Читать книгу If the Invader Comes - Derek Beaven - Страница 5

IT OPENS IN paradise, with my great-uncle. He was woken by a thud from the ceiling directly over his head, followed by a flurry of squeals, as the little cobra that seemed to have got into the roof caught another rat. In the darkness of the bedroom, Dr Wulfstan Pike lay under his mosquito net and listened to the drench hitting the bungalow thatch and the cascade of rivulets from the eaves on to the garden outside his window. He could distinguish, too, the pelt of huge globes of water into the puddles in the compound. The steamy rot smell from the old carpet mingled with the flavour of his own sweat.

He felt under the sheet for the woman lying at his side. Selama stirred in her sleep and turned over towards him; his palm traced the child-stretched skin of her belly to rest on the prominence of her hip. He smoothed the curve to her waist, and, as he bent his head near her hair on the pillow, he caught both the savour of the food she prepared, and the deeper note of her body’s secretions. The spicy confluence in his nostrils was so tender that he woke her with his kisses.

Later, they slept until dawn. When he got up, he felt confident, as if the world these last two weeks really had not been shifting under his feet. Outside, on the veranda, the view towards the coast showed each leaf for miles rinsed and urgently viridescent. The huge sky was mottled with pearl.

He stood, taking it in, still hardly believing after so many years the sublimity that lay around him – until a waft of fresh coffee announced that Musa, the kuki, was up and doing. A queue of patients had already begun to form on the other side of the front steps.

The coffee pot, on its Chinese tray, had been served neatly to the sideboard in the dining-room. Dr Pike took his cup and clomped in his boots and dressing-gown to the teak table. Its top was completely covered with cut-out newspaper stories; but as if they were no more than a scrapbook in process he was at pains not to notice them.

Most mornings Selama sent the cook, Musa, off to do housework or buy groceries, and made breakfast herself in an old shirt she’d taken a fancy to, a frayed blue one with cooking splashes down the front. Most mornings during the last fortnight she had begun the meal by objecting to Dr Pike’s mess of papers all over the breakfast table.

Today, however, she wore the red kimono he’d bought her once in Kuala Lumpur. And, seeing her like that, he wished he could hold time still with Selama sitting opposite him just as she was, her brown eyes looking up for a second, her quick smile showing the missing front tooth, and her fine, slightly greying hair spilling down on to red silk.

Isolated words from the expanse of print caught his attention: Blitzkrieg, cathedral, armour-piercing, Bydgoszcz. They flicked up at him with venom. He felt Selama watching him. She guessed exactly what was in his heart – of that he was certain. She knew he thought of quitting Malaya, of simply failing to return from his next leave. Part of him wished they could discuss his dilemma, another was relieved they never did. She knew he could never take her with him.

Neither spoke over a breakfast of last night’s rice pancakes, heated up again and buttered. When they’d finished, he rose and went to kiss her cheek. ‘Dear, you know how I need you.’

‘I know and I don’t know.’

‘You know.’ In the haven of her neck, breathing her, he was overcome.

‘No, Stan.’ She stood up, crossly, and rearranged her lapel. ‘Haven’t you got patients to see?’

My great-uncle sighed. Taking his quinine from the sideboard, he went to get dressed.

As always, he stood in front of the long mirror in his wardrobe door. It showed nothing youthful, nor romantic; merely an ample, red-and-white Englishman with grizzled body hair. He was no more than his reflection, and age had caught up with him.

How strange not to notice. Sag had occurred in several regions quite recently taut. And how thoroughly bald he’d grown. Only the eyebrows and moustache appeared to flourish, sprouting ever whiter and more luxuriant. Wrinkles he’d rather thought of as charm were bunched under the pale blue eyes. Surely his nose had enlarged while he slept. The jowls, simian; the ears, elephantine – it all added up to little more than roguishness.

The amah, the Chinese woman who’d first looked after his daughter and still remained with the household, had left a jug of tepid water on the bedroom floor. A large enamelled tin bowl was the apparatus he generally used for washing his privates. Planting his feet either side of it, he would lower himself on to its rims and then work up a good lather by the action of his hands, diving all about, leaving no crevice of his life unexamined. But for some reason this morning found him too picturesque for his own good and he left the mirror. He went instead to the little bathroom which adjoined, in order to sluice himself from the monumental earthenware jar kept permanently there. The cool water slipped deliciously from his back and belly and disappeared through the slats in the floor.

As he returned, dripping, to rummage in a drawer for underwear, Selama knocked at the door. ‘Stan! What’re you doing? It’s getting late. Are you lazy?’

‘Just thinking.’

‘You think too much.’

Dr Pike’s old thatched bungalow was on stilts. Standing next to the bedroom window as he hauled on his khaki shorts and snapped his braces over his shoulders, he looked down on smiling faces. A child waved. He recognised her. Under his care, she’d recovered from a paralysis, which the mother had insisted was caused by an ill-wisher. On such matters he kept an open mind, for he’d proved the abracadabra of medicine himself, countless times. The body might be decently addressed with an instruction to heal – and quite often it really would, throwing off even the most tenacious bug. Therefore, he allowed, in wickedness it could be told to become sick, and might comply.

Shaving, he reminded himself that his daughter, Clarice, was arriving at teatime.

‘They’re waiting for you. Hurry up, dear!’

‘All right, woman! D’you want to make a chap cut his bloody throat.’

HE LEFT THE bedroom as soon as he’d finished, and carried the little desk and cane chair out from the study to the veranda. There he called up the first patient to stand before him, and without more ado began examining the sore in a plantation worker’s leg. With its ring of ooze, it was a bad wound to come across first thing. It lay beside the shin-bone, an obscene, pointless crater in the structures just below the knee.

In fact, his head swam at the sight of it. He actually felt as though he were going to pass out – something that hadn’t happened since the day Clarice broke her arm. That had been on her seventh birthday, in England. His pale daughter had stood before him holding the shocking misalignment with her good hand and he’d fainted against the bookcase corner, the one by the door in the Suffolk house, and almost knocked himself out. Little use it would have been then to her, having a doctor for a father. All at once the plantation worker’s lesion meant nothing to him. His brain refused to focus, and he lacked any notion of the routine treatment called for. The only thing he could sense was that the sufferer seemed unusually sullen and unco-operative.

Dr Pike was an intuitive. As a healer, he relied on the inner ‘click’ – that moment when body responded to body – by which he’d know how to begin. Just now, its absence was unnerving, and, while the sweat broke out on his brow, his skin grew incomprehensibly cold. The sore mocked him. It threatened to widen and erupt before his eyes. He felt his other patients waiting, watching from the garden. A fly settled on the raw flesh; a couple more. His relationship with Selama was racially illicit. It was September 1939. The paradise was altering around him.

There had once gone out in that world an imperial edict, the Concubine Circular. After its issue, ‘native women’ had become less and less permissible in a government or company bungalow, no matter how unpretentious. While new men sat at the famous long bar at the club in Seremban, older Malaya hands would describe the passing of the Romance of the Orient. Before the Great War, most white officials had Malayan mistresses; the practice had been so ordinary as to be beyond comment.

Nowadays, men brought out their wives from England. There were roads, cars, telephones. Among the English there was a polite society of sorts, an urban sentiment, and with it a heightened racial feeling, for white women looked on the natives as unfair competition. Dr Pike brushed the flies away. The accumulation of fester was already dangerous. Tentatively, he began cleaning the mess with a spirit swab, trying to gather his wits.

He hadn’t set out to take up with a Malayan woman – nor was he the typical imperial servant I might already have led you to suspect. He’d left England in desperation because his young wife Mattie’s family couldn’t be trusted, and would never suffer her to be free of them. From London the couple’s first escape had been to East Anglia with the child, Clarice. When Suffolk failed to lighten the marriage, my great-uncle had prescribed this more drastic relocation and trained for the tropics. But Mattie had taken sick: of climate, of separation from home, of jungle fever or falling fever, or perhaps wilfully of some yet-to-be-identified complaint.

He and Selama had met at the cottage hospital. A ward sister, she had been recently widowed. In the way of doctors and nurses, they’d worked together over a period, brought close by several problem cases and their shared determination not to give up on them. Gradually, they’d become attracted enough to risk love. Both had been gratified. He’d immediately found a happiness, which had lasted.

But their liaison broke rules and crossed boundaries. Even after Mattie died, they thought of themselves as an embarrassing throwback, a white man and his ‘keep’. They were inadmissible among either his or her people, tolerated only so long as they kept on the very edge of society.

Now his daughter was a grown woman, and only last month a Mrs Christopher, a Perak District Officer’s wife en route northward through Seremban, had sent in a complaint about him: that Dr Pike’s liaison made his daughter’s social position impossible. Everybody knew about it except the girl herself. The plantation worker flinched at the swab’s touch. There was a dull hatred in his eyes, as if this tuan doktor were cause rather than cure. Dr Pike pressed into the weeping tissue, trying to do the right thing. Or was even this called in question, he asked himself? Had one person ever the right to intervene in the condition of another? It was his duty, surely, at least to clean up the damage. The man groaned and muttered through clenched teeth.

A whole region of clotted blood and pus finally came away. In the exposed corner of the sore, just under a film of partially healed skin, Dr Pike spotted a blue-grey shape, like a gaping comma, sharply defined. He stared at it in surprise. It was the head of something. ‘There’s a good chap,’ he told his patient. ‘You’ve been very brave.’

He finished off with the swab and rinsed his hands. Then, as if the treatment were complete, he prepared a fold of powder at his desk. ‘I’d like you to take this, three times a day after meals.’ He repeated the formula in his best Tamil, and handed over the paper.

The patient relaxed, visibly.

‘Oh. One thing. Sit down here.’ He stood up, and gestured to his own chair.

The man complied, and, apparently half-amused, settled himself in.

Dr Pike picked up one of the sharp slivers of bamboo he kept ready and split it to make a springy clip. He returned almost casually, before pain could be anticipated, knelt down, and inflicted one deft but absolute stroke.

A sharp scream echoed round the compound. It was still dying away as the doctor stood, triumphant. From the bamboo in which its head was trapped, a strange marbled worm hung curling like three inches of theatrical macaroni. ‘Found you, rogue. My God, but you’re an altogether different kettle of fish.’ And it was true: he had not seen the like before.

Laughter and applause broke out in the queue below the veranda. He could have sworn he felt the thing twitch at the sound; and he called over his shoulder, ‘Selama! Come and look! Tell me if you’ve seen one of these!’

The plantation worker darted a strained glance behind him towards the bungalow’s interior, from which Selama’s voice came back, high and still irritated, ‘Whatever it is, I don’t want to see!’

‘Don’t be silly. Come here, woman. Just take a look at this.’

There were calls for Selama from the lawn. At last she came out, an apron round her fine red kimono and a feather duster in her hand. ‘You’re dreadful, Dr Pike. Get away with you. My, my, a very bad animal.’

Everybody laughed, except the worm’s host, who looked offended. As for doctor and nurse, it was imperial farce, and the incident restored them. Dr Pike made up a dressing, sent both his patient and his lover away, and found himself able to proceed.

BY TWELVE THIRTY he’d finished. He’d treated three vitamin deficiencies, a lethargy, a broken toe, the child with the paralysis, two toothaches, two animal bites and a knife wound; advised one man to smoke less, another to smoke more; and monitored, through their husbands, the progress of several pregnant women. His last patient left a chicken in a bamboo cage which would answer for tomorrow’s dinner, and which also reminded him of East Anglia, where a parish doctor might find a brace of dead pheasants on his doorstep in lieu of payment.

The worm lay in a dish, faintly convulsing. He spoke to it. ‘What have you been up to, eh? Don’t imagine I don’t know.’ He took his trophy to the larger, mahogany desk in the den, poured himself a Scotch, and turned to his books to attempt identification.

He had small hope. There was such great variety in the forest, so much speciation. Manson’s Tropical Diseases, he knew, was both limited and soggy: the pages clung one to another at this time of year. Usually, he didn’t mind – the rubber company got him new volumes whenever the print started actually coming away. Today, however, it put him out. He unpeeled the relevant chapter and read. For large worms there was always the Hippocratic method, whereby nematodes such as Dracunculus were teased slowly out of the human lymphatic system, poulticed, rolled week by week around a piece of stick. Manson also listed a biblical technique for them: Moses had once nailed a brazen snake to a pole. Though Dr Pike lamented the lack of such kit from his issue, he dismissed these findings as irrelevant. In this part of the world Dracunculus was not a problem.

His own specimen began in a sightless head, was bloody, much shorter, and fringed with liverish stalks. It had visible segments. He imagined sharing his own body with such a thing, while it strove and grew. The sweat broke out again, this time soaking his collar and the armpits of his shirt. He prescribed himself another whisky.

With the usual filariases and helminth infestations, the difficult ulcerations, the mysterious wastings and crippling diarrhoeas, Dr Pike was generally more successful than science alone could have made him. Obvious incurables were packed off to the government hospital in Seremban, but where there was a chance, flair could tip the scales. He did see strange cases, and story-book monsters of the kind that lay in the dish seemed to long to be understood. Sometimes he had literally to wrestle with them; at others they required a long and teasing dance. Dr Pike was prepared to entertain the notion of a medical borderland, and was unconventional enough to meet the jungle half-way.

It was a far cry from an English surgery. The little lurking ticks, the mischievous snails, the local threadlike Wuchererias and Brugias concealed themselves within the abundant Malayan woodland, glued under leaves, afloat in pools, suspended from threads, or cunningly ciphered in the bodies of insects, waiting only to hide yet again in the tissue of a passer-by. They reproduced by threading species and air, being and space in the most ingenious stitchwork. Parasitical colonisation was the defining disease of Malaya, and Dr Pike felt both the worm’s malice, and its repulsive yearning to find a place for itself. Nature, so secretive, so abundant, so enterprising, actually craved attention. The worm desired a name. Dr Pike spluttered into his glass.

The creature was beginning to dull into a mass. There was already a putrid stink to it. It made his gorge rise again, as if today he lacked all stomach for research. To stretch it out and examine it thoroughly, to take the omens, how revolting. Thankfully the Scotch was always in good supply. In the heat it went straight in at the mouth and out at the pores, hardly touching the bloodstream. He splashed in another couple of fingers.

Now Selama knocked on the study door. ‘Stan! I’ve made lunch.’

She served him neat vicarage sandwiches filled with spiced egg. Afterwards they went to the bedroom. He undressed her, and the kimono cascaded round her feet in a silken rush; but when she responded to his embrace and huddled herself close, the room suddenly emptied for him, as though a plug had been pulled, and he was left afloat on nothing. He recalled his lapse of mind on the veranda, that feeling of being lost, disconnected.

‘Sorry. Sorry, dear.’ Horrified, he turned away from her. ‘The bloody Scotch, I expect.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No. Sorry.’

‘Stan. It doesn’t matter.’

‘No. I expect not. Sorry. I’m so sorry.’ He couldn’t think. Her body, always so desirable, like a home, a flame, a frontier, had become strange. Because of his failure, she was almost unbearable to him. ‘Must be getting old,’ he said. The forced chuckle sounded like a rattle. His mind offered him only the image of the worm.

She held out a hand. ‘Come. Lie down.’ He obeyed, and allowed himself to be led to the bed and settled. Naked, she lay beside him.

He tried again, pouncing on her, almost; capturing her breasts and kissing them, pressing her belly, prising her legs apart.

‘Stop it! Stan, you pack that up!’

‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’

‘What are you playing at?’

‘Well … Hasn’t done any good anyway.’ The bedroom seemed far away, tinged with a juiceless aerial light, her anger terrible, but so remote. ‘Hasn’t done any bloody good.’

THEY LAY ON the bed, in the heat of the afternoon. He wished he could be sure she was asleep, but fancied she was merely pretending, lying there hating him. After an hour she got up and stretched in front of the window. Her silhouette, the back he knew he loved, the waist, the fullness of her hips, all struck him with fear.

‘Clarice will be here soon, won’t she?’ she said. ‘I’m going to Ibrahim, then. Straight away.’ Her son’s family lived closer to Seremban itself. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow after dark, when your daughter has gone. Don’t worry yourself, though. He’ll bring me.’ She faced away from the doctor as she tied on a batik skirt, slipped into a brown cotton jacket and left the room.

He followed, useless. He found her by the print-strewn dining table, and struggled for words. ‘He’s good to his mother, Ibrahim.’

‘Yes, Stan. He is.’ She picked up one of the plates left from their lunch and placed it waitress-like on her arm. Then she waved her free hand crossly at the strewn cuttings. Outside, it was about to rain again.

‘So what’s happening? Eh, Stan? You tell me what’s happening.’

He had no answer, but only peered down at the evidence he’d assembled. There were reports out of the Straits Times, the Malay Mail, the Tribune, Planter, and clippings, too, from the English Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph – in fact whatever of the Fleet Street press had managed to find its way up to Seremban, hot off some RAF plane into Singapore and already quite overtaken by events. Shamed, he shifted his weight from foot to foot like a schoolboy up before the beak. Selama stacked the other plate on top of the first, and disappeared towards the kitchen.

‘Shall I drive you?’ he called after her.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Till later then. Goodbye, dear.’ He handed the umbrella out of the bamboo hall-stand. ‘You’ll need this.’

From the veranda he watched her go down the length of the garden path, the umbrella under her arm, still rolled even though the first warm drops had begun to fall. Musa, the kuki, hovered with a broom in his hand on his way to the back bungalow, pretending not to look. At the mud road Selama turned in the direction of the town, refusing to glance back and wave. Failing her, betraying her, he watched until she was hidden in the tunnel of large, overarching trees at the bend.

Almost immediately out of the same gap a Malayan lad appeared on a bicycle, coming towards him, bringing the latest paper. The boy hurried to where the doctor stood on the veranda. ‘Selamat petang.’ He presented the broadsheet. ‘Tuan.’

There was also a letter, from England.

‘Terima kasih.’ Stan Pike fished a small coin from his pocket, and then remembered himself. ‘May your deeds also be blessed.’

The newspaper contained flashed accounts of the Russians going into Poland from the east, together with more evidence of German barbarities as they’d made their way through from the west. The letter was from Phyllis, Mattie’s niece, whom he hadn’t seen since she was a scrap of a kid.

Then Clarice arrived in the town’s ancient taxi.

‘DON’T BE RIDICULOUS, Daddy.’ Ensconced in a cane chair, Clarice held her cup and saucer balanced in one hand and brushed with the other at the rain splashes on her shoulder and sleeve. Dr Pike was proud of his daughter’s looks: Clarice had Mattie’s features, fine and regular. Her hair, though, had always tended towards his own sandy colour. It was now further bleached and streaked from her trip up-country. Today, she wore it pinned, visibly ridged with the traces of a perm.

He was proud, too, of her dress sense. She’d put on a cool, belted day dress in pale grey crêpe de Chine. Leaning back somewhat languidly, with her legs elegantly crossed, and conducting a minute rhythm with the toe of one slim black shoe, she appeared more assured and sophisticated than he’d ever seen her; more mature, certainly, than her twenty-three years. As for himself, he stood facing her from the doorway to the dining-room, holding the teapot, with sweat already sopping the armpits of his shapeless tropical kit. ‘I’m not ridiculous,’ he said.

‘Who in their right mind would choose just now to up sticks? And England of all places. Even if they’re not bombed to bits, I certainly don’t want to go back to England. What was it you said once? Malignant middle class, beaten working class, and Mummy’s relations. I thought you never wanted to.’ She squinted at him, with a puzzled expression.

‘There comes a point when one thinks of retiring,’ he muttered.

She chided him. ‘And don’t be lame, either. There’s years in you yet. You’re not the retiring kind. Anyway, Malaya’s your life. Weren’t you planning to go up to the hills? Gunung Angsi, buy a little place?’

He changed the subject. ‘What about this young man of yours? You might have brought him with you.’

‘Oh, Robin,’ she said, airily. ‘I would have done. But he said he had some business at the club. You can meet him when he comes to pick me up in the morning.’

‘A nice trip?’

‘Fine, thanks. Absolutely fine.’

Clarice got up, still holding her tea. ‘Daddy, you’re looking terrible. I didn’t like to say it as soon as I came in, but honestly … What is it?’

‘It’s nothing.’

She placed the back of her hand on his brow. ‘Hadn’t you better sit down? I’ll get your medicine, shall I?’ Taking charge, she moved past him into the dining-room. ‘And what on earth have you been doing here?’

He saw her put down her cup on the strewn table. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said.

‘Why not? I’ll just see if I can find a sponge for you – and some water, too.’

‘No!’

But she went off despite him towards the bedrooms. He sat down to mop his own brow.

He sometimes wondered how much Clarice had suffered, lacking a mother, trailing about the world alone like a lost soul, sometimes at school in England, at other times mured in this old-fashioned colonial bungalow, back and forth. Her mother’s death had come when she was fourteen and she’d taken ship directly back to Malaya for a period of mourning with him. Selama had moved discreetly out.

Then Clarice had gone home to finish her schooling and Selama was reinstated. Clarice had returned once more, and, once more, he’d kept up appearances. Now Clarice moved in higher social circles than his own. Singapore was a fortress.

But even if he could maintain her there indefinitely, he wasn’t sure what her place was in the scheme of things. Daughters were supposed to be married off. Or she should have some career? Whatever, there was some strong element in it of a father’s duty; though Clarice had shown little sign of knowing for herself what she wanted.

At times she’d thrown herself into helping him on his rounds, like a devoted nursing auxiliary. Dr Pike had distrusted her motives; they smacked of spinsterism, possibly of religion. In any case, if he’d wanted a nurse he had Selama, and Clarice muddled his drug cabinet. But now she seemed the composed one, while he sat baffled, ghostly, and afraid of his decision.

He dabbed at himself with his handkerchief. The core of his fear was the subject no one at the club would discuss: that the Japanese would come as they had to China, and there’d be nothing anyone could do. People at the club said he was being alarmist. They seemed to lack the imagination to grasp the meaning of what had gone on in Nanking. Dr Pike had been left alone with the vision culled from his newspaper cuttings: of the Japanese Army occupying a Malaya left defenceless because Britain was suddenly locked into a struggle on the other side of the world – of the merciless rape of the two women in his life over his dead body. Nobody believed it could happen, yet for the two weeks since Britain had declared war on Germany he hadn’t been able to shut the thought off.

He wondered whether he really was in for a bout of his fever. His preoccupation might be delirium. He tried thinking of Selama, of all his familiar textures, the closeness of his house, the rattan chairs, the boxed discs of chamber music for the wind-up gramophone, the pictures on his walls, his specimen cabinets, his rack of Dutch cigars.

Clarice returned with the sponge. ‘Call yourself a doctor, Daddy? I can’t leave you, can I? Thought you’d have known better. And why have you left those wretched pieces all over the dining table?’

Eyes screwed shut, he tilted up his face for her. How he wished he could put aside the buzz in his ear which said, Take Clarice away from Malaya, go now while you can. Or was it in his bones, his blood, this gathering intuition of crisis?

‘I’m not being ridiculous, Clarice,’ he repeated. ‘I really think we have to leave.’

‘I’ve no intention of going anywhere except Singapore,’ she said. ‘Now take some of this.’ She held out the quinine bottle.

Later, he staggered out of his bedroom just as Musa was serving Clarice’s dinner over the arrangement on the table. He did try to explain. He picked up a cutting from the Times. Dated 18 December 1937, it was by C. M. Macdonald, the only British correspondent to have remained in Nanking during the Japanese army’s entry into that city. He scanned past the descriptions of murder to the part of the report which glared by its tale of omission, But it is a fact that the bodies of no women were seen.

Clarice was firm with him. ‘Daddy, I’m terribly tired, actually. Would you mind awfully if we did the political lecture another time. I know you’ve probably got something gruesome to demonstrate, but to be honest I’d rather not hear it just at the moment. I’ll have to make an early start tomorrow. You won’t be offended if I call it a day, will you? Just go back to bed. Come on. This way.’

‘We have to get out.’

‘You have to get some sleep.’ Stifling a yawn, she kissed him good-night. ‘And so do I. Now you’ll take care of yourself, won’t you?’ She turned to go.

‘Of course,’ he said, submissive now. ‘Sorry. Sleep well, darling.’ He still held the cutting in his hand but was glad, after all, that he didn’t have to explain to her how the missing women hadn’t been chivalrously spared.

IN THE NIGHT he got up. He was very frightened. His desire to put things right, to do his duty at last as a father – that was what had turned him into this parody of a supreme commander, pacing agitated, solo, around his dining-room table as if it contained the relief map of the theatre of operations. If he could assess the situation accurately, the enemy’s strength and disposition, then and only then would he know how to act. The evidence was laid out before him. Thousands of miles away, Poland, a fully functioning European state with a considerable army and a fine cultural history, had been reduced to rubble in a week or two. Some terrible permission had been given. Reports confirmed both the astonishing German tactical brilliance and the brutality of the assault. He tapped his foot on the floorboards. Rain outside drowned out the sound. What if Britain and France got drawn in and bogged down? If America stayed on the fence? What of the imperial supply lines if the thing really got going? Any ship between Singapore and the English Channel would increasingly become fair game for a U-boat.

He rummaged for Selama’s sharp sewing scissors in the sideboard drawer and cut out a piece from the newspaper that had just arrived. It counted the total sinkings as two dozen British ships, so far. No such announcement had come through on the short-wave radio. The liner Athenia had been torpedoed by a submarine.

If his vision was right, Clarice must not stay. But he couldn’t just send her away – to nowhere, to Mattie’s family – cast her adrift as she’d been set to drift already, this time on dangerous seas. He’d been a wretched parent, if the truth were told. Booting her out once more would be to fail her utterly. The whole thing was repeating itself. Supposing England were more fire than frying-pan, and he were deliberately hurrying his daughter under a cloudburst of bombs. Then, as her father, he should at least go with her. But he couldn’t take Selama. Nor could he leave her. Every delay made the seas more perilous. The fever beat up and up; and then broke in another drenching sweat.

In the morning, in the lull, he put on a brave face. A sultry sky showed the monsoon weather, and Clarice maintained, over breakfast, her refusal to discuss change. By way of diversion, he read Phyllis’s letter. It had been weeks delayed.

Dear Uncle Stan,

I know you will have forgotten all about me. In fact when Auntie Mattie passed away you probably thought you would have got rid of us Tylers for good, and here we are turning up again like a bad penny. I’m sure I did write on the occasion of my marriage and again on the birth of our little boy, Jack, but unfortunately received no reply. Normally I wouldn’t trouble you except Victor, my beloved husband, has lost his job, he is a shipwright at the boatyard, and is finding it hard to get another start. If there was any way you could see your way to help us through this difficult time, I can assure you we would be very grateful. I hope this letter finds you well. I always remember how kind you and Auntie Mattie were to me when you used to very kindly have me to stay with you in your country house in Suffolk.

I remain

Your loving niece

Phyllis Warren (Tyler as was)

‘“I remain”,’ Dr Pike quoted, sighing. ‘She wants money, of course.’

‘Who?’

‘Phyllis. Her husband’s lost his job.’

‘Phyllis! Your letter’s from Phyllis.’

‘Yes.’

Her father saw the blush come to Clarice’s cheeks; and I can feel it too, as I describe it.

‘Is anything the matter?’ he said.

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ She struggled to compose herself. ‘Will you send her some? Money, I mean.’

‘Not sure I’ve all that much left.’ Dr Pike eyed her meaningfully.

‘May I see?’

She took the letter, stood up, and hurried out to the veranda. The blush still prickled violently in her cheeks. Her hand was unsteady, and her knees had gone to rubber, making the short walk feel like a lurch into unsupported space. Outside, by a gap in the chick blinds, she read the letter over twice, three times, and then stared intently out at the sweep of countryside and rain forest – as if she could see all the way to England. Victor, my beloved husband …

No, I’m not Jack, the ‘little boy’ of Phyllis’s letter. I am not yet born. I must draw up this landcape of privilege and make my portrait of the woman who should have been my mother, though her world has nothing to do with me. The past is a fable of desire, a romance, an illusion.

Why then, curled as I am, tucked away in the story, do I make these imaginative stitches, pulling Clarice Pike and my father together again? Why linger with the family connection, suturing a gash in time? And why, like my great-uncle, Dr Stan Pike, do I tackle certain monsters? Because of the hope for love, of course.

Clarice held on to the timber pole that propped the veranda roof. She tried to reinstate Robin Townely, her man of the moment – who ought to have been here by now to pick her up. But with the letter in her hand all she could think of was Vic, and London. Three years and she could still be visited by these heart-racings and shakings, these physical clichés. And still she couldn’t tell whether they were genuine, or merely symptoms of her own dislocation.

On her mother’s side was East London and a poverty she’d lived protected from. That was the London out of which her father had rescued her mother. That was also the London where her cousin, Phyllis, had grown up, so distressingly unrescued. But there, paradoxically, Clarice had found Vic. And what was Vic but an ordinary working man, a dockside shipwright …

Vic had been engaged to Phyllis; and yet instantly, shockingly, Clarice and he had been drawn to each other. They’d met for concerts, been to lectures together, stolen hours in cheap cafés. Staying at her grandmother Tyler’s house, Clarice had not had long before her return to Malaya. There’d been a secret affair; then a realisation, followed by renunciation. She’d left for Southampton and her ship. He’d consented to his marriage.

Now in her mind’s eye he was caught by cross-hatchings, staring hopelessly back at her out of darkness, trapped back in that Dickensian ménage of cobwebs and candlelight that Phyllis’s letter evoked for her. She pictured too, unwillingly, the marital bed, with its creaking springs, the couple panting at each other, Phyllis something triumphant, and the man who had so startled her with a meeting of minds made weak and run of the mill, ruined.

From the distance, somewhere in the plantation compound, there came the chime of gongs and a burst of drumming. She guessed there was a rehearsal for the festival to mark the end of Ramadan. Later there would be a shadow play. She turned back into the house. All the while, as she was collecting her things to meet Robin, a faint metallic music hung about her efforts. It seemed the moist air finely shook, and took on almost discernible curlicues, insinuating tendrils of sound.

AT THE COAL HOLE night-club in Betterton Street, people were ready to dance again. The band was coming back after its break, and the spotlight waited, a large empty moon half-way up the spangled backdrop. From a table beside the dance floor Victor Warren stared into the illumination. Shortly, his wife would occupy it; tonight’s chanteuse. It was her lucky break.

Since he’d last seen Clarice, my father was not at all ruined in features. At first glance, his looks appeared quite dashing. Some negative quality, however, had certainly leaked into the rest of his appearance, and sitting with Tony Rice and Frances, the girl, he looked badly out of place. His grey flannel jacket was disreputable, his tie was skewed, and his shirt collar had too obviously been turned.

On closer inspection the face, which was thinnish with slightly Slavic lines, revealed a brow contracted and a mouth tightened. He wore his brown hair slicked away from his face, so that his dark moustache gave him a worn and dangerous cast. It belied his earnest eyes – and his twenty-six years.

He had good reason to look grim. The feeling all along that he’d been playing for the very highest stakes seemed entirely borne out. Having done his best with Phyllis, he was sure she was trying to destroy him. In fact, it could have been the circle of his own death that glittered back at him from the stage. He, like Dr Pike, felt mightily scared. As he touched his drink to his lips he tried to convince himself he was being irrational.

The club was full. In one of Covent Garden’s least promising streets, the Coal Hole was something of a find for a certain set. Or it was stumbled upon by theatre-goers after a meal at Monty’s or L’Escargot, who told their friends. From a narrow, sandbagged door in the face of an old tobacco warehouse, a staircase led down to the cellars, where there was not only late-night alcohol but a resident dance band of four black jazzmen. If it hadn’t been for the war, people said, the Coal Hole would have been set to ‘take off’. In the absence, so far, of bombing or gas attacks, it was still open, still defiantly humming. For once, thank God, the idiotic situation across the Channel could be shoved firmly to the back of the mind – so long as the band proved authentically rhythmic, the singer sufficiently charming.

At the Coal Hole it wasn’t a requirement to be dressed to the nines. Ordinary suits mingled with evening wear; there might be artists, addicts, a boxer or two, even an obstinate Blackshirt. There were types of unescorted girl. The Saturday-night clientele was unpredictable, and a frisson of intermixture ran in the smoke-filled air. The only real entrance qualification was a little spare cash, a commodity Vic clearly lacked. It was Tony Rice who’d brought him and Phyllis along, and it was Tony Rice, the perplexing, charmed and upwardly mobile gang boy, whose hand lay over Phyllis’s career.

Yet it wasn’t Tony of whom my father was afraid – it wasn’t a physical fear at all. His desperation lay deeper. He was permanently wrought up, on edge.

He picked his wife out as she emerged from a side door. Her slim figure made its way towards the light. The stage was a shallow pedestal, no more than a foot high, and he watched her pause in front of it as her long dress threatened to trip her. Clutching the slink out of harm’s way, she stepped up. The gown’s plunge back exposed nearly the whole of her spine.

All week she’d been crippled with nerves. She despised her looks. She believed she was disfigured by a shame no amount of make-up, no glittery evening get-up could conceal. Her vocal cords, if she could force them open, would only humiliate her. All week he’d coaxed her through it, reassuring her that it was the actions of others that had left her so insecure; privately reminding himself that he’d put aside his feelings for Clarice in order to do what was right. Now he willed himself to believe that for once Phyllis could be straight with him.

When eventually she faced her audience he knew he’d been outwitted. She was completely at home, and the long wait seemed calculated. Her eyes glittered wide under plucked and pencilled brows, the cheeks were a rouged mask, the mouth a bait. For her sheer knowingness he was unprepared. She looked sly. When she let her head droop, he held his breath.

Light fell on her close-waved dark hair, the silver threads glinted in her gown, and the few bars of introduction poised on the arpeggio of a suspended chord. Chatter from the tables subsided. She lifted her eyes, childlike; and then the voice launched itself high, virginal, and with a fashionable flutter.

Think of what you’re losingBy constantly refusingTo dance with me

From behind her a saxophone and muted trumpet picked up the phrase, and the bass threw a squib of rhythm. It was a safe number. After the success of the Branksome Revue, everyone was singing it again. The lover needed encouragement; she delivered it. With her one gloved hand on the edge of the piano, she seduced.

Then she played the man’s role. Setting her head at just the coy angle, she scolded the audience with an artful smile.

Not this seasonThere’s a reason.

They held up with her, and she hit the refrain:

I won’t dance! Don’t ask me;I won’t dance! Don’t ask me;I won’t dance, madame, with you.

The brash denial swelled out. The band swung, the bass player’s free fingers vaulted the board to the springy dub-dub of the beat, and couples got up to dance. From the tables all around rose that buzz of relief which comes when the entertainment will do. Parties returned safely to their concerns: cigars were lit, and corks were popped. Aproned staff holding their trays high slid once again between casual encounters and established liaisons.

Where Vic sat a waiter hovered.

‘No more, thanks.’

‘I said I’ll get them, Victor. We’ll need three more of these, mate.’ Tony indicated the cocktail glasses in front of them. ‘No, make it four. Have one ready for Phylly when she comes back. Should really.’

Tony Rice was clean shaven, fleshy. He had the street looks of certain cruel young men and sported black silk lapels and neat white bow with all the sharpness Vic lacked. ‘A winner, isn’t she? You think so, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’ My father glanced at his wrist-watch again: half an hour after midnight. Every passing minute ticked up feelings he couldn’t cope with, costs he couldn’t cover. ‘She’s divine,’ he said. ‘It’s turned out a success. But I think we’d better leave as soon as she comes off. If you don’t mind, Tony. Thanks so much and a bad show to break up the party, but …’ He looked up at the waiter. ‘I’d like the bill, please, actually.’

Tony cancelled him and signed the man to leave with his order.

‘But our boy,’ said Vic. ‘Jack’s on his own. We really must go.’

‘Don’t throw it back in my face, Vic.’ There was an edge to Tony’s voice, a hint of the dockside razor. He held Vic’s gaze with narrowed eyes, then backed off. ‘It’s Phyllis’s night and she deserves a break. Doesn’t she, mate?’

Vic lit a cigarette, and looked over to where Phyllis was beginning her next number. Her body, such a battlefield in their marriage, seemed at ease. There, on the miniature stage, she was the idea of enchantment. There was no denying it – she was a good performer.

So he was being churlish; he was turning everything into melodrama. Tony was right, she deserved her break. Her pretty mouth, the nakedness of her neckline and arms … While she sang, while the music flowed, he could see her as if in a movie, briefly disentangled.

‘That’s more like it, Vic.’

FEMININITY FLICKERED EVERYWHERE in the smoky club. Vic’s gaze wandered. There were more attractive women than he’d ever seen, wearing less. Out of his element, at home neither with his own class nor the posh one, he was wretchedly alert to them. The flash of one braceleted wrist caught him like a blow. Voices, laughing or languid, tempted at his ear; they underscored the chirruping of his wife. Everywhere he looked he mustn’t look, at the eyes he mustn’t meet. The place scandalised and fascinated him.

‘You’re a lucky bloke, Vic. You’ll want to hang on to a skirt like her. I should like to have one, just the same as that.’ Tony chanted softly as if all Phyllis’s melody wanted was a secret fight. ‘Where’er I go they’ll shout hallo where did you get that … tart.’ He grinned. Vic saw his hand under the table squeeze the thigh of the girl; he also saw the wince that crossed her face. He was momentarily excited. ‘She deserves better, Phyllis does,’ Tony said.

Vic tried to smile. ‘Better than what? Better than the Coal Hole? Or better than I can give her? That what you mean?’

‘I don’t know what you’re playing at, Rabbit Warren, keeping a woman like that in the manner you do.’

‘Thanks.’

But Tony compelled him, turning to his female companion. ‘Eh, Frankie? The boffin and the songbird. What do you think of that?’ The voice was level, the grin emotionless.

Frances opened her mouth disbelievingly at Vic. The drinks arrived. She took hers and held it in front of her with her little finger raised. He looked back. Thickly made up, she might be about twenty, the same age as Clarice Pike when they’d met, and fallen in love. …‘Are you, though? A boffin?’ Frankie giggled.

‘So I heard.’ Tony’s grin became a sneer.

‘Evening classes,’ said Vic. She even looked a little like her, like Clarice, he thought.

‘Can’t you just see him, duckie, with his chemistry bottles and tubes?’

‘Marine engineering. I used to go up to Imperial College. On the bus. Three times a week after work. Trying to cram my physics,’ Vic said again, quietly. ‘It’s over now. It was daft anyway.’

‘Oh, physics, Frank. Only joking, Vic.’

Frances looked blank for a second; and then she giggled again nervously. ‘I wouldn’t know what that was.’

‘The science of bodies,’ said Vic.

‘Really?’ She looked him full in the eye. ‘So what do you do now, then?’

‘Nothing. Can’t you tell?’

The girl stared one moment longer. Then she complained that Tony hadn’t asked her up to dance.

At the completion of her spot Phyllis made her way through the applause. Vic stood up to greet her just as Tony and Frankie arrived back from the floor. She was breathless, on the verge of tears. ‘Was it all right? Tell me honestly! I was terrible, wasn’t I?’

‘Knocked ’em cold,’ said Tony.

‘No, I was awful. I’ve spoilt everything. They’ll never ask me back. Vic?’

He reassured her. ‘It was terrific, darling. You were superb.’ As he kissed the proffered cheek he heard Tony mimicking ‘darling’ to Frankie.

But Phyllis hardened. ‘You’re lying,’ she said. Her ice-cold look was close up and intent.

‘Honestly,’ Vic said. ‘Look around. They’re still clapping. They loved you.’ He licked his lips.

‘I can’t look.’ Phyllis clenched her fists. ‘I was so nervous.’ She snatched her handbag from the table and sat down at the vacant seat, her back to the scene of her triumph. ‘So bloody nervous. Is that one for me?’

‘You deserve it,’ said Tony. The party resumed their places. ‘Doesn’t she, Vic?’

‘Was I really any good?’ Phyllis looked from one to the other, her garish eyes again childlike over the glass, the flutter of lashes too naïve. But she allowed herself to be persuaded. ‘Truly? I get positively sick. It is all right, isn’t it, Vic? You don’t mind?’

‘You were marvellous.’ Vic made himself smile. ‘Completely bowled me over. I’d no idea. And the voice. I mean, I hear it at home, but …’

‘My voice. I thought it was going to die on me. Did you hear that note in “Mexico Way”? I right muffed it, didn’t I?’

‘Never heard any such thing. It all sounded perfect.’

‘Really, Vic?’ She seemed winsome.

He smiled more genuinely, relieved, off guard. ‘Perfectly perfect.’

‘You hear what the engineer says. Another round, then, shall we?’ Tony clicked his fingers at a waiter.

Vic tried to insist. ‘Darling. I know this is boring of me …’

The atmosphere changed again in an instant. She was fierce. ‘Vic, I told you. My sister said she’d look in on him.’

‘It’s incredibly late.’

‘This is my night, my chance. For Christ’s sake. This is my kind of place, for once. Jack’ll be fast asleep. He’s not a baby any more, you know.’ Crossly she took out her compact and opened it. ‘Oh, my God. Just look at me. Frankie, you’ll come with me if I go and put things right?’

‘All the same, if Tony wouldn’t mind I do think we really should …’

Phyllis hit the table with her fist. ‘No!’ She shook her head, petulantly. ‘No! No! No!’

‘Darling, I …’

Tony was decisive. ‘You spoil that kid. Come on. Drink up. You’re a smart girl, Phylly, and if you weren’t married to drearyface here …’

‘Tony, really!’ Once more Phyllis appeared the innocent. ‘Whatever will you think of saying next?’ Colour spread from her cheekbones and up across her forehead – the streaked powder could do nothing to contain it. Where the shaken wave of hair had worked loose from its kirby-grip, a bright little gash on her temple was visible. Her hand sprang up to touch it. Newly glazed, it reopened. A spot of blood appeared like a red pearl and fell to the table. And another. ‘Christ!’ It was on her fingers.

Tony cooed in mock concern. ‘Now that’s a nasty one, isn’t it. How did you come by that, Phyllis?’

Her eyes flashed and she fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief, holding it up to the cut. ‘This? Walked into a door, didn’t I.’ A stain spread under her varnished nails and into the cloth.

‘A door, was it?’

‘Yes. A door. This evening, as I was changing. Just now, in the ladies’ room. Before I went on. I’ll have to …’

Tony leant across and touched her hair. ‘You’ll have to be more careful, won’t you, girl?’

She stood up and held out her other hand for Frances. ‘Coming, Frank? Quickly!’ Together they made their way off between the tables.

AT THE SIGHT of the wound he’d said nothing, done nothing. His fingers shaking, Vic lit another cigarette. The band thumped out a Latin number and the couples on the dance floor stalked each other.

Close to Phyllis there was always deceit, always pain, and he wore her chaos almost closer than his own skin; but the detail of the cut was more than anything he’d expected. Its implications stole over him like a dead faint. Tony had hit her, and she was protecting him.

The regular singer, a slight young man, was dapper in his white dinner jacket with a rose in his buttonhole; he sermonised from the stage, pinned by a searchlight:

Keep young and beautiful, it’s your duty to be beautiful,Keep young and beautiful, if you want to be loved.

Tony got up for the gents. ‘Might as well go for a drain-off myself. Don’t go away, will you.’

Vic dragged at his smoke. Despite her blushes, Phyllis wore the shiny little injury as an adornment. They were already lovers. She’d given this pimp what she always contrived to deny her husband, and Tony had taunted her with it, barefaced. They’d been carrying on here, right in front of him, knowing he was too simple to see – that even when he saw, he’d do nothing, nothing. He stubbed out his cigarette. His mouth was parched. He drank the glass in front of him too quickly. It tasted trite, bitter.

Then the others returned. The girls were quite natural, and they laughed, comparing make-up and quipping one to the other. Tony, seating himself once more, was bluff. ‘There, Vic. Told you not to go away.’ His eyes were clear, the sculpted lips a design on the fine skin.

A table next to them erupted with laughter. Someone was standing up on his chair, holding a champagne glass in his teeth to roars of encouragement. Phyllis turned round, clapping, and then smiled in Vic’s direction. ‘All right, Vic?’

He smiled back. ‘Fine.’

Another crackle of laughter went up. Through the din she mimed the words ‘Thanks’ and ‘Sorry’.

Soothed, he smiled again.

Tony set the next round up, and the next. Then Vic drank wilfully. He told himself he needed to lighten up. You’re a lucky bloke, Vic. You’ll want to hang on to a skirt like her. He was confused. He wanted to dissolve the fierce nag of not knowing, never quite seeing, and to drown all the other issues, the kid, the money, the war, the awful round of his futureless days. A man at a further table held a woman’s hand to his lips, nibbling the fingers; he thought of Clarice.

The club became a whirl of sensations. Noise and laughter from the tables reverberated almost visibly in the low vaults, like strips of newspaper hung out; and on the spotlit floor, bright couples wove in amongst each other. Bodies swayed, clasped, parted. A woman’s naked spine was crossed by a man’s hand and the crowd at the next table was trying to form itself into a conga dance. People were crying out, ‘Come on, then! Are you with us?’ To the frugg of the band they were a counter-chorus. Cut-glass accents aped in cockney a popular song:

Oh we ain’t got a barrel of money,Maybe we’re ragged and funny …

Jack would be fine, probably.

‘Vic!’ Phyllis was speaking to him.

Tony was insisting on something to her. He was shouting above the swirl of noise. ‘Vic here wants to make some money, Phyll. He told me.’

‘You’re not kidding me he does. It’s only my earnings keeping us, to tell the honest truth. If he won’t do it, I have to. Don’t I?’

‘Eh?’ Vic fought to concentrate. Frankie’s young eyes were contacting his. She really did have the look of Clarice Pike, the shape of the nose, something in the line of the chin. Tony and Phyllis were linked together. There was something between them, but who was he to police her friendships? In the marriage he’d been too rigid, even a little inhuman, unfaithful at the heart, and that was why Phyllis … He could see now. She was right. Of course she was right. No one’s life was really at stake. Truly he should try to be less of a bloody Nazi.

There was a twenty-pound note on the table.

IT WAS LONDON cobblestones banging under the wheels, and the car was racing east through the starlit port. Phyllis was in the front beside Tony, her mother’s fox fur draped around her shoulders. The fur cast a shadow on her hair so that there was only the clouded trace of her white neck. She was resisting sleep – her head nodded and jerked as if an outside force had it in mind to break her.

Vic was slumped next to Frankie in the back. The window had been wound right down. Unlit gas lamps hung where the wind came from, then swept past. Forbidden headlights made the iron beaks of warehouse hoppers poke from speeding, eyeless cages. The night was a tall sack ripped by a car’s roar, and the air driving to meet his face tasted of coal.

Still his evening replayed itself. He mustn’t close his eyes. ‘It’s your money, Vic. Yours, mate. All you have to do is pick it up.’

He’d been wary. ‘Me? Don’t expect to see that kind of item in a month of Sundays.’

‘More ways to skin a cat, aren’t there? Come on, pick it up. Think what a difference a twenty would make. And twenty more like it.’

The tyres screeched in a left-hand corner. Frankie was forced against him. Vic’s shoulder hit the right door and he was pinned under her. The car swung again. Her eyes screwed tight, she raised an arm and clung on to his neck. Then her other hand slipped across into his. He clasped at it. She made words in his ear he couldn’t catch.

He’d danced with her. To the muted trumpet and the whining sax, she’d answered his arm’s inclination and the nudge of his hip. When they’d sat down again Phyllis and Tony were drinking through straws from each other’s glasses. Blatant and provocative, the twenty-pound note was still on the table.

Now beside them careered the black brick ends of streets, the outlines of sheds, the ironwork of a bascule bridge. A pub sign hung above the scream of another high-speed turn. Beyond Frankie’s perfumed hair Vic saw the city momentarily framed, a hard silhouette that touched low cloud. He’d made a deal. The food was taken care of, the rent, and shoes for little Jack. He and Phyllis could tide themselves over, pull themselves up … but there was a condition attached, some codicil that he still couldn’t recollect.

‘Well, Vic? What am I worth to you, Vic? What would you do for me?’

Tony thrashed the engine through the gears. Tall cranes angled darker strokes on dark. A ship’s hull, huge, loomed almost within touching distance.

Vic had come back from the gents, his legs loose, his brilliantined hair flopping over his eyes in strands. Through them he’d stared at the persistent banknote. There were glasses and ashtrays around it. He’d been taken up with the detail, the King’s head, the faint lettering, the fine lines that looped and scrolled.

His own head reeled with the thought of it, and with the weight of the girl thrown now this way, now that by the lurching car. Frankie’s fingers held on. She was managing to stroke the side of his face. So like the girl he’d fallen in love with, he could almost imagine … The sequence was scrambled. He’d stretched out his hand over the note, poised to give it back, or reluctant to touch it. ‘Did you drop this? Tony?’ The note was a test. It was Frankie’s eye he’d caught, and not Phyllis’s. ‘I know what you mean, Tony, but you can count me out of all that.’

The engine raced hard, accelerating. ‘It’s yours, mate. Yours for the taking.’

The straight run was a relief, a lampless high street. Frank’s eyes remained closed. Her breath was warm and damp and she was naked in his mind. No, she was slipping out of her purple evening dress and the flesh-coloured underwear. Or his hand was against the suspender hitch, where the silk of the stocking met the silkier skin of her thigh, still bearing the bruise of Tony’s fingers.

Vic saw Phyllis’s head loll on to the back edge of her seat. Now a long bend bumped it against the pillar and she must have felt the hurt. Her fur stole rucked up over the leather as she shifted down, curling herself out of view. Frankie moaned and hardened herself against him. He tried to speak. Literally behind his wife’s back, his drunken imagination was unbuttoning a prostitute to the jazz, there on the dance floor. Or here in the car, and all the time wishing for Clarice Pike. There was a fox fur caught up on Phyllis’s seat back, with its little cub mouth and eyes and sharp suggestive teeth. What would he do for her? ‘For you, Phyllis, anything. You know that. You know that, don’t you, darling. I love you … beyond measure.’ They’d all laughed.

Vic pulled himself away. Tony braked hard, swore, and then jumped a red light. The girl’s face lifted for a second, her eyes suddenly open in surprise, her lips slightly parted. On an impulse, Vic met the mouth and held the kiss. They broke off just as Tony shouted back to them, ‘Enjoying yourselves, you two? Just goes to show. You can never tell with snobs, can you?’ The voice had a hint of triumph. ‘What do you think, Phylly?’ There was no reply from Phyllis. ‘Must be asleep. Tell the missus later, shall I, Vic?’

Vic recognised the occluded shop fronts of Beckton Road, Canning Town. Once more, the car accelerated fiercely. Soon there was nothing but the long stretch over the East Ham levels, the stink coming off the marshes of rot and salt and the oily wash. They were going too fast into the night and Tony had caught him red-handed – hadn’t he? ‘You should’ve gone left,’ he said.

‘Scenic route,’ Tony called. ‘Any objections?’

He’d taken the money. He remembered picking it up. The kiss, was it good or bad? Clarice would always be the other side of the world. Suddenly desperate, light-headed, Vic played up to his wife’s manfriend. ‘You know. We’ve got this little place in the country, Phyllis and I. We go there at weekends. We’d love to see you. Why don’t you all come down?’ He shared the laugh.

At Ripple Road he was looking into the child’s room. If Phyllis’s sister had called in she’d left no trace of herself. But Jack was fast asleep, as though in the child’s mind there’d been no alteration, nothing of the bounce of the music and the foxy, foxtrotting on the dance floor. Frankie’s kiss still stung Vic’s lips. He’d made a deal.

In the chamber-pot the mess of his vomit reeked. The couple who ran the shop below had the only bathroom, half-way down the stairs. The chain cranked in the iron cistern. He cleaned up and rinsed his mouth. Back in bed there was Phyllis’s body, its familiar and unfamiliar smells.

At last, the deal held its focus and he realised what he’d agreed to. It was to do a job with Tony Rice. If he loved Phyllis. His heart thumped in his chest.

‘And no backing out.’ Tony had sealed it, laughing.

‘Yes, Vic. No backing out.’ She’d hold him to it. His head ached, cracking up. In the darkness, the bright, jazz-hard lines around his wife horrified him.

AWAKE TO THE SHRILLING of birds, Jack carried his box of toys into the front room of the flat. Through half-drawn drapes the sun made a glinting, near-horizontal bar, and the child sat in the gleam of it, where the dirty brown rug stuck a plaster over the join in the floor. All along the length of the join, except for the rug, the striated, mustard-coloured lino had chipped away to show the string and glue inside it. The join was the edge of England, and when the tin bomber came Jack’s mother would be all right because of the soap packet. That stood for the wooden house, lifted by low hills, which his parents always reached when they rode on the tandem. If he sat, so, on the rug, he believed he could save her.

Jack didn’t like Ripple Road. There was a dog’s muzzle in the coal scuttle. It was a brass creature whose gaze had cracked the leather in the two chairs. Pugs and griffons lurked behind the hat-stand; sometimes he ran at them with his wooden sword. The war was a dog in a gas mask with eyes like dinner plates. Any moment it would burst in, carrying the tin bomber on its back. Jack’s mother said Ripple Road was in Barking, and from that the three-year-old imagined a perpetual canine gape ready to swallow his family.

Vic Warren stepped around my brother, or half-brother, to draw the curtains. Through dirty uneven glass, taped crosswise, the sunrise hurt his eyes. Below him, on the opposite pavement, a shirtsleeved newsagent was putting out a sign for a Sunday paper: LONDON – 200,000 CASUALTIES STILL EXPECTED.

One or two cars were parked by the post office, and a solitary Home and Colonial van stood further along. Two old men were stopped on the Vicarage Road corner to exchange greetings, and by the sandbagged shop front of Wallace’s, the chemist, a black labrador sniffed and cocked its leg. The long, dry September had left all surfaces the colours of dust, and even the moist morning air was stained with tar haze.

Vic looked along the road towards the East Street traffic lights. Turn left, and, from Barking straight through the metropolis to Brentford in the West, terrace followed terrace for twenty unbroken miles. London was a working-class concentration – of window-cleaners and war cripples, clerks and typists, slaveys who lived in, skivvies who lived out, shopkeepers, journeymen. London was full, in fact, of people just like himself. Why, then, had he been singled out? His head pounded. Having slept, he wasn’t sure now which ought to trouble him more, the girl or the money. The girl in the night-club had reminded him of someone he should have forgotten, and Tony had seen him kissing her. He tried to rationalise: they’d all been in high spirits, he’d drunk too much. My father was not well, but his illness was more than just a hangover. He really was cracking up.

He thought of his own parent and the little place in the country to which he’d so grandly invited Tony. It did exist. Before 1914, Percy Warren, my grandfather, worked in the same yard as Vic, at Creekmouth where they repaired the Thames barges and wooden lighters. Blunt, working craft, the staple of the river trade, they required the attentions of blunt men who knew the limits of their materials and could knock the grimy vessels back into shape.

Perce was the kind who could build a durable cabin, and did – in the countryside miles downriver, while the family watched and picnicked. That was in the one acre of England where you could buy a square inch of land – never mind that it was an Essex farmer’s private racket. When most working men had scant hope of owning much at all, the tiny wooden house was something unique, a triumph, a place for holidays and sunny Georgian Sundays.

Perce had got a roof on, and glazed the windows, and would have begun decorating the inside if the Great War hadn’t broken out. At Loos, he inhaled several chestfuls of gas, British, when it characteristically blew back on them. At home in East Ham he was convalescent. Vic remembered the pair of them, himself and his dad, playing together, despite the cane that lived on top of the bedroom wardrobe. Like mischievous children they avoided the mother’s bitter tongue.

Most particularly he remembered all three of them at weekends, the little party going out on the train to the wooden house, where the mending rifleman pottered about with his hammer and nails. That was his true father, who loved him; and not the tetchy, shell-shocked side of the man. Vic held the good face of his dad like a precious coin kept always mounted one way. It was himself who was the ‘wrong’un’. He couldn’t stay the course. A marriage forced, a heart elsewhere, a perfectly good trade thrown away. Look, now, how he’d spoilt everything again.

He left the window-pane and sat for an hour, and then another, playing ludo with Jack, trying to keep his eyes open and his craziness at bay. The child insisted on the game only to sabotage it. Over Jack’s breakfast leavings, Vic read him the story of the tinder-box; and at the bad end of a bad tale refused to begin again. On the Somme in 1916, Perce got a machine-gun slug that grazed the lung before passing clean through, and he came home for the second time from France. Vic was five.

A chapel bell started in one of the neighbouring streets, a monotonous clang; and Jack played up until he got slapped. His cries threatened to wake Phyllis and the Wilmots downstairs. Vic issued more threats, sick at the trap of having to back them up. During the start of the German May offensive, 1918, Perce was gassed on the skin. The shell landed right next to him on the earth parapet, tore open his uniform and splashed raw mustard compound on to it, while the fumes were sucked the other way along the trench. The contact raised a tented blister down the whole of his side – which healed in a month and spared him once again to return home alive. Vic’s father, Perce, had character.

JACK UPSET HIS DRINK. There was no change of clothes. Vic sponged him off, grateful for the continuing warm weather. At half past nine, able to bear neither his son’s company nor his own, he risked making Phyllis tea. Jack fidgeted round her in the bed, plucking at her nightdress. But she was laughing awake. ‘I did it, Vic, didn’t I.’

The room with its heavy wardrobe and bilious walls lightened suddenly and unexpectedly. ‘You were marvellous.’ He sat down on his side of the mattress.

‘And we had a good night out on it, didn’t we? Draw the curtains, Vic.’

He obeyed, still wary, afraid his guilt would show.

A prospect of hot slates and bright sky washed in as she lifted her hand to her head. ‘Christ, I’ve got a bloody hangover.’

‘Mummy!’

‘Splitting.’ The cut looked sore and crusted, the two laps of skin heaping on either side the neat gash.

Jack pointed: ‘That’s a hangover!’

A frown fleeted across her brow. She touched the place. ‘Oh, that. No, it isn’t. When you drink too much. Like Dad.’ Her eyes were alight. She teased Vic amiably.

Relieved, he went and bustled about, heating the kettle again, finding the scissors and some lint, bringing a pudding basin of hot water from the kitchen. He settled it down beside her. With his one hand he smoothed her hair back, cradling the head on to the pillow. With the other, he hooked the warm lint out in the scissor blades and stroked it gently across the place. Her head felt small and still. There was the warm female smell of her, the damaged female skin. ‘This should help.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘You know, we ought really to get you to hospital. It ought to be stitched.’

She flared. ‘I don’t want someone else touching me. I don’t want to think about it.’ The emotion subsided. ‘Anyway, they’ll reckon you did it, won’t they?’ Her mouth softened and she smiled up at him. ‘Won’t show under my hair. What’s a war if no one gets wounded? More important to get out to the country. Work on the cabin. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you think. You don’t want to be hanging about on my account, do you, Vic?’

‘Well …’

‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘If you’re sure. There.’ He finished with the lint.

‘Now we’ve got a bit more cash.’ Her gaze followed him as he stood to go.

He paused at the door. She was genuinely compliant. Her affection confused him, and suddenly the agreement with Tony presented itself in a new light. Phyllis hadn’t seen the kiss, wouldn’t trouble about it if she had; it was the deal that held power with her. That alone had been the test, the chance to prove himself. What she’d really needed all along was for him to measure up, to show he cared for her. She wanted the gesture – no one would seriously hold him to it.

How grateful he was. Clarice was just infatuation. Some of the sunlight of the day filled his heart and he believed he’d broken through with his wife. There was a chance; the boy was provided for. And Tony, in the only way he knew, had been trying to help.

Soon, Phyllis was behind him on the tandem. In their shorts and shirt tops, they cut a dash in the Barking back streets. Bareheaded, healthy as Germans, they were a sculpture of modern life, threading through to the Longbridge Road with Jack in the miniature side-car they’d bought when he was a baby, holding his miniature fingers up against the breeze. Vic was taking care of his wife and child. Further out they’d be bomb safe – if it came.

Through Hornchurch and on into Upminster they steered the accustomed route. Householders were piling more sandbags, still installing Andersen shelters, digging slit trenches across prized front lawns. Under the Cranham railway bridge scuffed kerb sides gave way to verges where weed bursts frayed. He was excited, almost aroused. When he glanced down he could see her pretty feet in the toe-clips.

Soon enough, real country appeared, bright as a poster. The shorn fields stretched away, dark edged, flawless. Dotted in them here and there the last stooks were browned by the fine weather. Soon, too, solitary old oaks held ground in pastures, with gangs of cattle in their shadow. Ashes and quickbeams stood up from thorn brakes. Greenfinches from the hedgerows looped beside the bike, their beating bodies almost close enough to grab. Grasshoppers shrilled from copper tufts and dun-coloured butterflies meddled with the late white flowers.

In rhythm with the lowland, the road undulated gently, an edge of the tidal basin. Every so often a car passed. Redeemed, daring the bubble to burst, Vic breathed deeply. There was still no job for him at Everholt’s, but if Phyllis was with him he’d find something else. His old bag of tools was strapped to the side-car. And once everything was set to rights they could uproot and do well at the little house, war or no war. He could maybe find a bit of wallpapering, distempering, odd jobs. He could sell vacuum cleaners, superior gas masks. They could live off the land, and she’d be away from the temptations of London. …

The heat was soon freakish; their tyres slicked a little on the tar. At Horndon, women were covering a rick in a cornfield; he heard the sound of a threshing machine in the distance – that, and a flourish of church bells driven faintly on the wind. The Englishness touched him. Then came a run-down, rather desperate stretch. No one could miss the doorless car at the back of a farm cottage, or the unusable tractor abandoned in a field further on, the harrow still attached. Barns and sheds were patched with rusting corrugated iron, doubling for pig pens, degrading into chicken runs.

They overtook a traction engine. They passed a party of hikers, tousled lads who waved, and would soon be holding rifles, being likeliest for the call-up. All along the way, telegraph wires strung out the distances. In a paddock just before the main road a dispirited cart-horse stood in the heat haze. The notion of it troubled Vic like a presentiment, and he was instantly assailed by the truth of the matter, shocked by the situation he was in. His family, all on the same bike, began the slow climb into Laindon.

HE’D TELL HER NO. He sawed new gabling for the porch, climbed up on his dad’s old pair of steps, and nailed the strips carefully into place. From the roof he could see the river, wide and grey-blue in the distance. Behind him the clutter of cabins, holiday shanties, miniature follies and disused plots stretched over the roll of hills as far as the arterial road and along eastward to the village of Basildon. The locals called the settlement Slum Farm.

But Vic had always loved it. People had made dwellings out of anything, flotsam and thievings, offcuts and salvage. There were clinker-built homes, and boiler-made homes. There were railway carriages and self-assembly kits. Closest to his heart was the converted bus, six plots along the lane, where the Flatman family had lived with their ungovernable brood. Over the open top it had a crazy pitched roof with a stove-pipe sticking out, and barefaced roses groped and wrestled up the conductor’s spiral staircase.

Roses grew everywhere on the encampment. They straggled over cabin porches, trailed under tiny, curtained windows or were clustered upon brick chimney stacks. They made bold and prickly hedges inside the picket stakes. Unpruned, they burst right through the tumble-downs, the failures, scratching at roofing felt and asbestos fibre. Now hip-laden in the Indian summer, they rioted.

Vic climbed down to finish the glazing he’d pinned the previous weekend. He pressed a strip of putty against the pane, shaped it deftly to the joinery with his thumb, and looked over at Phyllis. She was singing a nursery rhyme to Jack, cuddling and kissing him. He caught his breath at the slope of her shoulders, her wrists, the whiteness of her legs. In his imagination he ran his hand all along the flesh from her sandal strap to the cuff of her shorts. She was his wife. He left his work and went to put his arm around her, touching her neck with his lips whenever the boy looked away. In her ear, he whispered, ‘After lunch, eh? Shall we? When he has his nap.’ But Jack was hungry, and Vic stood up to lay out the picnic.

And while they were eating he plucked up his courage, a grown man, and told her that the deal was out of the question. And to his surprise she merely nodded, and frowned, and looked away. Then he imagined it was all right.

Jack licked the jam out of his last sandwich until the red sweetness was the same as his tongue. Always his mother was beautiful when they came to the wooden house. He thought of the slips of complicated words that had just flown between his parents. ‘Twenty quid and my three, Vic. What about that for a night out?’ He held on to the shape of them.

Still tasting his bread, he wandered away from his parents and over towards the little house. By the window where his father had been working he put his hand in the putty tin. ‘The fact is, Phylly, the twenty’s out of the question. You must see that. I’ll have to go and see Tony and give it back.’ The plump, oil-smelling stuff was warm and smooth.

Then his father caught him, picked him up, kissed him too and swung him round. His head high up next to his dad’s, Jack gazed down at her, there, lying in the deck-chair. The putty lump was a feeling squeezed in his hand. She had frowned when they couldn’t keep it. A crease appeared in between her eyes, just to the left of centre, and Jack remembered the cut. On the floor at Tony’s place there had been red blots, as if large wet buttons had come slipping out of his mother’s head and fallen to the floor. And her cream blouse dripping red.

Jack watched her as she lay in the deck-chair, her face clear now, her eyes fallen shut. He struggled to get down, and next thing he was climbing on her, his knee on her stomach, his head down on her soft chest, looking up under the dark wisps of curl.

‘Christ, Vic. I thought you were looking after him.’

But Jack could see it, still there, a small line coming out of her hair and opening the top of her forehead with black and red. He wanted to point to it, put his finger in. Now she had her hand up to touch the wound, the ring on her finger a gleam of yellow, bright as sunshine. She had told him not to tell. He liked the gold, how one point of it shone.

Vic pulled his son off her. He said, cautiously, ‘If I can just stop up that bit where the rain came in over the door. Then we’ll need a couple of new panels for the sides because of that mould. I’ll bike over and order them. Churchill Johnson’s, that place at the station, they’ve got asbestos. Maybe next weekend.’

Phyllis straightened her blouse where it was tucked up. ‘You’re turning Tony down, then.’

‘You can’t seriously expect …’

She, too, seemed to check herself, as though she were fighting her impulses, as though she were really trying. ‘Look, Vic, it’s only me keeping us going, isn’t it? No call for you to be looking down your nose any more at me, or my family. Or my friends. D’you think I like it or what, standing up in that club making a spectacle of myself? Those men, Victor. They do pass comments. If it wasn’t for Tony … You do respect me, don’t you?’

‘I have to give it back, Phyllis. I can’t get involved in all that, no matter how much we need it. …’ He looked away.

‘You say you love me, Vic.’

‘I do love you.’

‘Do you, though? You don’t. You don’t love me at all.’

He sighed and turned back to her. ‘Look, darling. A bloke like me has to stick in the lee of the law. That’s loving, isn’t it? That’s for you.’

‘You don’t want me. If you loved me you’d do what it takes. You think I’ve got no morals, don’t you? How could I have, where I come from? Down by the docks. That’s what you think. Well, love means more than lying down and taking it, Victor. It’s more than, Yes boss, No boss, Thanks for the sack, boss. A man would be on my side but you never are.’

‘I’d had too much to drink, for God’s sake. I want …’

‘I know exactly what you want.’

‘What do I want?’ he responded crossly. ‘You tell me what I want. Tell me.’ Then he sensed the trap he’d fallen into. ‘No … Phyllis.’

But a line had been crossed. ‘You just want to get rid of me, don’t you? You want me dead.’

VIC FELT EACH colour of the world click off as the frame changed. It was always so sudden, and he always walked in. He knew every detail of what had to come next – and on, and on, until the man in him broke. Her eyes were already glazed over, hard, like an old one. Phyllis had drained out of her; she was terrible, unreachable. ‘Come on. You just want me dead, don’t you? You just want rid of me.’

‘For pity’s sake, don’t start.’

‘You do, though, don’t you? You hate me. You do. Why don’t you admit it? Go on. Admit it. Why don’t you, Vic? Face facts. Well, if that’s what you want …’

‘Please …’ Vic looked at Jack. The boy was playing ostentatiously with the tool bag, trying to save his father. ‘Please, Phyllis. Not now.’ Vic lowered his head into his hands. ‘Look, we’re having a nice day. I thought we were going to …’ The lover’s plea was feeble.

‘Mummy! Stop.’

‘And you can shut it,’ she called. ‘You and him, the two of you ganging up.’

She ran across to Jack and grabbed his arm away from the tools. The boy went limp by her side. Tears began to stream from his eyes. She shouted, ‘Why are you crying at me? I’m your mother. Why are you crying? Eh? Tell me, you ungrateful little brat!’

‘Stop that. He’s only a child. He doesn’t understand.’

‘Of course he understands. He hates me. Don’t you? You both do.’

Vic went to separate them. There was a byplay of hands and arms, a brief scuffle. He took Jack, quivering, and set him in a no man’s land a yard or so off, triangulated between them. Neither should appear to take sides against her.

Phyllis called, ‘Come here, Jack. Come to your mother.’

‘Leave him be, Phyllis. Can’t you see he’s upset? The kid’s crying, for God’s sake. Can’t you see? He’s a child.’

‘He’s my child and I can do what I like with him.’

‘No.’

The stare was icy in her; but Vic watched her attention as it lifted from the boy and was directed back at him. Her fists clenched and unclenched. ‘If you two hate me so much, if you’d both get on so well without me, then I’ll go. That’s what’ll make you happy, isn’t it? The pair of you. You want me out of the way. Come on. You do, don’t you? Face up to it, you’d both be better off without me. I’m dirt. I’m rubbish. It’s a simple fact. Well, I’ll do it for you. All right? It’s only what you want.’

‘Get inside the house, Jack. Shut the door. It’s just Mummy and Daddy talking. Do as I say.’

Vic watched the boy go to the cabin, mute and sniffling. He saw the cabin door shut after his son – the hostage she kept to her demands. It was for the child’s sake he held on. It was for the child’s sake he’d been reduced to this. If he could break down first, she might relent; but the hurt wasn’t yet great enough and nothing he could do would alter the weary routine of what was about to occur.

‘I’ll go then, shall I?’

‘That’s not what we want.’

‘You do. No, listen. If I was dead you’d be free. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you, Vic? Vic? Answer me. That’s just what you want. Tell me the truth, Vic. It would solve everything if you got rid of me.’

‘I don’t want to have this.’

‘Why don’t you kill me, then? Then I’d be out of your way. That’s what you think. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘Damn you!’

‘What did you say?’

‘Nothing, Phylly. Nothing. I didn’t mean it. Truly I didn’t.’

‘I’m evil, aren’t I? You think I’m the devil. All right I’ll go, then. I will.’ She made as if to gather her things. ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘You’re his mother. He needs you. We love you, Phyllis. Stay. Please stay.’

Phyllis stood, half turned away with her maroon cardigan in her hand. Vic stepped towards her and took her arm. ‘I need you.’

‘You don’t want me. I’m filthy. That’s what you think. Say it. You’d be better off without me.’

‘I love you.’ He wanted to smash her head. ‘Phyllis. Think of the kid. Try, Phyllis. We’ve been through all this.’ He sank down, holding his face again, turning away himself now and crouching towards the ground as if he were being beaten.

‘Why don’t you kill me, Vic? You know it’s what you want.’ She cast about as if for some implement. His bag lay in the long grass. She bent to rummage in it. He heard the scrape and edge of his tools. ‘Here, then.’ She had hold of a large, one-inch-wide chisel. ‘Here, Vic’ She held it out to him by the blade, thrusting the yellow handle at him, its hammer-burred top fractured like the crown of a wooden dandelion. ‘Take it!’

‘Phyllis!’ He tried ignoring her, presenting his back. But he needed to watch what she did as she jabbed words at him.

‘I’ll do it for you, then,’ she said. ‘If you’re too weak. If you’re not man enough, Vic, to do it yourself, I’ll take it out of your hands. I will, Vic. If that’s what you’re after, I’ll save you the bother. Save you the trouble.’ She clamped both her hands on the chisel. ‘Here. It’s just what you’ve been hoping for all this time. Haven’t you? Eh? Look.’ Gripping the shaft of it with both hands, she poised the blade at her neck, forcing him to look.

‘Phyllis!’

‘It’s what you want, Vic.’

‘It’s not what I want. Listen to me.’ He dared not move. ‘Let me talk to her. Let me talk to Phyllis. I know she’s still there. I love her. I don’t hate her.’

‘You want me dead. Don’t you? Then I’ll do it. I’ll give you what you want. I’ll give you exactly what you want.’

He was on that edge for minutes. Then he broke out and grabbed a wrist. ‘No! I love you, Phyllis. You know that. Sweetheart. Come on, let the thing go. Can’t you? Please.’ He tugged at her forearm. The chisel glinted. ‘For pity’s sake! Stop it!’

‘Mummy!’

Vic caught a glimpse of the little face in the window he’d just glazed.

Then, once again, nothing else was alive in the garden but the chisel and a voice, half stifled, grinding, coming remorselessly out of the fixed features.

‘No. Think how much better things’ll be. Think how much you want rid of me. See, I’m doing it for you. Why don’t you let me? Then you’ll be happy. Won’t you, Vic? Won’t you? You’ll be happy. With me gone.’ The chisel stood, pent in the inches, juddering at her throat.

All at once Vic saw himself through Jack’s eyes. His one arm was around her shoulders, and he was using all the force in his other against her two hands with their woman’s strength conjoined, endlessly driving the chisel towards her own throat. ‘See! See! This is what you want!’

She would succeed. She was determined. This time he fully believed she would finish herself, and he felt excruciated, invaded; his soul would burst and there’d be hell to pay. He had brought her to this. At last, to his infinite relief, the pain and despair broke out of Vic’s eyes. He wept in terrible, gasping sobs.

‘Oh, Vic. What’s the matter, love? It’s all right.’ It was as though she knew nothing of the steel in her hand. She ignored it, and broke her grip. The tool swung down. She might have been holding the rolled-up newspaper she’d used to chase a wasp. She wouldn’t have hurt a fly.

Slowly Vic straightened and, smiling, dashed away the tears from his face. ‘I thought you meant to do it that time.’ His good humour was automatic, once the punishment had stopped. He wanted to soothe her, to tell her it was all right. He was strong, strong enough for both of them. Strong enough also to hide the guilty secret that in his thoughts he had held on to Clarice.

They were standing together. ‘Oh, come on, Vic. Don’t be so bloody daft. You know I didn’t mean it.’

‘I didn’t know, Phyllis. I didn’t.’

‘Course you did.’ She smiled.

Her smile was like a blessing. He was so grateful.

‘Yeah.’

‘Vic? When Tony comes.’

‘All right, Phyllis. I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever he wants.’

‘There,’ Phyllis said.

Later, Jack watched his father sitting in the doorway to the wooden house with his long, safe legs tucked up under him. His dad was pumping the Primus until flames lapped up the sides of the kettle. In a tin box which he called his tinder-box there was a piece of thin metal, spoon pale with a wire in it which his father took and poked into the middle of the flames. The Primus roared suddenly, and hissed, and the fire turned blue so they could see holes in rows. The flame was a blue flower that never went away.

‘There we go.’ His father smiled at him and pumped the pump again. The metal had the same shine as the ring on her finger. Jack loved the hot smell of the Primus, the heat on his cheeks.

Much later still, when the sky was colouring up, he was clutching a piece of wood like a stick. His mother was sitting on a box drinking a cup of tea. Jack must get the wood into the cut on his mother’s head. Needing both hands, he tried to bring it down from above in one clear swipe but she was too big, too high above him for it to be right. His stick was too heavy and he couldn’t reach.

She smacked him hard and put him in the side-car. Then it was getting dark. Her shorts were next to him, moving. The sound was the hum, hum, of the tandem back to Ripple Road. The cars had their faint lights on. Up high were stars.