Three

The phone rang at precisely midnight.

‘Lin … is that you?’

‘Yes.’

She heard Kieran try to control his voice. ‘Where’s Theo?’

‘Right here.’

She glanced over at the open door leading to the only bedroom, a tiny eight-by-six room under the eaves, where Theo was now soundly asleep. They had a bedroom, sitting room, and a bathroom down on the half-landing. Sometimes, in the darkness, Lin could hear the slow, muffled bleep of the alarm on the front door of the shop far below.

‘Is he all right?’ Kieran asked.

‘Of course he is.’

A pause.

‘I’ve warned you, Kieran,’ Lin said softly. ‘Dozens of times.’

‘Where are you exactly?’

‘We’re in Hampton.’

He gave a deep, impatient sigh. ‘When did you get there?’

‘Yesterday.’

Another silence, then, ‘This about beats all.’

‘Maybe now you’ll take me seriously,’ she said quietly.

‘I spoke to Ruth last month—you know that.’

‘You told her not to come to the house any more?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘She denied it, Lin, as I could have told you.’

She stared around the living room. The phone was next to the sofa where she slept. There were no curtains on the window. No need so high above everyone else, with a view of roofs and the winding hill and the river.

Kieran’s voice came back softly. ‘I just got in and found this message,’ he said.

‘I rang you at noon.’

‘We’ve been filming up the coast from here,’ he said.

‘Is it hot?’

‘No, it’s raining.’

She said nothing. Filming was misery in rain. She ought to know. She could hear other voices, a great many, but far back from the phone he was using.

Two thousand miles away, Kieran glanced about himself. He was in a small Cypriot hotel in a mountain village. The reception desk was a counter four feet from a door that had probably been propped open for a hundred years. The floor was a lurid green linoleum, the steps from the door bright blue. Calor Gas cylinders lined the steps and the pavement outside. And beyond the door the rain sheeted down in one solid curtain, straight and heavy. There was no breath of wind. The temperature was stuck at sixty-five.

‘How is Harry?’ Lin asked.

‘Never mind him. Lin …’

She felt his exasperation. ‘This is your doing,’ she told him. ‘She still comes around, Kee. She was there on Monday.’

‘Look, I accept it’s something of a pain,’ he said. ‘You know what she is. Needs to be in there. Can’t you just tolerate her? It’s not as if she’s malicious—just the opposite.’

Lin stared in exasperation at the ceiling, knotting her fist on the lumped-up blankets that covered her.

‘I wonder how much you would stand of it if you were here more often.’

‘I’d be glad to see her. I like Ruth.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘You obviously do.’

‘You’re letting this get out of proportion, Lin.’

‘She comes in at night! What more do I have to say to convince you? She comes at night, for God’s sake!’

‘To do what?’ he demanded.

‘Nothing. That’s it, don’t you see? She just sits there, rearranges magazines …’

‘She rearranges magazines?’ His tone was now incredulous. ‘You’ve left home because my ex-wife rearranges your magazines?’

‘Yes!’ Lin retorted. She felt tears beginning to block her throat. ‘She has a set of keys and comes into our house at night, Kieran. Or when I’m out during the day. I know she’s been there.’

‘Have you asked her about it?’

‘What?’ Lin said.

‘Have you asked her if she’s doing it?’

‘Of course not!’

‘Then how do you know it’s Ruth?’

‘Oh, God.’ For a moment, Lin put the receiver down, then lifted it again to her ear. ‘If it isn’t her, I’m in even worse trouble,’ she said almost tonelessly. ‘I’ve got a stranger coming into my house at night and fumbling around, moving things. Never taking things. Never destroying things. Just moving stuff around. Can’t you see how crazy it is?’

‘It’s crazy all right,’ he murmured.

She caught his meaning. ‘You mean Ruth can’t be crazy, so I must be?’

‘Now—’

‘I’m the ridiculous one. She’s the one constantly ringing up and coming round here. But I’m the ridiculous one. I’m crazy. I’m … what? Overreacting? Of course. It’s me—that’s right, I forgot.’

She closed her eyes. The room suddenly felt cold. She had a sensation of being cast away, isolated. There was a sudden violent thump from Theo’s room.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said into the phone.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s Theo. Wait a minute.’ She dropped the phone and swung her legs down off the couch. In the dark she ran over to look into his room. But her son was lying perfectly still, on his back, the bed coverings still tucked tightly around him. She leaned down, checked his breathing, the sweet warm smell of him.

Lin went back to the living-room couch and picked up the discarded receiver. ‘It was nothing,’ she said.

Kieran had obviously taken the time to gather himself for their next flurry. ‘I’ve only been away six weeks.’

‘I know that.’

‘And you say she’s escalated to this in six weeks?’

‘I’m telling you—’ Lin began.

‘This is such a petty thing to do, Lin.’

‘Aren’t you afraid?’ she asked.

‘About what?’

‘Afraid for me. Someone’s coming into our house—’

‘But not breaking in? And then doing what? Do you really think Ruth would come in and just sit there? Just fiddle about with the furniture? Why? What’s the purpose?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lin said miserably.

‘Do you see how utterly fantastic this sounds? I’m more afraid for you there now, wherever you are.’

‘I’m not imagining it.’

‘I didn’t say so.’

‘I can hear it in your voice.’

‘Well,’ he said, smiling to himself. ‘You do have a wonderful imagination.’

She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She fisted one hand and put it to the side of her head. If he had been present in the room, she might have hit him. She sat with her knees now pulled up to her chest, her free arm wrapped around them, her breath coming in short, progressively laboured gasps.

‘Kieran,’ she said slowly, ‘don’t belittle me.’

For some time there was nothing but the background voices on his end of the line. She heard someone loudly ordering drinks. She could even hear the whispering slush of the rain.

‘I’m all right here,’ she said finally. ‘It’s a little flat, over a shop in the Liddles.’ That was a warren of market streets just out of the centre of Hampton: a mixture of delicatessens, bookshops, secondhand-clothes stores. ‘Don’t you remember Edith Channon? With the shop? She lives below me. She—’

‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, as if he had heard nothing of the last few sentences. ‘To leave home over this—leave our beautiful home—’

‘Your home,’ she corrected him. ‘Yours and Ruth’s.’

‘No, no …’

‘Yes, yes. She still thinks it’s hers. It’s like …’ Lin finally broke down, much to her own disgust after all her attempts to seem rational. She wanted to play this trump card calmly. Ruth or me. Choose Ruth or me. And instead she could hear herself weeping, gasping.

‘Darling,’ he said.

‘I don’t want to have to leave the house,’ she said. ‘Oh God,’ she murmured, a private plea that was barely audible.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

She fumbled for a tissue on the table alongside the sofa. She found nothing, and wiped her free hand over her face. ‘What?’

‘Your headaches.’

‘Oh … OK.’ This was a lie. Something in her head, something in the way she looked at the world, the messages she processed through, was awry. She couldn’t determine the exact difference. It was as if the world were made of some subtly altered substance: the same and not the same.

Another long pause. ‘Are you working?’ he asked.

She stared at the phone helplessly. ‘Frightened I won’t finish your script?’

‘Don’t be funny.’

‘Or the editing?’

‘Lin, please.’

She made a grudging face to herself. ‘I’m working,’ she told him. Working in the moments—sometimes no more than fifteen minutes at a time—that Theo would allow her. Her bursts of sharpened, irregular concentration had also changed, heightened and distorted. Sometimes, as she sat down to write, the page seemed to lie at the end of a kaleidoscopic tube. Then, closing her eyes, reopening them, this image would vanish.

She was so very tired.

‘You know what this is?’ Kieran asked. He sounded closer now, as if he had cupped his hand over the receiver. ‘This is blackmail.’

‘What can I do if you take her word over mine?’

‘I don’t take her word over yours. I’m simply …’ Another selection of the correct phrase. ‘I’m simply astonished,’ he said finally. ‘And disappointed.’

Her heart went cold. She tightened her grip on the phone.

‘Just tell her,’ she said very evenly, ‘to stay away. Leave us alone. Have her own life. Not mine. Not yours.’

‘All right,’ he conceded at last. ‘All right. I’ll phone her tomorrow. But, if I do, you must promise me one thing.’

‘What is it?’

‘Go back to the house.’

‘No.’

‘Oh, really!’

‘No,’ she repeated.

She started to put the phone down, then rapidly pressed it back to her ear. ‘Don’t tell her where I am, Kieran,’ she said.

‘Why should I?’

‘Promise me.’

He laughed to himself. ‘Hope to die.’

Exasperated, she gave in to a childish impulse and hung up on him. She listened to the street, the silence.

‘You don’t know,’ she murmured. ‘You don’t know.’

On the other side of Europe, he put down the receiver.

‘What is it?’ Harry asked him.

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ Kieran said.

Harry handed him a drink. Kieran’s agent had been holding ready two thumb-smeared glasses, a quart of Scotch tucked under one arm. Harry was a short man, carrying much more weight than he could afford, who looked older than his forty years, with a heavily greying beard and a rumpled, battered look. Kieran allowed himself an amused moment of pity.

Ever the concerned agent, Harry had arrived only two days before, scenting trouble and trying to avert it. Kieran was already enmeshed in another running battle with the crew over locations, changing his mind, altering the script, scorching the telephone lines between here and London. Ben Lazenby had already gone home, and left the last half-episode to his assistant.

Harry felt like the original fish out of water. He had spent barely two hours, on first arrival, in his pre-booked hotel; for the rest of the time he had been accompanying Kieran on bumpy, sweaty, dank journeys along tracks whose overstated scent of thyme and breathtaking views did nothing at all to ease Harry’s mood. They had spent last night here, where Harry had grumbled for a full hour about the stacks of empty Beck’s crates and a 1930s bathroom of peeling, verdigris grandeur.

‘Why are we here anyway?’ he had demanded. ‘There’s a beautiful hotel just down the road.’

‘Not with this view,’ Kieran had told him.

They had been sitting outside, looking over the white church in the valley, while a thin Cypriot girl swept the path and the empty road.

Harry put a hand on his arm now. ‘You want to tell me what’s going on?’

‘She left the house.’

‘Lin? Why?’

‘Because of Ruth.’

Harry put down his glass, looked at his feet.

‘That’s what she says—but it’s not true.’

Harry glanced at him. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because it’s too absurd.’

‘Oh, absurd. Right. What exactly?’

Kieran considered for a moment, then shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. She’ll come back.’

‘You are having a great month. Anyone left to insult?’

Kieran waved his hand. ‘She often goes away for a couple of days to do research. She always has. This is just that, dressed up—dramatized. She’ll be all right by the time I get back.’

Harry was staring at him. ‘And that’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

Harry bent his knees to look up into Kieran’s downturned face. ‘You’re a piss-poor liar.’

Kieran ran his hand through his hair, but made no reply. Then, with a grudging smile, he extended his own hand, flat, and pushed Harry’s face away.

Harry went back to the bar.

In the corner, an elderly couple were staring at Kieran, both with the bemused smile reserved for the unknown confronting the famous, as if Kieran were an illusion capable of vanishing at any moment.

And Kieran possessed, Harry had to admit, a perfect television face.

They had altered the graphics on The History House this year. The programme was impressive, no longer giving off that made-in-the-provinces aura. It was immensely slick now, with a cellophane-wrapped quality. Some of the original quirkiness had gone, of course, ironed and airbrushed away. Hand-held cameras, with their choppy style, had edged out the static frames of the first episodes. But that had suited Kieran all the more—made a good partner to his casual charm.

Kieran was in his mid-thirties, dark, tall and lean, with a lazy sexual smile that rattled the screen. Since The History House began two years ago, he had become a national name.

The opening credits of the programme were imposing: a packed sequence of ramparts, Elizabethan courtyards, country houses, bones in burial ditches, air-shots of the Thames, causeways, and vast Neolithic rings bleaching through downland. Stone eagles transmuted to Byzantine horses, each image bordered with the red-and-gold of the programme logo. The horses in turn melted into flags, swords, crowns and crests, with Kieran’s smile miraculously and handsomely appearing between the familiar faces of politicians, newscasters, actresses, and sports stars. All to a throbbing and insistent tune written specially by a knighted West End composer.

The final episode of the previous series had been particularly well done. In the opening shots Kieran was revealed standing on a small headland overlooking a Welsh estuary. Next to him was another television face: a game-show celebrity known for his quick wits and bordering-on-the-offensive grin.

They had looked rather a comic couple, each vying for the camera’s attention: Kieran with his laid-back air, his faint but seamless tan, his trademark black shirt and black leather jacket; the older man as pale as Kieran was dark, and dressed sadly in a golfing sweater and sparkle-patterned tie. He rapidly lost the battle, poor man, standing in a cow rut while Kieran lounged on a nearby wall.

‘Tell me how you came to buy such a marvellous place,’ had been Kieran’s opening line.

The comedian had laughed. ‘Well, it’s a funny story …’

Not a very funny story, as it had turned out. Kieran had listened, smiling, then taken the other man’s arm, as if guiding an invalid down the grassy slope. A nice touch, Harry had to admit. ‘And now let’s look at the Bronze Age evidence …’

Of course, Kieran had not always been such a household name.

When he and Ruth first met, she had just taken up partnership in the town medical practice, and he had been doing a postgraduate course at the university. Three years later he had his teaching post: History, of course. Roman history. The Punic Wars. He had once lovingly described his old flat to Harry: filled with Latin and Greek texts, a bachelor’s flat on campus—before Ruth had reorganized him. She was older than him by five years. Kieran admitted that he had not then possessed a grain of ambition, so after their marriage it had been Ruth who had manoeuvred him towards a better job, Ruth who thrown the discreet little dinner parties, Ruth who had fitted them both so well into the university hierarchy. She was the perfect hostess, Kieran had told him. Utterly charming. He had been promoted by the time he was twenty-eight.

Harry studied the same man now. Lin had also wrought a complete change in his career. Kieran was a lucky man, the kind who always fell soundly on his feet, the kind nurtured by one clever woman after another, nurtured and mothered for his good looks and his charm, and his air of being the naughtiest boy in the school. A lazy, smiling Flashman. Nevertheless, Harry was sure that Kieran was at heart an academic, not a television personality. Television was not his meat at all; to Kieran it was just a passing game.

‘Hell, poor old Lin,’ Harry said out loud. Several feet away, Kieran glanced up. Harry rejoined him. He liked Lin. She was an original, a one-off, and more of a contrast to Ruth Harry could not imagine. He switched the whisky bottle from palm to palm.

‘Another glass?’

‘No,’ said Kieran. ‘I’m going to bed.’ He walked to the stairs.

As Harry watched him go, he drained his glass, a thoughtful expression on his face. Then he turned and leaned over the counter behind him. There was a litter of paper there, an ancient switchboard, a safe lurking underneath it, the ubiquitous plate of little oranges. Oranges everywhere out here. No crisp packets in the roads, no cigarette packets, just orange skins squashed every hundred yards. Oranges in the road, orange trees at the side of the roads. He picked one off the plate and began peeling it, thinking, speculating.

Kieran’s passing games.

Sucking on the fruit, moving the sweet pith around his mouth, Harry looked hard along the counter. The girl who had attended it an hour before was now behind the bar across the damp hall, taking no notice of the reception area.

There was a sheet of lined paper beside the phone, and Harry turned it around with his fingertips. On the paper was a UK telephone number.

Lobbing the orange peel out into the rainy street, Harry swiftly wrote down the number. Then, taking the whisky bottle with him, he went up to his room.