. Not as much as his face.

Totally unbidden, a pair of hands removed the teapot
and replaced it with another in the interests of peace. Maggie nodded thanks; he remained still. She tucked one hand into the mass of her hair and leaned on her
elbow, confidentially.

'You do not kick a woman with a hangover. Henry.
It simply isn't cricket. Were you saying something?'
'Oh no, not at all. Just wondering what you would
do to prove to me that you weren't a scheming liar
with some hidden agenda. And a sad old conscience
as big as an ice floe. Breaks the surface from time to time.'
'I don't have to prove anything to you. And I don't really do lies. I don't know how. Evasions, maybe.
My motives are entirely pure. Henry. It's the end result might be a bit sullied.' She had picked up her bag and shrugged on the coat. He followed her out of
the caff. The two men at the counter were suddenly busy, not looking in their direction. She ran down the steps on to the fishing platform with the intact boards
and again he followed. He had never been so far, only looked at it. Down below, with the caff resting on girders above their heads, they were in a different, shaded world. From a distance, the platforms looked as if they were built on afterthoughts, flying additions  to give ballast to the end of the pier, with nothing beneath the building, but from here there was one
continuous arena, guarded by waist-height railings,
high enough to avoid any accidental falling, low
enough to balance a rod. At one side, he noticed a
purposeless set of barnacled steps going down into
the sea. The height of the tide obscured most of
them; they seemed disused. The area beneath the caff
felt like a vast, open-sided shelter.

'Before everyone became so safety conscious,'
Maggie said, ever the tourist guide, 'when people
came here just to see the damn pier, they ran boat
trips from here, or the other side.' The undulating
water lapped at the steps and the platform boards
with calm curiosity. From the darkness of the shade,
the sea ahead appeared luminous with sunlight,
while inside and beneath, it made sucking sounds.
He was following her again, to the near edge of the
platform with the broken boards. 'I tell you what,
Henry,' Maggie was saying, chattily, 'you don't trust
me one teeny, weeny bit, so what about a nice
medieval test? Either I'm a scheming liar and a bit of
a witch or I'm not. Bloody well decide to trust me or
I'll jump in.'
'Oh, for Chrissakes . .. what would that prove?'
'That I mean what I say.'

He shook his head, prepared to laugh at her, grinning
contemptuously until she threw him her coat
and kicked off her shoes. She wore tight-fitting pants
and a sweater and the laughter died as she placed one
neat foot on the bottom rung of the railings, swung
herself over and hung on to the other side, looking
down at the water. The drop was about the same as
her own height; she seemed to be considering it, holding
on to the rail and looking down, judging the
distance, wiggling her toes. Then she let go with arms  outstretched and a banshee yell and dropped. He
scarcely heard a splash; the water slurped and
echoed, like an animal with appetite. Henry let the
coat fall and ran to the railings.

She hit the water on her back, star shaped, sank
briefly and reappeared. He could feel the current and
almost touch the swell. She was treading water furiously,
shook her head to get the hair out of her eyes
and then, as his eyes adjusted to the sun on the sea, she rose on the cusp of the swell and was swept
beneath the pier. Henry felt a groan tear itself out of
his chest: he peered down, heard the sucking sound
of the mountainous water gurgling among the buttresses
beneath, imagined the crump of a body driven
against concrete. Which way would the current go?
Would it take her out to sea, in to land? Would it
merely sweep her beneath the lethal superstructure of
this thing? Down here in this cavern, they were
entirely out of view; no one from the caff would
notice, yet, or was the constant shifting of the ocean a
noise sufficient to deaden any other sound? Lifebelts? Where? Rescuers? Where? Jesus God, why did they all
want to die  Paralysis gripped and he did nothing,
then at last began to shout and run in the direction of
where she had vanished, dropping her coat, ripping at
the buttons of his secondhand jacket with stiff,
clumsy fingers. He saw a lifebelt and grabbed it; it
wouldn't budge. And then, like some ghost, that
damned black dog appeared and barked at him.
Stood in front of him and barked. He followed it to
the steps and tripped on his way, his yelling echoing
back into the cavern, whipped away by the greater
sound. The steps - he would go down the day trippers'
steps and get into the water; anything better
than nothing; the shoes would weigh him down: fuck
the shoes.

He ran, climbed over the locked gate at the head of
the steps, stumbled down, feet crunching on shells.
He could see the steps continuing below the clear
water, an invitation into another world and another
life below, the steps all crooked and wavy, distorted
and oddly inviting if it were not for the cold. Stunning
cold on his skin, the afterthought of a scientist: how
long could one survive this? Four minutes? One? Two? His waist was lapped with ice; the weight of water
shoved at his chest. Don't drown, not you; I couldn't
bear it. And there was Maggie, hauling herself up by
the same railing he touched, gasping for breath. He
grabbed at the other arm and hauled. They both fell
backwards on the steps, barnacles sharp on his back, relinquished hold of one another and scrambled back
up. She was shaking and flicking water from her fingers;
he could not decide whether she was helping his
progress or he hers until they both stood upright on
the platform, breathing heavily. When she smiled a
lopsided smile, his fury was uncontrollable. He
grasped her hair in both hands and shook her until
she rattled. A momentary lapse; he would have yelled
instead but his voice was all gone. His hands fell to his
side and he saw the water streaming from his cloththes.

'You crazy lunatic . . . You .. . you . . .'
'Come on. Henry, before someone calls a fucking
lifeguard. Come on.'

Back to where they were, collecting coats, putting
them on; she forcing feet into shoes, both of them
striding back down the Titanic length as if it were
perfectly normal to do it in a dripping trail of sea-
water. Two fishermen, the only ones, stared. Maggie grinned at them; they winked, acknowledging some kind of joke, and Henry felt perfectly hysterical. The mark on his forehead was now a gigantic turd. They
passed through the nondescript portals of the
entrance and the notice sea temperature today is . ..  and he shuddered. Her car was parked next to the
hotel, bravely bearing a parking ticket. Inside  it,
heater full blast, he felt as if he had come out of the
bottom of a pond. The only remotely gratifying thing
was her hand trembling violently as she lit a cigarette.

'Do you believe me now?' 
'I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to
believe!' he yelled. 'Except you being mad as a snake. What kind of fucking trick was that?'
'Language, Henry, you're becoming quite AngloSaxon.'

She was smoothing her dripping hair with her free
hand, making a face in the rearview mirror. She
dropped the cigarette out of the window and started
the car. He leaned over, twisted the key back so the
engine stopped. She should stay still; no driving yet.
She did not protest, spoke through chattering teeth
and uncontrollable shivering.
'It was a trick you learned as a child in order to
scare your parents to death and make them take
notice of you, if you had them. Let the current take
you from one side to the other. I did it Christmas
Day when I was twelve. Last chance.'
'You bitch.#'
'If only I was,' she said. 'Life would be so much
easier.'

There was this insane cheerful thought at the back
of her mind which cleared it beautifully and made
everything as bright as the sun. No way would Philip
ever have attempted to get into the water and find
her; he disliked getting wet. It was always the thought
that counted.

They sat in his room. She admired the tidiness of it,
the carefully stacked papers, the book of poetry, the
laptop, the room of the soon-to-be-off, journeying
man. Henry preferred the penitent look of her, with
the metallic curls scraped back; she was a certain
kind of animal which looks better when sleek, wet
and unadorned. Outside, a row of seagulls lined the
edge of the waves, waiting for the revelations of the   tide. 

'Look, I'm sincerely sorry about this. Henry. When I was asked to represent Francesca, and it was her
choice, I certainly believed she was guilty. She made
me believe it. Which might have been why she asked
for me, because I always believed her, was always  slightly in thrall to her superior wisdom, she was
always more powerful than me. If she said a thing, it
was the truth. Will of iron. She was so calm, it was
repellent. And the calm could have meant she was  resigned to the truth, no room for self-pity, any pity,
or it could have meant a ridiculous level of self-control. Either was consistent with the way she was. We
always talk about her in the past tense, as if she was dead, don't we? May as well be. She won't talk to 
me. I broke my promise.' 
'She wasn't in a position to exact promises. I never can understand how she manages to manipulate from  afar.' 
'You give away your car, your video, your valuables, you can ask for things in return, can't you? On
one level, anyway, although the promise she exacted  from me had nothing to do with that. I promised on  my solemn, ten-year oath - we exchanged blood, you 
know, down in the moat of the castle, and a little  blood goes a long way - anyway I promised I'd never 
look into it. That I'd do her the honour of never questioning what she'd done. Accept it as all for the best,
she said. If she ever heard that Edward or I were
making further enquiries, and she would hear, somehow,
then she'd sack us and make a statement saying
we were deluded. She wanted her flat sold. and the
money given to Angela, that was all. Otherwise, forget
about it. I promised.'

'And?'
'I had to take it literally. Not difficult at first,
otherwise distracted, you see, by the relative disappointments
of my own life. Then it just creeps up, the
nonsense of the promise as well as everything else.
Some of the things you've thought of, some I have.
But I couldn't open the can of worms, I promised I
wouldn't. Somebody else had to do it. A stranger and
a determined stranger at that. Some completely objective
searcher after truth. Walking into Edward's office,
you were manna from heaven. We just had to tease
you along a bit.'

'A sting,' Henry said.
'You don't come with a bundle of preconceptions
and you can look at the place with a cold eye. That's an advantage. You don't know the people involved.'

'You lived here and you don't either.'
She paused. 'True.'
'Are we doing what she wants? That's the main
thing.'
'I've no idea. We could turn away. God knows, I've
wanted to.'

He stood by the window and watched the seagulls.
They looked like sturdy, disinterested guardians of
the shore, incapable of squabbling or even flying,  waddling round, awaiting orders and he no longer
felt the same. 

'I don't know if I'm trying to prove guilt or innocence,' Maggie said. 
'I want that boy's death to have a purpose,' Henry answered. 'I can't think of another way to justify it.' 

He looked with distaste at the jacket flung on the bed. 
'So I'm going on my fucking errand. With my fucking jacket.'
'Where? Can I come, too?' 
'Nope. I'm going to see an Uncle Joe and I don't want you wrecking things, because . . .'
'I'm not objective,' she finished, flatly. He grasped
the arms of the chair in which she sat, leaned into it
and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She flinched and
then smiled sadly. "Course you aren't objective,'
Henry said. 'You're a lawyer. And you might get
cold.'


It was a grey hinterland into which the taxi with
creaking springs took him round the back of the town
where big houses diminished into small and the grey
fields began. Never too cold or too hot, Francesca
had told him; she was wrong about the first and he
had no means of testing the second. He did not think
he would wait to see the spring or feel the legendary
heat of a summer; he could not imagine a day when
that cold ocean would welcome a swimmer without
the water feeling like a grave. The flat land gave way
to fields of undistinguished crops and three miles
beyond the town, his taxi took him through the
Fergusons plant. The sight of the factory shocked
him; it was a reminder of another world. It rose out of
the mist like a strange mirage, all chrome and steel,
spreading out across the emptiness. The buildings
shone with acres of glass buttressed by gleaming
metal: the lights of a hundred offices and laboratories
illuminated the gloom of the afternoon and the vast
carpark housed hundreds of new cars. This was his
own territory; this was where he would work, if he
stayed, in a place constructed out of anything but
brick. Henry asked the driver to slow down. They
crawled, creaking, beneath the bridge which spanned
the road in an arch of steel, connecting one wing of
millennium industry with another, and through the
glass of the walls Henry could see a rising escalator on
one side, thronged with people. The edifice radiated
cleanliness, efficiency, prosperity; the contrast
between it and the town he had left behind was
breathtaking. It looked like a spaceship recently
landed on alien terrain and Henry reminded himself
that this was where he rightly belonged: in buildings
like this half of his adult life had been spent.
Perfecting scientific processes to improve the lives of
the twenty-first century. Pro-cesses, not prahcesses, he told himself, and you don't put flowers in a vaice,
you put them in a vahz. Grasshopper mind. Henry,
he told himself as they left Fergusons behind. And the
natives imagined that all Fergusons did was make
Viagra. The fucking English might as well be going
round covered in fucking woad; they were blinkered
and prejudiced; they did everything they could to
keep themselves confined.

It felt like a long time since ever he had ridden  an
escalator or even seen a building bigger than a castle. Or seen one committed to the future, and the sight of these made him grimace with homesickness. There
would be no smoking and no dogs allowed inside Fergusons. Henry had a faint sense of panic at the 
thought of returning to normal life. It suddenly
seemed impossible to imagine himself going back to a
structured existence which had nothing to do with the
past, or secrets, or idiotic promises made by himself 
or anyone else: he had a yearning for a world of
bright, clinical lights, no shadows, no dark corners, no 
suspect motives, nothing but the driving imperative  of work which had bored and dismayed him and now 
seemed infinitely attractive. 

Everything in that little town, so old, so pessimistic 
compared to this. People content to remain in a tiny
world. They were not even interested in prosperity.
Look at Maggie: bright enough for a brilliant career,
content to junk it, Edward, an attorney who failed to
make money; Francesca who let her own, unambitious
life eat her alive because she could not or would
not move . . . didn't she want to get on? They all
avoided their duty to be happy. It was the sea that
mesmerized them all into collective stupidity. Under
floods that are deepest. Which Neptune obey. Over rocks
that are steepest. Love will find out the way. Get out of
here.

The car crawled uphill, gears grinding on a steep
gradient, and the ocean appeared below at a turn in
the road. Henry saw the jagged outline of a white
chalk cliff meeting the shining water, found himself
smiling. The guttural sound of his humming alarmed
the driver, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat and
revved the engine.

Henry had been happy that his own father had
never had to leave his own house in order to die. Died
with a view of the walnut tree in his precious back
yard, without any of the upheaval involved in a
removal to a place like the one the taxi finally reached
on the headland. Dad always did have a good sense of
timing and he would have liked the view. The ideal
place if you liked to watch from the windows either
the stormclouds on the horizon or the golfers on the
greens behind, but it seemed to Henry far too remote
for its purpose of housing the old. It had an air of
faintly distinguished decrepitude, like the occupants, but the isolation of it made him obscurely angry. Put
the elderly on a headland, away from sight, as if they
were lepers of a kind. The interior reassured him
slightly. It was warm and green with plants, like a
comfortable hotel. The woman in the office seemed
kind.

There must be some confusion, she said. No one
had visited Joseph Chisholm in months. He lay sleeping in a pleasant room at the back, overlooking the
golf course, waking to moments of increasingly rare animation when there was football on the television.  Still able to goose the younger female staff occasionally but deteriorating like a piece of old stone. The 
man who received the Sunday visitor was that one,
over there, the one with the white hair and ruddy
skin, holding the newspaper. He had taken possession
of Joseph's favourite place as soon as Joseph had
taken to his bed. He loved company, that one. Sat
and watched the comings and goings as if he was watching a play. Henry took the seat alongside. The 
old man had a smile of great sweetness. His speckled  hands folded the newspaper with neat certainty and he looked at it, as if pleased with the achievement. 

'I think,' he said, 'that I only have a small part in 
this play. I knew you'd come. Or someone like you. She won't come any more, will she? She won't.'
'I don't know who you mean.'
'You liar, of course you do. My beautiful
Angela .. . her beautiful daughter. Those two. You've
stopped them.'

Henry patted the mottled hand. It had the feel of
warm, dry paper. He knew the feeling of it. 'Tell me
why,' he suggested. The old man sighed. 'Oh, it's
obvious, isn't it? She might realize that my name is
George, not Joe. She might realize that one old roan is
distinguishable from another. But I couldn't resist,
you see. In she came with that gorgeous child and
said. Are you Uncle Joe, I've been sent to see you. I
knew she'd be wasted on miserable old Chisholm, so
of course I said, yes, who else would I be? It doesn't matter who you are at my age.' He sighed and the
smile twinkled back across a distinctive, ruddy face,
with devastating effect. 'I was once handsome, you
know. Like all Chisholms are. I used to eavesdrop
when the last one came: I'd look at the way he listened.
They were good at that. Handsome or mad,
usually both. And all I had to do after that was occupy
the same seat and listen myself. Which has been a
positive pleasure.'
'Why shouldn't it continue? What made you think
it would stop?'

The face of the old man blurred into that of
Henry's father, weatherbeaten from fishing, and the
greenery behind blurred into the yard. The walnut tree, the lines of the face becoming beautiful, and he
was going to ask him about Francesca until he
remembered that this man had never met Francesca
and might know nothing.

'I'll come and see you if she doesn't,' he said,
rashly.
'Shall you? How absolutely lovely.' He began to
fold the newspaper, slowly, sadly. 'I'd prefer Angela,
I must admit, and that talkative child. She talked and 
talked and then Angela didn't bring her back. They
talked as much as one another actually.' He crossed
his legs and his arms. 'She shouldn't have done it, you   know, it was frightfully bad . . . that poor child ....'
'Why do you think she won't come back?' Henry
wanted to shout it.
'Because she told me too much,' the old man said, simply. 'Far too much. I knew there would come a
point when she would realize that.' He smiled again,
blithely confident of Henry's understanding, then the
smile faded into a frown. 'Oh dear, you young people are so slow.' He leaned forward. Henry could smell 
mint on his breath, admired the closeness of his shave
and the careful combing of his hair. A man who had
not lost an element of vanity and was always expecting a visitor. 'You see, I never really knew what she
was describing, or any of the people she was talking
about, so I just agreed with everything she said.
Agreeing, placating, an echo, really. I didn't want to
talk: I just wanted the joy of listening to her. And
once it's obvious that you're spellbound by a person  dying to talk and you really won't be able to repeat it 
because you're too old and dumb, well you're a whatsit, aren't you?'
'A receptacle,' Henry said.
'That's the word. Fancy a Yank knowing a word
like that. She'll bring us some tea if you wave.'

Henry had a yearning for a double espresso from
Starbucks, the sort of coffee that made a man sweat.
'And you can smoke out here,' the old man added.
'That's why Chisholm sat here. Probably what's
killing him now too.'

'Well I guess a cigarette helps conversation,' Henry
said, producing a packet in case this was a hint. The
offering was looked upon with disapproval. Henry
put it away. He had misunderstood. The only oil the
conversation required was the weak tea which he
loathed; he should have brought a gift. They looked
downhill over a peerless view, enhanced by the glass
of Fergusons laboratories, or ruined by it, depending
on your point of view.

'I'm eighty-seven, you know,' the old man said with
a touch of defensive pride. 'Lost my wife to a Yank at
the end of the war. You had the money, you see. Now
what was I saying?' Henry cleared his throat in an
attempt to modify his accent when next he spoke.
'And I suppose you work at that place,' he gestured
towards the barnacle on the view. 'Where they make
all them happy pills that can't keep me walking or
daft old Chisholm alive.'

'You were saying that you were a receptacle and
Angela told you too much,' Henry whispered helpfully, speaking through pursed lips to make his voice
sound rather more BBC.
'Speak up, will you? Yes. Far too much, but it does
make a change from someone sitting there and
watching the clock, wishing they could go. A bit like
you. Talk, talk, talk, about this and that, such a storyteller she should go on the wireless. Not much of it
true, I shouldn't think. People like making up things
to make their lives more interesting. Never enough
drama in daily life, I found. You need a newspaper for that. That's where things happen. Not that I believe them entirely either. Mad axeman strikes again, that
sort of thing. Not here he doesn't. It's more like frog
remains on coastline for third day running.'

Henry smiled. He was beginning to see how
visiting this old man was less than a chore. He himself
could feel an anxious enjoyment.

'What kind of stories did she tell? Murder, rape
and mayhem? Burglary, robbery? Happens in the
best of places.'

'Well, I wish it happened here. Not in Warbling it
doesn't. Absolute nonsense. The way that girl of hers
talked in the beginning, well, of course I didn't believe it. She learned how to fantasize from her mother, I
suppose. Very entertaining. Matilda told such dreadful
lies...'
'It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes,' Henry
murmured.
'... about someone I was supposed to know pushing
a child off the pier, as if anyone would. I just said, how dreadful and let her go on while her mother went to the
lavatory. Then She had to go and sort out the car, water in the brakes or something on the way up this damn hill. And anyway, telling me all this and getting me to
pull faces made poor Tanya upset. I managed to shush her before her mother got back, get her to talk about
school. I didn't really approve, you know.'
'Approve?'

The old man lowered his voice and leaned forward.
'She could describe it in such detail, you see.
How the child was pushed by a dog on the pier. Her
mother shouldn't have told her such stories, even though she's an angry woman. Very. They need a
dog. Mind, I wasn't going to say anything. None of
my business and she might have stopped coming to
see me. Angela's forgotten about it. Other worries.
Now she's got a whatsit, you know, one of those buggers
who goes after kids, a . . .'
'Paedophile,' Henry supplied through gritted teeth.
'One of them, running round the town. I ask you.
I told her to get a dog!' He laughed uproariously at his
own suggestion. The teacups rattled as he slapped
the table. 'Bite his balls off. Lock him up!' Henry
winced. Then the old man became sombre. 'I might
have caused offence,' he said sadly. 'Is that why she
won't come any more?'
'No, I'm sure it isn't that. And I'm sure she'll come
back. Why shouldn't she?' Henry rose from his armchair.
He needed to think; the warmth was oppressive
and the door was closed, he could feel the beginnings
of the familiar agitation and he was ashamed of it.
'And so shall I,' he added, wondering at the wisdom
of what might be a lie. The old man grabbed at his
sleeve, he shook his hand, feeling the surprising strength of the bones. His own hand seemed enormous by comparison.

'Those things she told me . . . None of them were
true, were they?'
'No,' Henry said. 'Of course not. Remember Matilda? None of them.'
The old man winked, a slow, deliberate wink.'you haven't heard the half of it. So you'll have to come back, won't you? Bring some of that Viagra with
You. We could do with it.'


He stood on the headland and watched as the  fog rolled in. Down below, before the mist covered it in
blanket, the Fergusons buildings caught the light and then faded into an insignificant part of the white landscape. Without being able to see the details he could
make out the shape and thought he knew where
everything was. When the fog rolled back, a slightly
different picture would emerge, but he would still
know what was there. And he had been looking at
all the wrong books.

The taxi moved off with evident relief and a horrible grinding of gears. He had the impression that the
vehicle could find its own way back to the flatlands, to
speed home on automatic pilot for the sake of a real
fire in a warm garage. He wanted to weep. The driver
grumbled under his breath because of the open
window which made them both shiver.

He got out in front of the House of Enchantment
and paid what seemed a small sum. Almost a third
world sum. He thought that might have been why he
always went back to the East for his travelling; the
cheapness and the idea that it might have been a
deciding factor did not exactly cheer him up. So
undemandingly demanding, the English. They had
an aversion to making money.

He crossed the road and sat on the steps which
led from pavement to shingle beach. The cold seeped
into his ass, arse, bottom, behind, bum, an English
person doesn't have an ass, not even to go to work on. His
spine, then. The cold was calming and chilling; he
liked it.

Then the dog with the warm muzzle inserted a fat,
moist nose into the crook of his elbow as he held it
tight against his side in the awful jacket. He felt the
interference of a snout, burrowing away in there. Snout: an informant; a muzzle. He had looked it up.
He moved his arm to contain the shoulders of the
animal, loosely, exerting no pressure, no suggestion that it could not go whenever it wanted to go. The big
black dog sat beside him, allowing the touch of his
arm, both of them staring straight ahead.
'You've got some secrets, I bet,' Henry said.



I was always proud of my ability to keep a secret. The  obligation to keep a confidence was one I learned early and it was one of the earliest surprises to discover that not everyone else did the same. It was exactly the same with
promises. I would be the one waiting at the bus stop
because I had promised, but no one else turned up, because
there were promises which are not really supposed to be
kept, just as there are secrets which are meant to be told.
The instruction 'don't tell' might mean 'do tell', but only selectively, with the right interpretation. It might also mean what it says. To save a minefield of confusion, I've  abided by my original principle of keeping quiet as the proverbial grave and denying the knowledge I've
received rather than break the seal. The irony of this highmindedness is that it turns the keeper of the secret into a liar while the teller of it goes on to share the burden with
other close and confidential friends, all seventy-five of them.
The one thing I've learned is never to confide anything
vital about myself unless the person told is quite unable to repeat or understand. Confessing to a brick wall, in other
words, someone who can't be moved or distressed, simply  to get it off one's chest and rehearse out loud what to do. 

Which is why I took the coward's way out and told
Uncle Joe, the day after. He was deaf, after all, and mim icked the act of listening with every sign of enjoyment.  (Such dissemblers, the Chisholms.) I could decode what he 
said, but few others could. And he understood, poor soul,
what it was like to face loss of reputation and disgrace. He
might have forgiven me.

I told him how the door was open; I hated closed doors.
It was far too early and wet and Harry was fractious.
Tanya appeared in new clothes, a jacket of shiny stuff she
loved and wanted to show off. Harry clung to her; he
always did. I encouraged them go out together. God help
me, only on to the pier where I could see them, and not for
long. She wanted to go; Harry wanted her to stay inside
with him, but the lure of doing anything with Tanya was
too great to resist. They went. The peace was marvellous.
I don't know how long after that I realized I'd sent him
out of doors without a jacket and I started to go down the
stairs with it. Quite some time, I think. I crossed the
road. She was huddled by that statue, trying to get inside
it. Hysterical. Her sleeve was torn.
There was a black dog running off the pier. Harry
hated dogs; they knocked him over.

That dog . . . It reminded me of how she had been
when she first came to us and I tried to capture her on
camera. A scared, vulnerable savage, with nothing to call
her own and no ability to trust. Rudderless as a boat in a storm; she was nothing but a promise. Angela, somewhere,
Neil's fishing stuff, he often left it. . ..

I can't go on with this. None of us ever really tell the
truth. It might be better to be deaf and dumb, like Uncle Joe.
FMC.


chapter twelve.

'I wish you'd turned up sooner,' Henry said to the
dog. 'Your eyes and ears for a start. Love the coat.'
The dog shuffled. Henry stroked the rough hair of its
flank and tickled its chest. There was adequate flesh 
on the bones, contoured muscle on the legs and the
animal, though still, was poised for flight.  Don't let
me hold you back,' Henry told it, removing his arm.
The dog remained, turned a large head to sniff his
face and then, satisfied, leaned against him an resumed contemplation of the sea. The water
sounded suspiciously sullen beneath the mist, plotting
something.

Gradually, as the cold at Henry's back became
acute enough to be almost painful, the dog seemed to
hear a signal, shook itself and trotted away to the
right. It had the gait he had noticed before, unhurried,
even paced, like a distance runner with a long 
way to go and no doubt of the destination. Someone
cared for the dog and someone had taught it to cross
a road. An educated hobo with a place to sleep, so
they had something in common. Henry thought,
except that the dog, close to, was a handsome beast
which left a fine coating of hairs on his jacket. Inside
the house, catching sight of himself in a mirror in the
hall, Henry wondered how he had become quite so
sartorially challenged in such a relatively short space
of time.

The dim lighting of the hallway gas lamps irritated
him, although they did him the honour of blurring
his reflection. Gas lamps, in this day and age, for
Godsakes, as if the house was not merely a unit for
living but a piece of theatre. Which it was, he realized,
looking at the details he had scarcely noticed before.
The hall and the first stairwell were decorated with
oriental hangings and above these, flags. The mirror
was framed with ornate gilding and looked valuable
until careful examination revealed the chips of gold
paint. There was a reason for retaining the dim light
of the gaslamps with their delicate sconces and flickering
glow. Henry could hear the murmuring of the
radio from the kitchen; the rest of the place was comfortably
silent.

He looked into the dining room, where the walls
were covered with a variety of pictures, the windows
draped with heavy, faded velvet and the mantelshelf
covered with framed photographs set between two
tall candlesticks which were moved to the centre of
the table at mealtimes. The table itself was covered with a heavy linen cloth. Henry felt the surface  with his fingertips, the mended patches which were invisible to the eye when the table was laid with its magnificence of mismatched plates and cutlery, the  
items individually charming but never forming a  set.
The carpet, like the runner on the stairs, was threadbare and rich in colours. Mess up the artful
arrangement and all it would be was secondhand
junk.

The sitting room, currently empty of human life, followed the same pattern. There were gleaming  fire
tongs and old armchairs with hand-stitched covers
to obscure the frayed ends of the arms, rugs lying upon other rugs, a small table polished to such a
shine he had failed to observe its mended leg. Henry
looked at the photographs, framed, it seemed, in  driftwood, and saw the black and white image of two lithe young men dressed for swimming, standing against a backdrop of waves, laughing. There were no recent photos. Cameras cost money, Henry counted up what he had paid for his lodging and
was embarrassed by his late realization of the stringent budget which must govern their lives. No phone, no wasted expenditure, no new possession of any kind, except of course the video in the kitchen,  looking odd in there, like a garden spade in a bedroom. "

He guessed the source of the video. Francesca had
given her car to Angela, her books to the granny who
had never wanted them, anything else useful in her
apartment to various others. Did she use her gifts as
blackmail? Was there a price for receiving them, such
as Angela going to see Uncle Joe and Peter and Tim
guarding some votive flame for her dead son? Henry
noted the decor of his own room with new approval.
The ornateness of the ground and first floor fell away
into sheer simplicity by the time he reached the
second landing. Bare walls and striped wooden floors
of sweet, yellow pine, the runner on the stairs muffling
his footsteps, the old silk coverlets on his high
bed the only colour in the room apart from the
turquoise seat of a comfortable chair. A room for Van
Gogh to paint in celebration of a minimalism which
was not stark, but comforting. Peter was there, fussing
over the fire, coaxing the kindling to light and
embrace a log from the basket of wood he had hauled
upstairs. A small bucket held the ash cleared out of
the black iron grate. The missing shawl was neatly
folded over the bedstead. Peter grinned at him, not
quite comfortable with being seen on his knees, genuflecting
to his own labours.

'It is the cheapest form of heating, you know,' he
said defensively. 'Especially if you go out and find it.
We've got plenty of time for that. I think having time to make and mend is better than having money, don't
you?'

'Why did Francesca give you her video?' Henry asked, taking off his jacket and slinging it across
the room. How nice to have a garment he could treat
with contempt: he had an unaccountable desire to throw the contents of his suitcase, vitamins and minerals included, out of the window. Peter looked
surprised.

'Do you know, I was never quite sure why she did.
It simply arrived with all her tapes. She must have known we'd never use it much, apart from looking at
the one with darling Harry, 'cos we didn't evenhave
a telly before. We've no time for it, it's so unstimulating. I can't see the point in sitting down gawping at a film unless there's someone in it you know' 

The flames lit the logs. Peter looked on with satisfaction, as if the fire was his own invention and his
mastery of it a triumph. 

'There are other tapes?'
'Yes, of course. Cartoons, Walt Disney. Home
videos and kids' stuff. I must admit, I love The Jungle Book..:
'Can I see them?'
'Of course, you only have to ask. I'll bring it  up
here, shall I? Do us a favour, though. Keep Maggie
off the booze tonight. Otherwise she'll get depressed
and think about going back to her husband.'
'I didn't know she still had one.' Henry adjusted
the log with the toe of his shoe and watched sparks
fly.

'She doesn't. But she may be able to get one
returned from the cleaners if she wants.'
Henry was furious with all these ambiguities. The
log crackled, as if laughing. He wondered how much
extra money he should leave them when he left, only
he didn't want to go. He wondered about the etiquette
of relative poverty, remembered the same
puzzle from other travelling days. He was feeling
lightheaded.

'Do you know where she is?'
Peter looked at his watch. 'The pubs are open. She
could be there.'
'Well I doubt I'll keep her off the hooch; Henry
said. 'It's my turn for that.'

He would go back to the old man on the headland
with a bottle of whisky. Just like they did in the old
and new films, where all you had to do was pour alcohol
down the throats of reluctant spies and out came vino veritas. Fat  chance. It would not work with
Maggie either, any more than it would with the damn
dog. But he was still a tourist, obliged to experiment,
and perversely, he needed a noisier place than this for
analysing his thoughts.

Henry had never been much of a drinker. He could
hear his father say, what a pity, it did a man's career as
much good as harm and loosened up the soul, while
Henry himself thought it merely depressed it.
Freedom from addictions up until now had not managed
to save him from embarrassments, nor from the
contemptuous eyes of contemporaries when he fell
over his own feet. There were times, he thought to
himself, when he may as well have been drunk on all
the occasions when he was tongue-tied and sober.
You prudish guy, he reflected as he donned the
ghastly jacket and hit the road; prudish about drugs,  trying the stuff once or twice and hating the way it
made the company talk in monosyllables. He hated
loss of control, but the hell with it; if control was going to be lost it may as well taste nice. He would do
the famous English pub crawl, go native. 

The first beer in the first pub made him shudder.
He sipped at the foamy scum of a clear, warm soup 
and wanted to gag. The pub was called the Smugglers but showed no sign of serving the fine wines available on the other side of the Channel, smuggled or not. They liked slop. They actually preferred this
and did not seem to give a shit what they ate or drank away from home: just look at the menu on that blackboard. liver and onions, irish stew. When he went home, he would take that notice as an abiding
memory and laugh about it, but then a native from
here would find hash browns equally unappealing. The greatest cultural divide known to Western man 
was not one of nationality, he decided; it was simply 
the food and drink and the difference between those who lived in cities and those who lived away 
from them. 

He sipped his half-pint to aid his own reflections, 
wondering if Uncle Joe ever got to a pub and
whether it was wimpish to order a half-measure
when the other men had pints. Forgetting his specs
made him slightly myopic and dizzy, but no one else
was looking at anything much, except at him. They
were staring at him. Not consistently, he had to
admit and not many of them either, because at this
early point in the evening there were not so many to
meet his gaze and let their own slip away into the surface
of their pints or to the far point on the opposite
wall. They were the sort of glances exchanged with a
dead haddock in the fishmonger's. Conversation was
lacking. A man came in and said 'Lo and then took
his pint glass and went off to sit nursing it in a
corner. There was an interval Henry marked before
the customer moved or spoke and only then to present
the same glass on the counter with another 'Lo,
answered with a nod and a refill. There was the small
clink of money. Isn't this fun. Henry thought. Are
they always like this or is it me? The mist outside
seemed comparatively attractive. He left his drink on
the table and departed, pretending he was suddenly
in a hurry.

Which he was, but not out of need. He did not
like the idea of going into one pub after another
simply looking for Maggie: it made him feel like a
father trying to round up a wayward child or, even
worse, some jealous boyfriend. He had to admit the
thought of a returning husband piqued him for some
indefinable reason, probably because it was one 
more thing she hadn't explained to him and it irked
him. All these subtexts. Henry considered his own
life an open book from which anyone could read and
he found it difficult to see why everyone else kept
their pages stuck together. In the second pub, this
time sipping wine and taking refuge behind a news 
paper, he came to the conclusion that the
monosyllabic conversation between patrons was simply their natural, limited discourse; they just
didn't go in for back-slappings and big greetings. In
the third pub, he changed his mind. There was a
woman behind the bar who responded to his polite
request for a drink with a stony stare and then told
him to fuck off in a quiet, but definite command
which made him think better of asking why. He
went. So much for an evening of riotous inebriation.
Outside, he found himself looking for the dog.
Henry could feel the dirty mark of disgrace on  his
forehead and remember the shrill accusations in the
street. The fish and chips he ate sitting on a bench facing the statue at the entrance of the pier were solidly delicious, the more so for being served with spontaneous friendliness. There were only a dozen more pubs to go, increasingly crowded as the evening drew into night, and the prospect was distinctly unpalatable. Henry put the greasy paper into a garbage can like a good citizen and went back to
the place he called home.

He was becoming separated from anything he
could think of as home. His empty house in the environs
of Boston seemed utterly remote and the
splendid modernism of the Fergusons plant where
he might resume his career was equally alien. In the
house, there was a bridge game in the room Peter
called the parlour and up on his own floor Henry
found the TV, video and a stack of tapes.

'Two can play,' Maggie said evenly. 'You can fling
mud in the street against a nice and harmless man,
how dare you? I can take a stand on the same corner
and say how I found your daughter playing truant
from school, sadly neglected by her mother.'
'You bitch.'
'Now there's another accusation I keep denying
without it making much difference, I wonder why?'
Maggie said airily. 'And after I've bought you a nice
bottle of wine, too. Oh come off it and stop playing
hard to get. I'm not a nasty witch any more than you
are. Otherwise Francesca wouldn't have loved us. She
wasn't exactly discriminating about the people she loved - look at her bloody husband - but she did have
some judgement. Just drink it.'

Angela's hand strayed towards the glass Maggie
had poured and set down on her kitchen table. She
looked at it longingly and knew the drinking of it
compromised her. She had tried to shut the door in
Maggie's face, but Maggie was stronger. The child

was asleep and a shouting match would wake her.
Trapped. She wrapped her fingers around the bowl
of the glass to warm the red wine within and stop
Maggie noticing that her hand was unsteady. 

'Just tell me why you locked Henry Evans in the
castle overnight and disturbed my sleep, will you?
That'll do for starters,' 
'Neil should have ... It was a mistake.' 
'No, it wasn't. Tanya knows it wasn't. Don't give
me that crap. What was it you didn't want him to 
know? What's wrong with answering his nosy questions? What harm can it do?' Angela took hold of the
glass and swallowed half the contents. Good: drink the  rest, will you, Maggie urged silently. It makes fools of us all. ' 
'He brings back the guilt, that's what he does/,'
Angela said, in a rush. 'He's made Tanya remember what she ought to forget. It's not bloody fair.'
'Why should you feel guilty?'
'Are you mad or just stupid?' Angela yelled and
then remembered, stopped, went at the wine again
and took one of Maggie's cigarettes. She examined it
between work-worn fingers and then put it back in
the packet. 'Of course I feel guilty. I never liked
Harry . . . there was something about him I couldn't
like and I thought I was someone who loved all kids.
Well, I'm not. I love my own, that's all. I didn't want
to share her. I didn't want her held back by a kid like
Harry. He was so ugly. He needed such a lot. I'm
sorry, I detested him, which is enough to make
anyone feel guilty, isn't it?'

Maggie resisted the cigarette. The atmosphere
inside here was conspicuously smoke free, a good
example to children. She wanted to rush around and
open windows, let in a bit of healthy mist to neutralize
all the cleanliness.

'I don't think you can do much about native dislike,
can you? You either like someone or not, children
included,' Maggie said. 'What you feel doesn't matter
nearly as much as how you behave. You weren't mean
to him, were you? Didn't hit him or anything?'

There was a palpable hesitation. 'No ... I... No,
of course not.'
'Did anyone? Was there anyone he was afraid of?'
'NO! He wasn't afraid of anyone. No one gave him
any reason to be, everyone treated him with kid
gloves, even when he screamed. He was only afraid of
dogs. That was the one time when Neil hit him.'
'Neil?' The glass was empty. Maggie refilled it
quickly, spilling some down the side.
'Neil has rages. You don't think I'd have chucked
him out just because of the sex, do you, with Tanya
to consider? I couldn't have him throwing things
around.  And he always wanted to come back... well,
he did then. He tried to be more of a father then,
keep in my good books, win us round. He bought us
this dog, see. Typical, silly Neil, but he knew I'd been
thinking about it. Only when he brought it round,
this puppy, Harry was here. He was often here, just  as often as Tanya was round at Francesca's.' Maggie dabbed at the spilt wine on the table with a tissue and
watched the tissue turn pink. Harry was always
knocking things over, Peter said, a habit not confined
to children, but Harry was always afraid of losing his balance.
'...Such a sweet puppy, but Harry took one look  at it and screamed and screamed. He backed into a
corner and wouldn't come out. I told him not to be
so silly, but nothing worked. I dunno why,' she mused, 'but I reckon Neil sort of thought that the puppy was  his last chance, thought we'd be thrilled, but I told
him we couldn't have it, not with Harry reacting like
that and Harry being a bit of a fixture. I told him
he'd have to take it away, whatever he'd spent on it.
That's when he picked up Harry, shook him a bit
and gave him a clout. I think he hated Harry for being
in the way, nothing personal, that was all and that
was the only time.'

'The dog it was that died,' Maggie murmured.
'Whatever happened to it?' 
'Neil sort of shares it with Granny round the corner , she feeds it. It keeps on getting out. He never  could keep anything, Neil.' She was calmer now. And
is that all you wanted to hide? Maggie wondered.

'Anyway, that was when I told Francesca we
shouldn't be so dependent on one another. Separate
out a bit. Better for the kids. Why shouldn't Tanya
have a dog? But I don't suppose it helped, me saying
that. She might have thought I was telling her we
didn't want her at all, which wasn't true. Might have
pushed her further over the edge, so of course I feel
bloody guilty. She wasn't useless, she was bloody brilliant
and I don't know what we'd have done without
her.'

Maggie wished she had something to chew. She
shredded the tissue and knew the action was irritating.
'I'm surprised you let Neil look after Tanya if he
has these rages.'
'I haven't a choice, have I? I've got to organize our
lives, work where I can. And he's never been a danger
to Tanya, never. He loves her. Everyone does.' The
voice rose in defensive pride
'Of course they do. What happened that morning?'
Maggie asked gently. Angela shrugged.
'Nothing happened. Like I said, Francesca said
she'd take Tanya to school for me while I waited in for
the electric. I told her not to bother, I'd get Neil to do
it. But then he was late and Tanya had a temperature
so neither of us went anywhere. Then she came, looking
for Harry. She was out of her mind. I don't think
she could take in what she'd done.'

Maggie could not pinpoint why this had the sound
of a rehearsed speech and she struggled to remember
where she had heard it before. Mrs Hulme's statement,
made to the police, word for word, no
deviations, no hesitations.

'So perhaps,' Angela said with cold confidence and 
some of her aggression returning, 'you can tell all
that to your stupid American and stop him bothering
me. Why should I answer a pervert's questions?'

They stood at the door, Maggie uncomfortable, 
wrongfooted, wary, and it seemed trite to say good bye when so little had been achieved. Somewhere in there, there had been a momentary spark of mutual  tolerance, sympathy even, understanding of how 
Francesca had admired her, all fading into Angela's 
fixed, farewell smile. Angela, anxious but triumphant, the key to the mystery, telling her there was no mystery at all. 

What should she do now? Go home and report
faithfully to Henry? Listen to whatever he had to say
about Uncle Joe, but only with the same lack of
curiosity she had always had about that missing relative she had never been invited to know. The lightship 
was out to sea, winking at her blearily through the
mist and the seafront looked as if it was beginning on a series of slow preparations for sleep. She was weary; she could feel the itchy nose and blocked throat which 
heralded a cold; what a fool to jump into the water  like that, serve her right. She lit a cigarette. She
should have written to Philip, and how pleasant it it
would be to be able to put her thoughts in a logical 
order of priority, stop them bumping into one
another like a crowd at a football match scrabbling for
a view.

Such a view, the sea and nothing else. The gates to
the pier were locked and that took her by surprise: she
had forgotten they were ever locked. It made her want
to rattle the bars and demand entry. She stared
through the iron gates at the empty concrete road
and decided no one had the right to close the pier, not
even to stop people coming out of the pubs and
jumping off the end.

Neil: the rages of impotence, why not? Neil could
have killed Harry in mistake for a ghost. Frustrations
of love and lust turning into violence: maybe he had
cause to fear his ghosts. The thought chilled her. He
had a tendency to theft which she had never suspected
either, and he was there, wasn't he, round the
corner when someone pushed Harry into the sea . ...
That's what he was, that child, an object of love and
an object of hate. I wonder if he knew. And then there
was Angela, exerting the divine right of motherhood.
which allowed everything and made her perfectly
capable of killing the opposition. And then there was
Francesca, the homicidal parent about to be abandoned
by her closest allies and all her ambitions for a
family unit destroyed. The obvious culprit, underlined.
I should never have started this.

There was a fisherman on the beach with a fire. He
turned to retrieve something from a satchel. She
looked at him twice, hesitated, moved on hurriedly.
There was a light from the top floor of the House of
Enchantment. The attic in occupation could never
be anonymous; the light shone out like a beacon at
the highest point in the row. Henry's room had once
been given to her until she rejected it in favour of her
own, nicely enclosed little room with a limited view on the world. It gave a lift to her spirits to know that Henry sat up there with his quiet patience and his
laptop and his tidy, innocent mind. She was always  diminishing Henry when she described him, she realized. Nice, harmless, tidy. She was making him out to
be smaller than she knew he was, as if she was trying
to contain him and make him safe. As she went  upstairs, Maggie was trying to work out what it was
about Henry which made him both appealing and
abrasive to others. She was perfectly aware of what
made him appealing to her, but that was nobody's business. Perhaps it was his consistency, his clear set 
of moral values which stood out like the light from the 
window; perhaps it was his normality. Being normal   was something she had always found desirable; it 
would be a barrier, a bedrock; it would mean being 
a person who went on obeying the Ten Commandments
as if they made perfect sense. Thou shalt
not covet thy neighbour's wife, thou shall not steal, thou
shall not kill, thou shalt not neglect to wash the car and
thou shalt not pity thyself. He was so free of that.

There was nothing she had found out this evening
which she had not, strictly speaking, known before,
nothing which was not included in the statements she
knew by heart, and therefore little enough, apart from
Neil, to report to nice, normal Henry. Music played
softly from inside his room; he had a tiny CD player
she envied. The door was open a crack. She knocked
and pushed it wider.

Henry had his back to her, facing the silent TV
screen. He sat crosslegged on the floor in front of it,
clutching the control monitor, staring fixedly at the
images which moved in front of his eyes. A homemade
video, jerky camera, an amateur record of a
family outing. She stepped into the room, stood
unnoticed behind him and joined in the watching.
There was a bright summer scene, blue skies and
green grass with a red ball by a deckchair. From the
right of the scene, a little girl moved into focus to
climb into the deckchair with a doll. She stared at the
camera, challenging it, swimsuit slipping from her
shoulder, legs splayed, all of her sprawled
aggressively, eyes squinting. The camera moved
closer, catching the texture of her pale skin and stick
thin arms: the child smiled, a sudden vision of
laughter and welcome, but there was something about
the scrutiny she did not like. As the camera came
closer to her face, her expression contorted with startling
ferocity. Then she spat; it looked as if a gob of
phlegm hit the lens. The child covered her eyes. The
camera moved away abruptly, abandoned on the
ground hurriedly. The film went on for a few seconds,
showing grass and sky and a pair of bare feet.
Then it stopped and resumed, showing the child as
she slept in the same deckchair, curled into it with her
little buttocks exposed in the too big swimsuit and the
small hand of the doll stuck into her mouth like a 
dummy. Her hair was covered by a white sunhat. The   rest of the doll was strewn in pieces round the chair. The camera lingered lovingly on her limbs. There 
were the marks of faint scars on her thighs. 

Henry sent the film fast forward. There was the 
same, unmistakable girl child, equally half naked, balancing on the shingle at the edge of the sea, those thin 
arms extended and one foot exploring the feel of the water. Frightened, stepping back from the sensation, 
unable to move without trying again, hesitant, anxious, then kicking at the water to punish it. The  camera turned away from her before she turned 
towards it, panned to a view of the pier reflected in a
sea as calm as a quiet pond. That seemed to capture
Henry's interest for a second; then he went back to
the swimsuit girl and her skinny thighs in the
deckchair and froze the frame. Maggie for the first
time recognized an infant Tanya, smaller and more
ferocious, ready to spit. She drew closer to Henry's
back, fascinated and repelled.

Pervert. Sitting alone in an empty room, studying
images of a half-clad infant, lingering on her skin. She
watched as he flicked forward through the frames, featuring
others, unknown grown-ups, scenery, a
birthday party, until he found Tanya again. She was
the star player, usually captured from behind with her
vivid hair identifying her. He went back to the scene by
the sea. Angela must be right, then, Maggie thought in
a rush. Normal Henry Evans was abnormally interested
in images of little girls, yeuggh. She was close
enough to touch his shoulder and did not want to
touch. He had crossed his arms across his chest and
rocked back and forth. She felt she might as well have
discovered him masturbating, took a step back.
'Oh dear,' he sighed. 'Oh dear, oh dear, oh shit' 

The voice brought her back into the room. She
watched him scratch his head, turn his face away and
then rub at the tears in his eyes with his fist. He was
suddenly childish and entirely normal, someone
locked into the wrong TV channel and wanting the
programme to end.
'What the fuck are you up to. Henry?' Her voice
was loud but did not seem to disturb him any more
than her presence, as if he had known she was there
all along. He straightened his legs, leaned back on his
arms and stretched his toes. There was a draught
from the window. His left cheek was pink from facing
the fire and his hair was tousled. His trousers were
crumpled and she noticed his socks were different
colours. 'Would you like a drink?' he asked, nodding
in the direction of a bottle of sherry and two glasses
on the bedside table. 'It's not bad stuff for a cold
night. Better than beer, but then anything's better
than beer. And I was supposed to keep you off the
hooch, but I didn't feel like setting an example.'

There was not a trace of guilt on his face, nothing
of the shifty expression of a man caught in the midst of private sexual fantasies. Maggie tried to retrieve her suspicion, her righteous revulsion and the fleeting
belief that he was here with some other, appalling
agenda he could not confess; that he had come to
find a child like Tanya . . . but he was simply the
Henry she admired with the American twang and the traces of tears beneath his eyes, getting to his feet awkwardly, stiff from sitting too long. Maggie took his
place on the floor while he poured sherry. Sherry reminded her of vicars and the way her own parents had entertained, cocktails, lunchtime and evening  drinks, old-fashioned even then, before the universal
devotion to wine. She had forgotten the soothing texture of sherry, a drink to calm and comfort rather
than inebriate.

'A nice little tipple,' she said.
'A what?'
'Nothing. Never mind.' She wanted to soothe him.
He looked fevered; his face puckered and he sneezed, 
then blew into a handkerchief with an unselfconscious trumpeting sound. All these actions restored
him. He put another log on the fire and came and sat beside her with his back resting against the bed. 

'Are these all Francesca's tapes?' Maggie waved
her hand in the direction of the spilled pile surrounding the TV.
'I suppose so. She never appears on any of them so 
I presume it was her with the camera. Or someone
with a camera who never included her on the tapes
because they knew she hated that. Someone who
wanted to capture the kids in all their moods, make a
record of progress, something she could look at when
they were grown and flown, remember what they
were like.' She proffered the cigarettes. 'That child,
Tanya, she was scarred, you know. Someone hurt her
very badly.'

'I told you that.'
'Yes but I didn't quite believe it until I saw it.
Cigarette burns, I think, it puts me off smoking. And
I don't think I know much about love. I don't think
anyone who hasn't had kids knows about that kind of
love. You know fuck all. You know about the breakable
kind you can put down and pick up, make a little
sacrifice for, but not that much. Turn it in for another
model.'

She realized he was really rather drunk. Or ill.
Controlled drunk and flicking through the videos,
looking for a glimpse ofFrancesca who was not there.
Still with a rough command of words, wavering
rather than drowning. She felt entirely excluded,
watched as his eyes began to close and then snapped
open.

'I don't suppose Tanya's her daughter, is she?'
No. Definitely not. A daughter of a kind, but a real
daughter, no.'
'Ah, shame. That might have explained it. I don't
understand love like that,' Henry repeated. 'I really
don't. It makes all other kinds seem . . . incomplete, corrupt.'
'I beg your pardon?' she said crossly. 'What about
liking?'
'For if the darkness and corruption leave, A vestige of  the thoughts that once I had...' Henry intoned, dreamily.
'C'mon, what's the next line?'
'How the hell should I know?'
'How the hell? Better by far you should forget and
smile. Than that you should remember and be sad. Just
as well she doesn't remember. Poor thing.'
'Who's a poor thing. Henry?' He waved, expansively, his back sliding down slowly towards the floor.
'All of us. All of us poor things. So stupid not to have worked it out. It's perfectly obvious. Dunno 
what I do know, though- Why do you pretend you
don't know the last line?' 

She watched silently as he hauled himself to his 
feet and then, uncertain of the next task, sat down
abruptly on the bed. Got up again and walked
towards the fire, leaned against the mantelpiece in a
parody of nonchalance. She could see him as an
archaic academic in a study, holding forth over the
port on the finer points of Chaucer. He was not
made for the real world. Then he squatted by the 
fire and warmed his hands against the flickering
blaze.

'I saw Angela,' she said, briefly. 'She puts Neil in
the arena too. He hit Harry, didn't like him. It was all
about a dog. He hit him.'

She watched, tense with caution. There was a
strange temptation in fire; like water, it lulled one to
destruction and promised no harm. His hands went
closer to the flames and he stretched his long fingers
like a pianist preparing to play, then dipped two fingers
into the half-full glass of pale sherry and flicked
drops of it into the fire. The flames sputtered in
response. His hands went back to clutch the glass at a
crazy angle. 'Don't put your hands in the fire,' Henry
said. 'My dad told me that, but I did it anyway. A
dog, huh? They couldn't have kept a dog.' His eyes
glittered: she wanted to mollify him, prepare him for
the headache he would have in the morning, clouded
with poisonous sherry and thick with snivelling cold,
and yet at the same time she suspected it was all a bit
of an act.

'Did I tell you about Neil? He broke in here, looking
for Viagra. It was him took your shawl, I got it
back ... I put it on the bed. Neil could have been on
the pier, fishing on the morning Harry went down,
you know . . .'
'He's not a fucking ship!' Henry roared. 'He wasn't
launched off the jetty with a bottle of fucking champagne,
he was pushed under. And I read that
statement, I can read. Could your fucking Neil have
done that, do you think? And why should he think I
keep Viagra?' He scratched his nose. Anything rather
than him putting those long fingers towards the fire.
She shifted, guiltily. She wanted him to stop everything, even reciting poetry like a maudlin bore, the
way she herself did sometimes, although her tastes seemed to have become cruder lately, her memory for
verse selective. Oh love, will you not linger, like a sticky  little finger. With your digit on the fidgit, are you true? she recalled to herself. 

'I haven't the faintest idea,' she answered crisply. 'You can ask him if you like.' If you stir your cock in custard. It will never cut the mustard. Oh my darling is this person really you? Now where had that one come 
from? Out of an empty wine bottle, like a genie,
something she had composed for Philip. 

'Ask Neil?' he repeated stupidly his eyes suddenly sober and full of hope.  'Neil? That fella? If only.
Where is he? Gotta talk to him. If only it was him.' 
'He's outside on the beach. Fishing. Got his dog  with him. The black one.'
'Oh shit. If only.'
His eyes closed and he put down the glass carefully,
got up again and walked towards the bed where
he lay down on the silk covers staring at the ceiling with his hand supporting his head. He was not a
healthy colour.
'Yes, I need to talk to him. But not now, obviously. Might ruin my reputation.' He laughed. 'Sorry about
this. Upset. Dunno what to do. Need to think again.
Poor things. Talk in the morning.'

She stacked the video tapes, saw the description of
contents noted on the outside in Francesca's neat
hand, picked up the glasses and the bottle, turned
out the central light, moved the fireguard and went to
close the window. Henry spoke out of the corner of
his mouth.
'Maggie, don't go back to that husband. Look what
he made you. Took away the poetry. And don't close
the window, please don't.'



chapter thirteen.

after she had gone, Henry waited. He stared at the
ceiling and saw the cracks he had never noticed
before, either, tried to conjure up Francesca's face as he had last seen it, on the bus which drove her away,
twenty years before.
It was light that distorted faces, gave them a different texture. If he were to see her now, in the same
light as then, he would know her for sure, but he had never seen her under the grey skies which had influenced
her flawless complexion. He could not really
remember the face or what it was about it which had
convinced him of the goodness within. Sitting on the
train, coming into Warbling, he had tried to recall it
and tried, painstakingly to reconstruct what it might
look like now. What he could remember was a series
of dissociated details, such as a prominent eyebrow,
so much darker than the colour of her hair, the
tanned cheekbones, the lack of jewellery, her profile
against the sun, how she put out a hand with bitten
nails to wave away the camera he had carried
through a continent. The way she coiled her long,
fair hair against the back of her neck and how soft it
felt when he touched it. He remembered the happiness
she had brought to making love. When did I
start wanting you. Henry? Was I five, or six, or seven? How typical of a man that he could recall the details
of her slender body far better than he could remember
her face. And the feeling of heat and sheer
belonging; the acceptance that she was the centre of
his universe as he was of hers and always would be.
How little he had mattered in the scheme of things,
how naive and selfish and insecure to resent other
loyalties. He was not the love of her life; he was
merely one of them. Francesca had a cast iron set of
priorities, like his own father. 'Dad,' Henry sighed.
'What would you do?' His forehead was sticky with
perspiration.

He got off the bed and tiptoed out of the door and
down to the next landing. Staring down to the ground
floor, he could see the shawl on the newel post, Maggie's signal that she had gone for a late night
bath, and there was the distant rumble of the plumbing.
He went back to his room, picked up his shoes
and rummaged in his case for the lightweight rainproof
cape he had packed somewhere so carefully he
had forgotten its existence. It crinkled as he went
downstairs. He carried his shoes until he reached the 
outside door.

So much easier to act drunk when distress made
him feel it. He could Feel the booze at the back of his throat like a metallic taste with the sherry as the last note, a single glass of the bottle which had lasted all
week. He didn't like it much. The lightheadedness
persisted, the sweat froze. The cold dispelled the last
vestiges of the earlier wine and beer. Between here
and the castle, on the beach by himself; that was  where she said Neil was. Neil was the last hope. He
was not going to talk voluntarily, none of them were
now. He would have to be taken by surprise. Henry
broke into a jog.

The mist was damp. He pulled the hood of the
cape round his face. There was nothing intimidating
about the dark unless it was enclosed. He could have heard himself from a mile away. It was weeks since he
had jogged or done anything sensible like that and he
felt his legs creak in protest and his breath telling him
to stop. His shoes were all wrong. He could see the
light of the fire on the beach ahead and the shadow of
a black umbrella. He slowed down. If he crossed on to
the beach now, the noise of his footsteps would waken the dead and he would be slow. Henry stayed close to the inland side of the road, huddling against the 
houses until he was past the campfire. Not a fire, he
noticed, a burning Camping Gaz lantern sufficient to
illuminate and warm the hands. Two forms huddled
around it. If he jumped down the steps at the nearest
point, Neil would have no time to move. Henry
would walk towards him slowly, like a fellow fisherman
with a query about his luck, ask him how he was
doing.

The sound of his feet landing on the shingle
seemed unnaturally loud. The drop was further than
it seemed and Henry felt as if he had crashed to earth.
The two forms by the umbrella moved as he
approached, broke apart and doubled in size. The
breeze made Henry's cape flap and crinkle noisily as
he strode towards them, ready to say hi, as if this
almost midnight encounter was natural. He waved
and the cape waved with him. Then the gaslight was
held aloft, illuminating his galloping form as he
moved closer like a great moth with large, nylon
wings. There was a gasp; the lamp crashed to earth;
the dog barked and Neil staggered. Henry had a brief
glimpse of a grimacing mouth and then the other
man began to run, sidestepping him, better used to
moving on shingle, more familiar with the contours of
the beach. Reaching the edge he clambered up the
steps Henry had not seen, the dog at his heels.
'Come back!' Henry shouted, but the words came
out like a whisper.

He followed, memorizing the steps of the man, reaching the sidewalk and seeing him make off in the
direction of the castle and the pier. He was suddenly
furious, as if the man had slapped him for no reason
or pushed him to one side. I only want to talk to you,
why won't you talk to me? Nobody wanted to talk to
him; he was sick of it, began to jog again, pacing himself, fuelled with sullen determination. Neil ran  unsteadily, his unathletic build encumbered by enough extra weight to slow him down. The dog
pranced around him silently as if it was a game;
Henry could see them in the streetlights, their disparate heights making them look like an odd, comic
team. Then the dog got in the way of Neil's feet and
he stumbled, correcting himself before he hit the
ground, losing all rhythm to his running and moving slower and slower. The dog seemed to try and impede him and Neil seemed to forget where he was
and the direction he wanted to go. He looked over his
shoulder and as he did so, the dog stopped. It stood
still for a second, a growl sounding in its chest, its
body braced. Then it launched itself forward and tore back towards Henry. It grew in size in the approach,
turning into a big black wolf.

He stood stock still for a moment of terror, keeping
his eyes on the man rather than the animal, waiting
for the man to give an order, convinced that the dog would leap for his throat, knock him to the ground  and tear at him. He clenched his fists beneath the
cape, but the dog did nothing but slew to a skidding
halt and stop by his side, panting. Still with his eyes on the man. Henry could see the despairing slump of
his shoulders, as if he was saying, you traitor, you
damned traitor, leaving me now. Henry began to
move again, striding until they stood level, the dog
between them. When he was close enough, Henry
saw that the other man was trembling. Fear in his
case, downright anger in Henry's own.

'What'ya do that for?' he demanded. They were
level with one of the archaic bus shelters which littered
the front at random intervals. They were like
solid concrete bunkers facing the sea. Neil moved
inside the shelter with a groan and sat down. Henry
followed. It was a bleak enough place to avoid the
world. 'I thought you were a fucking ghost,' Neil said.
'Flapping about like that. Fucking Valkyrie with no
hair and a tail.' He began to laugh, a harsh, breathless
sound which was more like a wheeze and singularly
lacking in humour.

Henry pushed back the hood of the cape. The
bunker was icy cold, he was burning up with heat
and not disposed to be apologetic. Far too irritated
for that.
'What ghost?'
'Oh, ghosts who live in there -' he pointed to where
the castle walls loomed in the near distance. 'Those
ghosts.'
'Crap,' Henry said. 'You were running away from
me.' Neil nodded as the trembling began to cease. 'I
might have done that too, if I'd known,' he conceded, 'but I was really just running. I always knew they'd get
out one of these days.'

'Nights,' Henry corrected, breathing heavily.
'Yes, I meant nights. Of course. Anyway when the
dog left me I could see there was no point. They'd got
me at last.' He laughed again. 'I should be grateful it's
only you.' 

Neil shuffled on the bench seat, withdrawing into a corner , not wanting to be close and patently embarrassed as awareness of Henry's identity hit home. Only you. He looked utterly miserable.

'I suppose I owe you an apology,' he said resentfully.
'Several, really. Should have been in a fit state to
let you out of the castle, but I wasn't. Shouldn't have
got into your room, but I did. I'm bloody sorry about that.' Henry shrugged. Apologies disarmed him, he
was as ready to accept them as make them, whatever the circumstances. He nodded. 

'You couldn't have found much,' he said. 'Vitamins
are all I carry and if you want Viagra, why it's easy. 'You can order it on the net, like everyone else does.'

Neil began to laugh again, nervous hysteria, tinged  with relief. 'I can? Oh Christ, why didn't I think of
that? Jesus Christ.' Then he sobered, sighed gustily. 
'Might be better if I stuck to fishing. At least I know 
what I'm doing.'

'Catch much?' Henry asked, chattily.
'No, that isn't the point.'
He would never understand the English. Fished
without wanting to catch fish.
'I owe you,' Neil said. 'You could have reported me
to the police. I'd have left fingerprints all over. You
could have complained about being locked in ...
Maggie could have shopped me for ignoring the
alarm. I owe you.' Henry raised his hand to stop the
babbling. He wasn't going to say there was small
chance of fingerprints because of the way Peter and
Tim scoured and dusted, nor would he say it would
not have occurred to him to go anywhere near the
police in case it was himself who would be put into a
cell.

'You owe me sweet nothing. A few facts'd be nice.'
'Facts?' Neil said scornfully. 'I don't deal in facts.
Only history.'
'This is history. All I ever did want to ask you was
do you think Francesca killed her boy?' The words
came out badly; he was making a hash of this. 'I
mean, were things really as bad as that? You knew
them all and your wife won't talk to me.'

Neil began to shake again. The bus shelter saved
them from the breeze which shooed away the mist.
He seemed to have a resurgence of the fear which had
made him run and he looked at Henry as if he was the
fang-toothed spirit of his nightmares. 'Don't,' he said.
'Please don't. It isn't fair.'

'It's perfectly fair. You weren't ever asked for a
statement, were you? No need by the time they got
round to you. They had all the answers. She'd given
them. Just tell me what you think, that's all. I'm not
going to tell anyone else, I just want to know.' Henry
crossed his fingers to save himself from the curse of
telling a lie. There was a silence, punctuated by the
background sound of the sea and the sigh of the dog
as it settled itself with its head on Henry's knee. At
another moment, he would have felt absurdly comforted by this gesture of allegiance, but for now he was pleased with the animal for conspiring with him
to isolate its owner. Or what passed for an owner. He might even have admired Neil Hulme for being a
dedicated fisherman except for the fact that this dog,
which was clearly his, wandered around by itself all
day and that was cruel. The silence continued and the shaking increased. It seemed to communicate itself to
the walls.

'OK, OK,' Henry said, leaning down to stroke the
dog's ears. Silky soft, not such a bad owner after all,
not so much cruel as negligent. 'Just take me throu  the morning it happened. You went round to get
Tanya to take her to school... so there you were .. .'

'Did she say that? The bitch, the bloody bitch . . .
why did she have to mention me? That's about all the
use I am. A bloody alibi... the bitch.'  
'No, not really. It means she's an alibi for you, too.  In case anyone should reckon you were on that damn
pier, fishing away, catching dozens, thinking away when along comes this irritating little kid who kicks over the bait and snags the line and pisses you off just
when you have the hangover from hell and a bad
night with a woman and life's a bitch and your
temper's gone, man, really gone.' Henry exaggerated
his drawl and his alien vowel sounds, making himself
the caricature American. 'You fishermeyen, tetchy
critters. Kind of man, sitting out there all aloan, when
every other son of a bitch is tucked up with his
sweetie . . .'

The response was not quite what he had predicted.
If he had ever predicted at all about what he was playing
by ear, he might have expected to be punched in
the nose, which would not have bothered him much,
especially as he was aping the role of a second-rate
sheriff in a B movie. Henry did not expect the sigh of
relief and the slow expulsion of nervous, spontaneous
laughter so free of artifice that his heart sank. Neil
was not the answer; Neil was not going to give him an
alternative explanation to the one he thought he
already knew.

'Oh is that it? Fine. I'll own up, then. Killed the
little fucker, never liked him anyway. February's a
bad time of year. I don't care, I don't care. I'll swing
for that. I thought that what you were going to say
was . . . was . . . was . .. Oh Jesus.'

He dived into his pocket for a ready-made spliff,
fished in the other for a lighter and sucked greedily.
Henry could not avoid the curiosity of his prudish self
which wondered why the saliva-coated stub handed
to him in bizarre courtesy should present such a challenge.
He took and sucked tentatively, remembering a
code of conduct abandoned long since. Pass it back.
Hide the distaste of its lousy texture and pretend
gratitude. Neil had stopped shaking. If this was all it took
to keep out the cold and shove emotion into a corner,
he might try it. Another long, shuddering si erupted from him as he sat back against the unwelcoming shelter of the concrete. A shadow of moss
grew above the corner he occupied. Henry looked  at
the featureless ceiling, grey, yellow, patched with  black, as worn and speckled as his own conscience,

'I thought you were going to say it was obvious.
That she did it. Angela. She fucking loathed him,
poor little brute. She had time to do it, 'cos I was
late, see? Very late, s'far as I knew. And there was no
one there, no one at all. They'd already gone. Lights on, no one at home, like the Marie Celeste, but doors
locked. Then I looked at the time, and thought,
Christ, I am late. Serve 'em right. They don't wait for me, they just use me, they don't even want my dog.
But I'd lost the dog already.' He went into reverie. 'That's right. I'd given her to Granny to look after for
a day or two. I'm always giving her to Granny for a day or two and she's always getting out, daft bitch.
Anyways, on that morning ... Christ, I was glad
when Franny admitted it was her did for the kid, 'cos
I thought it was Angela.'
'Angela shoving Harry through the broken
boards?'
Neil looked at his feet. 'Yeah.' He nodded in rueful
agreement with himself. 'Yeah, she could do that. Got
a temper like nobody's business, you might have
noticed. When she loses it, she really loses it.'

'There was a fisherman on the pier,' Henry began.
The single inhalation down his throat made him dizzy
and slow and when the spliff came his way, he handed
it back after a token pretence to draw on it.
'No there wasn't,' Neil said with sudden precision.
'There was a brolly and a box of bait, I remember
that, how could I forget it? You'd think I was fucking
rich the way I keep leaving stuff. I'm always fucking
leaving it. Awh, bugger it. I've got to go back.' He rose
and then sat down again, abruptly. Huddled back into
his corner and resumed his morose stare at the ceiling.

'That's why I was late. Went fishing early, forgot
the time, the way you do, because it was good. You
don't look at the time when you're waiting on a fish.
Then Granny let the dog out. It was wandering
round. I shooed it away and went home with my rod.
Nobody really wants that dog, never did. I. was going
to come back for my brolly and the bait and the spliffs.
later on, but after what happened, I never did. I
wasn't going to say they were mine, was I, no more
than anyone else. Saying there were signs of a fisherman
doesn't mean to say there was one. I was long
gone. You didn't really think it could be me drowned
that kid? I was cleaning fish. Give us a break. All I'm
good at is catching fish. So I better go back for my
rod.' He turned belligerently to the dog, which
remained with its muzzle on Henry's knee, eyes
closed as if afraid to hear anything to its own discredit.

'Are you coming or not?' Neil demanded.  Henry could feel the weight of the dog's heavy head
and its damp jaw staining his tan trousers. The constant stroking of its ears made it a big, soft sloth.

'Where do you take her?' 
'Home with me if it's too late to knock on Gran's  door. Don't worry. She's fed and bedded. She roams
but she's always got somewhere to go.'

The sound of his boots striking the concrete floor
made the dog spring into life. Henry felt the thrashing
of its tail against his legs as it stood and Neil patted its
back with rough indifference. It would never be sure
of him. 'Always looking for something, aren't you?' Neil demanded of the dog without unkindness. 'So
take me back to where I left my fucking rod. And
while you're at it, tell him ... oh fuck it, don't tell him
anything.' He stretched his arms above his head. 'Tell
him I couldn't hurt anyone I don't care about. Like
you. I might not be very nice to you, doggie, can't even give you a name, but I only hurt the ones I love.'

The dog stood indecisively between them, large head regarding them in turn.
'I cuffed Harry once,' Neil admitted gruffly, suddenly
more expansive now he was on the move. 'But
that was all it was and I wasn't too sorry either. He
had a scream set your teeth on edge, you'd do anything
to stop it. But I haven't got the bottle to do
more. Unlike my wife.' He fingered his jawbone as if
remembering a blow, nodding with rueful wonder, a
slight smile altering his features. 'Never passionate
enough, me. Not like those two, Fran and Angela.
Pair of furies.' He looked down at the dog. 'C'mon,
girl.'
'Go on,',Henry said softly.

They began to walk back in the way they had
come. The dog would go with Neil; that much was
established. It would find his rod on the beach in the
absence of light and be rewarded for usefulness.
'Everyone stopped laughing when Harry died,' Neil
said, pointing at the dog. 'I thought Tan would want
the dog after all, but they didn't. Neither of them
would let me in the house for months. Tan stopped
talking and stayed off school. They spent the summer
on the beach, away from everyone. It was only in the
autumn it all went back to normal. As normal as it
ever is. Christmas came round again, wasn't bad.
Then you came along, you berk.' It was said without
recrimination, simply a sad fact. He stopped and put
his hands on his hips, facing Henry under the dark
eaves of the hotel. 'Making a mess 'cos you were so
sure Francesca couldn't be a killer. But how can you
know? How can anyone ever know?'

Henry shook his head in agreement, suddenly anxious
to explain himself, for his own benefit at least.
'I began with the belief she had to be innocent,' he
said, earnestly. 'I began with a belief in her virtue.
But that isn't why I went on. I went on because the 
facts didn't fit... it's galling when facts don't add up.
Offends me.' They continued walking, a little faster in response to the cold. The dog's paws clicked softly. 
'Well now you've got them to add up, perhaps
you'll be going home soon.'

Henry stopped, arrested and grief-stricken by the
very thought. The dog stopped with him, careful of
the presence of them both, waiting for a sign of
aggression. 'Yes,' Henry said slowly. 'Yes, I probably will.' The light of his room shone out in the distance. The sky was ominously clear. Peter had told him that
clear skies were an announcement of forthcoming storms and if he could see the shores of northern France from his window, the omens were bad. Better
to run from a storm than face it. He turned to Neil.

'I'll get you the Viagra,' he said. 'Least I can do.'
'For what?' Neil's voice was full of shocked surprise. Henry shrugged.  
'For settling something. Making me face up to
truth.' 

They did not shake hands. It was not a deal; it was two men walking away from one another, one of them
possessed of an animal which the second one craved.
Only the dog looked back. 

As Henry drew nearer, he could see there was a 
head sticking out of the top window of the House of
Enchantment. The head retreated hurriedly. There
was so little which could be done in a town this size
without anyone noticing. Except kill a child, throw
stones, break hearts. The head retreated as he drew
level and waved at it. The window remained open.
Henry felt churlish about being observed, just as he
had felt foolish about being rescued. He wanted to
spite her and not go in, go off wandering simply in
order to make someone worry. Like he had done once
or twice as a child, like all children did. Except Harry,
who would probably rather sit indoors than go out in
the cold when it was raining. He was too small and
frail for the luxury of runaway gestures. Pity the child
and what he might have been. Francesca would have
made him better.

Henry sat, his legs suddenly weak. He seemed destined
to sit on the wall outside the house across the
narrow road from the big front door. Watching the
sea and wondering for how long he would watch.
When he would go home, by what means, what he
would do when he got there, to whom he should
write, e-mail, fax his next intentions. Whatever they
were.

She bewitched me
With such a sweet and genial charm,
I knew not when I wounded was,
And when I found it hugged the harm.

Who wrote that? Francesca would know. He sat still
from sheer weariness and an aversion to climbing all
the stairs which would lead either to a night of disturbed dreams or to Maggie, standing guard like a protective housekeeper, scolding him for going out.
Let her wait, she was not his guardian, and yet there
was a faint pleasure in the knowledge that someone
was concerned about him; it was a novel sensation to know that someone might register his comings and
goings and a long time since such a thing had happened. He had begun to enjoy coming back to a
house which was inhabited and he was sure he was becoming immune to the cold. Nothing seemed to  touch him. He took out a cigarette and smoked contemplatively. ti

Ten minutes? Fifteen? Two cigarettes and his fingers numb. Amazing the difference in the time it took
for a person to smoke a cigarette. Some took two
minutes, others seemed to make the thing last half an hour. Amazing how time eclipsed. How long you
could sit still in a state of indecisive shock, grief for an
unknown child, admiration for sacrifice and work out you were feeling too ill to move, like someone falling over in the snow and finding it was a nice, warm place to be, comfortable to sleep. He could stay here all
night, looking at the sea, waiting for the frost to form. 
He could sort everything into clinical order, label his   conclusions and put them into bottles. He could  smoke another cigarette if he could work out where
he had put them. He felt something hit him in the
back with a light thump. Then another small object
whizzed over his head and crashed on the sidewalk
beside him. He bent to see what it was and saw a
smashed brown bottle and a litter of pills of a familiar
size, the colour difficult to distinguish. A plastic canister followed, about the size of a camera film, but
heavier. It was shiny and he knew by the shape of it as
he bent to retrieve it what it was. Henry found it was
difficult to turn his head up towards the window, he
seemed to have frozen to the spot; he put his hand to
his face and found his fingers were numb. Squinting
towards the light he saw another missile and realized
what she was doing. Chucking out his supply of vitamins
and stuff. Perhaps she had shouted too, but he
had not noticed that. He tried to pick up one of the
ginseng pills but his fingers could not grasp it. Henry
got to his feet slowly and gestured surrender. Realized
she was right; he could scarcely move. Serious cold;
everything slowing to a halt and his vision of the
house on the other side of the road slightly blurred.
He thought of the boy who could not grasp with his
right hand.

There was a crackle of thunder.
Maggie was behind the door when he reached it;
she closed it softly behind him and began to push
him up the stairs. His hands were ghostly white. The
stairs were endless 'People die of pneumonia. Henry,'
was all she said, calmly enough but with a catch of
anxiety he may have mistaken. His teeth were chattering;
there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

Beneath the silk coverlet, the warmth began to
come back slowly and then he was raging hot and his
chest was on fire. She went away and was a long time coming back with water and a kind of pill which,
when he swallowed it, had the bitter taste of aspirin.
Her absence and the fluctuations of temperature
alarmed him; all that wanting to be alone and now he
did not want to be alone at all. 'Don't go,' he saidto
her. 'Please don't go.'

'No, of course I shan't go. I should never have gone
in the first place.' The glow of the fire turned her into
a mere silhouette, a sweet smelling creature in a mannish dressing gown.

'Where did she put her letters and diaries?' he
asked petulantly, his eyes closing with the effort of
keeping them open.

'In the Wendy house. But they don't help, honestly they don't.'
'Oh.'
He found he was squeezing her hand tightly, relaxed his grip. He could grip; he could count  herhet[
fingers; he could learn to fish. He tried one more time
to conjure up an accurate picture ofFrancesca's face and begged her forgiveness.



Where's Henry? I asked her. I referred to him as Henry
on formal occasions. I pushed him, she said. I pushed
him under. He's a wanker. Harry is, he wouldn't have
me alone. The dog came on the pier and he started to yell;
he pushed me first, he did. He's a baby, he's such a baby.
WHERE? I was screaming. I thought we could have been
heard on the moon, but it rained and the sea was crashing.
Show me WHERE. No, no and no. I dragged her
along the pier, past where the fisherman had been. We
started running. Got to the end where she showed me the
barrier she'd climbed and he stood whingeing behind. She
said she was trying to get away from him; he couldn't run
anything like as fast. She wanted to hopscotch over the
broken boards and trespass, of course she did; it was the
sort of thing I'd taught her to do. He was timid, crying for
company when the dog appeared. And then he would
have got over the barrier out of sheer terror. He ran at me,
she said, he pushed me and he slipped. It was only a dog,
it was MY dog what I couldn't have 'cos of Harry. Then
he slipped into the crack and got stuck. I laughed at him
and he screamed. So I went to pull him out. He looked
silly. He grabbed at me and bit my jacket, my lovely new
jacket. He tore it with his teeth and I pushed him off with
my feet. Fucking big tear. Where do you want to go? I
shouted at him. You going to swim or wait for that dog?
You bite like a dog! So I shoved him down with my feet.

I lost it, I just. . . Did you hit his head? Yes. Did he go
through the first time you used your feet? No, but I heard when he hit the girder thing down there. I heard a thump. I thought he'd just come up the steps the other side. But he never. The dog kept barking, didn't it? You pushed him really hard, didn't you? YES YES, his jumper was up by his neck, he wouldn't go . . . How long since? She was
always good with time, knew how long things took. Well,  she said, I waited for him to come up, an' the dog made funny noises, an' I walked back, again an' again. Fifteen
minutes?

I wanted to kill her there and then. I knew it was too
late to save him. He could swim a little bit, but no one can
swim against that current. I tore off my coat to jump  after him, but she clung to me, reminding me there was no
point. It was bitter. Survival time is about five minutes
for a grown man in February and he was hurt. I know this sea; it was my playground, my friend, my enemy. I
made her tell me again, blow by blow as I walked her back, just in case. The dog sat at the end and howled. I
knew he was dead. And knew what I held by the scruff of
her beautiful neck was a child with no conception of what
she had done. No one appeared; no one at all until we
saw Angela at the door. And I made Tanya tell it, all over again. 

So I knew what to say when they asked me. I knew how each injury had been caused. I knew they would find him soon. The sea always yields up the dead. I knew
they would question family first. Murder is done by those
who purport to love one another. If they got as far as
Tanya, it would be too late. If they took her away from
her mother, everything that had been gained would be
lost. She would be ostracized and institutionalized; she
would become another lost child. She could become one of
the faceless girls in my prison.
And Harry would still be dead.
I still miss the sea most of all. It saves me from remembering
that I have no one to love any more. No child to
love. And I did love them both, with all my heart.

I knew he would not believe me, but the chaplain says
catharsis is good for the soul.

There, the anniversary of my arrival has passed.
Everything has a purpose, and I have achieved mine.
My only achievement was to be believed when I lied.
FMC.



chapter fourteen.

after the rain, the temperature rose. The office was
warm.
'No one will believe him,' Edward said. 'Is he all
right in the head?'
'Not exactly. Nobody with a temperature that hi
can ever be described as all right, but he's better. He
talks less than he did. No more deliriums.'  

Cigarette smoke spiralled up into the air. Maggie
seemed to have lost weight in a matter of four days.   The small gold studs in her ears were her most
vibrant features. Edward wondered at the fact that   she had remembered the earrings as well as the
brushing of her hair.

'I've been worried to death. I thought we might
have killed him.'
'You might have. Mine was the small part. All I
did was confirm things with the bogus Uncle Joe.'
'Yes. I might have killed him. Me. Margaret F.
Chisholm. Me.' She gazed at the fish and its lifeless
profile. Edward's fingers, free of his black half-gloves,
beat a mild tattoo on the desk. He coughed to clear
his throat of the last cigarette before lighting another.
Cigarettes had been forbidden from Henry's sickroom,
but elsewhere Maggie smoked as if survival
depended upon it. 

'An old-fashioned chill equals pneumonia. He's a
heavy man to move. He loves being nursed and a
clear conscience aids recovery. It reminds me of how
much I like looking after a man and how much I
hate those macho types who won't succumb to
weakness.'
'I didn't think you were a natural nurse, but you
are, aren't you?' Edward paused. 'You must mean
Philip. He came here for directions.'
'So what about him? He arrived without warning.
I was too busy with Henry and his highly articulate
nightmares. Philip took one look at the boys and the
House of Enchantment and finally at me. He's even
blinder than most, oh dear, oh dear.' She laughed,
softly. 'We took a look at one another. He's so distinguished.
He wore a suit. He was born in a suit.'
'So was I,' Edward said, shooting his cuffs, holding
his arms steady the better to observe the unequal
lengths of his dark sleeves.
'Not that kind of suit, not even a cousin to that kind of suit. Philip would die of embarrassment. Still,'
she added carelessly, examining the coffee mug for
cracks, 'Henry appreciated the flowers.'
Edward stood looking out of the window into the
bustle of the High Street. From where he stood, he
could watch the traffic in and out of the greengrocer's and hazard guesses about what they carried away in
their bags. The grocer had five different kinds of 
potato, his wife had told him. There was the sonorous
clanging of the church clock striking midday, a
reminder of work undone and yet to do. He was relieved and depressed; truth was better than fiction, but not always as cheerful; it felt like the interval
between one headache and the next. The storms had
licked everything clean; the hotel had been flooded again in a minor way. The owner wanted to sell it. They were at the beginning of the season for storms. Fishing would be out of the question. He wanted to
be outside to take advantage of the temporary blessing of the sun. 

'Did you really have no idea?' Edward asked, casting the question over his shoulder. She shook her
head. Even her hair seemed to have shrunk a little. 

'No, but I should have done. Should have been
able to work it out the way Henry did because it fitted 
so well with what Francesca's really like. It accords perfectly with what she would have done. She would  have taken the blame and taken it soon enough to 
stop Tanya being questioned because Tanya would
crack. Henry has a huge imagination or perhaps he
really did know her better than any of us. On a different
level. He told me the story as he saw it in every
detail, as if he'd been there. It all makes sense. Angela
so defensive and protective, keeping Tanya apart...'
'... Francesca hiding medical books with someone
who would never read them and videos with someone
who would never watch them to see how often she
filmed Tanya. With love and curiosity. No one should
see what Tanya could be like. No one could see what
Harry was like. How much, how little she changed.
How fucking sad. Does Henry know what he told
you?'
'Yes, he knows. He's repeated it all when sober, if
you see what I mean. But if he hadn't been so ill, I
doubt he would have said a word. He would have
kept it locked up and said, I can't talk now. And neither,
I suppose, can we.'
'Not without permission, no. I faxed the prison.
We should get a reply saying whether she wants to see
him, oh, any time now. Let's go for a walk before it
rains again.'
'Not the pier, not today.'
'No. The other place. The back way.'

He was too well known for the High Street. On a day
when the sun shone in late February and the populace
was out on errands they might otherwise have
ignored, it would take Edward half an hour to survive
the greetings and the chatterings and the sheer duty
in acknowledging the length and breadth of his
acquaintance. Francesca had once told him it was the 
same for her: she could not walk down here without
 meeting a parent of a child, or a child, or latterly an
ex-schoolchild, hoped it would be so until she saw the
ex-pupils walking here with their own children, but
she sometimes wanted to do her shopping in the dark,

to make it shorter. He tried to remember what he had
written to her, what sort of a code he had used, so that she would get the meaning and no one else, then 
remembered he had given up trying to be clever, had 
given up some time ago since words of more than one
syllable were rarely understood.

DearF.
A detective called Dr Henry Evans (mentioned
before) has unearthed the truth about T;
not only the pros and the cons, but also the
whys. He awaits further instructions and so do I.
Do you wish to meet him? Can be arranged if
so. A confidential fellow who will doubtless disappear
on request; no profit motive. As discreet
as myself. Regret to inform you that Uncle
Joseph Chisholm has died.
Deepest sympathies and understanding.

'I don't understand,' he burst out. 'She could
phone, she's allowed to phone. If she was worried, she
could always phone. She doesn't.'
'She'd say too much. She can't talk now. She never
could, don't you see? Henry sees. Henry sees it all.'
'I don't. Why are there so many kids about? Oh, sod it. Half-term. They tread on the daffodils.'

They were approaching the castle from the back of
it, where the bridge over the dry moat met the road
and where there was the sign saying when it was open
and when it was shut. Such a squat beast, this castle.
Sitting there like a great, solid mushroom. Almost
beautiful in this light, he said, if you liked every permutation
of grey. Look at it, Edward said; a grim
place, like a prison. A Victorian prison might have
been made on similar lines, with the slight difference
that it would be designed to keep them in rather than
keep them out. A small amendment. The interior
could be as spartan as one pleased to ensure the
rigours of the soul. Doubtless Francesca's prison had
a few more creature comforts, he thought sourly,
such as TV and reliable hot water and heat, as if that
would make all the difference. Probably, in her own
way, with her own upbringing, she was used to confinement.
He told this to himself to make himself feel
better.

'Miserable place,' he said. 'Look at it. I don't know
why anyone bothers.'
'There's no choice about it. You can't destroy it
and it's quite incapable of falling down.'

They had moved from the road on to the seaward
side where the swathe of grass separated the environs
of the castle sunk into its own vast well, so that they
walked the perimeter railings erected to protect the
unwary. Dark inside at sea level and darker still
beneath sea level in the Runs. Edward was looking out for the daffodils traditionally planted on this stretch of green. They tended to bud during storms and he never knew why. Any sensible thing would stay beneath earth until it was over and the spring as certain a thing as it ever was. Not very certain. He could see the green shoots, with only a single yellow
bud in sight. 

'How can you dislike it, Edward? It's your heritage.  Look.' Maggie dragged him across the green to lean 
against the rails and look down into the moat. There were pools of water and crops of winter crocus, brilliant blue and yellow even in the shadow. Cotoneaster
and hebe, privet and rhododendrons, nothing that
minded shade. 'You can grow anything here,' she
informed him, 'it's a nursery garden.' She was leading
him from the precipice back to the bench against the
beach where the sound of the sea soothed and no one
would pause for long because of the wind, which worried the backs of legs and made the pennant flutter.

'Please don't be a cynic, Edward, don't. It was wonderful
to be here, I promise you it was. We stood at that window. You had to stand to see out, you got used to
it. That one.' She was pointing towards the middle
keep, where a silly wooden turret protruded above the
rest. It was like the tuft of a nest sticking out of a tree.

'What a cold place to live. Who stood?'
'Oh, me, Francesca, my aunt and uncle. After my
parents died.'

She wanted to tell him something else, but he
sprang to his feet. Pointing, still with his gloves on,
quivering with worry and rage. 'Will you look at
that? Will you just look at that? Jesus fucking Christ, they should be shot, look at that. Who let her,
ohmyfuckingGod, oh jesusbloodychrist, GET DOWN!' He bellowed with his hands cupped round his
mouth and his cheeks distended like a trumpet
player. 'GET DOWN!'.

There was a figure dancing round the walls. The
balancing act looked like the dance of a butterfly in a
patch of sun which caught the vivid auburn of the
hair swept back by the breeze into a huge halo. She
stepped to her own tune, nimbly moving from brick
to brick around the curved and inward-sloping walls
of the nearest inner keep, arms outstretched with the
elegance of a ballerina, oblivious to the height and the
slope and the remnants of frost. She tested herself
and went a little faster, tried a skip. Slipped and
landed with her long skinny legs each side of her
body, supported on her hands. Raised the body by
the hands in one effortless movement, extended her
arms again and ventured on. She turned her progress
into an elegant goosestep, each leg swung forward in
a high kick, extending the opposite arm to touch the
opposite toe. Then sat on the last sunny part of the
wall, examining the abyss below without any sign of
fear, delved into the pocket of her windcheater for
something to chew. Lay down on the sloping wall and
looked at the sky, crossed her legs like a miniature 
sunbather, sprang up in a single moment, continued  the act, snapping her fingers to some indiscernible
beat, body vibrating with it.

'That's Tanya.'
'Ah. I see what she meant, oh Christ. Take me
away. I can't stand it. She'll fall, she'll bloody fall.'
'No, she won't,' Maggie said, pulling him away.
'Not if you leave her alone. She'll thrive if she's left
alone.'


Edward's room had reached a stuffy temperature
which was almost intolerable. The building was emptied
for lunch. Prominent on the mess of the desk
was the fax.

Dear Edward and Maggie,
So that's why you haven't been to see me,
Maggie. You've been breaking promises all over
the place and much as I love you for it, why can't
you just ACCEPT? Accept that of all the people
involved on the morning 'in question' I was, without
doubt, the only one who knew what I was
doing. I'm over the worst, I can stand it, if only
because the alternative would really break my
heart. What's left of it. Don't do ANYTHING.
I DO NOT WANT TO APPEAL. Not until
she's far older, anyway. Can't you ever see the
virtue of doing NOTHING?

Henry Evans? Of course I don't want to see
him. What are you up to? Bring some daffodils,
just so I can look at them. Get a garden and tell
me about it. Get a bloody LIFE and tell me
about that.
These ARE my formal instructions.
Tell Henry Evans to go home.
I love you very much, Maggie Chisholm.
You're better than a sister. I've given you a lot of
duff advice in my time, but this is for real.
Edward, go fishing.
FMC


Maggie looked at the fax and wondered what it had
cost to write. All Chisholms had a talent for the stiff
upper lip. If this is what you've got, get on with it. She found that she was crying, copious, effortless tears.

Henry combed his hair and tried to select from his
jumbled suitcase an item of clothing which was not
ruined either by adventure or the enthusiastic cleaning
attempts of Tim, who was willing but less able
than Peter. He had never really replaced the original
hat, might not be in this weakened state if he had
done so. You lose half your body heat from your
head, someone had told him once and now was the
time he believed it. There had been a kind of pleasure,
latterly, in lying up here, listening to the storms, forgetting for a while where he was, other than at the
wheel of a big, safe ship, ploughing through the sea 
towards a headland and not, as he had been in the
other kinds of dreams, sinking beneath the waves,
weighted with sadness and wishing he had learned
how to fish.

He went downstairs in a motley array of clothing,
ready to compete with his hosts for the prize for inept
dressing, not caring. He had told Fergusons to put
the job on hold and he could not bring himself to
care about that either. In this land of the relatively
poor, he was still relatively rich. He could feel the
touch of Maggie's hand on his fevered brow and hear
himself talking more than he had ever talked. And no
amount of talking would tell him what to do.
Knowledge did not point him in any direction.

'you see,' he said to Peter in the kitchen, watching
him pour the tea from the teapot which looked as if it
was too heavy to lift, 'it's in the nature of us
Americans to believe that things can be fixed.
Nothing broke that can't be fixed. No illness can't be
cured. No tragedy can't be turned round into a happy
ending. No mess can't be negotiated into success. I'm
stuck with it. Positivism. The secret of our success.
Compromise is a no-no.'

'How completely unnatural. It's all compromise,
isn't it? And what's the point of striving all the time?
What you can't accept is the fact that life's full of
mystery and you aren't supposed to know all the
answers. Acceptance is the key. There's no hardship at
all in going along with a whole lot of broken things.
You have to accept fate, just like you have to accept a
hefty measure of ignorance. Go with the flow. Henry.
You can't actually change anything.'

Henry followed him into the garden, where
Timothy was tidying up. There was the reassuring
sound of a broom swishing on the paving stones with
an even rhythm, gathering together broken twigs and
scattered leaves. The door to the Wendy house was
open and the inside was empty when Henry looked,
except for two folders of assorted papers and an old
leather writing case.
'I wanted to make a fire,' Tim said. 'Get rid of it
all.'
'All what?'
'Harry's things. He's gone, you see. I think he's
gone somewhere with his mother. I told him we didn't
mind, but I don't think he'll be back. We'll leave the
Wendy house, just in case. Might keep an ostrich in it.'
'Why do you think he's gone?' Henry asked with a
massive lump in his throat. Timothy shook his head,
warningly.' You might know, but we don't. Don't want
to. That isn't for us to know. But something's been
settled. He's stopped flitting around. I think he's
finally understood that it wasn't all a waste. He was
looking for a purpose, you see. I don't know what it
is, I don't want to know, but he's found it. I think he 
finally understood that he was .. . loved.' 

'Don't burn the letters and things, will you?'
'Should we not?'
'No. Keep them. And the videos. She'll want them,
some day.'
'She?'
'She. Someone.'

The Wendy house was sparkling clean from the
hosing down of rain followed by ministrations with
detergent. The plastic colours were weatherworn and 
faded out of their original garishness; Henry could
see it as the cake icing house, shrouded with shrubs as
it was and perfectly comfortable in these surroundings.
Perhaps it was true that things grow into their
own places. Senta prowled around it disdainfully, sniffing and oddly subdued. She sniffed Henry's
ankles with a greater show of animation.

'She misses him,' Peter said. 'They kept each other
company when we were busy, you see. It's always
been like that. We're a bit too old for her, really, that's
the problem, aren't we, Senta? Can't keep up with
you, can we?'

Henry wondered about the other person he had
been a mere two weeks ago, who might have bridled
at this archness and gagged at the sentimentality of
talking to animals and ghosts, hating it all the more
for never doubting its appalling sincerity. He put his
arm round Peter's meaty shoulders.
'What's old, old man? Middle age is man's greatest
dignity, his piece de resistance, the age of wisdom and
just about enough vigour to go round. I got an idea.
Don't turn me down. Can't waste the damn Wendy
house if Harry doesn't come back. What say you to
another dog? There's a beauty...'
'A black beauty,' Timothy said, dreamily. 'Wanders
round by itself all day and finds somewhere to go at
night. I long for it, can you get her? I never know
where she goes. Oh yes. Now how did I know you
were going to suggest that?'
'You must be psychic,' Henry said glibly, but his
heart was beating to a strange tune, kerthump,
kerthump, kerthump and he felt slightly giddy so that
the words came out rather careless. 'I think I can get
her,' he said. 'Or get Maggie to get her. Got something
to trade.'
'Fetch,' Tim yelled and flung the broom in the air.

Henry drew a deep breath. 'You know the first
night I got here? How did you know I was coming
along? Psychic again?' Peter had the grace to look
shifty and looked down at his shoes; brogues as violent
a brown as brogues were ever made, polished to
a piano varnish finish the better to offset the canary
yellow socks. Some people did better out of thrift
shops than others. He stood with his hands clasped
behind his back, gazing at the shoes so hard that
Henry thought he would overbalance and tensed
himself to catch him.

'Maggie has to check the hotel register every day.
Make sure they do it right. Must have seen your
name, I suppose. Told them to send you along. Told
us.'
Somehow, it did not Surprise him. He was rather
relieved to find an instance of cooperative cunning
rather than anything weirdly telepathic, although if
the explanation had been obscure enough to feature
some message from either God or the Devil, he
would not have been surprised either. Henry was
beyond surprise and into anticlimax.

He knew where the dog was, he had seen it from
his window. He saw everything from his window as if
he were filming each scene. He could always get as far
as the window and watch the people without the
people watching him. Watch the dog and know where
it sheltered; he knew that it came as far as this door
every day, imagined he knew where it was now, grabbing
a halfway sunny spot on the shingle for as long
as it lasted.

'Excuse me,' he said,
The sunlight made him giddy, he didn't know why,
it was a pretty pallid sort of sunlight only made brilliant
by the sea with the dark clouds backing up on
the horizon again, ready to spit and blow and Snarl
and bite and fight. The thunder God went for a ride, he
recited and couldn't remember the next line. He
crossed the road and whistled. My only talent, he
thought to himself. I can whistle for the dog I never
owned. I can whistle for the wind and be heard on
any other planet and by any other species than my
own. The dog gambolled off the beach and sniffed his
ankles. I would die to be able to run like you. Henry
told it. And once we're inside, behave, right? It's me
who'll square everything after, like the price of a
decade of food. And something for Granny and
tablets for Neil.

The dog wanted to come upstairs. He said no and
heard it greeted in the kitchen with wails of delight.
The stairs seemed longer and longer, halfway up, he
heard a door slam and did not look back. He did not
want to talk to her just now. The only way that
Maggie had ever seen him was when he was pathetic
and she was in control. Whenever he looked like shit,
she looked like a birthday party; whenever he felt like
shit, she was there at the rescue and whenever he
thought shit, she had thought it first. And such a user,
such a manipulator. How could a woman like that
have a cousin like that, but all the same . ..

All the same...
All the same ... He felt weak at the top floor,
checked the view from the window again, just to
make sure he could not see the dog on the beach. A
copy of a fax was on the bed, pristine black and white
and almost warm. Henry read it, once, twice, three
times, absorbed the message, leave me alone, leave
me alone, LEAVE ME ALONE, until he thought he
had understood. Well, what had he expected?
Gratitude? For what? From whom? It wasn't as good
as it was before he'd got here and learned to swear,
and it wasn't good now, but at least someone knew a
lot more truth than they knew before, and godamnit,
they didn't want to know it and they wouldn't have
been bothered if they didn't know it and there was
nothing he could do. Could do, fucking should do, FUCK NOTHING, he yelled at the wall.

Cool Ms Chisholm. You can go now. Henry, and
let us resume our lives. She does not want to see you.
What you do next is entirely up to you. Thanks a lot.
He sorted money into piles. The early days of archaic
Warbling taught him that cash mattered more than
anything. He counted madly: food for the dog, benefit
for Granny, Viagra he would send, no cash
needed, biggest stash ever for P and T, Edward had
refused payment. He touched the shawl which was
grubbier now, because Maggie had wrapped it
around his throat when his temperature was way high
and he shrieked at her not to close the window. He
put it in an envelope and scrawled her name on it.
She would know what he meant; she would never ask
for anything more. He checked his watch. These were
the hours for cooking.

His suitcase was extraordinarily light. No potions, no minerals, no whatsits, a few antibiotics in his
washbag and the seagulls outside friskier than ever
from what they had picked up. Seagulls freaked out
by vitamins and ginseng: he tried to cheer himself
with that idea, checked his watch again. Trains went
on the hour. The sky was slate and the wind ominous.
If he went now, quietly, he would have to wait, but if
he did not move, another kind of madness would
descend. The horror of doing, being nothing.

No hat. It was mild for the time of year, gathering
energy for another storm, going to be horrible soon. Horrible: he toyed with the word on the way to the
station, going the back way. It was an unfamiliar
description and he tried to think what he might say
instead. Awesome, terrific, incredible, nasty. Not nice.
The station was deserted apart from three kids with
one bicycle between them. The smallest one-sat, kicking
the wheels as if it was an enemy instead of
transport. He waited for a sense of relief. Checked on
his fingers for the things done and left undone.
Waited.



chapter fifteen.

there were starlings under the eaves of the station
canopy, putting out clarion calls, shrieking for
mother. He walked to the edge of the platform and
trod along a yellow line explained by a notice which
said, do not cross. He looked at the plants which
withered in the aisle between eastbound and west.
The train failed to arrive. He was way too early and
the next city train was going to be late because of the
weather. The sky turned from slate to black and even
the birds fell silent as the wind began to rattle. Henry
checked the breast pocket on his jacket, one last time,
as if it would be the last time and he would not do it
again and again. Back in the twenty-first century
which Warbling had managed to suspend, he could
feel himself slipping into the benign neurosis of
everyday concerns, and the need for everyday documents.

A woman appeared in charge of the kid who was
kicking the bike, and cuffed him. Henry leapt to his
feet, about to intervene and then sat down again as
she followed it up with no more than a scolding and a
crushed packet of crisps taken from her bag. He
moved to the far end of the platform and sat on a
metal bench out of the wind, adjusting his scarf and
his gloves and feeling his feet warm in his boots. He
might look like a tramp, but he was well insulated.

Should have said goodbye, but why did anyone
need goodbyes? Because it closed the chapter. He
found himself imagining what the reaction of the two
men would be when they found he had gone, told
himself they would not be quite reconciled by the
over-generous payment, that was not the point with
the English he had met. Money in quantity was not
important; they were weird like that. And what about her? Would she shrug her shoulders and say to herself
that was exactly how she expected him to behave?
What was it she had needed from him anyway? She
needed What he had achieved, without breaking any
of her ridiculous promises to her cousin. She did not
need him. If that woman needed anything, she was
not going to say. He stared at the trees on the far side
of the platform, pinned behind the high railings and
shaking in the wind. The waves on the seafront would
be high; he had liked it when the waves were high
enough to throw shingle into the road.

A train pulled in opposite, a slow-moving bullet of
light. Probably the only train on the track, going all
the way to the end of the line before coming back for
the patient few on this platform. They should be
throwing things at it in protest. He was never going to
smoke again and only ever eat nutritious food.

If he saw Maggie from the outside, as if he was a
stranger, what would he see? Someone who had
moved heaven and earth to find out the truth about
the cousin she loved like a sister. Someone who went
on serving the interests of that same person, doing
her bidding, remaining faithful to her, inhibited by
ridiculous promises to a self-confessed murderess, as   if that made no difference to love or loyalty. Perhaps
it didn't. Perhaps it made you suspend judgement
entirely; If you loved someone, you didn't leave them
whatever they had done. Any more than Angela
would abandon her daughter, or Peter would abandon
Tim. You would do anything. You would lie, for
a start; you would trade on affection and sentiment.
You might even blackmail people with their own
decency. You would put yourself on the back burner,
wipe yourself out.

There was an unfamiliar lump in one of the pockets
of the jacket and it dug into his thigh as he sat on the
metal bench. Henry investigated and found a bar of
chocolate and a tube of extra strong mints, examined
them carefully. Now who had put those there?
Someone who knew that he was inclined to forget
about sustenance and needed to take a little something
for his blood sugar in his weakened state? Don't you be
going out without something to eat, she had scolded
him only yesterday in that maternal way she had developed
with the patient. He could not blame her for
himself becoming ill, but in a way, he had. It was not
her fault that he had ignored the impact of cold and
shock and incurred the almost inevitable sickness, but
it was she who had started it all. He was trying to make
himself angry, but the presence of a bar of chocolate
was preventing it.

He could not fault her care of him in the last few
days and the way she'had responded to his words.
She had made sure that he did not feel ashamed to be
so helpless; she let him keep his dignity. She had been
peculiarly sensitive in her presence and her absences.
He would miss her, of course he would miss her; he
had always missed her.

You don't just leave people. Henry, that's what you
always do. Once it gets messy or complicated, or hurtful,
off you go. His father's voice; Francesca's voice, both
saying the same thing in markedly different accents.
No, he argued with himself, that isn't what I do, not
any more. I didn't do that, this time, I didn't. And no
one begged me to stay; it's clear they don't want me.
Francesca doesn't want me; she doesn't want me. How do you know? You never asked. Maybe she would have told you if you'd waited to be asked. You
aren't the only one who needs reassurance to get
beyond their own reserve; you aren't the only one
who shies away from confrontation like some frightened
thoroughbred at a fence. Francesca does that, too.
Whatever her name is.

She took me for a fool, he told himself So, you're 
going to leave her to her grieving, let her cope with the frustration of doing nothing, just because of that, 
are you? She still has all that mess on her plate. You 
bum. You've spent half your life carrying round bits 
and pieces of unfinished emotional business, frightened of being exposed. Who are you to criticize? Fear 
or ridicule weighs heavier than vitamins or water or clothes. C'mon. There are times when you just can't 
let people get away with their privacy. Even if they
want it.

Henry asked the man in the ticket office to keep his
bag. I have to go back for something. You'll miss the
train, the man said. OK, so I'll miss the train; there
are other trains in and out of here. There are trains
you should never even try to catch. Henry said.
There are buses which should never leave on time.
He walked out of the station.
The wind caught at his hair and seemed to lift it
away from his scalp. He kept his hands in his pockets
and pushed his way through the parking lot. No rain,
yet, simply the godforsaken wind which pushed him
downhill past the shops that were shutting and placing
barriers to guard against weather rather than
vandals. There was a lull in the dip by the crossing
where he seemed to enter another climatic zone, and
then the road rose again towards the sea. The weather
was a better enemy than most, he thought. It was at
least entirely even-handed, impersonal and indifferent
and you did not have to waste time reasoning with it.
The streets were clearing rapidly, everyone scurrying
indoors, bringing the afternoon to a premature end.
They all knew what to do. No one argued with
English weather; they simply evaded it. Unless they
were Maggie Chisholm, who liked to hide in the back
of the house but also liked to be outside in a storm.

Henry stood in the doorway opposite the hotel and
considered his direction. Without baggage and rain,
the wind was exhilarating and the sea was in a state of
glorious rage. He crossed the road to the entrance to
the pier and stood in the inadequate shelter of the
fisherman statue, touching the cold metal with affection.
The pier was her favourite place, she had said
and even with its terrible associations, it had become
his. Especially now, with the waves so high they
lapped at the walkway, sucked at the structure and
sent up spumes of spray. The whole 'structure
vibrated and hummed with the sound of the sea. He
wondered why some prudent town official did not
close the gates, but no one had. It felt more dangerous
than it was and if the whole thing was going to fall
down, today was not the day. Out on the horizon, the bigger boats rode unperturbed. If the wind blew
him sideways, all he had to do was sit down. Sit down
and think, but he was done with thinking. He walked
the length of the Titanic steadily enough, keeping his
eyes fixed on the darkened windows of the caff at the
end. He could see a figure, holding on to the railings
at the end with her back to the shore.

Tuttttt, he would say. Look at me, he would say. If  you sit out here, he would say, you get cold and sick,   and I can't let you do that, can I? You wouldn't let me 
do that, would you? You look after me when I'm sick. 
You did it twenty years ago and you've done it again
this -last week and I'm telling you, I'm sick of it. It's
my turn. Do you hear me? That's what he would say
if he could yell the words. I'm sick of it, Francesca.
There was her yellow hair which would be soaked
with spray. He could see her now, clearly, and Henry
could have howled with relief. Not too late. This time
he had turned back in time. As he approached, she moved to sit on the bench by the caff door, relatively 
sheltered by the overhang in the place where he had 
slept after his late breakfast on the first day, a century
ago, and woken to feel someone was watching him.

She was entirely oblivious to his presence. Henry had
the sharp and appalling remembrance of that face on
the ramshackle Indian bus, two decades sooner. The
shawl round her. neck and pressed against her face,
her skin pink and inflamed with weeping. Not at her
best, not then, or when she should have said, please
don't leave me; I need you, instead of saying, you must
do what you think best. Henry. Did not plead, any
more than he had offered. What a pair of fools. He
remembered himself, beginning to run, bashing his
fist against the dirty rear window of the bus, yelling, Wait for me. I'm not just another passenger, I'm ME. I
came back. And in the same uncoordinated way he
had begun to run then, he started, clumsily, to run
now.

She turned and noticed his awkward progress, gave
a tremulous smile. Then she went back to what she
was there for, crying. Sobbing into a handkerchief
sodden with tears or spray, he could not tell which.
He stopped, halted by the jolt of recognition. A
crying face took on the contours of a childish face
and assumed its own, unmistakable distinction. It was
the same face which had wept against the window of
that bus. Weeping like that, she was instantly recognizable
and he wondered why he had ever doubted it,
how he could ever have been fooled by her height, the
heeled shoes, the polish, the little bits of jewellery,
the distracting effects of years, all conspiring to confuse,
as if a person were no more than the sum of all
their visible details. He had known; he had ignored,
but then he was a literal man who tended to believe
what he was told. He was the scientist who believed in
the evidence of his own eyes and first-hand reports
from reliable sources. He let instinct take second
place, and sitting next to her now, alongside the roar
of the sea, he tried to recall when it was he had
guessed her identity and if the precise moment of his

guessing and concealing really mattered. He was 
there; she was there, and nothing else was important. She was the one. Prancesca. Maggie. Francesca.
They had blurred, but they were quite distinct.

'Shh,' he said. 'Shhhh, now. I don't know the half
of it, do I?'
She went on crying. If she made any sound in the
process, the sea drowned it.
'It doesn't matter,' he said, putting his arm round
her shoulders. 'You shouldn't think it matters at all. I
just don't know what to call you, I really don't. It's
embarrassing. Can't call you Fran. You hated your name to be shortened. I'm surprised you ever consented to Maggie. I like Margaret better, but I'd never
get used to it now. Couldn't stand another variation,
so you're Maggie, OK? You still bite your nails, don't
you? I never thought you'd dye your hair. You didn't
seem the type then for tinted hair, but who knows?
And you were going to be a teacher.'

She carried on crying, not bothering to stem the
flow. He pulled her a little closer, fished in his pocket
for a handkerchief, found the chocolate and proffered
it instead. She smiled a bit at that, shook her head.
They sat as they were. Even the bone of her shoulder
was familiar. She could not stop her compulsive
weeping. Henry told himself that for once he was the
one in control, but he doubted his ability to manage
the tremor in his voice. They must look like a couple
of eccentric tramps, and who gave a shit. 'Francesca
Margaret Chisholm is in prison,' Henry said, matter
of factly, 'and Margaret F. for Francesca Chisholm
practises law. Why did you call yourself Francesca all
those years ago when you went to India? What's in a
name? Come on, Maggie. Tell me, please.'

She heaved herself upright. Blew her nose until it
shone red and attempted to put the handkerchief
back in her pocket. It fluttered to the ground and the
wind took it towards France.
'Because it's a much nicer name than Maggie,' she
said gruffly. 'I hated being called Maggie. And
Francesca was a much more glamorous person to be.
Glamorous and kind. That's why I went travelling in
the first place. So I could be someone else. I wished I
had lived in the castle. It was my second home. I
wished her parents were my dead parents and I was
as nice as her. And although her father wasn't my father, he was as good as ... and he loved me as if I
was ... oh shit. I should be crying for Harry. I am crying for Harry. I'm crying for every bloody thing.'
He nodded, close to tears himself. No one would
know it was not the spray.
'And I'm not Francesca,' she muttered. 'I'm whatever
I've got left. Some bloody muddle.'
'You're the one who remembered poetry,' he said.
'The crazy one who looked after me and made me
feel . . . whole. The one who laughed with me and
never at me. That's you. The fact you like to play
charades doesn't alter that. I know who you are. I just

don't know why you felt you had to go on playing
charades. Couldn't you trust me?'

The rain began, thundering on the concrete. She
cried a little more and wiped her face with the sleeve
of her coat. 'Trust you?' she shouted over the storm. 'I
did trust you. But not with everything and not with
that. You would-have despised me.' She sniffed. 'How
pathetic to have borrowed the identity of someone
else, even at eighteen. Self-aggrandizement. Why
should you help poor, deluded Maggie Chisholm
who travelled under false colours? But I thought. . .
I thought... you might be curious enough to enquire
into Francesca because you carried a torch for her.
You never carried a torch for Maggie. Not for me.'
'A torch? He remembered where he was.
Remembered the history he had read, about wartime
sailors, putting up misleading flags in order to get
close to the enemy. False colours. 'They weren't false
colours,' Henry said. 'You just added in a stripe or
two. Altered the shading. I'm colour blind anyway. I
knew you.' His voice also rose to a shout. It was a
mad way to conduct a conversation. 'I know you now
and I'm telling you, there aren't so many surprises.
You're the kind one. But you used me. Never mind
fake colours. You hooked me like a fish and reeled me
in.' The weeping continued.

'Yes, I did.'I'm sorry. There was no one else.'
'It was extremely calculating.'
'Yes; she yelled.
'You're cunning and dishonest.'
'YES! All right, yes:
He pulled her hair gently and laid her head against
his shoulder. Gradually the crying ceased. The storm
lulled into a temporary calm, as if taking a breath.

'I'm sorry I left you that first time,' Henry said.
'Shouldn't have done it. Never forgot it. I guess we're
quits. Do you think we could start all over again?'

She looked up in tearstained surprise, her face
puffy and pale, the nose red.
'Don't be ridiculous. Why?
'Got a cigarette?'
'Somewhere, yes.' A packet emerged from her
handbag. He watched her pale white hands, no longer
hiding bitten nails, Maggie turning her head into the
shelter of the dreadful jacket he pulled across them
both to forestall the wind and rain long enough to
light one smoke and another one from the first for
him. 'These are bad for you. Henry,' she said,
earnestly, handing him his. 'I told you twenty years
ago, don't copy my bad habits. And anyway, why?'

One inhalation and the cigarette tasting of salt.
Never again. The rain drenched his hand. He felt
utterly, bewilderingly certain and as obstinate as the
weather.
'Because I've always loved you. I do mean you.
That's a long, long time. And I want the whole thing.
Dog, garden, care of your cousin. That sort of stuff.'
'You're out of your mind. I am not Francesca.'
'I don't want Francesca. I want you. And I'm just
about done with turning back.'

A huge wave crashed into the pier at the end nearest
the gate. Someone by the entrance, flanked by the
profile of a dog, waved at them anxiously, shouting, voice lost in the boom. The wave broke into a plume
of foam, washing the floor with a vicious shsshhhh, slinking away. Another followed. The surface before
them flooded and bubbled rapidly. The waves hit
again, irregular in their onslaught, murderously precise.
The tide could go higher. Henry ditched the wet
cigarette.
'Well, kind Margaret, we either stay here all night,
or run for it. What do you say?'
She buttoned his jacket first, then her own coat,
looking sideways down the length of the pier, judging
the distance. She shuffled her heeled boots like a soldier
on parade, testing the circulation in her feet and
took his hand.
'Run,' she said. 'Now.'