Читать книгу The Grandmothers - Doris Lessing - Страница 5

Cold dark was already drizzling into the playground; the voices of two groups of children told people arriving at the great gate where they must direct their gaze: it was already hard to make out who was who. By some sort of sympathy, children in the bigger group were able to distinguish their own among the arrivals, and by ones or twos they darted off to be collected and taken home. There were two children by themselves in the centre of the space, which was surrounded by tall walls topped by broken glass. They were noisy. A little boy was kicking out or pummelling the air and shouting, ‘He forgot, I told her he’d forget,’ while a girl tried to console and soothe. He was a large child, she thin, with spiky pigtails sticking out, the pink ribbons on them dank and limp. She was older than him, but not bigger. Yet it was with the assurance of her two extra years that she admonished, ‘Now Thomas, don’t do that, don’t bawl, they’ll be here.’ But he wouldn’t be quietened. ‘Let me go, let me go – I won’t, he’s forgotten.’ Several people arrived at the same time at the gate, one a tall fair boy of about twelve, who stood peering through the gloom. He spied his charge, his brother Thomas, while others were already reaching out hands and stepping forward. It was a little scene of tumult and confusion. The tall boy, Edward, grabbed Thomas by the hand and stood while the little boy kept up his thrashing about and complaint. ‘You forgot me; yes, you did,’ and watched while the other children disappeared out into the street. He turned and went off out of sight with Thomas.

It was cold. Victoria’s clothes were not enough. She was shivering now that she did not have the recalcitrant child to keep her active. She stood with her arms wrapped about her, quietly crying. The school caretaker emerged from the dark, pulled the gates together, and locked them. He had not seen her either. She wore dark brown trousers and a black jacket and was a darker spot in the swirling gloom of the playground: the wind was getting up.

The awfulness of that day, which had begun with her aunt being rushed off to hospital, and had culminated in her being abandoned, now sank her to her knees, and she rocked there, eyes blank with tears until fears of being alone opened them again, and she stared at the big black locked gates. The bars were set wide. Carefully, as if engaged in some nefarious activity, she went to the gate to see if she could wriggle between the bars. She was thin, and told often enough there wasn’t enough flesh on her to feed a cat. That had been her mother’s verdict, and the thought of her dead mother made Victoria weep, and then wail. She had a few minutes ago been playing big girl to Thomas’s baby boy, but now she felt she was a baby herself, and her nine years were dissolving in tears. And then she was stuck there, in the bars. On the pavement people passed and passed, not seeing her, they were all hunched up under umbrellas; the playground behind was vast, dark and full of threat. Across the street, Mr Pat’s sweet and newspaper shop and cafe was all a soft shine of light. The street lights were making furry yellow splashes, and, just as Victoria decided to make another effort to wriggle free, Mr Patel came on to the pavement to take some oranges from the trays of fruit out there, and he saw her. She was in his shop, but usually with crowds of others, every school day, and she knew he was to be liked because her aunt, and her mother too, before she died, had said, ‘He’s okay, that Indian man.’

Mr Patel held up his hands to stop the traffic, which was only a car and a bicycle, and hastened over to her. As he arrived her wrigglings freed her and she fell into his hands, large good hands, that held her safe. ‘Victoria, is that you I am seeing?’

Saved, she abandoned herself to misery. He hoisted her up and was again holding up his hand – only one, the other held Victoria – to halt another car and a motorbike. Having arrived in the bright warmth of the cafe, Mr Patel set her on the high counter and said, ‘Now, dear, what are you doing here all by yourself?’

‘I don’t know,’ wept Victoria, and she did not. A message had come to her in class that she was to be picked up in the playground, with Thomas Staveney, whom she hardly knew: he was two classes down from her. There were customers waiting for Mr Patel’s attention. He looked around for help and saw a couple of girls sitting at a table. They were seniors from the school refreshing themselves before going home, and he said, ‘Here, keep an eye on this poor child for a minute.’ He set her down carefully on a chair by them. The big girls certainly did not want to be bothered with a snotty little kid, but gave Victoria bright smiles and said she should stop crying. Victoria sobbed on. Mr Patel did not know what to do. While he served sweets, buns, opening more soft drinks for the girls, as usual doing twenty things at once, he was thinking that he should call the police, when on the pavement opposite the tall boy who had dragged off his fighting little brother, suddenly appeared, like a ghost that has lost its memory. He stared wildly about, and then, holding on to the top bars of the gate with both hands, seemed about to haul himself up to its top. ‘Excuse me,’ shouted Mr Patel, as he ran to the door. ‘Come over here,’ he yelled, and Edward turned a woeful countenance to Mr Patel and the welcoming lights of the cafe and, without looking to see what traffic might be arriving, jumped across the street in a couple of bounds, just missed by a motorbike whose rider sent imprecations after him.

‘It’s a little girl,’ panted Edward. ‘I’m looking for a little girl.’

‘And here she is, safe and sound,’ and Mr Patel went in to stand by the counter where he kept an eye on the tall boy, who had sat himself by Victoria and was wiping her face with paper napkins that stood fanned in a holder. He seemed about to dissolve in tears himself. The two girls, much too old for this boy, nevertheless were making manifestations of femininity for his sake, pushing out their breasts and pouting. He didn’t notice. Victoria still wept and he was in an extreme of some emotion himself.

‘I’m thirsty,’ Victoria burst out, and Mr Patel handed across a glass of orange crush, with a gesture that indicated to Edward he shouldn’t dream of thinking of paying for it.

Edward held the glass for Victoria, who was indignant – she, a big girl, being treated like a baby, but she was grateful, for she did badly want to be a baby, just then.

Edward was saying, ‘I’m so sorry. I was supposed to pick you up, with my brother.’

‘Didn’t you see me?’ asked Victoria, accusing him.

And now Edward was scarlet, he positively writhed. This was the burning focus of his self-accusation. He had in fact seen a little black girl, but he had been told to collect a little girl, and for some reason had not thought this black child could be his charge. He could make all kinds of excuses for himself: the confusion as the other children were running off to the gate, the noise. Thomas’s bad behaviour, but the fact was, the absolute bottom line, he had not really seen her because Victoria was black. But he had seen her. All this would not have mattered to a good many people who came and went in and out of those big gates, but Edward was the child of a liberal house, and he was in fact in the throes of a passionate identification with all the sorrows of the Third World. At his school, much superior to the one here, though he had attended it, long ago, ‘projects’ of all kinds enlightened him and his fellow pupils. He collected money for the victims of AIDS and of famine, he wrote essays about these and many others of the world’s wrongs, his mother Jessy was ‘into’ every kind of good cause. There was no excuse for what he had done and he was sick with shame.

‘Will you come home with me now?’ he enquired, humbly, of the pathetic child, and without a word she stood and put up her hand for him to lead her.

‘Poor little kid,’ said one of the girls, apparently touched.

‘Oh, I don’t know, she’s doing all right,’ said the other.

‘It’s not that far,’ said Edward to the child, who was half his height. He bent down to make this communication. And she was stretching herself up, so sure was she that she ought to be behaving like a big girl, while she whimpered, like catches of her breath, staring up at his face which was contorted with concern for her.

‘Goodbye, Victoria,’ said Mr Patel, in a stern, admonitory way, that was directed at this white boy, who was reminding him of those summer insects, all flying legs and feelers, called Daddy-Long-Legs. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he shouted after the couple, for he was remembering he knew nothing about this boy, who should be informed that Victoria was not without friends. But the couple were already in the street, where their feet made sturdy progress through clogs of wet leaves, and puddles.

‘Where? Where to?’ the child pleaded, but in such a little voice he had not heard: he was bending continually to send her smiles he had no idea were agonised.

Just as Victoria thought they would be trudging until her feet dropped off, they turned in at a gate and were walking up into the face of a house whose windows blazed light, in a cliff of such houses.

Here Edward inserted a key and they were in a big place that seemed to Victoria like a shop, of the sort she sometimes gaped at in the High Street. Colour, light and warmth: she was cold now, for the wind had cut through her, and in a great mirror on a stand where Edward was, all touzled by the wind, was herself, yes, that was her. Victoria, that frightened thing, with her mouth open, staring, and then Edward was bundling her jacket off her and throwing it over the arm of a red chair. He was going on ahead and she ran after him leaving herself behind in the surface of the mirror. And now they were in a room larger than any she had seen, except for the school hall. Edward reached out for a kettle, which he filled at a sink, and Victoria thought that this part of the room was like a kitchen. Toys lay about. It occurred to her that this was where Thomas lived, so where was he?

‘Where is he?’ she whispered, and Edward stood still in the midst of his fussing with cups and saucers to work out what she meant. ‘Oh, Thomas? He’s gone off to sleep over with a friend,’ said Edward. ‘Now, you just sit down.’ When she did not, he lifted her and deposited her in a chair that was like a cuddle, it held her so soft and warm. She looked about cautiously for fear of seeing more than she could take in. This was a room so big all of her aunt’s flat would fit into it. And then, as she gaped and wondered, she slumped down, asleep: it had all been too much.

Edward, who was used to a small child – he still thought Victoria was that, she was such a tiny thin little thing – did not do more than lay her back in the cushions, for comfort, and then began searching in a vast refrigerator for something to eat. He did not know where his mother was, but he wished she was here. He had arranged to go out and meet schoolfriends, and here he was stuck with this child, whom he had so shockingly mistreated … it had better be said now that he was on the verge of an adolescence so conscience-driven, agonised, accusatory of his own world, passionately admiring of anything not Britain, so devoted to every kind of good cause, so angry with his mother, who in some way he saw as embodying all the forces of reaction, so sick to death with his father, who represented frivolity and indifference to suffering – his good humour could mean nothing less – that, at the end of it, about eight years from this night, Jessy Staveney told him, and everybody else around at the time, ‘Your bloody adolescence, my God, my God, it’s shortened my life by twenty years.’

Edward sat, in his usual way, as if he didn’t really have time for this lazing about, and spooned in yoghurt – low-fat yoghurt, with added vitamin D, and frowned over his dilemma about Victoria. Victoria went on sleeping.

If she were dreaming – she was subject to nightmares and sleepwalking – her dead mother might have appeared, smiling away, but always out of reach, evading Victoria’s reaching arms. She had died five years before. Victoria had had uncles but no father, or none that her mother was prepared to identify. No ‘uncle’ came forward to claim her or acknowledge responsibility. Victoria’s aunt, her real aunt, her mother’s sister, had no children. She had only recently agreed with herself that she was lucky, kids were such a grind, when she was landed with a four-year-old orphan. She was a social worker. She lived in a council flat – bedroom, lounge, kitchen, shower – in Francis Drake Buildings on a council estate (the other three were Frobisher, Walter Raleigh and Nelson), whose children went to Victoria’s school. She had pared her life down to the outlines of her work, which she loved, but then she had to take on Victoria, and she did, showing no reluctance, only a little weariness.

This very morning she had been taken ill. In the ambulance she remembered Victoria, and told the ambulance man that Victoria would be standing waiting in the playground to be picked up after school. He was not unfamiliar with this kind of situation. He telephoned the school, no easy matter, since Victoria’s aunt kept passing out with the pain of her illness, which would kill her when she was still not fifty. The ambulance man got the number of the school from the operator, rang the school secretary, explained the crisis. She went to the classroom where Victoria was copying sentences off a blackboard, a good little girl, while apparently oblivious of the noise made by the other children, who had no aspirations to be good. The teacher said, or shouted, No problem, Victoria could go home with Dickie Nicholls and she supposed someone would fetch her. The secretary said, No problem, returned to her office, looked for the Nicholls number, rang, no reply. Working mother, diagnosed the secretary, being one herself. She tried the numbers of various mothers, and at last one said she couldn’t help, but how about trying Thomas Steevey in the register: that was how Staveney had been pronounced. The deputy secretary rang the Staveney number and got Jessy Staveney, who told her son to collect a little girl at the same time as he did Thomas. The deputy secretary had not said that Victoria was black, but why should she? There were more black or brown children at the school than white, and she herself was brown, since her parents had come from Uganda, when the Indians were thrown out.

This kind of frantic telephoning and arranging being so common, because of working mothers, the deputy secretary thought no more of it: Victoria would be all right.

When Victoria woke from a short anxious sleep, into this unfamiliar place, Edward was seated at a very big table, and a tall woman, with her blonde hair down all around her face, sat opposite, leaning her arms on the table. Victoria had seen her in the playground coming to pick up Thomas.

Victoria kept quiet for a little, afraid to make her existence known, but then Edward, who had been keeping an eye on her, cried out, ‘Oh, Victoria, you’re awake, come and have some supper. This is Victoria,’ he told his mother, who said, ‘Hello, Victoria,’ and finished some remark she had been making to her son. That a little girl she didn’t know was asleep in her kitchen was nothing that needed comment. Edward’s friends, and Thomas’s, washed in and out of her house on social or school tides, and she welcomed them all. Thomas’s social life, in particular, since he was after all only seven and could not come and go like twelve-year-old Edward, was a bit of a trial, being such a complicated network of visits to this or that attraction, planetarium, museums, river boats, friends, sleep-overs, sleepins, eat-overs. Making events match with kids and times was a feat of organisation. She was pleased, rather than not, that the little girl was black because, as she never stopped complaining to Edward, his friends were all much too white, now that we lived in a multicultural society.

Why was Thomas at a very inferior school? Ideology. Mostly his father’s, Lionel, who was an old-fashioned socialist. While Thomas would certainly be lifted out and up into one of the good schools, at the right time, he was taking his chances in the lowest depths now. The phrase was Jessy’s, when engaged in altercation with her ex-husband, ‘Here is news from the lower depths,’ she would cry, announcing measles or some contretemps with a bill she could not pay. But she made the most of a situation she deplored, because she was able to look her less principled friends in the eye and say, ‘I’m sorry, but he has to know how the other half lives. Lionel insists.’

Victoria was lifted, put into a chair where her chin barely appeared over the edge of the table, and Edward adjusted the situation with big fat cushions. ‘And now, what do you feel like eating, Victoria?’

Victoria was not used to being asked and since nothing she saw on the table seemed familiar, looked helpless, and even ready to cry again. Edward understood and simply piled a plate with what he was eating, which happened to be Thai takeaway that Jessy had brought home, stuffed tomatoes from last night’s supper, and left over savoury rice. Victoria was hungry, and she did try, but only the rice seemed to meet with the approval of her stomach. Edward, who watched her – well, like an elder brother, as he would Thomas – found her some cake. That was better and she ate it all.

Jessy silently observed, her plate untouched, the cup of tea between her long hands held below her mouth, so steam went up past her face. Her eyes were large and green and Victoria thought they were witches’ eyes. Her mother talked often about witches, and while her aunt never did, it was her mother’s sing-song incantory voice that stayed in the child’s mind, explaining the bad things that happened. And they so often did.

‘Well, what are we going to do with you, Victoria?’ at last said Jessy Staveney, carelessly enough, as she might have done with any of the small children who appeared and had to be dealt with.

At this, tears sprang into Victoria’s eyes and she wailed. Even worse than the witchy eyes, ever since she could remember, even before her mother died, What shall I, what are we, what should I do with Victoria, was the refrain of her days and nights. She had been so often in the way, with her mother’s uncles. She was in the way when her mother had wanted to go to work, but did not know what to do with her, her child Victoria. And she knew her aunt Marion had not really wanted her, though she was always kind.

‘Poor little girl, she’s tired,’ said Jessy. ‘Well, I’ve got to get off. I’ve got a client’s first play at the Comedy and I must be there. Perhaps Victoria should just stay the night?’ she said to Edward, whose own eyes were full of tears too, so terribly, so unforgivably guilty, did he feel about everything.

Victoria was sitting straight up, her fists down by her sides, her face turned up to the ceiling from where struck a clear and truthful light illuminating the hopelessness of her despair. She sobbed, eyes tight shut.

‘Poor child,’ Jessy summed up, and departed.

Edward, who had not yet taken in that this child was not perhaps six, or seven, now came around to her, picked her up, put her on his lap, and sat clutching her tight. Her tears wetted his shoulder and the heat and fret of the taut little body made him feel not much better than a murderer.

‘Victoria,’ he said, in the intervals of her sobs, ‘shouldn’t I telephone somebody to say you are here?’

‘My auntie’s in hospital.’

‘Who else do you go to?’ – thinking of the networks of people used by him and by Thomas.

‘My auntie’s friend.’

At last necessity stopped Victoria’s sobs. She said her auntie’s friend was Mrs Chadwick, yes, there was a telephone.

Edward rang several Chadwicks until he reached a girl who said her mother was out. She was Bessie. Yes, she thought it would be all right if Victoria stayed the night. There was no bed for her here tonight: Bessie had her friends in to watch videos.

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Edward, abandoning his own plans for the evening. This necessitated several more telephone calls.

Meanwhile, Victoria was wandering about the great room, which she had not yet really understood was the kitchen, staring, but not touching, and she was wondering, Where are the beds?

There were no beds.

‘Where do you sleep, then?’ she asked Edward.

‘In my bedroom.’

‘Isn’t this your room?’

‘This is the kitchen.’

‘Where are all the other people?’

He had no idea what she meant. He sat, telephone silent in front of him, leaning his head on a fist, contemplating the child.

At last he said, hoping that this was what she was on about, ‘My mothers room is at the top of the house, and I have a room just up the stairs, and so does Thomas.’

Some monstrous truth seemed trying to get admittance into Victoria’s already over-stretched brain. It sounded as if he was saying this room did not comprise all their home. Victoria slept on a pull-out bed in her aunt’s lounge. She was not taking it in: she could not. She subsided back into the big chair which was like a hug, and actually put her thumb in her mouth though she was telling herself, You’re not a baby, stop it.

Who else lives here, she wanted to ask, but did not dare. Where are all the other people?

Edward was looking steadily at her, hoping for enlightenment. That anguished little face … those hot eyes … He followed his instincts, went to her, picked her up, cradled her.

‘I’ll tell you a story,’ he said.

And he began on The Three Bears, which Victoria had seen on television. She had not really thought before that you could listen to a story, without seeing it in pictures. A voice, without pictures: she liked this new thing, the kind boy’s voice, just above her head, and the way he changed it to fit Big Bear, Middle Bear and Baby Bear, and Goldilocks too, while he rocked her, and she was thinking, But I’m not a baby, he thinks I am. As for him, he knew very well what he was holding: this was what he championed, made speeches about in school debates, and what he had recently announced he would dedicate his whole life to – the suffering of the world.

When he finished the story, he was about to ask if she would like a bath, but was afraid she might misunderstand.

‘Have you had enough to eat?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Then I’ll take you up to bed.’ It was nowhere near her bedtime: she stayed up late at home because she could not go to sleep until her aunt did. Or she would fall asleep while her aunt watched television and find herself, still in her day clothes, with a blanket over her, on the day-bed. She held on to the tall boy’s hand and was pulled fast up the stairs, flight after flight, and then she was in a room crammed with toys. Was this a toy shop?

‘This is Thomas’s room. But he won’t mind if you sleep in his bed, for tonight.’

No one had mentioned a toilet and Victoria was desperate. She stood staring at him, a silent please, and then he said, rightly interpreting, ‘I’ll show you the lavatory.’

She did not know what a lavatory was, but found herself in another room, the size of her bedroom at her mother’s, on a toilet seat of smooth, unchipped white. There was a big bath. She would have loved to get into it: she had known only showers. Edward was waiting for her outside the door.

She was led back to the toy-shop room across the landing.

‘When I go to bed I’ll be upstairs, just one flight,’ said Edward.

Panic. She was being abandoned. Above and below reached this great empty house.

‘I’ll be downstairs in the kitchen,’ said Edward.

Her face was set into an O of horror. At last Edward understood what was the problem. ‘Look. It’s all right. You’re quite safe. This is our house. No one can come into it but us. You are in Thomas’s room – where he sleeps. Well, when he’s not with one of his friends. You kids certainly do have a lot of friends …’ He stopped, doubtful. He supposed that this child did too? On he blundered. ‘I am here. You can give me a shout any time. And when my mother decides to come home she’ll be here too.’

Victoria had sunk on to Thomas’s bed, wishing she could go down with Edward to the kitchen. But she dare not ask. She had not really taken in that this great house had one family in it. People might easily have a family in two rooms, or sometimes even in one.

‘You’d better take off your jersey and your trousers,’ said Edward.

She hastily divested herself, and stood in little white knickers and vest.

He thought, how pretty on that dark skin. He didn’t know if this was a politically correct thought, or not.

‘Here is the light,’ he said, switching it on and off, so that the room momentarily became a creepy place full of the shapes of animals, and huge teddies. ‘And there’s a light by your bed. I’ll show you.’ He did. ‘I’ll leave the door open. I’ll be listening.’

He didn’t know whether to kiss her good night, or not. Seeing her without her bundling clothes, she was a tough wiry little thing, no longer a soft child, and he said, ‘How old are you, Victoria?’

‘I’m nine,’ she said, and added fiercely, ‘I know I’m small but that doesn’t mean I’m little.’

‘I see,’ he said, knowing he had been making mistakes. Once again scarlet with embarrassment, he lingered a while by the door, then said, ‘I’ll switch this off, then,’ did so, and went off down the stairs.

Victoria lay in a half dark, under a duvet that had Mickey Mouse all over it. She liked that, because she had had Mickey Mouse slippers when she was smaller. But this room, in this half-dark – she did let out another wail and then clamped her mouth shut with both hands. All these animals everywhere, she had never seen so many stuffed toys, they were heaped up in the corners, they loaded a table, and there were some teddies on her bed. She pulled a large teddy towards her, as protective shield against the looming lions and tigers and mysterious beasts and people, their eyes glinting from the light that came from outside. She couldn’t stay here, she couldn’t … perhaps she would creep down the stairs and go back to that place they called a kitchen and ask Edward if she might stay. He was kind, she knew. She could feel his arms tight round her, and she set herself to listen to his remembered voice in the story.

There was another fearful thing she had to contend with. Suppose she wet her bed? She did sometimes. Suppose she walked in her sleep and fell down the stairs. Her aunt Marion told her she did walk in her sleep, and she had been caught, fast asleep, out on the landing standing by the lift. If she wet the bed here, in this place, she would die of shame … and with this thought she fell asleep and woke with the light coming through a window she had not seen last night was there. She quickly felt the bed – no, she had not wet it. But now she wanted the toilet again. She crept out of the room, and in her little knickers and vest ran across the landing to the toilet. She felt like a burglar, and kept sending scared glances up the stairs and down. There were lights on everywhere. What time was it? Oh, suppose she was late for school, suppose … back inside her trousers and jersey, she went down the stairs and saw beneath her Edward at the table, eating toast. There was no sign of the woman with all that golden hair. Edward smiled nicely, made her toast, offered her tea, put the milk and sugar in the way she liked it, and then said he was going to take her to school.

She ought to have sandwiches or something, but did not like to ask. Perhaps Mr Pat would … she knew her lips were going to tremble again, but she made them tight, and smiled, and went off down the steps with Edward, leaving that house which in her mind was full of great rooms like shops. She scuttled along beside Edward through the lumps of wet leaves on the pavement. He took her to the great gate that last night had been so cruelly locked, and from there she ran to the classroom. On the way she saw Thomas.

‘I slept in your room,’ she announced proudly, superior and calm: she was her real age again and he was just a little kid.

‘Why did you?’

‘Your brother made me.’

‘Then, I hope you didn’t break any of my toys. Did you play with my Dangerman?’

She had not seen a Dangerman.

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Thomas, going off to his class.

She was thinking that this little boy, so much younger, had spent the night in a strange place but it hadn’t mattered to him. As for her, the night had been like a door opening into prospects and places she had not even known were there. She was thinking, ‘I want my own room. I want my own place.’ She did not dare to think, my own house, my own flat, that was far beyond her, but if she had her own room she could hide in it and be safe. Those wild animals with their gleaming eyes in Thomas’s room were dangers that could get to her, find her. If she had her own room she could go to bed any time she liked instead of having to wait for auntie Marion to get tired. She could have a light by her bed and turn it off. ‘My own place, my own …’ was what she brought into her own life from that night, which had been like a wonderland. But not entirely comfortable or even pleasant. She had behaved like a little girl instead of a big one, and she was ashamed to think what Edward must think of her. She had not missed his surprise when she had told him she was nine.

That afternoon, when the dark came, she stood near the gate to the street, waiting for someone to come and take her home. She was hoping that Edward would come for Thomas, and planned to smile at him, like a big girl, not all crying and stupid, and she’d say, ‘Hello Edward,’ and he would say, ‘Oh, there you are, Victoria, it’s you.’ But another woman came, who had a couple of older kids with her, and Thomas rushed towards them, shouting. Victoria was so hungry: at lunchtime she had gone over to Mr Pat’s, who would give her a big bag of crisps and let her pay tomorrow, but he wasn’t there, only a girl she didn’t know behind the counter. If her aunt’s friend Phyllis came perhaps she would buy her a bit of chocolate or something. But it was Phyllis Chadwick’s daughter Bessie, older than she was, and Victoria was ready with apologies for the mixup others had caused, but Bessie said, ‘Shame, poor little thing, your auntie’s very sick, you’re going to stay with us till she gets home.’

Running along beside the big girl Victoria said, ‘Please, please, have you got some chocolate or something?’

‘Didn’t they give you anything for lunchtime?’

‘They forgot – they didn’t know,’ Victoria begged, all apology for noble Edward.

Bessie swerved off into a fish and chips, bought chips for both of them, and they ate as they walked along.

Mrs Stevens, auntie Marion, came home from a stay in hospital an invalid, her formerly large body already gaunt. She was always being rushed back for treatments that left her sick and weak. Victoria looked after her. After school she did not go to other children’s homes to play, but came straight back to be a nurse. At school she was diligent and often praised. Victoria’s evenings were spent doing homework or watching television programmes that told her about the world.

One afternoon, she was sent by her aunt to fetch urgent medicine, and she took a wrong turning and found herself in a street she felt she knew. The house of that evening when the tall kind boy had looked after her was in a part of her mind that corresponded to her dreams of it, floating in another dimension, nothing to do with the quotidian, the ordinary. She remembered warmth and glowing colour, a room piled with toys. Sometimes she stopped in front of shops in the High Street and thought yes, it was like this, the richness, the abundance.

If that house had a geographical location, then it was far off, in a distant part of London. Her legs had ached – hadn’t they? Edward had pulled her along – oh, for ages. Yet wasn’t this the house, just in front of her, not ten minutes’ walk from her aunt’s flat? Yes, it was that one, that very one there – was it? – yes; and at that moment a child came running along the pavement towards her but he turned in at a gate and up the steps. Thomas. He was larger than he had been, no longer a little kid. He reached up to a bell and almost at once the door opened and he dashed inside. She had a glimpse of that room she now knew was a hall, from seeing them on films, full of light and colour. After that she often secretly went to the house and stood there, or walked up and down outside it, hoping no one would notice her, as much as she wished that someone would. This was not an area where black people lived, or not in this street. Once she saw Edward, who was even taller. He strode along not seeing her or anyone, passing so close she could have touched him. He bounded up the steps, letting himself in with his own key. Well, she had a key, Victoria did, tied around her neck on ribbon, so that her aunt wouldn’t have to get up and struggle to the door. More than once she saw the tall woman whose hair she remembered as being like Goldilocks, but now it was in a heap on top of her head. She was untidy. She was always worried, seeming in a struggle to keep hold of her bag, shopping bags, parcels. Victoria was critical, feeling that from this house only perfection should come. If she had hair like that, she couldn’t let it be in a great lump, with wisps falling down. Then, again, she saw Thomas. They did not recognise her. What Victoria told herself was. They don’t see me. Once, as Edward came striding along, no longer a boy, to Victoria’s eyes, but a man – he was sixteen – she was tempted to call out, Look, I’m Victoria, don’t you remember me? Then she told herself that if he and Thomas had grown out of what she remembered, then she must have too, tall for her age, shooting up, no longer in the junior school.

To her the most extraordinary thing was that the house, a dream, so far away she had never expected to see it again, was so close – only a short walk away.

In her aunt Marion’s flat she still slept on the day-bed in the lounge. On nights when her aunt was poorly, she pulled it into the bedroom so she could be there when the sick woman woke and called for water, or a cup of tea, or said in her frightened thick voice, ‘Are you there, Victoria?’ Victoria had broken nights, and was finding it hard to keep up with her lessons. Her aunt’s best friend, Phyllis Chadwick, Bessie’s mother, came to see how things went along: she was supervising Victoria, on behalf of the Authorities. Victoria did not resent it. She longed for help, from anyone. Sometimes Bessie came, and sat with aunt Marion while she went shopping or just to get out. In the day when she was at school, home helps or nurses dropped in. But really, Marion Stevens should be in hospital, she needed proper full-time nursing: it was what Phyllis Chadwick said, and what Victoria thought. ‘If I wasn’t here, they’d have to do something, but I am here and so they don’t bother.’

Now four years had passed since that night when the tall boy had been so kind – so the event stayed with Victoria, in her mind and in her dreams – and her aunt was really very ill. Cancer. There was no hope, Marion herself told the girl. The nurse who came from Jamaica too, had said to her, ‘There is a time to live, there is a time to die. Your time is coming soon, praise the Lord.’

Marion Stevens had always gone to church, but not to the same one as this nurse. Yet they prayed together often and Victoria had even heard them singing hymns. She was not sure about praising the Lord, with this dreadfully ill woman here in front of her eyes day and night. She enjoyed church, when she had time to go, because she liked singing, but now she had to stay with her aunt. The nurse said to Victoria that she would be rewarded in heaven for what she was doing for her aunt, and Victoria kept silent: the things she wanted to say were too rude.

It was so difficult, all of it, trying to get to school, doing her homework, when she was being interrupted every minute by her aunt’s, ‘Victoria, are you there?’ Sometimes the sick woman could not be left, when it didn’t look as if the home help would come: she often didn’t, they were overworked, with too many helpless people on their hands. And often the nurses didn’t stay, they checked pills or perhaps washed that smelly sick body and then they were off. ‘I won’t be a nurse, I won’t,’ Victoria promised herself. At school they suggested she could easily be a nurse, she could manage the exams. She was clever, they said. ‘It’s time to think what you want to be,’ they told her. Bessie was going to be a nurse. Well, let her, Victoria would rather die, so she told herself.

The teachers were proud of her: not so many children at that school were likely to be anything much – on the streets, more probably. When she couldn’t get to school at all, they forgave her and made excuses. They knew what her situation was, asked after her aunt and were sorry for her. One teacher offered prayers, and another actually dropped in to visit, to check on her of course, the girl knew, but it meant Victoria could go out to the shops. The home help never seemed to get things exactly right, though Victoria left lists on the kitchen table, in her neat handwriting, headed Food, or Medicines; and what had to be fetched from the chemist was longer than from the supermarket.

‘You’ve got to eat, girl,’ said Phyllis Chadwick, bringing her bits of this and that, some soup, some cake, but Victoria felt permanently nauseated from the smell of her aunt’s illness. Sometimes she felt she was slowly submerging in the dark dirty water, that was the illness, down and down, but up there, far above her head, was light and air and good clean smells. When she could no longer bear it, she told her aunt she would be back in a minute and she ran through the streets and stood outside the Staveney house and thought about what was inside. Space, room for everyone. She had understood by now what had been so confused in her mind, and for so long: in that house was one family, the fair woman, who was the mother, and Edward, and Thomas. She had never questioned that there hadn’t seemed to be a father. None of the families she knew had fathers, that is, real fathers, who stayed.

Her aunt Marion had never had a husband. When she had been well enough to be interested in her own story, she had said to Victoria that she had no man in her life but then she had no grief either. And that was as far as her explanations had gone. But if there had been a man around, Victoria thought, even an uncle, he could have helped her. She had to do everything, remember rates bills and the electric and the gas and the water, staying at home from school so the meters could be read, fetching her aunt’s money from the post office. ‘You’re a good girl,’ Phyllis Chadwick told her. ‘You are a very good girl.’

But surely she was getting too old to be told she was a good girl? She was nearly fourteen. She had breasts now. She was not a little girl, but she was sleeping on the day-bed, with her possessions, such as they were, in a suitcase that had a cloth over it to make it look like a seat, and her clothes on a rail in a corner of her aunt’s room. One day, prayed Victoria, I’ll have my own place, my own room. Her aunt would die and then she would move into her aunt’s room, and this would be her place.

For the last few weeks of her aunt’s dying Victoria did not get to school. She was simply there, by the deathbed, and so much identified with the illness that she even had pains in her stomach: stomach cancer. It was all a long dark bad-smelling bad dream, the nurses coming and going, medicines, making cups of this and that which cooled untouched by her aunt’s bed, while she cried with pain and Victoria measured out another dose of painkiller. Victoria said to Phyllis Chadwick, ‘Why can’t aunt go into hospital?’ but it was put to her that this wouldn’t happen until the very end, and meanwhile Victoria was being such a good girl. ‘And she gave you a bed and a place. Don’t forget that, Victoria. She did that for you.’

At last aunt Marion was in hospital and Victoria visited her, for most of the day, though it was doubtful if her aunt knew she was there. ‘But you never know,’ said Phyllis Chadwick, and the nurses agreed. ‘You never know these days if they are conscious of what is going on or not.’ These days referred not to a recently acquired capacity of dying patients, but to new ideas about patients, who could be suspected of knowing everything that was going on around them, even if in a coma or half-dead. Or even dead?

Aunt Marion died and it seemed it was Victoria’s responsibility to see to the funeral arrangements, supervised by Phyllis, though the actual signing of forms was done by a social worker, because Victoria was too young. She thought, If I’m too young to sign the forms, how is it I wasn’t too young to look after her?

Victoria was in the empty flat, and she opened windows to let out the smell of dying and of medicines. When everything was fresh again she would move into her aunt’s bedroom … there arrived a man who was consoling and respectful about aunt Marion’s death, and her being all alone in the world, but asked where she planned to go, and she said, ‘I’m staying here. In auntie’s flat.’

‘But you’re only fourteen,’ said this man. ‘You can’t be by yourself

Victoria was not really taking it in that she couldn’t have this flat, have her own place, until Phyllis Chadwick came to say she had better come home with her. ‘We’ll make some room,’ she said. ‘We’ll put you in with Bessie.’ She had three children already.

‘But I want to stay here,’ persisted Victoria, and she went on protesting, and then begging and weeping and refusing to leave until one day Phyllis Chadwick, who knew the officials concerned (she too was a social worker) arrived at the flat with a senior official, who was going to put a lock on the door, to keep it empty until someone the right age arrived to live in it.

And now Victoria was dumb. She was numbed by the injustice. She had looked after her aunt for years, had remembered to pay everything, remembered times for medicines, and kept the place clean. No one thought her too young for that. Now, just like that, she was being taken to the door, Phyllis Chadwick on one side, the man with the keys on the other, both holding her by an arm, while Victoria shouted, ‘No, no, no,’ and then went silent again, her lips tight closed. On the pavement outside the flats – she had to look up ten floors to see her auntie’s windows – they let her go, and Phyllis said to her, ‘Now, Victoria, that’s enough, girl.’ But Victoria hadn’t said one word all the way down.

She was frightening both these people: she trembled with rage and with the shock of it, it seemed she could explode. Her eyes were mad, were wild. ‘Victoria, surely you couldn’t have thought you’d be allowed to live by yourself – a girl of fourteen?’

But that is exactly what she had thought and was thinking now.

At last she went home to Phyllis Chadwick, and she was shown another pull-out bed in Bessie’s room, who was being nice, but was furious. She had only just achieved this room, a little one, but her own, and now she had to share it. This flat had three rooms, apart from the kitchen and the lounge, all small. The two younger children, noisy boys, slept in with Phyllis Chadwick, in her room. Another room was used by Phyllis’s grandfather, who was very old and dying of something or other. Victoria didn’t want to know. She had had enough of illness and dying. The two boys had been in the little room but Bessie was taking exams and needed quiet. It seemed Phyllis didn’t deserve quiet, and had to put up with the boys: it was this thought that persuaded Victoria to be grateful for what she was being offered. She reported back at school, and the teachers said she could stay an extra year, to make up. No more was said about scholarships and university – she was too far behind. She could go to commercial college and take book-keeping. She was good at figures.

Being too old for the class she was in isolated her. She was alone too because of her experience of illness and responsibility. The others in her class seemed like children to her, and the whole school had shrunk, as people and places do. The playground, which on that long-ago night had seemed to her a vast and dangerous place, with shadows full of muggers and knives, she now saw was a pathetic paltry place, so small that at break there wasn’t room for the children to play. Victoria knew now how bad a school this was. That playground summed up everything for her. Grey cement and damp old brick walls, you’d think it was where prisoners were let out to exercise. Good enough for us, she thought, bitter, and then, I bet Thomas and Edward don’t go to a school where the playground is like a prison yard. Yes, they were taken swimming once a week in the summer, but that was about it. Good enough for class 5 people. Good enough for the under class. That’s us. She got this language from Phyllis Chadwick’s pamphlets and social-working guides.

She knew she should be grateful to Phyllis Chadwick, who was a good woman. Without her, she would have been taken into Care. ‘You must think of us as your family,’ said Phyllis. ‘You must call me Auntie Phyl.’

Now, coming home from school, Victoria made detours to pass the Staveney house, and one day saw a tall, fair boy coming up the pavement and turn in at the gate. She thought: Edward, and yearned for that long ago kindness but saw it was Thomas. He did look very like his brother. He noticed Victoria, frowned, and went in. Victoria did not at all resemble the skinny little black girl, with her sticking-out plaits. She was tall and slender, and Phyllis Chadwick had sent her to a hairdresser, who was a friend, and now Victoria had a neat soft Afro round a pretty face that had a pointed chin and a full mouth that Bessie told her was her best feature, ‘Wow, now make the most of that.’ But Victoria thought her big eyes were her best feature.

Thomas had not been at their school for three years. He was at the kind of school people like the Staveneys would send their sons to: she knew enough to know that.

Now she buckled down to exams, and sometimes sneaked looks at the Staveney house, but she did not see Thomas.

She passed her exams well enough, but nothing like as well as had been expected of her, before her aunt’s illness. She at once found a job. Mr Pat, who had always liked her, said that his brother, who had a little dress shop, needed an assistant, and someone to keep his books. She would earn enough to give something to Phyllis Chadwick for her keep, but very far was she from a place of her own, and this was what she dreamed of, always. She was not the only one. Phyllis herself had two rumbustious boys in her room every night and, while sometimes they were separated for everyone’s peace’s sake, one sleeping in the lounge, and one beside Phyllis, the two of them could make the little flat sound like a fairground with noise. Bessie, who was going to be a nurse and needed space for her studies, used the table in the kitchen, where the light was good, but was always being interrupted by the boys. She and Victoria were friends, but Bessie knew that without Victoria she could have had a room to herself. The old man, Phylliss grandfather, occupied a whole room, with his little television and radio and piles of magazines. He had had a stroke and was part paralysed, and just as for Victoria’s aunt, nurses and home helps came in and out when Victoria and Phyllis and Bessie were out working. He sat in a big chair, his body dwindling away into cavities and lumps, under a great head that looked like a lion’s. Beside him on the floor was a flask always filled with strong-smelling dark yellow pee. There was a commode in a corner. His old thin knobbly legs stuck out in front, on a stool, and there were cracks in the black skin, which seemed to have grey ash in them. Phyllis oiled his feet and legs, but that didn’t help. Everyone secretly thought that it would be best if he died and took his miserable and unenjoyed life away, and then there would be a room, a whole room, where the boys could make their mess and noise and shut the door.

Bessie was good to the old man: she saw it as useful for her training. Victoria dutifully did what she had to do, emptying the urine flask, and sometimes the commode, but she hated it. Phyllis, who worked long hours, and had four youngsters and the old man to see to, was sometimes able to sit with him a little. He said that no one cared about him.

Phyllis said to Victoria, ‘We need a serious talk, girl, so when will that be?’

It would have to be Sunday, and on Sunday evening when the boys were getting up to mischief outside in the streets, with their gang, Bessie absenting herself behind a shut door, Victoria and Phyllis closed his door on the old man, who complained. ‘But it will be only for a short minute, Grandad,’ Phyllis told him.

Victoria had decided Phyllis was going to ask her to leave: there was not a reason in the world why Victoria should be here at all, adding to an over-burdened woman’s troubles.

‘Make us both a good strong cup of coffee, and then come and sit down,’ said Phyllis. She fitted her bulk into a sofa corner, and put her feet up. She seemed tempted to drop off to sleep then and there.

‘Victoria,’ she said, ‘I know you took that job in such a haste because you wanted to give me something, but it makes me sad, girl, you’re not doing as well for yourself as you could do.’

Behind this directive, which was delivered in the manner of one who has been planning words, in Phyllis’s case for several nights, lay a story which neither Victoria nor Bessie knew anything about. Not even her grandfather knew half of it.

Phyllis Chadwick’s grandparents came to London after the Second World War on the wave of immigrants invited to take on the dirty work which English labourers did not want. They came to streets they had imagined paved with gold and found – but all that has been well documented. A hard life, hard times, and the young couple had two children, one Phyllis’s mother, a lively rebellious girl who got herself pregnant aged fourteen, and had a botched abortion which left her, she was told, sterile, and she embarked on what she thought would be consequence-free sex, but became pregnant again, with Phyllis. Phyllis’s father, for she must have had one, never made himself known, and her mother kept the information to herself. The very young mother and child took shelter with parents who sermonised, but saw them fed. Phyllis did remember her as a shouting screaming mother, in fact a bit demented, who could disappear for days on some binge or spree, returning sullen and silent to lecturing parents, who had had to look after Phyllis. She got herself killed in a brawl. Phyllis was relieved. She was then looked after by her grandfather, who was now there, just behind that door, from where came loud television noises and radio (he often had both on at once) and her grandmother, who was kind but strict, because of the bad example of her mother. ‘You have bad blood,’ she was told, every day of her life. Phyllis worked hard at school, determined never to be drunken or vagrant or brawling, and was ambitious to get her own roof and her own family. She passed exams and then had a brief lapse from grace, as her grandparents saw it, telling her she was going the way of her mother, because she did not stick with one job, but took many, one after the other, from a feeling of power, of freedom. She was a large sensible girl, pretty enough, and worked at check-outs, sold shoes in an Oxford Street shop, served food at the big trade fairs in Earl’s Court, was a waitress in a coffee shop, and was having the time of her life. The money – yes, that was wonderful, it was fairy gold arriving in her hands every week, but what she was earning was the liberty to do as she liked. She stayed in a job just as long as it suited her, and then the best moment of all was the interview for the next: she was liked, chosen out of sometimes dozens of applicants. There was something about her employers trusted. While her grandparents grumbled and prophesied a feckless future and a disgraceful old age, she felt she was dancing on air, owned her self and her future. But then she met her fate, the father of Bessie, though not of the boys, and had to buckle to. She started on the lowest rung of the Social Services ladder, and in due time was given her own flat, this one. Her grandmother, who had in fact been more of a mother, died, and her grandfather became her responsibility. ‘He landed on my poor shoulders like the old man of the sea,’ she would say. But she was not only bound to be grateful, she was fond of the old man who, when you saw him naked, was like a dangling puppet, thin and loose underneath the big head and face that had all his history in it.

‘Victoria, my girl,’ says Phyllis. ‘What are you doing in that nothing job, and you are such a clever girl?’

‘What do you want me to do? What shall I do?’

What Phyllis wanted to say was, For the Lord’s sake! Get yourself out, make use of this time, because you’ll meet a man and then your number’s up. But she didn’t want to wake in Victoria the bad blood that was bound to be lurking there, and in any case the devil lay in wait for women, disguised in smiles and flattery.

She leaned forward, took the two young hands in her own and threw all thought of being a bad influence over her shoulder. ‘You’re only young once,’ she said. ‘You’re pretty, though handsome is as handsome does. You have nothing to weigh you down yet.’ Victoria noted that yet which was a giveaway about how Phyllis Chadwick saw her own life.

‘There are jobs you could do, Victoria. Unless you try for them you’ll never know what you can get.’ She suppressed: if I could get a nice little job, when I wasn’t even pretty, what could you get for yourself, with your face and figure? ‘You don’t want to limit yourself to what you can get around here, in this neighbourhood. You just get yourself down to Oxford Street and Knightsbridge and up to Brent Cross and pick yourself the fanciest there is, and walk in bold as brass and say you want a job.’ She went on to talk of modelling, which is what she would have liked best, but she was not built for it. ‘Why not? You’ve got a well-made body and a face to match.’ The best of the things she had done herself, and the ones beyond her, were being presented to Victoria. Phyllis Chadwick, the descendant of slaves, whose name, Chadwick, had been the slave owner’s, knew that she had been good enough to work in places that wouldn’t have let her parents through the door. All the time she was talking, a little nerve of panic was twitching: am I sending her into danger, am I doing that? But she’s so sensible, so cool, she’ll not come to harm.

She gave Victoria money, told her to go out and buy herself a bit of style but not be too flash.

Victoria took all this in, not least that she had been given a glimpse into her benefactor’s life that she would have to think over.

She fitted herself out, and, taking heart from Phyllis’s homilies, began at the top, in Oxford Street, for she did not yet know anything better and smarter. She worked for a while selling perfume and then, having learned that Oxford Street was not the empyrean, became assistant in a very exclusive shop indeed, but left that, when she became irked by it, for encouraged by Phyllis she was able to acknowledge imperfections even at the top. She hated selling beautiful clothes to women too ugly or too old, clothes that would have looked – did look – better on herself, and she found herself modelling for a photographer, not pornographic, but sexy enough to embarrass her, and then, proving herself as contradictory as Phyllis, who urged her on while counselling caution, she did nude poses for another photographer. All this time she was putting money aside, her nest egg, the entrance fee to her own place, her own, hers.

The nude poses seemed to have as their natural end sex with the photographer, so she left.

The grandfather died. The young ones saw from Phyllis’s grief that this had been much more than just a smelly old half-dead man, with his urine bottle, who had taken up space better used by the living.

Into the room went the two boys, and Phyllis told Bessie and Victoria that she had never in her life before this time had her own room. She was in her own room, and she actually wept tears of gratitude to life, or fate, or God, for it.

Bessie, a good-natured, easy-going young woman, said to Victoria, as they lay in their little room, talking into the dark, that she had thought the old man, the grandfather, her great-grandfather, a rough type: she had been embarrassed by him. ‘Yes, I was, Victoria, he used to get me really upset by some of the things he said.’

Victoria did not comment. She had a good idea of what raw materials Phyllis had made her life. She could feel for Phyllis in ways that Bessie didn’t. Couldn’t, rather: she had had it easy. She, Victoria, was closer to Phyllis than Bessie was.

Victoria had no idea how Phyllis yearned over her, fretted because of her, was afraid for her. She had lived as Victoria did now, dancing on the edge of danger, and while she urged Victoria on, and triumphed in the young woman’s successes, the sparkling new job, the compliment from an employer, or from a customer, she thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don’t know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire.

Oh, yes, older women understand why some people think young ones should be locked up! Good God, girl, Phyllis Chadwick might think, watching Victoria go off to work, looking a million dollars, you’re a walking catastrophe in the making, though you trip along so meek and mild not looking to right or left, you don’t sway your little hips and come on fast, you wouldn’t let that photographer go too far (Phyllis knew about the first but not the nude-poser), but all the same, girl, you’re playing with fire, and so was I, and I had no idea of what I was like. Sometimes I could shake and shudder at the risks I took.

‘Don’t you worry so much, Ma,’ said Bessie to her mother, after they had watched Victoria go off to work as a croupier in a gambling place. ‘She’s got an old head on her.’

‘I hope she has, my dear,’ and Phyllis thought how odd it was that this daughter of hers, whom of course she loved, since she was her daughter, was far away across a gulf of incomprehension, that generation gap that is the cruellest of all, between parents who have done it the hard way, to win ease and safety for their children, who then have no understanding of what they have been saved from. ‘But Victoria understands me,’ Phyllis thought.

Now Victoria was in a job she liked better than anything so far, a big music shop, in the West End. She had earned more in other places, but this was where she belonged. The music, the people who came in, the other assistants – all perfect, all a pleasure, and she told Phyllis and Bessie that this time she would stick.

One afternoon who should come in but Thomas Staveney: for a moment she again thought she was looking at Edward. She watched him wander about the store, at his ease in it, familiar with everything: he picked up tapes and put them down and finally bought a video of a concert from The Gambia. Then he arrived in front of her, and said, ‘You’re Victoria.’ ‘And you’re Thomas,’ she rejoined smartly. He was eyeing her but not in a way she could object to: of course he must be surprised: she knew what he was remembering. She stood smiling, letting him come to conclusions.

Then he said the last thing she expected: ‘Why don’t you come home with me and have some supper?’

‘I’m not free for another hour.’

‘I’ll come back for you.’ He sloped out. His style was one no one need notice in this place, more Jimmy Dean than Che Guevara; there was a hole at the knee of his jeans, and another in his sweater elbow.

When the two left the store, as it closed, they were an incongruous pair, for she was in a sleek black leather jacket, a black leather skirt, heels like shiny black chopsticks. Her hair was straight now, like black patent leather.

They took a bus, another, and were soon outside that house that had been inhabiting her dreams for ten years.

She was now nineteen, he, seventeen. They knew to the month how old each was. He looked much older, and she did too, a smart young woman, no girl, this.

As he went up the steps she lingered, to grasp the moment. She was here with the tall fair boy she had been dreaming of, yet it was like those dreams where a familiar figure comes towards you, but it is not he, this is a stranger; or with what delight you see across a room your lost sweetheart and she turns her head with a smile you don’t know. This was Thomas, and not Edward, and the theme of deception continued as she tripped fast up the steps to join him at the opening door: the hall which had stayed in her mind as a place of soft colours and lights was smaller, and the spring afternoon sent a cold light where she remembered a warm diffusing glow. She remembered a reddish-rose softness, and here they were, old rugs, on the floor and on the walls, but she could see white threads where the light highlit worn patches. They were shabby. Yes, pretty, she supposed: could not these rich people afford new ones? At once she put the remembered room, unchanged, into another part of her mind, to keep it there safe, and condemned what she saw as an imposter. Now they were in the enormous room she remembered she had been told was a kitchen. It still was – nothing had changed. A child, she had not taken in all the cupboards and the fridge and the stove, which could easily appear in a magazine that endorsed such things, and here was the table, large, yes, as she remembered, and the chairs around it, and the big chair where she had sat on Edward’s knee and he had told her a story.

Thomas had put water into the kettle and switched it on, and reached into a vast refrigerator. He brought out various items which he deposited on the table, and said, ‘But if you’d like something else? I’m making coffee.’

At Phyllis’s, coffee was drunk, often and copiously, so she said, ‘Coffee, please,’ and sat down, since he had not thought to suggest it.

If she could not stop herself sending glances of enquiry, and then confirmation, at him, he could not stop looking at her. She thought he was like someone who had bought something special at the supermarket and was pleased with his buy.

‘Where’s your brother?’ she asked, half afraid to hear what he would say, since the answer was bound to confirm that this was not Edward, nor ever could be.

‘He’s in Sierra Leone, gathering facts’, was the reply, and she could not miss the resentment that was supposed to be concealed by indifference. ‘Gathering facts as usual’ he added. And then, deciding that politeness needed more, ‘He’s a lawyer, these days. He’s with a lawyer’s outfit that gathers facts about poverty – that kind of thing.’

‘And your ma? Does she still live here?’

‘Where else? This is her house. She comes and goes at her own sweet will. But don’t worry, she keeps her distance.’

In this way her suspicion was confirmed that there was something clandestine about this escapade. After all, he was seventeen. He must still be at school somewhere. She was the prize got at the supermarket.

For all of Edward’s tumultuous decade of growing up, Thomas had been the very pattern of a younger brother. He belittled and he jeered and he mocked, while Edward championed this cause or that, filling the house with pamphlets, brochures, appeals and quarrelling with his mother. Yet Jessy supported Edward, on principle, and Thomas might go off with both of them to a concert of musicians from South Africa or Zanzibar. At one of these shows Thomas, aged eleven, fell in love with a black singer and thereafter went to every black concert or dance group that came to London. The secret torments of teenage lust were all directed towards one black charmer after another. He said openly and often that he thought white skins were insipid, and he wished he had been born black. He collected African music from everywhere, and from his room when he was in it came the sounds of drumming and singing, as loud as he could get it, until Edward shouted at him to give it a rest and his mother complained that her sons did nothing by halves. ‘If only I could have had a nice sensible girl,’ she mourned: this was very much the note of the women’s movement of the time.

Thomas had in a thousand fantasies come up those steps with some delectable black star or starlet and when he saw Victoria in the music shop his dreams in one illuminating moment came close and smiled at him.

Victoria asked if he remembered she had slept in his room that long ago night. He did not, but he grasped at this gift from Fate and said, ‘Would you like to see it?’

Up the stairs they went and into a room no longer like a toy shop, but full of posters of black singers and musicians. Never has an old sweet dream of something unobtainable turned so sharply to say: But I was not that, I was this all the time. She knew all the performers from their recordings, and now she sat on the bed to listen to music from Mozambique, staring around at the posters, while Thomas stared at her.

Victoria was not entirely a virgin, because she had only just escaped from the predatory photographer number two. Thomas was not pristine either, because he had managed to persuade a waitress – black, of course – that he was older than he was. But he was inexperienced enough, and nervous enough of this cool black chick, to delay and put off and then put on another tape, and another, until Victoria got up and said, ‘I think I should be getting home, it’s late.’

But he jumped up and grasped her arms and stammered, ‘Oh, no, Victoria, please, oh, do stay.’ So he gabbled, and she stood, helpless, because it was not Thomas just then, but Edward who held her. He began kissing her on her neck, her face and then, well, you could say it was inevitable, given that years had gone into the making of the moment.

Since both were so unskilled, they had to confess, and that made conspiring innocents of them, and so she stayed, while he begged her not to leave him, and stayed, and it was hours later that she crept down those steps, with his arm proudly around her, he hoping he would be seen, she hoping she was not. When she got home Phyllis accepted her apologies with a sigh, and she was saying to herself: So, that’s it, I suppose I should be glad she’s been safe until now.

It was a long summer, a warm good summer, and Thomas, who should have been studying for his final exams, was meeting Victoria at her music shop every day, and going home with her, and up to his room, where they made love to the sounds of music from most of Africa, not to mention the West Indies and the Deep South of America too.

Jessy found them at the big table, drinking strong black coffee.

‘Make me some,’ she told her son, and sat, falling back into her chair, eyes shut. ‘What a day,’ she said. When she opened them a large cup of strong black coffee steamed in front of her and she was looking into a face she seemed to know.

‘I’m Victoria,’ said Victoria. ‘You let me stay here one night, when I was little.’

Jessy had had children of all ages in that kitchen for years, and some had been black, particularly more recently, during Edward’s Third-World phase. Who was this frighteningly smart black girl? She was feeling a generalised warmth, reminiscent, even nostalgic: she had enjoyed that time of children, who came and went and slept over.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s nice to see you again.’ And having swallowed the coffee with a grimace – it was much too hot – she jumped up. ‘I’ve got to get to …’ But she was already gone.

You might be tempted to say that two people whose deepest secret fantasies had been made flesh in each other were in love, had to be, even that they loved. Never has anything been more irrelevant than being in love, or loving. Thomas was not Edward: this was a rougher, coarser-fibred creature – not a man, he was still a boy after all. And Thomas was not finding in Victoria the luscious sexy black charmers of his fantasies. She was a careful correct young woman, who walked as if afraid of taking up too much space, who hung her clothes on the back of the chair, folded nicely, before getting into bed. She was pretty, oh yes; he adored that warm brown skin against the white sheets; she had the nicest little face, but she was no siren, no temptress, and he knew that sex could be different from this – wilder, hotter, wetter, sweeter.

In short, no two people who have spent a summer making love most afternoons could have learned less than they did about each other’s minds, lives, needs.

The summer began to dim for autumn, and he would have to go back to school, and Victoria was pregnant.

She at once told Phyllis, who was neither surprised, nor angry. The boys were out, doubtless raising hell, Bessie was at her hospital. The two were alone: they did not have to lower their voices or watch for an opening door.

‘And is the father going to stand by you?’

‘He’s white.’

‘Oh, my Lord,’ said Phyllis, and her dismay was not so much for the weight of history she was managing to put into those three syllables, but for much nearer trouble.

‘Oh, Lordy-Lord,’ she said again, with a sigh from her depths. Then she summed up, ‘There’ll be problems.’

‘I don’t want him to know.’

Phyllis Chadwick nodded, accepted this, while she sighed and frowned – brows puckering, lips woeful – knowing what Victoria was in for: the girl herself didn’t. The end of her butterfly time – well, that had to happen, and it had been too short, but Victoria could have no idea how her horizons were going to tighten around her.

‘I can manage,’ said Victoria, and now Phyllis’s face showed some humour that was meant to be seen: Victoria would manage because Phyllis would help her. But the young woman had got further ahead in her thinking than the older woman knew.

‘As a single mum I’ll be entitled to my own place,’ said Victoria. She knew all about it because she had heard it from her aunt and from Phyllis: girls got pregnant because they wanted to escape from their families, most often their mothers.

‘I hope that is not why you let yourself get careless?’

Careless? Thomas used condoms and she had no idea if he had been careless or not. ‘No. But when I knew, that was when I thought I can have my own place.’

‘I see.’

‘I can work in the music shop till the baby. They like me there.’

‘And so I should think, that they like you. You’re such a good girl.’

‘And they said I can go back when the baby’s old enough.’ Phyllis was smiling, but there was something there that made Victoria slip off her chair and crouch beside the older woman like a child needing to be held. Phyllis held her, and Victoria began to cry. What she was crying for Phyllis could not possibly guess: if Edward, if that tall fair kindly boy, had been the father of this child, then Victoria would have told him.

‘We’ll start seeing about your own place,’ said Phyllis. ‘I’ll speak to the housing officers.’

There were waiting lists, but when the baby was three months old Victoria moved into a flat in the same building, four floors up. You could say she had a perfect situation. Phyllis, who would help with the baby, was so close. Bessie, a nurse, would be on hand too. The two boys, growing up fast, tearaways and bad lots, were delighted with this baby, ‘A penny from heaven,’ they said, and promised to babysit and teach her to walk.

When Mary was a year old, Victoria, again a slender pretty young woman, still not quite twenty-one, went back to work. There was a child minder in these buildings, one known to Phyllis. At weekends Victoria took Mary to the park and wheeled her around and played with her and there the two were noticed by a handsome young man, who turned out to be a musician, a singer in a pop group. He thought Victoria with her little girl the prettiest thing he had seen in his life, and said so. Victoria could not resist. Phyllis Chadwick had feared the man who would be Victoria’s doom; the unknown white progenitor of little Mary had turned out not to be him, but she had only to take a look at this one to know the future. Phyllis had told Victoria to hold out for a good man, who would stick; yes, there weren’t many of them around, but Victoria was pretty and clever enough to be worth one. This man, she told Victoria, would be all spice and sugar, but ‘You’ll not get much more out of him than that.’

But Victoria got her way and her man, for she married him and became Mrs Bisley. Now there were real difficulties because he moved in to live with her and the little girl, and there wasn’t room enough, and besides, Victoria got benefits as a single mother, which she now had to forfeit. Sam Bisley was out every night, playing gigs all over London and other cities, he came and went, and while Mary had a father, which was more than most of the other black kids did, she scarcely saw him. And he didn’t see all that much of Victoria either, working at his music seven days a week. Then Victoria was pregnant again and Phyllis mourned. She had not seen the man who had impregnated her with her two boys since the night the deed was done. ‘Now you’ve done it,’ she told Victoria. ‘Well, we’ll have to manage.’

And was this tragic sympathy really necessary? Yes, Sam Bisley was hardly the perfect husband and father, but she loved him, and knew the little girl did too. And when there was his baby, he’d be around more and … so she reasoned, trying to calm Phyllis.

Her job in the music shop must end, though they valued her. Two small children – no. She would stay at home for a while and be a mother, and then later … she did get money from Sam, if not much. She could manage. Her life had become the juggling act familiar to all young women with small children. She found herself a few hours a week working for Mr Pat and he was pleased to have her: he was getting on. She took one babe to the minder and another to nursery school, looked after other women’s children in return for their helping her, and knew that the real theme of her life was waiting: she waited for Sam, who was always coming back from somewhere. Sometimes he brought friends who had to sleep on the sofa and the floor. She cooked for them and put their clothes into the washing machine with Sam’s and the kids’. She could scarcely remember the free young woman who was a bit of a pet in the music shop, let alone the girl who had had all those glamorous jobs in the West End. But it all went on well enough, she was holding her own, the babies were fine – only they already were not babies, but small children, and Phyllis Chadwick was there, four floors down, always helpful, kind and ready with advice, most of which Victoria did take. And then Phyllis died, just like that. She had a stroke, a bad one. She didn’t linger on, as her grandfather had done. Now Bessie was responsible for the boys, and could not help Victoria as much as she had. Perhaps who missed Phyllis most was Victoria. ‘What’s wrong with you and your long face?’ Sam wanted to know, not unkindly, but he was not a man for the miseries. But he did go to the funeral, and the two little children stood between Victoria and Sam and saw earth thrown down over the woman whom they had called Gran.

Soon after that Sam Bisley was killed in a car crash. He was always on the road to and from somewhere, and he drove – as she had told him often enough – like a madman. She was afraid to drive with him, and when the children were in the car she begged, ‘Drive more slowly – for the kids, even if you won’t for me.’ He was smashed up with a friend, one who had spent the night sometimes, on the sofa, or on the floor, and for whom she had cooked plates of fried eggs and fried bananas and bacon.

Victoria took hold of herself, rather like picking up the pieces of a vase that has fallen, and sticking the bits together. There were the children to consider. They depended on her now, and she knew to the roots of her being what depending on someone could mean: the absence of Phyllis Chadwick was as if behind there had been warm rock, where she had leaned, and now there was space where cold winds wailed and whistled. Victoria had to beat down waves of panic. Bessie told her she would find another man. Victoria did not think so. She had loved Sam. Long ago Edward had marked her for his own, and then there had been Sam. Thomas had not come into it. For better or worse, Sam had been her man.

One afternoon she saw Thomas in the street. He had not much changed. He was with a black girl, and they were laughing, arm in arm. Victoria thought: That was me. If she had bothered to consider Thomas at all, she would have decided that he would go on with black girls. ‘I like black best,’ he had joked. She remembered how he had brought forth a photograph of her – by the second photographer – nude, posing and pouting, and had said, ‘Go on, Victoria, do that pose for me now.’ She had refused, had been offended. She was not like that. Maybe that girl there across the street …? A smart girl she was, not like Victoria now, who did not have time for doing herself up.

Thomas was walking towards his home with the girl. Victoria followed them, on the other side of the street. If Thomas did look up and see her, he would wave – but would he? He would see a black woman with two kids: he wouldn’t really see her at all.

And now she stopped dead on the pavement, and the thought hit her, but really taking her breath away: she stood with her hand pressed into her solar plexus. She was crazy! Thomas’s child was here, sitting beside Sam Bisley’s son, Dickson. So far and so completely had she shut out any thought of Thomas as a father, it was as if she was in possession of a completely new idea. She had made a good job of that, all right – cutting Thomas out of her mind. Why had she? There was something about that summer that made her uncomfortable. She knew she didn’t really like Thomas – but he had been a kid, seventeen: what was he really like? She had no idea. He wasn’t Edward; for all of the summer that had been her strongest thought. Now she bent to peer at the little girl who was the result of that summer: she didn’t look like Thomas. Mary was a pretty, plump little thing, always smiling and willing. She was a pale brown, lighter than her mother by several shades, and much paler than the little boy, who was darker than Victoria. Sam had been a black black man, and she had liked to match skins with him – in the early days, before they had got used to each other. He used to call her his chocolate rabbit … and then he would eat her all up. ‘I’ll eat you all up,’ – but she did not like to think of their lovemaking, it made her want to cry. Not thinking of Sam was part of her holding herself together. But here was little Mary, and there, walking rapidly away down the street towards his home, was Mary’s father.

She was so shaken by all this that she went home earlier than usual with the kids, made them sit quietly in front of the television, and thought until she expected her mind to burst. That little girl over there, staring at the telly and licking at a lolly – she was an extension of that house, that big rich house.

Victoria knew the Staveneys were famous. She knew now. That was how she categorised them, famous, a word that meant they were far removed from the undistinguished run of ordinary people where Victoria belonged. She had seen Jessy Staveney’s name in the papers, and had made enquiries: that woman with her golden hair – so Victoria still thought of her – was famous in the theatre. Victoria thought of a musical, like Les Misérables, which the first of the photographers had taken her to see. She remembered that afternoon as she did the Staveney house, a vision into another world, beautiful, but she Victoria did not belong: she had never thought of going to a musical or the theatre by herself or with Bessie. And Edward, the fair kind boy – Victoria could still feel the warmth of those arms around her – he had been in the newspapers because he was a lawyer and had returned from somewhere in Africa, and had written letters about conditions. Phyllis Chadwick had cut out the letters, and kept them, not because of the connection with Victoria, but because in her social work she dealt with people from there – Ethiopia, was it? Sierra Leone? – and she found what was in the letters useful, to fight some battle she was having with superiors about housing refugees. And there was more. Lionel Staveney was famous because he was an actor, and she had seen him on television. It had taken Phyllis to say, ‘Is that the same Staveneys?’ The truth was, Phyllis had always been more interested in the Staveneys than she had ever been. Until now.

And that too was so upsetting to think of, like something pricking into her side, or in her shoe, that she positively wriggled as she sat trying to rid herself – what had been the matter with her? What had got into her that she had cut the Staveneys so completely out of her mind? When Phyllis mentioned them she felt a sort of revulsion, and it was Thomas she had not wanted to think of. But surely that was unfair? An ordinary seventeen-year-old, pretending to be older, having his first real sex, and she had gone there most evenings for weeks. No one had forced her!

Now Victoria had begun to think, she kept it up. She thought about the Staveneys and looked hard at little Mary. You can’t go wrong with Mary, Phyllis had said. You can’t go wrong with the Mother of God. She was Mary Staveney. Not Mary Bisley.

She had a pretty good idea what the future of the two little children would be. The six-year-old, the two-year-old, would have to go to the same school she had, and she knew now what a bad school it was. Much worse now than when she had gone there. It was a violent school, full of drugs, fights, gangs, and these days the children who went to that kind of school were seen rather like wild animals who had to be kept restrained. It had been rough when she was there, she knew that now, though then she had not questioned anything. A good little girl, a star pupil, doing her homework – that was why they had made a fuss of her: she had liked to learn and do her lessons. Not like most. These days she would probably be wild and fighting, like the other kids now. And soon there would be Mary and Dickson, having to fight battles every minute, and they would come out the other end of it ignorant – worse even than she had been. She did know now how ignorant she had been, that pretty good little girl who owed everything to Phyllis, who had made her do homework, kept her at it. But in spite of the homework and the hard work, she had been ignorant. She was in that Staveney house most evenings for a summer and had not understood a thing. She had not been curious enough to ask questions. She had not known the questions to ask; not known there were questions to ask, and now, six years later, she could measure her ignorance then by what she had not asked or even wondered at. There was a father, Lionel Staveney, and so used was she to families that had mothers and no fathers, or fathers that came and disappeared again, she had taken it for granted there was no man around in the Staveney house. The truth was, she, Victoria, with her man Sam Bisley, had been better off than most of the women her age: he had not only married her but was sometimes there. A father; a father actually taking responsibility.

She did remember Thomas had said his mother and his father did not get on. She seemed to remember that Thomas said his father paid for school fees ‘and that kind of thing’.

And Jessy Staveney? She had never asked who Victoria was or what she did, was seldom there, and when she was accepted her presence, without a nasty word or look, though surely she must have sometimes wondered if she and Thomas … Retrospectively Victoria was a bit shocked. Surely Jessy Staveney should have said something?

Seventeen: that meant Thomas was now twenty-three or twenty-four. Victoria was twenty-six. Edward who had seemed so unreachably above her in age as in everything else, when he was twelve to her nine, was almost thirty. Edward wrote letters to newspapers, which were published. No one would ever print a letter by her, and nothing she said could be considered important or even interesting.

And these two children, Mary and Dickson, would emerge from school even more ignorant than she had been. Would Mary ever learn enough to be a nurse, like Bessie? And Sam’s son, if he didn’t have some music in him from his father, what would he be?

Thomas’s children, when he had them, and Edward’s, they would be writing letters to the papers that would be printed. And they might turn out famous, like Jessy and Lionel and Edward.

All these thoughts that should – surely? – have marched profitably through her mind years ago during that long lovemaking summer, were presenting themselves now. Now she believed that she must have been a bit simple, not merely ignorant, but stupid.

She had never then thought, Thomas has a right to know. Now she was thinking: But it takes two to make a baby, a favourite saying of Phyllis who had often to deal with paternity cases, ‘I don’t think the idea even knocked at the door,’ Victoria thought. ‘Why didn’t it?’ And if it had been unfair to Thomas, then what about little Mary who had a father in that part of society where people’s names were known, and they had letters printed in newspapers. And children were sent to real schools. Thomas had been at the same school as her, she dimly remembered, because the father – Lionel Staveney – had said his children should know how the other half lived. So Edward and Thomas had both spent some years with the other half’s children before being whisked off to real schools where children learned. If she, Victoria, had been at a real school, then … but children who go to real schools don’t have to nurse sick mothers and fall out of the race – fall off that ladder that goes up – and become girls working in supermarkets or posing for dirty little photographers. If they are pretty enough.

Suppose I didn’t have my looks? Fat Bessie could never have had that time in the West End, all those jobs I had, I could pick and choose. It was Phyllis who said to me, you just believe in yourself and just walk in, show you aren’t scared, and you’ll be surprised … and Phyllis had been right. But she, Victoria, was pretty. Luck. Luck – it was everything. Good luck and bad luck. What could you call it, that day, when they had forgotten her and her aunt was sick, and Edward had taken her home? Good luck – was it? She had lived for years in a dream, she knew that now, thinking about that house, all rosy golden lights and warmth and kindness. Edward. And Edward had led to Thomas. What sort of luck had that been? Well, she had got Mary from it, a solemn little girl with beautiful eyes – like her own. Mary was alive because of luck, a series of lucky or unlucky things happening because Edward Staveney had forgotten her that afternoon, leaving her alone and afraid in the school playground. And Thomas walking into the music shop? No, that wasn’t anything, he was mad about music from Africa and that was the shop for it. But he could have taken his tapes and stuff to the other girl working there that afternoon, black too, and smart and well-dressed, just as she had been.

Victoria seemed to herself like a little helpless thing that had been buffeted about, by strokes of luck, not knowing what was happening, or why. But now she was not helpless, at last she had her wits about her. What did she want? Simply that Mary should be acknowledged by the Staveneys, and after that – well, they would all have to see.

Thomas was with a black girl in his room when his telephone rang. He heard, ‘I’m Victoria. Do you remember me?’ He did, of course he did. These days, when he thought of her, it was with curiosity: he could make comparisons now. The girl he was with had said to him, ‘In my country we say, laughing together, for making love.’ This made Thomas laugh and they did laugh together. But he would never have said of Victoria, We laughed together. Now she was saying, ‘Thomas, I have to tell you something. Now, listen to me, Thomas, that summer I got pregnant. I had a baby. It was your baby. She’s a little girl and her name is Mary.’ ‘Now, hold on a minute, don’t go so fast, what are you saying?’ She repeated it. ‘Then, why didn’t you tell me before?’ He didn’t sound angry. ‘I don’t know. I was silly’ She had been expecting anger, or disbelief, but he was saying, ‘Well, Victoria, I don’t think much of that. You should have told me.’ By now she was weeping. ‘Don’t cry, Victoria. How old is she? Oh, yes, I suppose she must be …’ And he did rapid calculations, while Victoria sobbed. ‘Now here’s a thing,’ he said. ‘She must be six? ‘Yes, she’s six.’ ‘Wow.’ And then, since the silence lengthened, she said, ‘Why don’t you come and see for yourself?’

For a bit, he kept the silence going. She thought, Oh what a pity she doesn’t look like him. What is he going to see? A little brown girl called Mary. But she’s so sweet … ‘I go to the park’ – she named it – ‘most afternoons.’ ‘Okay. I’ll see you. Tomorrow?’

She left Dickson with the minder, and took Mary, in a pink frilly dress, with a pink bow in her hair, done into a little fuzzy plait, and met Thomas on a park bench.

He was humorous, he was quizzical, as if holding scepticism in reserve, but he was pleasant. In fact, they were getting on more easily than during that summer when their relations had been defined by the bed. He was easy with little Mary, and actually said to Victoria that she had her grandmother’s hands.

Grandmother? He meant Jessy.

He bought Mary a lolly, gave her a kiss and went off, saying, ‘I’ll be in touch.’ He had the telephone number now and the address.

Victoria thought: Perhaps that’s the last I’ll see of him. Well, I’m not going to court! Either he does or he doesn’t.

That evening at supper he told his mother and his brother that he had a daughter and her name was Mary, she was a sort of pale milk-chocolate colour. Did they remember Victoria?

Edward said no, ought he to? His mother said she thought so, but there had been so many in and out.

Edward was now a handsome man, grave, authoritative, and he was tanned and healthy because of just having returned from fact-finding in Mauritius. He was a credit to his family, his school, and his university, not to mention the organisation for which he fact-found. Thomas was still a younger brother at university where he was studying – reading – arts and their organisation: he proposed to organise the arts, specifically, to found a pop group. All his choices were because of his being the younger brother of a paragon. How could Thomas ever catch up with Edward, who was married, as well, and with a child?

When Thomas told them, ‘I have a daughter and I’ve seen her and she’s a poppet,’ it was definitely in the spirit of one catching up in a race.

‘I hope you’ve considered the possible legal consequences,’ said Edward.

‘Oh, hell, don’t be like that,’ said Thomas.

Jessy Staveney sat brooding. The yellow, or golden, hair of Victoria’s imagination was now a great greying bush, tied back by a black ribbon whose strenuous efforts to cope left it creased and greying too. Her face was bony handsome, with prominent green eyes delicately outlined with very white lids. She was staring out into perspectives bound to be fraught with fate, if not doom. Her emphatic hands were in an attitude of prayer, or contemplation, and on them she rested her chin.

‘I have always wanted a black grandchild,’ she mused.

‘Oh, Christ, mother,’ said Thomas, affronted not by the sentiment, but perhaps by the fact she could have done well as a ship’s figurehead, staring undaunted into a Force Eight – at least – gale.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Jessy. ‘Do you want me to throw you out?’

‘Well, Jessy’ said Edward, humouring them both with a well practised smile, ‘this could be blackmail, have you thought of that?’

‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘Money has not been mentioned.’

‘This is a classic blackmail situation.’

‘Of course we should give her some money,’ said Jessy.

‘No, of course we shouldn’t, not until we know it’s true.’

‘I’m sure it’s true,’ said Thomas. ‘You don’t know her. She’s not the sort of person who’d do that.’

‘There’s an easy way of finding out,’ said Edward. ‘Ask for a DNA test.’

‘Oh, God, how sordid,’ said Thomas.

‘It certainly does introduce a belligerent note,’ said Jessy.

‘It’s up to you,’ said Edward. ‘But this family could be supporting anybody’s by-blow, for years.’

‘No,’ said Thomas. ‘She’s all right.’ And then he added, coming out at last with one reason for the pride which shone from him: ‘Dad’s going to be pleased.’

‘If he isn’t pleased he’s not very consistent,’ said Edward.

‘You can’t expect consistency, not from Lionel,’ said Jessy. She never spoke of her ex-husband except with a careless contempt. This was partly because of the manner of their parting, and partly because of the feminist movement which she energetically supported.

Lionel, very handsome, irresistible in fact, had been so unfaithful that at last she had to heave him out. ‘Love you, love your infidelities,’ she had screamed at him. ‘Well, I won’t.’ ‘Fair enough,’ he had equably replied.

They met often, and always quarrelled, describing this as an amicable divorce.

Lionel paid the school bills, and, given the precariousness of an actor’s life, his payments for clothes, food, travel and so forth had been dependable. The parents had quarrelled violently, about the boys’ upbringing, but less now. He was an old-fashioned romantic socialist and insisted on both boys going to ordinary schools, as then was common among his kind. ‘Sink or swim.’ ‘Do or die,’ his wife riposted. Although Edward had emerged from the junior school, Beowulf – the same as Victoria’s – pale, thin, haunted by the bullying, hardly able to sleep, and stuttering badly, this had not prevented his father from insisting on the same treatment for Thomas. His prescriptions for them had borne fruits, though unequally. Edward had learned a compassion for the underdog, or the other half, that burned in him like a tormented conscience. ‘You’d think you were personally responsible for the slave trade,’ his mother might shout at him. ‘You are not personally responsible for people being hanged for a loaf of bread or stealing a rabbit.’ As for Thomas, he had learned to love black girls and black music, in that order. No one could ever fail to admire Edward, but Thomas? And now here he was, in his last year of university, a father, with a child of six.

‘I think the best thing to do is to ask her here with the child, to meet us all – Lionel included,’ said Jessy.

This being considered too much of an ordeal, Victoria and Mary came one Sunday afternoon, when Edward was there, and Jessy.

It was indeed an ordeal, mostly because Edward was being so grand, so aloof. He cross-examined Victoria as if he did not believe her. He sat at the foot of the table, in the vast room they called the kitchen, Jessy with her sad grey hair at the top, remembering to smile from time to time at Victoria and the child. Thomas, who seemed ready to flirt with her, he was so pleased with himself, sat opposite Victoria. The child, in a white dress this time, with little white boots and white bows, sat on a pile of cushions and behaved with painful care. She had been told she was going to meet her other family, but had not really taken it in.

‘Are you my daddy?’ she asked Thomas, her great black eyes full of the difficulty of it all.

‘Yeah, yeah, man, that’s about it.’ His American phase was useful to fall back into, at such moments.

‘If you are my daddy then you are my granny,’ said Mary, turning to Jessy.

‘That’s exactly right,’ said Jessy, encouragingly.

‘And what are you?’ she asked Edward. She did not miss the hesitation before Edward brought out, ‘I’m your uncle.’ He smiled, but not as his mother did.

‘Am I going to live with you?’ Mary asked.

Edward sent a sharp glance at his mother: was this a clue at last as to what Victoria was after?

‘No, Mary,’ said Victoria. ‘Of course not. You’ll be with me.’

‘And Dickson too?’

The Staveneys had only just managed to take in that there was another child, from another father.

‘Yes, you and me and Dickson,’ said Victoria.

Considering the difficulties, it all went off well, and at the end Jessy kissed Victoria. Thomas gave her a brotherly kiss, and Edward, hesitating again, put his arms around the child, and it was a good hug.

‘Welcome to the family,’ he said, nicely, even though it did sound a bit like a court order.

He had complained that all this was happening before anything had been clarified with the DNA test.

Victoria went home, not knowing what had been achieved, part regretting she had ever rung Thomas, and she wept, thinking of Sam, who had been such a strength when he was alive. It is not only in Rome that saints are created from unlikely material. If Victoria had been able to foresee a couple of years before, how she would be thinking and talking about Sam, after his death, she would have not believed it.

All this was being discussed with Bessie, every twist and turn, usually talking into the dark in Victoria’s bedroom. Bessie’s own flat – Phyllis’s – had become impossible. The two boys, now sixteen, young men, were out of control. Their mother had managed, just, to keep them in check, but they took no notice of Bessie. The flat was just as much theirs as hers, as they kept telling her, but she paid the bills for it. They stole cars and car parts to get money for their needs. Bessie might come into her home and find it full of young men, drunk, or stoned, the place a pigsty. She regularly had to clean it up. Her bedroom she kept locked, to stop her brothers and their friends stealing her money, but these were not youngsters likely to be deterred by a locked door. The police knew these lads and from time to time took one or two of them off. ‘They’re going to end in prison,’ Bessie said to Victoria, who did not contradict her. ‘Then perhaps I’ll get my flat back one day,’ Bessie might be thinking, but did not say. Phyllis’s death had left an absence that told them continually that some people are much more than a sum of their parts. Her influence had been enormous, in this building and beyond it. People were always coming up to tell Bessie how much her mother had done for them. ‘I wish she was here to do something for me,’ Bessie would think, but did not say. There was a laboratory technician from Jamaica she would have invited to share her flat and her life, had it been possible. He was a sane, sensible person of whom Phyllis would have approved – but he did not have a place of his own and neither did Bessie. That was why she and Victoria were sharing a bedroom again.

Bessie said to Victoria that she ought to arrange for a DNA test. Victoria had never heard of it. The two young women made draft after draft of a letter to the Staveneys, thought safe and correct by Bessie, but stiff and unfriendly by Victoria. The letter Thomas eventually did get had been written by trembling and weeping Victoria, surrounded by all the torn-up drafts. She went down to post it, at four in the morning, daring the dangers of the dark estate, thinking that any muggers or thieves she was likely to meet were bound to be Bessie’s lay-about boys or their friends.

‘Dear Thomas, I am so unhappy thinking that you are thinking I might be trying to put something over on you and your family. I can’t sleep worrying. I would like it best if you and Mary could have the DNA test, the one that proves if a child has a real father. Please write or telephone soon and let me know how you feel. I don’t want to impose.’ This letter too had been torn up more than once, because the first one ended ‘Love’, No, surely, that was a bit of cheek? Then she thought, But what about that summer, how can I put, With good wishes? Love and good wishes alternated and then, worn out with it all, she wrote, ‘With my very best wishes’, ran out to post the letter – and fell into bed.

As soon as Thomas read this, he rang Edward and read it to him.

‘So what do you have to say now?’

‘All right, you win, but I was right to warn you.’

Jessy read the letter and said, ‘Good girl. I like that.’

‘Do I really have to go and have that bloody test?’

‘Yes, you do. We’ve got to keep Edward happy.’

Thus she allied herself with her erring son. ‘A little girl,’ she said. ‘At last. And she seems such a sensible little thing.’

The test was made, but before the result came, Thomas had telephoned to ask what Victoria’s bank account number was. She didn’t have one. He then said she must open one at once, it would make things easier. ‘Things’, it turned out, was an allowance for Mary, of so much monthly, ‘and we’ll see how we all go along’. The money was from Jessy, but when Lionel was informed, he said he would contribute.

There was another afternoon tea, this time with Lionel. Mary was told she was going to meet her grandfather, and went along without fear, thinking of Jessy’s kindly smiles.

Lionel Staveney was a big grand man, in style rather like Jessy, who always seemed to take up the space of two people. He had a mane of silvery hair and wore a shirt of many colours, again like Jessy’s. They sat at either end of the big table, reflecting each other.

Lionel took Mary by the hand and said, ‘So, you’re little Mary. Very nice to meet you at last.’ And he bent to kiss that small brown hand, with a solemn face, but then he winked at her, which made her giggle. ‘What a delicious child,’ he remarked to Victoria. ‘Congratulations. Why have you kept this treasure from us for so long?’ He held out his arms and Mary went up into them, burying her face in the rainbow shirt.

So that was that afternoon, and soon there was another.

‘Here’s my little crème caramel, my little chocolate éclair,’ was Lionel’s greeting to Mary, and Lionel saw Victoria’s face, whose nervous look was because she was remembering Sam’s culinary endearments. ‘If I say I am going to eat you all up,’ Lionel said to Mary, ‘you must not take it as more than a legitimate expression of my sincere devotion.’

When Victoria and Mary had gone home, Edward said to his father, ‘If you can’t see why you shouldn’t call her a chocolate anything, then you are a bit out of step with the times.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Lionel, ‘dearie, dearie me. Is that what I am? Well, so be it.’

‘Lionel,’ said his ex-wife, ‘I think you sometimes scare her a bit.’

‘But not for long. What a little sweetie. What a little – I’m in heaven. Now, if we had a little girl, do you think we’d have stuck?’ he enquired of Jessy.

‘God only knows,’ said Jessy, giving the Almighty the benefit of the doubt.

‘Certainly not,’ said Edward, but this was as much a warning for the present as a judgement on the past.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Thomas. ‘Happy families.’

‘I’m claiming visiting rights, that’s all. Aren’t grandparents encouraged these days?’

‘You’re welcome to visit,’ said his ex-wife. ‘But let’s not push our luck.’

Thomas telephoned Victoria to ask if he could take Mary to his swimming pool. Victoria said the child didn’t know how to swim, and Thomas said he would teach her.

Then it was the zoo, the planetarium and a trip on the river-boat to Greenwich.

Meanwhile Victoria was thinking, ‘But I have two children. What about Dickson? ‘What was happening was unfair. Yes, Dickson was still tiny, just three, but he knew his sister was getting treats that he didn’t.

Jessy had remarked that it was not right, when there were two children, if one got more than the other.

Edward said at once, ‘Don’t even think of it, Mother.’

‘Perhaps we could take him out sometimes with Mary?’

‘No. One’s enough. I’m sorry, but there are limits.’

Now Mary was in her first year at school and miserable. This made Victoria remember how miserable she had been, though she had managed it by being quiet, and keeping out of trouble and – frankly – sucking up to the big boys and girls. She told Mary to do the same, and suffered herself, knowing that the child cried herself to sleep at nights.

She speculated, amazed, how it was that the Staveneys could willingly submit their precious children to such nastiness, such cruelty – for she believed that the good schools, the ones children like theirs would attend, would be free of all that. In her most secret dreams, not shared even with Bessie. Victoria was hoping the Staveneys would send little Mary to a good school where she could learn and become somebody.

Then Jessy telephoned to ask if Mary would enjoy a matinée? Victoria thought of Les Misérables and said Mary would love it. Victoria took Mary to the Staveney house where off went Jessy and Mary in a taxi, to be returned, in a taxi, to the council estate. Mary was in a state of babbling incoherent delight. Victoria never came to grips with what the little girl had seen. But the next time she was whisked off to that other land, the Staveneys, Mary asked Thomas if she could go to another ‘matney’. ‘A what?’ It turned out she thought matney was the name for a theatre. She went to another matney with Jessy and then to the zoo with Edward and Edward’s wife, and their three-year-old. And then, having begged, to another matinée, of a show Lionel was in. She returned to say that her grandfather was a funny man but she liked him. ‘He likes me, Ma,’ she confided in Victoria.

Whenever this grandfather was mentioned grandfathers whirled dolefully in Victoria’s mind. She was being reminded that she must have had a grandfather, but as a fact he had simply disappeared. It was Phyllis’s grandfather she thought of as grandfather, a generic progenitor, an old man with his smelly urine bottle. But – she could not dispute it – Lionel Staveney was her little girl’s grandfather, and when Mary said, ‘She told me I was her grandchild and so I must call her grandmother,’ Victoria felt the earth shaking under her feet. When she confessed how she felt, Bessie reasonably said, ‘But what did you expect, when you told them?’

Well, what had she expected? Nothing like this. It was the thoroughness of the acceptance of Mary that was – well, what? It was all too much! Bessie told her she was ungrateful, she was looking a gift-horse in the mouth. Victoria at last came out with: ‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d be so pleased to have a black grandchild.’

‘She’s not black, she’s more caramel,’ Bessie pronounced. ‘If she was my colour I bet they wouldn’t be so pleased.’

About a year after she had first telephoned Thomas, Jessy wrote a letter to say the family were taking a house in Dorset in the summer, for a month, and people would come and go. Would Victoria agree to Mary’s joining them? Edward’s Samantha would be there for the whole month. Victoria was not invited, and she knew it was because of Dickson. Mary was sweet, lovable, biddable and friendly, but Dickson, now nearly four, was a different matter.

The question of colour – no, it couldn’t be evaded – though Victoria could be pardoned for thinking that the Staveneys, except for Thomas of course, had never noticed that colour could be a differentiator, often enough a contumacious one, believing that whatever had happened – regrettably – in the past, was no longer a force in human affairs.

Dickson was black, black as boot polish or piano keys. Somewhere long ago in his family tree genes had been nurtured to cope with the suns of tropical Africa. He sweated easily. Sometimes sweat flew off him as freely as off an over-hot dog’s tongue. He roared and fought; at the minder’s he was a problem, making trouble, causing tears. Mary was able to calm and charm him, but no one else could, certainly not Victoria, who often found herself weeping with exhaustion over Dickson’s brawling and biting. Bessie adored him, called him her little black imp from hell, her hell’s angel, and sometimes he would allow himself to be held by her, but not often. By now he knew that he was excessive and impossible and everyone’s headache, but that made him worse in behaviour and worse in effect, for he acquired pathos, saying things like, ‘But why am I impossible? Why am I a headache, why, why, why, I’m not, I’m not,’ and he would kick out around him until he fell sobbing on the floor.

He could not possibly be an easy guest in any family, black or white. The Staveneys had scarcely seen the child. It seemed they had enquired of Mary if she would like Dickson to be invited, but Mary had replied, gravely, in her responsible little way, that Dickson would quarrel with everyone and would scratch and bite Samantha. ‘I told her – Jessy – that he would grow out of it,’ Mary told Victoria she had said. Quoting Bessie. ‘Don’t worry, Victoria, he’ll grow out of it.’

But here was a real turn of the screw. Little visits here and there, a matinée, a tea party, but to go away by herself, for a month – they were asking her for a month? Yes, they were. The politician a mother has to be – let alone an economist – told Victoria that the Staveneys wanted Mary because of Samantha. Mary was good with small children. At the minder’s she was commended for it. Victoria thought – and it was bitter – Mary’s going to be a nurse for Samantha. Bitter and unfair and she knew it. Mary loved Samantha. An unanchored bitterness, ready to become suspicion, floated near enough to the surface in Victoria to be dangerous – she pressed it down. Wasn’t this what she had wanted for Mary? The little girl was being so lucky, and Victoria should be giving thanks for the blessing of it.

This was what Bessie, who was taking to religion, called it. ‘It’s a blessing, Victoria. That family – they’re Mary’s blessing from God.’

Now there was the question of clothes. Samantha’s were different, and Mary knew exactly what she needed. Victoria found herself being taken to a shop, by her little daughter, and instructed on what to buy. So this was what Samantha wore? Cheeky little clothes, and the colours were gorgeous – and it was all so expensive. But there was money in the bank for Mary’s clothes, put there by Thomas, and this was when she must spend it.

Victoria was thinking, I am losing Mary to the Staveneys. She was able to contemplate this calmly. She did not believe Mary would come to despise her mother: she was relying on the child’s kind heart. She was thinking, as mothers so often seem to do, How is it possible that these two such different children came out of the same womb? A little angel – the minder’s name for Mary – and a little devil. ‘Never mind,’ said Bessie. ‘They’ll both grow out of it.’ And Victoria found she was thinking about her daughter as Phyllis had thought about her. The terrible dangers that lie in wait for girls … the traps, the snares, baited by the devil with a girl’s best qualities – Bessie had just had an abortion. She wanted the baby, but she would have liked a father for it, and while she had a flat to put it in, she didn’t have a home.

Off went Mary, wild with excitement, with the Staveneys. She rang her mother most days, for Victoria had insisted, and kept saying that it was lovely, oh, it’s so lovely, Ma. And then Victoria was asked to go down for a weekend. She arranged for Dickson to stay at the minder’s and took the train, two hours, into England’s green and pleasant land. But Victoria had hardly ever been out of London. It seemed to her she was being smothered in green, a wet green: it had rained.

She stood on the platform of the station, in her hand her new suitcase full of her best clothes, and waited until appeared Lionel, with Mary on his shoulders. Mary slid down her grandfather to get to Victoria and kiss her, and the three went off, linked hand to hand, to the old car. Lionel’s mane of hair had a leaf in it and Mary’s new dungarees, bright purple, were patched with mud. She was fatter and sparkling with happiness.

Victoria was in the front seat by Lionel, with Mary on her knee. The child smelled of soap and chocolate. Lionel kept up a banter with Mary, a chant of bits of nursery rhymes, references to things Victoria did not recognise, and Mary giggled, sitting on her mother’s lap but watching the big man’s mouth, from whence spilled words like spells. ‘Contrary Mary, smooth and hairy, the spider beside her big and scary …’ ‘That’s wrong, that’s wrong,’ the child shrieked. ‘You’re mixing them all up.’ ‘But Hairy Mary, did not scream, she ate up the spider with curds and cream.’ ‘I’m not hairy, I’m not,’ the child protested, dying of giggles.

‘Mary as smooth as silk, drank up all the milk, none left for her mother, her mongoose and her brother, she …’

He kept it up, while Mary squirmed in Victoria’s arms, and as for Victoria, she was longing for the thing to end. They were driving fast through lanes where the wet green was heavy overhead, splashing down showers of wet around the car. She felt she could not breathe. Soon, soon, they would reach the house, which she imagined rather like the Staveneys’ town house, but they had stopped outside a little house all by itself with the trees growing close, and a great squash of garden, where a big tree leaned over a patch of lawn. On the lawn chairs and a table stood waiting. The house seemed to Victoria a nasty little place, not worthy of the Staveneys. What were they doing here? But Mary was out of the car, and tugging her mother out, by the hand. It seemed no one was about.

All Victoria wanted was to lie down. Lionel told her to make herself at home: there would be tea in half an hour. Mary tugged her mother up tiny slippy stairs and into a dark little room that had windows broken up all over into patterns, letting in thin light. There was a big high bed with a white cover, and on this Mary was already bouncing, ‘Oh, it’s lovely, it’s a lovely bed.’

Victoria wanted to be sick. Mary showed her the bathroom, which was tiny, with thatch showing through the window, where things were flying about. ‘Look at the bees, Ma, look, look.’ Victoria was discreetly and tidily sick, and retreated to her room.

‘Where’s your bed?’ she enquired, falling into the big white one.

‘I’m with Samantha. We sleep in a room by ourselves.’

Told that her mother felt bad – a headache – Mary kissed her, and ran out.

Victoria lay flat on her back, and saw the ceiling had a crack across it. In the corner of the room was a spider web? Was that a spider’s web? – Victoria fell asleep, just like that, but perhaps it was more like a swoon. She was shocked deeply, painfully, to her core. How could the Staveneys … and when she woke, Jessy was just putting down a cup of tea on the bedside table.

‘Sorry you’re not feeling too good,’ she said. ‘Come down when you’re better.’ And she left, the big tall woman, who had to bend her head at the door.

Victoria lay and watched dusk invade the room. That meant it must be getting late. She should go down, shouldn’t she? Cautiously she slid from the bed, careful that her feet would not encounter – well, what? She imagined something soft and squishy that might bite. At the window she stood, careful to touch nothing, and looked down. Under the big tree, which had birds in it, making a noise, an assortment of people, not all of them Staveneys, sat about drinking.

If Victoria went down, she would have to descend those stairs, find her way out, join all those people, who would have to be introduced. She could see Mary sitting on her grandfather’s knee.

Just as Victoria had got up courage, she saw the company rise, variously. Some people went off to cars parked outside in the road. And then the Staveneys came in to the house and she heard them just below. The house echoed. It was a noisy house. And it was then that she saw, just beside the window, a great spider, making its way – she knew – towards her. She screamed. In no time Thomas had appeared, identified the trouble, and having taken her towel off a chair he enveloped the beast and shook it out of the window. It would climb back!

‘Well, Victoria, how are you, you look great …’ How could he see? It was dark in here. ‘Are you better?’ He kissed her cheek, and laughed, a tribute to their past. ‘Come down and have some supper.’

Victoria wanted to say she would get into bed, put her head deep under that wonderful white counterpane and not come out until it was time to go back to London. Instead she began opening her case to find something to wear.

‘Oh, don’t bother about that,’ said Thomas. ‘No one bothers here.’

And off he went and she heard him bound down the stairs.

She followed. A big table almost filled another smallish room. Around it already sat Jessy and Lionel, facing each other, from the head and the foot, Thomas, with a chair opposite him for Victoria, Edward and a sharp observing young woman who must be Edward’s Alice. A chair piled with cushions accommodated Mary, near to her grandfather.

Wine bottles stood about, and plates of cold meat and salad. Friday night, she was told: this picnic had been bought, but tomorrow she would see better things.

Jessy had been here for most of the month, which was nearly up, and Lionel had come every weekend. ‘I can’t keep away from your daughter,’ he announced, ‘she’s my lady love.’

Thomas had been several times. Edward not at all (this was his first time), because he was too busy. Alice had come to visit Samantha, who was in bed, young for late nights.

Alice was eyeing Victoria, who felt criticised. In fact it was Alice who believed she was at a disadvantage. She had been brought up in a provincial lawyer’s family and was sure the Staveneys criticised her. They were so travelled, worldly, liberal and generous, often in ways that shocked Alice. She thought worse of the Staveneys for letting the little dark girl call Jessy and Lionel granny and grandfather. She did believe she was in the wrong to feel like this, but could not change. When Mary attempted uncle for Edward, he had told her, ‘No, call me Edward,’ and Mary did so; she was already calling her father, Thomas. If Edward was Mary’s uncle that meant that Alice must be Mary’s aunt, but the little girl had sensed Alice wouldn’t like that.

Victoria was not jealous of Alice. Her Edward, the kind boy of long ago, lived in her mind, unchanged, and the Edward of now she did not much like. In fact these days she thought Thomas was nicer than Edward.

It was a slow sleepy meal. Jessy kept yawning and apologising, and that made it easy for Victoria to say she was tired too.

‘Normally,’ Thomas said to Victoria, ‘we spend the evening in healthy parlour games, but tonight we’ll skip all that.’

Victoria went with Mary to her room, where Samantha was prettily asleep in a little bed. Mary had a big bed, like Victoria’s. Mary put up her arms to kiss her mother and smiled and fell asleep.

Victoria went to her room, looked for the spider, did not see it, dived into bed, and pulled up the white cover. In here, she was safe.

Friday night. Two more nights to go – she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, she hated it all. She could hear an owl hooting. Didn’t that mean death? It was in the big tree. The garden was full of horrors. At supper Lionel had said to Mary that she mustn’t forget to take crumbs out for the toad.

‘It’s dark,’ Mary had said, comforting Victoria with this sensible protest. ‘Toads can see in the dark,’ said Lionel. ‘It’s a perverse toad,’ Jessy had said. ‘I don’t expect they see many wholemeal crumbs in their usual diet, so why they like ours, I can’t think.’

‘We’ll find him some worms tomorrow,’ Lionel had said.

Victoria did sleep at last and woke early to find Mary had come in the night and was asleep near her, on top of the coverlet. For a long time Victoria lay on her elbow watching her child sleep, rather as she would a ship sailing away over a horizon – if she had ever seen a sea that was not on television or in a film. Behind those tight smooth sealed eyelids was already a world that Victoria did not share.

In the morning Victoria tried to find something in her case that would match Lionel’s old sweater that had a hole in its sleeve, or Jessy’s slacks and grey tweedy skirt. She did not have the right shoes either. They talked of walks and of Mary and Samantha going off on ponies with some other little girls.

Victoria stood at the door of the house and felt that she was surrounded by jungle. She knew all about jungles, the way we do, from the screens, big and small: they were dangerous, full of wild animals, crocodiles, snakes and insects. This jungle had none of those but nevertheless was filled with hostile creatures. If she could just leave, leave now – but she didn’t want Mary to be ashamed of her.

When the long breakfast was over – she drank some tea, and had to listen to Jessy lecture them all on the importance of a proper breakfast – she watched while they all went off to walk in woods that were near, and very wet. She said she would stay sitting under the tree, which was bound to be full of creatures that might drop on her, and tried to find haven in a room they called the sitting-room. She sat in a big chair with her feet drawn up, so that nothing could crawl up on them.

Lunch over, they all piled into cars and drove off some miles to a famous tea-room, where they parked, and everyone went walking again, but Victoria and Mary, who insisted on staying with her mother.

‘Poor Ma,’ said Mary, acutely, and her eyes were full of tears. ‘But I love you always.’

Supper was the same. This time Jessy had cooked stew, which Victoria liked and a big fruit tart had been bought at the tea-room to bring home.

Saturday night. Another night to go. By now Victoria was feeling like a criminal. They knew she was not enjoying herself, though had no idea just how much she was hating it, how she feared it. The spider was back on her wall and it had fled when she stamped her foot at it, into the crack, where it bided its time. She tried to keep her eyes on it, but moths had flown in, before she shut the window tight. A big moth crouched on a wall, making a shadow. She had last seen that hooded shape, a frightening shadow on a wall, in a film about Dracula.

Next morning she went down early, with her suitcase. She did not know how she would get to the station but somehow she would. She found Alice, already up, drinking tea.

‘Do you hate it?’ Alice asked.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘I’m sorry’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, I wish I could live here for always, never leave.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Victoria feebly.

‘Yes, it’s true. Edward can’t leave London yet but we will buy a house in the country and then we’ll live in it.’

‘A house like this?’ Victoria looked incredulous.

‘No, bigger. More comfortable.’ She looked kindly at Victoria and said gently, ‘Don’t mind them. I know they are a bit overwhelming.’

‘It’s not them,’ said Victoria. ‘It’s this place.’

Absolute incomprehension: Alice frowned and was perturbed. Victoria seemed about to cry.

‘I wish I could go home,’ said Victoria, like a child. And then, as an adult, said, ‘I would, only I don’t want Mary to be ashamed of me.’

‘She wouldn’t be. She’s a nice little girl, if there ever was one. Samantha adores her. I tell you what. I’ll drive you to the station and I’ll tell them you don’t feel well.’

‘That’s not a lie,’ said Victoria.

And so Victoria got into Edward and Alice’s car and was driven through the early morning countryside to the station.

Victoria had never driven, had never had to, and the skill and speed of Alice was depressing her. She was actually saying to herself, ‘But there are things I am good at.’

At the station, Alice took the bag and went before to the booking office, bought a ticket, said, ‘There’ll be a train in half an hour.’

The two stood together, waiting. Victoria had understood that this young woman, who so intimidated her, meant her well, but – did that matter? What mattered very much was that she liked Mary.

‘I feel a real fool,’ she said humbly. ‘I know what the Staveneys will think. I ought to be grateful – and, well, that’s all.’

‘Poor Victoria. I’m sorry. I’ll explain to them.’ And as the train came in she actually kissed Victoria, as if she meant it. ‘It takes all sorts,’ she added, with a little pleased smile at her attempt at definition ‘I don’t think they’d ever understand you don’t like the country.’

‘I hate it, hate it,’ Victoria said, violently, and got into the train that would carry her away – for ever, if she had her way.

Mary came home a few days later. Victoria saw the child’s bleak look around the little flat, criticising what Victoria had greeted with such relief: a bare sufficiency, and what there was, in its proper place. And then Mary stood at the window looking down, down, into the concrete vistas and Victoria did not have to ask what it was she missed.

Mary kept saying, rushing to embrace her mother, ‘You’re my Ma and I’ll love you always.’ Bessie and Victoria exchanged grim-enough smiles, and then Mary forgot about it.

Thomas took Mary to concerts of African music, twice, but she thought they were too loud. Like her mother, she wanted things to be quiet and seemly.

Then Victoria was invited to an evening meal at the Staveneys, ‘preferably without Mary – and anyway it will be too late for her, won’t it? ‘This, from people who had her up to all hours in Dorset. ‘Without Dickson’ could be taken as read. Victoria put on her nicest outfit, and found herself with a full complement of Staveneys, at the supper table. Undercurrents, some well understood by Victoria, others not at all, flowed about and around Jessy, Lionel, Edward, Alice and Thomas. Lionel at once opened with, ‘I wonder what you’d think if we suggested Mary went to a different school?’

This was Lionel, who had insisted on both his sons going through the ordeal of that bad school, Beowulf.

Victoria was not afraid of Lionel – she was of Jessy – and did not find it hard to enquire, ‘Then, you’ve changed your mind about schools, is that it?’

At this Jessy let out a snort, of a connubial kind, meant to be noted, like putting up your hand at a meeting to register Nay.

‘You could say our father has changed his mind,’ said Thomas.

‘Yes, you could say that,’ said Edward.

‘I’m not saying I was wrong about you two,’ pronounced Lionel, flinging his silvery mane about while he speared roast potatoes judiciously on to his plate.

‘You wouldn’t ever admit it,’ said Jessy, confronting him, while the concentrated exasperation of years of disputation flared her nostrils. ‘When have you ever admitted you were wrong about anything?’

‘Isn’t it a bit late for this altercation?’ enquired Edward.

‘For better or worse,’ said Thomas. ‘But the birds in your nest couldn’t agree.’

‘Oh, worse, worse,’ said Jessy at once, ‘of course worse.’ But from her look at Thomas it could be seen that what she meant was her bitter acknowledgement that his highest ambition was to manage a pop group. ‘As for agreeing, no, we never agreed about that, never, never!

‘Okay,’ said Thomas, ‘I’ll accept your verdict. I am the worse and Edward is the better.’

‘At least the gap between you two was wide enough for you not to quarrel – that really would have been the last straw.’

This spat ended here, because Edward was pouring wine for Victoria, which she didn’t much like. She put her hand over the glass, and then, since a few drops had splashed, licked the back of her hand.

‘There,’ said Lionel. ‘You do like wine.’

‘You should have some, it does you good,’ said Jessy. ‘The Victorians knew their stuff. At the slightest hint of wasting away or brain fever or any of their ghastly diseases, out came the claret.’

‘Port,’ said Lionel.

‘Best Burgundy,’ said Edward. ‘Like this. Best is always best. If I had been asked – for after all I wasn’t given a choice, was I, father? – I’d have said no. I do not have pleasant memories of that school. It was your school, Victoria, I know …’

At this reminder to her that he did not remember the event which was so present and alive in her mind, tears came into Victoria’s eyes.

She made her voice steady, and said, ‘Yes, it’s not a good place. And it’s worse since I was there. Since we were there,’ she addressed Thomas.

‘There was a stabbing there last week,’ remarked Jessy, aiming this at her ex.

‘Which brings me to my point again,’ said Lionel, addressing Victoria. ‘Suppose we send Mary to a good school? I have to say that there is disagreement in the ranks …’

‘When is there not?’ said Jessy.

‘Some of us think – I, for one – that Mary could go to a boarding school.’

‘A boarding school?’ And now Victoria was shocked. She knew that people like the Staveneys did send their children, when they were still little, to boarding school. She thought it heartless.

‘I told you,’ said Thomas.’ Of course Victoria says no to a boarding school.’

‘Yes,’ Victoria bravely said, smiling gratefully at Thomas, who smiled back, ‘I say no to a boarding school.’ For a tiny moment the current between them was sweet and deep, and they remembered that for a whole summer they had felt two against the world.

Alice broke in with, ‘I was at boarding school and I loved it.’

‘Yes, but you were thirteen,’ said Edward.

Who then of the Staveneys, would agree to Mary being sent off to the cold exile of boarding school? Alice and Lionel.

‘Very well, then,’ said Edward. ‘No boarding school. Well, not yet. Meanwhile there’s a good girls’ school, not far, it would be a few stops on the Tube and a short walk.’

Victoria was thinking, She’ll have a bad time. She’ll be with girls who have money and the things the Staveneys have, and she’ll come home to … it would certainly ask a lot of Mary’s kind heart: two worlds, and she would have to fit in to both of them.

Victoria said to Lionel, who was the author of this plan, which in fact fulfilled her dreams for Mary, ‘I couldn’t say no, how could I? It will be such a big thing for Mary’ And now she dared to turn to Thomas, reminding them all that he was after all the child’s father. ‘What do you say, Thomas? It’s for you to say, too.’

‘Yeah,’ said Thomas. ‘Yeah. That’s exactly right.’ Here his belligerent look at his father, and his brother, told them that he was feeling – as usual – belittled. ‘Yeah, it is for me to say too. And I say, Victoria should have the deciding vote. Providing Mary doesn’t go to Beowulf, that’s the main thing.’

Victoria said, ‘If I say no, I could never forgive myself. But I’d like to talk it all over with – she’s not my sister, but I think of her as.’

Bessie heard what Victoria had to tell her, nodding and smiling I told you so. She said, ‘They’ll get Mary away from you, but that’s not how they’ll see it.’

A central fact was there, out in the open, still unvoiced, with its potentialities for pain and gain. Mary had spent a month with the Staveneys, and that experience had made it urgent for her to be rescued from her environment and be sent to a good school.

‘Well,’ said Bessie, ‘she’s going to come out the other end educated. Which is more than can be said about Beowulf.’

‘You went there and you do well enough,’ said Victoria.

‘You know what I mean.’

They were back at what was not being said. For one thing, it was Mary’s way of speaking, which was very far from the Staveneys’. Thomas might speak badly, his phoney American, or his cockney, as he called it, but she had never heard a cockney – who were they when they were at home? – talk like that. And the Staveneys spoke posh, and Thomas too, most of the time. Mary’s voice was ugly compared to theirs.

‘She’ll have a hard time of it,’ said Bessie. ‘There’s no pretending she won’t.’

‘I know,’ said Victoria, thinking that she had had a long hard time of it, and yet here she was, she had survived it. Bessie had had a better time, because of Phyllis being her mother, but she was having a hard enough time now – and she would survive it too.

She wrote to Thomas, asserting his rights, ‘Dear Thomas, I agree to your kind suggestion. Please tell your father and your mother thank you for me. It won’t be easy for Mary but I’ll try and explain it all to her.’

Explain what, exactly? And how?

Mary must be thinking many things already that she might not want to say to her mother. She was kind – that was her best quality: she had a good nature. And she wasn’t stupid. Victoria could easily put herself back into herself at Mary’s age. Kids always know more than adults think, even if they know it the wrong way around, sometimes.

And Victoria knew more than the Staveneys about the future.

Mary would go to that good school where most girls were white. She would have many battles to fight, of a different sort from the rough-housing of Beowulf. The Staveneys would be Mary’s best support. Probably, when the girl was about thirteen, the Staveneys would ask if she, Victoria, could consider Mary going to boarding school. Neither they nor Mary would have to spell out the reasons why Mary must find things easier, for she would no longer have to fit herself into two different worlds, every day. Victoria would say yes, and that would be that.

There was another factor, which Bessie was reminding her of. Victoria was an attractive woman, not yet thirty. She was going now every Sunday to church, because Bessie did, and there she enjoyed the singing. She had been noticed. She took the lead in some hymns, was no longer just one of the congregation. The Reverend Amos Johnson had taken a fancy to her. Her dead Sam, who with every year became more of a perfect man in her memory, could not be compared with Amos Johnson, who was twenty years older than she was. The incomparable lustre of Sam made it possible for her to consider Amos. She had visited his home, full of God-fearing and sober people, and while she was not particularly religious, liked the atmosphere. She had always been a good girl, Victoria had – like Mary now.

If she married Amos she would have more children. Little Dickson, the child from hell, as he was known generally around and about the estate, would calm down, with brothers and sisters.

And Mary? To match the Staveney world with the world of Amos Johnson – she even laughed about it despairingly, with Bessie.

Yet if she married Amos she would be binding the two worlds together, even if both were careful never to get too close. And Mary, poor Mary, in the middle there. Yes, thought Victoria, she will be pleased to get out of it and into boarding school: she’ll want to be a Staveney. Yes, I have to face it. That is what will happen.