Читать книгу A Natural Curiosity - Margaret Drabble - Страница 5

Friday, 2 January 1987

A low pale lemon grey sun hung over the winter moor. It swam, haloed, in the grey mist. The road climbed gently into obscurity. Dimly on either side appeared straw-grey tufts of long grasses, pale reeds, patches of dwindling, lingering snow. Grey shades, yellow shades, a soft damp white light. Alix Bowen gazed ahead, exalted. She was on her way to see her murderer. Her heart sang, in the cold landscape, as she drove towards the flat summit of the moor.

Alix Bowen goes to see her murderer quite regularly. This will be her first visit for a month, her Christmas gift, her New Year’s gift. Some of her friends disapprove of what could now, Alix realizes, be described as an obsession, but most of them are too polite to comment. Her husband Brian says nothing to deter her. He smiles indulgently, anxiously, as he listens to her stories. If he thinks her interest excessive, or unnatural (which it is, and he must), he does not say so.

Alix’s old friend Liz Headleand is less restrained. ‘You’re barmy, Alix,’ Liz would comment, from time to time, over the phone, as Alix reports her murderer’s latest intimations, her own most recent speculations. But then, Alix tells herself, Liz is probably jealous. Liz, a professional psychotherapist, probably thinks it quite wrong that an amateur meddler like Alix should have acquired such easy and privileged access to so notorious a criminal. Liz had missed her own chance to befriend the murderer. She, like Alix, had been in the same building with him, had been more or less held hostage by the police on his behalf: if Liz had thought quicker then, had acted quicker then, he could by now have been Liz’s murderer, and Liz herself could be driving to visit him across this lonely moor.

The murderer had come Alix’s way, without much intervention on her part. He had followed her, as it were. He and Alix were inextricably, mystically linked. Well, that was one way of looking at it. It was not Alix’s, whatever her friends might suspect. But it was rather odd, reflected Alix, as she drove along through the mist at a steady fifty miles an hour, that he should have turned up here, more or less on her doorstep. She had moved north from London a couple of years ago, and he had followed her, though less voluntarily. It took Alix under an hour to drive from her north Northam suburban home to reach the desolate top-security prison which now housed Paul Whitmore. Not exactly her doorstep, but near enough: in the old days, when she had worked in London, it had taken her at least an hour and a half to drive across the city to work, whereas here, up here in the north, you could be out of town in ten minutes, in the depths of the landscape in twenty, and safely arrived at the iron gates of Porston Prison in fifty. If that’s where you wanted to be.

‘O come, O come, Ema-a-anuel, Redeem thy captive I-i-israel, That into exile dre-e-ear is gone, Far from the sight of Go-o-od’s dear son,’ sang Alix, cheerfully, as the white mist parted for her. She had the illusion of moving in a small patch of light, her own small pocket of clarity. She took it with her, it moved with her. The pale sun loomed. The horizons were invisible, but Alix knew they were there, would be there, and that she herself would see them again. The sleeping place of the sun, near the freezing of the sea. As the Ancients put it. And the sun indeed seems to slumber, up here in its dim haze, in its cold thrall.

Alix had brought a book as a Christmas present for her murderer. A new, illustrated book about Roman Britain and the resistance of the Brigantes. She had been browsing in it the night before, captivated by tales of Client Queen Cartimandua’s deals with the Romans, by the stubborn resistance of her divorced husband Venutius. Colourful stuff, and colourfully narrated. It would make a good television mini-series, the story of Cartimandua. The treacherous Celtic queen, gold-torqued, magnificent, betraying her people for the civilization and comforts of the Romans: the rejected consort, hiding out in the snow with his bands of warriors. North and South, the Two Nations. One could make it topical, surely – a hint in the portrayal of Cartimandua of the Prime Minister, duplicitous Britannia, striking deals with a powerful America, abandoning the ancient culture of her own folk? Those stiff hair styles would surely lend themselves well to allusion, to analogue.

Alix had become intrigued, excited, the night before, and had got out her battered old purple Penguin Tacitus to look up the story, and yes, there it was, most aptly prefigured. ‘And so Agricola trained the sons of chiefs in the liberal arts . . . the wearing of our national dress came into favour . . . and so, little by little, the Britons were led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable: arcades, baths, and sumptuous banquets. They called such novelties “civilization”, when they were in reality only a feature of their enslavement.’

She read this passage aloud to Brian, who nodded agreement: Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, blue jeans, jacuzzis . . . yes, that was surely what Tacitus had in mind. But, continued Brian, mildly, he didn’t suppose that the Brigantes and the Iceni and the Silures were very nice people, really, either. Hadn’t they burned people alive in wicker cages? Hadn’t they consulted the gods by inspecting the twisting human entrails of their tortured and sacrificed victims?

‘A bit like P. Whitmore, you mean?’ said Alix.

‘Well, yes. Not unlike P. Whitmore.’

‘I think those are just atrocity stories,’ said Alix. ‘Roman propaganda against the native population. Recent research seems to indicate that maybe the ancient Britons weren’t even very war-like. They were just peaceful farmers. That’s the newest theory.’

‘Really? And the figure of 60,000 Romans put to the sword by Boudicca is just a historical figment too, is it?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Alix. ‘I think that’s a different period. And anyway, how can they possibly have known? How can they have counted?’

She paused, reflecting that P. Whitmore said he could not quite remember how many of the inhabitants of North Kensington he had killed. Brian, who could read her mind, said, ‘And P. Whitmore, is he atrocious?’

‘Well, that’s what I’m trying to work out,’ Alix had said, closing the Tacitus, getting up to put on the kettle.

Yes. P. Whitmore was very interested in the ancient Britons, and knew quite a lot about prehistory. Indeed, Alix wondered if the book she had bought him was perhaps a little too easy for him, a little too popular in tone? But it was new, and covered the new excavations by Ian Kettle at Eastwold, and had new speculations about the relationship of the Parisi and the Brigantes. And some very attractive photographs of Celtic mirrors and shields. And an authoritative introduction by an important professor, a real professor.

‘If it’s not too easy for me, surely it can’t be too easy for him?’ asked Alix, doubtfully, returning with a pot of coffee.

‘Don’t be absurd, my darling,’ said Brian. ‘He’s lucky to get any book at all. I think it’s a perfectly acceptable book. I’d be quite pleased if somebody gave me such a nice book. I think you’ve done him proud.’

And so, really, did Alix.

So why is Alix Bowen in such a good mood, as she drives across the top of Houndsback Moor?

Alix Bowen is in a good mood partly because her protégé, Paul Whitmore, is offering her intellectual and psychological stimulus of an unusually invigorating nature. He has come to her by chance, but it is almost as if she had invented him, as an illustration of whatever it is she wishes to discover about human nature. At the age of fifty, Alix had come to recognize that for some reason as yet obscure to her, she, an exceptionally law-abiding and mild-mannered and conscientious citizen, has always been peculiarly interested in prisons, discipline, conviction, violence and the criminal mentality. Is it perhaps because she is so ‘nice’ that she is so intrigued? Does her interest express her other darker ever-repressed self? Will that repressed self break out one day wildly or can it remain for ever latent, as, apparently, can the aggressive nature of Onychomys leucogaster, the stocky stubborn mouse of Utah (see study by L. D. Clark)? It is getting a little late for it to break out now. She is already fifty-one, inexorably heading for fifty-two. Or maybe it is precisely because she definitively lacks this element in her psyche that she is drawn towards it, and has spent so much of her adult life teaching in prisons and studying the deviant behaviour of female offenders? As though in a search for her own wholeness? Or in search of a refutation of the concept of original sin?

Alix does not know. But she does realize that in P. Whitmore she has stumbled upon an uncannily appropriate subject of inquiry. He fits her queries geometrically. He is like a theorem. When she has measured him, she will know the answer to herself and to the whole matter. The Nature of Man. Original Sin. Evil and Good. It is all to be studied, there, in captive P. Whitmore, towards whom she now drives, bearing her propitiatory copy of The Queen, the Rebel and Rome: A Study of the Resistance of the Brigantes AD 40–AD 79. It is not entirely coincidental that Porston Prison is sited in the heartland of the ancient territory of the Brigantes. The interest of Paul Whitmore and Alix Bowen in the Brigantes has been much stimulated by the location of the prison and by the recent Yorkshire Television programme on the finds of Ian Kettle’s dig. Had the prison been in Newport, or Colchester, other aspects of the historical past might well have captured their attention, other tribes might have solicited their sympathy: but then, of course, they would not have been together to be so captivated.

Paul Whitmore is serving a life sentence. He was convicted of the murder of four women and one man, although he claims to have killed at least one more. The last of the corpses was that of an old friend and professional acquaintance of Alix’s, a young woman called Jilly Fox, whose severed head was discovered in Alix’s car in a shabby street in North Kensington. Paul Whitmore was in the habit of decapitating his victims. He did not know why, or so he told Alix, but Alix was in the process of working it out.

Paul Whitmore had become something of a folk monster, because of the sensational nature of his crimes. His personality, however, did little to stimulate that sensation. He was a dull-voiced, monotonous, studious young man, not a flamboyant monster. The Horror of Harrow Road (for such had been his sobriquet) proved something of a disappointment, to those in search of La Bête Humaine. Even the women’s lobby found him rather dull. There was not much to get at, in Paul Whitmore. No obvious hatred of women, no Ripper-like despising of prostitutes. The crimes had not been sexual, or not obviously so. Members of the anti-racism lobby had slightly more to build on, as most of the victims (although not Jilly Fox) had been black, but they had not managed to build much, for even they conceded that maybe the victims had been black for geographical reasons, because Paul Whitmore happened to live at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove. They suggested that the police might have been more active had the victims been white, pointed out that it was only after the peculiarly noticeable murder of the white Jilly Fox that P. Whitmore had been apprehended, but these arguments did not carry much conviction, even to themselves. P. Whitmore remained unclaimed, unwanted.

Alix Bowen had kept quiet about her association with him, her claiming of him. She did not fancy poisonous letters from either lobby, or from the general public, which would, en masse, though not human soul by human soul, have liked to see the Horror hung, drawn and quartered and mouldering on Tower Bridge, rather than visited by Alix Bowen bearing an illustrated book on Roman Britain costing £9.95.

She talked about him to Brian, and to her friend Liz Headleand, and to her employer, the ancient poet Howard Beaver, the Grand Old Man of Yorkshire letters. The ancient poet was way beyond all moral judgement, and was possessed, in the last evenings of his life, with what Alix considered an admirably lively curiosity about Paul Whitmore.

The ancient poet would listen, fascinated, as Alix described what she had learned of Paul’s childhood and background. The father was a butcher, the mother a hairdresser, in a small town in the north Midlands. When the mother ran off with a lorry driver, Paul had been taken into care for a while, and then returned to his father. He had been taken on a school outing at the age of eleven to see the Bog Man of Buller. He had become obsessed by death and human sacrifice. He had devoured books on the Druids and Stonehenge, on the Celts and the Romans, on the old gods. History had been his favourite subject, although he had also, less dangerously, enjoyed botany. He had no doubt seemed a docile pupil, with a good future ahead. A quiet boy, who liked to avoid the playground’s rough and tumble, who liked to keep his nose in a book.

Beaver too had been, was interested in ancient Britain. He had even written a poem about the Bog Man of Buller. He was very interested in Paul Whitmore’s interests.

He made Alix find the poem, read it aloud to her, noisily. It was an uncollected piece, originally published in Collusion. ‘You can read it to your murderer, if you like,’ he offered, helpfully, provocatively.

‘No thank you,’ said Alix, primly. ‘I don’t think he’d like it. He’s not into Modernism. He likes Swinburne.’

Reading Swinburne, alone, in his lonely flat. Dusky ladies, delicious tortures, Our Lady of Pain.

Paul did not, in fact, read Swinburne, but he might have done, reflected Alix. As she invented P. Whitmore.

The ancient poet found the whole subject very entertaining.

A poet and a murderer. Odd company I now keep, thought Alix to herself jubilantly as she traversed the sodden high flatland, beneath a winter sky.

Ancient crimes arise to declare themselves, to invite detection. Graves weep blood, sinners return to the fatal scene, the primal crime. And Alix Bowen once again finds herself in front of Paul Whitmore, in the visiting room, with its strange huge view. This Victorian building is so designed that once inside, once through the clanging gates and the turning of the keys, one cannot see the walls and watch-towers that surround it. There is an illusion of freedom, of space, of being islanded upon the moor. Not imprisoned, but stranded, with all perspectives opening, helplessly, widely, impersonally, meaninglessly, for ever.

Alix is entranced and appalled by this view, but looks down from it to Paul Whitmore, who is inspecting Alix’s gift.

‘Thank you very much,’ he says, politely.

‘It’s really quite interesting,’ says Alix. ‘In fact, I think I may get myself a copy too.’

Paul Whitmore leafed through the pages, pausing at a photograph of a Parisi chariot burial. A skeleton lay between two great preserved iron wheels, which retained traces of wooden spokes.

‘There’s an exhibition of British archaeology on at the British Museum,’ said Alix. ‘A friend sent me a catalogue. I must try to get down to see it.’

Paul was reading the captions. ‘A woman,’ he said. ‘A tribal queen, it says. They say she was buried with a side of pork on top of her. And an iron mirror.’

‘A side of pork?’ echoed Alix. ‘I missed that bit. Show me.’

He handed the book back to her. She stared.

‘I can’t see a side of pork,’ she said.

‘I suppose it rotted,’ said Paul Whitmore.

‘Then how did they know it was there?’ asked Alix. Foolishly. Paul looked at her in friendly contempt, and they both laughed.

‘I don’t know much about archaeological techniques,’ said Alix, in apology.

‘I had a letter from my Dad,’ said Paul. ‘He says he’s shut up the shop. My fault, he says.’

Alix did not want to imply that it was not, so said nothing.

‘He blames me,’ continued Paul, experimentally.

‘He must be getting on a bit anyway,’ said Alix, as a diversionary tactic, as a semi-excuse. One of these days, Alix fears, Paul will ask her to go and visit his father. She half hopes he will, half fears it. Paul’s father had been pursued by and interviewed by the press at the time of the trial, but had not said much. Would he have more to say now?

‘Fifty-eight, he is,’ said Paul.

A silence fell, during which Alix reflected that she was getting on a bit too and that, though it did not seem so to her, it must seem so to others, including Paul, who was young enough to be her son.

Paul abandoned the subject of his father, turned another page, and lit on a picture of a coin portraying the vanquished Britannia, elegantly perched. From the next page, the Colchester sphinx with a human head in her forepaws gazed bare-breasted at them. Riddles, mysteries. How to read them? Was there any way of reading them? Was this mild amateur scholar victim, villain or accident? The sphinx’s nose was battered, but her wings were powerfully built, undamaged.

Alix could tell that Paul was pleased with the book, and this gave her pleasure. Though why she should try so hard to please a convicted multi-murderer is a riddle, a mystery.

Ancient crimes. Clive and Susie Enderby contemplated them over a glass of sherry. Separately, together, a whole assortment of them. They were both in a state of mild shock, though neither would have admitted it. The new year had begun badly. This evening, Susie had put on her new mustard-coloured layered coordinates, to cheer herself up, but they hadn’t made her feel all that cheerful. She kept glancing at herself in the carefully angled mirror over the fake marble mantelshelf, to keep up morale. And this was supposed to be a good year, a prosperous year, with Enderby & Enderby in its glittering new premises in Dean Street and Clive in the running to become the youngest ever President of the Chamber of Commerce. A pity it had started off on such an odd note. They should never have gone to Janice’s. It was Janice’s fault. But the mustard was a good shade. And a good dry silky rustly texture too. She stroked her own sleeve. Amber. Amber would look good on the mustard. The false gas fire glowed.

Domestic tranquillity. The children were playing upstairs, already in their nightclothes, model children. The table was laid in the dining-room, with cloth and candles, for a rare quiet meal together. Susie had looked forward to this evening, had hoped that it might be a small occasion for celebration, for self-congratulation, for closeness. Not that she had consciously thought that she and Clive were growing apart, no, but he was so busy these days, so preoccupied – as indeed he was now, but at least it was by something that she knew about, something that she understood. Susie did not understand Regional Development Grants and European Investment Strategies and Incentive Zones, but she understood all too well what had happened the night before, at Janice’s, and could feel herself, despite herself, drawn towards dragging it up again. Clive couldn’t just go on sitting there, saying nothing, sipping his sherry. And why was he having a sherry anyway? He usually had a gin and tonic. Was it meant to be some kind of comment or something?

The silence was irritable, painful. It was all Janice’s fault.

‘What an evening,’ said Susie, at last, irresistibly. ‘I’m never going to try to make you go to Janice’s again.’

‘No need to assume responsibility,’ said Clive. ‘She’s my sister-in-law, not yours.’

‘But I was at school with her,’ said Susie.

‘That’s hardly your fault,’ said dynamic thirty-eight-year-old Clive Enderby, with a shade of his usual briskness.

‘Though as a matter of fact,’ said Susie, ominously changing position in the corner of the settee, ‘though as a matter of fact, I don’t quite see why we were all so upset. By what Janice said. After all, it was probably true.’

Clive gazed at his bouncy chestnut-haired wife in alarm. She couldn’t want to talk about it, could she? He couldn’t face it. No, he couldn’t face it. There are some things one just can’t talk about. Janice had cheated. She had broken the rules. Was every wife in Hansborough, Breasborough and Northam, was every wife in Yorkshire, about to start cheating too?

Susie smiled, edgily.

‘Actually, I blame Edward,’ she said.

‘I don’t see why we have to blame anyone,’ said Clive. ‘It’s not Edward’s fault that he’s married to a neurotic bitch on the verge of a nervous breakdown.’

‘How do you know it isn’t?’ asked Susie.

Feminism had reached South Yorkshire with a vengeance, in the 1980s. Or at least that is one interpretation of the scene at Edward Enderby’s on New Year’s Day, and of Susie’s reaction to that scene.

I suppose, thought Clive, we may live to find it funny. But it hadn’t been funny at the time. And Susie was right, the whole thing was probably Edward’s fault. Edward had always been a bully, with a sadistic sense of humour: where he got it from, his younger brother Clive couldn’t imagine. Early ill health, perhaps. Quick-tempered Edward, always ready to put people down. Thin, even gaunt, now, in his early forties. Pushing and pushing. Teasing beyond the limit. Ambition disappointed. He’d always taken it out on Clive, but Clive, so brightly prosperous, had learned to fight back amiably, without hurting, without being hurt. Why quarrel with one’s one-and-only brother? That had been Clive’s attitude.

But last night had been over the top. Right over the top. Drink, was it? Edward never seemed to drink much, to be drunk, but you could never tell. He’d started at the beginning of dinner, teasing Susie about her new hair colour, teasing Clive about his posh new premises, asking uncomfortable questions of Derek and Alice Newton about their son who’d dropped out of the sixth form at King Henry’s, embarking on a whole run of risky jokes about AIDS. Janice had looked uncomfortable through a lot of this, though whether that was because she didn’t like the chat, or because her mind was elsewhere, you couldn’t really tell. She was a very nervous hostess, was Janice, a bit of a perfectionist who managed to make everyone feel slightly uncomfortable as she dished up not-quite-perfect meals. She kept apologizing because the beef was a little overdone. They all assured her they liked it overdone. And anyway, in Clive’s view it wasn’t overdone at all, it was practically raw, so what was the woman talking about? Not that he minded, he liked it red, himself, he really didn’t like it overdone. He caught Susie’s eye and smiled, as he tucked in. He hated cringing and apologies. He liked people to be sure of themselves. Like Susie.

It was over the second helpings of beef (second helpings they all felt obliged to accept) that Edward really got going. Reminiscing about meals of the past, cooked by their mother. Not a very good topic, in Clive’s view, as the Newtons were new to the district and had never met the colourful quaint old Mrs Enderby, but less dangerous, it proved, than reminiscences about Janice’s early days of cooking. ‘And you’d never believe this, from this excellent meal we’ve just eaten tonight,’ said Edward Enderby, smiling a little manically, gesticulating with the carving knife, ‘but Janice, when I first met her, was an atrocious cook. Atrocious. Couldn’t boil an egg, could you, darling?’ Janice stared at her husband with loathing, while the others politely laughed. ‘You remember that first chicken you cooked, when my mother came round? Left the giblets inside in a little plastic bag, didn’t you? Cooked the little plastic bag and all? Didn’t you, my darling?’

‘That wasn’t for your mother,’ said Janice, in a reasonably equable tone. ‘I remember it well. It was for Kate and Bill Amies. It was embarrassing.’

So far, so good. They all sat round and munched the red flesh.

‘No, no,’ said Edward, his grey eyes glinting, ‘it was definitely for my mother. I remember it well.’

‘No,’ said Janice, firmly, but with a note of slight (and to Clive quite understandable) distress creeping into her manner. ‘No, it wasn’t for your mother, it was for Kate and Bill Amies. I remember it well.’

‘A little of the gravy?’ asked Clive, desperately, passing the new fashionable Christmas present gras et maigre sauce-boat along the table to Janice. It ran with thin red blood. No gras, no alleviating emollient gras.

‘No, no, for my mother,’ repeated Edward. ‘We did laugh. Yes, you’ve learned a thing or two since then, Janice. You’ve learned a thing or two about cooking since then.’

‘It was Kate and Bill, and we’d only been married a fortnight,’ said Janice. ‘It was the first time we ever had anyone round.’

‘My mother,’ said Edward, helping himself to another roast potato. ‘Yes, you’ve improved since those days.’ And he laughed, heartily, from his thin asthmatic chest.

‘Yes, we’d only been married a fortnight,’ said Janice, staring straight across the table at Edward. ‘I didn’t know much about cooking. And as I remember, you didn’t know much about fucking, in those days. We weren’t much good, either of us. At cooking or fucking.’

Edward’s face was, Clive had to admit to himself, a study. He turned dark red (which for so pale and grey a man was astonishing) and a vein stood up terribly in his forehead.

One didn’t use words like fucking, over dinner, like that, in 1987, in Yorkshire, in the presence of strangers. It wasn’t done. Or certainly not done to use such a word seriously. As Janice Enderby had done.

A terrible silence fell over the gravy. Susie coughed, nervously. Edward twitched. The Newtons looked at their plates. The unspeakable had been said. Three sexual initiations, three wedding nights, three honeymoons, played themselves in mental images for the three couples around the table. Clive and Susie guessed that their memories were the least disagreeable, as they were the ones to find their tongues first.

‘Well, we all learn as we get older,’ said Susie, platitudinously but boldly: and, simultaneously, Clive volunteered ‘Well, I know I shouldn’t say so, but I think Janice’s beef is much better than Ma’s ever was, she always overcooked it, and her Yorkshire puddings were like soggy dollops of wet cement.’

‘I like soggy Yorkshire,’ said Alice, gamely, and the conversation staggered on. But Janice and Edward said nothing more all evening. They had done one another in, they had murdered one another.

If looks could kill. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.

And now Clive and Susie Enderby sipped their sherry, in the safety of their own home, looking back over the evening before, on the first ominous night of the New Year, contemplating their own marriage and its chances of survival.

Fucking and cooking. Division of labour.

Susie had kept her side of this primitive bargain: Clive wondered, a little uneasily, if he had kept his. The unease of the 1980s. She hadn’t seemed to fancy it much, after the birth of Vicky, but whose fault was that?

These thoughts were uncomfortable: surely it was dinner time? He glanced at his watch ostentatiously, but Susie didn’t seem to notice. He guessed that she was going over it all, apportioning blame, beginning to blame him as well as Edward, blaming all Enderbys, blaming men in general and Enderbys in particular, abstracted by resentment as she sat neatly there in her mustard silk.

But Susie’s mind had moved on. Susie was remembering, with a flutter of panic that she was sure was even now tinting her well-made-up complexion, an encounter on New Year’s Eve, at the Chamber of Commerce dance. An embarrassing encounter, a revival of yet more ancient crimes, and crimes worse (or so it had seemed to her) than cooked giblets in plastic bags, worse than insults over the roast beef. Crimes that she had repressed, disowned, forgotten, until they rose to confront her in the person of Fanny Scott Colvin, whose name she had never ever been able to forget. And there, appallingly, on New Year’s Eve, in the Victoria Hotel, in a black sequined evening dress with great shoulders like wings, like black angel’s wings, stood Fanny Scott Colvin, whom Susie had not seen for twenty years, with whom she had, mercifully, and, she hoped, for ever, lost touch at the age of twelve. She would never have recognized her, never have glimpsed in her that red-haired schoolgirl, but Fanny came swooping up to Susie, and claimed ancient friendship. ‘Susie!’ she shrieked, as though sure of her welcome, ‘It’s Susie Bates, isn’t it? Don’t you remember me? Fanny Scott Colvin I was then, and Fanny Kettle now! How are you, Susie? After all these years and years and years?’

And Susie had stood there shocked, amazed that this woman could stand there claiming acquaintance, as though nothing had ever passed between them, as though they were adults in an adult world. Guilt over her association with Fanny Scott Colvin had nearly killed Susie Enderby nee Bates, and yet there Fanny stood, calling herself Fanny Kettle, invoking old times, as though they had been times of innocence, of childhood innocence, in the school playground, in the bicycle shed, upstairs in the twin bedroom, in the secret dell.

Two evenings of revelations. Susie thoughtfully stroked the sleeve of her silk blouse. Guilt. No, not guilt. Shame. Yes, that was it, shame. Shame, like a dark stain, pouring through her body, flooding her cheeks. And Fanny Kettle had seemed to feel none of it. ‘We must have tea, coffee, lunch, you must come and see me now I’m a neighbour again!’ declared Fanny Kettle, her red hair blazing, her prominent eyes bulging, her neck extended like a fighting swan’s, and Susie had smiled, coldly, drenched in ancient shame.

Clive Enderby coughed. ‘Would you like another sherry, darling?’ he inquired. Susie looked at her gold Tissot watch. ‘Heavens, it’s late. Sorry,’ said Susie, in a voice that spoke from miles away, a choked small diminished voice. Yes, she’s blaming me, acknowledged Clive Enderby. Fucking and cooking. What a disastrous evening. Would they ever live it down?

Janice Enderby lay on the large double bed, moaning and gurgling and thrashing her head backwards and forwards on the hot pillow. ‘Help me,’ she moaned, ‘help me, help me, can’t you help me, help me.’ On and on, a monotonous keening. A sour perfumed psychotic smell rose from the crumpled sheets. Edward Enderby sat and watched helplessly. ‘Never mind, never mind,’ he said, from time to time, ineffectually. His sharp grey pointed face was peaked with misery. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, help me, help me, help me,’ moaned Janice.

A bad start to the new year, said the sardonic corner of Edward Enderby’s consciousness, as the rest of it kept dumb vigil. Yes, a bad start. But at least there’s no one to hear it through the wall. Now we’re detached. Detached misery. Semidetached misery had been hell.

Paul Whitmore was composing a letter about his prison diet, addressed to the prison governor. He had asked Alix’s advice, and she had recommended this course of action. ‘Be polite,’ she had urged. ‘There’s nothing to gain by being rude.’

Paul Whitmore was a vegetarian. He was not satisfied with the variety of diet offered. He would like more fresh vegetables and something other than lettuce and tomatoes in his salad. Eating meat is bad for the mind and body, and leads to aggression. So, laboriously, he informs the Governor. Eating meat is against Paul’s principles.

Paul Whitmore spells it out, as he conjures memories of sides of beef hanging from hooks, of pigs’ heads grinning, of trays of kidneys and livers and lights. These memories fuse suddenly with the image of a woman, sitting in a chair, gazing at herself in a mirror. Her hair stands out from her head in a shining halo of stiff silver spikes, some six inches long. A fevered smell of burning fills the room.

Paul Whitmore shakes his head, dully, like an animal on which a fly has settled, and the images separate and dissolve. Doggedly, he continues his letter to the Governor.

‘Last week,’ he writes, laboriously, ‘I had potatoes with tinned peas, twice . . .’ Paul Whitmore leads a sedate, solitary life in prison, protected from his fellows by Rule 43.

Alix Bowen, driving home towards her husband Brian and her son Sam, bottles for the Bottle Bank clinking merrily in her car boot, is glad she does not have to look forward to a supper of tinned peas. Tinned peas had been one of the torments of her childhood. They are one of the few foodstuffs she still finds repulsive. Repulsive pulse. She does not blame P. Whitmore for finding them unpalatable, but then, if he’s so fussy about what he eats, he shouldn’t have put himself in a position where he can’t pick and choose, should he? Refrain from Murder and Eat what you Want.

It is dark now, and she cannot see the white landscape. The river running through the little town above the prison had been fringed with slabs of ice. How the Romans must have hated it, up here. P. Whitmore’s book claimed that they imported vast quantities of wine, olives, figs, mulberries, raisins and a pickled fish sauce made of mashed sprats, pepper, lovage, caraway, honey and vinegar. But these luxuries probably hadn’t reached them up here, the legionaries pitted against the Brigantes probably had to make do with barley and lentils and cabbage and lard. The tinned peas of yesteryear. Or was that view of the diet of Roman legions out of date now? Hadn’t somebody recently proved that the Roman legions, even in the far north, ate quite a lot of meat? A dim memory of an article in The TLS flutters in Alix’s mind. Is nothing safe, is all knowledge to be revised, will not the dead lie quietly with their stomachs full of cabbage, do we have to chop them up and anatomize them again and again and again?

All sorts of delicacies had reached Northam and Brigantia since Alix’s wartime cabbage childhood. Now one could buy fresh coriander, cumin, mangoes, Chinese leaves, and more than one variety of mushroom. Despite the decay of the manufacturing industries, despite the slump.

Alix ponders privation. She wonders if P. Whitmore expects her to slip him condoms full of heroin, which she gathers are all the rage amongst the criminal population these days, or whether he has decided she’s a dead loss as far as that kind of thing goes, and good only for bars of chocolate and books. P. Whitmore does not seem interested in drugs, though he had in his time been a heavy drinker. Vodka and peppermint had pepped him up on his night sorties.

Alix wouldn’t know heroin if she saw it. Once, years ago, when her elder son Nicholas had just left home, she discovered while clearing out his bedroom a carefully secreted old Maxwell House coffee jar containing some strange white powdered substance. She had stared at it with suspicion. What was it? Was it illegal? She did not trust Nicholas at all. She sniffed it, and finally, greatly daring, put her finger in and conveyed a speck to her tongue.

Detergent. Unmistakable detergent. Daz, or perhaps Persil.

How deeply law-abiding I have been, thinks Alix to herself, as she drives homewards towards baked potatoes and, she hopes, a nicely roasted guinea fowl, with some spinach purée from the freezer. And, as she drives, pondering her willingness, nay eagerness, to see the upsetting P. Whitmore, a new lump of memory detaches itself from the frozen forgotten backward stretches, and bumps downstream into the light. As a child, as a nice, timid obsequious law-abiding deputy headmaster’s daughter, she had been haunted by the idea that one day she would find herself in the dock accused of a terrible crime which she had not committed. For years, this notion had haunted her, for years she had prepared her defence, her moving pleas for acquittal, her heart-rending reproaches upon conviction. Why? What on earth had all that been about? Alix smiled to herself at the absurdity of her childhood fantasies. What on earth had caused them? Had her mother unjustly blamed her for eating a slice of cake? Had her sister unjustly blamed her for losing her French Grammar? Had she been found masturbating?

Heroic courtroom dramas she had staged in her head. Innocent Alix Doddridge, a mere waif of a girl, accused of – of what? Murder, infanticide, treason? Alix could hardly recall. Nor could she now remember whether the essence of these daydreams was that she felt innocent or felt guilty. She suspected that she must have felt guilty, or the fantasies would not have been so elaborate, indeed would not have arisen at all.

Paul Whitmore did not feel guilty, although he admitted guilt. Alix felt guilty when she was not, and knew she was not.

Alix added this perception to the conundrum, drew this new line into her equation.

Paul Whitmore was not getting much psychiatric help at Porston. The chap that he saw once a week sounded a fool. Alix had, by and large, a perhaps exaggerated respect for the psychiatric profession, fostered by her friendship with Liz Headleand and Liz Headleand’s first husband Edgar Lintot, both people possessed, in Alix’s view, of compassion and common sense. This chap up at Porston, from P.W.’s account, did not seem to have much of either. Though that doesn’t mean he’s not a professional. Maybe he knows what he’s doing, after all, thinks Alix Bowen.

But she doubts it.

Alix sees herself in the dock, pleading her case. She is convicted, perhaps, of participating in the Human Condition. Is that it?

Alix gnaws on, like the stubborn Utah mouse.

Nature and nurture. She would like to acquit Mankind, and if she can acquit P. Whitmore, then she can acquit absolutely anybody. Anybody and everybody. Nurture and nature. Alix cannot help believing in the nurture argument, as the nature argument is so unfair.

Why on earth should Paul Whitmore have been born a murderer?

Or made one, come to that?

Alix feels it is very, very unfair.

The one thing she cannot believe is that Paul Whitmore, of his own free (God-given?) will, chose to hack the heads off various young women by and near the Harrow Road, and chose thus to end up eating tinned peas in Porston Prison. She is sorry, but that she simply cannot believe. And that is my last word on this subject for tonight, she says aloud to the empty passenger seat of her car, as she enters the yellow fluorescent glare of the suburbs of Northam, and sees the steep hillside of home.

‘Rat a tat tat, Who is that, Only grandma’s pussycat,’ chants Alix’s friend Liz Headleand, to the step-granddaughter bouncing on her knee. The baby laughs, obligingly, but Liz has forgotten the rest of the rhyme. It is a long time since she bounced a baby on her knee. ‘Rat a tat tat,’ she repeats. The baby does not seem to mind repetition. Liz is delighted to have a step-grandchild. It is about time. Jonathan, her stepson, the father of this child, is into his thirties. Liz had begun to think that none of her stepchildren or children would ever reproduce. Something had put them off family life and babies – her own behaviour, their father’s behaviour, the overcrowding of Britain, the violence of city life, the nuclear threat, the decline of Empire? Any or all of these things could have done it. But Jonathan and his silly wife Xanthe had overcome these hesitations, or else the Life Force had overcome them independently: either way, there bounced and wriggled young Cornelia Headleand, triumphant, in her fancy little smocked and embroidered dress.

Xanthe does dress the child oddly, Liz thinks. But then, Xanthe dresses oddly herself. All bows and ribbons and bits of glitter on her stockings. Liz thought all that kind of thing had gone out decades ago, but she supposes it could have gone in and gone out again several times while she wasn’t looking. Do other people really wear these funny balloony puffed up Bo-Peep very short skirts? Liz has never seen them around anywhere. Liz thinks Xanthe is a bit batty. Yes, that’s the word for her. Batty. Those bright eyes, those shiny dark-red lips, those very white teeth, that strange vacant giggle. Liz prefers the toothless young Cornelia. But recognizes that probably Xanthe Headleand is quite the thing. In whatever circle it is that she and Jonathan move in.

She’s not very good with the baby, Liz thinks. Doesn’t know how to keep her happy, holds her awkwardly, looks nervous when she cries. At home, Xanthe has a nanny for the baby. I mustn’t interfere, says Liz to herself, as she marvels at the child’s soft blooming skin. No wonder mothers want to devour their babies with kisses, feel the urge to gobble them all up. Cannibal mothers.

Liz had been, just before Christmas, to the archaeology exhibition at the British Museum, ‘New Views of the Past’, and had stared, along with all the other morbid sightseers, at the strangely preserved, smooth, brown, plump, patterned immortal skin of Lindow Man. Bard or Druid, victim or sacrifice. Ageless, timeless, rescued from the bog.

Liz is withering, the veins stand up on the back of her hands, and she is even developing dark freckly spots. She is putting on weight, but she is also withering. It is an interesting process, and she watches it with an amused fascination.

The baby bounces. She is soft, seductive, delicious. She smells of milk and biscuit and sweet breath.

At the far end of the room, sitting together on the window seat, Jonathan and his brother Alan are in conference. Liz’s tabby cat lies on the rug before the fireplace. A great gold-rimmed jug of yellow chrysanthemums, curved overbred formal globes, stands in the fireplace. Their acrid perfume mingles with the smell of baby, with Alan’s Gauloise, with the sweeter scent from a small cut-glass vase of freesias, with the general smell of dust and room and home and cat and London. The lights are warm and low. A charming domestic scene.

But the conference is serious. Jonathan and Alan speak in low, worried voices. The men of the family. They are discussing their father Charles, who has, they think, gone mad. Alan runs his fingers through his hair, Jonathan leans forward intently, gesticulating wildly as he speaks. Alan shrugs. Alan is laid back. Mostly.

Liz cannot hear what they are saying. The baby is getting tired, soon she will summon Xanthe to take her away.

Liz is not so worried about her ex-husband Charles Headleand. She has spent enough of her life worrying about him, because of him. He can look after himself. Or if he can’t, well, that’s too bad.

The baby struggles, and makes herself into an angry, tired shapeless shape. Liz joggles her, soothes her, rests her over her shoulder, sings gently in a dull undertone. Cornelia wriggles, settles, wriggles, sucks her thumb.

Liz has always been good with babies. She is glad she has not lost the knack.

Liz’s thoughts move to her friend Alix Bowen, who had telephoned earlier that week to say she might come up to London soon. She feels vaguely aggrieved with Alix, and cannot think why. Is it something to do, as Alix supposes, with the murderer, in whom Alix takes such a proprietorial interest? Liz sometimes feels like saying that some of her patients are just as mad and just as interesting as Alix’s murderer, and that if she were to tell all . . . Yes, there may be an element of that, but it is also likely that Liz resents Alix’s having moved out of reach – and resents the fact that, having moved, Alix seems quite happy, and even occasionally delivers herself of comparisons between Northam and London in which London comes out badly. Sour grapes, of course, Liz says to herself, but nevertheless it is irritating. Liz has been deserted by both her close women friends, both her friends of college days, whom she used to see regularly, on whom she relied for gossip and support and provocation, for reading lists and shared memories. Alix had gone north, and the third of what was once a triumvirate, art historian Esther Breuer, had gone to live in Bologna. Liz has been left alone, holding the fort of London single-handed.

The baby settles, slumps, nestles, and begins to breathe evenly and deeply. Damn, she’s gone to sleep, says Liz to herself: I should have got Xanthe to take her away, now I’m lumbered.

Liz ponders the subject of infantile sexuality. The oral phase. Cornelia has an engaging way of sucking not her thumb but her knuckle.

Although Liz does not yet know it, 1987 is to be the Year of Child Sex Abuse. For some years now the subject has been arousing interest and controversy amongst the professionals, but in 1987 it will catch the press and the popular imagination like a fever. 1987 will be a psychotic year, the year of abnormality, of Abuse, of the Condom. Perhaps it is already possible to detect the early symptoms.

And as if in anticipation, Liz sits there rocking her step-granddaughter and wondering what normality is. Is this it? This comfortable bourgeois room, with flowers?

If one reads ancient texts – the Bible, the Koran, Sophocles, the Veda – is one not sometimes led to suspect that the whole of human history is nothing but a history of deepening psychosis? That something went wrong at the beginning of human nature, of human nurture, that humanity mistook itself fatally, for ever? False revelations, hoax riddles, grinning sphinxes from prehistory. Murder, arson, pillage, savagery.

The baby sleeps and sucks, her pearly dewy eyelids a pale veined blue.

A pity one can’t reinvent the whole thing from infancy, thinks Liz, and get it right. A world without violence, murder, aggression. Some of her calling believed that if you brought babies up properly, if you loved them and fed them and weaned them correctly, there would be no more Paul Whitmores, no more Hitlers or Pol Pots, no more wars: Liz does not believe this. She thinks this is simplistic. The whole thing has got quite out of hand. It is irreversible. Abnormality is in-built, by now.

Alix, up in Northam, returning again to Tacitus, reaches the same conclusion. Tacitus strikes her as sane. Now what does she mean by this? He is reporting mass historic madnesses that make Paul Whitmore’s aberrations seem trivial. Yet he himself is sane. On the other hand, if you define sanity, if you define normality, so narrowly that only one or two exceptional people can ever achieve it, what does that signify?

The baby’s little temples beat. Her little life is fragile, hardly yet incarnate. Her skull is soft, frail, open.

Charles Headleand has been reading the Koran. He is reading the Koran because he plans to go to the Middle East to rescue his old enemy, cameraman Dirk Davis, from the clutches of a bunch of terrorists, who have been holding him hostage for over two years. The Koran has driven the Iranians mad. Who would have predicted, back in the 1970s, the tide of Islamic fundamentalism that has swept the land masses of the East, that threatens even the secular monolith of the Soviet Union? Charles certainly did not, although he knows he ought to have done, because he has always been gripped by News, by day-to-day News, has always been a privileged receiver and passionate disseminator of News. But he had not foreseen the rebirth of Islam, the rise of the Ayatollah, the war between Iraq and Iran, the boy soldiers clutching the Koran, the Turkish women returning despite menaces to the veil, the murmuring in the Soviet colonies, the floggings and the amputations of Pakistan. What is it all about?

He has discussed this with various Middle East experts of his acquaintance, with Hugo Mainwaring the journalist, with Harry Painter the historian, and with a varied collection of television reporters from various countries, some of whom had once worked for Charles’s own company, Global International Network (a company now, incidentally, in severe financial difficulties). He has discussed it with experts in famine relief, with members of the International Red Cross, with employees of Amnesty International. Some of them, he suspects, had not foreseen all this either, although some of them (himself, most of the time, included) lay claim to hindsight, cast backwards premonitions that they had never truly felt, or had felt late, late, late.

He had even discussed Islam with one believer, a friend from college days, a gentle-mannered woman married to the American-born WASP director of a multinational conglomerate. She was bringing her children up in the faith. Why? He had wanted to know why? She had explained that the extremists, the fundamentalists, were as far from her conception of the true Islam as Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons or American Bible Belt faith-healers were from the Church of England. How can that be, he had wanted to know, as Ishrat smiled gently and poured him another cup of tea. He had not been able to comprehend her replies. They are fanatics, said Ishrat, but that need not make me an unbeliever.

It was his ex-wife Liz Headleand who suggested that he should pursue his inquiries by reading the Koran. Frankly, this notion had not occurred to him, nor had it been put to him by any of the experts on Middle Eastern affairs. But, in the grip of obsession, he had humbly taken himself to the nearest bookshop, the Owl in Kentish Town, and purchased a Penguin Classic: The Koran, translated with notes by N. J. Dawood, first published in 1956, many times reprinted. He attempted to open his mind, he attempted to make his way through it: Charles was not used to reading, he was accustomed to news flashes and teletext bulletins and telex reports and memoranda. He found the Koran heavy going, and was more than slightly put off to learn that the chapters of the version he was reading had been rearranged, their traditional sequence abandoned. The original editors of this sacred text had, apparently, arranged its chapters not chronologically but in order of length, ‘the longest coming first and the shortest last’. He complained about this narrative anarchy over the phone to Liz: Liz, not having read the Koran herself, was intrigued by this revelation. ‘You mean you can read them in any order, like the chapters of an experimental novel?’ she asked. ‘Like that novel in a box, by whoever it was in the sixties?’

Charles, who had never read an experimental novel, and very few traditional ones, cut the conversation short. ‘How can you understand the minds of people who don’t respect sequence?’ he wanted to know.

‘I’m sure there must be some kind of sequence,’ said Liz, vaguely. ‘Why don’t you read on, and see if one emerges?’

Charles read on, but not very far. He managed to find one or two pleasant passages about rich brocades and sherbet and fountains and young boys as fair as virgin pearls, but he found a great deal more about unbelievers and wrongdoers and the Hour of Doom and the Curse of Allah and thunderbolts and pitch and scalding water and the Pit of Hell. ‘Will they not ponder on the Koran? Are there locks upon their hearts?’ Charles decided that there was a lock upon his heart: was it because he had been seduced by Satan, as the Koran suggested? Surely not.

He even found himself thinking of the New Testament with some affection, and went so far as to open it, drunkenly, one night, to see what it had to say to him. He stabbed at his old school Bible with his finger, looking for a message. He lit on Matthew 6:25. ‘Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’

The words glowed with a hesitant, radiant beauty, a beauty of remembered faith. Was there not something about God caring even for the sparrows? About each hair of our head being numbered? Inspired stuff, divine stuff, said Charles to himself, hunting for the text, but failing to find it. ‘Christ,’ thought Charles, at midnight, ‘the Koran has converted me back to Christianity.’

The effect of the New Testament did not last. Charles was not a reader, but a man of action. He had persuaded himself that the amateur video of the death of kidnapped Dirk Davis, which had been thrown over the embassy wall in Baldai, was a fake, and had been given enough hope by reported sightings and messages to build on this persuasion an elaborate structure of explanation. He was abetted in this by Dirk Davis’s wife. Dirk Davis’s wife also refused to believe that Dirk was dead. She and Charles encouraged one another, in speculation, in fantasy.

Dirk Davis’s wife was not quite what one might expect, from her brief grieving public appearances: but then Charles knew enough about television duplicity not to be surprised by the real Carla. Wives and widows are never quite what one might expect: what we see is a strange public construction of what we think we would like to see, what the news presenter decides would be suitable for us to see. We are all partly aware of this, and Charles knows it more than most. Nevertheless, the gulf between the public Mrs Davis and the real Carla was unusually wide. The public Mrs Davis was a woman of, say, fifty, dressed plainly and soberly in black, with a bruised, pale face, huge dark pained saucered eyes, long straggly black, limp, grief-unkempt hair, and a husky, pleading whisper of a voice: a woman of sorrows, a victim, worn down by prolonged misery and hopeless vigil. The real Carla was an animated, hard-drinking, loquacious, vitriolic, dangerous creature, aggressive, witty and only occasionally tearful: life had dealt her some hard blows, and Dirk’s disappearance was not the first of them, but she was a fighter, and would not surrender.

Carla Davis lived in Kentish Town, under half a mile from Charles Headleand’s flat.

Is Carla manipulating Charles, or is it the other way round? Is it folie à deux? Is Carla trying to send Charles off to his death, because she blames him for Dirk Davis’s death?

These are the questions that Jonathan and Alan Headleand ask themselves. They are of the opinion that the video of Dirk Davis’s death is genuine. Jonathan has reached this conclusion after many inspections of the tape, professional inspections (for he has followed in his father’s footsteps and now makes TV documentaries), Alan after two viewings through half-closed eyes, a barrier of fingers, and a natural blindness when confronted with the unacceptable. Jonathan ascribes Charles Headleand’s obsession to the financial problems of Global International and Charles’s loss of status. Alan thinks it is more closely linked to sex and the Zeitgeist, to the need for self-assertion and machismo so common in middle-aged men.

Charles and his third wife, Lady Henrietta, are now divorced. Charles lives on his own in Kentish Town. The divorce was expensive. Charles spends evenings drinking with Carla Davis in Carla’s dark terrace house, with Carla’s odd assortment of lodgers and teenage drop-outs. Some of these look a little like terrorists themselves, North London terrorists. Carla, witch-like, presides. She has an entourage. She is queen of a small dark world. She has a certain style. She hates Liz Headleand, who lives spaciously, in the light, in St John’s Wood: who has seduced and corrupted Charles Headleand’s three sons, and drawn them into her own orbit.

Charles plots to go to Baldai to track down Dirk Davis. Carla eggs him on. Liz is neutral. Jonathan and Alan are concerned, because they are the responsible members of the family. Aaron, the irresponsible son, rather admires his father’s late recklessness. Sally and Stella, the youngest, daughters of both Charles and Liz, do not know what to think. They have their own problems, both of them, and anyway nobody cares what they think. So why bother to think anything? This is Sally’s line. She is not interested in the ridiculous male world of plots and bombs and fanatics and hostages and warfare. She fights on another battlefront, and belongs to another plot, another story.

Stella weighs twelve stones, hates university, is very unhappy, does not get on with either Liz or Charles, and with some justification thinks herself neglected, the neglected runt of the family. She will be neglected by this narrative too, for thus is the injustice of life compounded. But it has to be said that none of the Headleand children will get much of an appearance here. They will serve only as occasional chorus. There are too many of them to be treated individually. And anyway, Charles himself is only a small subplot. This is not the Headleand saga. You do not have to retain these names, these relationships.

But nevertheless, Liz rocks her step-granddaughter Cornelia in her arms, as she sits in the cane-backed rocking chair in which she nursed her own babies. Alan and Jonathan plot against their father’s plots. The eagle clock ticks on the mantelshelf. Liz thinks Dirk Davis is a heap of crumbling bones.

It is a Friday lunch time in late January, and Tony Kettle and Sam Bowen are taking a short-cut through the Botanical Gardens. They are on their way to a talk at the old grammar school. They both attend a sixth form college downtown, and have struck up a friendship, as they are both new boys in Northam: Tony is newer here than Sam, but he has not travelled so far. Sam is from London, from Wandsworth, and spent his early years of secondary education in a mixed, noisy neighbourhood comprehensive. Tony Kettle spent those years in a quiet dull old-fashioned school in a small market town in the flat wastes near the Humber.

Tony and Sam have compared notes, over the past three months. On Northam, on the sixth form college, on their own past experiences of school, and, very circumspectly, very indirectly, on their parents and on the factors that have brought their parents to Northam.

They are talking, now, about racism, prompted by an incident reported at school that morning by Ramesh Bannerjee. Ramesh claimed that a pair of pig’s trotters had been suspended from his next-door neighbour’s front door knob, and an abusive message had been scribbled on the door. PAKI SWINE, it had declared, in yellow aerosol. Tony and Sam are not sure whether to believe this story. Ramesh seemed to enjoy relating it so much that his relish made them suspicious. They like Ramesh, and respect him as an advocate for his cause, but sometimes think he goes too far. ‘I mean, in Brixton we heard a lot of stories,’ said Sam, ‘but you wouldn’t think, on the Hilldrop Estate, would you?’

‘It’ll be a pig’s head next,’ said Tony.

‘There was a case of a pig’s head, in Bromley,’ said Sam. ‘Nailed to the gatepost.’

‘And what about that kid in Manchester?’ asked Tony.

They walk on, in silence, for a while. The papers that week had been full of reports of a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, knifed to death in a school playground, amidst racial taunts.

Tony Kettle remembers the street life of the little town of Ogham. Dull, dull, dull. Faded pink-tinted advertisements of out-of-date fashions piled haphazardly in the window of a small shop selling knitting wool. An estate agent, a grocer, a newsagent, a video library. The old medieval market cross and the little bridge, where a bored sullen knot of teenagers would gather of a summer evening, in the empty rural wastes. Boredom. God, Tony Kettle knew what it was to be bored. Boredom could drive you out of your mind, could make a knife in the chest seem a soft option.

He kicks a stone.

‘Things are worse in Manchester,’ volunteers Sam. ‘More blacks. There’s a very small black population in Northam. Comparatively.’

Sam knows this because he often hears his parents discuss these matters. The Kettle parents do not discuss them. Tony expresses scepticism. There seem to be a hell of a lot of blacks in Northam, Tony says, not that he has anything against them, but there are, I mean, even in the sixth form college there are a few, and that’s not even a proper sample. Sam expresses scorn, worldly wisdom, implies that Kettle, from the sticks, doesn’t know a thing. He describes, luridly, some of the goings-on at his old school in Wandsworth. ‘You’re from the backwater, the backwood,’ says Sam. Tony Kettle nods as they skirt the overgrown ancient bear pit, where once captive bears paced back and forth, back and forth, for the entertainment of the citizens of Northam. It still has a hint of the Colosseum, a dangerous whiff of barbarity. ‘Yes,’ says Tony, ‘there wasn’t much going on in Ogham.’

They emerge into the well-kept stretch of gardens, the landscaped areas, leaving the back path and the bear pit. Under the vast swollen bole of a large labelled rare tree, a fine specimen of tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera, cluster many brave little clumps of snowdrops, raising their heads, their green leaves, from the pale cold tender yellow-green grass of January. Their little white heads assemble. A promise of spring. Tony Kettle and Sam Bowen pay them no attention at all. They do not even see them. They are too old and too young to see trees and snowdrops. Tony Kettle kicks another stone.

Alix Bowen has picked a little wineglass full of snowdrops from her own back garden and placed them on her desk. They cheer her, they comfort her. Alix Bowen believes that her son Sam Bowen is at heart a country boy, a snowdrop lover, a pond examiner, a springer spaniel enthusiast. This is her image of him. She would be surprised to learn that he is no longer much interested in springer spaniels or botany, and that something in him hankers after the violent delights of Wandsworth.

Sam and Tony are on their way to listen to an address from a visiting dignitary of the Wildlife in Britain Fund.

The dignitary, when he arrives upon the platform, is not very dignified. He is one of the new-style campaigners, a jolly young bearded forty-year-old with an indeterminate accent and a stock of quips. He speaks of the destruction of the countryside, of the Green Belt, of the threat to the landscape from Britain’s agricultural policy and the EEC. He gives a little history, he shows slides. He conveys a lot of information, but he conveys it so informally, so chattily, that many of his listeners are not aware that it is being conveyed at all. Old Mr Spriggs, Geography teacher of the old style, on the verge of retirement, listens with mingled admiration and irritation. Is this the way to do it, then? Jokes, a little bad language to season the discourse, a lot of amiable smiling and a big Guernsey sweater? Mr Spriggs does not know. He is glad he is leaving the battlefield of educational ideology. He has had enough. Will any of this bright and breezy talk stick? Mr Spriggs doubts it.

The bearded dignitary concludes. It is up to them, the next generation, to cherish the heritage of Britain. He announces the plans for the nationwide Wildlife Competition he is here to launch. The prize money is generous, the judges are glamorous. ‘We really want your ideas,’ he assures the audience. ‘You can help us.’ He beams sincerity and bonhomie. He does not solicit questions, as he is running out of time and has to be in Leeds by six for another meeting. He leaps down from the platform with conspicuous agility, and, as he departs, distributes free ballpoint pens and little badges bearing symbols of badgers and birds and buttercups, along with copies of the competition leaflet.

He does not distribute them very democratically, as he has not enough to go around, but nevertheless Tony Kettle manages to acquire a ballpoint.

When that evening Tony, in the middle of his supper of sausages and baked beans, tries to take down a telephone message for his often-absent, much-telephoned mother, he finds his Wildlife Pen does not work. He presses hard, trying to indent the paper deeply enough to be able to read it by impress alone, but the name and number he has been asked to convey to Fanny Kettle never reach their destination. Fanny Kettle never rings back. One of her many ghostly victim-admirers will wait for ever in vain, reprieved by chance from the lethal attentions of Fanny Kettle.

‘My God,’ says Carla Davis, opening the front door to Charles Headleand in Kentish Town, ‘whatever has happened to you?’

Charles stands there, his face covered with elastoplast. Strips cover his forehead, his nose. His eyes stare out as from a visor.

‘I was mugged,’ says Charles. Morosely, grudgingly. He is not best pleased, one can tell.

Carla, I am sorry to say, laughs. Mysteriously, this response brings a smile to what is left of Charles’s features.

‘Come in, come in,’ she says, although she is in fact blocking his entry, as he stands there in the narrow London hallway. He pushes past her, hangs his coat on the row of hooks, amidst an untidy array of raincoats, scarves, cardigans, anoraks, overcoats, plastic bags.

In the dark drawing-room, she inspects him more closely. What one can see of his face is yellow-blue with bruising.

She pours him a stiff Scotch, adds a splash of water, without asking him what he wants.

Charles explains that he was mugged while jogging in Regent’s Park. This makes Carla laugh some more. She has always been amused by Charles’s jogging habits. ‘Who wants to live longer?’ asks Carla, self-destructive Carla, rhetorically, from time to time.

Nevertheless, she listens with interest as Charles explains the detail of his encounter with the two muggers, at six on the preceding evening, interrupting only to wonder why anyone should want to mug a jogger who clearly hadn’t got thousands of pounds of cash stashed in his track suit pocket.

‘It was just by the rose garden, on the Inner Circle. Outside Regent’s College,’ said Charles, as though this somehow made matters worse.

He had been hit across the face by a heavy object – a metal bar, a wooden club, he hadn’t been able to tell which. Fortunately he hadn’t fallen, had been able to stagger on, then had run towards Regent’s College, streaming blood, and had crashed wildly in as though for sanctuary. The porter had been alarmed by his apparition and so had Charles’s old friend Melvyn Stacey, who was just on his way in to give a lecture on the Thai–Kampuchean border on behalf of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Assembled agency do-gooders and governmental procrastinators had had to wait for their address while Melvyn listened to Charles’s outpourings of rage against thugs and vandals, while Melvyn dabbed at the spatters of Charles’s blood that had somehow communicated themselves to Melvyn’s best grey lecture suit, while Melvyn convinced Charles that he couldn’t possibly drive himself home but would have to go to St Andrew’s casualty department in an ambulance.

‘And when I got back from the hospital,’ said Charles to Carla, ‘they’d locked the gates, and I had to leave the car in the college car park overnight, and as I don’t have a permit they had the cheek to fine me £15 for unauthorized parking. Bloody inhuman, if you ask me, and now they’ll be on the look-out for me whenever I use the park again.’

That’ll teach you to go jogging,’ said Carla, sipping her Scotch.

‘If I hadn’t been a jogger, I’d never have been fit enough to run away. I might have been dead in the gutter by the rose garden,’ said Charles.

‘If you hadn’t been a jogger, you wouldn’t have been mugged in the first place,’ said Carla.

His nose had been broken and pushed sideways across his face. Would it go back to where it had come from, Carla wanted to know? God alone knows, said Charles, who was cheering up under the stimulating influence of Carla and Scotch.

He did not divulge to Carla his mixed feelings about Regent’s Park, which had somehow broken out in this broken nose. Once he had lived a short walk from Regent’s Park, with his second wife Liz Headleand: once he had lived in a grand eighteenth-century house in Harley Street: once he had been able to take a turn beneath the red horse-chestnuts while the potatoes boiled. Now, thanks to the legitimate claims on his estate of his second wife, the extravagance of his third wife, the demands of his five offspring, and the insolvency of his business, he was obliged to live in a flat in Kentish Town, drive his car to Regent’s Park to jog, and park illicitly in the grounds of Regent’s College. Regent’s Park represents all that is gracious in London living, all that Charles had lost, all that need never have been forfeited had he lived more prudently. Outer circle, inner circle, little bridges, roses, ducks, tennis courts, avenues of trees, urns with wallflowers, pink blossom in spring. Charles is not much interested in flowers, but he has, partly through Liz’s influence, become accustomed to them, both indoors and out. His own flat, where he lives alone, is flowerless. Sometimes he buys himself a bunch of daffodils and shoves them in a jug, but they never look convincing.

Carla has dried flowers. Honesty, sea lavender, all a little dusty. She rarely indulges in the freshly cut variety.

However, Charles continues, some good has come out of his misfortune. This unexpected, bloodstained renewal of acquaintance with Melvyn Stacey may bear fruit. Melvyn had rung Charles that morning at nine, to ask after his nose, and Charles had managed to engage his interest in the plight of Dirk Davis, languishing forgotten in Baldai. The International Red Cross was one of the only channels through which one could get a visa to Baldai these days. Journalists were unwelcome in Baldai. Charles had raised the subject at once, in what seemed uniquely favourable circumstances, and he and Melvyn were to meet for lunch the following week.

‘Well done,’ said Carla. Her large eyes swim with pain, with anger, with subjection. She and Charles stare at one another, the bruised and the broken-nosed. They stare and stare, attempting to read what they see. Aggressors and victims. Once, years ago, Charles Headleand and Dirk Davis had come to blows, in a carpark in East Acton, on Bonfire Night. Over a union dispute. Blood then had flowed also, and silence had followed. The silence of the seventies, of the eighties.

‘Anyway,’ said Charles, ‘at least they didn’t break my teeth. They cost a fortune, my front teeth. I’ve spent a fortune on these teeth.’

He bares them at Carla, in what passes for a smile.

Shirley Harper finally plucked up her courage and made an appointment to see Clive Enderby, solicitor and executor of her mother’s will. It was not the will that worried her, but her husband’s business. She could tell Cliff was in trouble: his little empire of wing mirrors and picnic sets was rusting, unassembled, as the bills poured in. What if he went bankrupt? Where would that leave her? She had consulted her sister Liz Headleand, with whom she was not on intimate terms, but for whose financial sense she had some respect: Liz claimed to know nothing about money at all, but she always seemed to land on her feet, and Shirley thought that must mean something. One did not live comfortably in a handsome freehold house in St John’s Wood by chance, thought Shirley. Liz had suggested Clive Enderby. ‘And while you’re at it,’ she had said, ‘you can ask him about probate on Mother’s estate. It can’t still be dragging on, can it? It sounds to me as though you could do with the money.’

The scheme had seemed sound to Shirley, but it was nevertheless with a heavy heart that she made her way to Hansborough to keep her appointment. Enderby & Enderby had moved to new premises. They had abandoned the poky but rather charming little early-nineteenth-century house in Dilke Street, with its pretty little stained-glass windows where swans floated amidst water lilies. They had moved uphill and up-market to an office in a fine new building, deep carpeted, air-conditioned. It was smart, functional, unwhimsical, for the quainter fancies of Post-modernism had not yet hit Hansborough: in fact, its modernity was already a little old-fashioned, but Shirley did not recognize this, and neither, yet, did Clive Enderby, who rather liked its grey steel and sheet-glass and large windows.

These large windows survey one of the most spectacular views of dereliction in twentieth-century Britain. From the fifth floor, where Clive sits, one can see all the way from Hansborough to Northam, across the waste land of demolition. It is a beautiful view. Clive Enderby has plans for it. He regrets the failure of the Enterprise Zone Scheme, of the Rate Reduction Incentive, of the scores of variants of YOPS and TOPS and Restarts and Jobbangs and Youth-boosts and Community Programmes that have tried, piecemeal, to rescue the area, but he is not surprised by their failure. Messy, confused, contradictory, piddling little schemes, doomed to disaster. Clive has his own Master Plan, his own Operation Pegasus. He can foresee that whatever happens at the next election (and he confidently predicts a handsome Tory victory) something will have to be done about dereliction and the inner cities, and Clive means to make sure that Hansborough will be in a position to get what is going. From this rubble will arise the winged white horse of new industry: the lion will lie down with the lamb, and the right-wing Chamber of Commerce will work hand in hand with the left-wing Council. The right hand shall know what the left hand is doing, in Clive Enderby’s scenario, and a glittering new high-tech industry, clean and sparkling, will arise from the ashes to employ the redundant hordes and to dazzle the envious soft hearts of the lascivious south and the less forward-looking dumps of Tyneside and the Black Country, of Liverpool and South Wales. It is a vision of a fabulous rebirth. Clive Enderby, in his own way, is a dreamer.

But his dream is in the future, and will not much help the struggling small businessman in trouble. Shirley now sits before Clive Enderby, with her back to the view, and listens patiently as he explains about her mother’s will. He assures her that everything is in order, that the house in Abercorn Avenue is sold, and that cheques will be on their way to Shirley and her sister Dr Headleand in a month or two at most.

‘These things always take time,’ he says. ‘You did receive the interim statement I sent you, didn’t you?’

Shirley nods.

‘I’m afraid we’ve been a little held up in our regular work by the removal,’ he says, conversationally, as she continues to say nothing. ‘It was shifting the papers that was the problem. Mountains of stuff, going back to my grandfather’s day. You can’t throw it all away without looking, though, can you? Some of it probably has historical interest, if you go in for that kind of thing. You know, local history. Archives. But most of it went into the shredder, I’m afraid.’

‘It was the same with the stuff at my mother’s house,’ says Shirley, with an attempt at interest, at politeness. The things people hoard. We burned boxes full of paper.’

‘Really?’ Clive looks at her with sudden acuteness.

‘Boxes,’ repeats Shirley, dully. The very thought makes her feel tired.

‘Lucky she kept the will in a sensible place,’ says Clive, slightly probing.

‘Yes, very lucky,’ says Shirley, bored.

Clive explains to her the capacities of his new shredding machine, but she does not listen. Gradually she works the conversation round to Cliff’s ailing business, to her own liabilities as a director.

‘I was so worried,’ she says, blushing slightly, ‘that I went round to the Information Centre at the public library. And they gave me this leaflet. And frankly, it worried me even more.’

She hands over the leaflet. It is entitled ‘Implications of the Insolvency Act 1986 and the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986’.

‘I mean,’ says Shirley, ‘what about our house? And all my personal assets? Can they be included in the company assets? I’m a non-executive director, I know, but look, it says the Acts make no distinction between executive and non-executive. I don’t know what it all means. To be frank with you I don’t even know what the word “executive” means. I don’t know where I stand. At all.’

‘Hmm,’ murmurs Clive Enderby, playing for time. He asks for the name of Cliff’s own solicitors, for the company’s name and registration number, for the names of its other directors. He scribbles them down on a piece of paper and looks knowing. Then he tries to explain to her the distinction between wrongful trading and fraudulent trading, but she is not listening, she cannot follow, she takes in only one word in ten. He explains that he cannot offer useful advice in the absence of more detailed information about the company’s liabilities. He encourages her to call a meeting with the other directors.

‘But Cliff is my husband,’ says Shirley. ‘How can I call a meeting with my husband? He won’t speak about these things, anyway. He’s very depressed At least, I think he’s depressed. He won’t admit it. But he is.’

‘Perhaps you should get him to see his doctor,’ says Clive, brightly, eager to shift responsibility for the Harpers’ financial and marital problems on to another profession. After all, they aren’t even his clients. They are small fry, little victims of recession, tiddlers.

Clive watches Shirley closely, as she promises to speak to Dr Peckham. He’s not surprised that she can’t follow her husband’s affairs, but frankly he is rather surprised that neither she nor her clever sister Liz has spotted the intriguing anomaly in their mother’s financial statements. He had noted it at once, and it had led him to an interesting revelation. Now, of course, he does not know whether or not to share it. It is, arguably, of no importance, better left sleeping. Neither Shirley nor Liz has shown the slightest suspicion.

‘Give my regards to your sister,’ he says, as he ushers Shirley to the lift.

Perhaps women never read account sheets, financial reports. Women are interested only in the bottom line, and they can’t always find that. Women will sign anything – hire-purchase agreements, life insurance policies, applications for shares, joint mortgages with defaulting husbands – and they never read the small print, as Clive knows all too well. And even if they try to read it, as Shirley has just demonstrated, they do not understand it.

They shake hands, outside the gleaming lift. Shirley voices her thanks, but the interview has left her more worried than before.

And Clive too, trying to put her from his mind, feels a certain unease. The images of Janice and Susie swim, unsummoned, towards him. Wives, women, marriage. The voicing of dissatisfactions. The crumbling of loyalties. The breaking of bonds. Where will it end? He opens a desk drawer by his left elbow, and stares at a new brown legal envelope in which lies a rather grubby document, a Deed of Covenant dated 23 December 1934. Should he have handed it over? He shuts the drawer, and lets it lie there, inert.

Alix Bowen stops her two-finger typing of a draft of a letter to one of old Beaver’s one-time correspondents and looks up to gaze at her snowdrops. They jostle in the wineglass on their thin stems. She lifts the face of one of them, gazes inquiringly into its intricate green and yellow and white, and lets it fall back. With a sigh, the whole wineglassful rearranges itself, with inimitable, once only grace, to create a new pattern. The flowers shiver and quake into stillness. They cannot fall wrongly. They cannot make themselves into a false shape.

‘If you do happen to have kept any of Howard’s letters,’ Alix types, ‘we would be so grateful for photocopies of them. As I am sure you will appreciate, they would be of great value to any future biographer, and there may be the possibility of a volume of Collected Letters at some point in the future.’ She crosses out ‘in the future’ as tautologous, crosses out the ‘future’ in front of ‘biographer’ on the same grounds, and then puts it back in again, as the sentence looks a little too bare, a little too definite, without it. There is no certainty that there will be a biography, no certainty that Beaver’s recent renaissance of reputation will last, although he clearly believes it will. It is Alix’s task to set his papers in order, a task with which Beaver himself co-operates only intermittently. A Herculean task, for the disorder is considerable. But Beaver seems to like Alix, and does not mind her rooting around in his upper rooms.

Alix does not know whether or not she likes Beaver. ‘Liking’ does not seem to be relevant to what she thinks about him, feels for him. Indeed, the word is not wholly applicable to Beaver’s feeling for Alix either. She is useful to him, in more ways than the way in which she is paid to be useful. She is company, she is a welcome irritant, she shops for him sometimes, she sometimes does his washing up.

He is a dreadful mess, is Beaver. An egg-stained, tobacco-stained, shabby, shapeless mess. A memento mori. Alix, who does not find the company of old people easy, is frequently disgusted by him. He eats noisily, slopping and slurping his food, and blows his nose violently, and spits in the sink. Coarse, fleshly, decaying.

Grammar-school educated, university educated, the son of a miner, once destined for a life as a schoolmaster, read Classics, waylaid for some years by poetry. A brilliant mind, he must have had, reflects Alix. There is little evidence of that brilliant mind now, for Beaver has engineered and capitalized upon his return to popularity by cultivating a deliberate boorishness, an aggressive provincialism. Alix is the only person to whom he speaks of literary matters, and even with her he sometimes relapses into a gross mockery of the mind, a philistine, snook-cocking, infantile savagery. Alix cannot tell whether it is all a pose, whether he thinks that this is how a working-class northern intellectual ought to behave, or whether he has relapsed into behaving like this because he finds it more comfortable, and no longer cares. Is he copy or archetype? She cannot tell.

His career has been curious, enough to drive anyone into eccentricity. After a year or two of schoolmastering in Wakefield, he had taken off for London and lived the life of a literary hanger-on, working in publishers’ offices, writing reviews when permitted, scrounging review copies, copy-editing, borrowing money, publishing the odd poem. He had then vanished to Paris for a couple of years in the late twenties, where he claimed to have got to know the American expatriate literary community and to have worked as assistant editor on transition – although Alix finds this period of his life suspiciously ill documented, and his knowledge of French is now rudimentary and rusty in the extreme. (But he may be joking, that awful accent may be a fake, a stage prop, like that custard-stained check waistcoat and that cloth cap.) He had returned to England, and had become, in the thirties, briefly, successful. References to him and his work during this period were easy to uncover in the little magazines, in the review pages, in the now published letters and diaries of his then eminent contemporaries. ‘Met Howard at the Roebuck.’ ‘Saw Beaver walking along the Embankment with Rose Feaver.’ ‘Discussed Pound with Howard Beaver.’

And then, after this fragile notoriety, he had vanished. He had vanished utterly, into obscurity. He had returned north, and taken an office job with a company that published technical journals and children’s comics. He had married his old school friend Bertha Sykes, and had children, and grown old. He had missed out on the vogue of provincialism that had swept Britain during the 1950s. He now claimed that he had not even known that it had existed. Kitchen sinks, Angry Young Men, no, he had never heard of them. He lived in the past, in the past of the 1920s that had been his own twenties, in the distant past of Greece and Rome and Ancient Britain.

Now he has been rediscovered, a living fossil. He has been televised, recorded, reprinted, honoured. He is seen as a sort of missing link in literary evolution, a coelacanth hauled up from the depths of a cultural Continental shelf.

Or is he, as Alix sometimes wonders, Piltdown Man? A hoax?

Well, he can’t be a complete hoax, because somebody must have written his poems, and by all accounts that somebody seems to have been him. It seems unlikely that this crusty old relic could have produced such work, but somebody must have done, and it must have been either him or the person that used to live inside him. Alix sometimes peers at him to see if she can see any sign of that delicate, shy and vanishing spirit, but Howard Beaver, in his robust eighties, glares defiantly back, his red-rimmed bloodshot eyes mocking her curiosity, her disbelief.

Alix types on. ‘We would very much appreciate any help you can give us,’ she continues.

Beaver wants to edit his own past, to make sure that an authorized version survives him. Alix is slightly surprised that he should care about his posthumous reputation. It depresses her, to find vanity lurking in such a hulk. But she collaborates, because she is paid to do so. And because she is curious. And because she is, by now, involved. Beaver needs her, although he would never admit it. His rudeness, as she occasionally admits to herself, is in part an admission of that need.

Susie Enderby is appalled to find herself sitting in Fanny Kettle’s drawing-room. She cannot think how it has happened. She has been drawn here like an innocent bird by a hypnotic snake. Fanny Kettle’s protuberant, lascivious eyes stare at Susie Enderby.

Fanny is wearing green, dark green, in a shade traditionally favoured by those of her colouring, and she looks at once archaic and avant-garde. Her shoulders are padded, huge, soaring, as they had been at the evening of the Chamber of Commerce ball: her waist appears tiny, her legs are long and her long clinging skirt is carefully arranged to reveal a stretch of hard brown nylon shin. Susie, who takes a pride in her appearance and considers herself one of the best-dressed young professional wives of the region, suddenly feels herself to be a little dull, a little stocky. Fanny pours herself another cup of tea, her long fingers and crimson nails hovering over silver pot, china cup and saucer, sugar tongs. After all, it is only tea time, says Susie to herself, bracingly: nothing awful ever happens at tea time.

Fanny has been describing the reasons for her reappearance in Northam, after years of exile in the flat fens of the East Riding. She shudders with horror as she recalls the desolation. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she says, ‘how lonely it was, how isolated, how cut off from all social life of any sort . . . if you didn’t make an effort, you could speak to nobody, nobody at all, for weeks on end. Well, days on end. If it hadn’t been for my little trips abroad, my little trips to London, I’d have gone mad, quite mad.’

Susie wants to ask why on earth Fanny and her husband Ian had spent so long in such an out-of-the-way region, but she does not want to betray her ignorance. Fanny seems to expect Susie to know all about Ian Kettle’s work. She talks about him as though he were famous. As Susie has never heard of Ian Kettle, she has to tread warily, Gradually she pieces together the information that he has been on television, but is not a television personality: that he was vaguely connected with York University, and is now vaguely connected with the University of Northam: that he is, perhaps . . . yes, this must be it, and now it somehow begins to come back to Susie, as though she had known it all along, that’s right, he is some kind of archaeologist, who has spent years excavating burials in the wet dull flat eastern bits of the county . . .

‘Of course, our house was rather grand, and that was a consolation,’ says Fanny. ‘We had house parties. Quite famous parties.’

Susie does not know whether to believe this or not, and slightly hopes it is not true. How could one have famous house parties in that damp wilderness?

‘Ian’s people are called the Parisi. I always thought that was a hint,’ said Fanny. ‘Parisian parties. You know.’ She insinuates.

Susie does not know. She has no idea what Fanny is talking about. Ian’s people? Parisian parties?

‘Yes, the house was good, but it was too far out . . .’ Fanny sighs, looks round her new residence, which is a detached Victorian granite building high on the ridge by the university, in a suburb once fashionable, now slightly ‘mixed’. It is an area dominated by the great architectural fantasies of the fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century iron masters and by houses like this, the solid comfortable spacious houses of the solidly prosperous. ‘Now this house,’ says Fanny, ‘has some party potential, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?’

Susie nods, smiles. She is out of her depth. She herself sometimes gives little dinner parties for six or eight, and a cocktail party once or twice a year. She considers herself, by Northam standards, a successful hostess. But is she? What new scale has Fanny Kettle introduced?

Fanny Kettle has a son of nearly seventeen. Susie expresses disbelief. ‘Yes, I can hardly believe it myself, such a big boy now . . . of course I married very young, with all the usual consequences . . . only twenty, I was.’ Fanny Kettle laughs. ‘I’m afraid poor Ian has found me rather a handful,’ she says, and laughs again, with display of teeth and rather gaunt neck.

Susie feels sorry for Ian Kettle. She thinks she has no recollection of him, from their one meeting – or was he perhaps that shadowy figure lurking at Fanny’s elbow?

Fanny inquires, formally, after Susie’s own children, without displaying much interest: Susie says she has two, William, aged eight, and Vicky, aged six. ‘How sensible you have been,’ says Fanny, as though sense were a commodity she mildly despised. To wait, to have them a little later, when one can afford more help . . .’

‘Yes,’ says Susie, conscious that she has been emerging dully, uncompetitivety from this interchange. ‘Yes, we are very fortunate, we’re very well placed now, and I have this excellent’ – she hesitates over terminology – ‘this excellent girl . . . a trained girl, you know – who lives in. So life is very agreeable.’

‘And you’re quite free, then? To do what you want?’

Fanny stares at Susie with her shockingly personal, investigative, unmannerly stare. Susie feels herself blushing, hopes her make-up will conceal the colour in her cheeks.

‘Yes,’ says Susie, firmly, primly (why does Fanny make her sound so smug, so prim, so suburban?), ‘yes, I do speech therapy at the clinic where I used to work, two half-days a week . . . and apart from that, yes, I am quite free.’

Free. The word hovers in the room, over the very slightly tarnished silver teapot, over the three-piece suite, over the coffee-table and the occasional tables, over the silk-fringed shades of the standard lamps. Free. An uneasy word, an uneasy concept, a confession, a concession. What has Susie surrendered? Something, she knows. Fanny has noted, has recorded, will exploit. Despite herself, Susie feels a faint tremor of excitement, a physical thrill, a stirring of the flesh. Fanny continues to chatter on, about her parties at Eastwold Grange, about her weekends in Paris, about her plans for future parties, about the complaisance of poor Ian . . . Susie does not know what to believe, does not know what is fact and what is fantasy, succumbs to a mild gin and tonic, refuses a second (‘I have to drive back’; ‘Ah, next time you must have a proper drink and go home in a taxi!’), and as she drives back through the waste land that links Northam and Hansborough, images of a strange, sinister, isolated Grange float into her mind, a Grange with brightly lit windows moated in mist. Laughter echoes into the surrounding emptiness, laughter on stairs and in bedrooms. Carnival, abandon, licence. Susie is outside, out on the flat grey mist-spangled lawn, looking in. Fanny, within, lies back on a brocaded settee, in a silken dress that parts to show the lace of her underskirt. Her head is thrown back. It is cold outside. Susie shivers and turns up the fan on her car heater, as she drives home to a solitary supper. Clive is out at a meeting, and the girl will have fed the children, will be waiting to go out with her boyfriend. Susie will eat eggs on toast in front of the television. Fanny’s ringed hand with its crimson nails reaches for a glass, and a high-heeled shoe drops from her thin hard ankle. A hand – an unattached, disembodied hand – reaches for Fanny’s lean thigh, beneath the silk.

Tony Kettle returns from an evening at the Bowens to find his mother lying snoring on the living-room settee. Her head is thrown back, and she snores, deeply, evenly, rhythmically. The television is still on, but it is soundless. The remote-control gadget has dropped from Fanny’s fingers and lies on the Persian rug by an empty bottle of Bulgarian Mountain Cabernet, an empty wineglass, an empty packet of cigarettes, an orange plastic cigarette lighter, and a stub-filled triangular Craven-A mock-antique ashtray. It is twenty to ten. Tony gazes at his mother with an indeterminate expression which accurately reflects his indeterminate feelings, then watches for a while the muted but loquacious participants in an incestuous BBC Answerback free-for-all about the alleged obscenity of a recent drama series. Tony does not know whether to creep quietly upstairs, like a prudent coward, or whether to attempt to wake his mother and persuade her to go to bed too. His father is away at a conference, so it doesn’t really matter if she lies there all night, or until (which is more probable) she rouses herself in the small hours, makes herself a cup of tea, and then puts herself to bed.

He wanders into the kitchen to think things over. He has had a pleasant evening with his friend Sam and Sam’s parents. Tony had not met Alix and Brian Bowen before. Alix did not seem the kind of mother that one would find lying asleep on a settee with an empty bottle of wine, but she was by no means unalarming: her wild grey hair, her piercing blue eyes, her intent concentration on everything one said, her large gestures, her sudden exclamations over forgotten parsley sauce, all these things had been slightly disconcerting. She seemed of a different generation from Tony’s mother, but Tony was used to that: most mothers belonged to an older generation than his own freakish darling. Most mothers, in Northam as in Ogham, seemed more reliable, more capable, more regular, more dull than Fanny Kettle. But Alix had not been dull: she had been full of talk, full of questions, full of enthusiasms. She had been particularly interested and indeed well informed about Tony’s father’s recent dig. She knew about chariot burials and Romans.

Sam Bowen claimed that she was obsessed by a murderer in Porston Prison, and Tony Kettle had waited eagerly for evidence of this, but none had emerged.

Instead, Alix over the fish pie had talked of the finds at Wetwang, the burials at Eastwold. She was fascinated to learn that the Kettles had actually lived at Eastwold, practically on the site, as it were. She wanted to know what it was like living at Eastwold Grange, how he had found the social life of Ogham, whether she ought to go and visit the ruins of Ogham Abbey. She expressed a polite desire to meet the Kettle parents.

Tony had drunk a glass of white wine with his supper. There wasn’t any pudding.

‘I’m afraid I never make puddings,’ said Alix, as though this deficiency had newly occurred to her. ‘I don’t know why, but I never do.’ Brian Bowen, Sam’s father, had showed less interest in archaeology, but equal interest in Tony’s impressions of social life in East and South Yorkshire. Brian worked, Tony gathered, for the Education Department of Northam City Council. He wanted to know what Tony thought about sixth form colleges, how many kids had gone on to do A-Levels at Ogham, that kind of thing.

‘Your parents didn’t think of boarding-school?’ he asked, at one point.

‘I wouldn’t go,’ said Tony. ‘They suggested it, but I would stay at home.’ He laughed, a little uncomfortable at being the centre of so much attention. ‘Really boring it was, but I would stay.’ He paused, took another sip of wine, continued boldly, ‘But they took me around, you know. I didn’t spend all my youth in the sticks, as Sam likes to think. I went around with my mother. To London. And Paris. And Venice. Places like that.’

‘How nice,’ said Alix; thinking, what an odd boy, what can his parents have been up to?

Tony Kettle, standing irresolute an hour later in the vast high-ceilinged kitchen of the new Kettle residence, wonders the same thing. And wonders if Brian and Alix are normal parents, or whether there are no such creatures as normal parents? And if there were, would he want them for his own? He shrugs. He doubts it. He will take life as it is. What choice is there, after all?

He returns to the living-room, quietly removes the glass, the bottle and the ashtray, and slowly, sneakily, from the far end of the room, increases the volume of sound on the television. His mother stirs, mumbles, suddenly sits bolt upright, as Tony backs out of the door and makes his escape up the stairs.

Attractive danger. Natural curiosity. Unnatural curiosity. Charles Headleand cannot resist pursuing a visa for Baldai, Alix Bowen cannot resist travelling to see her murderer across the lonely moor, Susie Enderby cannot resist returning to take tea with Fanny Kettle, Janice Enderby cannot resist inviting people to dinner and Liz Headleand will not be able to resist an invitation to appear in a contentious debate on television. Their friend Stephen Cox has been unable to resist one of the challenges of the century, the secretive Pol Pot, hiding in his lair, at the end of the Shining Path.

Cliff Harper’s approach to the cliff edge of danger is less voluntary. He does not have an illusion of freedom. He has been struggling for years to prevent himself from reaching this precipice. He lies awake at night, adding up columns of figures, counting his creditors. He lacks the gift of self-deception, the Micawber touch which might have got him out of this mess. His partner Jim Bakewell blames him for lack of confidence. ‘You’ve got to think positive,’ Jim is – or was – fond of saying.

Cliff thinks that is all beside the point. Figures are what count, not faith.

His relationship with Jim deteriorates, almost as dramatically as the non-contractual relationship between Jim’s wife Yvonne and Cliff’s wife Shirley has done. These two women cannot stand one another. The origins of their mutual dislike are lost in history, though there is some remembered legend about a rejected piece of lemon meringue pie. It is known that Yvonne thinks Shirley gets ‘above herself’, ‘thinks a lot of herself’, ‘thinks she’s too good for this world’. ‘Who does she think she is?’ is the phrase that springs most frequently to Yvonne’s lips, when speaking of Shirley. Shirley, for her part, cannot forget or forgive a remark Yvonne once made about Shirley’s mother and the virtual seclusion in which Shirley’s mother chose to live. Cliff and Jim, for years, attempted to mediate, and then to keep the women apart, but rancour persisted, and has now flooded into their own friendship. ‘What did I tell you?’ is now Yvonne’s refrain.

Jim resigns as fellow-director, tries to get his money out. There is no money. There is talk of liquidation of assets, of consulting an insolvency practitioner. Jim argues (rightly) that insolvency practitioners come very expensive and that the company’s accounts will not rise to one. Cliff muddles on. He cannot sleep, he cannot eat, he loses weight. He worries, secretly, about his health, and furtively consults medical dictionaries in the Information Centre at the public library. They terrify him, as leaflets on insolvency in that same library terrify Shirley. Things drag on, good money is borrowed and thrown after bad, money leaks and oozes away, staff are laid off, the Customs and Excise query Cliff’s VAT returns, he cannot work out how to deregister.

He does not discuss these matters with Shirley. He has become morose and surly, impossible to live with. He punishes her for his sense of impending failure. He torments her. She wonders if she can stand it much longer. He is a changed man, he is not the man she thought she married. She can see no way out. A kind of dull despair settles in her: this is it, this is the end. But there is no end.

Meanwhile, she cooks Cliff’s breakfast, and cooks his supper: she cleans his house, pays his household bills, washes his clothes, cleans his bath, buys his soap and lavatory paper. The house ticks over, Shirley ticks over, Shirley-and-Cliff tick over. They watch television together, they sleep in the same bed, occasionally they even go out for a meal together.

It all seems a little unreal, but then, the country at large seems a little unreal too. It is hard to tell if it is ticking over or not. Are we bankrupt or are we prosperous? Have we squandered our resources and drained the North Sea gold, or is the economy booming and the balance of payments healthier than it has been for decades? Are our hospitals crumbling and our streets full of litter, or have we triumphantly reduced the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement? Are there nearly four million unemployed with unemployment rising daily, especially in the north, or are the unemployment figures sinking daily, especially in the north? Has spending on the National Health Service since 1979 gone down by 5 per cent, as the Opposition claims, or up by 24 per cent, as the government claims? Each day brings new figures, new analysis, new comment, new interpretations, newly false oppositions of factors that cannot properly be compared: for the nation has fallen in love with statistics, although it cannot decide what they mean. A few eyewitnesses continue to describe what they see, as they travel by tube, walk the streets, wait in bus shelters, queue in doctors’ waiting-rooms, serve on juries, and clutch their wire baskets at the supermarket check-out, but others accuse them of telling atrocity stories, of indulging in a pornography of squalor.

Brian Bowen has learned nothing from the last few years. He stands where he did. He is an unreconstructed socialist. He has not learned doubt. Alix has learned doubt, but not Brian. Brian is less reconstructed than his friend Blinkhorn of Northam City Council, a man of the New Hard Pragmatic Middle Left. He is far less reconstructed than his older and closer friend, Otto Werner, economist, who has left for Washington, as part of the Brain Drain. Brian is way, way out of date. He is so far out of date that sometimes he thinks the revolution may, in its revolving, turn again to his own aged and honourable position. Meanwhile, he organizes evening classes and worries over balance sheets and interviews teachers and sets up courses and seminars, and even finds time to do a little teaching himself. And out there, amongst the people, he fancies he finds some unreconstructed socialists like himself. One of them, a middle-aged catering manageress, is so unreconstructed that she thinks the correct term is ‘unreconstituted’, and firmly declares herself on any suitable occasion to be just that – unreconstituted – proudly, as though she were a wholesome piece of prime beef or fresh fish, not a knitted turkey roll or a soya hamburger.

The truth is that Brian, since coming up to Northam, his home town, has felt happier, less isolated, in his unreconstructed state. He is not, here, driven to extremes of position, as he had been in London. The political atmosphere here seems more decent, more realistic, less febrile and opinionated than the atmosphere in London. This is partly because the left here has more roots, more confidence, more sense of tradition. Northam has a left-wing council and a vast majority of Labour Members of Parliament, so Brian here does not have to feel like a pariah or a crazed dreamer. He does not have to fight every inch of the way, every day, as he did in the Adult Education College in south London that jumped at the chance of making him redundant. True, Northam has a reputation for being extremist, for being of the ‘loony left’, but anybody who lives there knows that this reputation is greatly exaggerated. Northam is a solid provincial town, staggering now from the recession, but not yet on its knees. Perry Blinkhorn and Clive Enderby may not yet be on speaking terms, and may feel culturally condemned to despise one another, but they come from the same stock, they speak with the same accent, they share some of the same hopes, and they have more in common with one another than either have with the yuppies and city slickers and get-rich-quick boys of a south which they distrust. Brian fits in here. He settles back into the familiar city that bore him, and which he struggled so hard to leave.

And Alix, far more uprooted than he, far less a northerner, far less in tune with Northam’s brand of socialism – she does not seem too out of place, too unhappy, either. She has made new friends, she has found herself a job, she keeps up her criminal connections, and she too loves the landscape. She does not miss London as she had feared she might.

Sometimes Brian finds himself remembering (or reconstructing, perhaps?) some remarks made by Alix when there had seemed to be a probability that Brian’s new job might take him not from London to Northam but from London to Gloseley, an unattractive Midlands town famed chiefly for its nuclear missile station and its attendant Peace Women. Alix had said that if they went to Gloseley, she could join the women over their camp-fires. But, Brian had protested, you don’t even think you believe in unilateral disarmament. No, said Alix, I don’t suppose I do, now, but I could become an outcast, and if I became an outcast by joining those women, then I would begin to believe what they believe. That’s how it would go. I would sit by the fire, and that would bring belief.

Fitting in, believing, consensus, outcasts. Yes, he could see clearly an Alix who would crouch by a fire warming her hands on a mug of soup, her fingers dirty, her grey hair wild, her eyes glittering, her mind slowly filling with belief, as her body took on the posture of a witch. She would knit little Peace Emblems and tie them fluttering to the barbed wire: she would murmur incantations in ghostly gay company. It was perfectly plausible, this version of Alix, in a way it was what she had been bred to be, by her school, by her parents, by generations of radical intellectual nonconformists. She had been bred to be a protestor, a marcher, a martyr, a woman of faith. She had met her first husband, who had died long before Brian met her, on a protest march. In the face of such destiny, the details of conviction, of opinion, did not matter: it was the posture of protest that gave one shape, belief, faith. If one is born and bred to a role of outcast protestor, then one must adopt it, in order to conform.

But Alix had not adopted it. Reason had been too strong for her; reason followed, fatally, by doubt. She had become deviant. And she had detached herself from politics, in disillusion; she had taken up psychotics and long country walks instead.

Well, she had not quite detached herself from politics. She cannot wean herself away altogether. She cannot help looking for a way forward, for a new consensus that will unite her and Brian and Perry Blinkhorn and Otto Werner and their absent friend Stephen Cox, Stephen, the most extreme of all. She has been reading a book called How Britain Votes, which describes the emergence of a new semi-professional class of Perry Blinkhorns and catering manageresses and nursery schoolteachers and social workers, which suggests that higher education in practice as well as in theory leads to a liberalization of attitude on such matters as capital punishment. Clutching at straws, at men of straw. For does not everything else she reads suggest that we are moving towards a new intolerance, a new negation of ‘progress’, a culture where education is openly used not to liberalize and unite, but to segregate and divide?

Alix and Brian agree to differ, for their hearts are united. They may differ about means, but their vision of a just society is the same. Their marriage has been through some rough times lately, but they seem to have survived them. Unlike some of the couples in this narrative, they do not seem at the moment to be heading for marital disaster.

Shirley Harper has no interest in politics at all. At the last election, she did not even vote. Cliff Harper, small businessman, small employer and member of the petty bourgeoisie, is, as How Britain Votes would predict, of the die-hard right-wing. He is slightly acquainted, through Shirley’s sister Liz, through his sister-in-law Dora, with Brian and Alix, but they do not, cannot like one another or trust one another. Alix, who extends sympathy and interest to criminals and murderers, finds it very hard to listen with patience to the views of a Cliff Harper. This is one of her more serious limitations, a limitation of which she is, seriously, unaware.

Alix enjoys danger, but Brian, like Cliff, does not. Brian does not need it, does not see the point of it, wishes that people could get along without it. He gets impatient when rescue teams are called out in appalling conditions by parties of stranded walkers in the Lake District. He secretly sympathizes with judges who are held up to derision for saying that young girls in mini-skirts shouldn’t ask for trouble by hitching lifts from strangers at midnight. Brian cannot see why people have to climb Everest or cross the Atlantic single-handed in coracles. He cannot see why his friend Stephen Cox has gone off to Democratic Kampuchea when he could have stayed at home writing novels in his bachelor flat in Primrose Hill. And as for Charles Headleand’s plans – well, Brian thinks they are ridiculous, embarrassingly ridiculous. But then, he had somewhat harsh views of the generally admired conduct of the long-vanished kidnapped envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite. Why can’t people accept the limitations of the human condition, instead of trying to show off all the time? Brian is not a risk-taker. Or so he thinks. He does not admire heroism, would never himself aspire to act heroically. Or so he thinks.

Ancient crimes, ancient victims. Over supper, in St John’s Wood, Alix and Liz Headleand laugh heartily, with abandon, as they recall the scene in the British Museum archaeology exhibition, by the glass coffin where the upper half of Lindow Man sleeps everlastingly. ‘So nice,’ says Alix, almost choking over her lentil soup, ‘so absolutely sweet, such a – such a little boy!’

‘And oh dear, that marvellous old lady, though I don’t know why I call her old, she wasn’t all that much older than us,’ agrees Liz, dabbing her eyes with her rose-sprigged napkin: happy to see Alix, happy to remember the day’s adventures, still amused by the little seven-year-old, grey-uniformed, pink-braided boy who had piped up so sweetly, so piercingly, so unselfconsciously in his treble, gazing at the miraculously preserved, multiply wounded, overslaughtered sacrificial corpse, the corpse of a victim who had been bashed on the head, stabbed in the chest and garrotted, whose throat had been cut, and who had been left to lie for two millennia in a boggy pool. ‘Gosh,’ the little boy had announced, to his schoolmates, to his teacher, to Alix and Liz and two Japanese tourists and the old lady in a felt hat. ‘Gosh, isn’t he lucky, to have ended up here!’

Liz, Alix and the old lady had all smiled: the old lady had spoken up. ‘Not very lucky up to that point, young man!’ she had admonished him, pointing to the writings on the wall announcing the probable sequence of events that had led to his death and his body’s recovery. The schoolfriends had laughed, Alix and Liz had laughed, and the little boy himself had smiled broadly, unabashed, his freckled face with its gap tooth and small nose open as a flower, open as a book that all might read, open as innocence. He knew what he meant. And of course, as Alix and Liz agreed over their lentil soup, they knew what he meant too, there was something rather wonderful, rather lucky even, about such defiance of time, about Lindow Man’s role as a link and a messenger from the underworld, about such arbitrary, quirkish, museum-venerated fame.

‘I wonder if people would pay to be put in museums after their death?’ ponders Alix.

‘Well, the Egyptians did, in a sense,’ says Liz. ‘And the Chinese. And the holy saints of the Catholic Church that hang around under altars in Italy.’

‘The saints didn’t pay,’ says Alix, reprovingly. ‘They were preserved by sanctity.’

‘Sorry,’ says Liz.

Liz and Alix have had a good afternoon. Alix is pleased to have caught up with the exhibition before it closes and wonders if she has not become more conscientious about attending cultural events in London now that she does not live so near them. She has come down on the Rapide Coach and is spending the night with Liz. They have a lot to talk about.

They discuss Bog People in general, the poems of Seamus Heaney, the Bog Man of Buller, P. V. Glob, the excavations of Ian Kettle, P. Whitmore’s interest in corpses and Ancient Britain, and Alix’s notion that the story of Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes should be adapted for television.

‘Why don’t you write it yourself?’ asks Liz.

‘I’m too busy. And anyway, I can’t write.’

‘Get Beaver to write it. It’s his period.’

‘Oh, he’s well past it.’

They discuss Beaver, briefly. Beaver claims to have an ex-mistress living in elderly seclusion on the shores of Lake Maggiore.

‘You should get him to send you to visit her,’ suggests Liz. ‘In some pleasant month. Like May. Or June.’

‘He says she’s the subject of his Novara sequence,’ says Alix. ‘But she disputes this. At length, and illegibly.’

The conversation moves to their friend Esther Breuer, who now lives in Bologna, and who has it would seem dropped from their lives as from this volume. They do not hear from her often. She has been translated into another world. They miss her, but not perhaps as much as they thought they would. Maybe she will come back, maybe not. She is living with an Italian Etruscan scholar, Elena Volpe, sister of Esther’s dead admirer, Professor Claudio Volpe. Esther had lived for years, unknowingly, in a flat in the same building as P. Whitmore, in North Kensington, at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, and his arrest had in part led to her departure. The house in which Esther and P. Whitmore lived has now been demolished, and a row of what Liz says must be Small Industrial Units has been erected on the site. They will, according to Liz, never be occupied, and already look derelict. ‘The area is too much for them,’ reports Liz to Alix. ‘They haven’t a hope, they died before they began.’

Liz and Alix drop the subject of Esther, as she has dropped them, and move on to Charles and Carla Davis (a subject new to Alix, who has not seen Charles for a year or two). They allude to the long silence of their friend Stephen Cox, who is somewhere in Kampuchea, and is said to be writing a play about Pol Pot.

‘Are they quite mad, these men, to want to go to such disagreeable places?’ asks Liz, rhetorically.

They speak of Liz’s step-grandchild Cornelia, and Alix expresses regret that her older son Nicholas and his consort Ilse have not yet had a baby. They have made do, so far, with one of Liz’s tabby cat’s kittens, which has already had kittens of its own.

Then they move, with slightly sinking spirits, to the financial problems of Liz’s sister Shirley and her husband Cliff Harper.

‘I told her to get independent advice,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t know why she doesn’t just leave him. He’s making her life a misery. Why not quit? The children have all left home, why doesn’t she just clear off?’

‘People don’t just leave their husbands, up in Northam,’ says Alix.

‘Don’t they? I thought that had all changed.’

‘Swift and Hodgkin argue that the divorce rate is 20 per cent higher among the professional and semi-professional classes and the petty bourgeoisie in the south than it is in the north and the north-east,’ says Alix.

‘Really? And what do Swift and Hodgkin have to say about Scotland?’

‘They don’t cover Scotland,’ says Alix.

They both laugh, although they agree it is not a laughing matter. But, as Liz points out, she is not her sister’s keeper, and anyway she doesn’t understand business. ‘I thought of asking Charles to give her some advice,’ says Liz, ‘but frankly, Charles is in a terrible mess himself. He owes money all over the place. It’s on a grander scale than Cliff’s mess, so I don’t suppose he’ll ever have to pay up, but it does rather make one distrust his judgement.’

Alix says that her opinion on such matters is not worth having, and that moreover she has a feeling that Shirley doesn’t really like her. ‘She doesn’t really like me, either,’ says Liz. ‘In fact, that’s probably why she doesn’t like you.’

They abandon Shirley as a lost cause, and move on to grander themes: prison visiting, insanity, Foucault, Lacan, the oddity of French intellectuals, the grandeur of Freud, the audacity of Bernard Shaw, the death penalty and social attitudes towards.

‘I mean, really,’ asks Liz, mellowed by a plateful of Toulouse sausage and swede-and-potato mash, ‘really, do you think P. Whitmore ought to be alive or dead? Do you think there’s any point in keeping P. Whitmore alive?’ She stirs the green salad.

‘I don’t know,’ says Alix, slowly. ‘I suppose one can argue that he’s a kind of – a kind of living experiment. A kind of Lindow Man in a glass coffin. That we can learn from him if we can learn how to. I suppose that’s what I think.’

‘Shaw would have had him polished off. Painlessly, of course,’ repeats Liz, who has already made this point earlier in the conversation.

‘As no use to society, I suppose?’ says Alix. ‘As a meaningless sport of nature, like a dog with two heads? Well, yes, I can see that.’

‘And he, what does he think? All those American murderers seem to long to end up on Death Row. They are after the publicity. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Or so we are told.’

‘I don’t think P. Whitmore wants to be hanged,’ says Alix. ‘No, I don’t really think he wants that. He wouldn’t be so interested in the Romans and so worried about his tinned peas if that’s what he wanted. Would he? But then, I think, I have to think, that he wants to understand what he did. And he probably doesn’t at all, I’m simply projecting on to him my desire to understand what he did. In some way . . . it sounds absurd, but I don’t think he’s all that interested in what he did. As though it’s not quite real to him. You know what I mean? Is there a name for that?’

‘Plenty,’ says Liz, the expert. ‘But they don’t explain much.’

‘No,’ says Alix. ‘It’s circular, really. Naming and observing, observing and naming. One can never tell what it’s really like, inside his head. Any more than one can tell what it’s like inside the head of those guys who bumped off poor Dirk Davis.’

‘Or inside the head of Charles Headleand, come to that,’ says Liz.

‘I wonder,’ says Alix, speculatively, ‘if we know what it is like in one another’s head? You and me? After knowing one another – how long is it – for thirty years and more?’

‘We could only know if we found out that we didn’t know,’ says Liz. ‘If one or the other of us did something really surprising. Really out of character, or that would seem to be out of character to the other person.’

‘Like that defector Esther, you mean? Whom we both thought we knew so well, until she suddenly vanished?’

‘I sometimes wonder about the children. I mean, I’d say it was impossible that Jonathan or Aaron or Alan could turn out to be a murderer. Or Sally or Stella either, not to be sexist about it. But then, one wouldn’t know, would one? Because it wouldn’t be obvious. So it would come as a shock. If one found such a thing out.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I imagine if anyone had been in close touch with P. Whitmore, they might have known. It was because nobody was in touch with him that nobody found him out.’

‘Well,’ says Liz, ‘I think I do know you quite well. I know that you aren’t a murderer, and I can predict, for instance’ – she pauses, watching, as Alix turns over the leaves in the salad bowl – ‘I can predict that you are about to reject the bits of fennel in favour of the lettuce and watercress.’

‘I’ve always hated fennel,’ says Alix, pleasantly. ‘In fact, I don’t like anything with that aniseed flavour, really, it’s about the only flavour I don’t much like. I can’t understand how people can drink Pernod.’

‘People are mysterious,’ says Liz, somewhat guiltily pondering the reason why she has put fennel in the salad at all, when she knew quite well Alix wouldn’t touch it. To test her? To annoy her? To attempt to dominate?

‘Tell me again,’ she says, ‘what P. Whitmore said about the tinned peas.’

The next morning Alix got up early and caught a bus down to Baker Street and Madame Tussaud’s. She did not mention this outing to Liz, who was already seeing a patient when she left. She felt slightly furtive about it anyway, slightly ridiculous, at her age, queuing with an ill-assorted crew of down-market foreign tourists and oddly ill-complexioned provincials. Did she look as out of place as she felt, she wondered, would she be arrested for wrongful curiosity? And she was indeed stopped, at the top of the stairs, by a young woman with a market survey, wanting to know, amongst other things, if and when Alix had last been to visit the waxworks.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Alix, ‘About forty years ago, I suppose. With my mother.’

And she wandered on into the dark exhibition, recalling her mother’s reluctance to indulge Alix and her sister in this outing, remembering their pleadings and cajolings and whinings, their eventual success. They hadn’t been able to understand why their mother, who had seemed keen to let them visit the British Museum and the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens and the Zoo, should have tried to draw the line at something they considered equally educational. Nearly everyone at school had been to Madame Tussaud’s, they said, why couldn’t they?

Gazing, now, at the exhibits, Alix could see all too clearly why their mother had thought it unsuitable. Gloomy, morbid, grisly. Horrible history. Guy Fawkes, Mary Queen of Scots about to have her head cut off, Henry VIII with a tableau of his ill-fated wives, the infant cavalier of Yeames’s ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’ Right-wing History. Martyrs’ Memorials. Alix moved on, through modern times, where she recognized Princess Di and Boris Becker and the Beatles, but was at a loss to identify many other personalities from the ephemeral world of entertainment; she was amused to see Ken Livingstone, and wondered whether Perry Blinkhorn would ever make it into wax.

She had come, of course, to see the Chamber of Horrors, but could hardly make herself descend the fake-dungeon stairs. She had been frightened by it as a child, just as her mother had said she would be. Her mother, having given in, had washed her hands of them: ‘Well, if you must look, you must look,’ she had said, and Alix and her sister had gazed uncomfortably at treadmills and tortures. It seemed now, forty years on, perhaps slightly less gruesome – but oh dear yes, there were the authentic casts of the severed heads of Louis and Marie Antoinette, there was Marat in his bath. Well, one could hardly call Paul Whitmore all that peculiar in his interests, could one? Yesterday in the British Museum a cluster of perfectly respectable people had gathered to stare at Lindow Man, and here an only marginally less respectable lot were goggling at Marat and a replica of Garry Gillmore in the electric chair. A natural curiosity?

Paul also had been here when he was ten, or so he had told Alix.

Alix walked through quite briskly, but not so briskly that she did not, in the last section, come to a standstill face to face with an effigy of her friend P. Whitmore. There he was, the Horror of Harrow Road. It seemed rude to stare at him, but she did. He shone with a waxy pallor, and looked slightly smaller than he did in real life, though she supposed he couldn’t be. They must get the measurements right, surely? He didn’t look quite – well, real? He was dressed in a grey suit, and stood to attention, alert, helpful, like a shop assistant. Oh dear, thought Alix. She did not know whether to laugh or cry. Poor dummy. There he stood.

She looks at him, he does not look at her. She is reminded of the day when she went to watch his trial. Then, as now, she had felt furtive, guilty, ashamed. She had not been called as a witness, although this had at one stage seemed a possibility, and she had avoided the early days of the hearing. But at the end of the second week she had found herself drawn there, to the Old Bailey, by an attraction more powerful than her natural distaste. In vain did she say to herself, as she stood in the queue waiting to enter the public gallery, that this was her civic right, that she had a right if not a duty to enter a court of justice to see justice being done: in vain did she say to herself that her interest, unlike that of those around her, was prompted by something more legitimate than mere idle sightseeing or muckraking, moneymaking curiosity. She had continued to feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, conspicuous, as she sat on the back row of the gallery, as unobtrusively as possible, her eyes modestly lowered for much of the proceedings, occupying as little space as possible, clutching her bag and her shopping basket.

She had chosen, unwittingly, a dull day, not a day of lurid revelations. There had been interminable cross-questioning of a witness who had had a drink in a pub by the canal on the night that one of the victims had been murdered, and who had spoken to Paul at approximately 10.25 – or was it more like 10.35? – for some minutes about a newly released horror movie. There was a long slow rigmarole about fingerprints and a carnival float on a waste lot. Time was spent clearing the court while matters of law were discussed. Time was spent refilling the court to proceed. Alix had watched the judge in his wig and half-moon glasses, making notes, twiddling his thumbs, occasionally almost yawning: she had watched the bewigged counsel, one of them high-coloured, large-nosed, scrubbed, choleric, the other pale as soap. She had watched the faces of the jury, the twelve random citizens, and had tried to read their faces: a handsome neatly suited Turkish lad, a white youth with cropped hair and a scar blaring across one cheek, a perky girl with tufty black Gothic hair and a red necklace, a woman with a soft weary managerial face, a raw-boned man with an open shirt and a gold medallion at his throat, a cashmere-cardiganed Sloane Ranger with smooth blonde hair . . . And she had watched, covertly, Paul. There he had sat, in the dock, impassively, this monster, unmoving, unmoved, expressionless, listening to the catalogue of his crimes, the slowly unfolding drama of his massacres.

And it had been high drama, however slow the pace, however silent the protagonist. His very silence spoke. Alix, then as now, found herself wanting to ask the unaskable. ‘But why? Why? How did it happen to you? Why and how?’ The court was not interested in ‘why’ and its interest in ‘how’ ended where Alix’s began, but nevertheless the raw material was there. She had been transfixed. She had wanted to return the next day, and the next, like an addict, but luckily work prevented her. But she had felt, from that one long day, a bond, a connection, a continuation of that curious relation begun so obliquely on the night that the police had surrounded the house where Paul Whitmore and Esther Breuer lived. She had felt an obligation.

The wax figure of the Horror stared at Alix from his subterranean chamber in the Hall of Fame. Yes, her mother had been right to consider such sights unsuitable for schoolgirls. But society condoned rather than condemned her curiosity; her mother was revealed as a woman of unnaturally high principle. Mrs Thatcher had posed upstairs for her image here, and so had Bob Geldof, and Kenneth Kaunda and Marie Antoinette (twice, in her case, alive and dead). They’d all condoned it. Alix wandered on, up, towards the daylight. The Hall of Fame, the Chamber of Horrors. Snigger, snigger, have your photo taken with the famous, with J. R. or Red Ken or Marilyn. Oranges and Lemons, say the Bells of St Clement’s. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. Oh God, the gruesome panic of those party games, the little clutching fingers, the human trap . . . and here, at last, was Baker Street, sanity, traffic, human faces, newspapers, pigeons, double-decker buses in a splendid convoy, tourists, touts, ice-cream vans, gift shops, bureaux de change, roasting chestnuts – for a moment, Alix wildly loved the 1980s.

Paul Whitmore is carefully copying in fine pencil the famous outlines of the bronze horse mask found at Stanwick. Probably a chariot ornament, the text tells him. The sad blind horse face stares in curved Celtic lines. Paul is a poor draughtsman, he is dissatisfied with his handiwork, he rubs it out and begins again. Bronze, dull bronze, buried, now bright again. The last stand of Venutius. The triumph of the Romans. It has square pierced ears, the bronze mask, holes by which it had once been attached to long-rotted wood. In his mother’s salon, Mrs Murphy had pierced the ears of the young women of Toxetter.

He rubs out, begins again, discards. The enigmatic horse stares. Heads had hung in rows from hooks. Pigs’ heads. Not horses’ heads. The British do not eat horse. They do not even feed horse to their dogs and cats. Horse is totem, taboo, sacred. But there had been jokes about horsemeat, unkind jokes in the little town. Horsemeat. Whoresmeat. Somebody had made such a pun. He hadn’t known what it had meant, had make the mistake of asking his father, over tea. Had been clipped over the ear, shut out of the house, while they screamed and ranted at one another. Near the end, that had been.

He turns the pages of Alix’s book. There is a bronze mask boss from the River Thames at Wandsworth. Alix Bowen had lived in Wandsworth, she tells him. Sometimes she describes her life there. She describes the house that is now let to a visiting professor from Australia. She describes the neighbourhood, the shops, compares notes with North Kensington, where Paul Whitmore and Esther Breuer had lived.

Paul Whitmore does not know the region where he is now imprisoned: he knows it only through books. He knows London, where he earned the sobriquet of ‘The Horror of Harrow Road’, and he knows the small town in the north Midlands, of the hairdressing salon and the butcher’s shop, where he was known as Piggy Paul the Porker (although he is not and never has been fat). He has drifted in other places (a few months in Manchester, a year in Stoke-on-Trent), but he has become a Londoner, a drifting Londoner, a lost Londoner. Now he is nowhere, in limbo, in a coffin. He does not know Northam. He has never been there. It is to him a fictitious city, a city of the mind. Alix describes it to him sometimes. He cannot visualize it well. He knows nobody else who lives in it. Alix is his sole personal source of information about Northam and Leeds.

He turns the pages of the book, to the paragraphs on Celtic ritual and the impact of the Romans on the Old Religion. A wooden rubbed armless old god from Ralaghan, County Cavan, stares at him expressively, reproachfully, balefully. He reads: ‘A grove there was, untouched by men’s hands from ancient times, whose interlacing boughs enclosed a space of darkness and cold shade, and banished the sunlight from above . . . gods were worshipped there with savage rites, the altars were heaped with hideous offerings and every tree was sprinkled with human gore . . . The images of the gods, grim and rude, were uncouth blocks, formed of felled tree trunks . . . The people never resorted thither to worship at close quarters but left the place to the gods.’ A quotation from Lucan, the poet. Not Lucan, the murderer.

Paul Whitmore has made of himself a hideous offering. Here he is, offered up. But no one can see him. He is absent, obscure. No light reaches him. No one looks at him, save his fellow-prisoners, the prison officers and the blue eyes of Alix Bowen. Is this what he had wanted? He does not know. He knows there had been a need for sacrifice, for appeasement. The gods had wanted a sacrifice. But of what nature? Had it been accepted? One does not worship at close quarters. It is not safe to go too near the sacred grove.

As he sits there, chewing the end of a pencil, the people of Britain are still in the process of making him up, of inventing him. He had offered himself up to their imagination, as he had offered up his victims. What will they make of him, of them? Will they fail him, themselves? Sometimes he thinks that Alix Bowen will be able to invent him, that her story will make sense, that it will persuade the newspapers and the courts and the people. Sometimes he thinks she is incapable of doing anything of the sort.

Paul Whitmore would like to ask Alix Bowen to try to contact his mother. He has not heard from his mother since she ran away, fifteen years ago. He knows that in similar cases parents have been retraced, interrogated, their memoirs have been purchased for vast sums by the tabloids.

So far, he has not dared to suggest this course of action to Alix. He does not quite know how to bring the subject up. It is a little delicate. He is hoping that she might think of the idea for herself. On her next visit, perhaps, he will drop another hint. By months, her visits are measured. He will wait for the next moon.

It is early March, and daffodils bloom in London window boxes. A faint false spring deceives the buds, and trees turn bronze, pink, lime green. Liz Headleand is lunching with her old friend and enemy Ivan Warner, as she does once or twice a year. They gossip. On Ivan’s part, at least, seriously, professionally. Ivan is a gossip columnist. He likes to pick Liz’s brains. He is always hoping that Liz will present him with a psychiatric scoop. As one of her specialities has been the problems associated with the reuniting of adopted children with their true parents, maybe she will one day find for him an abandoned princeling, a reclaimed cabinet minister, a film star’s rejected babe, a tycoon’s incestuous marriage with his own daughter? The plot possibilities in Liz’s line of business are endless, he reminds her, as he plies her with Pinot Chardonnay and admires the little pastry fish swimming in the saffron sauce of her ivory sole.

‘No,’ says Liz, ‘nothing. Nothing exciting at all. Sorry.’

She smiles at him, amiably. It is only a game. He knows she will not tell. Her heart softens to Ivan, over the years. She used to think him a dangerous little man, but time has mellowed him or strengthened her, she is not sure which, and she no longer half fears him. She indulges him. And he her.

‘I had heard,’ said Ivan, in that inimitably suggestive way of his, ‘that we were to be honoured with the sight of you on television? Can this be true, I asked myself? I had thought you didn’t approve of the television.’

‘Who told you?’ asked Liz, disconcerted despite herself.

‘I can’t remember,’ said Ivan.

‘Well,’ said Liz. ‘I did agree to be on this panel thing. That’s all.’

‘I wonder why?’ insinuates Ivan.

‘I don’t know why,’ says Liz. ‘I mean, why not?’ But she also wonders why. She admires, yet again, his sense of her weak spots, her Achilles’ heel.

‘It’s just not your style, that’s all,’ says Ivan.

‘No, I suppose not,’ says Liz. ‘But they were very pressing. And I thought it was time somebody talked some sense.’

‘So we shall have the pleasure of seeing you talking sense?’

‘I hope so,’ says Liz, briskly, staring hard at his inquiring small black well-hidden eyes.

‘Well,’ says Ivan, ‘you’re a brave woman.’

‘But of course,’ says Liz.

‘I didn’t know you knew Christopher?’ says Ivan, gently probing, cutting in half a green bean with the edge of his flat fork.

Liz’s mind races. Christopher? Does she know a Christopher? Ah, yes, she has got it. Christopher What’s-his-name, newly appointed Director of Programmes for PPS. What is his name? A false trail. An utterly false trail. So that’s why Ivan was interested in her TV appearance.

‘Oh, Christopher,’ she says. ‘Of course I know Christopher. I’ve know him for years.’

Ivan can tell he has drawn a blank. He loses interest in the pursuit, switches track, starts again.

‘And your ex?’ he inquires. ‘How’s old Charles?’

‘Oh, Charles,’ says Liz. ‘He’s mad, poor darling.’

‘I heard he broke his nose?’

‘Mugged,’ says Liz. ‘Nothing personal. Just mugged.’

‘And how’s his business?’

Liz shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t understand such stuff. He seems to have switched his interests to some kind of Euronews project. It’s all to do with satellites. I’m sure you know more about it than I do.’