Читать книгу The Friendly Ones - Philip Hensher - Страница 9

1.

There was another man next door. Aisha remembered that the old man had said he had grown-up children, and this one could be one of those. She was going to stay on. She had explained to Enrico that she would be hanging around until Wednesday at least, to make sure of Raja, and he might as well get a train back to Cambridge on Sunday night. Enrico had looked doubtful, in his party shirt underneath his tatty old sweater, but Aisha had assured him that the trains were good until quite late on Sunday night. There was a train to Birmingham every hour, at five minutes past, then a short walk over the platform and a fast train to Cambridge, all night until at least eleven. In fact she had no idea. By the time he was at the station and on a train to Birmingham, it would be too late for him to do anything about it.

It wasn’t until she heard the impatient rattle and tick of a black cab outside in the street that she realized how keen she was to get rid of Enrico. The poor man, she found herself thinking. He was sitting there with his coat on, his small bag by his side on the floor, and it only takes the sound of a taxi for them to leap up and say, with relief and thanks, ‘That’ll be for you.’ It was herself she was shaking her head over, leaping up and smiling brightly. Fanny smiled, gorgeously, slowly, pulling herself up without much enthusiasm, and the two of them took Enrico to the door.

‘I’ve very much enjoyed myself,’ Enrico said, scowling. ‘Please thank your mother and father for me.’ He made a sort of gesture towards Aisha, but she had a sandwich in her left hand, a piece of pork pie in the other. Although the rain had retreated to the spattering stage, Aisha was not going to venture out from under the porch, and the handshake he had in mind turned into a sort of shrug, performed by two people leaning into each other.

‘I’m so sorry they couldn’t be here to say goodbye themselves,’ Aisha said formally. ‘And I’ll see you in Cambridge in a few days’ time.’

‘I don’t think that’s Enrico’s taxi,’ Fanny said, drawling. ‘Someone’s in it.’

The cab had pulled up outside their gate, but Fanny was right: there was a man in the back of it. His shape was hunched over, counting money or gathering bags.

‘Why don’t you take it anyway?’ Aisha said. She took a bite of the pork pie. ‘One taxi’s much like another.’

The man got out. He had two suitcases with him, old brown leather suitcases. He put them on the pavement and stretched, a wide, relieved sort of stretch. He looked up at the heavy sky, feeling a drop of rain. There was even some enjoyment in his face at being rained on. At first Aisha thought he was going to walk up their drive, but that was impossible. He was coming home, not visiting a stranger. That was in the way his arms fell after the stretch. There had been other homecomings. She saw the stranger’s relieved face, and it was with a sense of something being talked over that she heard the Italian’s voice beginning to complain. That face, bemused, round, the eyes big and startled and blue: it was like a long-ago familiar piece of music that you caught in a public place and paused, listening intently to its cadence. She could not go on chewing. The stranger’s expression, warm and humorous, regretful, even flirtatious, went over the three of them, and he turned away. The taxi had got the house number wrong – they were hard to read from the road – and this man with the two suitcases walked twenty paces, and into the house next door. It was a strong, assessing, somehow disappointed face moving away quickly from what it had considered.

‘I’ll go now,’ Enrico was saying.

‘See you later,’ Aisha said. She smiled brightly, and surely she smiled in his direction. But there was something strange in the way she did it: he looked at her first curiously, then, as if with understanding, with the beginnings of fury. He walked down the wet gravel drive, hunched as if it were still bucketing down. He did not look back.

2.

Leo had forgotten what the trains on a Sunday were like, and had managed to get on the wrong one. He had found himself at Doncaster and having to change. There had been nothing to eat on either train, and he had even thought about getting a sandwich when he arrived at Sheffield. The girl who had sat opposite, with the Louise Brooks bob, the heavy boots and the delicate ankles, she had agreed – it was a scandal, she was starving. She’d got off at Chesterfield.

Under the porch of the house next door, three Asian people stood, saying goodbye to one of them – no, two and a white man. It had been raining hard. He wondered what had happened to the Tillotsons. His father, when he opened the door, looked surprisingly chipper, and was even rubbing his hands together.

‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Parked your car on the road, have you?’

‘No,’ Leo said, coming inside by pushing past his father. ‘It wouldn’t start this morning. Some mechanical thing. I took the train in the end.’

‘You could have got someone to come out,’ his father said. ‘That’s what they’re there for.’

‘I’m just doing what Mrs Thatcher was telling us to do the other day,’ he said. ‘Save the planet. Go by train! We’re all going to die.’

‘I don’t suppose taking the train from London to Sheffield instead of driving is going to put that off very much,’ his father said.

‘You seem cheerful,’ Leo said.

‘Do I?’ his father said. ‘Come through. That would be most extraordinary. I suppose I did something rather clever, just an hour ago.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Leo said, discouragingly. They said that when you returned to your childhood home it seemed smaller. The house was the same size, and in any case, he’d last been here at Christmas. His father had succeeded in shrinking, however. He was determined that he was not going to let him begin by explaining how clever he had been. There had been enough of that. His father should look outwards, and think of other people, and not sing his own praises for once.

‘You know the people next door moved out,’ he said. ‘The people who bought it, a nice family, Asian, they were having a party for all their relations. Visiting, visiting, not living there. And one of them was eating something too fast and got it stuck in his throat. And luckily I could do something about it. He’ll be fine. It all comes back to you when it needs to. I dare say they’ll always be grateful for me leaping over the fence like that, just at the right time.’

‘Like speaking French,’ Leo said.

His father gave him an interrogative look, as if there were something superior and dismissive in what he had said.

‘Is there anything to eat?’

‘Oh, I dare say,’ his father said. ‘I eat at six, these days. Your mother’s left the pantry stuffed with the usual and there’s all sorts of goodies in the freezer. It never changes.’ He went off into the sitting room where the Sunday Telegraph lay folded on the arm of the chair. Had he changed newspapers? Leo could have sworn he used to read the Sunday Times. When he’d said, ‘It never changes,’ he’d meant, of course, that your children came home, dumped their suitcases on the floor, and started demanding food. It was true that Leo had done exactly that. But it was not quite the same. He discovered this by going into the kitchen, and then into the pantry. The kitchen was bare; a single mug and a single plate stood, washed, on the side of the sink. The pine table in the middle had a scatter of breadcrumbs, the remains of something on toast, all that the old doctor thought he would make for himself.

To go from the kitchen into the cool, windowless pantry was to go into the ruin of his childhood. In the past, when he had come home or when he had lived here, there had been six of them – the old ones, Leo, Blossom, Lavinia and Hugh. Quite often a boyfriend or a girlfriend, too, turning up and needing to be fed. Sometimes Leo, at fifteen, had come in here and dithered, pleasantly, unsure whether he would go for a biscuit or for the full sandwich, for a piece of cheese and pickle – one of seven or eight different pickles – or for a piece of cake. What must the shopping have been like? Speculative, unplanned, just getting food in for whenever anyone felt like diving into it. Now it was depleted, like the middle point of a siege: one tin of beans, a jar of pickled onions with the label half slipping off and translucent with spilt juice, cloudy and menacing within, a jar of peanut butter for the children. Leo reached up and took the cake tin from the top of the fridge. There was a dried-up and stony block inside that might once have been half a walnut cake. Christ on a bike. Only in the fridge were there a few things: a small steak, some bagged tomatoes and small potatoes, a block of Lancashire cheese and an open jar of pickle, the lid lost. The contents of the pantry did not show that his mother had got the usual in. Hilary was shopping for himself, these days.

‘No news, then,’ Leo said, coming into the sitting room with the best he could do, some crackers with cheese and a smear of peanut butter and a couple of very doubtful pickled onions. He had found, too, a bottle of beer in the cool corner of the pantry.

‘No developments on that score in either direction,’ Hilary said. He put his newspaper down, folded it, set it aside. ‘I went over after lunch. She’s in a ward with some dreadful old folk. One Alzheimer’s woman wandering round all night, wanting to know what all these people are doing in her bedroom, shouting. I’ve asked that your mother be moved to a private room, but there’s none available just now.’

‘Can’t you pull rank?’ Leo said.

‘Well, I could,’ Hilary said. ‘But I don’t know that it’s worth it. You’ll see her tomorrow. Gaga with morphine, alas.’

It had always been one of his father’s guiding principles, he remembered: pick your battles. If you’re going to have to stand your ground over the withdrawal of palliative care tomorrow, don’t have a row about the shepherd’s pie not being hot today. For a moment they sat in silence. The light was fading, but only the small lamp by his father’s chair was lit; some paperback book was on the table, his place marked neatly with a bookmark.

‘They seem quite nice,’ his father said, in a conciliatory way.

‘At the hospital?’ Leo said, puzzled.

‘Next door,’ Hilary said. ‘Our new neighbours. Asians. Very nice. A pair of boys and an older girl at university. I think she said Cambridge. They were all visiting this afternoon, though, aunties and cousins and all, coming over for a party in the garden. That sort of person, they keep in touch with every one of their family, having them over at the drop of a hat. Live with them, too – there’s always an old mother in the spare room, sewing away, not speaking much English.’

‘How many are they next door?’

‘Oh, I’m not talking about next door. There’s only four or five of them, less than us. Practical, professional people. Speak better English than you do. I meant the families I used to see when I was in practice – nine or ten of them, living on top of each other, you couldn’t understand how they were related to each other, happy as clams. Baffling.’

‘It’s the culture, I expect,’ Leo said.

‘Of course it’s the culture,’ Hilary said shortly. ‘I don’t think anyone would suggest it was biological necessity.’

‘I see.’

Hilary looked at him. He might have registered for the first time just which child it was who had arrived. ‘Can you get time off work like this?’ he said. ‘Don’t you have hotels to write about? Tell the readers how luxe they are? Counting the sausages at breakfast? That sort of thing?’

‘That sort of thing,’ Leo said. ‘I’ll have to take their word for the number of sausages at breakfast, though. I just go down for the day.’

‘What a wonderful way to earn a living,’ Hilary said.

Leo smiled graciously. He had made a decision, long ago, and with renewed force on the train coming up to Sheffield, that he would not respond to Hilary’s disgusted comments on his job. Of the four of them, it was only Lavinia, his younger sister, who had anything resembling a job that Hilary thought worth doing, and that not very much: she had left her job as a marketing assistant for Procter and Gamble and was now working for a medical charity. Lowest on the scale was Hugh, just out of drama school, scrabbling for parts in this and that. Blossom had four children and a colossal house in the country: she was excused, with all the glee at Hilary’s command whenever he spoke about her. Leo did not do the job that the elder son of a doctor should do. He knew that. He worked for one of the daily newspapers that Hilary never read and, between subbing the copy of grander writers, was permitted from time to time to go round the country, visiting hotels and restaurants and writing a paragraph on their pretensions. How he longed, sometimes, to be allowed to spend the night at one of these places, and be rude about it afterwards! But the hoteliers told him they were aiming to introduce a new level of luxury to Harrogate, and he went home from a long day taking detailed notes about thread counts, and wrote, ‘The Belvedere Hotel is going to introduce a new level of luxury to the already excellent Harrogate hotel scene.’ It was the job that the recently divorced son of a doctor did.

‘How’s Catherine?’ Hilary said, as if he had closely followed Leo’s train of thought into the deep morass of his failures. ‘I always liked Catherine.’

‘I always liked Catherine, too,’ Leo said. ‘Catherine’s absolutely fine. She’s staying with Blossom, in fact, as we speak.’

‘Blossom said she was going to come up soon, but I can’t imagine when,’ Hilary said. ‘I told her she didn’t need to bring the children – there’s a difference in coming if you have to bring four children.’

‘It takes some organization, I expect,’ Leo said.

His father stood up; jounced his fists in his pocket; went to the window and looked out, pretending to be very interested by something in the garden. Finally he made a casual-sounding comment.

‘I was thinking the other day,’ Hilary said, ‘what would it be like to have your family – all your family, the grown-up bits as well – all of them around all the time?’

3.

‘It must be terribly hard for your father,’ Leo’s mother used to say, ‘to spend the whole day telling people exactly what to do. And then come home and find out that he can’t do the same to us. We don’t follow doctors’ orders, do we, darling?’

Whenever Hilary said something of great import, something he had been contemplating for days and weeks, he brought it out casually, sometimes walking towards the door or turning away while he spoke. Leo supposed that it was the habit of an old GP, getting the right answer to an important question about vices or symptoms by asking it in passing. In just such a way, he had chattily said, ‘Oh, another thing – I don’t suppose you’re drinking much more than a bottle of vodka a day?’ or ‘Still taking it out on you, is he, your husband?’ just as the patient was getting up to leave his consulting room. His children had got wise to it, of course, and the words ‘Oh, by the way …’ or ‘I don’t know whether it’s of any importance, but …’ had long put them on guard. Only Hugh could imitate it convincingly, the way Hilary’s voice querulously rose in light, casual enquiry, like the happy, imperfect memory of an old song.

But this was not an enquiry: this was Hilary observing that he didn’t know what it would be like to have your family, the grown-up bits as well, around you all the time. He was not – could not be – casually suggesting that all his children uproot themselves and come and live in his house. It could only be a general observation, yet Hilary had brought it out exactly as he brought out the one significant statement of the hour, with a careful lack of weight, his voice rising a jocular octave. What would it be like to have your family, your grown-up family, living around you all the time? Leo said, ‘Ye-esss,’ and then, ‘Well …’ and then a delaying ‘Erm’ that threatened to turn into a hum. He was examining the statement from all sides. Finally he had to respond. His father had fallen silent, waiting, head slightly cocked, for the answer.

‘It would be nice,’ he said. ‘But it’s not very practical nowadays. I suppose people elsewhere marry and move in and work alongside each other. We probably wouldn’t get on, anyway.’

‘I always thought it was odd that you threw in the towel so early.’

‘Threw in the towel?’

‘With Catherine.’

‘Oh,’ Leo said. ‘We’re much better off now.’

But his father shook his head irritably, and Leo understood that he was thinking about their separation and divorce from his own point of view.

The marriage had been failing for ever – sometimes Leo felt that what had separated them permanently, put an end to whatever joy there had been, had been the long, painful and ugly preparations for their immense wedding. For eight months before the wedding, there had been something to talk about in absorbing and horrible detail, every aspect of it. They had gone on fucking – that was the thing, the way they’d fucked ceaselessly, three times a day, four, the feeling that here he’d met his match. But before the wedding you couldn’t help seeing that the fuck came at the end of a big argument. Disagreement about a choice between napkins – surprising personal remark – serious row – apology – fuck. Catherine had been swept up in the intricacies; Leo had gone along with the process and the reconciliatory fuck; and then, three days into the honeymoon, sitting on a beach in the Seychelles, facing the theatrical sunset, she had turned to him and he, unwillingly, to her. They had seen that they really had nothing more to say each other. He had got a good deal from the Seychelles Tourist Board for flights and accommodation and a couple of excursions.

So the marriage had failed from the start. Before long, Leo had turned up in Sheffield on his own, and told his parents he and Catherine were going to separate, and then divorce. ‘A trial separation?’ his mother had cried, half rising from her chair, but his father had shaken his head irritably. For Hilary, the crisis had come at that moment when, in fact, Leo and Catherine’s marriage – their divorce, rather, it was so much more permanent, dynamic and long-running – had gone beyond the new lacerations of contempt and insult and into a curious cosy zone where the whole thing was the topic of despairing, rueful, shared jokes, mock generosity about awarding custody of the household’s colossal Lego collection, the occasional absurd, almost ironic fuck, with Leo not bothering to take his socks off, and the important question of who would have the more successful divorce party when it was all done. Catherine had not come to break the news. It was for Leo alone to see the collapse of his mother’s face, his father turning to him with what looked very much like irritation. He had quite enjoyed it, actually.

‘People stay married all the time,’ Hilary said.

‘Don’t they just,’ Leo said. ‘Do you mind if I turn the lights on?’

‘Do as you please,’ Hilary said. He watched him closely as he moved about the room, turning on the two standard lamps, the other table lamps; there was a central light, a brass construction, but no one ever lit it: it cast too brilliant a light over everything. ‘No one else planning a divorce, I don’t suppose.’

‘Not that …’ Leo began, but Hilary didn’t expect or need a response.

‘I rather thought – I don’t know, but I rather thought’ – his voice went up in that querulous, amused, treble way again – ‘it might be my turn.’

‘Your turn?’

‘My turn to get a divorce,’ Hilary said.

‘That would be interesting,’ Leo said.

‘After all,’ Hilary said, ‘it’s now or never, you might say.’

‘No time like the present,’ Leo said. ‘You might even find it an interesting way to fill the time, you and Mummy.’

‘Oh, I haven’t told your mother yet,’ Hilary said. ‘I’m just going to present her with it when it’s all …’

‘What?’

‘When it’s all …’

‘When it’s all …’

There were questions that, in the past, Leo’s father had raised with him in exactly this way, at exactly this time of day, when there was nobody else in the house. When Leo’s life had run away from Oxford, the conversation about his future had begun here – they had, surely, been in the same chairs. Hilary was sitting and, in his light-serious voice, talking about getting a divorce in the same incontrovertible way. Hilary gazed, half smiling, patiently, into the middle distance, waiting for Leo’s slow understanding to catch up.

‘Are you serious? You’re not saying …’

‘Am I serious?’ Hilary said. ‘About getting a divorce?’

‘A divorce from Mummy?’ Leo said.

‘A divorce from Mummy,’ Hilary said. He sat back; he might have been enjoying himself. ‘Why wouldn’t I be serious?’

Leo stared.

‘I should have done it years ago,’ Hilary said. ‘Actually, I was going to do it five years ago. Perfect time. You’d all left home. Then you waltz in with your news. That was that. Couldn’t possibly have two divorces in the family at the same time, would look absurd. So there you are. It has to be now, really.’

‘You’re not serious,’ Leo said.

‘I wish you’d stop asking me if I’m serious.’

‘But Mummy –’

‘Oh, Mummy,’ Hilary said, in a full, satisfied voice: it was the voice of parody, but also of warmly amused affection for something almost beyond recall. ‘Well, I’ll tell Mummy myself. You can leave that to me.’

But that was not what Leo had meant. He did not see how he could point out what he had wanted to say. The urgent point that first presented itself to Leo was that the situation would solve itself: that a man who wanted an end to his marriage could, in Hilary’s position, save himself the trouble of a divorce by waiting six months and burying his wife. It was only in a secondary way that the humane point cropped up, that his mother might, at the end, be spared something. Silence had fallen between them. His father, surely, had never said what he had said.

‘You shouldn’t even say such a thing,’ Leo said.

‘Oh?’ Hilary said. ‘Why? Is it forbidden now?’

‘You’re …’ Leo waved in the air.

‘I’m?’ Hilary said. ‘Or we are? Are you trying to allude to something unmentionable? Oh – I think I see. You think divorce shouldn’t happen after the age of, what, seventy? Or sixty? Or is it the length of marriage that’s in question? One isn’t permitted to think of divorce after forty years of unhappiness? The thing I don’t believe you quite understand is that I am still a free person, able to take my own decisions, and your mother has a degree of freedom, too. I am under no illusions. She deserves to have a future without being shackled to me. There should be an end to this ‒ this punishment.’

‘But she’s dying,’ Leo said, forced into it. He looked away.

‘Well,’ Hilary said. ‘Well. Yes. That’s why there’s some urgency about the matter.’

‘You must be mad,’ Leo said. With that he hit, apparently, the right answer. His father sank back in his chair, almost smiling. He had been waiting for exactly this. He might have started the whole conversation to lead Leo to say that he was mad.

‘You might like to reflect whether you have ever changed anyone’s course of action by calling them mad. Worth thinking about, that one. And here comes Gertrude,’ his father said, with sardonic pleasure.

Gertrude must have been approaching for some time, and now she stood in the doorway. Her scaled neck reached upwards, swaying to and fro: she placed first her left foot, then her right foot, on the carpet, with almost angry determination, as if making a point. No, she appeared to be saying, not this, but this, here, here, you see, and her right foot stomped down. It should have banged with the determination of Gertrude’s movement, but there was no sound, and Gertrude walked forward to inspect what was going on. Did she know who anyone was? Had she recognized Leo and come forward with her greenish-grey, flexible but hard features bent downwards in angry disapproval to inspect him at close quarters? Gertrude had been here for ever; she had been bought when Lavinia was born to give the older children something to take an interest in. Sometimes Leo, greatly daring, had called her Gertie, but, somehow, never when she was in the room; her look of firm inspection and silent disapproval was too much. Now she came forward in her silent stomp, the almost agonized way her fat little legs held her up in the air. How did she pass the days? Was the arrival of Leo the cause of unbearable excitement, or just another flittingly trivial occurrence in the smooth passage of seasons from waking to sleeping and back again?

‘Dear old Gertrude,’ Hilary said, with relaxed warmth. ‘Here she comes, dear old thing. I gave her some hibiscus yesterday. My goodness, she enjoyed that. Come to say hello to Leo, have we?’

‘Blossom never carried out her threat, then?’

‘Hm?’

‘Wasn’t she going to take Gertrude off for a life in the country with the kids?’

‘No, thank God,’ Hilary said. ‘I took advice and it turned out to be not such a good idea.’

‘Oh, I remember,’ Leo said. ‘There was some talk about them being eaten by badgers, wasn’t there?’

‘Not in front of Gertrude,’ Hilary said. ‘Don’t you listen to what the awful man says, Gertrude.’

But Gertrude paid no attention. She lumbered forward in their direction, the whole expanse of hallway and sitting room behind her as she came. She was ignoring the talk of badgers as if it were a lapse in taste, and coming forward with patient insistence, her head turning disapprovingly from side to side, like that of a dowager in a nearly empty room. In a moment the humans, apparitions in her slow world, would flicker out like candle flames and be gone. What mattered were the things that were there more often than she was: walls and tables, floor and carpet and the box itself, the beloved box.

4.

When Leo got up the next morning, there was a note on the kitchen table – one of his father’s thrifty pieces of paper, a complimentary piece of stationery from a pharmaceutical company torn into quarters. It said that Hilary had gone out, and suggested they meet at the hospital at the beginning of visiting hours, at two. His father had forgotten, of course, that Leo had no car.

The house was not unfamiliar, but estranged from Leo. In the bathroom, the range of soaps and shampoos had narrowed to what his father had chosen for himself – an amber-transparent slab of Pears with its smell like nothing else, a father-smell, and a supermarket budget brand. Dressed, he went with interest from room to room, having nothing else to do, and though he knew everything, recognized everything, it was now a part of his blind past. The house was, as it had always been, in a state of mild decay: things had gone wrong, sometimes months ago, and had been left as they were, a clock stopped, a burst cushion thrown irritably behind the sofa, a bookshelf collapsed onto the shelf of books below. Where steps had been taken, they were, as always, inadequate and impatient. The doorknob to the sitting room shook in the hand; when Leo looked at it, he saw that it had fallen off and been reattached with a nail rather than a screw. Everything was familiar, and seen for the first time in an age. When he lived here he would not have seen those jade fingerbowls edged with engraved silver: they had always been there. The blue carpet, the vase lumpy with Japanese fish, the William Morris curtains in the sitting room, Gertrude’s box in the kitchen, the view of Derwentwater in pastels on the wall in the entrance hall – he had lived among them for years and had hardly seen them. Now he saw them, with a flavour, even, of reminiscence. These things were what had happened in his childhood.

But the house, too, had altered. The distancing had not happened solely in his head, from his change of dwelling and experience. Between the unmoving objects, the treasures chosen and bought and placed with care, the lives had begun to shift. Leo had glimpsed this the night before when, in the pantry, he had understood what happened when his father went up and down the supermarket’s aisles, thinking about nobody but himself and what he might like to eat over the next few days. Now, going through the house, Leo felt that it had lost a quality of crowded possession.

The telephone in the hallway began to ring. That was what it had always been like – some urgent professional call for his father. Perhaps now it was his father, calling with some important information, but he let it ring and in a while the caller hung up without leaving a message. The telephone ringing in an empty house – a house empty of father and mother and sisters and brother – and Leo cocking his head as if one of them were about to hurry forward to answer it. The Trimphone warble was specific, and now he went from room to room, recognizing what in particular it reminded him of. Those three or four years before he left home to go to Oxford, what his life had mainly been devoted to was cunt.

He must have fucked a girl in almost every room in the house – even on the polished dining table, wobbly and not as much fun as it had promised. The kitchen table had been more solid – Barbara – and, of course, the armchair where he had begged that Chinese girl with the beautiful smooth skin to sit and part her legs and let him kneel and taste her. ‘Let me taste you,’ he had said – he could almost laugh at it now, and she had certainly stared. Six months later he would have said, ‘Let me taste your cunt.’ She was one of the first he had had. It had been in the sitting room because he hadn’t known how to ask her to come upstairs. Carol, her name was. And in his room, too, the first time had been Jayne, with the y and the untrimmed pubes, the wonderful smell she had blushed to be complimented on, the light floating of hair on arms and legs – she was a nice girl, adorably unkempt, the youngest of four sisters. She had had every make-up tip, every look tried out on her bullied features every day since she was six. And the look of bewildered amusement, the fascination on her face when it had come to it! She had averted her eyes only when she had seen the stupid poster of the tennis girl scratching her bum that had been above his bed for ever. To his astonishment, she had cried afterwards. She had been so tender and happy and even sympathetic towards his gormless gratitude, and when she started crying he’d comforted her and told her he’d always love her. Downstairs the phone had been ringing, and he’d ignored it, gazing into her face with the sincerity of a love with no end. He’d taken the poster down a few days later – he wanted nice girls like Jayne to see the point of him, not just nasty girls who wanted to tell him he was gorgeous, a dreamboat, a hunk in miniature. They couldn’t believe he was only fifteen before taking their bras off and pushing his head down between their tits. Not just them. And Victoria – not Vicky, Victoria – and her red hair and the way she had sneered at him on the walk home from school, and called him ‘little boy’ and said he was like a dog bothering her and all her friends. Look at the little man’s Adidas bag. He thinks he’s really something, look at him! And one day he had said to her, ‘Why not come round and find out how little I am?’ And she had walked on with him disdainfully, like someone carrying out a bet, her friends calling rudely after them. He had sworn she was going to walk with him to the front door and then carry on, not looking back; but she hadn’t. Victoria with her red hair had walked up the drive with him and had come in – with his beating heart he hadn’t believed it until the front door was shut behind her. She led him upstairs and into a bedroom. It had been Blossom’s room. Victoria had looked up at one point and said, ‘You don’t sleep in here, for God’s sake.’ He hadn’t realized before then that her strutting contempt was mounted to hide the fact that she was never quite sure she had understood. A life of being ridiculed by her brothers and father for being slow on the pick-up. It was filled with pictures of ponies, Blossom’s room.

He remembered all of those girls – after Victoria, they had come round to him, the female half of the species. He’d known, after Victoria, what the secret was – not to beg, not to apologize, just to know with perfect certainty that the girl, the woman you had brought within your orbit and decided to fuck, was going to want to fuck you. They were already persuaded or they were not going to be persuaded. After Victoria he never had to wear anyone down; he did not pester, was always aloof, his gaze moving steadily over the surface of an irresistible girl as if he had hardly registered her. When his parents and his sisters and his brother were out of the house, for three years, his life and the house he lived in were alive with cunt. That was how it was. Once on the stairs, even.

And then when he had come back from Oxford after that disastrous four months. He had had to try it out. The outrageous line had failed in Oxford. Even the level gaze had failed in Oxford. It had been greeted, once or twice, by its challenging partner, a level gaze in return. He could not understand it. It was as if they all knew what it was he had said. And soon it was his gaze that shyly dropped, in a college bar facing a girl who knew that, two years before, she wouldn’t have been let in here, across a table in a seminar room, in the faculty library. The women had scented blood and, instead of going after him, had laughed and turned and gone elsewhere. The way Oxford had misread him, and that last night in January with that man Tom Dick outside his room with half a dozen drunk cronies, hammering on the door at three a.m. and shouting, ‘Shy boy! Shy boy!’ Had he ever been a success with women? He had returned to Sheffield in failure and misery at the beginning of February. It had been a month before he had raised his gaze in a bar, and made sure it did not quail, waited for his gaze to stay level and draw a woman to him. It had worked again, as it had not worked in Oxford. He had brought the woman home; she had stayed the night. She was called Lynne. It was a month after that that he had met Catherine. That had been a triumph, too. Framed by a life of accustomed triumph, by the ability to get whatever he wanted, however, there were those four months in Oxford.

He was at the foot of the stairs. He ought to phone Lavinia – no, Hugh, no, Lavinia – and find out whether their mad father had said anything to either of them about divorcing Mummy. Lavinia would be in the office; Hugh would be at home, and quite possibly still asleep. He thought. This was always the dark part of the house, the wood panelling and the lack of windows seeing to that, but also, outside the front door, the heavy growth of wisteria casting a shade over the porch. There was a figure outside in the gloom. It might be peering in, or just deciding whether to ring the doorbell. Leo came to his senses. He opened the door.

‘I think it must be your father,’ the small person said.

‘I mean,’ she went on. ‘I came round to say thank you – it must be your father I was going to thank.

‘It is your father – I mean, you’re his son, aren’t you?’ she said. She was very young, her tiny hands fluttering a little as she talked. She had known that it would be him answering the door and not his father. She had started talking, unprepared, as soon as Leo had opened the door, her eyelids half closing defensively, and had begun to explain things starting with the wrong end.

‘Yes, that’s my dad,’ Leo said. ‘Did you want him? He’s down at the hospital with my mum.’

‘Oh,’ the woman said. ‘Only to –’ She flapped, not knowing what else to do.

Leo hung on to the side of the front door. She had given some thought about what to wear: the grey skirt and paler grey sweater were new, and the burst of orange in a little silver and plastic brooch her only concession to a colour she had been told she ought to wear more of. It was the brooch that made Leo decide he ought to help her out. ‘You live next door, don’t you?’ he said.

Perhaps she thought she had already explained, had ventured into detailed conversation. ‘I’m Aisha,’ she said. ‘I’m not living next door – I’m just visiting for the weekend and a day or two more.’

‘Come in,’ Leo said. ‘I can do you a cup of tea and perhaps a biscuit, but more than that – anyway, come in. It’s nice to meet you. You’re in the –’

‘Everyone says it’s the Tillotsons’ house,’ the girl said. ‘I never met the Tillotsons. I expect they’re sitting somewhere everyone describes them as the new family living in the Smiths’ house.’

They were in the kitchen now.

‘Your dad is astonishing – a genius. Yesterday. He was straight over the fence and putting Raja right in no time at all. My brother, Raja. Mummy hardly had time to scream, even. Your dad was as cool as a cucumber. Raja’s back home now, with nothing to show for it but a gauze bandage round his neck. His brother keeps on at him to take the bandage off but he only wants to see the hole in his neck.’

‘You’d have to ask my father,’ Leo said, smiling, ‘but I don’t think he should do that. Probably.’

‘I haven’t been in here before,’ Aisha said. She looked around her at the kitchen. She might have been observing it with the weight of evidence and experience, comparing it as Leo had to the kitchen he had known, groaning under the weight of six adults or near-adults with bellies to fill. ‘I haven’t been in any of the neighbours’ houses – well, only as far as the hallway of one. I’m Aisha – I’m so sorry I didn’t introduce myself.’

‘Aisha,’ Leo said. He had got it the first time. Then he realized what she meant, and said, ‘I’m Leo Spinster. I don’t live here either.’

‘Well, there you are,’ Aisha said. She almost glowed. She might have prepared all this, and at the last, when it came to getting it out, found that there was something on her tongue that was keeping her from saying it in the right order. ‘Your kitchen’s nice,’ she said. ‘It’s so nice to come somewhere just next door where, you know, that oven’s been there for ever, and the kettle and the toaster.’

‘The toaster doesn’t work,’ Leo said. ‘It wasn’t working at Christmas and it still isn’t working.’

‘You should see our house,’ Aisha said. ‘Mummy’s gone mental. Every single thing is new – well, not quite everything, but she said she’s not going into a new house with all the old things. She’s got a fridge that opens the wrong way because of where she wanted to put it in the kitchen. She’s got her own money, the houses in Wincobank she lets out, and she’s spending like a Rothschild on new stuff just now.’

Leo’s face must have responded somehow to this; he had, he understood, been wandering about the house touching things in wonderment and alarming fulfilment, picking up objects that had always been there: a piece of rock crystal on a shelf, not seen through years of dull observation, had possessed the deep shock of a truth recognized immediately, as if for the first time. He had picked up object after object, turning them round and inspecting them in the familiar light of the empty house, letting them lead to the memory of one fuck after another.

‘Not even the bloody clock’s telling the time,’ Leo said. ‘Nothing works in this house.’

Aisha looked up at the Swiss railway clock that hung over the stripped-pine door to the hallway. She flicked her wrist upwards for Leo to see; she wore a man’s heavy watch. Now Leo looked at the clock, he didn’t know why he’d thought it had stopped: it was ticking solidly, reliably, just as it ever had. It was twenty to two.

‘What time is it?’ Leo said. ‘I didn’t put my watch on this morning.’

‘Twenty to two,’ Aisha said. ‘Have you got to be somewhere?’

‘I thought it was about ten o’clock,’ Leo said. ‘I’m supposed to be at the hospital. Oh, God, I was supposed to book a taxi and everything.’

‘Which hospital? I can take you. Mummy’s not using her car. Don’t you drive?’

5.

Aisha told him to wait there, just at the end of the drive, and dashed off – scampered, you could almost say. Leo could meet them all another day, she called over her shoulder. Mummy’s car was a red Fiat, a little run-around for town. Aisha briefly opened her front door, shouted something, and slammed it without waiting for an answer. She jumped into the car and, with a reckless burst of speed, reversed through the gates and onto the street. She rolled down the window. ‘Hop in,’ she said. ‘Other side. Come on, quick.’

‘It’s very kind of you,’ Leo said. With the act of driving, Aisha had taken on an air of capacity and system; the sense that she was doing things out of order, of staring and nearly giggling and not knowing what came next had quite gone. He got in. ‘Where have your parents come from?’

‘Bangladesh,’ Aisha said. ‘Or do you mean just now? Hillsborough. They’ve moved from Hillsborough. Which one did you mean?’

‘Did you go to school there?’

‘In Hillsborough? Yes, mostly, but then I got taken out and I did my A levels at the high school. My mum wanted me to go to Oxford. It’s all right, you can ask where my family come from, being brown and all that.’

Leo had, in fact, retreated in an embarrassed way at the thought that he had been asking an English girl where her family came from. He gave a shy grunt.

‘Look at that woman,’ Aisha said. ‘She’s really going for it, isn’t she, with the Cornish pasty? Go on – go on – can you get it all in in one go? Can you? My God, the things you see in Broomhill on a Monday afternoon.’

‘I think I was at school with that woman,’ Leo said.

‘Surely not,’ Aisha said. ‘You were asking – I was born here, but then they went back to Bangladesh. That’s where we come from. Daddy was doing a PhD in Sheffield, in engineering, and he was married to Mummy and she came over and I was born here. All I can remember is the blue door we had by the side of a shop and the Alsatian that sat in the shop downstairs. When he finished his PhD we all went back. I don’t know why he didn’t stay – it was a terrible time over there. And then after 1971 Daddy said there was a duty. He had to stay and work at the university in Dhaka, the university needed him and, really, the country was going to need people like him. He says it now and it’s like a big joke that anyone would ever need someone like him, but Mummy says that that’s what people used to say, back in 1971. Duty – they used to sing songs about it, probably.’

‘What happened in 1971?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Aisha said, concentrating on the road. ‘I forget not everyone talks about it all the time over breakfast, lunch and dinner. Bangladesh happened – there was a war of independence. It was part of Pakistan and then there was a war and it became independent but very poor, which is how it’s stayed since. Lots of people were killed, you know. I had an uncle who was killed. I just about remember him. We talk about 1971 like you’d talk about 1066 if it happened twenty years ago.’

‘I don’t really know anything about it at all,’ Leo said. ‘I went to India once with my wife, before we got married. I thought it would be romantic.’

‘It’s sometimes quite romantic, I believe,’ Aisha said. In the little rectangle of mirror, he caught her eye; it flicked away. ‘I’ve not been, apart from once to Calcutta where we were changing planes and Daddy thought we’d stop over for two or three days to see things. Where did you go?’

‘Rajasthan. Temples and palaces. There was a night in a really expensive hotel, a palace on a lake, but apart from that it was terrible backpacker hostels. My wife got awful food poisoning – she thought she was going to die or have to be shipped out.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Well, she was fine in the end, no harm done.’

‘No, I meant …’

‘Oh – we’re divorced. Is that what you meant? Her food poisoning and some camels and the traffic – that’s what I remember about India. I must go to Calcutta,’ he said, in a rush.

‘That wasn’t romantic, I don’t think,’ Aisha said. ‘I remember little bits about Bangladesh when I was little, but it’s all confused now. We’ve only been back once since Mummy and Daddy left definitively. They came over in 1975 ‒ they said enough was enough. The twins were born here. They were born in the Northern General, actually – I remember going through the snow to visit Mummy with some flowers and seeing the pair of them for the first time. It was really the snow more than the twins I was excited about.’

‘Your family’s all here, then,’ Leo said.

‘Yes, they all came over in dribs and drabs,’ Aisha said. ‘Most of them after ’seventy-five, though Mummy and Daddy were the first. No, I tell a lie. Aunty Sadia and Uncle Mahfouz came over here before then. Do you have any war criminals in your family? I’ve hardly met Aunty Sadia or Uncle Mahfouz, apart from maybe when I was about two years old and had no judgement.’

‘How glamorous, having war criminals in your family,’ Leo said.

‘Well, I don’t really know what they’re supposed to have done,’ Aisha said, ‘but we’re never allowed to meet them and Daddy always says that if everyone got what they deserved Uncle Mahfouz would have been shot by a firing squad years ago, or hanged, or put in the electric chair. Everyone, I mean the aunts, they all say that nothing could ever bring them to have Mahfouz or Sadia in the house again, which is unusual. They never agree with Daddy about anything. Here we are, the Northern General Hospital. How are you going to get back?’

‘You’ve been very kind,’ Leo said. ‘I hope you didn’t have anything important to do.’

6.

The hospital wing he found his way to, with many confusing blue signs, had a new brick frontage with a choice of steps or wheelchair ramp, but inside, its narrow corridors and metal windows revealed it as what it was, a conversion of army huts, thrown up rapidly during the war. It had the powerful disinfectant smell that all hospitals had, a sharp twinge of annihilation – there was no real question of cleanliness in the smell, just a sense that things, quite recently, had gone too far.

All about were families of visitors, a small gang of decrepit patients in dressing-gowns and slippers heading outside for a smoke, a child or two carrying a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums and there, in the middle of the hall, an old woman in what must have been a communal wheelchair, abandoned and fretful, sitting with her expectant gaze in the middle of the space, waiting to be collected or returned, like a volume of a dictionary in a public library. Leo reached his mother’s ward thinking that he too should have brought some yellow chrysanthemums. Grapes.

His mother was sitting up in bed in her nightie, a shawl round her shoulders. Her right arm was in a thick plaster, her fingers poking out of the end, like curious animals. She looked clean and pink, her hair in an unaccustomed greying shock round her face, and she broke out in a delighted smile to see him.

‘Nobody tells me anything,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Came to see you,’ Leo said. ‘I thought you’d be a bit bored.’

‘Your father was here a moment ago,’ Leo’s mother said. ‘Did he know you were going to come?’

‘He should have,’ Leo said lightly. ‘I got in last night. We arranged to meet here. What’s up?’

‘Oh, he does madden me,’ she said. ‘He’s just gone out for a cup of tea, I think. Fancy not mentioning that you were on your way.’

‘Probably wanted it to be a nice surprise for you,’ Leo said, wondering. ‘But what’s that? What have you done?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, raising her heavy plastered arm with some effort. ‘It’s so absurd. I can’t imagine how it happened. I thought I just banged it, just that, and then there was this awful pain, and your father looked at it and told me I’d broken it. You wouldn’t think you could break an arm that easily. Did you …’

But then she went off into a fit of vacancy, and Leo remembered that she must be on a heavy dose of morphine.

‘I got up here yesterday,’ he said. ‘Late last night or I would have come over. I met the new neighbours!’

He wasn’t quite sure, but Celia refocused, smiling in a woozy way, and nodded. Out of her window was a courtyard, and in the middle an ornamental cherry tree. There was a bench on the far wall; a man in a tweed jacket was sitting on it, reading a book.

‘Plenty of people have been coming,’ his mother said. ‘Plenty of people. It was Catherine and Josh yesterday. They brought those flowers.’

Leo thought it unlikely that his wife and son had been to visit yesterday, but he nodded encouragingly.

‘She’s a lovely girl,’ Celia said. ‘Of course, it’s mostly been your father. He’s been very strict with the hospital, telling them what needs to be done, keeping an eye on all the treatments. I think –’ she broke off and almost sniggered ‘– I think they’re actually a little bit frightened of him. It’s good to have somebody strict and professional in charge of your care. He’s a good doctor.’

‘I would have brought you some flowers,’ Leo said.

His mother seemed surprised at this. ‘Have you come very far?’ she said, in a sociable manner. ‘I do hope it wasn’t too much trouble. It’s been lovely to see you. Thank you so much. I truly appreciate it.’

‘Mummy, I’ve only just got here,’ Leo said. ‘I’m here for a few days to look after you.’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ his mother said. She appeared to focus, and now she lit up with real pleasure at seeing her son. ‘You haven’t come up just to see me? I’m quite all right. I’ll be out of hospital in a day or two.’

‘Well, I’ll still be around then. Are you hungry?’

The question appeared beyond Celia. She wetted her lips experimentally, and passed her tongue over them. But then she cast her eyes downwards, shaking her head, as if she were a small girl with something to hide.

‘Have you ever been in hospital?’ Celia asked in amused, society tones. ‘Like me? Look – this is my husband.’ Leo wondered who she thought he was. There was no Daddy: the way she was speaking to him was as a grand guest at a party offering warm platitudes to an unimportant stranger. But she was a little more acute than he had given her credit for, because in a moment there was a peremptory knock on the door that Leo had shut, and his father came in with a bag from Marks & Spencer’s food hall.

‘Got here, then,’ he said heartily to Leo. ‘I forgot – you don’t have a car. But it didn’t seem to stop you. Well, how’s the patient?’

‘I’m quite all right, thank you,’ Celia said. ‘The pain is under control.’

‘Well, it will be if you keep pumping morphine into your system at that rate,’ he said. ‘She’s no idea what’s going on. She’s been given a device with a button she can press. Once every six minutes. She’s pressing it constantly, as far as I can see. She’ll be lucky if they don’t take it away.’

‘How am I, Doctor?’ Celia said.

‘I’m not your doctor,’ Hilary said shortly.

‘I mean Hilary,’ Celia said. ‘I know perfectly well who you are. We’ve been married long enough.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Hilary said. ‘Leo doesn’t want any more nonsense.’

‘Well,’ Celia said, ‘I’d be quite happy if …’ but she trailed off, not quite following what she should be saying in response.

‘Yes, dear?’ Hilary said, and that dear was something Leo had never heard before from him. Never had Hilary addressed anyone near to him as dear; it was a vocative from a sitcom, a ludicrous performance of old woman and old man, a word that Hilary would never have used to the face of any of his patients. The only use he had ever made of the word, as far as Leo could remember, was dismissively, on returning from a day in the surgery, and remarking that there had been nothing but a lot of ‘old dears’, nothing much wrong with them, and God knew what he was doing wasting his life in this way. But now he had said dear to his wife, and the word was savage.

‘And all because she can’t pay attention and falls head over tit,’ Hilary said.

‘Did she fall over?’ Leo said.

‘I didn’t fall over,’ Celia said. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t.’

‘You’ve started her off now,’ Hilary said.

‘I went over because someone pushed me. I don’t want to say who it was because that would get them into a lot of trouble.’

‘I wasn’t even in the house when it happened,’ Hilary said.

‘Be that as it may,’ Celia said, with a matching flavour of grandeur. ‘Be that as it may, there have been things in that house that led up to this. You should understand that as part of your investigations. When I think – I could have married anyone. There was Alastair Caron. He was a friend of my brother’s from school, he was very interested. He was a banker in the City. No messing about with sawing bones and sticking his fingers up men’s bottoms for a living. Or if there were doctors there was Leonard Shaw ‒’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Hilary said. ‘Not Leonard Shaw again. We’re really never going to hear the last of Leonard Shaw.’

‘– and he was charming, charming, a lovely man, and I was stepping out with ‒ with him and he had a friend, an awful, pathetic friend, and once when Leonard Shaw had to go abroad, to Paris or Rome or Brussels I think, I forget, I can’t remember. Once when he went abroad he said to me that his pathetic friend Hilary was stuck there in London and he didn’t know anyone, and would I drop him a note some time and take him out to the cinema?’

‘This, I may say,’ Hilary said, ‘is not at all how things really were. But let the morphine have its say.’

‘The King and I was on,’ Celia said. ‘It had just come out. This is material to your investigations. But the awful, the pathetic friend of Leonard Shaw said he wanted to see this – you know, with corpses and shooting – this film about gangsters, and the dead head of a horse in someone’s bed, and –’

Celia gave a sudden gulp, a whinny inspired by the dead horse and by pain in equal measure. Her fingers scrabbled; no one had repainted her nails in their usual deep red for days. She plummeted with her thumbs on the button, and in a moment the look of alarm on her face was smoothed away.

‘It’s just the drugs talking,’ Hilary said, with every air of satisfaction, of being proved right. ‘As you might have gathered from the total confusion about dates. I think you were old enough to see The Godfather when it came out, weren’t you?’

‘I wondered about that,’ Leo said.

7.

Lavinia had had it up to here – with Sonia, her lodger, as well as with Perla, her cleaner and Perla’s so-called sons and daughters, whose names she had never caught. She needed to employ Perla to cope with the chaos that Sonia left round her, and Sonia’s rent money went to supporting Perla, who came – or her ‘son’ came in her stead – twice a week, every Monday and Friday. Pretty soon the rent money would be going towards paying mental-health professionals to sort out Lavinia’s head after having to deal with Sonia’s chaos, Perla’s neediness and lies, and the bloody son whose name she had never caught.

The flat in Parsons Green was hers; a little fretted balcony ran along the front of the first floor, right along the L-shaped drawing room. When she had bought it, she had seen possibilities; the same woman had lived in it for twenty years, and encrustations and odd ways of doing things had made the flat peculiar, difficult to sort out, a bargain. One of those possibilities – and Lavinia always prided herself on seeing possibilities, in people and places as well as in property – was that there would certainly be at least one spare bedroom. That ought to bring in six hundred pounds a month, and any lodger she acquired – she remembered thinking this from the start – could pay her rent money into the Visa account, then nobody would ever catch up with her. That struck her as sensible.

Sonia had turned up, thanks to Hugh. She had lived with him at drama college. According to Hugh, she was no trouble at all, kind and quiet – heaven. Those things were relative, it appeared. If, among the drama students, she had been easily overlooked, living alone with a charity administrator of (Lavinia had to admit of herself) slightly set ways, she proved herself clearly a drama student: flailing, noisy, tearful, irregular in her hours and needful of statements of love at all times of the day and night. (It was a Brazilian lawyer called Marcelo whose dastardly treatment had created this need, according to Sonia.) She was, too, rather fascinatingly resourceful with irregularly detailed tales of how her grandmother had come over from Jamaica on the Windrush. She had undone all Lavinia’s good work with regard to Perla and her son.

Lavinia had made it absolutely plain that Perla was not to bring her son along, and not to subcontract the cleaning of her flat to him, either. She didn’t believe that he was Perla’s son: he could have been only ten years younger than her, at most. She didn’t know how long it had been going on. She had had the afternoon off, and had come back one Friday at lunchtime without warning – one of Perla’s days – to find a moon-faced man in his mid-twenties sighing over the ironing in her kitchen. She had asked who he was; he had said that he was Perla’s son. Where was Perla? She wasn’t there. He had giggled nervously. She had had to go: she needed to work for Mrs Putney. (That was what Lavinia pieced together; the word ‘Putney’ had had to be decoded.) The man, his face greasy with worry, pitted with the remnants of a savage history of acne, tried to go on ironing, but Lavinia dismissed him. It took some time to make him understand. He didn’t know ‘Mrs Putney’s’ phone number; in fact, Lavinia thought he hadn’t understood that Putney was Perla’s customer’s place of residence, not her name.

On Monday she stayed at home until Perla arrived, and told her that she had employed her and that she was not to give her key to anyone else. Not even her son. They were in the L-shaped sitting room as Lavinia spoke to Perla; Perla’s anxious face, her thin coat, her hands already clasped in supplication. Lavinia did not look, but she knew that outside, on the street, there was a man no more than ten years younger than Perla, waiting underneath a tree, kicking his heels, skulking, one might almost say, waiting for Perla to give a signal so that he could slide in and take over her task, let her go on to subcontract her job elsewhere. Was Perla the English-speaking agent of a vast subcontracting army of recent illegal immigrants, the one whose papers and verbs were more or less in order? Lavinia had made her point. She couldn’t sit there while Perla was supposed to be there, not twice a week.

That had been a year ago. Without enquiring into it, Lavinia had made the optimistic and positive assumption that Perla had, indeed, instructed her ‘son’, that from now on, she was going to do all the work, that Miss Spinster preferred her to do it. She would not be a cynical person. She would expect the best from everyone, even Sonia, and she would definitely hold the possibility in mind that Perla might be a lot older than she looked – the broad practised innocence of her face might do that – or that the son, skulking beneath trees with his big hands and his bad teeth, might be a lot younger. It was all possible. Anyway, she didn’t check it out. She had to say that Perla did what neither Sonia nor Lavinia was prepared to do: clear up the chaos of Sonia’s living quarters and the chaos that Sonia created whenever she ventured into bathroom or kitchen for face wrap or toasted cheese.

It had been only the week before that Sonia had remarked, ‘Perla’s so sweet.’ They had coincided; they were watching the television news. Sonia could hardly go two minutes without offering some irrelevant titbit from her life.

‘Were you at home today?’ Lavinia said.

‘I was feeling rather grim this morning,’ Sonia said placidly, ‘so I thought I’d give the agency a ring and tell them I’m not well. It’s been ages since I had a day off sick. Everyone else does it all the time. I’m due a sick day. I need to relax. I’m Jamaican.’

Lavinia thought that sick days were days when you were ill, not days when you felt you could do with a day off, even in Jamaica. But she understood that the rules of the theatrical agency where Sonia worked, having given up on the idea of making a living as an actress, were not quite the same as everyone else’s.

‘And Perla was here, was she?’

‘She’s so sweet, she really is,’ Sonia went on. ‘She told me that I was a truly good person, a person with a truly kind heart.’

‘What had you done to make her say that?’

‘What, me?’

Lavinia waited.

‘She asked me something – oh, I know. She said would it be OK if her daughter came to do the work because she had to buzz off somewhere, to Mrs … to Mrs – I can’t remember her name. Anyway, so I said yes so she said that I was a truly kind person.’

‘Sonia, I’ve told her she’s not to let anyone else do the work in her place.’

‘She said I’m a kind person,’ Sonia said. ‘You’ve no idea what those people at that office think it’s all right to tell me.’ She pulled her knees up to her chest, and pressed her bare feet against the cushions on the sofa; her toes made that kneading gesture against the silk a kitten makes.

‘I don’t want anyone but Perla cleaning the flat,’ Lavinia said. ‘I told Perla that ages ago.’

‘Your brother phoned, too,’ Sonia said. ‘He said could you call him back.’

‘Oh, OK,’ Lavinia said, but Sonia was waving a piece of paper in the air, not looking at Lavinia, concentrating on the television news. Lavinia reached over and took it. In Sonia’s handwriting it said, ‘Your Brother called’ – a scruffy, tattered piece of paper, folded over several times.

‘He said it was really urgent,’ Sonia said. ‘At least, when he called he did.’

‘I’m playing detective here,’ Lavinia said, giving up, ‘but did he call today?’

‘No,’ Sonia said, astonished, her eyes wide, her hands making a shrugging gesture. ‘No, I told you, it was a couple of days ago. It was when Claude was round or I’d have asked your brother how he was.’

Lavinia picked up the phone. There was no point in investigating Sonia’s beliefs about her behaviour. But Hugh, when she got through to him via a confused flatmate she didn’t recognize, shrieked and was full of a glorious story about what he’d said and what he’d done and about being thrown out of Pizza Express last night before he’d even finished his Veneziana. But in the end they established that he was not at all clear that he had, in fact, phoned her. They started again. Hugh wanted to get Lavinia’s opinion on a new set of photographs for his folder, more brooding, more serious, less comic-sidekick-who-could-advertise-soap-powder and more –

‘King Lear?’

‘King Richard the Second, please,’ Hugh said, making Lavinia laugh at the specificity of his ambitions. They established that neither of them really knew how Mummy was but, as Hugh said, Leo was up there in Sheffield. If there was anything serious about Mummy being in hospital with a broken wrist, he’d definitely be in touch. Lavinia put the phone down with slight puzzlement.

‘Not Hugh,’ Sonia said, her attention burningly fixed on the Channel 4 news. ‘Was that Hugh? It was actually your brother who called. From Sheffield. I thought I said.’

Lavinia didn’t explain that Hugh, as well as being Sonia’s ex-flatmate and friend, was also capable of being Lavinia’s brother, or that it was possible to have more than one brother. She phoned her home number – the number she had been taught to say out loud all her childhood, whenever nobody else was by and the telephone needed answering; and it was answered, this time by Leo.

‘I didn’t get your message,’ Lavinia said. ‘What’s up? How’s Mummy?’

‘How were the two of them last time you saw them?’

‘Who ‒ Mummy and Daddy? It would have been Christmas. No, I went up in March. They were all right. They’ve always been like that.’

‘Rowing, you mean. Were they rowing?’

‘They always row, Leo. He called her an idiot several times and she burst into tears and slammed the kitchen door on him. You know the sort of thing. He was just sitting there and saying, “Oh, charming.” She didn’t call him a prick this time. How is she? Physically, I mean.’

‘Broke her arm,’ Leo said. ‘They’re keeping her in. It broke too easily, or something – she hardly even fell, she said, and it went.’

‘She’s old,’ Lavinia said. ‘Old people are always breaking things.’

‘They think it’s metastized – is that right? It’s metastasized. Well, they’re keeping an eye on it. It can spread to the bones and then they start breaking for no good reason.’

‘What does Daddy say?’

‘He’s keeping stuff to himself. I talked to another doctor. Once it’s got into the bones it’ll finish her off, but incurable doesn’t mean terminal or that she’s got weeks left. You don’t need to rush up here.’

‘I’ll come as soon as I can. They’re not keeping her in, are they?’

‘Not indefinitely. This is the thing, though. Daddy’s said to me something really terrifying. He says he’s going to divorce her. He says it’s his last chance to, I don’t know, make things plain so she’s not dying in some sort of illusion about how their marriage was. He’s serious.’

‘He can’t be serious,’ Lavinia said. ‘What’s she saying when he says all this?’

‘She’s up to her eyeballs in morphine,’ Leo said. ‘She’s not making a lot of sense, apart from being just as beastly to him as he is to her. He’s going to tell her, though – at least, he says he is. He told me on Sunday night and he’s talked about it every day since then, going into all the details, what happens, who handles it, whether she’s got to appoint her own solicitor. It’s given him a real interest in life, frankly.’

‘What do the others say?’

‘I haven’t told them,’ Leo said. ‘I didn’t want Blossom turning up in her Jag to put everything right.’

She put the phone down, and immediately Sonia began to warble something about the Rain in Spain. She might have been suppressing it while Lavinia had been talking.

‘And he couldn’t sing at all,’ she said gleefully. ‘What a strange decision, to go into that particular line, if you can’t sing.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Rex Harrison died,’ Sonia said. ‘Didn’t you see? They had a lot of people on the news saying what a wonderful person he was. Hilarious. He was ghastly, famous for it. Still, you know – the Rine in Spine,’ Sonia went on, dropping disconcertingly into terrible stage Cockney for some reason. ‘Did yer muvver caw yer farver a prick, I mean for reaw?’

‘Maybe just the once,’ Lavinia said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t –’

8.

And the next day, Leo found that his father had gone out again in much the same way, on a trivial errand to buy something to eat from Marks & Spencer. He went out at the front of the house, and there was Aisha, watering the front garden next door with a hosepipe, wearing a dazzling pair of white trousers and a sailor’s blue striped top, casting aigrettes of glittering water over a pink-flowering azalea, a white-flowering rhododendron. It would be a pleasure to take him, she said. It was the least she could do. He could not read the expression in her eyes: she was wearing an absurdly glamorous pair of Jackie O sunglasses, covering half her face, like a panda’s eyeshields. There was, after all, nothing else she had in mind to do today, and in any case, there was something she had to do over that side of the city, something she’d been promising to do, had been putting off for weeks. The clothes she was wearing were quite impractical for anything resembling gardening, but she smiled at him and, given what she was wearing, Leo could not find it in himself to refuse her generous offer of a lift to the hospital.