Kelly knew that her father wasn’t always right about everything. For instance, the local garage where she had her own car serviced and repaired was a clean, orderly, unthreatening place run by a couple of quiet, respectful middle-aged brothers who treated her with greater deference than she thought was her due. There were other things she didn’t like about that essay: the mention of this ‘girlfriend’. Who was that? Some air-headed floozy? Some media tart? What was her father doing running around taking care of this stranger’s emotional and automotive needs when he had a wife and daughter in Suffolk who were far more in need of him? She’d tried to get her mother to share the same sense of outrage and betrayal, but in this, as in much else, her mother had been a disappointment to her.
Kelly felt her mother should be something other, something more. She had once been a sort of hippie; not the wild, drug-taking, marching on the Pentagon type of hippie, more the wide-hipped, earthy, nurturing sort, and perhaps it wasn’t such a big leap from being that to becoming the good home-maker she now professed to be, but still it depressed Kelly. Her mother lived a cosy, quiet, uneventful life in a neat little nineteen-seventies semi-detached house that her father would not have been seen dead in, but the house had come later, after his death, along with a second husband.
After Christopher Howell died Kelly’s mother got remarried, to a man called George. He was an honest man, a decent man, possibly even a good man, but he was also, in Kelly’s intense, unfair opinion, a very, very boring man. He worked for a company that sold heavy agricultural equipment, but his part in it simply involved shuffling figures and pieces of paper in an office in Norwich.
No doubt it had been quite brave of him to take on a widow with a teenage daughter as difficult as Kelly, and he’d tried hard to make friends with her and had been quite philosophical when she refused to have anything to do with him. He even helped pay some of the rent on the bedsit she moved into when she was seventeen, although no doubt his motives for helping her leave home weren’t entirely altruistic.
Even then Kelly could see that George made her mother happy, although at that point in her life she didn’t much care about her mother’s happiness. But George went and died too. It was sudden but not unpredictable. He was a fat, slow-moving man with high blood pressure, a bad diet and a job he found stressful. He keeled over one humid August afternoon in the car park outside his office and was dead before the ambulance arrived.
When Kelly looked back she was amazed by her own selfishness, by how little sympathy she’d felt for her mother, how little grief for George. Her mother took his death to be the end of something, perhaps the end of trying. She’d been married to a risky, difficult, interesting man, then she’d been married to a safe, secure, boring man, and it had all come to the same thing. Everything had been taken away, twice. She would make sure that nothing would ever be taken from her again.
George had found Kelly’s mother beguilingly different. By his standards she was arty and extravagant, a Bohemian. She was a splash of colour in his subdued, toned-down life. Once he was gone, she lost much of her colour too. She stopped being extravagant, stopped being arty. She became determined to lead a life that was thoroughly ordered, thoroughly controlled. She did her very best to become a boring, well-behaved, suburban widow, with some success.
She lived on a quiet, well-groomed little estate just fifteen miles down the road from Kelly. Fifteen miles wasn’t quite far enough away, but there were times when a million miles wouldn’t have been enough.
Kelly teased her mother about the mundanity of the house, and as with all teasing there was something important at stake. She told her that the widow of ‘the greatest modern English architect never to have built a building’ should live in quirkier, more subversive style; in a folly tower or a Gothic gate lodge or a converted fire station, something like that. Kelly felt there should be eccentric paintings and sculpture everywhere, trompe læil features at every turn, outlandish decor, wacky furniture.
Her mother pointed out that she had bought the house years after her father died, partly with the insurance money George’s death had given her. Christopher Howell had nothing to do with her current life, and even if this had been the house they’d lived in together, she still wouldn’t have wanted to turn it into a museum to him.
In fact the house wasn’t entirely devoid of Christopher Howell. There were a couple of curious, scrappy architectural drawings displayed in the hall. One showed a building in the shape of a back scratcher, a tall, spindly tower that ended in the five extended digits of a stylized hand. The scale of the drawing was exaggerated so that the building reached up from a patch of bare wilderness, way up into a vast sky so that the tips of the fingers were surrounded by clouds. The other picture was a series of rough sketches of pyramid-shaped buildings, some on stilts, some resting on the ground or on water, some just floating in space. Little domestic touches had been added to each of the pyramids, a television aerial, a porch, a dormer window, a two-car garage.
The drawings looked out of place among the overstuffed sofas and swagged floral curtains and cheap but tasteful antiques that filled the rest of the house. They looked even stranger given that the other paintings on the walls were careful, softly coloured East Anglian landscapes and seascapes. The local ladies who visited the house these days probably thought the Howell drawings were a bit of an eyesore but they would be too polite to say so, and Kelly’s mother never apologized or explained.
They should have seen the walls when her father lived in Kennington, in London. It was a moment when Christopher Howell’s skills at finding, or getting others to find, elegant places for him to live had failed and he’d had to move into a grotty little bedsit behind the cricket ground. He never complained and Kelly was too young to fully understand his discomfort, but inevitably he didn’t take his young daughter to bedsitland with quite the same panache as he would have taken her to some eighteenth-century cottage or Barbican penthouse. But to Kelly the place had still seemed wonderful.
She couldn’t imagine quite what the room must have been like to start with. It was her experience that nasty rented accommodation always had especially nasty, patterned wallpaper. Here the walls were white, but she thought it was quite possible her father had painted them himself. Whatever the origins of the white surfaces, her father had seen them as a blank canvas.
He told her he’d started to doodle on the wall beside the bed, a doodle he’d immediately seen as a sort of road map showing a long broad thoroughfare with many junctions and side streets. But then the doodle began to have a life of its own. That first main street led to other roads, to roundabouts, dual carriageways, motorway flyovers and tunnels, and he’d drawn all these in. This had led to the creation of rivers, railways, canals. The map had spread from one wall to two, to three to four, and it had risen up to the ceiling where the separate wall maps had converged around the ceiling rose. From certain angles it resembled an elaborate spider’s web.
He hadn’t drawn every single building in detail but he’d sketched in symbols that might be looked at as strange ground plans: a cinema shaped like a movie camera, a school in the shape of a saxophone, a swimming pool shaped like a brain, a drive-in restaurant in the shape of a coffin. Her father’s tastes did not run to the whimsical and although he had created an imaginary kingdom, there was nothing fey or childlike about it. There was a suicide bridge, and an area of open space called ‘Killing Fields’.
Then there were some dark jokes: nuclear reactors positioned next to hospitals, prisons for sex offenders that overlooked girls’ schools. There were housing developments that encircled toxic waste sites. And he had shaded in the ceiling rose so that it looked like a volcano which threatened to erupt and destroy the whole kingdom. Kelly loved it. Her father had asked her if she wanted to help colour it in but she preferred it in black and white.
Her father didn’t stay in that room very long, moving on rapidly to a much more stylish, borrowed houseboat. Kelly always wondered how the landlord had reacted to the redecoration. She supposed he was furious and had had the wall repainted. She imagined it took a good few coats. That might be a fruitful area for some particularly dedicated Christopher Howell scholar. He or she could track down the bedsit, find some process by which the covering layer of paint could be removed and reveal the Christopher Howell drawing underneath.
When Kelly got home from her father’s bedsit she’d tried a similar sort of thing in her own bedroom. She started drawing a city on the wall above the radiator. She’d got as far as creating a dam, a monorail station and a ring road before her mother discovered her and gave her a good slapping. It was one of the first things she’d never been able to forgive her mother for.
Kelly had been planning a visit to her mother for a while now. Enough time had elapsed since the last one for guilt and daughterly duty to reconvene. The promise of a week’s work from Dexter had made her postpone her plans, but now, having ditched him, she had an unexpected free day and she felt she might as well get the visit over with.
She didn’t believe she’d really seen the last of Dexter since, if nothing else, she intended to confront him and extract two days’ wages; but she decided that could wait. She switched on the answerphone and got on with her day. She would visit the gym and then go to her mother’s.
The gym was nearly empty, just a few retired male narcissists and herself. She rowed, did some weights, then ran a couple of miles on the treadmill, stopping before it came to feel too symbolic. Exercise gave her no great pleasure but she knew it must be doing her some good. And even if her body wasn’t toned and hard, she took some comfort in thinking (as with Dexter’s leg) that it would all be so much worse if she didn’t give it the treatment. When she’d finished she showered and came out feeling just about strong enough to cope with her mother.
It was to be an unannounced visit. It worked better that way. If she told her mother a day or two in advance that she was coming, then she’d spend the intervening days preparing for the visit, specifically preparing food. Kelly couldn’t remember exactly when her mother had started expressing maternal feeling through hard work in the kitchen but it was now an unshakeable pattern. There’d be cakes and pastries and pies, and Kelly would be expected to eat most of this on the spot while her mother watched. If she ate everything her mother thought she should, then she would be considered a good girl and earn motherly approval. If she ate less than that, she was being a bad girl, a bad daughter and therefore undeserving of parental love. By arriving unannounced she hoped it might be a day when her mother was less prepared.
It was late morning when she got to the house. She pulled up outside and entered by the back door, without knocking. She could hear the television blaring in the living room, but as she called out ‘Hello’ her mother immediately turned the set off, and by the time Kelly sauntered into the room her mother was on her feet, a duster in her hand, pretending to be in the middle of vital housework. There were times when Kelly felt bad about the effect she had on her mother, but not today. Today she was feeling tough.
‘Not working?’ her mother said by way of hello.
‘Not as hard as you, obviously,’ Kelly replied.
‘It’s all right for some people.’
‘Yes, it is all right,’ Kelly said. ‘It’s all right for people to do something other than work, especially if they’re self-employed like me.’
‘I thought you’d have thrown that old leopardskin jacket away by now,’ her mother said.
‘Not until you knit me a new one.’
‘It’s not very attractive, is it?’
‘I’m only trying to attract lovers of fake fur.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought you could afford to be so choosy.’
And so on. It happened every time. Kelly always went to her mother’s with the best of intentions and the moment she got in the door she felt the years being stripped away from her until she had regressed and turned into a sulky, difficult fifteen-year-old. Her mother always went right along with the act, played the neurotic parent of the neurotic adolescent. But now there was the added problem of Kelly being left ‘on the shelf’. For all that her mother wanted to protect herself from ever being involved with anybody again, she still wanted her daughter to be safely attached to someone. It didn’t have to be marriage, it didn’t have to be dull, but she wanted her daughter to have a love life. Kelly thought that from her mother’s point of view it must be like watching a stunt woman. She liked the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else risk their neck.
‘Well, I don’t know what I’m going to give you to eat,’ Kelly’s mother said. ‘It’s bad of you not to let me know when you’re coming.’
‘It was a spontaneous decision. You remember spontaneity, eh, Mother?’
‘I’ll just have to have a look in the freezer, but don’t expect much.’
‘I don’t want much.’
‘Well, you certainly need something. Bad diet always shows in the face.’
And so on. Kelly had heard there were mothers and daughters in the world who had real conversations and related to each other like real human beings, even talked to each other about things that mattered, but nothing in her own background had ever persuaded her that this was anything other than improbable science fiction.
They were about to get into a seriously petty argument about diet and health and complexion when there was a knock at the kitchen door. Kelly’s mother was the sort of person whose life did not accommodate unexpected arrivals. Kelly’s own visit was shocking enough, but a second visitor obviously spelled disaster. She looked at Kelly as though this new arrival was all her fault too, and as she went through to answer the door she looked briskly about her as if thinking of arming herself with a bread knife or rolling pin.
Kelly sat down on the floral, overstuffed, living-room sofa. She heard the kitchen door open and she could hear a conversation taking place, a man’s voice, though she couldn’t make out any of the words. Finally, she heard her mother say in an unnecessarily loud, clear voice, ‘In that case you’d better come in,’ and she returned to the living room trailed by Dexter. He was carrying a huge bundle of pink and white carnations, and with a flourish he presented them to Kelly.
She looked scornfully at him, dismissively at the flowers. She took them without saying thank you, without saying anything at all, and immediately handed them on to her mother. Despite herself, her mother was beaming. She didn’t like her life to be disrupted by strange arrivals, but if the stranger was a foreign man bearing flowers, well, that had an appeal to it. The fact that Kelly had never mentioned any such man, the fact that the flowers were now with her rather than with her undeserving, unappreciative daughter, added to her enjoyment.
‘You’ve got some nerve coming here,’ Kelly said, and only then did she take a good look at Dexter’s face. The flowers had been a distraction, probably a deliberate one. She saw now that he had a huge, fresh, curdling black eye.
‘I’ve come to apologize,’ he said. ‘I behaved pretty badly.’
Kelly’s mother’s eyes widened in anticipation of hearing something really good and juicy.
‘He spiked my drink,’ Kelly explained to her, hoping that would make her mother disapprove of Dexter. No such luck.
Her mother tutted. ‘Well really, Kelly, I don’t think that’s so terrible.’
‘If I hadn’t noticed, if I’d taken the drink and then driven the car, if I’d been stopped by the police—’
‘That’s a lot of ifs,’ her mother said.
‘No, Kelly’s right,’ said Dexter. ‘It was pretty bad of me. I behaved like a, I don’t know what the word is … a cad.’
Kelly’s mother was doubly thrilled and encouraged to hear that there was such a thing as caddishness still left in the world.
‘In any case, Kelly,’ she said, ‘if Dexter’s big enough to apologize then I think you have to be big enough to accept that apology.’ And without changing her tone of voice she added, ‘Will you stay and have some lunch with us, Mr Dexter?’
‘That’s very kind of you but I don’t want to impose.’
‘You won’t be imposing.’
‘Well, only if it’s all right with Kelly.’
‘Since when did I have a say in anything?’ Kelly said in her best moody adolescent’s voice.
They moved to the kitchen and Kelly’s mother began assembling the ingredients of an unnecessarily lavish lunch.
‘It’s no trouble at all,’ she said for Dexter’s benefit. ‘I don’t get nearly as much company as I’d like.’
Kelly sat down at the kitchen table, and Dexter immediately planted himself next to her, causing her to stand up and find the view of the garden very interesting.
‘How did you find me here?’ she hissed.
‘I asked around,’ said Dexter. ‘It’s a small world. You and your mother are quite well known. It took a little work, but I was very motivated to see you and apologize.’
She supposed that had to be true. He had apparently gone to some trouble. It would have been nice to attribute his presence to genuine regret and belated chivalry, and her mother appeared happy to do so, but Kelly needed more convincing.
‘How did you get the black eye?’ she asked.
‘Really, Kelly,’ her mother said, as if black eyes were something embarrassing like a birthmark or a hare lip that polite people didn’t refer to in conversation.
‘I got it from your friend Peter, as a matter of fact.’
‘He hit you?’
‘We hit each other. I think I probably hit him harder than he hit me, but it was a close thing. I’m sure he has a black eye too.’
‘How old are you?’ Kelly demanded.
He was puzzled, didn’t understand her question.
‘Isn’t it time you grew up?’ she added.
‘I hit him because he said something very tacky and wouldn’t take it back.’
‘Well, show me your duelling scar,’ Kelly snapped.
‘If it makes any difference, he actually said something very tacky about you.’
‘It makes no difference at all,’ she said, but she knew that wasn’t strictly true.
‘Look, there was a problem and I did my best to fix it, OK?’
‘Oh please,’ she said, and a part of her did indeed think that Dexter and Peter were a couple of stupid schoolboys who couldn’t be trusted to hold their drink and behave decently. At the same time, she certainly wasn’t displeased that Peter had been hit, and despite all her finer feelings, despite what she knew about the evils of male violence, there was something deep in her hormones, swirling around in the silt of her race memory, that went alarmingly warm and gooey at the idea of men fighting over her.
‘So, what did the bastard say?’ Kelly asked.
‘I don’t want to repeat it,’ said Dexter. ‘No way could I repeat it while I’m a guest in your mother’s house.’
‘Thank you, Dexter,’ said Kelly’s mother.
The kitchen table was filling up with lunch: slabs of meat, cheese, pâté and pork pies, bowls of salad and fruit, different kinds of bread and crackers, a tureen of soup, some olives, pickled onions, chutneys. Dexter made manly noises of approval.
All through lunch he was the perfect guest. He explained to Kelly’s mother about his bad leg and why he was employing Kelly, and he did it all with a grace that Kelly hadn’t seen before. Her mother was charmed. At times he almost seemed to be flirting with her. Being good with mothers was not a trait Kelly much valued in men, nevertheless she could see that her mother’s approval of Dexter was spreading into a more general, if no doubt very temporary, approval of her daughter. Meanwhile her mother was showing great concern over Dexter’s black eye, even offering him a piece of raw steak for it.
‘It’s nothing much,’ he said.
‘Coming all the way to England with a damaged knee, that’s very brave, very determined of you,’ she said.
Dexter smiled weakly and shrugged.
‘The truth is, I’m in England with a damaged heart. That pains me a lot more than my knee does.’
For one glorious moment Kelly wondered whether he was sending her mother up something rotten, that at some point he’d turn to Kelly, drop the act and burst out laughing. But no, there was no obvious irony there. He might have been putting on an act but it was an act he apparently believed in.
‘Well look, Dexter,’ said Kelly as lunch ended, ‘you’ve apologized, you’ve been fed, I’ve accepted your apology. Now, if you just pay me off for the time I worked, we can call it a day.’
Without hesitation Dexter produced his wallet and dealt out a full hand of crackling, machine-fresh notes. He gave Kelly all she was owed and then added another twenty pound note.
‘Is that a tip?’ Kelly asked.
‘If you like.’
‘Well, thank you, sir.’
Her mother watched the financial transaction with mild disapproval, as though the exchange of money was again something that didn’t take place in the better sort of homes, and then Dexter took even more money from his wallet and tried to give that to Kelly too.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘That’s today’s wages. I’d like to carry on with our arrangement for the rest of the day.’
‘I’m not working today, not for you or anybody else.’
‘It’s not a bad offer, is it? A full day’s pay for half a day’s work.’
‘It’s not about money.’
‘Look,’ Dexter pleaded, ‘at the very least I’m going to need to call a cab, and you’re going to have to drive yourself home. All I’m asking is that you drop me off on the way.’
‘Go on, Kelly,’ her mother said. ‘You’ve already spent more time here than you usually do, I can tell you’re itching to go.’
‘Thanks a lot, Mother.’
‘Oh come on, give the poor man a chance.’
A chance to do what, Kelly wondered, yet she knew she wouldn’t win this one. She was all too familiar with her mother’s habit of taking any side that was different from hers. She knew she might as well give in now and save herself a lot of grief and time. Besides, she really did want to get out of her mother’s house.
‘OK, I’ll drive you home,’ she said, ‘but don’t pay me. I’m just giving you a lift, all right?’
‘We’ll see,’ he said.
They managed to leave Kelly’s mother’s house, but only after Dexter had expressed unnecessarily exuberant thanks, offered to do the washing up, and graciously turned down the chance of taking some leftovers with him.
As Kelly accelerated the car away from the house he said, ‘What is it with interior decor? At seventeen you tell yourself that when you get a place of your own you’ll paint the walls purple and orange, have the ceilings black with silver stars, that you’ll carpet it with Astroturf and sit on inflatable sofas. But by the time you get your own place your tastes have settled down and you want something easy to live with.
‘Like when my wife moved out, she took a lot of her stuff with her and I thought, This is going to be OK, I’ll be a bachelor boy, and I’ll have red and black leather furniture, and satin sheets and a classic pinball machine. But then, two weeks later, I wished she was there doing all the stuff that I never even noticed, arranging cushions and buying cut flowers. Or is that just stupid and sexist of me?’
Kelly couldn’t be bothered to engage. ‘Maybe,’ she said.
But Dexter wanted more attention. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I was thinking, since we’re nearby, whether we might take a look at the nuclear power station. Sizewell? Is that the name?’
‘I don’t want to take you to Sizewell,’ said Kelly.
‘Look, I really am sorry that I spiked your drink.’
‘Fine. You’re sorry. But so what? Forget it. It’s over.’
‘But I want to explain why I did it.’
‘Because you’re an arsehole?’
‘If you say so, then I guess I am, but I had other reasons too.
‘I don’t need to hear this.’
‘But I need to tell you. Look, I don’t know, I guess it’s about wanting to make a good impression on you. Don’t laugh. OK, I know I’m not doing so well. I knew you didn’t like me very much and I wanted you to like me. I thought if you were more relaxed, if we got drunk together maybe, then things would be easier. OK, I know it sounds stupid now.’
‘It sounds a little desperate.’
‘Is wanting to be liked a sign of desperation?’
‘Sometimes. You didn’t seem to be desperate with my mother.’
‘I don’t suppose I was trying to impress her.’
Feeling manipulated but not entirely unwillingly, Kelly found herself driving in the direction of Sizewell, a tiny fishing village that had been overwhelmed by the arrival of one and then another power station. There was still a beach and a few fishing boats, but there was also a big car park and a picnic area and a cafe, for the tourists drawn to the threatening weirdness of the place. She pulled the car off the road and into the gravel of the parking area.
‘Why do you want to impress me, Dexter?’
‘I don’t know. I guess because I’m impressed by you,’ he said.
She was out of the car and halfway to the beach before Dexter had struggled out of his seat. She waited for him at the water’s edge and when he arrived they began to walk slowly, gently along the beach. The sun was feeble, the sea was a thick opal green and the power stations stood out hard and sharp-edged.
There was Sizewell A and Sizewell B. The former was a grey, frightening, shabby building, rugged and four-square with stained concrete walls, a death factory. There was scaffolding huddled round one corner. By contrast Sizewell B looked like something constructed out of children’s building blocks. From the beach it appeared as a long, low block of shiny blue metal, crowned with a simple, sparkling white dome. It looked cheerful, friendly, totally harmless.
‘It doesn’t look much like a nuclear power station,’ said Dexter.
‘No? What should a nuclear power station look like?’
‘Like Sizewell A, I guess.’
Kelly smiled as though Dexter had proved some point for her.
‘What did your father think of it?’ he asked.
‘He never saw it. He was dead before Sizewell B was completed.’
‘Do you think he’d have liked it?’
It was not an unfamiliar question, in fact it was the kind of question she asked herself all the time. She often looked at the world, at buildings and spaces and environments and then wondered how they would appear through her father’s eyes.
‘Yes, I think he’d have liked it,’ she said. ‘He’d have liked the colour, the bold shapes, the apparent simplicity of it. He’d have thought it was a pretty good joke.’
‘What’s the joke?’ Dexter asked.
‘The joke is that it looks like a big, safe, friendly building, when in reality it’s an atom splitter and if it blows up it takes half of England with it. The half I happen to live in.’
‘Does it scare you?’
‘Some days, yes.’
‘But you still live here. Why don’t you go somewhere safer?’
Kelly had no satisfactory answer to that. She’d often thought of moving on, and not only because of the nuclear reactor on her doorstep, but she never had, and she wondered if she ever would.
‘I’m not putting you down,’ said Dexter. ‘Hell, I live on a fault line in California. Why don’t I move away?’
‘We could go on a tour of the plant,’ Kelly said. ‘They spend a lot of time telling you how safe it all is.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Dexter, and she was glad he’d said that, ‘but I wouldn’t mind checking out the visitors’ centre.’
The tide had recently gone out and left its shabby residue along the beach. Up ahead of them, lying diagonally across their path, was a long, black, tattered piece of driftwood, looking like a decayed snake with a sharp, pointed head. They came to it and stopped. Kelly walked round it as though viewing a piece of difficult but intriguing modern sculpture. She looked across at Dexter. She thought he wasn’t the sort of man who would understand the attractions of flotsam and jetsam. She wasn’t even going to attempt to explain. But then, unbidden, Dexter said, ‘It’s great. Really great. Do you want to take it home with you?’
She did, very much, but she didn’t see how they could. She looked back at how far they’d come from the car park. It was a fair distance. The piece of wood was heavy and awkward, and Dexter, hampered by his bad leg and his walking stick, didn’t look like he’d be a great deal of use. Still, she wanted to try.
‘You sure you can manage?’ she asked.
‘Sure. It’ll be worth it.’
That was exactly what she thought. They each grabbed an end. The wood was frayed, splintering with dampness and felt even heavier than it appeared.
As they walked back Dexter said, ‘My family has a kind of vacation home out in the desert in California. When I was a kid I was always picking up weird bits of stuff, bones, hub caps, cactus skeletons. They thought I was nuts. At the end of each vacation I’d want to take it all home with me. I had to do a lot of arguing. A lot of tears got shed; mostly mine.’
Kelly found herself feeling curiously sympathetic towards her imagined picture of the young boy.
‘You know, Dexter,’ she said, ‘when you don’t try to be liked you can be quite likeable.’
They loaded the length of driftwood into the back of Kelly’s car. She was surprised by the ease with which Dexter operated. No doubt he was spurred by his determination to impress her, but this time he didn’t seem at all desperate.
They drove to the visitors’ centre at the power station and went inside. It was all very friendly and multi-media, lots of lights and television screens, and buttons to press. There was a section through a model house showing how power came in and how it was used. There were displays showing how atoms were split. There was a geiger counter and some mildly radioactive materials. None of it entertained them for very long.
‘Not a great selection of souvenirs for sale,’ said Dexter. ‘I was hoping there’d be a model of Sizewell B. It looks so straightforward, so easy to make.’
‘It only looks like that from one angle. I know it looks like a single block with a dome on top, but it’s really a lot more complex than that. The white dome doesn’t actually sit on top of the block at all, it’s free standing and it’s some way back, and it isn’t just a dome, it’s a stumpy little tower with a hemispherical roof. And the blue part isn’t a simple block at all. If you see it from the air it’s very messy.’
‘You’ve seen it from the air?’
‘I once went out with a guy who flew. He hired a plane and we went over.’
‘They didn’t shoot you down?’
‘They didn’t even try,’ said Kelly.
She became aware of Dexter gathering up his forces to say or ask something important. When it came it didn’t seem so monumental to her. All he said was, ‘Would you come and have a drink with me now?’
'No, not tonight, Dexter.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘And will you come and pick me up in the morning? Does our arrangement still stand? Where are you going to take me?’
‘I’ll think of something,’ said Kelly.
She drove him back to the Phoenix, then went home. On the way she started to wonder if she was strong enough to get the lump of driftwood out of the car without someone’s help.