There were three women in the room. One lying on the bed under a white sheet, eyes closed. One wearing a white coat, studying a bleeping monitor, among an assembly of strange devices on an aluminium trolley. The third staring fixedly out of the window.

A bare window; if there were curtains nobody had troubled to draw them across the naked night. A characterless window; no dividers, just glass, and so high up nobody could have looked in on the neon-lit drama within the room. Marian had been looking out for some time, ever since a faintly sulphurous ribbon across the glazed screen of darkness had caught her drifting, disorientated attention. This was dawn. Very slowly the streak of dirty pallor across the view brightened, and took on a yellow hue. It was finely laced with the black branches of still leafless trees. A simplifying mist had left them outlined. Behind the visible trees were more, softly obliterated, and a slight swelling of the rolling arable land that in Cambridgeshire passed for a hill. The hospital lawns below the window were white with spring frost, and gently steaming with drifting strands of mist.

The bleeping monitor counted down the onset of a threatening day. Marian wished it could stop. It did not. She turned to the doctor, and began to speak, but the doctor at once laid a finger on her lips, and shook her head. She beckoned, and they withdrew together into the corridor.

‘What has happened?’ asked Marian, though on one level she wanted to tell, rather than ask. She had opened the front door, calling, unsurprised to find no answer and nothing ready. To find the sink full of unwashed dishes, and the usual reek of turpentine competing with the slightly meaty smell of the dishwasher, partly loaded. She had called again, and climbed the steps into the barn that her mother used as a studio, and there had found the slumped body, alive and making awful noises – a monologue of groans and garbled ramblings.

‘Your mother has had a stroke,’ said the doctor. ‘A serious one, this time.’

‘This time? I didn’t know—’

‘Then we can assume that earlier ones, if any, were slight. Perhaps your mother concealed it from you. People sometimes do.’

‘Yes – well – but now?’

‘I can’t tell you very much. She may recover; people do quite often recover almost fully from a stroke. They may regain movement in the paralysed side; with therapy they can often recover some speech. But to be frank with you, at your mother’s age … there will be some recovery, if she lives long enough. How much, we must wait and see. I am so sorry.’

‘If she lives long enough?’

‘At her age, you see, Mrs Easton, and after such a severe stroke, she may well have another, within a few days or weeks.’

‘I see. Can we do anything?’

‘We can make her comfortable. We can keep her here for a while, and then if no further incident occurs, and her condition stabilizes, we would eventually discharge her and you can look for therapists. Perhaps a nursing home … One thing I should warn you about, if I may – your mother has not lost her power to hear and understand you, just because she has lost the power of speech.’

‘Warn me?’

‘That she can understand you. People sometimes say the most tactless things, even cruel things, because they haven’t fully realized that the patient may be upset, perhaps more easily than before, when they can’t respond.’

Marian nodded, and returned to the room.

It had been transformed in her absence, in two ways. The horizontal sun had torn through its wrappings of mist, and was lighting the room with a luridly golden light. It had eclipsed the neon strip lights on the ceiling, overwhelming their chilly accuracy with a rival vision, in which Marian’s mother lay under a sheet of pale primrose, her face jaundiced, the monitor screen had faded to an indecipherable dimness, and every metal surface in the room – the bedstead, the trolley, the machinery – was dramatically gilded. The window now offered a prospect of egg-shell blue sky, scattered all over with pink-gold puffy small clouds like a baroque ceiling.

But the other transformation was more striking. The patient’s eyes were open, in an unfocussed vertical stare.

‘Talk to her,’ the doctor said.

Marian was seized with a hideous embarrassment, almost revulsion, flinching at the thought of talking at her mother, the-no-reply-possible situation transforming conversation into an exhibitionist monologue, or a horrible manipulation, like that of the ‘carer’ saying, ‘Come along, Granny, time for your bath, don’t be naughty, now!’ Or worse. Marian had heard worse. To say anything at all to someone who cannot offer any reply seemed like a form of contempt.

But the doctor was standing there, waiting.

‘Mother?’ said Marian. ‘I’ll clean your brushes when I get back …’

And in the silence that followed she had time to feel foolish. She had been subliminally expecting a reply. And – how horribly revealing! She had made a placatory offering. Her mother found her useless in most ways, but had said once or twice that she was good at cleaning brushes. Was this what it would be? When the other cannot reply one simply haemorrhages self-revelation into the silence? She tried again. ‘It’s thick frost. Bad for the plants, I’m afraid.’ For the early spring had tempted the plants to put out tender tipping buds. Now the blooms would unfold with frost burn … Nothing to be done about that, of course. ‘But it does look pretty, don’t you think?’

The woman in the bed uttered a polysyllabic grunt, and very slightly turned her head towards the window.

‘Good!’ said the doctor. ‘She has a little movement in the neck, already. Good. And she answered you – you realize – she did answer, it’s just that we can’t decipher what the answer meant.’

‘So what else is new?’ said Marian, bitterly.

‘Pardon?’ said the doctor. ‘Look, I’m leaving her with you now. Just keep talking to her.’

But the urge to silence was overmastering. Marian’s moment of revulsion had given way to a rueful amusement. Nothing was much changed, then; she would be burdened with the need to talk, to keep up relations, to bid in one way after another for her mother’s attention; her mother would reply if at all in grunts or monosyllables, her attention always directed elsewhere. At least, now, she could not simply walk away! Marian remembered numerous times in the past … half-way through the big party she had organized for her mother’s eightieth birthday, mother had disappeared, and been found eventually, sitting in the hotel car-park, balancing herself on a bollard in a biting wind, sketching the half-frozen lake in the grounds. And long before that, in the middle of Marian’s wedding reception, the bride’s mother could not be found when the speeches were being made – she had retreated to her studio and resumed painting. And even longer ago, she had left the guests at Marian’s seventh birthday party unsupervised while she worked, and had taken quite calmly the awful results of the jelly-throwing riot which had ensued. But tiny Marian had felt abandoned to the barbarians …

‘Well, Mother, I can say what I want to you, now,’ she said softly. She had to say something, since she was enjoined to speak.

And that remark, floating unanswered in the silence, punctuated by the bleeping monitor, brought to Marian’s mind the other sense in which she could say anything she liked to her mother, and always had been able to. Indeed Marian’s entire class at school had obtained their unusually accurate and extensive knowledge of sex, male dispositions and physiology, consequences and contraception by getting Marian to ask the taboo questions of her mother, and relay the frank replies. It had not occurred to Marian till many years later that these questions might have misrepresented her to her mother, had she assumed a personal need-to-know basis for them. They had been both knowing questions, and, in Marian’s mouth innocent, technical, as unloaded of emotion as questions about the internal combustion engine would have been.

The room was suffocatingly hot for someone wearing winter clothes. No doubt for the patient under the starched sheet it was just right … and Marian had not slept that night, and was soon drowsing in the stiff little pseudo-leather chair in the corner of the room.

Later Marian’s grown children arrived. Toby and Alice had driven themselves up from London, starting early. Marian had not expected them – she would not have expected them to be able to extricate themselves from complex lives for any emergency of her own. Alice came straight to Marian, leaned over the chair, twined her slender arms round Marian’s shoulders, laid a cool cheek against her mother’s and said softly, ‘Hi, there, Mum. Love you.’

Toby went to the bedside, and took up his grandmother’s slack hand in his own. A sudden convulsion seized and twisted Stella’s face – her mouth moved lop-sidedly, one side drooping, Marian thought at first, in pain. Then she realized that this rictus was now her mother’s smile – her mother was smiling at Toby, and Toby was weeping, his tears falling on their linked hands.

Alice moved across to the bed, and took her grandmother’s other hand. Marian watched her children, amazed as always by their beauty and grace. She could see them normally for normal purposes, but secretly also always saw them this way – her children, aureoled by love. And if they made her feel bypassed, short-circuited, if the directness of their love for Stella shamed her, she deserved it. For she had not herself thought to offer tears, or touching, only a few stiff sentences.

Toby wiped his cheeks dry abruptly with the backs of his hands, and said, ‘Don’t worry, Gran, we’ll look after Mother for you!’

The very last thing that had occurred to Marian in this situation was that anyone needed to look after her.

Toby was right, though. When the nurses gently shepherded them out of the room, saying that the patient needed quiet, telling Marian that she needed sleep, suggesting that they came back in the evening, she was lost. She managed to walk as far as the reception area, with its shops and lights, and throngs of people, and the bevies of synthetically smiling clerks and helpers – then she couldn’t quite think what she was doing, or where they were going.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s not as late as it feels, Mum. Only eleven-thirty. Where are we going?’

‘Back to Gran’s – Gran’s spare rooms, unless you’d rather we looked for a hotel?’ Toby said.

‘Which would you rather?’ said Alice, gently.

‘Gran’s will be best; there are things we must do … people to tell,’ she said.

‘Not before you’ve slept.’

‘But …’ She began to protest. But she felt so dazed, so weak, that suddenly she gave in. She let them lead her, and they took charge. Toby drove; she sat in the back seat of his car, and fell so deeply asleep that she didn’t wake when they arrived and he switched off the ignition. By the time they woke her they had put sheets on the spare-room bed, and turned back the corner of the blankets, and there was a cup of tea on the bedside table. They had even, she discovered, as having stripped to her underwear she gratefully slid into the bed, put a hot-water bottle between the sheets. As she had so often in the past done for them – the unfamiliar inversion of familiar kindness struck her briefly as astonishing, like watching the shift and tilt of some great balance-beam – and then she slept.

Downstairs her children sat at the kitchen table, talking together, their voices softened partly so as not to wake Marian, partly from the sense of doom that surrounded them.

‘Mum won’t want to go home while Gran’s like that,’ said Alice. ‘It’s such a long way away. She’ll want to hang around and visit.’

‘I expect she’ll manage all right if she has to,’ said Toby. ‘But it would be hard on her. I was thinking I might stay over for a day or two.’

‘How can you? Won’t your precious firm lose millions the moment you take your eyes off the dealing screens?’

‘Listen to you! And no doubt you’re about to drop everything and everybody and tear off to some rehearsal. For some stupid concert with wads of unsold tickets that loses more money every time than I can make in an hour—’

‘Toby, we musn’t do this. We mustn’t quarrel now.’

They looked at each other across the kitchen table.

‘Find a time and place for it later, you mean?’

‘Probably. But for the moment in spite of your unkind assumptions, I am staying around.’

‘Nothing to rehearse for?’

‘Don’t probe, Toby. Just accept.’

‘OK. The place is a bit insanitary, isn’t it? Should we clear up?’

‘Someone will have to, some time.’

‘Social services would take one look at this, and decide Gran would have to be put in a home. It’s yucky!’

‘It always was. And we never used to mind,’ she said. ‘But just the same … and I bet there’s nothing to eat.’

Investigation revealed one quite good-looking lamb chop in the refrigerator, several packets of powdered soup, some mildewed bread, and a large jar of porridge oats. They began to laugh.

‘Hush!’ said Toby, shutting the kitchen door.

‘Oh, Gran!’ said Alice. ‘Gran as ever!’

‘I expect one can live for months on porridge,’ said Toby.

‘Porridge and a lamb chop – don’t forget the lamb chop!’ Their laughter was fed on recollections of desperate meals eaten in Stella’s house in long ago holidays – wild forays to the fish-and-chip shop, mounds of baked beans topped with one rasher of bacon between the three of them, once – once only – potatoes stolen from the field beside the house; these gruesome menus varied on rare occasions when Stella had sold a painting, by sudden excursions to posh restaurants in Cambridge.

‘Well, be fair – she wasn’t expecting company – she didn’t expect to be dying …’ said Toby. Laughter stopped at once.

‘I’d better start by going shopping,’ said Alice.

‘OK,’ said Toby. ‘I’ll ring Dad – hadn’t I better? I mean he ought to know about it, even if … And then I’ll tackle that.’ He pulled a face at the mound of dishes in the sink.

‘Dad will think himself well out of this,’ said Alice. ‘I’ll be as quick as poss.’

‘Fine. Do you need money?’

‘Toby, even viola players can afford food.’

As the door closed behind her, he went for the phone.

Marian woke as a small child. For a long moment she lay warmly awake, slightly puzzled as to her exact whereabouts, as she had so often been before. But it was indubitably childhood. The battered and faded familiarity of the chest-of-drawers, the bedside alarm clock, leaning backwards on angled legs, and topped with a miniature structure like a bicycle bell – the worn coverlet stretching over her – all these things which had been hers before she left home carried her backwards and displaced her sense of self. Even more vivid was the rapturously sweet sense of other people in the house – footfalls, quiet voices, a door closing, a few notes played on the piano – that wonderful sensation of a house which contained others, in which other lives also were sheltered and flowing, in which one’s own silence was not silence, one’s own stillness was not stillness – how she had missed it all this time living alone! There was the violently reminiscent faint penetrating odour of turps … only when Marian moved did she feel, astonished, the adult weight and length of her grown limbs, and come to herself again.

Of course, she was herself the grown-up; the children were downstairs, and the children themselves were grown up. She got up and went down to the kitchen. There she found Alice stirring a pot on the stove, and Toby rinsing brushes and laying them out on kitchen paper to dry.

The room was transformed; the dishwasher was rumbling away on an umpteenth load, and the dresser was bright with clean dishes. The floor had been washed, the counters wiped, a vase with dead flowers now displayed some prospective daffodils with tightly rolled yellow-tipped buds. She perceived with astonishment their competence, their willingness, Toby especially, doing the brushes.

‘I was going to do that, Toby,’ she said.

‘Done,’ he said, grinning. ‘Gran always said I was good at it.’

‘Did she? I thought I was the only one she let do it.’

‘More fool you two,’ said Alice tartly. ‘I made sure I did it very badly, myself. I hope you like garlic, Mum.’

‘Have you done supper, darling?’

‘I thought we had better eat before visiting this evening – don’t you?’

Marian realized she was ravenously hungry, and eagerly agreed. And yet her appetite was a chimera which faded after a mouthful, leaving her feeling vacant and sick.

‘There, Ma,’ said Toby, ‘it doesn’t matter.’

‘Alice cooked it …’ said Marian sadly, looking at the buttery, garlicky spaghetti on her plate.

‘It’s only spaghetti, Mum,’ said Alice, untroubled. ‘Shall I make you soup instead?’

Her children’s kindness was too much for her. She sat tongue-tied, overcome.

‘Oh, there, Ma, don’t take on,’ said Toby, and then, absurdly, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s too late!’ she said; the words had risen to her lips before reaching her conscious mind.

‘Too late for what?’ asked Alice.

‘Too late to ask her things – all the things I was going to ask her, and she was always busy, so busy, and I didn’t ask and now she can’t tell me … Oh, I left it too late!’

Her son and her daughter both put down their forks and looked at her tenderly.

‘What did you want to ask, Ma?’ said Toby softly. His eyes met Alice’s, wide and full of unspoken warning. They were both expecting an answer; they both knew what they thought she would have wanted to know; she must have wanted to know about her father, their missing grandfather, never named, never spoken of, whose absence had left their mother lacking some sort of sixth sense, whose absence had led in the fullness of time – or so they saw it – to the defection of their own father.

But what Marian said, at last, was nothing about her father. It was: ‘Oh, where were the beaches? Where was the Serpentine Cave?’

Someone had been there wearing a dress printed with bright blotchy flowers. Pansies, printed pansies. The dress had smelled of laundry – that washing line, open-air smell. Marian’s face had been leaning against the dress, as she was carried down. It must – surely? – have been Stella’s arms she was carried in; but if she rigorously divided memory from supposition, she would have to admit to remembering only the dress, not the wearer. They had to climb down a steep cliff-face. The cliff-top grass was shining and slippery. Marian was passed to another person, who held her firmly, and carried her down to the roaring shore.

But on the beach she had been alone. There were huge cliffs, and enormous pillars of rock, standing up out of the sea. It was a rowdy sea, with great glassy walls of waves rolling towards her, and falling into flat, speeding, lacy shallows at the last minute. She had been afraid of the sea; it was too big for her, here. She had backed away up the beach, towards the mouth of a cave. The cave glistened and shone. Down at her eye-level it had polished walls, smooth and coloured. Dark green and dark red, and speckled grey-white, marbled together like the lump of used Plasticine rolled into a ball when she finished modelling, but shiny where the Plasticine was dull. She had touched the gleaming rock, and walked further into the cave.

It was like a cave in dreams; or, perhaps, it was the cave that afterwards she dreamed of. The roof was rough and dark, and the floor was of smoothest golden sand, cool, firm and gritty under her bare feet. The polished planes of the walls were like coloured tombstones. And across the door of the cave there beat with slow violence a slowly rising tide. Right at the back of the cave facing her was a surface of particular beauty, deep red, with snaking lines of white and green. It was not darker back there, so she walked further in. And soon she saw that the cave was L-shaped; the light at the back was falling from another entrance, which gave out onto a prospect of more bright sunlit sand. So she went out by this other way.

Beyond the cave she was walking on a golden causeway towards another mass of offshore rock, taller than houses, and topped with grassy green. And in this mysterious place the sea was on both sides, on her right and on her left hand; roaring towards her in huge toppling glassy towers. She had thought the sea was always on one side, and the land the other. There were gulls calling overhead, and some of them began to call her name, screaming from some distance off. She went back into the cave, from which her own footprints led out to where she stood. But when she had walked back through it she found her way blocked, and she doubled back again through the cave.

The spine of sand beyond it was narrow now; it was awash with joining waters, running up the slopes and clapping themselves together in the middle. She ran for a little dry patch, and at once found no way back. She stood islanded, and said to the ocean, ‘Don’t!’

Someone came. A man came wading knee deep, shouting, and lifted and carried her. The only way possible, which was out to the cliff island ahead of them. He scrambled up higher and higher, pushing and dragging her with him, until they were on a flat grassy ledge, quite a wide one, with pinks and lady’s slipper growing in the grass. He crouched down with her in the wind shelter of a rock.

There must have been a sunset, but she did not remember it. All these memories had been sorted out long ago into some sort of sequence – a sequence full of darkness and puzzlement, but more orderly than the broken, intensely vivid visual ‘stills’ from which it had been assembled. It had been dark and cold. She remembered a great moon sailing up out of the sea, and icing the scene with faint but lucid light.

When she said, ‘I’m hungry,’ the man said, ‘I’m sorry.’ When she asked for her mother he pointed at a tiny point of bright flickering orange light, a fire burning on the facing shore, and said that was where Stella was. When she said she was cold, he took her on his knee, opened his jacket, and buttoned her into it, and she could feel his heartbeat. Now and then he unbuttoned his jacket, made her stand up, made her walk about, run, even. She didn’t want to. There were bright stars. Below them the moonlit water was softly clamouring.

How long was it? – she could not tell – before the waves rolled back, and reluctantly exposed a ribbon of wet, dimly visible sand? It changed its mind between one wavebreak and the next, uncovering and recovering the precarious link to the land. The man helped her down, and held her hand as they ran across between wave and wave, getting wet; but she remembered it not seeming cold – she was bone frozen already.

There were people round the fire on the cliff. They had blankets, and hot soup. They wore coats and scarves. They would not let Marian and the man come near the fire. And Stella was angry with her.

When she recovered enough to explain herself, Toby and Alice received what fragments of this memory she told over for them with considerable interest.

‘They kept you away from the fire because it’s dangerous to warm up too quickly,’ said Alice. ‘I learned that in First Aid.’

‘Is it?’ said Marian. ‘Yes, you’re right; I think I knew that – but I never connected it, somehow.’ She was bemused; she could actually feel the faint ghost of resentment, which clung about the memory like the fusty air in an old chest, dispersing at Alice’s breezy interpretation.

‘Was the man our grandfather, do you think?’ asked Toby. Somehow he avoided saying ‘your father’ which seemed too nakedly tactless.

‘I don’t know,’ said Marian. ‘Don’t you think I would know, if he had been?’

‘Perhaps if it was wartime he had been away for ages and he was home on leave,’ suggested Alice.

But Marian thought that somehow even if he had been strange to her, surely Stella would have told her that this was her father – surely such a thing as that could not have been unspoken. Though of course, with Stella one could not know. She might or might not have dealt with her child as another woman would.

It had always been a problem. What seemed natural to Stella, needing no explanation or excuse, seemed, often, weird and arbitrary to those around her, including her daughter. Nothing much, on the other hand, seemed weird to Stella, except her daughter. And on that reciprocal strangeness Marian had time to reflect in the days that followed, as she came faithfully to sit by her mother’s bedside, and think of things that might be said into silence:

‘Toby cleaned your brushes … Your neighbours have been asking after you … the vicar called; I told him you were here, I hope you didn’t mind? Did he come? …’ And when nothing brought a grunt, a flicker of reaction, a turn of the head, greatly daring she asked, ‘Mother, where was the Serpentine Cave?’

And then there was time to wonder, sitting in the room heavy with silence, on the little hard armchair facing the bed, on where it could have been, out of dozens of places possible, and why Marian did not now know where it was.

Stella had moved. She would move in somewhere – a little house in Concarneau, a flat in Rome, a concrete villa in the Algarve, a house in Argenteuil, a farmhouse near Avignon, an apartment in Siena – Marian lost count. Stella would enrol Marian in the local school, and leave her struggling with strange teachers, wary children, a gobbledygook language. She, Stella, would plunge furiously into the local scenery and paint it. Some time later, often when Marian had found a friend of some sort, knew the way to the local shops, had mastered the unfamiliar coins, Stella would suddenly have exhausted the landscape, and would move on. Stella did sometimes sell pictures; she toted them around cafés, she painted portraits which the sitters dutifully bought, she sent some home to England with departing friends who came visiting. But she also abandoned pictures, leaving numbers of them stacked face to the wall in the rooms that they left.

Marian could be reduced to tears, helpless rage in which she screamed and kicked, simply by the sight of a suitcase. And yet there was a consolation. Each new place was so clean and orderly when they moved in. Stella rented places that smelled of furniture wax, or of the coastal air. The walls were often white, the bedlinen worn fine with age and use. Even Stella could not create chaos – unwashed dishes lying on the trestle among the paints, the smell of turpentine, the clothes cast everywhere and hanging out of half open drawers like the aftermath of a burglary, the twisted and deformed tubes of paint, with caps forgotten, or dried-on solid, the stale loaves mustily green in the bins – absolutely instantly. Even Stella took a week or so to reduce her surroundings to the familiar condition of home. That week partly reconciled her daughter to the arduous business of learning local words, coinage, faces all over again.

For Marian had yearned for order. For things kept clean and put away after use. For spaces which specialized, so that cooking was confined to the kitchen, sleeping to the bedrooms; so that the toothbrushes could reliably be found in the bathroom, and coats and shopping baskets in the hall, hanging up. So that there should be a room, called the sitting room, la salle de séjour, the drawing room, il salotto, the lounge even, dedicated to the comfortable doing of nothing whatever, so that it could be calm, with clean cushions, folded newspapers, books in a bookcase – a room in which it appeared possible that people sometimes just sat. Above all, Marian longed for painting to be kept in a studio. For there not to be wet surfaces everywhere, for there to be a possibility at least of having no paint at all on her clothes, especially the ones she wore to school.

None of these things mattered to Stella. She thought about her paintings, and the light.

Once, after a particularly painful quarrel – for these differences between mother and daughter did not go unenunciated – Stella tried to explain herself, excuse herself to her daughter. Marian could not now remember what the triggering quarrel was about; not surprisingly her childhood was a blur to her now. She could barely remember which place was which … Mother, where was the Serpentine Cave? Perhaps they had quarrelled about a move. No – it must have been the occasion when she had been brought home in disgrace, having run amuck in a French classroom, bloodied the nose of a fellow pupil, refused to sit down …

The teacher had asked her what her father did for a living.

‘I have no father.’

‘Your mother, then?’

Groping for the word, Marian said, ‘Elle est une artiste.’

The other children tittered. But it was because the teacher had laughed too that Marian went berserk, and lashed out at the boy sitting beside her.

‘But what should I have said?’ Marian had asked her mother, as later they mulled over the calamity together, sitting facing each other across a table covered in congealed paint and abandoned coffee cups.

Stella had fetched her Harrap’s French Dictionary, and consulted it. ‘Une femme peintre,’ she said. ‘It seems I am une femme peintre. But it’s somewhat obscure. I might be une artiste peintre. But perhaps that sounds too like the artiste as in trapeze artiste, singer, stripper, performing seal, performing whore, or whatever it is you accidentally called me …’

And Marian had wailed at Stella, ‘Why can’t you be like other people’s mothers?’

Stella had not answered at first. She had wiped her hands on her overall, leaving a smear of flake-white on the blue canvas, moved across the room to the little bench that served as a kitchen, lifted the kettle off the gas ring, tipped the dregs of something out of a chipped mug, made herself a Camp Coffee, brought it to the table, and sat down facing her sullen and accusing child.

‘You see, Mara,’ she said, using Marian’s self-given, lisping baby name, ‘there isn’t any point in living just to live. In making oneself rich and comfortable and then just being rich and comfortable. What would it be for? Things have to be for something.’

At the time Marian couldn’t see anything she herself was for. Her answers, when they came, would be Toby and Alice, and Stella would have applied the same brutal query to them.

‘You find something to live for,’ said Stella, ‘and it takes priority. It must. Painting, for me. Only that.’

‘What about me?’ Marian had asked.

‘You’ll find something,’ her mother had said. ‘There are lots of things.’ But Marian had been asking a more dangerous question.

‘And are they all arty, these things?’ she had retorted, bitterly. ‘I think to make your life worthwhile something useful would be better!’

‘Then you will do something useful. But useful things, you know, are only for use.’

‘What’s for supper?’ young Marian had asked, baffled, and playing her ace card. Even her mother had to eat.

At bedtime that day Stella had arrived to kiss Marian goodnight – she did not usually bother – and said, ‘I suppose you don’t fancy that school any more. I think I might go and paint Italy for a while.’

‘Mother,’ Marian had said, ‘isn’t there anything to paint in England?’

Later shame was replaced by pride. An art teacher in the secondary school, in a mundane inland suburb of Brighton where they had fetched up, gave Marian a life of Van Gogh. The story transformed Stella’s total inability to sell paintings in England from a badge of failure into a possible waymark on the path to glory. Marian’s classmates at this stage of life mostly despised their mothers, whose neat homes, dated taste in clothes, and preference for dreadful dance music put them beyond every possible pale. The chaos and freedom of Marian’s life impressed them. And she was in the grip of a fierce and partisan admiration for her mother. Stella was a heroine, a self-sacrificing, aspiring martyr to her art. The desperate hand-to-mouth economy of mother and daughter, the near hardship they endured as the unsold paintings accumulated on top of wardrobes and under beds, the all too obvious disinterested lack of material greed which characterized Stella’s life-choices further impressed her daughter. Marian’s admiration was compounded by the knowledge that she herself would never be so noble; there was no cause or skill of anything like comparable difficulty and elevation that she, Marian, wished to serve or acquire. She was going to be ordinary.

The admiration while it lasted choked up her words, and further complicated her life with her mother. Had Stella noticed it? Marian doubted that she had.

There was a day she remembered, a bright summer day of the glassy light in which Brighton specialized, when Stella had driven the car up Ditchling Beacon, with a picnic in a basket along with all her gear. Marian had brought a book. She had spread out the rug, and lain on her stomach, chin propped in hands, book open on the grass in front of her, looking out over the view. The South Downs had seemed like a solid sea, made of green swelling waves, advancing like a great tide and stopped by some sudden ancient enchantment. Stella called her, and she lumbered up from the rug. There Stella stood, with two easels set up, two plain sized boards propped ready. Stella was wearing a white floppy hat, and a pale brown overall over her red dress. She held out to her daughter a brush, and a pallet.

‘Wouldn’t you like, just once, to try?’ she had asked.

Marian had looked at the huge prospect, the stilled movement of the crests and troughs of land, the heat haze just faintly now beginning to soften outlines, the light silken movement of wind running on the bowing grass under a sky like translucent bright shadows … She remembered the hours of labour, the misery, the striving, the painting over, the abandoned canvases, the subjects tackled again and again which characterized her mother’s life. She felt herself to be a tiny, incompetent pigmy, beside une femme peintre; and both of them cast away helplessly on the flood of the beauty of the world.

‘No, thanks, Mother,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve brought a book.’

It was later again that shame returned to her. She brought a boy home from college to stay a few days; he wanted to see Brighton. He seemed glamorous and sophisticated to Marian. He had played Hamlet in the college production, and affected an Olivier mode of dress – black polo-necks, and black jeans, and an expression of anguished abstraction. Entering the house, and having penetrated only the front room, he had said, ‘God, Marian, whatever are all these daubs? You don’t mean to say your mother paid good money for these?’

Marian had not briefed him; had no right to expect him to bite his tongue. His unfeigned contempt opened to her the horrible possibility that in the eyes of the cognoscenti her mother was not good – was terrible, even. The young man, on getting further into the house, and perceiving the confusion, the plethora of paintings and the smell of turps, cottoned on, and said not another word about it. He fell over himself to be courteous to Stella, who barely noticed whether he was or not, being as usual deeply engrossed. But taking his leave, three days later, he said to Marian, ‘I had no idea. It must be very hard on you.’ From then on, of course, it was.

For it is one thing to have been sacrificed in pursuit of the achievements of a genius; quite another to have been neglected and bundled around from place to place, to have had a fragmented education, and endlessly been put second to a duff artist. Marian could forgive her mother her childhood if her mother was brilliant; to have lived through all that for the sake of an obsessional hobby, for the sake of badly executed daubs, filled Marian with shame. And rage followed swiftly after.

Rage fuelled escape. Marian went to college, and seldom came home. If this now seemed ungracious to her, sitting watching her mother helpless, and probably dying, she remembered in her own defence how little difference her presence or absence made to Stella. Stella went on working absolutely regardless of who might be in the house, or what they might need for comfort – food, towels, a word of welcome. Late at night she would talk, over a shared whisky, but only about her painting. About Marian’s studies she never asked, her palpable incomprehension of her daughter’s choice of subject left unspoken.

But then, it occurred to Marian now, perhaps her mother had taken her studies as a silent reproach, as a move in the endless struggle between them. Marian studied pharmaceutical chemistry, a subject requiring neatness, orderly methodology, objectivity and calm. A subject she had thought of as indubitably useful – as far as could be from the hateful uncertainty of art, where a painting could seem valuable beyond all price to one person, and a worthless daub to another person. A drug had a proven and uncontroversial use. Its correct administration helped people. The possibility of iatrogenic illness had not then occurred to her. Only now, her mind drifting across occluded stretches of the past, now misty, now clear, did she remember seeing somewhere a lovely pharmacy window full of gorgeously swelling glass jars, containing a rainbow array of coloured liquids. Had she after all been following an inherited passion for colour and form?

At first Marian and the children were only camped in Stella’s house. It was a graceless modern house, much extended, set back from the village green, crouched behind a thick screen of holly hedge, dwarfed by a huge willow tree that spring was turning the colour of tarnished brass. Later it would drift gossamer wispy seeds all over the place like a split eiderdown. Stella had bought the place because it had been built in front of an old barn, a black, clapboard structure which the previous owners had converted into a games room, weather-proofing and insulating the walls, replacing the huge wagon-doors in the sides with enormous windows, and extending the house to meet it, so that there was an indoor way through to it, down a few stairs to the barn level. Here Stella had worked. It was on the stairs into the barn that Marian had found her lying stricken when she came for the weekend.

In the house Toby and Alice settled into the rooms they traditionally had on visits to Stella. Stella’s own room was left to Marian. For days they didn’t move anything. Apart from the clean kitchen, and the well-stocked fridge, everything was as found; they felt like guests, free to sit, but not to move the chairs. Toby and Alice in turn went down to London, and fetched their books and clothes. But it was a long way home for Marian; she went into Cambridge and bought herself two changes of ordinary clothes to make do. They began to take visiting Stella turn and turn about. And after a fortnight they did move chairs into the sitting room – they put an armchair to each side of the fire, and dragged the sofa across the room, so that they could all three sit comfortably.

Comfortably up to a point, that is. Stella’s furniture had come from her parents’ house, and had been in its day solid and respectable. It had probably come from the best department store in the city in which Stella’s father had been a shipping agent, and her mother had become the first lady mayoress. It had seen better days. The sofa had long since collapsed, ruptured by escaping coil springs, and broken webbing, and was covered with piles of cushions to build up the sag. The room satisfied the minimum requirements – there was a fire, there was something to sit on, but everything in it had been used almost to destruction. Also it was spectacularly untidy. There was a bookcase, in which the books were mostly in sets; Victorian novels with the names of Stella’s parents on the flyleaves. There was a piano, left open, and with piles of newspapers and art magazines stacked on the dusty keys. An unpleasant smell proved to be a liquefying cauliflower in a plastic supermarket bag full of groceries, put down behind the door and forgotten. The only normal-looking object in the room was a photograph of Toby and Alice taken five years ago, standing on the mantelpiece in a heavily tarnished silver frame. A rather good antique mirror with iridescence creeping across the mercury behind the glass hung over the mantel. No pictures. Oddly, no pictures.

The whole thing had that awful poignancy of a room not lived in. Apart from the cauliflower, which must have been fairly recent, it had been abandoned for years – it belonged to someone who had no time for sitting rooms. And yet they could not clear it up. Anyone can tidy anyone’s kitchen; but tidying all these scattered possessions without obvious rightful places was beyond them. And although it was Stella’s absence that the room spoke of; her total indifference to the things most people cared about, her life that went from bed to kitchen to studio, and never came in here; yet to tidy it would have been in some odd sense to obliterate her presence.

Meanwhile, they had to have something to do. Toby rented a television set with a video player, and rented videos from the village shop. They found a local walk along the ridge of a modest rise in the land – the last wrinkle of the chalk crests descending from the uplands to the fen.

‘It’s a good enough place, I suppose,’ said Marian to the children, over supper one night. ‘But I can’t quite think why it should be here, particularly, that your grandmother settled after so much wandering.’

‘To be near someone?’ asked Toby.

‘Or something,’ suggested Alice. ‘There were some pictures in Cambridge she liked to look at now and then, I think.’

‘There are good pictures in the Fitzwilliam,’ offered Toby.

‘She had a lot of space here,’ said Alice. ‘More than she could have afforded in a town.’

The hospital moved Stella into a side room, and then into another wing. She had fallen utterly silent – not a whisper, not a groan came from her sagging mouth. Toby thought he had set up a system. ‘She’s still there,’ he said. ‘If you ask her to squeeze your hand once for yes, and twice for no, she can answer questions.’ But either he was imagining things, or Stella didn’t want to answer Marian; and in any case neither Where were those beaches? nor Who was my father? could be answered yes or no.

On one occasion Marian’s visit was interrupted by that of a consultant. He picked up and read the medical notes hanging from the foot of the bed, felt for a pulse, pulled down an eyelid, and said to Marian, ‘Do you see any change in her?’

‘Only that she is quieter. She seems to have stopped trying to talk.’

‘I think she is slipping away from us,’ the consultant said. ‘Hard to be sure.’

‘Is there any hope for her at all?’ Marian asked him. ‘Any chance at all that she could go home, take up some sort of life again?’

‘Realistically, I should say no, I’m afraid. The longer it goes without sign of recovery, the bleaker the prospect.’

‘Then how long can this go on?’ Marian asked.

‘How long can what go on?’

‘This terrible state, neither living nor dying.’

‘I would tell you if I knew,’ he said. ‘I suppose – she didn’t leave instructions, did she?’

‘What sort of instructions?’ asked Marian.

‘A living will. Her wishes in case just this situation should arise. Or perhaps you can tell us what she would have wanted?’

‘I didn’t know her well enough for that,’ said Marian bleakly.

‘People often tell us that,’ he said. She was suddenly aware of how gentle his tone was. He was being kind, standing in the corridor on his way to some other calamity, lingering, talking to her. ‘You might like to think about it. Talk to other relatives. Go through her papers.’

Marian’s expression must have been eloquent.

‘It is quite certain she will never look at them again herself,’ he said. ‘Someone will have to sort things for her.’

‘I’ll ask the children,’ Marian said.

They confabulated sitting round the kitchen table.

‘I don’t entirely grasp what they want,’ said Marian.

‘They want permission – written if possible – to stop treating her. Not to resuscitate her if she has a heart attack, not to treat her if she gets pneumonia,’ said Toby.

‘But surely, they wouldn’t … ?’ Alice said. ‘Would they bring her back for that?’

‘They’ll protect themselves. In case we sue for neglect,’ Toby said. ‘Believe me.’

‘You mean we might have to get her out of there, to let her die?’ said Alice, incredulous.

‘Did she ever express any opinion about this to either of you?’ asked Marian. ‘She never did to me.’

Her children looked at her in silence. ‘Be merciful, Mum, and forge something,’ said Alice.

‘Well, let’s look first,’ said Toby. ‘It might be already there.’

‘I find,’ said Marian slowly, ‘it’s very difficult. It feels like an intolerable thing to do … spying … like reading someone’s diary by stealth. She would hate it so!’

‘You do her an injustice, Ma,’ said Toby. ‘She was – she is – quite a sensible person.’

‘Sensible?’ said Marian. ‘That’s the last word—’

‘She didn’t want the things most people want,’ he said. ‘But she was perfectly hard-headed at getting what she did want. I think.’

‘Mum, don’t worry, though,’ said Alice. ‘If you don’t fancy ransacking the inner sanctums, Toby and I will do it.’

So Marian was sent out into the garden with a book, while her children began, in a sombre mood, to search the house, setting it into some kind of order as they went.

It was that day of the year when suddenly there is a softness in the air, and one needs to be out of doors. Marian pulled a mildewed deck-chair out of the leaking summer-house, and set it up in deep grass under the apple tree, in the drift of falling petals. The creak of protest it emitted as she sat in it gave way to a deep silence defined by the audibility of bees in the flowering wilderness around her. A gawky overgrown cotoneaster with tiny tight pink blooms was loud with them, over by the sagging fence. A too bright, shifting dapple of leaves and light skittered over the page of her book and made her blink un-comprehendingly at the print. She never had been good at reading out of doors. Besides, she was weighed down with weariness. All the emotion, all the upheaval, the appalling sight of une femme peintre laid low like a fallen tree weighed her down, like that other silence at the bedside, defined by the bleeping monitor, or the discreet tap of flat-heeled shoes, approaching, retreating.

And was it fair, to be out here, mooning about, leaving the real task to the children? Grown children, to be sure – but she was aware of needing them, leaning on them, as she could never remember her mother leaning on her. And what were they doing here? How was it they were free to come, and even odder, free to stay? If she did feel it was unfair, she did not feel it enough to get herself out of the deck-chair. She lay still, and closed her eyes. A bird alighting in the leafy mezzanine above her began to sing in melodic bursts of fluent meaningless beauty.

And while reproaching herself for doing nothing, she found she had made decisions. No mother of mine, she had decided, will be shunted off into a nursing home. Of course, she may still be in charge of herself; we may find that living will. But if it is up to me, I shall bring her back here. I will make a bed in the barn, where she can have her working mess around her. I will see her through it – see her out. Whatever a perfect daughter would do, I will do it. She can call in her debts now, and I will make amends. Because of course it is only when I was callow and angry that I thought what lay between us was that she was a bad mother. To her I was a bad daughter. Whatever it was she lived by, I would not see it. What I chose instead she found worthless. It takes two people to make such a discord; if we couldn’t do anything else together, we will do her dying together.

This felt more to her like something she had discovered to be true than like a decision in the usual sense, where one feels one might have decided otherwise. It was not negotiable now it was known. The bird above her head sang an elaborate obbligato into her thoughts. It occurred to her that if her husband had needed her, if he had not left her, if he were not far away, and otherwise occupied, she could not have reached so simple a conclusion. Or, perhaps, the conclusion once reached would have been less simple. But Donald lived his own life. As to her job in Hull, she would give notice. There was nothing unique about being a dispensing chemist, they could replace her. And there were dispensaries everywhere. She could find another job when she wanted to. She had wilfully decided long ago to be ordinary, and she had achieved it, with what advantages it had.

Toby called her from the house. ‘We’ve made some tea, Mother. Will you come?’

She felt their excitement as soon as she sat down with them. A just perceptible tension in the room. She knew them so well they would never, lifelong, be able to keep things from her – or at least they would be able to keep from her the reasons for what they felt, but never the feelings.

‘You found something?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Alice. ‘Not what we were looking for. Toby found that.’ She grimaced as Toby flung open the lid of a tin trunk that he had placed on the kitchen table, the other end from the tea things where they sat. It was full of envelopes. He picked up a clutch of them, and held them out to her.

‘Just look at them, Ma,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t even opened them, and some of them are postmarked in the seventies!’

Tax returns, tax demands, electoral roll forms, bank statements, buff-envelope letters of every kind – soon they had the table covered with unopened communications, many of them stamped with URGENT and other assorted dire warnings. They began to laugh, awestruck.

‘But look …’ Toby picked up a knife and slit open an envelope at random. It summoned Stella to an interview, which she was to attend without fail, with a local bank manager in Cambridge, on the sixth of September, 1978. He urgently needed to discuss her account with her.

‘It won’t be funny sorting it all out,’ he said. ‘What will you do?’

‘Most of it will have sorted itself out by now,’ said Marian. ‘I shan’t do anything until the time comes to hand it all over to the solicitors. Close the lid, son. Drink your tea.’

Visiting Stella had become hard. Holding her unresponsive hand, talking into the silence, sounding foolish, knowing that given the possibility of answering such idle remarks Stella’s retort would have been crushing, they found now, all three of them found, that they were weighed down with guilt at having ransacked Stella’s house, felt as though they had been caught red-handed in some unpardonable act of busybodying. They had not found a living will. They had found other things.

Toby had found that his grandmother was deeply in debt. He had not been able to resist opening, reading, sorting, the contents of the tin trunk. He had hauled it up to his room under the skylights, put up a card table beside the desk to make more sorting space, and worked doggedly through the bills and letters. Stella had spent money steadily, which apparently she did not have. She had multiple bank accounts, which had all slid into overdraft, and then been left dormant. When she earned any money, as far as he could tell, she simply paid it into a new account rather than clearing any of the debt on an old one. It would take him weeks to sort out. He opened incredibly frightening missives, threatening distraint upon goods, proceedings in court, bankruptcy suits, and was appalled at his grandmother’s sang-froid in ignoring them. ‘Gran, how could you?’ he asked the empty room, and then realized since she hadn’t opened anything, she hadn’t known about it. Had she frustrated them all simply by not reading their letters? Had they all just given up and gone away?

He began a methodical tally, totting up the amounts owing on each account he discovered. He couldn’t imagine how she had got away with it. On the face of it she was mortgaged to the eyebrows, and that lamb chop should have been the last step into bankruptcy. Toby was appalled. Like many people who have always had enough money – the careful son of a prosperous and generous father – he was afraid of money, or rather of the lack of it. He understood gradations of wealth easily – could have measured the distance between himself and the senior partner in the stockbroking firm for which he worked in terms of exactly how much after-tax income, exactly how many promotions, it was composed of. Gradations of poverty were unfamiliar territory. He had no idea how little was enough; no idea what it cost to buy a loaf and a tin of beans. He had been doing well; by forty he would be provided for for life.

Or would have been, rather. He had not told his mother or his sister why he could so easily take time out. That he was under a shadow. Someone had been naughty; there was a nasty suspicion of insider dealing, and several people, Toby among them, had been suspended on full pay while a discreet internal enquiry was conducted. Toby’s own involvement had been marginal. He had overheard something in the office, and enlisted his current girl-friend. She was no longer current, as a result. Toby had lent her enough to buy a few hundred shares, but she had told her father, who had staked enough to make a difference, to attract attention. None of this would matter had other people in his firm not done the same – other more senior people. Cumulatively they had made a big blip on the charts, and now there was a hue and cry going on. Toby’s footprints would be hard to trace. But being nearly sure they couldn’t pin anything on him was not the point. He had so blithely got into trouble – sailed over the line into dishonesty without a second’s thought. Now he was ashamed of himself. At least he would never do anything like that ever again! But he wasn’t in a good position to blow the whistle on others, others senior to himself. He thought he would wait and see what they found out. It was up to them to find out. And meanwhile he could follow the prices, read the Financial Times, take a little time to reflect. Be a help to his mother, and sort out the terrible trunk. Twenty minutes of it was enough to convince him his own financial wizardry must come packaged with his father’s genes, and have nothing to do with any matrilineal descent from Stella.

While he worked methodically through the piles of paperwork, it occurred to him to wonder about that other line of descent. Stella must have had a little help producing his mother; had his grandfather perhaps been good at money, had a head for figures? He and Stella must have had remarkably little in common, if so. How could she have lived like that? Wasn’t she afraid of being found out? But it was he himself who was afraid of being found out.

Alice came to call him for lunch. ‘How’s it going?’ she asked him.

‘It’s horrendous,’ he told her. ‘She simply didn’t pay her debts, as far as I can see.’

‘Unless she paid in cash,’ suggested Alice. ‘She often had stacks of cash stuffed away somewhere. I saw her pay a gas bill once, over the counter in the Gas Board showroom, in handfuls of crumpled notes.’

‘Humm,’ said Toby. ‘Well, that would explain why she is now laid out under a cover of respectability in the local hospital instead of in a debtor’s prison.’ He was baffled. The cash economy, beyond the realms of small change, lay outside his province.

‘She always might have sold a picture,’ suggested Alice, leaning back in a battered cane armchair, and stretching her legs. ‘I’m going back to London tonight, if you can spare me. Just till tomorrow. OK? I take it I can leave you parent-sitting for the moment – no duty calls you back to the job as yet?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. It would be much harder, he realized, to tell his sister what had been happening to him than to tell his mother. Alice was only too ready to think the worst of him.

‘Social life?’ he asked. He was afraid she would mention Max, that she would be going to see the famous Max. Max was the leader of the quartet Alice played in. He was much older than Alice. He was cold and sarcastic to non-musical people like Toby, who had only met him once and instantly hated him. Alice lived with Max, on and off. And she probably was going to see him, but what she said was, ‘This is all taking much longer than I thought it would. I need my viola.’

‘Right. We’ll cope no doubt. Go and get the thing, and then we’ll have to listen to it. And last time I stayed with you you did the same three notes all day. Oh, Lord!’

‘The barn,’ she said. ‘I shall serenade the paintings in the barn.’

‘Those paintings,’ he said, ‘will have to be …’

‘… sorted. Yes. If she dies.’

‘When. You mean when.’

‘Yes. Meanwhile I suppose we should look for the will thing in there too.’

‘See what Mum says.’ For they both knew that they were all postponing the barn. That going in there and rifling through things there was a major step, compared to which ransacking every other room in Stella’s house was a bagatelle. Stella didn’t live in any other room in her house in any way that mattered to her; the studio was the only door that had ever been closed against her grandchildren.

‘Toby?’ said Alice, standing in the bedroom door, poised to leave. ‘Nobody has come looking for you – nobody has rung.’

‘Who were you expecting?’ He spoke sharply.

‘A girlfriend? Someone from work?’

‘There’s no girlfriend at the moment. And I have some leave owing. I told you.’

‘So you did,’ she said, disappearing down the stairs.

But it’s all very odd, he reflected. Like those fairy tales Mum used to read us when we were children. About getting stolen away. The tiny part of his life that consisted of being Stella’s grandson had suddenly ambushed him, and entrapped him. He was lost to his usual world, and could not tell when he would enter it again. And here he was floating, a non-participant – that’s why he had invented a role for himself, was busily sorting papers. The real job, as he saw it, was simply being on hand in case his mother needed him. Well, she visibly did need him, them both. But being needed in this passive sense reminded him dimly of playing cricket, of being a catcher in the outfield, waiting for a whizzing ball that never came.

Why think of cricket after all these years? He realized that beyond the bedroom window, beyond the garden hedge, he had heard something without quite registering it. The clunk of ball on bat. Time had been passing. It was the first Saturday in May, after all. They were playing cricket on the village green.

He tipped the lid of the trunk shut, and went out to watch the game.

Marian was alone in the house, writing letters. She was arranging to leave her normal life in abeyance indefinitely. There wasn’t much to it, really – the assistant pharmacist could run the shop, would enjoy it, and appreciate the extra money. A neighbour would keep an eye on the house. Not even a cat to arrange for. She had meant it to be a rooted life, a steady and quiet one, but could it really be that floating free was as easy as this? She looked at her watch, and got up to put her coat on. She fished the car-keys out of the pocket, and went out to the front. A man was advancing down the drive.

‘Can I help you?’ she said, scanning him. Stocky, sixty-something, sharp gaze under bushy eyebrows, dirty hands with broken fingernails, shabby clothes, something heavy in every pocket.

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ he said, marching past her and making for the back door.

‘It’s locked,’ she said to his back. ‘Nobody’s there.’

He stopped, and said without turning round, ‘She’s in the barn, then.’

‘No,’ said Marian, ‘in hospital.’

‘Shit!’ he said. ‘Now what?’

‘I don’t know. I’m on my way to visit.’

‘Oh well, then,’ he said, turning to stare at her, ‘I’ll wait. You can ask her. Tell her that Leo came – that I need the money now.’

‘My mother owes you money?’

‘Yes, she does,’ he said. ‘That is – she is paying for something in instalments. I’ve got to have the money, or else … Didn’t know she had family,’ he added. ‘Not much in evidence, usually, are you?’

‘What is it she is paying for?’ asked Marian, angered and cold.

‘Just ask her. She can tell you if she wants you to know.’

‘I can ask her, but she can’t tell me. She has had a stroke, and can’t speak.’

‘Oh, shit,’ he said again. ‘I’m sorry, I just assumed … I mean, last time it wasn’t serious—’

‘What wasn’t serious?’

‘Last time she was in hospital. They only kept her for a day. I wouldn’t have mentioned the money, only I thought … I don’t know what to do.’

‘Take yourself off,’ suggested Marian.

He didn’t move. He looked at Marian strangely – his expression at once wooden-faced and desperate. ‘Will she be all right?’ he said. ‘How bad is it? She’ll kill me if I botch her job.’

‘She isn’t in any state to do that. She may never be again. You need have no fear for your own safety,’ said Marian, and saw him wince at that.

He just stood there, in the middle of the drive, rigid. But he knew about some earlier hospitalization that she herself had not been told about. And she could not be sure her mother had not entered some agreement with a shady-looking stranger. She could not be sure of anything about Stella. But her own standards of conduct forbade leaving tradesmen in difficulties, forbade the postponement of debt.

‘A hire purchase agreement, you say? Do you have anything in writing?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s word of honour.’

‘I can advance fifty pounds,’ she said, sighing, ‘while we get my mother’s affairs sorted out. Against a written receipt.’ She opened her bag, tore a page from her notebook, and wrote ‘Received £50’ and watched him sign it.

‘Anally retentive old bag, aren’t you?’ he said, handing it over.

She counted out fifty pounds, in ten pound notes, noting that it left her short and would impose a trip to the cash dispenser on her way home, and cursing herself for a fool and a coward.

‘Thank you,’ he said, still looking at her strangely, thrusting the money into a back pocket. She watched him plod away down the drive. Then she got into her car and drove off towards Cambridge. In the hospital car-park she glanced at the receipt, thinking that she could tell Stella. It would make a thing to say into the oppressive silence. It was signed ‘Leo D. Vincey.’

‘Shit!’ said Marian in her turn, slamming the car door far too hard.

‘Mother, is Leonardo da Vinci a personal friend of yours?’ Marian asked the supine form under the sheet. ‘Is he a disreputable looking heavy in shabby clothes, not above demanding money with menaces, from whom you are buying an unspecified object on instalments?’ She got no audible answer, but an expression – a sort of jerk to the right side of Stella’s slack mouth occurred, which might have been a reaction to Marian’s message, and might have been coincidence.

‘I find it hard to tell, with you,’ Marian went on. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he could be anything but a sponger. He couldn’t be a blackmailer – what could he allege about you that you wouldn’t be indifferent to being known? And while we’re talking like this, Mother, I’d like to know something – anything – about my father. I’ve been wondering about him. We lost him in the war, you said – you didn’t say how. You didn’t give me his surname – I am an obvious bastard? I said once, perhaps I got my liking for tidiness, and ability at arithmetic from him, and you said no, he wasn’t an educated man, and he wasn’t tidy. Was he an artist? I asked you once, and you said no, he knew nothing about art at all, but he had a good eye. A good eye for tits and a bum, as well, come to that, you said. You said once we couldn’t go back somewhere, because of him – was it Concarneau? Was it Italy? Was it Spain? Was it where the beaches were, was it him who held me in his buttoned coat all night long while we waited for a tide to fall back? Where was that? That cave? You must realize that it isn’t much to know about a father. It isn’t enough, it leaves me not knowing enough. There he is, running in my bloodstream and in my children’s bloodstream, and we don’t know a thing. Those forms – you know those forms, Mother, that they make you fill out when you’re ill in some way, or on research projects – What did your parents die of? Has anyone in your family had cancer? We have to tick ‘unknown’ every time. Why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t I ask you before? I should have battered it out of you while you could still speak. And now what?’

She shrugged helplessly, and reached out for her mother’s hand. And thought that her mother had squeezed hers, for she felt the unfurled fingers tighten in a passing spasm that might not have been an accident.

‘This is taking too long, Mother.’ She said it sorrowfully, and saw what she would have sworn was understanding and agreement pass across the less frozen side of her mother’s face. ‘We have to deal with things. I have to read your papers, pay your bills, try to get a deed of attorney. We might have to sell your house; I’ll try not to, but we might. We shall have to clear things out of it. Oh, Mother, it feels terrible – a terrible thing to do. You would so have hated it, wouldn’t you? I’m so at sea in your life, I’m going to make horrible mistakes. Give me permission – blink at me if I may do whatever I think needs doing – can you?’ Stella slowly closed her eyes, and slowly opened them.

To the sister, who stopped her on the way out, and offered a cup of tea when she saw Marian’s face frozen with strain, Marian said, no, she hadn’t found a nursing home. ‘She can be in her own home. I shall look after her.’

The sister ushered her into the ward office, and offered a chair. ‘Would your mother have wanted that, Mrs Easton? Only many of our patients are desperately anxious not to burden their families, not to disrupt younger lives. Perhaps for you to give up your home and move in and nurse her isn’t what she would want …’

‘It’s what I want,’ said Marian. ‘She can’t always have her own way.’

A cup of red-brown tea in a thick white cup and saucer had appeared before her. She sipped it, unwillingly.

‘Is it money?’ the sister asked. Her tone was of gentle professional concern. In a minute she would offer an interview with a social worker, and a means test. ‘Is there a problem paying for residential care?’

‘No it’s not money!’ Marian snapped at her. ‘It’s love.’

And the word once spoken, like a bird let out of a box, flew away abruptly leaving silence and stillness behind.

‘We’ll keep her a few days more, while you think about it,’ said the sister.

There aren’t many hills in Cambridgeshire – none that would count as hillocks in Yorkshire. But one of the few gentle rises was on the road between the hospital and Stella’s house. Marian drove herself home and stopped the car on the crest. The towers of a cement works edged into view on the right of the road; on the left a stretch of England lay in sight, an unremarkable prospect, without any particular beauties – just gently undulant green fields, patched with scraps of woodland, and here and there a church tower. The season was poised now between spring and summer. A dusting of bright yellow lay across acres of rape, just now gone over, and nearer was a field of flax that looked like water under a grey sky, with the wind trailing swathes of green through it, rocking its fragile flowers. It isn’t that flat land is less beautiful, Marian thought, surprised, it’s just that it’s harder to get a view of it.

It occurred to her as she started the car that there was some kind of parallel. These hard days were like the gentle upswing of the minimal hill she was on – giving a view, letting her see what her life and her mother’s life had been like, which while being lived went unconsidered.

But it had been true, the word she never spoke to Stella. If she hadn’t loved her mother – if she had been able to manage the casual indifference, the dismissive mentions, the patronizing got-to-humour-the-poor-old-boot attitudes of other people in adult life to their parents – she would have been free. She wouldn’t have needed to strive so bitterly to be different. To be the shadow to every light in her mother’s life, the light to every shadow. To be practical, to be tidy, to be dutiful, to be attentive and kind, to choose a place and live in it, to stay put lifelong, to have no interest in art, no opinions on anything intellectual – it was loving her mother that had laid these heavy shackles on her, as though she could by being at the opposite pole in some way pay her mother’s unpaid debts, make up her mother’s shortfall, pay her mother’s unpaid tribute to convention, to normal conduct, to uncontroversial judgement about how to live.

This insight came to her with a guilty start, like a recollection of a duty neglected. Something she didn’t want to know, but ought already to have known – hadn’t Stella once told her that an unconsidered life was not worth living?

What needed considering now, of course, was nursing Stella. A hospital bed would be needed; it was back-breaking work to turn, wash, feed a patient on a normal one.

‘Where will we get one?’ asked Alice. A severely practical discussion was in flow around the kitchen table.

‘We hire it from the Red Cross, I think,’ said Marian.

‘And we put it – where?’ asked Toby.

They turned over the possibilities together. Not the kitchen. The bedrooms were small, and the cramped little stair with a wind in it was likely to make bed-hauling impossible. The living room was needed for the minimal comfort of whoever was living in and nursing, and in any case was rather gloomy, facing the screen of trees, and getting no sun.

‘The barn,’ said Alice. ‘It has to be the barn.’

‘Brace yourself, mother,’ said Toby. ‘It has to be the barn, and we have to turn it out. We have to, sometime.’

‘Yes,’ said Marian. ‘We do.’

Toby opened the barn door briskly, and the three of them stood together on the threshold. A threefold unspoken reluctance overcame them. Marian remembered herself small – with a grazed knee, or with impossible homework, standing at some quite different door. Toby remembered pushing Alice ahead of him, starving hungry, wanting to ask when dinner … Alice remembered her grandmother, so kind, so permissive in every other room in the world, so ferocious and self-defended in this one – there rang in the silence for all of them the familiar autocratic voice saying, ‘Get out!’

Here above all was where Stella had lived; here her absence loomed immanently, and it seemed ignoble and dangerous to take advantage of it. Toby was boldest, and unfroze first. They moved into the room. And the swiftest look around convinced them. The barn had two large wagon-doors, filled in as windows, facing each other amidships. One was heavily screened in coarse calico – that one faced south, and could be uncurtained to admit some cheerful light. The workbench on the wall against the house had an old butler’s sink plumbed in – for washing those brushes? – it would be useful. You could easily move the easels, and shift away the ramshackle shelving, with paints, tins and bottles, encrusted pallets, stacks of frame mouldings. There was a little cast iron stove that looked capable of enough warmth if kept fuelled. There was room for a bed, and a chair, and the clobber of a sick room, or at least there would be if the paintings were removed.

The paintings were stacked on edge, leaning face down against each other, dozens and dozens deep. Long lines of the tilted boards backed away from the walls across the floor space.

‘We could move them up there – perhaps?’ said Alice uncertainly. She pointed to the hay floor, a platform halfway up the walls, which covered some third of the barn. It was inaccessible, except by a steep fixed ladder. Toby scrambled up. ‘There’s room up here,’ he reported. ‘Quite a lot would go here, if we pack them tightly.’

Alice said, ‘We ought to sort them. We ought to see if there’s any kind of rhyme or reason in how they are stacked, and we ought to keep them together as they are if there is. Any system, that is.’

‘No-one’s ever going to care, sib,’ said Toby from on high. ‘They’ll all finish up being lugged into the orchard and burnt.’

‘They’re worthless, you mean? Gran’s entire life’s work, and all you can think is burn it?’ Standing below him in the middle of the floor, Alice was suddenly screaming at Toby.

‘Well, if they were worth anything, she would have been able to sell them …’

‘Everything comes down to money for you, doesn’t it? The great god money, the measure of all things! Just as well you’re so sodding good at earning it, because there’s fuck all else you’d be good for!’

He had opened his mouth to scream back at her, the old familiar adolescent in-fighting pulling him like a needle in a record track, when his adult self supervened. Why was Alice picking on him like that? Answer: she was unhappy. There she was, standing below him full of rage and misery, and it had nothing to do with him. It probably didn’t have much to do with Stella, either, it was probably about Max.

‘Not here, Alice, not now,’ he said. ‘Bitch at me some other time. Let’s get going. Change places with me, Alice – those things will be heavy. I’ll heave them up to you, and you can stack them, and Mother can watch and wait.’ One by one Toby turned canvases over and passed them up to Alice. Landscapes, and flower paintings, worked in thick paint, in bright solid colours. They might have been recognizable, Marian supposed – this procession of scenes must contain the palimpsest record of her headlong, disrupted childhood, she should have been able to name the places, if she could see as Stella saw. Instead she could name the feeling in which they were eloquent, urgent – that sense of displacement—

‘What are they, anyway?’ Toby asked, pausing for breath.

‘What do you mean, what are they?’ said Alice. ‘They’re all of different things.’

‘I mean, are they impressionist, expressionist, colourist, fauve?’

‘No good asking me. Mother? You must know something about these.’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Marian. ‘Stellist – that’s what they are. I don’t know anything about them; I wouldn’t look, I wouldn’t listen, I wouldn’t know, I was afraid of it – of them – I wanted to be useful.’

Her tone of voice brought Alice scrambling down the ladder to her side.

‘You were, to us. You were all the world to us,’ she said, squeezing her mother’s hand. Marian smiled at her. Though she had heard the necessary past tense.

‘But what would be useful now …’ she admitted.

She had been staring for some time at the canvas standing on the easel in the middle of the room. It was a new one; covered with a smooth grey-blue wash, darker below, lighter above. Its greyness and emptiness appalled her, as though instead of it giving way to Stella’s bright vision, it had captured and invaded Stella, emptied her of sight and sound … Marian was swaying on her feet, she couldn’t control her weariness – if she sat down she would fall asleep. As though thinking were work, as though feeling could drag you down like hard labour …

‘Hey, Ma!’ Toby was saying. ‘Ma, look at this! Gran kept something of yours. You must have done this.’

He was holding out to her a little picture, done on cardboard. It showed three big boats and a little one sailing past a lighthouse on a chalky-grey sea. Fishes swam along the lower margin. A line of houses endways up bordered the scene on the left.

‘No,’ said Marian, ‘not mine.’

‘You wouldn’t remember,’ her son told her. ‘It isn’t Gran’s, anyway; all hers are initialled. Hang on; look at this.’

He held up for her, back facing, a canvas on which was scrawled in chalk, ‘For Marian.’ Nothing else. Then he turned it over, and set it up against the canvas already there on the easel.

It showed a man sitting naked in a wooden chair, indoors, in front of an open window. He was looking into the room, and the cast of the light composed him of shadow, brightly aureoled. His hands lay slackly in his lap, preserving modesty, though they were the centre of the picture and drew the eye. Large hands, roughened, with broken grimy nails, held stiffly as though unused to lying at rest. His clothes lay tumbled at his feet, on bare floorboards on which, right at the edge, the familiar ‘S.H.’ had been painted in grey. He looked both muscular and thin, wiry, one might have said. And under the shade of his thick dishevelled hair his eyes stared out at them, unreadable, watchful, dark. Through the window behind him a patch of blue, a section of wall, a sketched-in schematic boat, and bright sky.

‘Who is it?’ said Alice, softly.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ Marian said.

Faintly, in the house, the phone began to ring.

It was Alice who took the call, and brought the message back into the barn. Stella’s dying was done.

There was a lot to do, then. A funeral to arrange. Telling Stella’s friends seemed an impossible task – they couldn’t find her address book, and Marian didn’t necessarily know who they were. Toby put an announcement in The Times and the Telegraph. Marian found a funeral director in the Yellow Pages. He was a quiet, soft-spoken, courteous man to whom it seemed possible to leave decisions. Neighbours came calling. ‘I didn’t know her well, but …’ Nobody had known Stella well, but they were very sorry. It was, evidently, a decent place. They were sorry they hadn’t known her better; ‘She was always so busy – you have to hand it to her,’ said the woman immediately the other side of the thick holly hedge. ‘I admired her for that.’

Marian and her children were cast adrift. The routine they had set up, each of them visiting every day, shopping and cooking for each other, was suspended. And then there were surprises. Toby went across to the village shop and bought copies of The Times and the Telegraph to check the notices he had put in, and later, Alice, flicking idly through The Times, found an obituary notice of Stella. It had not crossed anyone’s mind to look for such a thing.

‘Mum! Toby!’ she called. ‘Come and look at this!’ They spread out the paper on the table, and pored over it together.

Stella Harnaker, painter, died in Cambridge on May 30th, aged 84. She was born in Lewes, Sussex, on December 16, 1911.

Stella Harnaker trained at the Putney School of Art from 1928–31. She worked briefly in Florence, before settling for some years in St Ives, Cornwall, where she was a prominent figure in the St Ives Society of Artists. She painted landscapes and still life, in a broadly post-impressionist style. She was clearly influenced during the war years by the work of the modernists who had settled in St Ives. But she was among those who left the Penwith Society, founded by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, shortly after it was formed, and strongly supported the traditionalist faction in the increasingly divided St Ives artists’ community. After the war, Harnaker reverted to her pre-war style, and worked for some years abroad, before returning to live in Brighton, and then near Cambridge. In spite of the obscurity of her later years, Harnaker’s St Ives period works are of interest, dramatizing as they do the conflict between the modernist and the traditionalist vision, and she has always had a following among her fellow painters. She is survived by a daughter.

‘Golly,’ said Toby. ‘Did you know all this, Ma?’

And Marian said, bleakly, ‘No, I didn’t know all this. I did know about the obscurity. I suppose I survived her.’

Alice said, ‘So that’s where your beaches are, Mum.’

Toby put an arm round Marian’s shoulder, and squeezed her. ‘We’ll go there,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you there, and you can see your beaches again. Places change, but I don’t suppose beaches do, much. We’ll go. OK?’

‘We’ve got a funeral first,’ said Marian.

It was on a bleak, rain-swept afternoon, at the crematorium on the main road. It had seemed somehow unseemly to impose church on her in death, which they never would have dared to do in life. And yet even in a crematorium chapel one has to do something; the undertaker had arranged a chaplain. And there were people there. There had been one or two phone calls to the house, enquiring for time and place, but there were more than one or two strangers among the mourners. And, Marian noticed at once, the mourners included Leonardo da Vinci, tidied up, and complete with black armband and black tie. Brief though it was, the service caused Marian pain, for it included an injunction to look at the flowers, and see that they were all right, and a breathtakingly perverse and ignorant declaration that, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall have everything I want.’

‘It’s bad enough’, Marian reflected bitterly, ‘to be left alone in the world, to be an orphan, without being made to feel that one is a solitary survivor of civilization itself, of one’s language, of one’s religion. That one is living now among barbarians.’

The chaplain said, standing on a sort of stand that was ashamed to be openly a pulpit, that he understood very well that Stella had not believed in God, and that many of the people gathered here today in her memory likewise did not believe in God. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘God believes in you.’ It had always seemed to him, he added, that God must be particularly fond of creative people, being himself a creator. Stella would be safe in his hands; perhaps now and then – he liked to think so – God let a dead painter do the sunset for the day. Sometimes he was sure it was from the hand of Turner; sometimes it might be a Japanese printmaker’s work, sometimes it was Constable. He would look out for Stella as he drove himself home on winter evenings.

Marian thanked the chaplain sweetly, and invited everyone who wished to come back to the house. ‘But, dear Jesus!’ she muttered to Alice, who was looking inappropriately beautiful, black suited her so much, ‘What would your grandmother have said to that!’

Alice laughed. ‘I hope there’s enough to eat, mum,’ she said anxiously. ‘I wasn’t expecting many people.’

‘It doesn’t matter so much at teatime,’ Marian said.

‘Well, if they knew Gran they won’t be expecting much,’ said Toby.

Perhaps they weren’t; they didn’t stay long. Most of them were neighbours; one was an old friend of Stella’s from art school days, who came in a taxi all the way from London, a frail old lady with a stick, and whose taxi was lurking outside, making her tea lethally expensive. ‘You’re going to miss her very much,’ she said to Alice. ‘There never was anybody like her. Nobody at all.’

‘Were you a friend of Gran’s? Did you like her?’ Alice asked boldly, horrifying Marian who was standing beside them, offering a plate of biscuits.

‘No,’ said the old lady, surprisingly. ‘No, I didn’t. But I thought she was wonderful.’ Then into the silence she added, ‘Candid – like you, young woman.’ And then ‘I wonder who wrote that obit. It wasn’t very generous, was it? Perhaps Violet Garthen …’

‘We don’t know, I’m afraid,’ said Alice.

It’s an uneasy sort of gathering at best, a funeral tea. Nobody knows whether they are supposed to be enjoying themselves. Anecdotes about Stella probably better left untold hovered in the air. People began to depart.

Marian looked round at an empty living room. She sat down in the nearest armchair.

‘That’s that, then,’ she said to Alice. ‘Leave the clearing, love, we can do it later. Did that Leonardo person go without making a nuisance of himself?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Toby. ‘He’s just gone out to his car to fetch his things.’

‘What things?’ asked Marian in alarm.

Toby gestured towards the kitchen door behind him, and Leonardo came in, bearing a bulging duffel bag in one hand, and a bottle of whisky in the other. ‘Let’s stop pissing about with tea, and have a proper drink,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you need it as much as I do.’

All three Eastons were staring, not so much at him, as at his bag, dumped on the kitchen table.

‘I’ve come to stay for a few days,’ he said. ‘I reckoned you were going to need some help.’

‘We can manage—’ Marian began. She was too tired to sound angry. What was the matter with her? Why was she always tired?

‘Sorting paintings,’ he said. ‘You’re going to need help with that.’

‘Yes, we are,’ said Alice. ‘We do. Come and look.’ She led him through to the barn. He was still carrying his bottle. Toby and Marian followed. What faced them at once was the large easel, bearing the grey, empty canvas, and the small picture leaning in front of it.

‘Who’s that?’ Alice asked. ‘Do you know who that is?’

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘It’s rather good, isn’t it? Wouldn’t mind having done that. I’ve lost his name for the moment – I’ll get it in a minute, but I can tell you who he is. He missed the boat.’

‘What boat?’ Alice asked.

‘A lifeboat,’ said Leo, ‘what do you know about lifeboats?’

‘Nothing much,’ said Toby.

‘Pour me a drink and I’ll tell you about it.’

They settled Leo down at the kitchen table with a glass of his own whisky.

‘Have you ever lived in a place with a lifeboat station?’ he asked them.

‘There might have been one at Brighton,’ said Marian. ‘I lived there for a bit. I can’t remember.’

‘If you haven’t you might not get it,’ said Leo. ‘There’s even people thinking it’s some sort of government service, like it is in other countries. It’s all done by the coastguard in America, I’ve been told. Paid for out of taxes.’

‘Well, someone must pay for it, here,’ said Toby. ‘Isn’t it a charity?’

‘The boats and the gear are paid for out of charity, but the men are all volunteers. They’ve all got other jobs; but when the rocket goes up they down tools, leave meals half-eaten, and customers standing, and they get the hell down to the wharf. Unpaid. Well, the coxswain gets a pittance over the winter months, but nobody does it for money. They were all fishermen then, of course. Fishing was the town’s living.’

‘When was then?’ asked Alice.

‘Before the war. Well, the lifeboat continues to the present day, of course, but I’m telling you about thirty-nine.’

‘Was my mother there, then?’ asked Marian.

‘Yes. The fishing was declining already, and the artists could get cheap lodging, and have old sail-lofts and boat-sheds for studios. The town had artists like rabbits in a warren. I was there myself, come to that, though I was only a nipper.’

‘But there weren’t any artists in the lifeboat?’

‘God, no. I don’t know how to explain … Two things. First, it’s fiercely contested. It’s a signal honour to be regular crew. The young men can’t hold their heads up till they’ve held a jacket for a spell. It makes a man of you; and there’s only eight in a crew – not enough to go round for the natives, back then, and none to spare for others. Second thing, it’s bloody dangerous. Well, they have better boats now, I grant you; but even so. The open Atlantic beats right up to the doors of the town, and that’s a wicked coast right up to the Bristol Channel.’

Toby reached out and picked up the whisky bottle, and refilled Leo’s glass.

‘And there’s a special problem over the lifeboat, there. There’s got to be one. And it’s got to put out into the high seas, but low tide goes right out of the harbour. So half the time the boat can’t launch into water, but it’s got to be dragged across the sands on a trolley, and there’s a limit to how big a boat you can manage on a trolley. They have a submersible tractor now, but it used to take eighty men on two ropes, going into the water to their chins, before she could be floated off.’

‘So how big was it? What was it like?’ asked Toby. He had done some sailing, in San Franciso Bay. Not that he was an expert—’

‘I don’t know how big. I was only a nipper, creeping out of bed wrapped in a raincoat to watch. There was a wind out of hell blowing, and I got soaked to the skin. My mother gave me a leathering when she caught me, for risking my health … The significant thing about that boat was she was a self-righting boat. So she only drew two foot something below the water-line. She was a replacement boat, just like the one they had lost the year before, and there’s no way that wasn’t in everyone’s mind.’

‘What had happened to the other boat?’

‘She capsized. No loss of life, that time, just gold medals all round. But everyone knew how easily that other boat had gone over—’

‘You didn’t say why people do it,’ Marian prompted him. Of course, she had been reconsidering the great Leonardo during this exposition. His funeral black made him look more like a dignitary than a plumber. Her line of sight brought into view the receipt he had given her, propped against a plate on the dresser.

‘Why do they do it?’ he said. ‘It’s fear of drowning, I think. Horror at the thought. Next time it might be one of them. Ironic, really, when you think that a good way of keeping safe from drowning would be to keep on dry land in hurricanes. Religion might have something to do with it too; they’re all Methodists, if they aren’t Salvationists. They think they are in the hands of God.’

‘So that day in thirty-nine – what happened?’

‘Night. It was night. And a fearful storm. The rockets went up at two in the morning. The tide was out. Everyone was out on the wharf – the men to give a hand to launch her, and the women all standing at the top of the slip, wailing and calling out to their men – “think what you’ve got at home,” and “you aren’t going,” and – well, you can imagine. And it came clear she was short-handed. There was a bit of argy-bargy then. One man got into the boat and then changed his mind about it, and gave his lifejacket back. The coxswain said, “I want somebody to go.” And a man called William Freeman said, “All right, I’ll go. I’ll do.”

‘The coxswain said, “All right, you’ll do.” I heard him say it, I was hanging on a lamppost right there where they were passing. So Freeman put the jacket on and went in the boat. That’s what happened, basically. The coxswain was short-handed, and he took volunteers. Well, they got her afloat. And that boat no sooner got out of the bay than she went over. She capsized three times, and each time she righted again there were fewer men in her, till there was only Freeman left. He was still in the boat when she hit the rocks on the further side of the bay, and he somehow got through the surf and up the cliff, and to a farmhouse. The telephone lines were down in the storm, and the farmer had to ride to Hayle to get the news through. It was seven in the morning before they knew it at St Ives. It left twenty-one widows and orphans. Someone gone out of every web of family in the town.’

‘God help us, what a terrible story,’ said Marian.

‘Yes, it was,’ Leo said. ‘Inquests and funerals, and waiting for the sea to deliver the dead … for a few days there was talk of it having been all for nothing; of the boat having been launched on a false alarm. But by and by there was wreckage washed up in the coves along the shore to Pendeen. And bodies. More lives lost. Believe me, that wasn’t a good time to be someone who had missed the boat.

‘It didn’t die down, you see. There was hell to pay. All those funerals, one after another, thousands of people packing the chapels, coming from all over Cornwall and beyond. Everyone counting on their fingers, and saying well I saw that one down there at the launch, and I didn’t see that one. Where was he, where were you, where was I? Hell to pay. Now the second cox, he didn’t hear the rocket. He was moved into a council house somewhere back along, away from the sea. He’d lost his father, and he’d lost his younger brother, and he was distracted. Others living up where he lived hadn’t heard it either, what with the wind. The man that got into the boat and got out of it again, and gave his jacket away to Willy Freeman, he paid for that for the rest of his life, all but. People never got square with him about that. And there had been terrible confusion in the dark, and you couldn’t hardly hear yourself speak. And people shaking in their boots if they were honest, going, or not going with her. But let’s just say that your man there – Thomas Tremorvah, that’s who it is – was one who might have been down there, and offering to go, and he wasn’t. He hadn’t heard the rocket no more than Thomas Cocking junior, he said. But he would have heard it if he’d been where he should have been. Edgar Basset lived right near him, and Basset heard it and went down to the boat to be drowned with the others. But somehow Tommy Tremorvah missed it.’

‘So why did Gran give the picture of Thomas Tremorvah to Mum?’ said Alice. They were still sitting in the kitchen, all four of them, making a scratch supper of the remains of the funeral tea.

‘Did she? In so many words?’

‘It says “For Marian” on the back,’ Toby told him.

‘Well, then, it’s hers,’ said Leo.

‘But they’re all hers, anyway,’ said Toby. They had found a dead will, if not a living one.

‘And what can I do with them?’ asked Marian. ‘Of course I shall keep some but—’

‘There are impractically many,’ Leo completed the sentence for her. ‘Well, look, I’ve got a day to spare. I’m on my way up north, and not expected till Friday. I’ll put them in two stacks for you. Saleable and unsaleable. You need to get in cahoots with a gallery and put the saleable ones on the market a few at a time. I can probably find you someone …’

Alice had got up, and fetched the teapot from the dresser, moving towards the kettle on the side. As she did so something was dislodged and fluttered to the floor. She put the teapot down and picked it up. She frowned. Then she slammed the paper down on the table, and said, ‘What the hell is this? Is this something to do with you?’

It was the receipt signed ‘Leo D. Vincey.’

Toby picked it up and stared at it. Marian winced.

‘Is that something to do with you?’ Alice demanded. ‘What’s going on? That can’t be your name!’

‘It is almost,’ said Leo, grinning at her. ‘Leonard Vincey. And my middle name is Derek.’

‘But what are you doing?’ said Alice at him, through clenched teeth. ‘What’s going on? Are you positively trying to get under my mother’s skin? Why? Is it some sort of joke you’re playing at? Does it hugely amuse you to get people to misjudge you? You’re a sort of self-appointed touchstone for other people’s snobberies – is that it? How dare you?’

By now she was shouting at him, and Toby moved round the table, put his arms round her, holding her from behind, and said, ‘Alice, don’t!’

‘I won’t have people sending up my mother,’ said Alice, in a suddenly small quavering tone.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Marian said to Leo, anachronistically taking responsibility for what her daughter said. ‘Of course we’re all tired and overwrought …’

‘I didn’t do it on the day of the funeral,’ said Leo, looking at Alice. ‘It’s an old note. More than a week old.’ She wriggled out of Toby’s grasp, and sat down facing him.

‘So who are you, really?’ she said, grimly.

He cocked his head, looking at her intently, interrogatively. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.

‘One minute you’re talking like a tribal fisherman, and the next you’re talking like an art dealer.’

‘I was a fisherman; likely to be. Then Falmouth Art College, and the world my oyster. That sort of thing.’

‘Tell us how you did it,’ said Alice.

Leo’s face showed a brief passage of emotion, quickly covered up. ‘Stella,’ he said, ‘your bloody grandmother, gave me a box of pastels.’

‘That did it?’ said Toby. ‘She never gave either of us such a thing.’

‘It was a great big box,’ said Leo. ‘A wooden box in two tiers. Straight from Switzerland. Unopened. I can still remember slitting the paper bands that sealed it. I held my breath, and I ran my fingernail along the tiny groove where the paper crossed the edges of the lid and the box. And inside it had eighty-eight colours, all untouched. Every one three inches long, arranged in a marching rainbow. Glorious. There were little brass butterfly hinges on the back of the box, and a red elastic ribbon to hold your sketchbook inside the lid. I would have killed for that box, but I didn’t have to. Stella gave it to me.’

‘Why?’ asked Marian. ‘Why did she give it to you?’

‘She saw me trying to draw. I had brown paper, rough side up, and a jamjar with chalks she threw away. Little nibs and angles, the worn down ends that got too small to hold. I scrabbled for them in her waste-basket, and got a few colours together. She saw me. I was off school a lot that year, my chest was bad. When I felt poorly my mother sent me to sit in the garden under Stella’s window.’

‘When was this? How old were you, Leo?’

‘Must’ve been twelve or so. I went mad when I saw those colours. She said she’d spoilt me. She said I was better using dusty little butt-ends.’

‘That sounds more like Gran,’ said Toby, wryly.

‘Yes. She was a good teacher if you could withstand the brutal language.’

‘Stella taught you, Leo?’ said Marian, wonderingly. All her life she could never remember Stella having a pupil.

‘My mother got lessons for me,’ he said. ‘Stella rented a room to work in – a sail-loft that belonged to my family. When she couldn’t stump up the rent my mother took lessons for me in lieu.’

‘You’ve no idea how strange that sounds to us, Leo,’ said Alice. ‘All the time we knew Gran she threw a fit if anyone came near her when she was working.’

‘St Ives was full of that kind of barter,’ he said. ‘It was full of artists, and they hadn’t tuppence to their names sometimes. The locals took paintings or lessons in payment of bad debts. There are probably more good paintings in modest houses in St Ives than anywhere else in England. And bad ones, too, of course. Look, I’m knackered, I need to go to bed. Where am I sleeping?’

Both children glanced at Marian. But she had lost her urge to get rid of Leo. ‘The back spare room,’ she said. ‘I’ll share with Alice.’

In the middle of the night Marian eased herself out of bed, moving quietly so as not to disturb Alice in the other bed. Alice was tossing and murmuring, in the grip of some unquiet dream. Marian went barefoot to the kitchen for a glass of water. Leo in a threadbare dressing-gown was rocking himself gently in the wooden rocking-chair, a whisky tumbler half full in his hand.

She sat down opposite him, and he reached out and whiskied her water.

‘There’s something eating that daughter of yours,’ he observed. ‘Something serious.’

‘Yes. I don’t know what. She’ll tell me when she wants me to know. I can’t think why she should take it out on you.’

‘My age? Available father-figure? Real father gone missing?’

‘In America. These ten years past.’

‘Ah.’

‘I suppose you don’t know why Tremorvah missed that boat?’ she asked.

‘I don’t, I’m afraid. I don’t know where he was, and I don’t know why,’ Leo said. ‘But then I don’t know a lot of things. I used to hang around my dad and his friends, give a hand mending nets, and keep my ears open; or I’d help my mother pin sheets out to dry on the Island, and listen to the women, but it didn’t cover everything. For example, I didn’t know Stella had ever painted Tremorvah. I didn’t know she knew him.’

‘Wasn’t it usual to paint local people?’

‘Character portraits, yes. Folksy studies of the wenches gutting fish – that sort of thing. But—’

The striking, defended nudity of the man in the picture hung unmentioned between them, Marian shivered; her bare feet were freezing on the tiled floor.

‘Go back to bed,’ suggested Leo. ‘Why don’t you? I often can’t sleep. This is my thinking time.’

Something interesting was gradually emerging from Leo’s efforts in the barn. Marian wandered in to bring him some coffee. Alice had made the coffee, and filled the row of mugs. She needed coffee all day long, drinking it as a chain-smoker smokes. The sound of her practice session filled the house, grinding a rough zigzag of sound like a growling dog confined upstairs. But the barn was quiet. The easel still carried the canvas with the two zones of grey-blue ground, and the portrait of Thomas Tremorvah propped in front. Leo had simply placed canvases, face out instead of face in, in two groups, one each end of the barn.

At the far end a patchwork of sombre colour faced Marian – an almost lurid flower garden of blooms, blurry leaves, coloured shadows, highlit petals. A closer look revealed that some of the coloured patches were actually landscape – swelling fields, dark woods, black barns – but oddly, they were not really that different from the flower paintings. There was, Marian thought, a kind of gloomy fury in them, a fury of brush-strokes, a fury of the light. In one or two she recognized the subject – a church and field she had walked past going to school in France, a peasant chair that had stood under a fig tree somewhere in Italy. But though Marian remembered sunlight, the paintings had been done in black weather.

They were all initialled and dated, and Leo was putting them into a rough chronology. Gradually the murky colours became brighter, gaudier, raw. The style moved towards abstraction – or did it just become vaguer? Almost as though the painter had averted her eyes … Marian had a sharp and curious sense that the paintings did not play fair by the subject. As though the pictures formed a sort of complaint against the world, as though the subject had been worked up into a painting, as though seeing were an act of confrontation, an act of anger, of existential rage. It was perfectly clear why these paintings had not sold – who would want such disturbing things on living-room walls?

At the other end of the barn were far fewer pictures, and they were quite different – to Marian’s eye they might have been by a different hand. They were cool paintings, done on a white ground, shapes in grey line, and partly filled in with colour, as though they were half finished. Outlines of boats in a harbour, quays, lighthouses. Outlines of roofscape, higgledy-piggledy, with the sea beyond. Many of them were painted through a window, with casement and white curtains offering a broken and irregular frame to a view of part things – part of two boats, half a sail, half a man leaning his weight on a rope. Low headlands ran out from the right of those paintings which had a horizon visible. A lighthouse on a pyramid of offshore rock recurred, as did a green rocky hill tipped with a little chapel. They were all only partly coloured, but what colours they had were bright, flat and uniform. And they were calm. They radiated calm; as though seen with the transcendent radiance of memory. As though painting were a kind of expressive dreaming.

‘These are the saleable ones,’ said Leo, watching her.

‘But these are what one would keep,’ said Marian.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And then there are these.’ He was showing her the child’s pictures on cardboard, that Toby had thought she might have done herself. ‘Stella didn’t do these – she must have bought them. And in view of what she used to say about the artist, that’s a bit rich. But there you are, she’s got three Alfred Wallises. Just one would pay me what Stella owed me. OK?’

‘Leo, how much did she owe you?’ asked Marian.

‘Ten thousand pounds,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m seeing a friend this afternoon. I’ll finish this job for you tomorrow. Right?’

Marian was sitting in the garden, thinking. Mostly she was thinking about Donald, but also about Stella. Grieving, she was finding, is intransitive; its objects coalesce, it becomes a feeling about itself. Donald had hated Stella, but grief did not choose between them as life had necessarily done. And Marian had gradually swung round between them, like the slowly rotating beat of the Science Museum’s pendulum, at first taking Donald’s part, wonderful Donald, of whom her dragon mother would take no notice, for whom she would not stop painting, to whom she would barely talk. This hostile behaviour culminated disastrously with Stella’s desertion of the wedding breakfast, to the scandal of Donald’s family, so that Marian was doomed to the silent sympathy of all her future in-laws, as though Donald had married a social misfit of some kind.

Only very slowly had it become apparent to Marian what Stella’s crime had been. Only when other people committed it likewise, as of course they did, by and by. Donald liked to be the centre of attention. He liked to be the cleverest person in the room. Gradually their circle of acquaintance narrowed to exclude people at whose tables, round whose firesides, one found eminent guests, professors, famous musicians, writers. In the light of this later knowledge Donald’s positive detestation of his mother-in-law appeared differently. She was only a very glaring example. There had been a warning not taken, because not taken in. Blaming Stella, when one was blind with love, had been easier. That Donald was eminent in his own field – he was a popular scientist whose books were very well known – had not assuaged his thirst for attention. That he knew nothing whatever about art did not impede his adverse judgement of Stella’s paintings. Marian had thought innocently at first that Donald just did not like them – the ones he had seen, that is – as that early boyfriend of hers had not liked them. Later she had known that he could not like any painting that had not been acclaimed as a masterpiece by an accredited authority.

She had come to think very badly of Donald, though not to stop loving him. His posturing, his outraged vanity, could be encompassed in affectionate amusement. But only an unfailing wellspring of unqualified admiration – only deference would do for him; and he had found it elsewhere. She had stopped laughing then. His desertion was not funny, and the loneliness it left her with was hateful, and unfair. Above all unfair. He had left her for being unable to offer something he was not entitled to expect – something rationed in this hard world, and of which he had had more than his share. You would need to be stupid, or of very limited social horizons, to take Donald at his own estimation. He had left Marian for not being stupid.

Or so she had thought at the time. But perhaps it had more to do with sex. Marian’s colleague Susan had told her decisively that when marriages hit trouble it was always sex at the root of it. Simplistic though that sounded, it might, Marian supposed, be right. She didn’t know. Her experience of her own sexuality was uncannily like a struggle with an intricate machine, say a computer or a video recorder, delivered without a manual. It had proved possible to make it perform its basic functions – she had, after all, conceived and delivered two children – but it had never been possible to make it perform the fancier functions it was supposed to be capable of, it had never been possible to connect it to happiness. Was that why Donald had left? Had he basically got fed up with fruitless struggles with the tuning? He lived now in considerable prosperity in California, with a much younger woman. Yet whenever Marian thought of him, needed him, she called him ‘poor Donald’ to herself.

But Marian did not need Donald now. Just Stella. Yet, she knew very well, had Stella been alive she would have been painting, leaving Marian to her own devices. So Marian would have been doing exactly what she was doing now, sitting alone under a garden tree, her thoughts drifting. Surely then it should be possible to hold still, and feel no difference – to feel the world the same. Subtract the moments of attention her mother would have given her – those few – and very little was in any way changed.

But everything was changed. Marian felt like a tree when a great branch was down – unbalanced, straining to cracking point in the lightest breeze. Her whole knowledge of herself had been knowing herself unlike her mother; they had lived like adjacent counties on the map – each inch of territory divided by a boundary so that nothing was in both places, everything was coloured differently, and nothing that Stella was, was Marian. And now the line was gone and the colours were running together, and there was no knowing where she was. Or who. Except that she was no-one’s daughter. The whole branching and flourishing daughterliness of her life was torn away and lay broken and dying in the crushed grasses at her feet. It was the loss of a great part of herself that she was grieving for.

And here came her own daughter, walking into her mothering shade. Alice, leaf-dappled green and gold all over her pale dress, her turbulently unkempt red hair, coming calling her in.

‘Mum? Spare a moment?’

‘Coming,’ said Marian. She felt the wrench – the weight of being mother, and not daughter, like a crack in the heartwood of the world.

Alice came to her, lifted Marian’s arm across her bony shoulder, and twined her waist as they walked together back toward the house – meaning, no doubt, only a gentle show of love, but as one helps a casualty to walk.

In the barn the pictures were waiting, sorted. Leo had finished, taken his rucksack, and left.

‘Look, Mum,’ Alice said. She was pointing to a smallish painting, done on board. The scene was of a golden beach, curving like a lateral new moon round a brilliantly azure and improbable sea. A low grassy promontory stretched across the horizon, pointing towards a lighthouse on a rock. A green drum-shaped buoy topped with a slanting yellow pole floated a little way out. The picture had the meticulous, innocent verisimilitude of a diagram, and clear bleached colour – pale sand, peacock sea.

‘These ought to be your long lost beaches, Ma,’ said Alice. She was holding another picture, showing this time a vast expanse of sand, crossed with a silver-blue streak of water, as of a river reaching the sea across a beach. Behind it the white smoking towers of a power-station rose on a green shore. Unusually for Stella, the picture had a title: Low Tide, St Ives.

‘Yes,’ said Marian, softly, ‘I think they are.’ Shining memory stirred, unfocussed as she looked. With the third picture – a view of a beach from above, fringed with raggedy wild flowers, and in prospect the harbour, the chapel on the hill behind it, the crook-armed quay protecting tilted boats, high and dry, she suddenly felt the frame expand, dissolve. She knew that if she turned a little to the right she would see the lighthouse, far away. She knew that just ahead of her to the left a path would plunge down that zigzagged, and took her to dry, silken, engulfing sands at the back of the beach. She knew that behind her was home – the windows and doors standing wide, and the blind billowing stiffly in the breeze, like a salt-encrusted sail. She could hear the tapping of the little acorn-shaped bead on the dangling drawcord on the blind, as it flew in and out across the sill. The knowledge filled her with joy – she could go on and on – she knew how as you ran out into the expanse of sand it hardened under foot, and cooled until you were running on the smooth firm platform left by the falling tide, and then in the glassy waves, the scalloped lace-edged dancing petticoats of the sea. And if you turned round from there, and looked up you would see … memory faltered and fled.

‘What do you think, Ma?’ said Toby. He had come in behind her, from the house.

‘I think I must go there. At once. Today – well, it’s a bit far, isn’t it? Tomorrow.’

‘No problem,’ said Toby. ‘I’ll take you.’

Alice said, ‘I think I’d better get back. They’ll be working on the next concert by now – in fact I think – Mum, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can go. Do you mind?’

‘I’d always rather have you with me,’ said Marian. ‘But of course you must get back. You have your own life to live. And you’ve given me all this time already.’

Later Marian found Leo’s incriminating receipt had gone from behind the teapot on the dresser. A fifty-pound note was in its place.

She and Toby arrived in darkness. It took longer than they would have thought possible – longer to drive Alice to her London train, close down the unfamiliar house, check the doors and windows and lights, empty the fridge, leave the key with a neighbour, stop the milk, pack their things and load Toby’s car. Longer to drive right down England to the end, and into Cornwall. There was plenty to engage the eye in the cloudy-bright, early summer day. The trees in almost Day-Glo green leaf, acres of wheat, acres of barley swathing the gentle lowlands, and giving way to pasture on the uplands, the regions of chalk and bell-barrows, at the heart of which Stonehenge rose suddenly into view, rising from behind a slight crest beside the road.

Beyond Bodmin they were driving across bleak, rather flat land – what in the north was called a ‘moss’ – barren, marshy, and luridly lit by a sunlight that had slipped under the cloud cover, and was burning like bright embers in the ash. Then the darkness rolled up from the Atlantic, and they saw only road markings, signs, cat’s-eyes.

Somewhere along the way, Marian asked, ‘Toby, surely that leave you said you were due for must be running out by now, and you show no sign of being bothered at coming this great long way.’

‘Don’t you want me, Ma?’ he said.

‘You know I do. But …’

Toby explained about insider dealing, which Marian took a while to grasp. About how only a few people had the knowledge which had done the damage, and he was one of them. He admitted being under suspicion, but avoided owning up to any justification for it. He was ashamed to, with a sharpness that took him aback. He mentioned instead that various people senior to him—

‘But son, if you say you know who it was, hadn’t you better say?’ Marian asked him. ‘What about your own prospects? Won’t you be under a cloud?’

‘I’ll have to live it down, then,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it, Ma.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Marian. ‘It’s what mothers do. I’ll do it quietly. I’m worried about Alice too. Something’s wrong. Do you know about it, Toby?’

‘Don’t ask me, Ma,’ he said. ‘I take after you. I don’t get it.’

‘It’s artistic temperament, you mean. It’s music?’

‘That too. She’s had a bust-up with Max.’

‘Well, that might not be such bad news in the long run … What was it about, do you know?’

‘About missing rehearsals to come up to see Gran. He threatened to boot her out of the quartet. She’s been worried sick about it.’

‘Well, she’s gone back now.’ Marian was baffled. She was afraid for both her children, afraid for the sudden lacunae in what had seemed lives set fair, and full of prospect. Well, professional prospect, anyway; to be honest, since Toby had no steady girlfriend, and Alice was playing live-in-chattel to a man old enough to be her father, Marian felt no satisfaction with that aspect of their prospects.

At last the signs on the endless road offered St Ives, and they turned off.

‘I expect there’s a station car-park,’ said Toby. ‘We’ll try and find that while we get our bearings.’ There was. The moment they got out of the car they could hear the sea, chuntering away to itself below the wall. Marian crossed the wet tarmac – it had rained in St Ives – and leaned over. She could just discern, faintly pallid in the velvet night air, the white bolsters of foam crossing the beach below her. The air smelled rinsed and salty. ‘Oh!’ she said.

They walked out of the station, found at once a flight of steps descending, and went down them, instinctively heading for the water’s edge. But they were not at the water’s edge, but in a narrow little street with steep front gardens to the houses one side, and shoulder to shoulder cottages on the other. It was lit with staccato pools of lamplight, it glistened with rain, and the sound of the sea came over the rooftops in broken gusts. There were wind-harassed plants in window-boxes, and bed and breakfast signs. In a few yards they had found their billet for the night, and Toby went back to fetch their cases.

They were hungry, but there were places to eat – a modest-looking bistro just on the corner. ‘Toby,’ said Marian, as they strolled back after the meal, ‘thank you for coming. I don’t think I’d like to be doing this alone.’

But at first she was alone that first morning, because he slept late and she woke early. She woke to the sound of the sea. The well-known, long forgotten sound of clamorous shouted whispers, sighing and shushing with a rhythm of thrusting and withdrawing like sexual play. From where Marian lay it was loud and quite precise, each soft climax an audible ejaculation half a mile wide. The curtains in her room were not drawn quite together, and a dancing undulant riband crossed the ceiling above her bed in a widening net of reflected light.

She drew back the curtain, and found that the window was right over the sea’s edge; she found herself looking past the harbour quay, and out over bright blue water to the lighthouse, both suddenly seen and suddenly remembered, mistily white in a hazy morning distance. There were the headlands, the near one green, the further one lilac. And the sea that began beneath her a modest green like the glass of a white wine bottle, deepening to turquoise in the middle distance, had gathered at the horizon a concentration of bright blue fierce enough fully to deserve the name ‘ultramarine’. Marian stood tranced, wondering if she was remembering the paintings seen only yesterday – the paintings of the beaches – or something real teasing her from just beyond the limit of recollection, from some time before the dawn of a continuous Marian. She looked at her watch. There was more than an hour to go before breakfast. She got dressed rapidly and went out.

There was a pearly sky, and the golden beach – Porthminster, she gathered from a sign forbidding dogs in summer – had only one other walker. Marian wandered, deeply bemused, along the beach. The morning light cast the heights behind the beach into shadow, but there were houses there, and a bridge of some kind. On her right the shining bay, still more or less the view from the window just now. She walked on the glossy slopes of sand just relinquished by the falling tide, and her footprints filled with water as she went, and elided behind her. She waved at the other walker as they passed each other.

‘Did you see the seals?’ he asked.

‘Seals? No! Where?’

He pointed. There were two black faces bobbing just beyond the breaking surf, that seemed to be staring at Marian. They were growling and barking at each other in a kind of grumbling conversation that made Marian and the stranger laugh.

‘There are dolphins, sometimes,’ he said, moving on. But there couldn’t be, could there? Certainly there were none this morning. She watched the seals till they swam round the rocks of the point at the end of the beach, and disappeared. The sands ended in a tumbled rocky cliff, blue-black with mussel shells, and fringed with slippery gold-brown kelp. Marian turned to walk back.

Facing this way the town was in view, appearing to be floating high above the water. There was the crooked sheltering arm of the quay, with its two lighthouses; the clustered cottages, all roofscape and windows; the white hotel perched on the rocks, past which she had come down to the beach. A little square white beach café stood at the foot of the cliff on her left.

‘I have come too far,’ she thought. And then: ‘How do I know? Too far for what?’

But, nevertheless, she began to retrace her steps, walking up the beach as well as along, to go behind the café. And as if she had known it there was a path there, ascending the flowery verdancy of the cliff. It took its time over the steep, bending and bending back, crossing the railway line, offering wild garlic and bluebells shrinking into the grass, and the delicate stars of stitchwort to passing walkers, and reaching eventually the viewpoint – precisely the viewpoint – from which Stella’s ‘Low Tide’ picture had been made. There was a little blue painted garden bench set there and Marian sat down on it. Remembering, dreaming, and experiencing had become fused. She did not know which she was doing. From here she could see the sea above and behind the houses round the harbour, and was looking down at and beyond it all. The vistas had the wildness of landscape and the open, dangerous seas as well as the nested safety and friendliness of human habitation. There was freshness in the air as though all the ancient rocks and immemorial sands, and hundred and two-hundred-year-old roofs and mellow walls, had been newly made, mint struck clean that very morning. With a tackety-tack noise, freighted with nostalgia, a train ran into the station, passing just below where she sat. And if she turned her head a little, there across the bay was the lighthouse, emerging from the mists of the morning sharp and clear, as though it had come nearer, bringing its backdrop of receding headlands with it.

It felt like remembering music. As though someone hummed a bar or two of some great music – a Haydn quartet or something – and one’s mind began silently singing the rest, phrase after lovely phrase flowing in one’s inner ear perfectly replayed. And, of course, home was behind her. Marian found she knew that. She got up, and looked around, turning her back to the sea. Behind her was a gate in a garden wall – or a gap with gateposts, rather, for the gate itself had gone. A blue gate, she remembered, and in the same moment saw the remaining flakes of blue paint on the iron bolts that had formed the hinge, still jutting from the granite posts. She walked in, and ascended a terraced garden, all steps, to a driveway sweeping round a dignified granite house. Bay windows, a stained glass window lighting the stairs, a grand front door between two stone lions, mounting guard.

Marian rang the doorbell. A woman came quickly to the door, and saying, ‘You’re early,’ let her in.

But the moment she was inside, the dream and the recollection faded together. Marian was standing in the hall of a strange house, looking at a stranger.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry; I used to live here. It would be very kind if you could just let me see my old bedroom—’

‘But you can see everything,’ the woman said, and then ‘Didn’t Hickson send you? Aren’t you from the agency?’

‘No … I … Are you selling this house?’ Marian asked, struggling to keep a hold on reality in the clouds of dreaming.

‘Perhaps,’ the woman said. ‘We might have to consider that. For the moment we are letting it.’

‘I’ll take it,’ said Marian. ‘Right through. What will the rent be for a long let?’

‘But you haven’t seen it yet,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t you want to see it?’

She must, as a child, have spent hours on beach and in garden, and more hours gazing out of windows. Every outlook was familiar, every room unknown. It was a large house, having generously proportioned rooms, with high ceilings and mullioned bay windows. It had four bedrooms – three on the first floor, and one huge attic that stretched from end to end of the roof space, lined with some sort of fragrant wood panelling. A scuffed and scruffy coconut matting covered the floor of this room.

‘The floor-covering’s not up to scratch here, I’m afraid,’ the owner said – she had been making deprecating remarks all round the house, which was furnished modestly enough with family things showing family wear and tear. Now Marian tore her eyes away from the tops of wind-tilted trees showing through the dormer window, and considered the matting.

‘It’s a big room,’ the owner told her. ‘New carpeting would cost a lot.’

‘But bare boards would look good up here,’ said Marian.

‘They would cost as much as carpet, I’m afraid,’ the owner said, stooping to lift a corner of the matting, and turning several yards of it back. The floor was covered with paint. Not as in a painted floor – but thickly encrusted with daubs and spills and hardened-off worms of colour from tubes, and footprints in spills trodden all over the place and then covered and recovered with more globs and drips, and blots, in violent multicolour – a kind of chaotic graffiti of repeated accident and neglect.

Marian grimaced. ‘That will have been Stella,’ she said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Stella Harnaker. My mother. She was an artist. She must have used this room as a studio.’

‘We didn’t buy from a Harnaker. It was from a Mrs Godfrey.’

‘Stella would have been long ago. Before 1945.’

‘Well, none of the owners since has faced up to having it stripped. It’s all set rock hard, I understand. And we couldn’t face it either, we just covered it over and used the attic for a playroom. That’s why the matting is shabby, I’m afraid.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Marian. ‘Not the matting, not anything. I would like to rent from you for as long as possible.’

‘We have somebody coming at nine,’ the owner said, unhappily, looking at her watch. ‘From the agents. And you are somebody else altogether.’

‘I will give you references,’ said Marian. ‘And three months’ rent down. I’ll go back to my room and get my cheque book right away – I came without anything – I was just walking before breakfast—’

‘You haven’t had breakfast?’ said the owner. ‘I’ll make you some coffee and toast. Come and sit in the kitchen and talk to me. After all, the real people are late, and a bird in the hand—’

‘I’ll be the bird in the hand,’ said Marian.

Later, with everything talked over and agreed, she left, and went almost skipping, so light she felt, down the path bending and re-bending to the back of the beach. An extraordinary lightness of heart propelled her – she felt like a kite that flies only when its string is firmly anchored. At the little café – now taking down its shutters and making ready to offer not only vanilla ice-cream but moules marinière and grilled megrim sole – she stooped to shed her sandals, and ran sinking into the soft sand, going back along the beach. And here was Toby coming towards her – coming to look for her, of course, though he pretended not to be, and as soon as she was recognized he adopted a swaggering unconcerned manner, as though he just happened to be walking, accidentally to meet her.

‘I’ve rented a house,’ she said. ‘I’m staying for a while. You too – for as long as you can – if you like, of course.’

She saw in his eyes a strange expression, one that she suddenly recognized, knew must often have been in her own eyes, looking at Stella – that cautious, oh-God-what-next look of child confronting crazy parent. Laughing she said, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s the right one! I must get my cheque book,’ she added, and waving at him she ran along the edge of the waves, which now the tide had turned were larger, and pawed at her, jumping at her skirt, and wetting her to above the knees as she ran. ‘Three days!’ she called back to him, over her shoulder. ‘We can have it in three days!’

On that first day Toby set out to explore, to discover where his mother had landed him. He liked exploring. Especially in this kind of weather – cool, bright and breezy, with a salt tang on the air. He was wandering round a tight little town, almost watertight. Built long ago round two ways of making a living, and both of them bloody dangerous – fish and tin. Toby knew about the tin, and knew it was gone now, from reading commodity reports. Nothing left of it to see, above ground. Fishing had come first and lasted longest, though that too had almost gone now. There were a dozen or so little working boats in the harbour, tilting at their moorings on the sand. Having only a half-tide harbour can’t have helped. But the town was made for fishermen; it was built along a sandbar between the outer beach and the harbour, running out along to a green headland, with a little mariner’s chapel on top, overlooking the warren of streets and clustered houses. It was picturesque – a whole town built on a warren of pilchard cellars round a harbour. Everyone cheek by jowl, packed into little streets you could shake hands across.

There were an amazing number of these narrow little lanes with pretty cottages, making nooks and corners with each other, climbing steeps and twisting round bends, peering at each other through dormer windows, shuffling shoulder to shoulder, jostling each other for ‘Sea Glimpses’. The most cursory glance in the estate agents’ windows – Toby liked to keep an eye on property prices – revealed how desirable ‘Sea Glimpses’ were; those, and parking places. The folk who built the town had not been interested in either. Well, Toby thought, of course they weren’t interested in parking, though they might have been interested in bringing a cart to the door, and some of these narrow ginnels, these stepped alleyways, and enclosed courtyards, would not have allowed even that. And how odd it seemed that they positively turned their backs to the sea, and unfortunate really, now that they earned a living from doing bed and breakfast for tourists. But even in an irregular little square, or a crooked street in which the sound of the sea rocked to and fro and caressed his hearing, no prospect of the sea itself was possible. As though once they were home and dry, he reflected, they didn’t want to know, they didn’t want to see. And perhaps they didn’t, perhaps that was right.

Although, how could they not? he wondered, seeing down a steeply descending street a stretch of harbour water, not blue at all, but blazing golden-green, and sparkling with sprinkled stars of incandescent and extinguished highlights. He went down towards it at once.

And then there were boats. Very little boats in most of the harbour, but maybe a dozen fishing boats, using the quay. And one superb yacht, anchored a little way out. Toby looked at it lustfully, assessing its clean lines, guessing at the cost. He loved boats. His father in America had taught him sailing. He had a sailing boat in San Francisco Bay. Nothing in Toby’s life so far had given him more joy than the lean of a boat in the wind, the start-up of the babbling water under the prow. Now he stood on the end of the quay looking at the yacht, musing for quite a time.

While he was standing there a little fishing boat came bustling in, with a trail of shrieking gulls behind it, like dragged, tattered bunting. He smiled as it reminded him of a plough pursued across the fields – ‘I will sail the briny ocean, I will plough the salt sea …’ he hummed to himself.

Someone yelled, ‘Hey, Mathy!’ and a serpentine rope came sailing up from the boat deck twenty feet below him. He caught it easily, one-handed, and swiftly twisting loop on loop dropped a clove hitch over the nearest bollard, and drew it tight. ‘Come for a drink?’ said the voice below. ‘’Ang on and come for a drink?’

But the favour didn’t seem worth the payment, and, embarrassed, suddenly shy, Toby walked away. Away from the harbour, into the warren of streets, and out again, finding himself looking up across the grassy hill to the chapel. Once up there he could see yet another prospect of the town.

Toby sat down on a wooden bench in the lee of the chapel wall, out of the wind, to look at the spectacular vistas of golden beaches, both sides of the headland, and the Victorian town, a result of the railway, clearly, clambering back up the inland slopes. An old man was already sitting there, his hands crossed on his walking-stick, a fat little dog lying on the ground at his feet.

‘Handsome day,’ he said to Toby.

‘Glorious,’ said Toby. ‘Wonderful light. Is it always like this?’

‘Bless you, boy, not always. Different every day. That’s why the artists come.’

‘I don’t always expect to see what the artists say they see,’ said Toby. ‘But I can see this …’

‘It’s quite real,’ the man said. ‘We be upwind of everything in England that makes dust. Including all the ploughing. It’s dangerous light – you wouldn’t believe how quick the tourists skinburn. You won’t catch local people ’alf naked on the beaches.’

‘Are you local?’ asked Toby.

‘No. I’m not local, I’m a native,’ the man said. When Toby blinked he explained, ‘Locals live here. Natives were born here.’

‘I suppose if you’re a native, tourists are hard to bear,’ said Toby.

‘They’re a living,’ the man said. ‘And it’s not as bad as it used to be. The rabble go to the Costa Brava now. We do prefer the artists; they’re more faithful, year-round.’

‘Who am I speaking to?’ asked Toby. The dog was pulling on the leash now, and his companion got up to go.

‘I’m Mr Stevens,’ the man said. ‘But so’s half the rest of the town. If you wanted to find me you’d have to ask for Nubby. Nubby Stevens.’

‘Nubby?’ said Toby.

‘There’s not enough names to go round,’ Mr Stevens said. ‘Not enough surnames and not enough Bible names to tell us apart. There might be twenty Matthew Stevens in the town. But everyone knows who Bish and Bar and Dinks and Nubby are.’

He took his dog off on the rest of its walk, and Toby sat on for a while.

Then he walked round the headland, upon whose rocks the sea was energetically leaping, until the outer beach came into view, spectacular with booming surf a mile long and a mile deep. Even in the chill of the smart offshore wind the beach had children playing. And the surf was peppered with surfers, floating like huge black sea birds, or rising suddenly atop a crest to ride to a fall in the wave-breaks. Toby watched, resolving to try that. His gaze took in the shore, the rocky point beyond the beach, the sloping churchyard, crowded with men at anchor – the embattled run of old buildings – workshops? Sail lofts? And the snazzy modern flats which lined the back of the beach. As he watched, the yacht from the bay came suddenly into view, scudding across the skyline, in full sail, leaning to the wind, and making speed. Where could she be going? Toby wondered. What was out there? Cork? Fastnet? Newfoundland? The Scillies? Or round Land’s End? With all his heart he longed to be aboard her, cutting free, outbound, setting a course.

Marian was walking too. She was lost, and also disorientated. The town she walked in flickered in and out of memory, alternating places she could recall with uncanny accuracy, down to the shape of the shadow cast across the street, the skew of the lines of cobbles, with places she had never been in before in her life, the commonplace generic seaside town, unknown to her. And then round another corner she would be standing in the light of childhood, looking at the lighthouse framed in a gap between houses, back in a world where everything was perfectly placed. The street names – or passage names, rather – amused and confused her. Nothing could be much less square than Island Square – was Teetotal Street then a hive of drunkenness? And what about Virgin Street? No doubt the virtues of the original inhabitants were better than their geometry. She tried to make mental notes of the whereabouts of useful shops – a hardware store, a greengrocer, a real fishmonger, an old fashioned draper, a newsagent, among the plethora of shops packed with tourist tat.

Among those, she liked the one selling shells. But for the most part they were horrific. Sixties style kitsch beads and droopy shirts printed with suns and moons; tortured glass and brass, model creatures and luridly furry stuffed toys; mountains and mountains of fudge in yucky flavours … She smiled to herself, and promised herself a competition with Toby, to find the nastiest thing on sale in the town. And paintings. What was different from other seaside resorts was the number of ‘galleries’ selling paintings. Obviously the visitor to St Ives was expected to think that a painting would be a good souvenir. For the most part the paintings she passed by were dire – unbelievably bad. Unpaintings. They wouldn’t clean your eyeballs, and sharpen up your view of the world, they would clutter them, with a double whammy of awfulness. First with a sort of stupid prettification, an intent to show even this spectacular place in the light of any old beauty spot, and then with technical incompetence, so that the intended selective realism was botched and only half achieved. There were far too many sails and sunsets for probability. There was also an inescapable impression of haste, as though the artist had not had time to look carefully before slapping on the paint. However terrible some of the ‘souvenirs’, it would surely be one of these daubed canvases or boards that would win the prize nomination for the nastiest thing on sale in St Ives. Compared to the best of these, anything by Stella was a masterpiece! Marian shuddered. These things overwhelmed her with an unpleasant feeling of pity and contempt. Pity and contempt for the artists who had perpetrated them.

At twelve Toby bought a beer in the Sloop at the harbour-side, and carried it outside to drink it in the sun, view-gazing. A lot of other people had the same idea, and he was standing in a basking and chattering crowd. Was there another pub by the lifeboat shed? he wondered, for there too was a cluster of people, leaning on the railings. As he watched the glass doors of the boat-shed opened, up-and-over style – it was a snazzy crisp new building – and the boat nosed out, and lurched forward to stand poised at the top of the ramp. Then, with an almost sinister deliberate purpose, like something advancing on an assailant, it came on down the ramp. Near the bottom someone in yellow oilskins ducked under the looming prow to unhitch it from the trolley. Toby stared at it, seeing in everything about it, seeing in its fitness for its purposes, the illimitable, motiveless destructive strength of the sea. In its deep blue sculpted hull with the white Plimsoll line below and the scarlet stripe at the gunwale, drawing its shape to his attention; in the orange super-structure, ready to be battened down, he saw the strength and swell of storm waves; in the battery of radar equipment she carried he saw the immensity of the ocean, in which every ship was lonely, potentially lost, without these slender links, ‘all at sea’.

The boat, suddenly precipitate, dashed into the water at the foot of the ramp, and roared round a wide turning circle in the brimming harbour, making out to sea beyond the quay. A wide and foaming wake remembered her course behind her, fading and spreading slowly in the aftermath. Where was she going? he wondered, finishing his beer – who was in trouble? Not some child on an inflatable mattress this time – they had an inshore lifeboat for that sort of thing. With a leap of his heart he thought of the lovely yacht he had seen just a while ago. Could it be her? He minded that thought hideously, and though of course he could see with part of his mind that danger to life on a battered and ugly coaster or tanker was morally speaking just as serious, the beauty of the sailing boat, and the idea of free force, speeding on the wind, that she represented made him care nothing at that moment for morality.

He returned his glass, and positively ran along the wharf, dodging the strollers, past the amusement arcades with their shoddy and flashy temptations and blaring sounds, and reached the dispersing crowd at the top of the launching ramp.

‘What was it?’ he asked, directing his question to two vaguely official-looking men who were standing talking by the doors of the looming empty boat shed. ‘What did they go out to?’

They seemed surprised, and did not answer him at once.

‘Was it that yacht that was anchored here last night?’ he asked.

‘Bless you, it idn’t for real,’ one of them said. ‘Only practice. When it be real you’ll hear the rockets go up for the crew to muster.’

‘Thanks,’ said Toby, feeling slightly foolish. But the man nodded to him, friendly enough, and said, ‘I know you, don’t I?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Toby. ‘It’s my first time here.’

‘My mistake then. Thought I’d a seen you somewhere afore.’ He turned back to his companion, and Toby, hands in pockets, wandered off.

Marian was buying things. She had agreed with Mrs Veal that the house should be rented furnished; but the agreement excluded bedding and towels, china and cutlery, and some of the kitchen equipment – Marian had agreed immediately that Mrs Veal was to take with her anything she needed to help her set up home with her daughter. Marian would simply buy replacements. She had been offered a reduction in the proposed rent to take account of the required expense. And now she stood in White’s in Fore Street, choosing things.

She had an agreeable sense of wild luxury and self-indulgence, piling on the counter top sheets and bottom sheets and pillow cases in matching sets, piles of pink towels, piles of white towels, piles of blue towels. A green and white gingham tablecloth caught her eye, and she bought that too. And then coarse linen bedspreads, creamy white with a pattern in the weave … she had never done anything like this before. When she and Donald set up house money was in short supply, and she had started with wedding presents, chosen, however lovingly, by other people. And then one replaced things piecemeal, as this and that wore out. Soon nothing matched, nothing was a complete set, and thrift and familiarity worked together to keep things like that.

Now suddenly, she was buying things all together. From White’s, who would deliver her purchases the next day, she proceeded to Woolworths, where stainless steel kitchen thingummies seemed cheap and serviceable, and she envisioned a whole kitchen equipped in steel and clear glass, not a countrified patterned pot anywhere, and began to put that too into effect. She had set herself a problem carrying things, but luckily she no sooner emerged from Woolworths’ lower floors onto the wharf than she bumped into Toby, and despatched him to get the car. She was childishly happy. How wonderful to choose everything without compromising with Donald’s tastes, or, even worse, his mother’s – all white damask and patterned silver plate. And how relatively affordable it had been to be rich for a morning! She was avoiding thinking forward; she had not considered what she would do with all the lovely new things when the lease ended, when she had to go home. No, when she had to go away from home. Surrounded by carrier bags and parcels she sat on a seat by the harbour, listening to lapping water, and watching the reticulate reflections wavering on the side of a pretty moored boat. People wandered past her, and snatches of their talk mixed with the raucous calls of the ubiquitous gulls. How could any creature look so graceful, and sound so vulgar?

Toby wasn’t long. They drove the clobber up to the house, and discovered that Mrs Veal was leaving early – they could be in by tomorrow if they liked. Before they went out to dinner that night Toby rang Alice and put the address of the house on her answerphone.

‘How does it strike you, Toby?’ Marian asked him that evening. ‘St Ives, I mean. I can hardly tell. I can’t see it as if for the first time; it keeps doing vivid flashbacks at me.’

‘It’s lovely,’ he said. ‘A lovely empty shell. Well, not completely empty—’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘It was shaped for a way of life. For fishing, for people who lived cheek by jowl and worked together closely. Like a shell that’s shaped round a living creature, and left empty when it dies.’

‘And the tourists bustle round in it, like hermit crabs in a shell?’ she said, amused.

‘Yes. First artists, then tourists.’

‘I expect part of what one likes is the sense of that tight-knit life,’ Marian said. ‘The shape of it. People don’t live like that any more, knowing all the neighbours. We’re all more or less alone. It must have been very close and kindly.’

‘And bitchy too, I expect,’ said Toby.

The house had a big bay window to the living room. Its tall mullions divided the view into three; from the left-hand pane a dazzling prospect of beach below, then the sweep of the town round the harbour, the arm of the quay extending forward, embracing the boats. From the right-hand pane one looked across the bay to the lighthouse on its dark pyramid of rock, and given clear light further headlands fading with distance, one beyond another. Through the middle pane a mysterious prospect of pure sea, a simple line dividing air and water, each changing in an endless panorama of ephemeral effect. It was mesmerizing. Once they were in the house they spent hours simply gazing out. ‘Look at it now,’ they said to each other – and in a minute’s space, ‘Look at it now!’

‘Why do I like lighthouses so much?’ Marian wondered aloud.

‘Phallic symbols?’ said Toby, suppressing a grin.

‘Oh, rubbish, son,’ said Marian.

Toby came to stand behind her in the window, looking out. The view had changed again; an inky and blurred cloud on the skyline was casting rainbows. ‘Monuments to altruism, more like.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Marian. She could not bear to turn round to ask the question.

‘It’s in everyone’s interest to have them, but in no-one’s to provide them,’ said Toby. ‘We like them because they show us that people sometimes act unselfishly. Sometimes.’

He sounded a little wistful. But Marian, who would have liked to question him, thought better of it.

They had been settled in the house for a week when Alice reappeared. Toby let her in, and she marched into the centre of the living room, put down her bag and her viola case, and said:

‘I’ve come.’

‘Darling, how lovely—’ Marian looked up from writing letters.

‘I take it there’s room for me?’

‘Of course there is. There’s even a nice new quilt on the bed. Bring your things and I’ll show you.’

‘No rehearsals, sib?’ said Toby from the foot of the stairs, as they ascended.

‘No!’ said Alice, in almost a shout. ‘I wouldn’t be here, otherwise, stupid!’

‘Sorry I spoke,’ said Toby.

Later Alice sat morosely, silently, staring at the view. ‘Do you remember this, Mum?’ she asked.

‘Half and half. It’s a funny sensation.’

‘Oh – I met Leo on the train.’

‘Leo? Coming here?’

‘Yes; he lives here. He said he had a place in London, but he lives here. He said as soon as the train got round the headland he could feel it drawing him back.’

‘Well what was he doing in Cambridge, then?’ asked Toby.

‘Visiting Gran, I suppose. Coming to her funeral. Helping with pictures.’

Wanting money, added Marian to herself. She braced herself for Leo to reappear.

There was an oddity, of course, in settling in to live together, even only for a while, mother and grown children making up a family again. They had partly forgotten each other, or perhaps they had cheated memory by changing. Did Toby always sing so loudly, and take baths at such curious times? Didn’t he once like peanut butter, which he now refuses? Did he and Alice always talk so incessantly, arguing and quarrelling about every possible thing? Perhaps they did. Alice had always washed her hair every day, and left clothes lying around on all the chairs. Alice had always practised for several hours a day – had it always sounded so urgent, so raw? Perhaps it had. While it lasted it filled the house with a feeling of struggle and loss. Perhaps, Marian thought, it was just that Alice had once played more cheerful music, or much easier music. Toby seemed unable to live without watching video movies, and had rented a set with a video recorder. Night after night as Marian was going to bed they settled into the armchairs to watch something borrowed from the video shop, that would run till well after midnight. Toby poured them a malt whisky apiece. They bought the drink themselves these days; they offered to pay for their phone calls.

And something really had changed greatly, from Marian’s point of view; she had become what she never was in their childhood and adolescence, an object of their attention. Marian herself, her moods, needs, quirks, faults, virtues, had become a presence in the group. She had lost the quality of parent that made her once a kind of permanently non-playing captain of the team. Or perhaps it was the role of referee that she had lost; certainly they no longer appealed to her for justice, or even for sympathy, but fought each other without recourse. Of course it was because of her that they were down here, playing house. But it was more than that. If they call her ‘the AP’ – ‘Aged Parent’, Alice explained – if they humoured her, it was as they might humour each other. ‘Did Stella and I ever reach this stage?’ Marian wondered. ‘No, we did not,’ she answered herself. ‘I was never as old a daughter as Alice has become.’

Also, since she remembered them as a good deal of unremitting hard work, Marian was surprised at the effect of three pairs of hands on the chores of living. There was willing help, instantly, almost unthinkingly given. They washed their own clothes, they did the shopping, they even washed up after supper, and took turns at cooking. It was easier than living alone! And there was time, therefore, to stare at the sea, the sky, the lighthouse, and murmur, ‘Look at it now …’

‘I’d like to go there,’ Marian said, softly.

‘Where?’ asked Alice.

‘To the lighthouse. To land there.’

‘Oh, I asked about that, the other day,’ said Toby, looking up from his book. ‘No such trip. They gave me two reasons. No demand, and dangerous water. Look,’ – he came to stand beside her at the window – ‘see all that broken water running out along the horizon? That’s a half-tide reef; that’s what the lighthouse warns of. So it probably is dangerous.’

‘I expect altruism usually is,’ said Marian. And now, to the delectable remoteness of the white tower on the black surf-girdled rock, was added the strong pull of inaccessibility, impossibility. Yet from everywhere you went in the town the lighthouse could be seen.

The day came when Marian came back from shopping in the town to find a familiar duffel bag on the doorstep. Leo was sitting in the porch.

‘You found it, then?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Stella’s. First place I looked for you.’

‘It’s mine now,’ said Marian. ‘For a while,’ she added, deferring to truth. ‘I gather you live here, Leo? I somehow supposed you lived in Cambridge.’

‘I work all over the place,’ he said. ‘But I live in St Ives.’

‘Well,’ she said, putting down her shopping, and opening the inner door to the house, ‘cup of tea? Stay to supper? The young will be home by and by.’

‘Remember all this then, do you?’ he said, following her in. ‘Lumme – it’s gone a bit different though. Never used to be clean or tidy, in the good old days!’

‘Try looking under the carpet in the attic room,’ said Marian.

‘Jesus, is that Jackson Pollock floor still there?’ he said. ‘We should try cutting it into squares and selling it to the Tate!’

They were smiling at each other, like old friends. Like people with shared memories, waiting for the kettle to boil.

‘Leo …’

‘Yes?’

‘You put on quite a performance when we first met. You were so truly awful – do you always try to make people dislike you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose so.’

‘Why?’

‘In case they do.’

‘I don’t think I quite get that.’

‘Well, if people dislike me,’ he said, ‘at least I know why. You’ve changed your mind about me; but if you hadn’t—’

‘You would have been able to blame me.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Leo – that money …’

‘I will need it sometime. But I’ve raised it for now.’

She couldn’t help, evidently, her surprise showing on her face.

‘You thought I hadn’t two beans? Well, at a pinch I have one bean. I’ve pawned my house. Remortgaged it.’

‘My God, Leo – what if her estate isn’t enough – what if—’

He shrugged. ‘More fool me in that case.’

Alice had driven Toby from the house. The endless grinding music from her room, the edgy, restless company she made, oppressed him. It was a squally day, in which the rain lashed the window-panes, and the lighthouse retreated into invisibility in the occluded air. Marian was tidying and cleaning the house – both of them prowling around him. He suddenly found the company of women overpowering, and at a break in the rain he bolted from the house, and plunged down the hill into the town. There he took shelter from another squall in a sports shop, and spent some time trying walking boots. Then he bought boots, a good waterproof windcheater, and a map of the coast path, and set off.

Beyond the town the land turned rugged. Great outcrops of rocks broke the skylines, and green fields sloped to the brink of precipitous cliffs. The path snaked along the top of the cliffs, margined in wild flowers, and giving astonishing, thunderous prospects of roaring coves. Great vistas of grey-blue sea spread away to his right, to a smudged horizon, a blotted out margin between grey water and grey sky. The wind tugged and buffeted him, and his spirits lifted as he walked. Gradually the clouds were being torn apart by the wind, and giving rags of blue sky, and sudden fragments of sunshine edged with rainbow.

Toby walked almost at a run, going as fast as the roughness of the path permitted, pushing himself. He drew great lungfuls of the dust-free air. Miles out from the town he stood in the lee of a great cairn of huge fractured boulders that seemed to totter on the brink, but had probably been standing for a thousand years unchanged. It was surprisingly warm in its shelter. He felt exultant, clean. Everything round him was worn down to basics. He remembered London with panic and distaste, thrust the thought away, and walked on.

He turned back at last, thinking that he ought not to risk blisters from new boots, though they felt OK. He still had his shoes of course, one in each pocket. The squalls had gone rushing up channel, leaving a shining calm in their wake. As he came back within view of the town the graveyard caught his eye, the landed flock of gull-coloured stones and crosses, settled on the green slope above the outer beach, and he mounted the steps to go that way, and lingered in the rosy light of early evening. It gave him a pleasing sort of melancholy to read the headstones. ‘An unknown seaman, washed up, drowned.’ Names recurred, the names of the bedrock people – Paynter and Stevens and Barber and Care and Cocking. Toby wandered, hands in pockets, along the rows. In the middle of the graveyard a little pair of chapels, joined like Siamese twins, presided. If he looked east the back of the Island, grass and rocks and its own little chapel, rose at an angle, closing the beach, but giving, over its shoulder, a different prospect to the lighthouse. Below the wall the ocean shuttled up and down the beach, sighing softly.

A good place to come to rest, Toby thought, though perhaps all these seafarers, those drowned and those surviving for their natural term, no more wanted eternity in sight and sound of the tides than they had wanted ‘Sea Views’ from their cottages? Moments later he found ‘Matthew Barber, Lost in the lifeboat disaster, 1939.’

That must be the story that Leo told us, he thought, and, quieted for the moment, headed up to the road.

At the crest of the hill the town crowded up to the top graveyard wall, and then plunged down towards the church. ‘Barnoon’ Toby read on a road sign. He started down it, lost in thought. Below him the top of the church tower rose up towards his level. Gulls screamed overhead, music thrummed from an open window, and somebody was yelling for someone called Mathy. The sounds made discords around him. ‘Mathy, Mathy!’ Clattering footsteps behind him. ‘Be ’ee deaf, Mathy, for Lord sakes …’

Toby was trotting down the steps beside the steeply sloping road, when a hand fell on his shoulder. ‘Mathy…’

He looked round, confronting a young man of his own age and height, who at once withdrew the commanding hand, and said, ‘Oh, aa, sorry. Took you for someone else.’

The degree of surprise on the stranger’s face amounted to consternation. He disappeared rapidly, dashing off down the rest of the slope and turning left down a side-alley. Leaving Toby mystified enough to tell Alice about it, later.

Going to bed so late, always outlasting their mother’s stamina, gave Toby and Alice time to talk together, which they needed to do, knowing things about each other which Marian did not. You could hardly find two more different people out of the same nest, she would have said. And she was right in a way. But difference did not impede perception.

‘You must look very like this Mathy,’ Alice said, when Toby told his tale. ‘Was it a local voice? Was he a St Ives man?’

‘Yes.’

‘So Mathy is probably local too. Do you think grandfather was local and you look like him, whoever he was?’

‘Well, perhaps,’ said Toby doubtfully.

Slouched in an easy chair while the video tape of The Age of Innocence tickered back to the beginning, and the rewind light blipped on the machine, he observed, trying not to, but unable to block it out, that Alice, sitting barefoot, her blazing red hair untied and drifting across her shoulders, had an expression of desolation.

‘What’s up, sib?’ he asked, lifting a narrow strand of her straying hair, and winding it gently round his finger. ‘Are you worried about the Aged Parent wild-goose chasing after the missing ancestor?’

‘That too,’ she said.

‘So what first?’

‘Well, you for one thing. Might you go to prison?’

‘Ah. No. I might lose my job.’

‘But you did do it – this funny dealing thing?’

‘Sort of. It’s a very grey area, that’s the trouble. And I was one of several.’

‘I hate to think of you not being honest, Toby.’

‘So do I,’ he said. ‘So do I. But I just lost my foothold, somehow.’

‘What will happen to you?’

‘Nothing much. They are looking for someone to carry the can for everyone else. So that they can say, “We found the rotten apple, and got rid of it.” And I don’t know who they’ll pick on. It might well be me. Will you cast me out of your life?’

‘Can’t, can I?’ she said. ‘You just are my brother, stupid.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. But he could not fool himself that the bleakness in her had anything to do with him. ‘What else?’ he asked her, gently unwinding her strand of hair, which he had been wearing like a ring.

‘Max,’ she said. ‘I’ve quarrelled with Max.’

‘And there really aren’t any rehearsals?’

‘He said not. He’ll let me know.’

‘Don’t call him, he’ll call you? He’s such a shit, sib,’ said Toby.

‘What difference does that make?’ she said.

‘Well, some. Doesn’t it?’

‘No, not really. Love is a bit like talent, it just strikes where it strikes. It isn’t connected to anything else, either one way or the other.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘I know you don’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t hold it against you. And you will, when it happens to you.’

Marian could see the visitor coming, though she did not at first, of course, realize that the woman was coming to her. Marian was looking through the garden gate, a trowel in her hand, with which she had been planting nerines, a whimsical act, she knew, for a tenant gardener. She stood in the gate, half the lumpy bulbs planted, half still in the bag, and looked at the path, now tarmacadamed, but then, surely, a rough track. A pearly light from a bright cloudy sky cast a porcelain glaze over the evening scene. Her feet remembered the precipitate descent to the beach, but she stood still, and watched the woman on two sticks struggle up the slope towards her. If she was going to run down onto the sands she should wait till the poor creature was safely past her; probably though, she was simply going to turn away, and plant the other nerines.

When she finished, and went in, she found the visitor sitting in the porch, outside the open front door. Having passed the back gate she had gone round to the front of the house, and was waiting.

‘I heard there were Harnakers here again,’ she said. ‘I saw from the papers that Stella is dead. I’m so sorry … You are Marian, then.’

‘Marian Easton. Yes. Stella Harnaker was my mother. You are some friend of hers?’

‘Oh, yes. I am Violet. Violet Garthen.’

At Marian’s blank expression she said, ‘Unknown to you, I see. Unheard of, my usual fate. But I once knew your mother well. You too, in fact.’

‘Come in,’ said Marian. ‘I’ll pour you a sherry. Tell me about it.’

But the visitor seemed to have little urge to narrate. She looked blankly round the living room, and lowered herself gradually into a chair, leaning her sticks against the arm. ‘You don’t take after her then, I see,’ she said.

‘What do you mean, Mrs – Miss? Garthen.’

‘Miss. Call me Violet. You keep things tidy. You should have seen it when I lived here.’

‘You lived here?’

‘You don’t remember? Well, perhaps you wouldn’t. I shared with Stella for a summer, until we quarrelled. It was bloody chaotic. And you were not tidy in those days.’

‘I really don’t remember, I’m afraid. Are you an artist?’

‘Yes, I am. I make – made – prints. Stella didn’t think much of them.’

‘So she gave you a hard time?’ Marian suppressed the ghost of a smile.

‘I escaped. I admired her very much at the time.’

‘But you tried to share a house with her? Was that wise?’

‘There was a war on. Nobody had any money. Sharing was better than starving.’

‘Of course. I think you might be the only person left who remembers me as a child. How curious.’

‘I don’t know much about children. You were something of a nuisance, but perhaps not more than most.’

‘I was a nuisance? Playing with your gravers and spilling the etching acid?’

‘That sort of thing. Inclined to wander off.’

And Marian winced, hearing in that accusation the diverted attention of the grown-ups, all of them, both of them, preoccupied with other things, so that she was perpetually seen as an interruption. Had she really been a trouble to this stranger?

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Let me take you to dinner some time next week, and you can tell me all about it.’ For she had bought three plump mackerel for supper and could see no way to make three fishes do for four. ‘And shall I run you home?’ She hoped that dislike did not ring audibly in her voice. It was so clear to her and so groundless.

‘I both look and feel like a crab on these sticks,’ said Violet. ‘But I am supposed to walk. So, no, thank you. But what I came for was to ask you what you propose to do with Stella’s pictures. Are they for sale?’

‘Some of them will be. I take it you would like one?’

‘Very much, if I can afford it.’

‘Oh, it won’t have to depend on that. If you can remember a particular one and describe it to me, I’ll try to find it for you.’

‘You are very kind, Stella’s daughter,’ said Violet dryly, heaving herself to her feet, and leaning on her sticks again. ‘And where do you get that from?’

Seeing her to the gate, for the garden was steeply terraced and surely not safe for her, Marian thought to say, ‘Did you – do you – know a man called Leo Vincey?’

‘I know him,’ said Violet. ‘He’s a fake.’

‘He’s a fake? What do you mean?’

‘That awful war,’ said Violet, suddenly vehement, ‘all the flotsam and jetsam of Europe landed up here. Frightened to stay in London. Too wimpy to fight. Putting their wretched botches and daubs up to the exhibition hanging committees, curling their lips at real artists with a lifetime’s devotion behind their skills. Founding break-away societies, quarrelling, making trouble. The place never recovered, to my mind. We all suffered from it.’

‘But what has this to do with Leo?’ asked Marian.

‘Well, among the other things the modernists visited on us was a vogue for local talent,’ Violet said. ‘They went and “discovered” a poor old sod of a rag-and-bone man, and puffed him as some kind of untaught genius. Working on broken fish-crates and cardboard boxes, about like a three-year-old. Ludicrous. Next thing you know the town is full of artists; fishermen, grocers, window-cleaners, everyone can do it. You can sell a vile ignorant daub for more than a serious etching. That Leo … He’s plain Leonard, really, of course. Just a skiff boy.’

‘What did Stella think about all this?’ asked Marian. She really would take Violet out to dinner and pump her exhaustively, but still couldn’t resist asking, this minute, at the open door.

‘She even went down and bought some of Wallis’s stuff,’ said Violet. ‘She let it get to her, God forgive her.’

‘Is that what you quarrelled about?’ Marian asked.

‘Oh, no,’ said Violet, giving Marian a curious sideways stare. The deep wrinkles of age had bitten in a fixed expression on her face that was stronger than any passing expressive one, and made her hard to read, like a page already scrawled over. ‘Do you really not remember? We quarrelled about you. I’m off, but I’ll hold you to that offer.’

God might forgive Stella, but Violet won’t, thought Marian to her departing back. What a termagant! No worse than Stella herself, I suppose. And I wonder if her work is any good – I must try to see some. As if I could tell – how does one tell? And they quarrelled about me?

Toby had become sensitive to the sound of footfalls behind him – to any sense of pursuit. Someone running behind him along Fore Street and shouting ‘Oi!’ led him, therefore, without looking round, to turn abruptly to the left, up a side street. He turned and stood waiting, expecting to see the runner, whoever it was, hurtle past across the bottom of the alley. But instead the pursuers – there were two of them – swung round the corner after him, and came abruptly face to face with him. They were both youths, younger than Toby, certainly, but one of them was six foot tall and heavy. He had a shaven head, blue with faint stubble, tattoos on both forearms, and an earring. They were standing staring at him, lolling against each other. There was a sort of speculative determination on their faces which convinced him they were hunting him. The shorter one had a shuttle loaded with blue cord in his right hand. Toby walked straight towards them, and past them, back into the narrow little main street, and the crowds of shoppers, without looking back.

He dodged into Rose Lane, and Norway Lane, through St Peter’s Street and Fish Street into Island Square. There he stopped, listened, and looked round. The same two rounded the corner just behind him. They came with unmistakable deliberation, a challenging swagger. There couldn’t be any doubt about it, really; they must be following him.

In which case they could damn well have a run for their money. Abruptly Toby took to his heels, speeding away down Back Road East as fast as he could leg it. When he had shaken them off he slowed down, smiling grimly to himself. Then suddenly he was face to face with the pursuers again, only now there were four of them – one a girl. They were waiting for him at the top of the hill. He turned round and found his way back blocked – three youths with linked arms were standing across the road behind him. But in this town there was always an alley, or a flight of narrow steps. He bolted down the nearest one. It was a courtyard, dark and cramped and full of dustbins, and he thought he was cornered for a moment, but there was in fact a little passageway leading through to another street. He shot out of this like a cork from a bottle, turned and swerved towards the harbour, where there would be people flocking. He preferred a crowd of people. A game like this – surely it was a game? – could turn nasty. What did they want? Why hadn’t he asked them, instead of playing catch? But once you ran there was a hunt, and you were the quarry. Toby was nearly afraid, and still running.

Of course he couldn’t escape them in this warren of streets, which they knew backwards, and he not at all. He bolted down Bethesda Hill, and they came racing out of a parallel street – six of them now. They linked arms, and came towards him. He spun on his heel, and dived back into Bethesda Hill, leaping up its steep steps. Then he made the inevitable mistake. He chose Carnglaze, and they were close behind him. Turning right at the end of Carnglaze he found them doggedly advancing along the back of the harbour, and his only way to go turned out to be out along Smeaton’s Quay – a stony cul-de-sac standing out into water and sand. He might even have jumped and swum for it if the tide hadn’t been rather low. So he turned at bay, breathing heavily.

There were more of them than before – a pack of nine or so. They were all looking hard at him, with confrontational curiosity.

‘What do you want?’ he said. He was angry. If they wanted his money they’d have to fight him for it. In the back of his mind he tried to measure the drop to the sand behind him, the probable damage from being thrown over. ‘What the hell are you chasing me for?’

‘Chasing?’ one of them said. ‘Wudn’ be chasing if you wadn’ running. Why run? Just because we want you t’come for a drink.’

‘I’m not going anywhere with you!’ said Toby.

‘And if we say you are?’ the tall one said. Whereupon the girl pushed her way to the front, said, ‘Hang on; don’t hassle him,’ and looking at Toby said, ‘Come on, my cock. What harm can you come to having a drink in the Sloop?’ She even offered a half-hearted placatory smile.

Toby shrugged, and his captors surrounded him and marched him off the quay and along the wharf. He supposed it was true they could hardly be intending to set upon him in broad daylight, or mug him in the Sloop, but he could feel their tension, them nerving themselves for something. When they reached the dark little door of the inn one of them lifted the latch of the door to the bar, and someone pushed him between the shoulder blades, and propelled him through.

After the bright day outside the bar was dark. Toby blinked. He appeared to be there already, sitting at one of the long tables with a glass of beer in front of him. It was like looking in a mirror in a nightmare – one of those horrible transformation nightmares, in which you dream yourself displaced, in the wrong life – facing him was his twin, nearly. Looking very like him, though more tanned. His hair was cut very short – the skin of his skull glinted through it. Like his friends he was wearing tattoos and earrings. This fellow looked long and levelly at Toby. Then, ‘I’m Matthew Huer,’ he said. ‘And who do you be?’

Marian was happily prowling, a brief shopping list in her handbag, riding the lift to her spirits that ambient beauty gave to plain days. The light danced on the water in the harbour, and the colours of everything seemed peculiarly unmixed – the green of the grassy sloping Island intensely green, the sea an amazing blue, the sand pure chrome, as though the town and its setting had been painted out of a little box of primary colours. She crossed the road to lean over the wall and look down at the beach, the rioting waters of the sea. And felt it somehow, in her arm and fingers – thought of scribbling the surf in white chalk on the sort of blue sugar paper she had been given to scrawl on at nursery school, felt the ghostly movement that would drive the spiralling thick lines – the steady lateral pull to draw the line of silver on the horizon – was there silver chalk? What colour would she need to make the faded lilac sheen of the draining waters on the wet slopes of the sand, converging, repeatedly confluent like the branches of trees in reverse? Surely she would need oils? Or were there pastels bright enough, in the box Stella had given to Leo, all those years ago?

Nothing could possibly be bright enough, she thought, walking on. She passed an art shop and paused to gaze through the window. A collection of posters pinned up at the edge of the window advertised various events. Someone would demonstrate print-making at The St Ives School of Artists, where, also, you could take a life class for four pounds, open to all, beginners welcome. There was an exhibition of work at sale prices by Violet Garthen, in the artist’s own home, at the address below.

Violet Garthen lived in a part of the town Marian had never visited before, well inland, with no outlook to the sea. She showed Marian into her front room. It was the bay-windowed best room of a tight little Victorian terrace house, furnished stylishly in an outdated style – a cane-and-cushions settee, a glass-topped table with art books, an overflowing bookshelf built into an alcove, an upright piano on one wall.

‘Could I see some of your work?’ Marian asked.

‘Up there,’ said Violet. ‘Excuse me if I stay put. I don’t like watching people look.’

Marian walked upstairs. The front upstairs room, the largest in the house, was hung round with Violet’s work. A chart chest stood against the end wall. Marian looked at the work on the walls, and opened the chart chest to see more. Violet made engravings and lithographs. The engravings were amazing – technically very fine, meticulously detailed and accurate. They showed street scenes with people in curiously old-fashioned clothes. Or flowers. A good one showed a hare in the grass – every blade cut separately. The lithographs were washy in soft colours; sea scenes; several views of moored boats. One could imagine such things looking pleasant and restful on domestic walls. They recorded what one saw; what one already knew that one saw. They demonstrated mastery, but only of technique. Marian thought, It is not for me who have mastered nothing, and have no technique, to criticize this.

‘You’re very good,’ she said to Violet, truthful up to a point only, returning downstairs.

‘I sell,’ said Violet. ‘But the last thing you need is more pictures.’

Marian laughed. ‘I haven’t forgotten that you want one,’ she said. ‘And you will come out to dinner with me – shall we say next Tuesday? I’ll come and fetch you.’

Alice had begun practising in an empty house. The viola part didn’t stand up alone. She could always hear the other parts running in her head, weaving the pattern, and she could only dimly understand how the viola heard alone might strike a listener. It was a relief not to be listened to, however. She worked for an hour on her part in a Mozart quartet, and then moved on to playing a Bach piece for solo cello. That gave all the tune to her. Lovely, dark music.

She finished a slow movement, and realized suddenly that she was not, after all, alone. Leo had come in. He had come to the living-room door and stopped to listen. She would have been cross at his eavesdropping had he not said softly,

Musing my way through a sombre and favourite fugue

By Bach who disburdens my soul, but perplexes my fingers …

‘Gosh, Leo, what’s that?’ she said, startled.

‘Sassoon.’

‘Who?’

‘Ah. Music’s not the only art,’ he said. ‘There are cross-connections. He’s a poet.’

‘Can you remember more of it?’

‘No; but I’ll lend you the book if you like.’

‘Yes I would.’

‘Come and get it some time.’

‘Did you want Mum?’

‘Some other time will do,’ he said, waving at her as he left.

Alone again, Alice decided to be useful – to cook a chowder for supper. She needed fresh scallops, and cod, and a crab to stand in for lobster. Also a potato-peeler – being left-handed she couldn’t use her mother’s. She liked shopping like this, going from shop to shop with a basket on her arm like a Victorian photograph. And she needed some soothing activity.

Later she was on her way home, up the long hill from the town. Halfway up was a little bric-a-brac shop with pretty things in the window. She hesitated, and then went in. Almost the largest item in the shop was a dark-red marble lamp, shaped like a lighthouse on a chunk of rock, polished, and sombrely gleaming. At first Alice thought she liked it, but she turned her back on it, studied, or pretended to study, a rack of Coalport plates, and tried to imagine the lamp carried home and lighting a corner of a natural room. It wouldn’t, of course, shed much light, since the little torch bulb in its imitation lamp-chamber was too faint. It was a light to look at, not one to see by. Was it beautiful then? Enough to earn a place in a room? For it certainly wouldn’t be useful. Alice had recently heard, from Max, William Morris’s dictum, ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,’ and was trying to live by it. In the case of the potato peeler she had just acquired at Woolworths this was both clear and easy; in the case of a stone lighthouse?

She turned round, and looked at it again, perceiving it now as rather kitsch.

‘Serpentine,’ murmured the hovering lady in the back of the shop.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Alice. The word caused a tremor of recognition.

‘The lamp. It’s made of serpentine,’ the shopkeeper said.

‘Oh – I didn’t know serpentine was stuff,’ said Alice.

‘It’s a Cornish rock,’ the woman told her. ‘Very popular. It ranges in colour from deep reds to deep greens. That piece is quite a rare one – it isn’t often you get a large object made in the deepest red.’

‘Local?’ asked Alice. ‘Do you know where?’

‘On the Lizard. The other coast. There are craftsmen still working it there, but this piece, of course, is old. Sometime in the twenties, I think. It’s signed on the base.’

‘Are there caves?’ asked Alice. She was almost holding her breath.

‘That I don’t know,’ said the woman. ‘Perhaps at Kynance? I think there are caves at Kynance.’ But she was losing interest in Alice as Alice was visibly losing interest in the lamp.

She almost ran up the rest of the way to the house. Toby was lounging in a fraying deck-chair in the back garden, on the only little scrap of level ground between the terraced flower-beds, the rampant fuchsia hedges. An inverted open book lay on his unbuttoned shirt. Alice dumped herself down beside him.

‘Look, it isn’t a winding cave, snaking around,’ she said.

‘What isn’t, sister dear?’

‘A serpentine cave – it means a cave in a kind of rock – there’s a rock called serpentine!’

‘O ho,’ he said. ‘Where?’

‘There’s serpentine at a place called Kynance. There might be caves there too.’

‘Hang on while I get the map,’ he said.

They spread the map out on the ground. ‘Look, it isn’t far at all,’ he said. ‘And someone at work recommended a good restaurant at Helston, pretty much on the way. Let’s take mother out for the day, and treat her to dinner on the way back.’

‘Can we afford that?’ she asked. Musicians, he supposed, must be chronically short of money. Alice had no idea of the scale of extravagances – everything she couldn’t afford was lumped together – fresh Colombian coffee beans, champagne, yachts on the Mediterranean, designer clothes, meals out, economy size boxes of detergent … He grinned at her.

‘I can afford it,’ he said serenely.

‘Shall we tell her where we’re going?’ Alice wondered aloud.

‘Let’s surprise her,’ said Toby.

‘We’ll take a picnic lunch, shall we?’ Alice asked.

‘If you like. I’ll do dinner, you do lunch, OK?’

‘Thursday?’

‘Tomorrow would suit me better,’ he said. ‘I’m tied up Thursday.’