Читать книгу The Northern Clemency - Philip Hensher - Страница 7

It was a Sunday morning, a month or two after Katherine had started her new job, when Jane’s father put down the Sunday Express and said, ‘We ought to go out somewhere.’

Jane had been looking forward to the Sunday Express. There was the Foreign News page, a page she always enjoyed, with the story about the man coming back early and disturbing his wife with her lover in an unusual hiding-place – the names and the nation changed from week to week but the story was the same. She’d been looking forward to a boring Sunday, maybe a bike ride down the crags.

‘Go out where?’ her mother said.

‘It’s a nice day,’ Malcolm said. ‘We could go out somewhere after lunch.’

‘We never go out somewhere after lunch,’ Daniel said. He was sitting on the piano stool, one sock off, picking at his feet, absorbed as a grooming monkey. ‘On a Sunday. Mrs Kilwhinney, right, she said to us, “Do you ever go out into Derbyshire with your family, on a Sunday?” and only this one kid, this right spastic, said he did. But no one else.’

‘I don’t quite understand the point you’re trying to make,’ Malcolm said, with the heavy irony he sometimes used in Daniel’s direction. ‘But this afternoon, this family is going to get in the car and go for a drive in Derbyshire. Is that understood? And have a nice time. All right?’

Malcolm got up from the breakfast table and, without exactly storming, walked emphatically out of the room and upstairs; he often retreated to the study and his military books at moments of stress.

‘What was that?’ Daniel said.

‘It’s you that’s supposed to have tantrums and slam doors,’ Jane said, neatly swiping the Sunday Express. ‘The problems of adolescence in the young male.’

‘You read too much,’ Katherine said mildly. ‘It’s nothing unusual. Your father wants to go for a drive in Derbyshire. I don’t know why that’s so strange. Lots of people do it.’

‘It’s strange for us,’ Jane said. ‘We only do it when Nana comes.’

‘Well, perhaps it would be a good thing if we started doing it,’ Katherine said. ‘There’s some of the most beautiful country in England out there, and we look at it once in a blue moon. I don’t see that it’s “spastic”, Daniel, and I’ve asked you once—’

‘Okay, okay,’ Daniel said, and put his sock back on.

‘It’s disgusting,’ Katherine said. ‘But the other day, Nick, at work, he mentioned he’d been to Haddon Hall at the weekend, this would have been last weekend, and he was saying to me how beautiful it was. Well, I was really quite embarrassed to have to admit that even though I’ve lived forty years in Sheffield, not fifteen miles from Haddon Hall, I’ve never been there. Of course, Nick, he’s interested in beautiful things, he’s sensitive to them – a florist, it’s to be expected. But don’t you think it’s terrible that we live here and we never bother to go and enjoy all the beautiful things on our doorstep, and someone who’s only lived here for three months, he’s making so much more of an effort?’

‘We went to Haddon Hall.’ Tim sounded aggrieved. ‘Martin Jones was sick in the coach into a bag and Miss Taylor threw it out of the door of the coach without it stopping. I told you we went. You never listen.’

‘Well, it was only an example,’ Katherine said. ‘Of course I remember you going.’

‘It was boring. I don’t think I like beautiful things.’ Then Tim thought hard for a moment, and said, ‘Haddon Hall, more glass than wall.’

‘That’s Hardwick Hall,’ Jane said. ‘You’re mixing up beautiful things.’

‘No, it was Haddon Hall,’ Tim said, in a kindly, regretful tone. ‘Hardwick Hall we didn’t go to. I did a project about it, though. I got seven out of ten and I drew pictures. Oh.’

‘It was Hardwick Hall, wasn’t it?’ Jane said. ‘That’s got more glass than wall?’

‘I don’t care which one it was,’ Tim said. ‘It might be both of them probably.’

‘The point is,’ Katherine said, her voice lowered and slow, she might have been passing on a moral lesson, ‘don’t you think it would be nice if someone, Nick for instance, Mr Reynolds, said to me on a Monday morning, “What did you get up to at the weekend?” And I could say – or it could be your teacher, it could be anyone – instead of “Not much,” or “Mucked about”, or “Washed some socks,” I could say, “We had a lovely day out in Derbyshire. We went to see, I don’t know what, and it was really beautiful”? Don’t you think that might be nice? I’d really like, once in a while, to say something like that to Nick.’

Jane concentrated on the newspaper, as if she weren’t listening. She thought of her father’s outing, a suggestion out of nowhere; she listened to her mother, lovingly speculating on how she could describe a Sunday afternoon to Nick, the sort of person she could become for his sake. She had never gone on so much about beauty; you could hear the rhythm of her voice changing, as if some contagion had taken hold of it. She doesn’t understand anything, she said to herself.

‘Well,’ Daniel said, ‘you could always say it. It wouldn’t have to be true. And then we could have the best of both worlds. We could muck about and you could still say that you’d been somewhere posh and it was beautiful. But you wouldn’t actually have to go there.’

‘That,’ Katherine said, ‘is exactly the sort of thing I would expect someone of your age to say.’

‘How hilarious,’ Jane said, looking up from the paper and its breathless foreign adulteries, its lovers safely absurd, in faraway cupboards. How hilarious: she meant it to wound. But the outing happened.

After lunch, Malcolm said, ‘Can you be ready in ten minutes? I want to be off soon.’

‘Just let me do the washing-up,’ Katherine said.

‘Leave it,’ Malcolm said. ‘I want to be off, or it’ll be getting dark.’

‘It’ll only take ten minutes,’ Katherine said. ‘I’m not leaving the washing-up to fester.’ And in fifteen minutes they were in the car.

Sheffield fell away from you so quickly, and the gardens joined, broke up, grew and became moorland. There was a garden centre right at the edge, the very last thing of the city, or the first, and Jane had always found something funny about that: it wasn’t the sort of thing you could ever say to anyone, or even properly explain, but it was something to do with all that green, rooted life out there, going on without anyone doing anything, and then it got into the garden centre and people sort of then thought it was all right, one of those green things, to pay money for it and put it in their gardens, even though – Jane wished she could explain this thought properly. She just knew there was something funny about the garden centre being at the border of the city, like Passport Control for plants. Ah well. She loved the country, even those walking-distance views and landmarks she had to concentrate to see.

But Jane’s pleasure was being ruined by the noises and silences in the car. Her father’s concentration on the road had a different quality of silence to it, compared to Tim’s dense, bewildered concentration, or the quiet amusement Daniel was extracting from the situation. She wondered what her own pained silence sounded like from outside – perhaps very much like sulking. She looked out for the real boundary, a circular grinding stone turned upright and labelled ‘Peak District National Park,’ although no wildness began there. She looked forward to the moment that the car laboured whinnyingly upwards, crested the brow of the hill, and there before them, expected in advance and announced on its appearance, was the Surprise View, a valley opening up idyllically; the only surprise, ever, was if the weather had cleared or condensed on that side of the hill, and they came out of or into low-lying cloud, the view revealing itself or a dense white obscurity descending on the car. The weather today was clear; piles of clouds, seeming less vast than the purple expanse of the moors.

‘I thought we’d go to Chatsworth,’ her dad said, a recognized outing. That was all he said, hardly waiting or seeming to expect any response or excited agreement. But all the way her mother kept up a running commentary, and the texture of it was by now familiar, unvarying. She offered one posh superlative to the landscape after another, comments not exactly hers. And she could not keep off the subject of Nick. They might have been driving through the native country of someone dear to them, a figure of historical renown, and she, speculatively, saying what this meant or might be supposed to mean to Nick; Nick; Nick.

Jane sat there, trying not to listen. No one interrupted. And her father? Well, perhaps he was letting her off the leash in giving her excited voice its indulgence, as if to let her hear herself and shame her out of what, for weeks now, she had been unable to stop saying.

In half an hour, they were through a further gated border, and inside the huge estates of the duke. Just outside was a village, a peculiarly picturesque river running through it and, conspicuously, a pub of some pretensions. Nick had been there; he said the food was exceptional, to match anything one might find in London. Jane thought it was a servile, ugly village, ugly with flowerbeds. Once through the gates the quality of the country changed, not to lawn, exactly, but to well-tended grazing land, prettily organized copses and views. The sheep were whiter, the grazing cows like an illustration on a can of evaporated milk, the river, of a glassy clarity, wending its elegantly serpentine way between trimmed banks. Nick thought it one of the most beautifully landscaped estates in the country, if not the world; he had been knocked out by the beauty of Chatsworth, and liked often to come over here. Perhaps even today.

It was not that she disagreed with it, though the estate had a colossal smooth elegance that was not, Jane thought, exactly right here in the north; it was calculated as precisely as that estate village in orange brick. She thought the whole thing beautiful too, and was pained by how Nick’s views, filtered through her mother’s mesmerized infatuation, spurred her on to indignant silent disagreement. She wanted, rather, a kind of beauty that required no one to say, ‘How beautiful,’ and that, she was convinced, was what Chatsworth had: it spoke to the sort of mind that regarded the epithets of beauty and loveliness with shy scorn. And, most of all, there was the great house, rushing now into view: the encrusted palace, the dense magic of its gardens and beyond, a landing-strip of water with a single fierce jet, forty feet high. Seen from the far side of the house, it flung a firm trunk of water upwards, and at the top the mild wind seemed to carry it away like a willow’s foliage.

If Derbyshire had failed, Chatsworth did the trick. Katherine’s conversation dribbled to a halt, her gesturing hands froze in mid-air, then fell to her lap. Her head, which had been turning from her husband to her children in the back, now turned to the great house. Malcolm’s head and shoulders seemed to relax, his eyes no longer flickering tensely in and out of the rear mirror. They drove into the car park, gravel splashing under the tyres, chickens, exuberant as a flowering bush, scattering. He bought a parking ticket through the window. They all got out; locked the doors.

‘You know,’ her dad said, in his mildest voice, ‘that village in the park? Edensor, it’s called, spelt E-D-E-N, there’s an interesting story about that. One of the dukes, a hundred years ago, he wanted to build a model village on the estate for his high-class workers, as you’d call them, the important people, like the chief housekeeper, maybe, the gamekeeper or the head gardener, so he asked an architect to come up with plans for the houses, and the architect, he was nervous and produced a range of ideas, different houses, so that the duke could choose the style he wanted and then they could go with that one. But whether the duke didn’t understand –’ they were walking now into the main hall of the palace, stout ladies sitting under a fat, gaudy allegory on the ceiling ‘– or whether he liked them all about the same, he just said, “I’ll have those, all of them,” and so every house in the village, it’s in a different style. Two adults and three children, please. Of course, I’m not myself all that interested in the house, it’s the garden I like best, but you children, it’ll be interesting for you to see the house, you’ll enjoy it.’

They’d been into the house on school trips and on a family outing – years ago, when Nana Glover was still alive. But they drove through the park regularly, on their twice-yearly trips through Derbyshire, and every time Malcolm pointed out the village, and explained the facts of it. Jane found it comforting, like that longer story about the village of Eyam, the only place, apart from London, where the plague had broken out. She didn’t mind being told things more than once: it was a signal that everything was all right in the world. But a moment after they had begun to climb the stairs to the main rooms, her mother started again, her bright eyes glossing over the spectacle of the house and examining the other visitors, waiting for Nick to appear at any moment and, in the meantime, giving her family the sort of comments he might be expected to produce or perhaps already had. She had dropped his name, but there was nothing of her in what she was saying, and she kept it up through those many golden rooms, explaining them, their views, their historical associations, their – now painful word – beauty to her silent family. At last it was done, sculpture gallery, Mary Queen of Scots rooms and all.

‘Shall we go and have a look at the gardens?’ Katherine said, flushed with pleasure.

Outside on the gravel path, the others said nothing. To the right there were the elaborate gardens, their games and winding path, and the vast single jet; to the left, the car park and the toilets.

‘It’s getting a bit late,’ Malcolm said. ‘It’ll be dark before long. Maybe we’ll save the gardens for another day. We’ve had a nice time, though, haven’t we?’

It came out more plaintive than you’d have expected, and though Daniel said, ‘Lovely,’ and Tim said, ‘Yes,’ his voice rising into a question, Jane put herself into it, for her father’s sake, and said, ‘I’ve really enjoyed it. I wish we did it all the time.’

‘I thought you were looking forward most to the garden,’ her mother said.

‘Well, I was,’ Malcolm said. ‘But we’d better get off. I just want to go to the toilet.’

‘Can’t it wait until we’re home?’ Katherine said – and whether she now thought it was common to piss on the porcelain of Chatsworth, a thing Nick would never presume to do, or whether she imagined the dukes and their sons, the little lords, drove to Edensor for that purpose, or whether she just didn’t want to think about anything so low, nobody could tell.

‘I want to go to the toilet,’ Malcolm said, voice rising in something like anger, and two passing ladies, posh in pearls and dung-coloured sweaters, burst heartlessly into laughter. ‘Well, I do,’ Malcolm said childishly, kicking the gravel.

‘Go on, then,’ Katherine said, and with one last look at the posh ladies, retreating up the gravel path towards the formal gardens, he did so, plucking at his anorak.

‘You know something,’ Daniel said, when they were half-way home, ‘I need to go to the toilet. I wish I’d gone.’ And Jane’s dad – she enjoyed these witty streaks in his character – slowed to the edge of the speed limit, and maintained thirty miles an hour, ignoring Daniel’s complaints and the line of drivers behind them.

After that there was no more talk of anyone having a lover. Jane wondered how her mother could be so blind, so deaf: deaf to what she sounded like, blind to the protective shapes her father started to form whenever her conversation took a familiar turn. Anne might have mentioned it once, after that outing to Broomhill, but it was clear to Jane that she hadn’t got the force of the situation across, and Anne made her references to the lover in so amused a tone that the discussion couldn’t go anywhere; it could only become a joke, like Miss Barker’s impact on the continent of Africa. Nor were there any more Sunday outings.

At first Jane felt that she would never get on with her mother’s conversation, the way you waited for Nick to enter it at any moment, but time wore down anything. Soon it was the same as Tim’s dreaming evocation of snakes, his paragraphs of detail and longing, and they divided the long evenings between them like a pair of madmen supervising the silent sane. That might have been harmless, and there was no chance of it going beyond mad talk, Jane thought. It could never develop into a situation beyond easy horrid embarrassment.

But Jane was wrong, because after some months a suggestion surfaced and her mother had, apparently, decided to give a party, something never done before by the adults. There was no doubting the reason for this party. It was as if Tim had decided to hold a party to which the snake of his dreams would be invited. You could not say that, not to Daniel, not to Anne, not to anyone. Tell a teacher, was the advice in Jackie when things got bad for the correspondents of Cathy and Claire. But Jane thought of Miss Barker – and thought that Cathy and Claire didn’t know what they were talking about, and she went on thinking that until the night of the party, and the food was laid out to snare Nick, and her mother in a long blue dress, and the doorbell rang for the first time, and it was only Mrs Arbuthnot from over the road.

Perhaps even then it might have been all right. Tim and her dad were standing in the dining room, looking at but not touching the food. There were vol-au-vents, a dish of bright yellow cold chicken curry, decorative arrangements of cheese on sticks, and a whole Brie, cut open, oozing, but smelling strongly of ammonia. There were loaves of French bread, sliced into rounds and in baskets, and small bowls of pickle and bowls of butter, and on the sideboard, glasses set out in ranks with the bottles of white wine, Malcolm’s task, already open. There were bowls of crisps and nuts and, of course, in the middle of the table, and on the piano, and elsewhere in the house, in vases half theirs and half borrowed for the occasion, arrangements of flowers from Nick’s shop.

‘Are they going to eat all this?’ Tim said. ‘Have they had their dinner?’

‘They’ll eat it,’ Malcolm said. ‘Even if they’ve had their dinner. And I suppose if they don’t, we’ll be living off vol-au-vents and Coronation Chicken all week, you’ll see.’

‘How hilarious,’ Tim said. There was a silence.

‘What did you say?’ Malcolm said.

‘I only said it was hilarious,’ Tim said, faltering.

‘Did you say,’ Malcolm said, ‘“how hilarious”?’

Tim didn’t answer; he didn’t know what he had said or done wrong. But Malcolm left the room, with two bottles, his face set, and prepared to act like a host to whoever might come through his front door, to pretend they were welcome. Because that was what he had to do, just for tonight.

Mr Jolly, John Ball and Keith the boy had their routine worked out for an overnight stay and, under Mr Jolly’s direction, they reckoned to clear a good two hundred pounds a year on top of their wages. They worked together as a team. The routine was that you got money from petty cash for a bed-and-breakfast on overnight jobs, but of course you never used it. You slept in the van and kept the money. If they’d been sent out with just anyone, the routine wouldn’t have been possible. You’d have to explain each time, and word would get out, and they’d put a stop to it. As long as Mr Jolly had been with Orchard’s Removals, which was getting on for twenty years, they’d kept their teams fixed – maybe not for a day job, within London, but for overnights and more.

‘It’s that sort of consideration,’ a management wife had once said to John Ball at a works Christmas party, ‘that sets Orchard’s apart, and that’s why we never have any trouble with—’

‘Strikes?’ John Ball had said, and she’d blushed as at an obscenity from an over-familiar acquaintance. Yes, they liked to send you away with your team so, generally, Mr Jolly, John Ball and Keith could work their routine once or twice a week. Maybe everyone did; you didn’t ask.

Mr Jolly, the chief remover, had a kind of contempt for the management on account of this. Even while robbing it in this small way, he wasn’t grateful for the slackness. He’d have put a stop to it. They didn’t even ask for receipts, it being believed that the sort of establishments the men would use were not necessarily able to produce that sort of documentation. You just took the three quid each and signed for it. Later, on the way home, you divided it up; John Ball had three quid, Keith the boy thirty bob, and Mr Jolly took the rest. The firm’s accountant was called Perks, something which always made Mrs Jolly laugh as she took the cash, made a little roll of the notes and put it into the tea caddy on the shelf in their Streatham kitchen for a rainy day, the fifty pee over going straight into her pocket for a couple of glasses of mild for herself later.

‘Oi!’ Mr Jolly always said.

‘Oi yourself,’ Mrs Jolly always replied. He didn’t really mind. They’d managed to get to Majorca on the tea-caddy money last year.

But sometimes you wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to spend the money in the way it was meant, particularly in the summer. It was still quite warm now, at the beginning of September, even as far north as Sheffield. Mr Jolly had known worse than Keith – they weren’t especially smelly, the three of them. After a hard day’s work, you parked, went maybe to a pub for a pint or two and a bite of supper, then back to the van. The van itself was packed with someone’s furniture, beds, sofas and cushions, everything you could want for a nice restful night. That’s what Keith had said when he’d joined the team, complaining about the real sleeping arrangements. It had never occurred to Mr Jolly or (John Ball said, amazement in his voice) to John Ball. What an idea! It would be like – Mr Jolly said – it would be like a doctor treating, er, breaching – a lawyer suing a judge for – er – a thoroughgoing breach of – well, it wasn’t to be thought of, and, oddly, hadn’t been until Keith said it and then they all started thinking, hard, about those lovely soft beds in the back that they could arrange as they liked…

But they had their standards, so they went back to the van and made space for themselves in the cab and in the little loft arrangement over it with its porthole window, just about big enough for two with a blanket rolled up between you. Keith stretched out on the seats, complaining about Mr Jolly’s snoring and about the gear stick in his back all night. It didn’t seem so bad when you woke up, nice and warm and toasty often. Then you went off in search of a caff for breakfast and, ideally, a stand-up wash at a sink. When you came back and opened the cab door, phew! It was like something had died in there, and you left the doors open while you did the second half of the job.

‘I knew there wouldn’t be anywhere,’ John Ball said.

‘Good job you said so, then,’ Keith said. They were sitting disconsolately on the wall outside the house in Sheffield. It was a quarter to eight in the morning. They’d woken up an hour earlier, and Keith had been sent out on a recce for a caff. They’d looked the night before and seen nothing but, as Mr Jolly said, they’d been tired, they’d not looked everywhere. It was hopeless. The house was in a new development in the middle of one suburb after another, not the sort of place where anyone would think of opening a nice caff. Keith had come back shrugging. ‘No joy,’ he said.

‘I knew there wouldn’t be anywhere,’ John Ball said, ‘as soon as I saw where they were moving from. I knew the sort of place they’d be moving to. No caffs, you see.’

‘All right,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘You underestimate your uncle Bill. Get out the emergency supplies, John. You’ll find a Primus stove stowed under the cabin—’

‘That’s not safe—’

‘I dare say, but there it is, and you’ll find some bacon and eggs and a tin of milk too.’

‘How long’s that been there?’

‘Not long enough for you to worry about. So there you are – bacon and eggs and a cup of tea. Get going.’

Mr Jolly lit a cigarette and watched, with satisfaction, the preparations for his pavement breakfast. In a moment John Ball came back, Primus in hand. Behind him, Keith balanced bacon and eggs, a packet of tea and a tin of condensed milk. ‘Where’s the frying pan, Bill?’ he said.

‘Same place,’ Mr Jolly said, an awful doubt rising. ‘Along with the kettle.’

‘There’s no kettle,’ John Ball said. ‘And no frying pan.’

‘We could—’ Keith gestured towards the van.

‘We could what?’ Mr Jolly said.

‘I know where the kitchen box is,’ Keith said. ‘We loaded it last. It’s at the back of the van.’

‘No, Keith,’ Mr Jolly said, and John Ball shook his head in something like sorrow.

Everything seemed confusing in the Glovers’ house. Nobody woke Timothy. He got up on his own, washed his face, dressed himself. Downstairs people were talking, quietly. When he came into the dining room for breakfast, nothing was being made ready. His mother and sister were sitting at the table, without even a cloth on it, both dressed, his brother standing looking out of the window. His sister had her hand on his mother’s. That frightened him a little bit. Then he remembered about his dad.

‘I phoned the police,’ his mother said, as he came in. She seemed to be talking to someone else, not to Timothy. ‘They said they can’t do anything until he’s been gone twenty-four hours at least.’

‘Where is he?’ Timothy said.

‘We don’t know,’ Daniel said, not turning from the window. Outside, there was a van; there was some activity.

‘Daniel,’ his mother said. Timothy knew, really, that his father had gone and no one knew where. He was just being silly.

‘Look at that,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s amazing.’

‘What are you looking at?’ his mother said. ‘Oh, the new people. I’m not—’

‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘Come here.’

As if humouring him, his mother got up and went to the window, followed by Jane. They stood for a moment, watching.

‘Good heavens,’ his mother said.

‘I know,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s so strange.’

The van was in the early stages of unloading: the men had taken out the first of the furniture, some tea-chests, and left them on the pavement. They must have been waiting for someone with a key. There, on the pavement opposite, was the Glovers’ unit. It was exactly the Glovers’ unit, and Timothy did what they all probably wanted to do: he ran out into the hall and made sure that the unit, their unit, was still in the sitting room. It was. He came back into the dining room.

‘That’s extraordinary,’ Katherine said lightly.

‘What is?’ Jane said. ‘What are you all looking at?’

‘That,’ Katherine said. ‘The unit?’

‘What about it?’ Jane said.

Daniel stared at her, astonished, but she seemed genuinely baffled. ‘It’s the same as the one we’ve got,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘Oh, yes. I suppose it is quite similar.’

‘It’s exactly the same,’ Katherine said. ‘I hope they take it in soon. I don’t want everyone in the street thinking…’ She tailed off.

Timothy liked the thought of all your furniture outside, arranged, exactly as it was in the house, on a lawn, or maybe on the pavement. ‘Can’t we move?’ he said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Katherine said. ‘We’re hardly going to move just because the new people over the road have the same unit we have. Did you think Cole Brothers had made it just for us?’

‘No,’ Timothy said. ‘I meant—’ He didn’t know what he meant, and then he remembered he hadn’t said hello to Geoffrey that morning. There didn’t seem to be any breakfast.

He went upstairs cheerfully. His father hadn’t come home, but he expected there was a good reason for that. And maybe later that day the police would come, in a car with the lights flashing on top, and maybe they’d take him for a ride, so that would be OK. He went into his room and shut the door. When you came in, there was a bit of a fishy smell. The books hadn’t said. He supposed his mother would find out about Geoffrey soon, though it had been three days now without discovery. Timothy knelt down, and pulled a square, flat glass container from underneath his bed. Geoffrey raised his head and, looking straight at Timothy, flickered his tongue happily. ‘Sssss,’ Timothy said, though of course Geoffrey hadn’t made a noise and wouldn’t. Timothy knew that Geoffrey, flickering his tongue, was sniffing, tasting the air to see what was around, but he liked to think it was a friendly gesture. Geoffrey liked Timothy, Timothy knew that, and Timothy certainly liked Geoffrey. To buy Geoffrey, the glass container and the small objects in it, Timothy had saved all of his pocket money for three years, two months and one week, ever since he had first started being interested in snakes.

But Geoffrey ought to see the world, Timothy thought. He reached into the case, and took Geoffrey out, one hand by his neck, the other holding his tail. He didn’t put him round his own neck, of course. He had once seen a picture in the newspaper of a lady doing that, a lady with not many clothes on. The snake had been a yellow python, and gazed out of the picture with an expression of great sadness. That was an awful thing to do to a snake. So Timothy just carried Geoffrey out, very gently, opening the door with his elbow, and into Jane’s bedroom, to show him the interesting spectacle of a van being unloaded.

Outside, the men had stopped. They were talking to each other surreptitiously, out of the corners of their mouths. Always in this sort of place, you attracted an audience once you started work. Actually, wherever you were, you got one. It was just that when the house got to a certain size, cost a certain amount, once you got to houses with gardens and trees planted in the street, the audience stayed inside. It didn’t gawp on the street, not even the kids. The most they’d do was come out into the garden, pretend to be pruning. It wasn’t you they were watching, it was the chance, which might be the only one, to have a really good look at what the newcomers had got in the way of furniture.

‘Enjoying it?’ John Ball muttered to Keith, as they carried a sofa out, one at each end.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Keith said. ‘I’m loving it.’

‘Not you,’ John Ball said. ‘I meant them. I hope they’re enjoying it. Look at them.’

And, indeed, there was quite a lot of discreet attention. At the kitchen window next door, a lady in a housecoat was doing the washing up very slowly. A woman who had walked up the road with a chocolate Labrador ten minutes before was now walking back again on the other side of the road; you could see the dog hadn’t expected that, and was looking up at his mistress with a baffled expression. And directly over the road, hardly concealing themselves, a woman and two kids were at the downstairs window, really staring, and upstairs in the same house—

‘What’s that kid got?’ Mr Jolly said.

‘What kid?’ John Ball said.

‘The kid in the house over the road, the one in the upstairs window. He’s holding – it looks like—’

‘Christ,’ Keith said. He was thinking of the girl who’d ridden with them in the van, the way she’d stood in the upstairs window of the house and flashed her little titties at him. He looked back at the kid, and this was, in a way, even more strange. ‘He’s got a snake.’

‘Do you think they know where they’re moving to?’ John Ball said.

‘Give me Streatham, any day of the week,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Look at them, all of them staring, and not one of them, it wouldn’t occur to one of them to come out and say, for instance, “Oh, I can see you’re hard at work already, I don’t suppose you’d like a cup of coffee to start the day with,” or – the least you could expect – an offer to let you fill your kettle at their kitchen tap. Makes you sick.’

‘We haven’t got a kettle,’ Keith said.

‘They don’t know that,’ Mr Jolly said, shaking his head as he carried on unloading. The pavement was thoroughly blocked with all these possessions; they’d better come soon.

‘You’ve got the coffee-table,’ Keith said, as Mr Jolly put it down on the pavement, just next to the sofa.

‘So we have,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Cheeky sod. Right. I’m going over there.’

John Ball and Keith put themselves down on the sofa, just as if they’d been hard at it for hours. Mr Jolly, in a good humour, fetched three chipped old mugs from the cab of the lorry, walked up the driveway of the house opposite. The kid in the window upstairs with the snake – it was definitely a snake, there was no doubting that – he drew back into the bedroom with a look of alarm on his face. Maybe the snake wasn’t supposed to come out of its cage; maybe he wasn’t allowed to play with the thing before school. He rang the doorbell.

There was a confused noise inside. People talking, their voices raised and muted at the same time. It was a couple of minutes before anyone came to the door. It was a woman; she was dressed – that hadn’t been the delay, then – but her hair was unkempt. She held the door half open, looking at Mr Jolly with her mouth tense. She might have been expecting him, someone like him; she looked as if she was expecting something bad to happen to her, the next time she opened the front door. She said nothing.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you, madam,’ Mr Jolly. ‘This is a bit cheeky, like, but…’ He explained their predicament. She listened to the end; he grew less and less hopeful of success as he went on, she looked so unencouraging.

But then she surprised him by saying, ‘Yes, of course,’ and then ‘It’s awful to have to start work without a hot drink in the morning,’ and ‘No, I don’t know where you’d find somewhere to serve you breakfast, not without going right down into, I don’t know, Crosspool,’ a name that meant nothing to him.

‘Thanks very much,’ he said, handing over the mugs but not inviting himself in.

‘Who’s that, then?’ A girl’s voice came from the back of the house. ‘It’s not—’

‘No, it’s not,’ the woman said. ‘It’s nobody.’

Mr Jolly overlooked this rudeness, put it down to some kind of distraction as she carried the mugs away, almost at arm’s length. She left the front door open and Mr Jolly standing there.

‘It’s all with milk and two sugars,’ he said, calling into the kitchen where she’d gone, having forgotten to ask him any of this.

‘Sorry, what did you say?’ she said, coming out again, the mugs still in her hand.

‘Milk and two sugars,’ he said. ‘If it’s no trouble.’

‘It’s only instant,’ she said.

‘That’ll be perfect,’ he said, not having expected any other kind.

The conversation was not closed, but he felt foolish standing there. The other two sat on the other side of the road, talking with amusement to each other, watching his suspended embarrassment. Mr Jolly settled for a performance of head-scratching, whistling, inspecting his watch and looking up and down the road in an exaggerated way. He bent down and ran his second and third finger underneath a flower, a fat yellow familiar one, without picking it.

‘Don’t do that,’ a boy said, standing at the open door. It was the boy who’d been watching them from the upstairs window, a snake round his neck. The snake had been disposed of. Made you shiver to think of it. ‘That’s my dad’s flowers.’

‘I was just looking,’ Mr Jolly said. He was no good with children, having none; his sister neither, never wanted them, not that they couldn’t have had them, him and his wife. ‘I wasn’t going to pick.’

‘Just because he’s not here,’ the boy said.

‘Gone to work, has he?’ Mr Jolly said heartily. ‘Me too. We’re moving your new neighbours in, over the road, there. That’ll be nice for you, won’t it? Having new…’ He trailed away. The boy was looking at him, a horrified gaze.

‘That’s right,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘He’s gone to work, definitely.’

‘Good,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Make a nice early start. I saw you, just then with – you know, your friend—’

‘What friend?’

‘Your special friend, the yellow one,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘At least he looked yellow from where I was standing. You know –’ he made a face ‘– sssssss.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the boy said. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone else what you thought you saw only they might think you were mental or something. You wouldn’t want that, so don’t mention it to anyone, what you saw.’

‘Here you are,’ the woman said, bringing out the three mugs, now filled with coffee, on a shamingly clean tray. Amazingly, she’d only gone and put some biscuits on a plate as well. ‘I do hope my son isn’t bothering you.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Mr Jolly said, now rather baffled, and with the door closing firmly, he walked steadily back, balancing the tray carefully.

‘That’s the ticket,’ John Ball said comfortably. ‘Use your charm, did you?’

‘They’re all bonkers round here,’ Mr Jolly said, relieving his feelings a little. ‘Fit for the hatch, they are.’

‘Biscuits, too,’ Keith said. ‘You should have tried for bacon and eggs.’

‘That’s enough,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘And take your hands off those. This fucking job—’

‘That girl, rode with us—’ John Ball said.

‘Mental,’ Mr Jolly said.

‘Glad to get shot of her,’ Keith said.

‘Mental,’ John Ball agreed.

It had been a long night for the Sellerses. They had stayed not in the funded luxury of the Hallam Towers Hotel but in a small family hotel; since the week in the summer, looking for a house, the Electric had ordered a cut-back. Alice had found the Sandown, and apologized for it as soon as they had rolled up there, the night before. She ought to have known. The advertisement, found in a hotel guide, had used an illustration, not a photograph, and a highly fanciful one; you couldn’t have assumed that the hotel in reality would have had a horse-drawn carriage with a jolly coachman drawn up outside, but the false impression of window-boxes and carriage lamps at the door surely went further than excusable exaggeration. But there were few hotels in Sheffield, and it was only for one night; the front door already locked at eight, opened up to them by a fat man in cardigan and slippers, masticating sourly on slowly revolving bread and cheese, the slight marshy suck of the orange-and-black carpet underfoot, and the forty-watt lightbulbs casting their yellowish light over a long-term resident peeling the pages of an ancient Punch in the lobby.

There was naturally no food to be had, and only a shrug when, their bags deposited, Alice asked after nearby restaurants. Still, they found one and, thank Heavens, it had what to the children evidently seemed some quality of fun; an American-style restaurant with flags on the wall and drinks called Fudpucker; they were alone in the restaurant, but it would do to perk up the spirits. Alice wouldn’t say anything about what they had left, she wouldn’t.

It was a restless night. The hotel had once been three Edwardian semis, now joined together, the gap between the second and third filled with dismal grey prefabricated corridors, and the original rooms split with partitions. There seemed to be few people staying, but, perhaps to save the legs of the chambermaids, all of them were apparently squeezed into the same corner of the hotel. Bernie undressed and, without seeming to pause to think about it, pulled out his red pyjamas from the overnight bag, put them on. It was an agreed signal, undisguised, what he did with them at this point; it was kind of him to know how tired she would be, to remember that there could be better reassurances between them on this hard night than sex.

‘Goodnight, love,’ Bernie said, and as he got into bed, swinging his legs up under the cheese-smelling pink candlewick bedspread, rolling into the same central hollow in the mattress she had fallen into, he gripped her hand and kissed her and groaned and laughed all at the same time. She smelt his warmth; and, as ever, even at the end of the day, the warm smell of his body was a sweet one, like toffee. Always had been.

She was reassured for a moment, could have found the hotel and Sheffield funny as Bernie meant her to, but then, through the wall, there came an ugly noise: a human voice, groaning. It was horribly clear.

‘What’s that?’ Alice said.

‘It’s from next door,’ Bernie said, whispering.

‘It’s not the kids, is it?’ Alice said.

‘No, they’re the other side,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s—’ But then the noise resumed, and some kind of wet slapping noise, too; a single voice giving in to a single pleasure, and Alice clenched her jaw and tried not to think of it, tried not to hear it. It went on, the noise, in a way impossible to laugh about. Bernie coughed, sharply, a cough meant to be heard through the partition. But the noise continued, the animal noise of slap and groan, a middle-aged man – it was impossible not to visualise the scene – doing things to himself in the light of a forty-watt bulb, and not much caring whether anyone heard him through the walls or not.

Presently it stopped and, as best she could, Alice unclenched herself. Bernie was tense, pretending to sleep. It was better than trying to find anything to say. The sound of heavy feet padding around the room next door, clearing up – good God, clearing what up? – was concluded with the sharp click of the light switch and, in a startlingly short stretch of time, with the gross rumble of a fat man snoring. Alice lay there against Bernie’s slowly relaxing body, counting up to five hundred, over and over.

In the morning, they dressed and were about to leave the room when she heard the door of their wanking neighbour open and shut.

‘Hang on a second,’ she said to Bernie. ‘I just want to brush my hair before we go down.’

‘You’ve just brushed it,’ he said.

‘I want to brush it again,’ she said. She picked up the brush, and in front of the tiny wonky mirror she brushed her hair again, thirty times, until it was charged with static and flying outwards, until the man, whoever he was, was downstairs and anonymous. But all the same, when the children had been collected and they were all sitting round the table in the ‘breakfast room’, she could not help letting her eye run round the room. Everyone else there was a man on his own, each at his little table, in various positions of respectability, and the four of them talked in near-whispers. It could have been any of them; she rather wanted to know now, to exclude the innocent others.

‘Well,’ Sandra surprisingly said, when they were decanted into the green Simca, the hotel bill grumpily paid, ‘I don’t think we’ll be staying there again.’

‘Well, of course we won’t,’ Bernie said, turning his head. ‘We won’t ever need to.’

‘That’s not really—’ Sandra began.

‘I think the Hallam Towers was a better hotel,’ Francis said. ‘From the point of view of quality.’

‘Yes, of course it’s a better hotel,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m under no illusions there.’

‘If anyone asked you,’ Francis said, ‘Mummy, if anyone asked you to recommend a hotel to stay in in Sheffield—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Alice said, her temper now breaking out for the first time, ‘let’s just shut up about it, and never think about the bloody place ever again. I don’t know why we’ve always got to discuss everything.’

‘Your mother’s quite right,’ Bernie said. ‘Give it a rest, Francis.’ He smiled, amused and released from some of the tension of Alice’s bravely kept-up face.

‘You said “bloody”,’ Sandra said, gleeful and mincing.

‘I know,’ Alice said. ‘It was a bloody hotel. It’s the only word for it.’

‘Bloody awful,’ Bernie said. ‘Bloody awful hotel,’ he went on. ‘Arsehole of the world’s hotels.’

‘That hotel,’ Francis began, ‘was really the most—’

‘That’ll do,’ Alice said. ‘We all agree.’

The thing was that Bernie had taught her to swear, and he liked it, sometimes, when she did. She wasn’t much good at it, she knew that. But she’d grown up in a house where you earned a punishment for saying ‘rotten’; anything much stronger she’d never heard, or heard and never understood. Bernie and his family, they swore; swore at Churchill on the radio (‘Pissed old bugger’), at the neighbours (‘Stupid old bastard’), at any inconvenience or none, at each other, at inanimate objects and, strangest of all, affectionately. His mother, his aunts, even; and she’d tried to join in, but she couldn’t really get it, couldn’t do it; she couldn’t get the rhythm right somehow, couldn’t put the words together right, and it obviously became a subject of fond amusement among the whole clan of them when Bernie’s shy fiancée hesitantly described the Northern Line as a bollocks, whatever bollocks might mean.

It was a fine day. As they drove up the long hill towards their new house, a constant steady incline, three miles long, Bernie hummed; she had sworn and made him cheerful again. For some reason, it was nine o’clock by the time they turned into the road. ‘Here we are,’ Bernie said. ‘There’s the van. Christ, look!’ and, to their surprise, by the removal van, outside one of the houses, on the driveway and spilling out on to the pavement, was most of their furniture. It took a moment to recognize that that was what it was. In the sunshine, it looked so different, arranged in random and undomestic ways, like the sad back lot of a junk shop. The sofa against the dining-table, the dining-chairs against Francis’s bedroom bookshelf, one of the pictures, the pretty eighteenth-century princess hugging a cat, with no wall to be hung on, leaning against a unit. Their beds, too, stripped of sheets and mattresses like the beds of the dead, laid open to the public gaze, shamefully. Their possessions; they seemed at once many and sadly inadequate to fill a house. In the old place, they had stood where they stood for so long that you stopped seeing them. But on the lawn, in the driveway, under the sun, laid out as if for purchasers, you saw it all again. Some of it was nice.

‘There’s the men,’ Bernie said. ‘Well, they’ve made a start, at any rate.’

‘They might have waited,’ Alice said.

‘Look, Sandra,’ Francis said. ‘There’s the men.’

‘I know,’ Sandra said, angrily. The car stopped: they got out.

‘Morning,’ the foreman said.

From his bedroom window, Timothy watched the family get out. There were four of them. He had taken Geoffrey out of his case again, to let him watch the excitement. The father got out of the little turquoise car, like a box, and stretched his shoulders back. Timothy imitated him. And there was a mother too, holding her handbag tightly, a sweet nervous expression. The boy was tall, taller than his mother though Timothy thought someone had said that he and the boy were the same age. Timothy hated him already.

But he was really looking at the girl by now. He had no interest in the others. She stood there in a cloud of frizzed hair, and yawned. As she pulled her arms upwards, her wrist in the other hand’s grip, her T-shirt popped loose of her waistband, pulled tightly against her chest. Even yawning she was lovely; even from here her beauty was defined. ‘Venus,’ Timothy said to himself, and found he was stroking along his snake’s back, pointing Geoffrey’s head towards the lovely girl. The removers had seen him when he had stood here. But the girl did not seem to see him, to pay any attention to him. He wondered why not. He promised himself something about this sight; he knew it was important; he promised himself he would never forget it. He had heard of people seeing each other, and knowing immediately that was the person they were to marry. He filed it away.

The husbands of the road left for work at seven thirty, at eight, at shortly after eight, to be at work by nine. Some had noted the removals van, blocking half the road; the later departures had observed the furniture being placed right across the pavement, and worried, some on behalf of the furniture, some on behalf of anyone wanting to walk down the pavement, as was their right, not obstructed by household chattels and trinkets. That was quite good, but when the interest of the road quickened with the arrival of the new family around nine o’clock, the curiosity was limited to the non-working wives. Most of them welcomed this; they preferred not to have to share their mood of observation with a man. It usually meant dissembling, pretending not to be all that interested. But if you were on your own, you could take a healthy interest, and not have to explain anything to anyone.

Anthea Arbuthnot, in her flowered housecoat, was paying close attention. She had been finding important things to occupy her around every single one of the windows with a good view ever since the men had started unloading the van. Finally, she had drawn up a chair and a small table by her sitting-room window and made a show of reading the Morning Telegraph over a cup of coffee. ‘They’ll not have driven up from London this morning,’ she said to herself, and started speculating about their arrangements.

In Karen Warner’s house, her husband had gone to work an hour before. Her son, nineteen, a disappointment, lay at full length on the sofa. It was one of her rules: he might have nothing to do and nothing to get up for, but he would get up every morning and not lie in bed. In practice, it meant he got up, dressed, stretched out on the sofa and remained horizontal all morning. The telephone rang.

At the other end, Anthea Arbuthnot announced herself; Mrs Warner agreed that it had been nice at the Glovers’, the other night, and nice to have had a chance to meet in a social manner. Karen wondered, rather, why Anthea Arbuthnot was telephoning at the expensive time of day when she was only a hundred yards away. But in a moment she pointed out that the new family had just arrived, that they were standing outside with their furniture spread across the road, and invited Karen to pop round to take her morning coffee with her at, say, eleven. Putting the telephone down, it seemed to Karen that Anthea might have invented some kind of purpose for her telephone call, some occasion to justify the invitation – the loan of the garlic-crusher she’d been so interested by the other night would have done.

‘Really, she’s no shame,’ Karen said out loud.

‘Pardon?’ her son said, after a minute.

But Karen had been talking to herself – he wasn’t much company, her worry of a son. ‘I hope you’re planning to get something done today,’ she said.

‘Probably,’ he said.

Further up the road, the nursery nurse had phoned in sick. Everything about her seemed to be swelling, not just her soft parts, her belly, her breasts, not even her joints, her ankles, her knees, her elbows blowing up like warty old gourds. Everything seemed to be swelling, even her bones, and her face was purple and tight and aching with the effort involved in lying flat on a bed for eight hours. The nursery was growing politely unbelieving – you could hear it in their voices. She knew they’d put the phone down, and start swapping stories about Chinese peasant women giving birth behind bushes in their lunch breaks. The phone rang and she felt it might be something important – she couldn’t ignore it.

It was only the woman from down the road, the one they’d met the other night. ‘I let it ring,’ Anthea Arbuthnot said, ‘because I know what it’s like. You’re at the other end of the house and by the time you get there it stops ringing just as you pick it up and you spend the whole day wondering who it might have been. How are you, my dear?’ She apologized, she hadn’t noticed the new neighbours moving in; she agreed the other night had been nice; she demurred at the suggestion of coffee later, but there must have been some uncertainty in her voice, because in two more exchanges she had agreed to lug herself down the road. She put the telephone down, and scowled at it.

Taking the key from a willing, smiling Bernie, Alice opened the door to the house. She thought nothing of all these neighbours; she gave no thought to their being surrounded by all those accumulated possessions which in her case were pressed into boxes or arranged haphazardly in the open air. Behind her, the children came in, at first cautiously, craning round corners, and then with increasing confidence of possession, Sandra striding boldly upstairs, already arguing over her shoulder with her brother over bedrooms, something already decided. Outside, Bernie was discussing matters with the men in high good humour: he was good with workmen. Alice thought it would be a relief when the house was straight; she thought, too, that after being left empty for all those weeks, it smelt like a cloakroom, like the smell of dust heating on a long-unused toaster, and, a little, of piss. It looked not empty to her but emptied, robbed, and a little pathetic. She walked through the empty rooms; they seemed small, but she reminded herself that empty rooms did seem small. You put furniture in them, and they started to seem larger; you went on putting furniture in them and at a certain point they started to seem small again.

It was the curtains that gave each room its air of abandonment rather than emptiness. All the curtains had been left behind, and still hung limply at each window. It had made sense to Bernie, and to Alice too, at the time: your old curtains aren’t going to fit the new windows. And the house was going to be empty for weeks, maybe months. There wasn’t much you could do about that, but perhaps if there were curtains up, it might look to anyone passing that it wasn’t abandoned. You heard about squatters, these days.

Bernie came in and, shyly, put his arm round her waist where she stood, at the back window.

‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘Look at the garden.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’ll need some work. Nobody’s touched it for months.’

‘Maybe more than that,’ she said. ‘Oh God,’ she said.

‘What?’ Bernie said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Just so much to do,’ she said.

‘Not so much,’ he said. ‘I tell you what. I’ll mow the lawn straight away, it won’t look so bad. And then we’ll leave it till spring.’

That wasn’t really what she’d meant, but she said, ‘You’ll need more than a lawnmower. It’s too long for that, the grass. You know, I wish—’

‘What do you wish?’ he said, smiling; it was something they had always come back to, her wishing, his asking to know her wish.

‘Oh, I was thinking about the carpets,’ she said. ‘What’s it going to look like, none of the old carpets fitting properly? I wish we’d persuaded the Watsons – oh, well, never mind. You don’t suppose—’

‘What?’ Bernie said.

‘I’ve just had an awful thought,’ Alice said. She loosened Bernie’s arm, and turned round to look at the light fitting. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘They haven’t,’ Bernie said. ‘They can’t have done.’

‘Maybe they’ve just taken that lightbulb,’ Alice said, without any hope.

‘Let’s go and look,’ Bernie said.

Room by room, they went through the house, and it turned out to be true. ‘What are you looking at?’ Sandra said, as they came into the room where she and Francis were bickering, and her mother explained. The children stopped their argument, and followed their parents through the house. For whatever reason, perhaps after the negotiations over the curtains and the failed ones over the carpet, the Watsons had apparently, before leaving, gone through the house and carefully removed every single lightbulb. It was incredible. On Francis’s face was a look, a usual one with him, of something like fear; he felt these difficulties as catastrophes, personal catastrophes, Alice always thought.

‘Well,’ Bernie said, when they had finished, and had settled, the four of them, on the sofa in the middle of the sitting room, ‘I’m going to write them a letter. Give them a piece of my mind. How many lightbulbs is it? Fifteen?’

‘Problem?’ the foreman said, coming in with the smaller of the coffee-tables. Alice explained.

‘Happens all the time,’ the foreman said. ‘You’d be surprised. Mostly out of meanness.’

‘My dad works for the Electricity,’ Francis offered.

‘Well, he’ll know all about lightbulbs,’ the foreman said jocosely.

‘No,’ Francis said seriously. ‘It’s mostly other things.’

Katherine had made her phone calls now, lying to everyone except the police. To the building society she said that Malcolm was unwell; he couldn’t come to the phone, he was sleeping after a restless night. She said this in her best, her bored telephone voice, consciously removing the fact that she had, the night before, called the same woman in a state of panic, telling her about Malcolm’s disappearance. She could hear the puzzlement at the other end of the line, and finally his secretary said, ‘But he seems all right.’

Katherine said sharply, ‘No, he’s not well.’

‘He’s asleep at home?’ his secretary said. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Are you suggesting—’ Katherine said.

‘It’s just that he phoned five minutes ago,’ the secretary said. ‘I was sorry to hear about his mother.’

‘His mother?’ Katherine said. ‘Oh – his mother—’

‘Yes, being taken ill like that – what I don’t understand—’ she went on, but Katherine interrupted her with apologies before putting the receiver down. She sat by the telephone, breaking out into a light sweat of sheer panic, her heart thumping, and in two minutes she dialled the same number and apologized – the confusion with Malcolm’s mother, she’d meant to be phoning the children’s, Daniel’s school, it was Daniel, their son, who was ill. ‘I must be going round the bend,’ she said amusedly, ‘ringing the number next to the school’s in the address book and saying Malcolm when I meant Daniel.’

‘That’s all right,’ the secretary said, obviously thinking there were better things for her to be doing. She phoned the florist’s, and this time, to Nick, but with even more of a telephone voice, it was her that was ill. ‘Eaten something,’ she said. ‘Awful bore.’

Nick told her not to worry, he’d hold the fort; there was something almost enthusiastic about the way he said it, and then he apologized again for not making it to her party the other night. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ he said. She had forgotten all about that; almost all about that; but he had reminded her, and that absence, so painful and crucial, returned at once, shamefully battling in her mind against this now more urgent, more dutifully felt absence. To the police, she would have told the exact truth, but now she could only tell them that Malcolm had turned up safe and sound, and in a sense, so he had.

Thank God, with five of them, the washing was constant; thank God that supplied her with something to do. As far as she could see, going through the piles, then, her heart beating, their joint wardrobe, Malcolm had taken no clothes. What that meant, good or bad, she couldn’t articulate even in her mind. She took it all downstairs, at least three loads, and deposited it on the utility-room floor. That was where the washing-machine, the boiler, the freezer, all sat together. It was a good thing with the washing machine; an efficient new one, its cycle went into passages of immense fury you couldn’t make yourself be heard over when it had been in the kitchen. Even in the utility room, it made the walls of the house shake at its juddering climaxes. She put a load of washing in. That would be something to fill the time, that and the ironing. She could have welcomed the children going off to school, or at least engaging in some kind of holiday activity that would have removed them for a while.

As for her, back in the dining room, she looked out of the window at the activity outside. Then, quite abruptly, she decided to go and offer the new neighbours a cup of coffee. Get to know them. It wouldn’t do to give the removal men coffee, and then be remote and stand-offish with the people you were going to live opposite. She stared, hard, at the unit, identical to her own, facing her house for anyone to see. Drawn out by that, she slipped on a pair of shoes and walked out of the house, leaving the front door open. ‘Won’t be a moment,’ she called.

‘There’s Katherine Glover,’ Anthea Arbuthnot observed to Mrs Warner, both comfortably settled at the window with the best view. ‘I thought she wouldn’t be long.’

‘Why’s that, then?’ Mrs Warner said, enjoying this.

‘I wouldn’t suppose she’d put up with all that cheap tat lying about in the road,’ Anthea said. ‘She’s very hot on that sort of thing. Only the other night, she was saying to me that something or other, I forget what, was bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood. One of nature’s complainers, I’d say.’

‘She works, she was telling me,’ Mrs Warner said, not believing a word of Anthea’s version, quite rightly.

‘That’s right,’ Anthea said. ‘But it’s a very superior job, I believe.’

‘Those children, they’re not very superior,’ Mrs Warner said.

‘Not at all,’ Anthea said. ‘Do you know, I think she’s just going over there to take a better look. Some people really are appallingly nosy,’ she went on, but that was a joke, and both she and Karen tittered at themselves and their shameless vigil. ‘I don’t think much of that suite,’ she went on. ‘I wouldn’t have it in the house myself.’

‘Hello?’ Katherine called, hovering in the front door, calling into the empty house. She didn’t like to ring the doorbell when the door stood open.

‘Hello,’ the youngest of the removal men said satirically, coming through with a single chair. ‘Mind your back.’

‘Hello?’ she called again, and a woman her age, hair untidy, an expression of nervousness, came out into the hallway. At the same time, a pair of children, a boy, a child’s face, but too tall, and a girl with an unusual forward stance, dark and unformed, came halfway down the stairs, stood and looked.

‘Not there,’ an impatient man’s London voice said from somewhere else, and then ‘Who’s that?’ as he, too, came through, his shirt sleeves rolled. The four stood there and looked at Katherine, almost as if puzzled. She gathered herself.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ Alice said, once Katherine had explained, had welcomed them to the neighbourhood, had suggested refreshments. Introductions had been made; Bernie had smiled quickly and returned to the sitting room. The children stayed where they were. ‘We’d like that –’ but the children shook their heads, and Bernie had things to do. ‘Well, I would, anyway.’ Katherine would have liked to have a look round the house – she’d never really known the Watsons, and the layout of all the houses was slightly different – but in a moment she and Alice were going back together over the road, and Alice was asking what the previous owners were like.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Alice said, ‘I hope they weren’t great friends of yours, but…’ and she explained about the lightbulbs.

Katherine laughed a little and, no, she hadn’t known them well. ‘Come in,’ she said, with a big gesture. Alice had stopped halfway down the front garden path and was looking up at the front of their house. ‘It’s wistaria,’ Katherine said, laughing. ‘You’re shocked to see it doing so well up here, I can see, but it’s had a good year, ours,’ and, seizing Alice’s arm in a frank way, brought her into the house. ‘They surely didn’t take all the lightbulbs,’ she said, and then she was explaining about the Yorkshire character. ‘You’re from London,’ she said, not asking a question, and then was off on a great paragraph of generalisation. She could hear herself, how faintly mad she sounded, setting out what the people of Sheffield were like, and the people of the whole county too, all three ridings, ‘though we aren’t to say ridings any more, that’s all gone’, their tightness with money, the way they wouldn’t waste a word, their honesty and openness.

‘I see,’ Alice said, evidently wondering a little as they came into Katherine’s house. But Katherine went on, unable to help herself, and Alice helped her out with a banality she’d heard or read or seen, that there was a friendliness and openness in the north, which just wasn’t there in the south.

‘You won’t find people keeping themselves to themselves in the same way here,’ Katherine went on, forgetting that she had said exactly that of the departed miserly Watsons, who were nothing if not Yorkshire, had, indeed, according to Katherine, embodied the manners of the whole county.

‘I can see that already, the friendliness,’ Alice said, smiling awkwardly at this generous neighbour.

‘That’s kind of you,’ Katherine said. ‘But you’ll find that we’re all like that around here.’ She thought of saying that there were few people in the area who didn’t keep their door on the snib, but fell silent: this new neighbour would quickly discover that it wasn’t true, for one thing, and in any case it would have made the road sound a little common. She put the kettle on; she heard herself and her brave party voice, not able to be kind without making a comment on that kindness.

‘Normally,’ she went on, ‘I’d be at work by now.’

‘Really?’ Alice said. ‘Where do you work?’

‘Well, it’s quite a new thing,’ Katherine said. ‘I used to work, before the children were born. I mean, when I met my husband I was working at a solicitor’s, and then, after we married, I carried on working, though of course there was no real need, not at the solicitor’s, I didn’t carry on there. I worked at a school, not as a teacher, a sort of administrative job. Do you know Sheffield? No? Well, you must go and have a look at Peace Square. Most of Sheffield was bombed in the war, but that, it’s eighteenth century, untouched, really charming. That was where I worked, in the solicitor’s. Of course, when the children came along I gave up work, though you know, then, I don’t know if it was different in London, but it was quite unusual for a woman to go on working after she was married. You gave up, didn’t you, when you married, not when the children came along? It was the done thing.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said.

‘And, of course, the children – well, there were three of them, there are three of them, I should say, so it’s only quite recently that I suddenly thought, I’m bored with sitting at home all day, doing nothing, I’m going to go out there and get a job to keep me occupied. And I did, and it’s the best thing,’ she said emphatic ally, as if insisting on her point, ‘I ever did.’

‘Where do you work?’ Alice said.

‘In Broomhill – oh, you won’t know – a florist’s shop, a new one,’ she went on. ‘It’s only opened a year or two. Nick, the owner, he’s from London – he studied up here, and then he stayed, and he’s opened this little florist’s, and it’s doing very well. He was supposed to come to a party here a night or two back, but something came up and he couldn’t come. Actually, we were thinking, your house, we thought you’d probably be moved in by then and it would have been a good chance for you to meet everyone in the neighbourhood. That’s when we were planning it, and we set the date, thinking, they must be in and settled by then, the Watsons, they’d been gone so long, and then the date was fixed and the invitations sent out and we discovered, my husband and I, we’d missed you by two days. What a shame! You could have met him then.’

‘Your husband?’ Alice said. ‘I’m sure—’

‘No,’ Katherine said, ‘Nick, you could have met Nick, except that he couldn’t come. And you hadn’t moved in. I meant Nick. I don’t know why he didn’t come. Go away,’ she said, raising her voice, as Daniel wandered into the kitchen.

‘Your son?’ Alice said, nervously taking a cup of coffee.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘I’m sorry, I should have introduced you. How old are your children?’

‘Well, Sandra’s fourteen, and Francis, he’s eleven,’ Alice said.

‘So they’ll be going to—’

‘Going to?’

‘I meant their schools.’

‘Oh – I think Sandra’s, it’s called—’

‘The thing is,’ Katherine said, setting her cup down on the work surface and staring out of the window, ‘you’ve really found us at sixes and sevens this morning.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Alice said, thinking that the woman needn’t have asked her over if it was as inconvenient as all that.

‘The fact is that my husband’s left me,’ Katherine said.

All at once there seemed to be an echo in the kitchen, and both Katherine and Alice listened to the noise it made. Katherine had spoken definitely, but she listened, now, to the decisive effect of a statement she had not quite known to be true; she listened to it with something of the same surprise as Jane, sitting on the stairs listening to her mother going on. Alice listened, too; she knew that some sentences needed to be treated, once spoken, with respect, left with a small sad compliment of silence.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said. ‘Was it very recently?’

‘It was last night,’ Katherine said, almost angrily.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Alice said. ‘Listen, I’m sure you really don’t want a stranger just at the moment – it was kind of you, but I’d better leave—’

‘Of course, you’ve got so much to do,’ Katherine said.

‘No, it’s not that,’ Alice said. ‘There must be someone who can come and—’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘There isn’t anyone, really.’ It was true. Her party rose up before her again; she found it difficult to call any of them a friend, and impossible to imagine, say, sitting with that pregnant girl and telling her anything. ‘I don’t have any friends.’

‘I’m sure it just feels like that,’ Alice said.

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘It’s true. I’ve never had any friends, not really. You have friends at school, people you think are friends, but you lose touch with them afterwards. They get married, they go off and live on the other side of the city. And really all you had in common with them was that you were sitting in the same room with them most days, and when that stops, you don’t have anything much to talk about any more. And the people you work with, when you work, you leave, you say, “Oh, we’ll stay in touch,” and you mean it, and they mean it, but you don’t. Maybe you see them once in a while, just bump into them, and they tell you what they’re doing, their children, and you tell them what your children are doing, and then you go on and nothing ever comes of it.

‘My God, you’re wondering, what have I walked into?’

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t worry about that, I’m fine. You can talk to me, I’m here.’

‘There isn’t anyone else,’ Katherine said simply. ‘I thought about Nick. Nick, he’s my boss, he runs the florist’s. I thought he was, you know, my friend, but he isn’t, not really. I’m just counting them up. There are the neighbours – they’re just neighbours, really. There are other people – I used to meet these women for coffee in the morning, but…Can you imagine? They say, what – “We’re thinking of redecorating our lounge,” and you say, “That’s interesting, my husband’s left me.” They wouldn’t be able to say anything back. And Nick – I’ll tell you something. It’s all about Nick, really. I’m sure it is.’

‘What do you mean?’ Alice said. She felt that this woman had really forgotten the situation; she had forgotten that Alice wasn’t just a passing acquaintance she’d never see again, but someone who from now on would live opposite her. She, after all, was now exactly one of those neighbours and Katherine didn’t seem to understand that.

‘I’ve been silly about him,’ Katherine said, ‘I suppose. I like him, a lot. Well, he’s honestly not anything like most people in Sheffield. His brother lives in New York.’

‘I see,’ Alice said.

‘I don’t have a brother in New York, I don’t know anyone who does,’ Katherine said. ‘He’s funny, he’s really funny, when he talks – that’s the only way I can put it. And, you know, I’ve been kidding myself about him, I see that now. Because he’s a bit hopeless, really, and I’ve helped him out, I’ve kept him going, or so I thought, and he must have been quite grateful for it, or so I thought. But I had a party, it’s the first party I’ve had for I don’t know how long. Malcolm, he just doesn’t like the idea.

‘It would be a nice idea, you know? I said so to Malcolm. I said, I said wouldn’t it be nice if we had a little party for when the new neighbours move in, not just for that but for all the road to meet each other because these days, people, they don’t know each other, not because – but – well – I don’t know. I don’t know why people don’t know each other these days. My husband, Malcolm, he works in a building society, but he’s got lots of interests, outside interests, and he does know people. You wouldn’t think it to meet him, but he’s got all these friends through his societies – he’s keen on gardening, he’s in a society, and of course there’s the battle re-creation society, too—’

Katherine, so measured in her speech, had begun to loosen and quicken, her voice now free and bold, her vowels quick and emphatic with the speech of her Sheffield childhood. It was as if for years now she had been answering the telephone under observation. The voice was liberated from constraint and full, of all things, of new love.

‘Battle re-creation?’ the new neighbour was saying, puzzled.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘It’s an odd thing. They re-create old battles – they dress up, once a year or so, they act out old battles, just as they were, on the moors. Of course it’s usually the Civil War, that’s usually it – they can’t stretch to different uniforms every time, but once they joined forces with a society from Wales and they did the battle of Waterloo, that must be ten years ago. It takes a lot of work, it’s only once a year. Malcolm loves it. He’s got friends through that, you see.

‘But most people, these days, they don’t have the time, and they don’t really make friends with their neighbours particularly. I didn’t expect Malcolm to agree to the party, but he did. The kids, they weren’t around – I can’t remember why not – oh, it was – well, we were on our own, and it was a nice moment, not that I’d engineered it or planned it to get a favour out of him. But I asked and he said straight away, “Yes, let’s have a party.” He said it straight out, and he gave me a big smile, and it was something I’d asked, and it was something he could say that would please me. You see, he wanted to please me.’

‘He sounds a nice man, your husband,’ Alice said.

‘I think he is,’ Katherine said, almost surprised, it seemed, at the insight she’d been led to.

‘And you know him best,’ Alice said.

‘Do you think so?’ Katherine said.

‘Well,’ Alice said. ‘You know, I honestly don’t know – I mean, I don’t know you, I certainly don’t know your husband but—’

She stopped. Katherine withdrew her hand; without her noticing it, she had reached out and rested it on Alice’s. ‘I’m sorry,’ Katherine said, after a time. Something of her formal voice had returned; she might have been regretting the lack of stargazer lilies, late on a Friday afternoon. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘That’s all right,’ Alice said. ‘But you do know him best.’

‘I wonder,’ Katherine said.

‘You must do,’ Alice said. ‘Married to him.’

‘Maybe,’ Katherine said. ‘It was just that moment. When he said, “Yes, let’s have a party.” He hadn’t wanted to please me like that, not for years. He used to want to, it used to be all the time and you never noticed. You know when it’s been dry, all summer, and then one day it rains; and then everywhere there’s this smell of grass and earth and flowers, everywhere.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Yes, I know that.’

‘But you never noticed it had gone, that smell,’ Katherine said. ‘And after a while, if it goes on raining, you can’t smell it any more. It’s just the air, it’s just ordinary, you take it for granted.’

‘It was like that.’

‘Yes, it was like that,’ Katherine said. ‘But I’m so stupid. I always ruin everything, always. He said that, and immediately I said the thing I was thinking really. I said, “Let’s have a party,” and he said yes. And then I said we could ask all sorts of people, not just the neighbours, and he said, yes, we could, why not? I don’t know who he was thinking of, or who he thought I could be thinking of. But then I said what I couldn’t help saying, I said, “For instance, we could ask someone like Nick.” And he didn’t say anything. But I went on, I said, “After all, he’s never been here, he’s never come to the house, it would be nice to have him over.” It was an awful thing to say, it really was. I said it anyway. I don’t know what he said back. Maybe he said, “Yes, why not?” but it was awful for him. I don’t know what I’ve been doing to him. I couldn’t help it.’

By now they were sitting. Alice looked away from the beginnings of Katherine’s tears. The kitchen was brilliant with elective cheerfulness, constructed with wallpaper and blinds and spotlights; its morning yellow sunlit and shining with well-kept order and cleanliness. But there was a woman weeping in it, somehow. Alice had walked lightly across the road, and found herself in a place without landmarks. She looked out of the window tactfully; incredibly, her family were there, getting on with the unloading.

‘You’ll be wanting to get back,’ Katherine said dully.

Alice turned back to her. Probably better, she told herself firmly, that the woman tell her all this. She was going to have to tell someone, and better her than one of the woman’s children. There were things your children should never hear. She’d forgotten the woman’s name. That was awful, and now surely irreparable.

‘That’s all right,’ Alice said. ‘It’s better that you tell someone.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘That’s right. It’s better I tell someone like you all this rather than the children. Or a neighbour.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said, startled. ‘Of course, I am a neighbour now.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘Yes, I suppose you are.’

‘Listen,’ Alice said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something directly, because—’

‘Depends what it is,’ Katherine said, smiling, wiping her face with a tea towel – the Beauties of Chatsworth, Alice registered irrelevantly. There was something cheeky in her recovering voice; it wasn’t true, Alice thought, that you saw what people were really like only in a crisis.

‘You don’t have to tell me anything at all,’ she said. ‘You really don’t. But is that really the whole story?’

‘The whole story?’

‘I meant about Nick,’ Alice said. ‘Nick? That’s his name?’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘About Nick?’

‘You and Nick, I mean,’ Alice said.

‘Me and Nick,’ Katherine said. A formality came into her voice again as she saw what Alice had meant. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not having an affair, if that’s what you’re suggesting.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘That was what I was suggesting.’

‘Well,’ Katherine said, attempting a light laugh, ‘I suppose you did ask permission to ask a direct question, and I don’t know a more direct question than that. No, as it happens, Nick and I are not having some sort of mad passionate affair. I suppose there isn’t an enormous amount of point in my saying that. I wouldn’t be very likely to say anything different to you if we…’ she paused for a second ‘…we were in fact having an illicit affair. But one doesn’t happen to be.’

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘No, I believe you.’ It was true. She did believe it. Oddly, it was the way the note of deception had crept into the woman’s voice that convinced her. The woman, whatever else she was, had no gift for lying, and in most of what Alice had heard from her, the note of helpless truth had been audible. It was only at that point, asked directly if she were, in fact, having an affair, that the voice had started to listen to itself as if to monitor its scrupulous lies. And yet the voice was telling the truth; Alice had no doubt of that. The woman was not having an affair, as she said. But Alice had touched something secret and cherished; she had touched, surely, some characteristic and elaborate pretence. Katherine had lapsed into what, surely, was her usual allusive and interior style where Nick was concerned; she had treasured him up and made a precious mystery out of him before the only audience she had, her husband and children. There was nothing there; Alice could see that. But she’d played it out, and he’d believed what she’d wanted him to believe. The woman sat there in her kitchen, looking firmly ahead, away from Alice. She was smiling tautly, her expression now as she wanted it to be, and that must be bad to live with. An affair would be better; that was something to forgive, to walk away from. To have done nothing wrong, to make a secret of nothing, to coach yourself in the gestures of mystery and deflection, to turn your head away to suppress a manufactured expression of recalled rapture, all that, daily; from that there was no walking away.

‘Where’s he gone?’ Alice said.

‘Malcolm?’ Katherine said. ‘I don’t know. He’s just gone.’

‘He didn’t say anything?’ Alice said.

‘Nothing,’ Katherine said. ‘Not even a letter.’

Alice looked at her, seriously wondering. ‘He’s just disappeared?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘Just like that.’

‘But—’ Alice said. ‘Sorry, but – I mean – are you sure that he’s not – well, it could be anything, it could be—’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘He’s all right. I know that. He phoned his office this morning. I don’t know where from. He’d do that – he’d phone the office so as not to let them down. Me—’ She left it at that. ‘No, he’s not hurt or in an accident. If that’s what you mean. He’s obviously left me. He told the office that his mother’s been taken ill and he had to go over there all of a sudden.’

‘And she hasn’t been taken ill?’ Alice said.

‘Not urgently,’ Katherine said, and started laughing, an ugly sound.

‘Not—’

‘She’s dead, she’s been dead for five years. I’m surprised the building society didn’t remember that when he said so. It’s a stupid thing for him to say to anyone. Honestly, I don’t have any doubt what’s happened.’

‘I see,’ Alice said. She didn’t see at all. There must be other solutions to this situation; she just couldn’t see what they were.

‘It’s just the waiting,’ Katherine said.

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘I can see that. Not knowing.’

‘When there’s some news,’ Katherine said, ‘that won’t be so bad. Then I’ll know where he is, what’s happening, even, God forbid, if he’s done something stupid, but then we’ll know, there’ll be things to do. It’s the not knowing.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘Have you talked to the children?’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Yes. Well, sort of. Not all this. There’ll be time enough.’

‘If I were you,’ Alice said, ‘I’d just go and sit with them. You know, be all jolly and cheerful, as if nothing much has happened. They’ll be worried, too. I don’t know, go and help your little boy, show an interest in the snake, that sort of thing—’

‘The snake?’ Katherine said. ‘How on earth did you know about Tim and snakes?’

‘Well, I saw him,’ Alice said. ‘In the window.’

‘But how do you know—’

‘He was holding it up,’ Alice said.

‘A snake?’ Katherine said. ‘He hasn’t got a snake. He never shuts up about them, it’s snakes from the moment he wakes up, but I promise you—’

Alice looked back at her, and, incredibly, felt herself starting to blush. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you anything you didn’t know. But he’s definitely got a snake up there. When we were walking up your drive, I looked up and there he ws in the window with a snake round his neck. I’d better be going.’

Outside on the stairs, Jane had been listening to quite a lot of this. The kitchen door had been taken off, long ago, or perhaps there had never been one, she couldn’t remember. There was a sort of open-plan idea going on, and whenever anything was fried in the kitchen, the smell carried right upstairs, the light patina of grease settling on almost everything throughout the house. You could hear anyone talking in there, too. She’d heard everything her mother had to say, but this would bring her out of the kitchen, and Jane got up briskly and walked back to her bedroom. In a second her mother was following her; up the stairs at quite a trot, you could hear. ‘Timothy,’ she said, raising her voice, ‘Timothy!’ and into his bedroom. Jane came out on to the landing; so did Daniel. Downstairs, the new neighbour was standing in the hallway; she looked a nice woman, and tried a smile, a confused one, on the pair of them. The moment for her farewell was on the far side of some terrible family scene. She just stood there. Jane would have done the same.

‘Is this true?’ Katherine said, in the doorway of Tim’s room.

‘What’s this now?’ Daniel said.

‘Tim’s got a snake,’ Jane said to Daniel.

‘Is it true?’ Katherine said.

‘Is it true what?’ Tim said. He had got up from his bed, had backed nervously away to the window. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘You heard what your sister said,’ Katherine said. ‘Have you got yourself a snake?’

Tim said nothing for a moment; his fingers, behind him, running fretfully along his little shelf. ‘I’d love a snake,’ he said forlornly, but his regular request, so long overlooked or greeted with the same brief riposte had lost conviction. ‘I really would.’

‘Do I have to hear from the neighbours that you’re hiding a snake in the house?’ Katherine said. ‘Where is it?’

‘It smells in here,’ Daniel said, coming to the door of Tim’s room. ‘It really does.’

‘I haven’t got any kind of snake,’ Tim said.

‘Are you lying to me?’ Katherine said. ‘What’s under your bed?’

‘Nothing,’ Tim said, breaking out into a wail, but Katherine was already on her knees, dragging out the glass case with one, then two hands. She pulled it into the middle of the room, and knelt there, staring at the thing. It was like an aquarium of air; littered with small rocks, little toys and, ignoring all of these, curled up, was a snake; thirty inches long, yellow, skinny and ugly. With a gesture of disgust, Katherine got up, pushing the case to one side, and stared at Tim. He started to cry, turning his face away.

‘What is that?’ Katherine said.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Daniel said, coming in and peering at the thing.

‘It’s – please don’t – I didn’t mean—’

‘That,’ Katherine said, ‘is a snake. And where did it come from?’

‘I – I—’ Tim said, but it was all too much, and his tears overcame him.

‘You can’t keep it,’ Katherine said. ‘There’s no argument about that. It’s going straight back to wherever you got it from.’

‘What’s he called?’ Jane said.

‘Geoffrey,’ Tim said, through his tears. ‘I only wanted a snake called Geoffrey.’

‘How do you know it’s male?’ Daniel said, looking closely. ‘Look, he’s seen me, he likes me—’

‘The man in the shop said,’ Tim said. ‘And, besides, you can tell the difference between male and female by—’

‘That’s enough,’ Katherine said, not letting Tim set out his expertise; it was the way he comforted himself. ‘It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s going back to the man in the shop. My God, it’s not dangerous, is it? You’ve not been as stupid as that?’

‘No,’ Tim said. ‘He wouldn’t hurt anyone, he wouldn’t. I take him out, I talk to him. You can tell he’s not venomous, because the venomous ones, generally—’

‘If I want to know about fucking snakes,’ Katherine said, beyond everything now, ‘I’ll ask for the information and I won’t have to think about who to ask, I’ve heard enough about them now. I could write an essay on the subject with everything we’ve all had to listen to. All I want to know now is where it came from and then you and I are going to take it back there. And I’m going to give the man in the shop –’ and, as she said that, she dropped into an awful, mincing voice of parody, nothing like Tim’s voice, but just the voice of loose cruel mockery ‘– a piece of my mind for selling anything, let alone a snake, to a small boy on his own. My God, what must he have been thinking of?’

Tim’s tears, which had been drying up, burst out with great force, and downstairs Alice, still hovering and listening, decided that she would not be missed, and should probably not hear this. She tried to feel pity: not eleven o’clock and all this deposited on top of the situation. But Katherine had sworn at her child, and had spoken to him not even as a sardonic teacher speaks, but as one child to another, a bully in the playground. No one should be heard speaking like that, and Alice let herself out quietly.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ Tim said.

‘Of course you meant to,’ Daniel said, apparently enjoying the situation. ‘You must have saved up for months.’

‘Years,’ Tim said. ‘I thought you’d like—’

‘Of course I don’t like it,’ Katherine said. ‘How do you open this thing?’

Tim, crying, said nothing, and Katherine got down on her knees and fiddled with the case. With a single quick gesture, she reached in and took the snake with both hands, one hand behind its head, the other about its tail, and stood up. The snake buckled and writhed in mid-air, astonished and frightened, its tongue flickering in and out. ‘Don’t take him back there,’ Tim said, dashing at her and trying to seize her arms. ‘He doesn’t like it there, please don’t—’

‘All right, then,’ Katherine said, nearly smiling, ‘if that’s what you want—’

And she walked out of the room decisively and down the stairs, the snake in her hands, her children following her.

‘That was Caroline,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, coming back from the telephone. ‘You know, nice young thing, she works as a nursery nurse, very pregnant, I mentioned. She says she’s just setting off now so she’ll be here in five minutes, tops. I’ll go and put the kettle on.’

‘Oh, good,’ Mrs Warner said.

‘No, I won’t, she’s coming out again,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, sitting down. Over the road, Alice had opened the front door of the Glovers’ house and closed it behind her, very gently. ‘She’s been a time.’

‘Saw herself out, I see,’ Karen Warner said. ‘Too much trouble to take your guests to the door to say goodbye. Manners.’

‘Terrible,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Would you have said that she enjoyed herself, meeting the Glovers?’

‘Well,’ Mrs Warner said, observing Alice treading, very gently, down the path, as if trying to escape without being noticed, casting a glance upwards at the house. ‘I expect it was very nice for her, really.’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘Very nice. All the same, I think I might pop over there when they’re a little settled. You don’t want them to be thinking that we’re all like that, do you?’

‘Like what?’ Mrs Warner said, rather sharply; she didn’t altogether approve of being superior about your neighbours, even if they probably deserved it, particularly two days after you’d drunk their wine and ate their food and admired their furniture.

Mrs Arbuthnot, who would have said exactly the same thing, hastened to qualify her point. ‘Not all the same,’ she said. ‘People, they aren’t all the same, are they?, even if they all live in the same road, and it’s nice to meet – well, anyway. It was a nice party she gave.’

‘Very nice,’ Mrs Warner said. ‘Of course,’ she went on, offering Anthea a little concession in return, ‘I’m not sure about letting those children stay up, cluttering up the party. A little out of control.’

‘The boy,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, enjoying this part of the conversation. ‘The girl, of course, she’s not so bad, but I agree, I wouldn’t have them around, any kind of children, particularly when they’re at that difficult age. I notice you didn’t think of bringing your John along.’

‘No, I certainly didn’t,’ Mrs Warner said. ‘If you ask me, it’s nice to have an evening without your great lump hanging around and embarrassing you, and it’s not as if he needs a babysitter. They are a worry, though.’

‘A worry?’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. She remembered Mrs Warner’s John, hopeless. Mrs Warner explained.

‘Well,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said finally. ‘I’m sure it’ll all come right in the end. Now – goodness – what—’

Opposite, the front door of the Glovers’ had opened again. The removal men at the new people’s house, the new family, the husband, the girl and the elongated boy, as well as their mother, were all standing outside in an awkwardly arranged group, and had an excellent view. Through the door of the Glovers’ came Katherine. In her hands she was holding a – what was it – something limp but flexible, like—

‘That’s never a snake she’s got there,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘It is, it’s a snake. Goodness me.’

‘Where’s that from?’ Mrs Warner said. ‘Not the garden, surely.’

‘I never heard of—’ Mrs Arbuthnot said, but she dried up at what was happening. Behind Katherine and her snake came her younger boy, screaming and crying, tugging at her ineffectually, and the two others standing by. The windows were shut, but the boy was screaming, ‘You fucking, fucking mother,’ as Katherine marched down the path.

‘Disgraceful,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said. ‘He can’t be more than –’

‘Eight,’ Mrs Warner supplied. ‘Imagine. Look, here’s Caroline—’

But the nursery nurse, just heaving herself down the road, coming into view, stopped dead at Arbuthnot’s gate, and, like the new family and the removers and, inside, Anthea and Karen, watched Katherine and the children.

‘Don’t you ever—’ Katherine was screaming at her son, who was screaming back. ‘And if you ever do anything like that again – this is what happens when you do something as naughty as—’

She ran out of words. She didn’t seem to see anyone else around her; the snake, held between her two hands, she raised above her head in a bold, a dancer’s gesture, and flung it down on the pavement. ‘Stop it, stop it!’ Tim was screaming, over and over, but she raised her foot and brought the heel of her black shoe down on the snake’s head, crushing it in one. It flailed behind her like a whip. The screaming rose, went beyond words, and the little boy’s face purpled with terror and violence. His limbs flailed away from him in undecided, unformed gestures, as if some invisible force was plucking at them, and he screamed and screamed. Behind him, his sister turned away and, with a gesture too theatrical to be anything but instinctive, covered her eyes. Over the road, the new people, the Sellerses, stood and stared, and you couldn’t blame them.

‘My God,’ Mrs Arbuthnot said in her house, and Mrs Warner’s mouth moved, and it formed the words without being able to say them. Only Katherine, across the road, seemed composed: she had done what she had meant to do, and now it was all done, all over, and she stood up straight, paying no attention to her screaming son. But had it been enough? There was, surely, a little uncertainty in the way she scanned the houses, at whoever might be watching what she had so publicly done. The doorbell rang.

‘My God,’ Anthea said, hurrying to let Caroline in. ‘Did you see—’ she said, opening the door.

But the nursery nurse, enlisting the doorjamb to support her bulk, was muddily pale, grey to the point of greenness in the face; she had seen it. And it had been all too much for her, the sight of a woman, a mother, flinging down a snake almost in her path and then stamping on it, the snake’s head making a vile porridge on the pavement, and then the screaming – Caroline leant forward, as if in a swoon, and Anthea came forward with her arms open to catch her. But she leant forward in a single shy apologetic motion and, for the first time in several months now, vomited over Anthea, vomited copiously over the small glass coffee-table, the hallway rug, the art-deco figurine of a Greek dancer Anthea had always meant to have valued, everywhere.

‘My God!’ Anthea said – it was all too much and, with a little scream, she ran upstairs, plucking at her puked-over bosom as Caroline, still bubbling over, tried to raise herself up and start apologizing.

‘It could have been worse,’ Mrs Warner said, coming out gingerly, and trying not to look, guiding the poor girl into the downstairs clockroom, trying to help her without actually touching her. Because if there was one thing she hated—

The van was quite unloaded, and the removers gone, and Bernie had fetched thirty lightbulbs, half bayonets, half screw-ins, a mix of sixty and hundred-watt bulbs, and Alice, Sandra and Francis were sitting in their new sitting room, the furniture somehow arranged. They were surrounded by sealed boxes in the evening light, eating a kind of scratch supper off their knees, just for tonight.

‘Sounds like she’s not all there,’ Bernie said.

‘No,’ Alice said. ‘She’d had a shock.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ Bernie said.

‘Who? Oh, her husband,’ Alice said. ‘That’s an awful thing to say, love.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m worried at the idea of living opposite someone like that.’

‘She must be mental,’ Sandra said.

‘Imagine what it’d be like being married to her,’ Bernie went on. ‘You wouldn’t be blamed by anyone, really, for leaving her. Mentally unbalanced.’

‘We don’t know,’ Alice said. ‘It might be the shock, your husband ups and goes. That’s a terrible thing to happen.’

‘No, love,’ Bernie said. ‘Anyone normal, they just get on with things. They don’t—’

‘She took the snake,’ Francis said meditatively, telling the story bit by bit, almost more for himself than for anyone else, ‘and she threw it down and she jumped on its head until it was dead, and it was the boy’s snake, and he was there watching.’

‘That’s about the sum of it,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s not normal, whatever’s happened to you. It’s not still lying there, is it? Christ.’

‘No,’ Francis said. ‘The girl, his sister, she came out a while ago with a plastic bag and a broom, cleared it up and threw it away, and she washed the pavement down, too.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Bernie said. ‘Someone in the family’s got a bit of sense, apart from him, the dad, had the sense to walk out.’

‘Poor woman,’ Alice said. ‘I wish—’ She dried up and took a forkful of Russian salad from her plate of cold food. It was like the supper of a Christmas night, the dinner she’d arranged for them the first night in a new house, and the events of the day similarly cast a sensation of exhausted manic festivity over their plates.

‘What do you wish, love?’ Bernie said.

‘I don’t know,’ Alice said. You couldn’t say to your husband and children that you wished you’d kept the information of this woman’s situation to yourself. You owed her nothing, you wouldn’t keep anything from these three. But she still thought she might not have repeated any of that. ‘I bet he’ll be back,’ she said, surprising herself.

‘Why do you say that?’ Bernie said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just think he will be. He doesn’t sound like the sort of man who wouldn’t come back. He works in a building society.’

‘She sounds mental,’ Sandra said. ‘Killing the little boy’s pet like that in front of him. I wouldn’t mind a snake as a pet. If she couldn’t have it in the house, she could have found a home for it. Oh, well, who cares?’

‘You’re not to be getting ideas,’ Bernie said to Sandra, ‘about snakes.’

‘No, I don’t really want one,’ she said. ‘But killing it, that was horrible.’

‘Yes,’ Alice said. ‘It was horrible.’ But she felt—

She felt what Katherine, across the road, felt.

Katherine was sitting on her own in the dining room. The table was empty and not set; there was no food and Katherine had not prepared any. The children had been into the kitchen and had picked up what they could from the fridge, from the cupboards; children’s meals, the sort of thing they arranged for themselves between meals, coming home from school. At least Jane and Daniel had; Tim was still upstairs, gulping and muttering to himself in his room. The last time she’d looked, his face was in his pillow and he refused to take it out at any expressions of regret or apology. Inconsolable. It was just too bad for him; and he liked his food. She didn’t worry, not for the moment. What she felt was that the primary drama of the day, the awful thing that had happened to her, was Malcolm’s disappearance. But that, now, was inside and had only happened to her. What had taken its place, and remained in its place, was what she had done in the street: stamped on her son’s snake at the utmost pitch of despair and rage. Malcolm would come back, there was no doubt about that. That would finish the story in everyone’s memory; his disappearance, for whatever reason, would end up being trivial and anecdotal. What would remain was not what had been done to her but what she had done. In the dining room, only the small lamp on the piano was switched on, and the room was dim and gloomy, a pool of light in the blue evening. She sat, her hands on the table, like a suspect in a cell; she breathed in and out steadily, knowing what she had now made of herself. And in time night came, still with no word from Malcolm, whom everyone had now apparently forgotten.

Eventually she got up, switched the lights off, one after another, and went to bed. Over the road, the lights were still on. She looked at her watch and it was only a quarter past ten.

Malcolm came back two days later. She had stopped caring. That morning, she had taken the rubbish out, and over the road, the new people, they’d been coming out at the same time. She had been prepared to pretend that they hadn’t seen each other – she just didn’t want to think about the things she’d said to Alice. And she’d thought they would probably want to do the same, ignore her politely. Maybe, in a few months, they could pretend to be meeting for the first time, and everything could be, if not forgotten, then at least not mentioned, and they could both pretend they had forgotten. But Alice obviously didn’t know the rules of the game. They were getting into their ridiculous little car, some kind of small square boxy green thing, and Alice saw Katherine with her boxes of rubbish, the remains of the party, the empty bottles, the smashed glasses, the chicken carcasses, which had been attracting flies outside the back door waiting for the binmen’s day. She hesitated, evidently not knowing what she was supposed to do, and raised a hand. It was a gesture that might have been a greeting, or might have been the beginning of her scratching her head.

Perhaps it might have been possible. Perhaps if Malcolm had never left, she’d now be wandering over, asking how they were settling in, when the children would be starting school, offering advice about plumbers and local carpet-fitters, meeting the children and the husband, inviting them over for a drink with Malcolm and her children some time in the next day or two. But it was hard to see how she could manage that on her own. Alice didn’t seem to understand the rules of the situation. All the other neighbours did: the day before, Katherine had been walking slowly down the road, and the door to Mrs Arbuthnot’s had opened, issuing Mrs Arbuthnot, a scarf on her head and a shopping trolley, setting off for the supermarket. Mrs Arbuthnot had seen her approaching, and rather than continue and be forced to meet or ignore her, she’d performed a small pantomime of forgetting, slapping her forehead almost and shaking her head, going back inside until Katherine was safely past. Katherine blushed. Of course, she couldn’t know anything about Malcolm yet, could only have wondered about him not coming home, the car no longer in the driveway, or maybe she’d seen the business with the snake, heard Tim’s wailing. That sort of ignoring would not go on for ever, but only until these things were not the most recent and conspicuous subjects to talk about in a chance encounter. But Alice didn’t seem to know that, and raised her hand uncertainly. Her husband, opening the car, saw the gesture, and looked over the road to where Katherine stood. He waited, watching in the interested way of someone who hadn’t met her yet. Katherine smiled, but she could not wave because of the bags in her hands. She put them down, turned, and went back into the house.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t come to your party,’ Nick said, when she had got to work. ‘I was terribly looking forward to it. I don’t know what happened. It was all a bit chaotic. I went home and called my brother, you know, in New York, and then I sat down with the paper, just for five minutes, before getting dressed and coming up to your party, and all of a sudden I woke up and it was four hours later. I don’t know what happened – it must have been getting up so early for the market. And then, of course, it was far too late to come. I felt such a fool. I was so looking forward to it.’

‘That’s all right,’ Katherine said, stripping the leaves off a box of roses, her sleeves rolled up over her reddened forearms, Marigolds protecting her hands. They were white roses, just flushed with pink at the ends of the petals; lovely, unlasting. She had her back to him, her face down, concentrating on her task, and she let very little into her voice.

‘Was it a good party, though?’ Nick said.

‘Oh, it was just the neighbours mostly,’ Katherine said. ‘You’d have been bored.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Nick said. ‘I’m sure I would have loved it. Nobody ever asks me to parties. Well, there’s nobody I know who would invite me to a party, apart from you. I feel such a fool.’

‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ Katherine said, but there must have been something wrong with the way she said it, because Nick came up behind her and put a hand on her arm, as if he was about to turn her round to face him. The touch of him: she actually flinched. She could not endure the sensation.

‘Don’t be cross with me,’ he said, taking his hand away. ‘I can’t bear it if you – if anyone, I mean, if anyone’s ever cross with me. It’s just something I hate. It’s so silly, too, to fall out over something like that.’

‘Oh, no one’s going to be cross with you,’ Katherine said. She meant it to come across contemptuously, but it came out wrongly, as a confession of loneliness. Nick’s statement, which ought perhaps to have been that admission of loneliness, had instead been amused, self-reliant, adding to his confidence rather than anything else. Katherine had assured him that nobody could possibly be cross with him, and the words had their face value, a confession of admiration. All at once she was in tears, and gulping, trying to wipe her face with her arm and scratching herself with the rose in her yellow-gloved hand.

‘Katherine, don’t,’ Nick said. Without turning she could not tell whether concern or embarrassment would be in his face, but in a moment he took the rose from her, laid it on the pile, the right-hand one, of prepared roses, and he turned her round, her face lowered, not ready to meet his eyes and what might be in them. He so rarely used her name. No one did.

There was still quite some laundry to get through; that had been neglected in the days before the party and now it was keeping her busy. At home, she set the dinner to cook, and went through into the utility room to get on with it in the meantime. The children were in the sitting room, watching the noisy television they all seemed to get something out of. A year or two before they had extended the house. A garage had been built on the strip of land to the side, and what had been the garage, separated from the house, was turned into the dining room and, behind it, an intermediate sort of room, leading from the dining room into the garage.

After dinner, that evening, Katherine went back to the utility room. She had to do something to fill her mind with blankness. You could not hear the telephone from there, but the children would get it, and fetch her. Anyway, there was nobody to ring her, and if it rang, it would only be one of the children’s friends. The washing-machine had done one load – shirts and blouses – and was now starting on another, underwear. Normally, she would have transferred the shirts to the tumble-dryer, a newish acquisition, but today she wanted the chores to keep her busy, and she was ironing her way through a damp pile.

The door opened, the one from the dining room. It was Malcolm. She stopped and looked at him. He was wearing the suit he had been wearing that day, but a shirt she had never seen before, and no tie. He’s been buying new shirts while he’s been away, she thought, with a flush of anger. There were no children behind him; they’d probably taken themselves upstairs, whether to bed or just to be on their own. They’d been avoiding her, but now she didn’t care. After all, he’d come to see her first.

‘Are you back?’ she said harshly.

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘Yes, of course I’m back.’

‘I was worried,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m sorry,’ Malcolm said. ‘But you know why I went like that.’

She stared at him, and thumped down the iron. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, frankly, I don’t know why you went like that. I haven’t the faintest idea.’ She had to raise her voice; the washing-machine with its noisy rhythms was going into the racket of its spin cycle.

‘You want me to tell you?’ Malcolm said. ‘All right,’ and he started to speak. He was telling some sort of story, and in his hands, his face, you could see the weight of the conviction behind the story; telling what had led up to this, and what he had been doing the last few days outside the house, where he had been. His face went from pleasure, enjoyment as he thought of something, and rage, pain, irritation and puzzlement. He came into the utility room, and started walking up and down. But she could hardly hear any of it. His voice, always rather soft and low, stood no chance against the furious racket of the washing-machine. She watched, fascinated, and in all honesty not all that interested. It would probably be better, in the long run, not to know. She knew, afterwards, exactly how long Malcolm’s explanation had taken, because it was the exact length of the spin cycle. It took four minutes and twelve seconds. The spin cycle came to an end, juddering across the amplifying concrete floor, and made one or two final groans before going into a quieter reverse. It was Daniel and Tim’s socks in there, mostly black.

‘So that’s it, really,’ Malcolm said finally.

‘Yes, I see,’ Katherine said.

‘I don’t think there’s much point in going over and over it,’ Malcolm said.

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘I’ll not be bringing it up, asking for details. We’ll just get on with it.’

‘Exactly,’ Malcolm said. ‘That’s the best thing, just get on with things, don’t go on about them.’

‘Yes,’ Katherine said. ‘The new people moved in over the road.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Malcolm said. ‘Nice, are they?’

‘They seem nice,’ Katherine said. ‘Why don’t you go and say goodnight to the children?’

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said. ‘I’ll do that. I suppose I could just tell them—’

‘No,’ Katherine said. ‘Just tell them you’re back. That’ll do.’

‘Probably best,’ Malcolm said. ‘All right, then.’

There seemed to be something more he wanted to say; perhaps he could see in her face that in the last few days something had changed for her as well. But what would he know? For Malcolm, nothing in the situation as he knew it had changed; Tim had not had a snake under his bed, and still did not have a snake under his bed; his wife’s concealments remained his wife’s concealments; and he was back where he had always been. In a few days’ time he would wander across the road, drop in on the Sellerses, ask them over for a drink, and they would come over, none of them mentioning at any point any of the things he had caused or missed, and everything would be quite all right. ‘Is there any supper left?’ Malcolm called from the stairs.

‘There’s a bit,’ Katherine called back, but her answer was lost as the doors upstairs started to open, and something like conversation began again, and even the children pretended that there was nothing so very extraordinary, as there indeed was not, in their father coming home in the evening, the only cause for comment a shirt not seen before, the only remarkable detail a man in a suit, and no tie, and no sign of a tie anywhere.