End of the Line

‘There’s a girl called Weena Dodds on the end of the line,’ said Elaine Desmond.

‘Tell her I’m busy,’ said Defoe Desmond, her husband. They were fifty-fiveish. Both were personable and attractive. They lived in a secluded Grade I listed property.

‘She’s from the New Age Times,’ said Elaine. ‘And she wants to talk to you about Red Mercury.’

‘Red Mercury’s a hoax,’ he said, ‘and the New Age Times is a streak of shit. Tell her to go away.’

Elaine couched his response in gentler terms, but Weena Dodds would not go away.

‘What’s he fucking afraid of?’ Weena demanded. ‘What’s he so guilty about? Ask him!’

Elaine did.

‘I am afraid of nothing and guilty about nothing,’ said Defoe Desmond to his wife. ‘Tell Weena Dodds she can have her interview.’

Elaine explained to Weena that Drewlove Village was at the end of the line. Weena would need to change at Westbury Junction, and start out from London at 9 a.m. to arrive at midday. Then she should take a taxi. The interview would last an hour. Elaine was sorry she could not offer lunch, but there would at least be coffee.

‘All that way and no lunch,’ said Weena to her editor, Dervish Wilton. ‘What a bitch she sounds. Just like my mother.’

‘Find out why the Defoe Desmond show was really axed,’ said the editor of the New Age Times, who was thirtyish and had dark eyes as cold as Stalin’s. ‘You’re not going for the food.’

‘I’m going First Class,’ warned Weena Dodds. ‘I’m not roughing it in Standard.’

‘You’re lucky I don’t make you cycle down,’ said the editor. ‘There’s a dozen Vegan girls out there already lining up for your job.’

‘Let ’em line,’ said Weena. She was safe enough. She blow-jobbed the editor on Friday afternoons, and not many Vegan girls would do that these days, not even for the sake of employment. The old worlds and the new criss-crossed each other. You could turn them both to your advantage if you had the instinct. She was a pretty girl with a prim mouth and wide eyes, a smooth high forehead and a great deal of frizzy hair, and a bosom plumper than she wanted it to be. Sometimes she shaved the hair back from her forehead: then she had a bland, medieval look. But it was a problem when the hair was growing back. She had to stay at home.

‘What do you reckon the girl from the New Age Times looks like?’ asked Defoe.

‘Lank-haired,’ said Elaine, ‘from the sound of her voice. It had a nasal whine.’

‘Ah,’ said Defoe. He was sketching a nuclear warhead on his architectural drawing board, prior to Weena’s arrival.

Six slugs of Red Mercury backed six slugs of plutonium, all focusing in on a central point, where he helpfully wrote, ‘POW! CRITICAL!’

Underneath he wrote, ‘A neutron bomb in a golf ball!’

‘Isn’t that rather too jokey?’ enquired Elaine. ‘You don’t want even the New Age Times to do a hatchet job.’

‘I have been so hacked to pieces already,’ said Defoe, ‘a hatchet would have nothing with which to engage.’

Defoe’s TV science show had recently been pulled. Ratings had fallen with the end of the Cold War. No one feared nuclear extinction any more. Death by passive smoking seemed a more prescient danger. The world was bored by Defoe’s pacings, up and down, up and down across the studio floor, as he explained the mechanics of the nuclear apocalypse at length for the home market, in snippets for CNN, and many a broadsheet and yellow sheet had remarked upon it, and he chafed.

‘Tell me more about how you see Weena Dodds,’ said Defoe.

‘Unblinking,’ said Elaine. ‘Therapists, New Agers and Born Again Christians seldom blink. A blink marks the mind’s registration of a new idea. Converts have no intention of receiving new ideas. They know already all they want to know.’

‘I see,’ said Defoe, ‘that you already have a prejudice against the girl. Well, I will have to be nice to her to make up for it.’

‘She has a strange name,’ said Elaine. ‘Weena Dodds! What kind of parents name their child Weena? How did they expect her to turn out?’

‘I expect they were fans of H. G. Wells,’ said Defoe. ‘I expect they had read The Time Machine. Weena was the name of the little creature who befriended the Time Traveller. She was an Eloi. In the distant future, Elois skipped about and danced and sang on the surface of the earth; Morlocks toiled below the ground, dealing with the intricate workings of the universe. They lived in the fetid dark; dwarfish mechanics, and surfaced only to herd the Eloi for food.’ Defoe liked to give instruction.

‘And the Time Traveller brought her home with him?’ asked Elaine.

‘I seem to remember,’ said Defoe, ‘that the Morlocks ate her before he could.’

‘You are the chief Morlock,’ said Elaine. ‘I am glad I didn’t ask her to lunch, for her sake.’

‘I can’t stand wives,’ said Weena Dodds to her mother Francine that night. They were doomed to live together, it seemed, mother and daughter, for reasons of commerce and comfort.

‘I was your father’s wife,’ said Francine. She was an elegant, unemotional woman, doing a further degree in Clinical Psychology.

‘Exactly,’ said Weena. ‘You always acted as if you owned him.’

‘I did,’ said Francine. They decided, mutely, not to take the argument further. Both were tired.

‘What a bitch!’ said Weena, playing for sympathy instead. ‘All the way to the end of the line and not even any lunch.’

‘You could do without lunch,’ said Francine, who had been born thin and attributed her daughter’s tendency to put on weight as lack of self-control. Weena burst into tears and ran from the room.

Weena called her friend Hattie.

‘My mother is such a bitch,’ Weena said. ‘She killed my father, you know. People only get cancer if they’re unhappy.’

‘My father killed my mother,’ said Hattie gloomily, ‘in that case.’

‘It was stomach cancer,’ said Weena. ‘Even after it was diagnosed, she wouldn’t go over to health foods. She kept on feeding my father meat, not to mention animal fats.’

‘My mother was the worst cook in the world,’ said Hattie. It wasn’t so much that they conversed, these two, as set each other off. ‘My father says it contributed to her early death. It was stomach cancer, too.’

‘It isn’t healthy to live with one’s mother,’ observed Weena. ‘I’d move out, only I know my father always intended me to have the apartment. It was just the inheritance laws stopped him so now we have to share.’

‘Couldn’t one or the other of you buy the other out?’

‘Yes, but which one? We both want it. Guess where I’m going tomorrow?’

‘Where?’ asked Hattie.

‘To interview Defoe Desmond.’

‘That man who used to be on the TV?’

‘That’s right,’ said Weena.

‘What on earth for?’

‘There’s this new stuff called Red Mercury they say could blow up the world.’

‘Never heard of it,’ said Hattie.

‘That’s the point,’ said Weena. ‘It’s used in neutron bombs. Neutron bombs kill people but preserve property. So they’re keeping it a secret.’

‘They are awful,’ said Hattie bleakly. ‘What news on the Bob front?’

‘Still pattering along behind,’ said Weena, ‘breathing halitosis over my hopes.’ Bob was Senior Editor at a Publishing House, and forty-fiveish.

‘Men are awful,’ agreed Hattie. She was trying to paint her toenails and speak on the phone at the same time.

‘I blame his wife,’ said Weena. ‘First she said she loved him, and wouldn’t leave him alone; then she threatened to burn us alive in our bed, so we had to go into hiding; then she changed her mind and left him, and now it’s over between us and he needs her she won’t even go back to him. God, women can be bitches.’

‘It sometimes seems to me, Weena,’ said Hattie, ‘that once they’ve left their wives for you, that’s when you lose interest.’

‘I suppose you could see it like that,’ said Weena, ‘or you could see it as men trying to reduce you to wife status the moment they get you, and me fighting back. I would have thought a friend would see it the second way.’

‘Sorry,’ said Hattie. ‘I thought friends were the ones who were meant to tell you the truth. Well if Bob’s going free, perhaps I should take him up? He has money and influence. I think you’re mad to let him go.’

Weena shivered and drew the conversation to an end. Once a man was rejected, he ought to stay rejected, and by everyone she knew. She went and said she was sorry to her mother, for no rhyme or reason, and took herself off to bed. She still had teddy bears on her counterpane and liked to cuddle them.

Elaine showed a couple called the Swains, David and Lila, around Drewlove House. The property was for sale.

‘I like the way the house is at the end of a line,’ said Lila, ‘and then you take this journey into the woods, and suddenly there it is, a little piece of old England.’ Lila was from Bangladesh, and had an American accent. David nudged her and she said, ‘Oh, sorry.’

‘It should perhaps be better described as remote, not secluded,’ said David. He was tall, thin, whiter than white, blond and had a receding chin.

‘Just you and me,’ said Lila, twitching her sari to stop the gold and red fabric trailing in the cat’s saucer of milk. They were in the kitchen, Aga-warmed. There were spring flowers on the table especially for the occasion. ‘You and me. Safe from the world’s stare. Nature is so much kinder than people.’

‘We were looking for somewhere more accessible to London,’ said David Swain. ‘That wait at Westbury Junction certainly lowers the value of the place,’ and as Lila opened her mouth to speak, he nudged her and she shut it again.

‘I’m surprised you want to sell,’ David Swain said as they walked through the garden, and Lila fell on her knees in front of a frilly double tulip of particular attractiveness. ‘If, as you say, it’s been in your family for some generations.’

‘There has been a rather sudden change in our circumstances,’ said Elaine.

‘The names on the deeds of Drewlove House are a matter of public record – one likes to get these details straight before contemplating purchase. Do get up, Lila. You are making your sari dirty.’

‘I am a Drewlove,’ said Elaine, pleasantly. ‘My mother lost the house, gambling, in 1941, when I was little, which as you can imagine caused quite a family upset. My mother lost to a local builder, a Mr Malcolm Trott. Had she won, she would have owned the Trott farm. Mr Trott, being no gentleman, held her to her gambling debt. She would have done the same to him, no doubt. The house was presently requisitioned by, and later bought by, the Ministry of Defence, who then sold it to my husband, on our marriage. My husband was at the time a young scientist working for the Ministry. So the names on the Land Registry should read, since 1785, Drewlove after Drewlove, with various mortgaging, surrendering, conveyancing, further charging, of various lands and buildings to the Family Trott; the whole lot going to Malcolm Trott in 1941, who won in the end; to the MOD in 1947, and from MOD to Desmond in 1963. Okay?’

‘That was a very full explanation,’ said David Swain, appearing satisfied. They were back inside the house by now. Elaine had talked all the way. David Swain drummed his sweaty fingers on an Aga especially cleaned and polished for his visit. ‘Thank you for it. I know you understand that in the circumstances some explanation was certainly called for.’

‘Would you like to see the Granny flat?’ asked Elaine.

‘I don’t have a family,’ said Lila. ‘They have disowned me.’

‘One moment,’ said David Swain. ‘There is something fishy going on here. How come your mother’s name was Drewlove? There should be another name there somewhere if that cock-and-bull story is true.’

‘My mother,’ said Elaine, ‘never married. She was a very fishy woman. I am illegitimate. And I do not want you living in my family home; it will take you twenty minutes to walk to the station, the end of the line. My phone is out of order, or I would call you a taxi.’

‘I heard it ringing just now,’ said Lila.

‘It does that sometimes,’ said Elaine. ‘The lines round here can be very bad. You had better go now, and hurry, or you will have to wait hours for your next connection.’

‘The Swains went away quickly,’ said Defoe.

‘Not soon enough,’ said Elaine.

‘We don’t have to sell this house,’ said Defoe.

‘You haven’t seen this morning’s letter from the bank,’ said Elaine. ‘We do. They say it’s the end of the line.’

‘Perhaps this house is unlucky,’ said Defoe.

‘It was okay until they extended the railway line, in 1919. That was the year my mother was born,’ said Elaine. ‘And things go wrong anyway. One can hardly attribute all cosmic events to a verbal pun. One can hardly say we lost our income because you lost your job because the world lost interest in the nuclear threat because our house is at the end of the line.’

‘Some could,’ said Defoe. ‘Someone like the girl from the New Age Times could very well. New Agers drive winsome thoughts between ordinary notions of cause and effect.’

And his eyes drifted towards the window, to see if Weena Dodds was coming up the path. She was.

* * *

Elaine opened the door to Weena. Weena saw a woman who was a dead-ringer for her mother Francine, but without scarves and earrings. Her nails were broken and she was without eye make-up, which for someone of her age was foolish. This woman had clearly lived in the country too long.

‘There wasn’t a taxi at the station,’ said Weena. ‘I had to walk.’

‘Walking would do you no harm,’ said Elaine, ‘from the look of you.’ Weena seemed to be a heterosexual version of her own daughter Daphne. Just one of those things.

(‘The bitch, the bitch!’ said Weena to Hattie that night on the phone.

‘I expect she was jealous,’ said Hattie. ‘Probably flat as a board herself.’ Hattie had a nice little bosom herself, just about right.

Weena giggled.

‘Not flat,’ said Weena. ‘There are advantages to flat. Just shapeless. You know how wives and mothers get.’

‘I expect you had your revenge,’ said Hattie.

‘Oh, I did,’ said Weena. ‘I did.’)

‘Well,’ said Defoe, waiting until his wife had left the room, ‘this is a surprise. I didn’t think you’d have the nerve. I want my £20 back.’

‘What £20?’

‘The £20 you stole from my wallet while I was asleep.’

‘That was the point,’ she said. ‘I always take money from a man’s wallet if he falls asleep after sex. It’s policy. It repairs my self-esteem.’

‘I was tired,’ Defoe said. ‘It was after the show. You had no mercy. I am a tired old married man.’

‘You could have fooled me,’ she said. ‘And the wallet was so stuffed I’m surprised you noticed.’

‘That was before Nemesis fell,’ he said. ‘I could do with every penny now.’

‘Not Nemesis,’ she said, ‘but Karma. We all get what we deserve. But I know the feeling.’

‘We get what we deserve!’ he marvelled. ‘Do you honestly believe that?’

‘I got you that night,’ she said, smiling her pretty smile, ‘so I must have done something right.’

‘When I called the number you gave,’ he said, ‘the woman who answered said she didn’t know who you were.’

(‘The bitch! The bitch!’ Weena moaned to Hattie later.

‘That’s my mother’s idea of a joke. “I don’t know who she is.” She’s always driving my men away.’

‘Better than stealing them,’ said Hattie, but Weena wasn’t listening. ‘Everyone I know has mothers on HRT,’ continued Hattie, ‘who’ve a real problem, but me, I’m motherless.’

‘I can’t stand women who make jokes,’ said Weena. ‘Men don’t like them either. The way to a man’s heart is through total solemnity.’

‘If you want to get there in the first place,’ said Hattie. ‘It seems an odd ambition to me.’

‘Well I fucking do,’ said Weena. ‘I have simply got to get out of my home situation.’)

‘So you gave up,’ she complained.

‘Guilt undermined my intent,’ Defoe said. ‘And then my world crumbled about me.’

‘Of course it did,’ she said, briskly. ‘Guilt is a destructive emotion. I never feel guilty about anything, especially sex!’

Elaine came into the room with a tray on which there were two mugs of instant coffee and some sugar in a little white-lidded bowl.

‘I don’t take sugar,’ said Weena, looking under the lid. ‘It’s poison.’

‘Well, dear,’ said Elaine, ‘don’t take any, then.’ And she went out of the room, raising her eyebrows at Defoe. Weena caught the look. Very little escaped her.

‘She doesn’t like me,’ said Weena. ‘But then I’m not a woman’s woman. My mother doesn’t like me either. But you’re not interested in me.’

‘I am interested in you,’ he said. She was sitting silhouetted between the desk and the window. The fabric of her white blouse was fine. She wore no bra and the outline of her full breasts was visible: when she moved to adjust the tape recorder the nipple of her left breast flattened against the wood.

‘Well,’ said Weena briskly to Defoe Desmond, at Drewlove House, ‘I didn’t come all this way to talk about fucks past. I came to talk about Red Mercury and its implications for the future of the world. My editor says, though the nuclear threat is far from the top of the world survival agenda, it still has implications for concerned people everywhere.’

‘It does,’ said Defoe.

‘I don’t actually drink coffee,’ said Weena. ‘Most people nowadays don’t.’

‘My wife is old-fashioned,’ apologised Defoe.

‘I can tell that,’ said Weena. ‘Now, where were we? Oh yes, my editor said it didn’t matter I was science-illiterate, you were such a brilliant populariser even a Gaian could understand you.’

‘Did he really say that?’ Defoe was pleased.

‘He did,’ said Weena.

‘Your editor seems to loom large in your life,’ said Defoe. ‘What’s a Gaian?’

‘There!’ she said, pleased. ‘At last something I know, and you don’t. Gaia is mother earth as gestalt, a self-healing entity.’

‘Self-healing? How consoling a notion,’ Defoe observed.

‘You get so gloomy, you scientists,’ she said. ‘There’s a whole world of hope and happiness out there you know nothing about. Do you think your wife would allow me a glass of water?’

Defoe went to the door and called Elaine, and asked her to bring Weena a glass of water. Elaine did.

When Elaine was gone, Weena said, ‘She doesn’t like me much, does she?’

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Defoe.

‘She didn’t even bring the glass on a tray. It’s all thumb-printy. Shall we get on with the interview?’

‘I’m at your command,’ said Defoe. Now Weena’s skirt was rucked up to show her long bare legs to advantage. She bent to adjust the tape recorder and again flattened her left nipple against the wood of the desk. It looked an expensive desk.

‘It’s a nice desk,’ she said.

‘Eighteenth century, burr oak. It’s been in my wife’s family for a long time. It will have to go to auction.’

‘That’s a pity,’ Weena said. ‘There’s usually some way round these things.’

‘Not this time,’ said Defoe. ‘Or so my wife tells me.’

‘Some people are just doomy,’ said Weena. ‘Life falls into their expectations.’

‘You may be right,’ said Defoe.

‘I love nice things,’ she said.

‘You deserve to have them,’ said Defoe. ‘Someone like you.’

Elaine showed Harry and Rosemary Wilcox around the house.

‘A little less than a manor house,’ said Elaine, ‘a little more than a farm house. It grew, like a living thing. It began as a single stone structure, without windows, this room here, we believe, back in the ninth century. There’s a dwelling here in the Domesday book: 1070ish. See how thick the walls are? The farmer, his family, his hangers-on, the animals, all sheltered in here together. A few good harvests, no wars and some clever barter, and the humans can afford to separate out from the animals: they get to live above them. That way you get the warmth but not the stench. You build a staircase up the side of the structure: even get windows with glass. Later you build out and the farmhands and servants live apart from the farmer. You enclose the staircase. You build a big hall and panel it; you begin to get grand. A major upheaval moves the animals out to stables and byres: the servants move up to the attics; the family moves down. You send the farmhands to war and ask the monarch to stay: you get given land, or buy it. Now you’ve got more land, you’ve got more trees and can afford to heat the place. You get more confidence: separate bedrooms for the kids. An elegant frontage gets built in the early eighteenth century, and bathrooms in the twentieth. Farming’s no longer the family business. Second half of the twentieth you sell some of the land off. So, yes, it’s historic: it’s also a mess. Some of the improvers had taste, some didn’t. The bathrooms being a case in point. Wretched little things tucked under the eaves.’

The Wilcoxes looked at her blankly.

‘None of the doors are flush,’ said Rosemary.

‘We could soon replace them with something more modern,’ said Harry. ‘You could really do things with this house.’

‘Look at the state of my heels!’ she said. ‘There are actually cracks in the kitchen floor.’

‘Those are flagstones,’ said Harry. ‘We could tile them over easily enough.’

‘I expect what moved your editor to send you over to me,’ said Defoe, ‘was the documentary on TV last week. I was the nuclear expert he saw, sitting in a Moscow hotel with my face in shifting squares, electronically blurred, to no real purpose; experts are never in real danger. Everyone needs them. The chambermaid always survives the palace revolution. Someone has to make the beds. In my hand I held an anti-rad flask, and in it was a helping of Red Mercury, looking just like goulash. I tilted the flask, and it sloshed around as would any oily stew in a cooking pot, only with a paprika tinge, which is why I compare it to goulash, and why it is called Red Mercury. Hoax or not? A fictitious substance devised by the Russian Mafia – and in fact goulash? Or a real and dangerous addition to the nuclear arsenal, a substance so secret governments deny its very existence. A new element which will give the terrorists’ A-bomb in a suitcase the fillip required to turn it into an N-bomb in a golf ball, capable of destroying life for miles around – with one quick fizzle, one flash of radiation so profound it kills all living things, while leaving buildings, highways, transport, microwave towers, post-office towers to you – and water supplies untouched.’

‘You’re very good at this,’ she said, admiringly.

‘I earned my living at it for twenty years,’ said Defoe. ‘I should be.’

‘One thing,’ said Weena, ‘wouldn’t the water supply be contaminated?’

Defoe brushed the comment away, and accidentally brushed her breast.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘That’s okay,’ she said. ‘I don’t have a thing about body space. I’m the touchy-feely type, as it happens. Aquarius. You’re Taurus, aren’t you?’

‘I’m a man,’ he said. ‘That is all the definition I need. Where was I? Red Mercury, fiction or fact. Oddly, until the stuff was in my hand, I had assumed it was a fraud, a con. But there was a kind of reluctance of movement in the stuff, something about the sluggish way it shifted in the flask, as I said earlier, like chunks of meat in oil, which made me think it was authentic. The natural world hesitates when it’s on the verge of self-destruct. Surface tension prevents the lava spilling out: simple air pressure keeps shifting tectonic plates in place – to bring two pieces of plutonium together to reach critical mass requires a gigantic effort: as improbable as slamming together two pieces of magnetised metal with similar polarity. Everything in nature cries out no, no!’

Defoe paused for breath.

‘You’re very romantic,’ said Weena, ‘for a scientist.’

‘Scientists have hearts, too,’ Defoe said. ‘Who better than scientists to understand the romance of the universe, the mystery of matter?’

‘Tell me,’ said Weena, ‘if it’s true, if this stuff exists, why do governments deny that it does?’

‘The function of governments,’ said Defoe, ‘is to hold truth in reserve, as a last resort. If it doesn’t exist, so what: if it does exist, then the technology required to fit it into warheads is available only to governments, and major armies.’

And Defoe produced his diagram.

‘I think it’s wonderful!’ she said. ‘Did you draw that circle freehand?’

‘I did,’ he said.

‘I thought Leonardo da Vinci was the only man ever known to draw a perfect circle freehand.’

‘Leonardo da Vinci and me,’ said Defoe.

Elaine put her head round the door.

‘Do you want to explain the boiler to some people called the Wilcoxes?’

‘No,’ said Defoe. ‘I’m in the middle of an interview.’

Elaine went away.

‘Does she always do that?’ asked Weena. ‘Interrupt you in the middle of things?’

‘If in her judgement her needs are more urgent than mine, yes.’

‘Well,’ said Weena, ‘I think it’s rather rude to me. As if I was unimportant. You mustn’t worry about being temporarily out of work. The world can’t do without you. You talk so really well. Very few people can do that. That night in the hotel after the show I should never have let you go.’

‘I was tired,’ said Defoe. ‘I don’t suppose I did much talking. Have you read any of my books?’

‘No. I know I should have. But I don’t get to read much. But I love reading, all that.’

‘I’ll give you a copy of my latest,’ said Defoe. ‘Science the Terminator.’

And Weena actually clapped her hands with pleasure, and dropped her pen in so doing.

Perhaps Defoe would have helped Weena find the pen under the desk, but Elaine entered with Harry and Rosemary Wilcox.

‘It can’t be,’ said Rosemary, ‘but it really is! Are you the Defoe Desmond?’

‘I know of no other,’ said Defoe wearily.

‘We’re Harry and Rosemary Wilcox,’ said Harry.

‘The Harry and Rosemary Wilcox?’ asked Defoe, but Elaine frowned at him so he added, ‘Just a joke! We’re all the whoever it is to ourselves, aren’t we! The centre of our universe,’ and Rosemary and Harry’s hurt puzzlement turned to smiles.

‘Sorry your programme was axed,’ said Harry. ‘But we must all take the rough with the smooth. So now you’re selling?’

‘We always planned to sell when the children left home,’ said Elaine firmly. ‘This is the library – note the original panelling.’

‘I just love the atmosphere,’ said Rosemary Wilcox, who had turned, as Weena put it to Hattie later, from a moaning cow into a buzzy bee. A glimpse of a celebrity can do that to some people, albeit one teetering on the brink of has-been-ness.

‘Let me show you the Conservatory,’ said Elaine. ‘We haven’t had the staff to keep it up properly, but there’s a very good fig tree, nearly a hundred years old. It was planted the day my grandmother was born.’

And she moved the Wilcoxes on, looking at her watch and raising her eyebrows at her husband, as if to suggest he hurried things along with Weena if he could. Weena caught the look.

(‘The bitch!’ said Weena to Hattie later. ‘Treating me like dirt and thinking she’ll get away with it. I don’t know how Def stands her.’

‘Def, now, is it?’ said Hattie, ‘as in blind and deaf?’

‘Calling him Def makes me feel owned and owning. Like a child.’

‘And another wife bites the dust!’ said Hattie.)

‘Oh, Elaine –’ said Defoe, as his wife left the room.

‘What is it, Defoe?’ asked Elaine.

‘If you’re going upstairs, could you bring down a copy of Science the Terminator? I want Miss Dodds here to have one.’

‘We only have the shelf copy left,’ said Elaine.

‘Then we’ll lend it to her and she’ll have to bring it back.’

‘I am very good with other people’s books,’ said Weena. ‘I always return them.’

‘Oh, so you live locally?’ enquired Elaine. ‘I thought you told me you’d come up from London.’

‘I visit the area quite often,’ said Weena. ‘And I do so love this house.’

‘You are welcome to buy it,’ quipped Elaine. ‘Unless outbid by Mr and Mrs Wilcox here.’

‘There’s a lot of modernising to do,’ said Harry Wilcox to his wife as the party moved on. ‘To bring the place into even the twentieth century, forget the twenty-first.’ Defoe overheard. His ears were finely tuned and trained, after years of studio work, to catch remarks on the fringes of discussion.

‘What did you have in mind,’ demanded Defoe, now on his feet and pursuing Harry Wilcox. ‘Flush doors and an avocado bathroom suite?’

‘Defoe dear,’ said his wife, ‘calm down! And please remember we already have an avocado bathroom suite.’ And she smiled cordially and led her guests to view further features of the house. It was clear, from the look exchanged between Mr and Mrs Wilcox, that she was now wasting her time. This was a property they were unlikely to buy.

Defoe, his object obtained, calmed down quickly. He and Weena discussed his motives in leaving the field of theoretical nuclear physics, where he had started his career, his move to the Ministry of Defence on his marriage to Elaine, and thence into weapons development, and finally, when his children were born, into the media. ‘So, because you had a family to keep,’ said Weena, ‘you couldn’t follow your chosen path. Just think of it – you could have been the one to harness the power of the sun. Nuclear fusion, and all that.’

‘I was not a world-class scientist,’ Defoe said. ‘With or without my marriage.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ she said. ‘You get a kind of aura off some people. I get it from you. Charisma.’

‘In the eight weeks since the programme ended,’ said Defoe, ‘I fear mine has somewhat faded. But it’s good of you to mention it.’

‘Your wife shouldn’t have humiliated you like that,’ said Weena.

‘Like what?’

‘Showing you up like that in front of those people,’ said Weena, ‘about the bathroom suite. As if you didn’t know your own house. But some men just like bitches. Or else they get so they don’t notice.’

Elaine came into the room with a copy of Science the Terminator, and found Defoe scowling at her.

‘Is something the matter?’ she asked, surprised.

‘Consult your conscience,’ he said.

Elaine did, finger on chin, a mockery of anxiety on her face.

‘If it’s about the bathroom suite,’ she said, ‘we’ll talk about it later, when this interview is finished.’

She handed her husband the book he had asked for.

‘What shall I write in it?’ Defoe asked. ‘My mind goes blank.’

‘It’s the shelf copy,’ said Elaine. ‘The one that’s not supposed to leave the house. You’re lending it, not giving it.’

‘So I am,’ said Defoe. ‘You will be sure to bring it back, won’t you, Miss Dodds? Next time you’re in these parts?’

‘Or you could post it,’ said Elaine. ‘If you registered it first.’

‘And when you come next time,’ said Defoe, ‘you must be sure to stop for lunch. Now the children are grown, now I’m out of TV, now I’m confined to quarters, as it were –’

‘Oh I will,’ said Weena, reluctantly moving herself from her place in the sun, so the light no longer made a halo of her hair, so the curve of her bosom could no longer be seen, ‘I will.’

‘Let me see you to the door,’ said Elaine.

‘Thank you, Mrs Desmond,’ said Weena, ‘you’ve been ever so kind. Can I call you, Mr Desmond, if my notes don’t make sense? Or the recorder hasn’t picked everything up?’

‘Of course you can,’ said Defoe. ‘These days I have time to spare.’

But he did not catch her eye as she left the room, and she thought that was a bad sign.

(‘You went too far, too fast,’ said Hattie on the phone that evening, ‘from the sound of it. You shouldn’t have slagged off his wife. Men like to do that themselves; they don’t like others doing it.’)

Weena called Bob Ratchett in his bedsitting room. Lawyers had got him out of the matrimonial home and his wife and children back in it. He was in debt. None of his family would speak to him. This is what love can do for a man.

‘Oh God, darling,’ he said, ‘it’s you.’

‘We’re just good friends,’ said Weena. ‘Remember?’

‘Come round and we’ll talk about it,’ said Bob.

‘What I want to talk about,’ said Weena, ‘is the possibility of my writing a biography of Defoe Desmond, for a ginormous advance.’

‘Well,’ he said, cautiously, ‘I think the time for Defoe Desmond is past. He peaked five years ago. And since the Berlin Wall came down, forget it. On the other hand –’

‘On the other hand what?’

‘Come round and talk about it,’ said Bob Ratchett.

‘Okay,’ she said.

The next morning Defoe and Elaine got up before breakfast to go mushrooming in the fields behind the house.

Their golden labrador gambolled ahead. Little circles of white amongst the short horse-cropped grass drew them first here, then there. They held hands.

‘Everything has to change,’ observed Elaine. ‘I may be the fifth in the line of generations who have walked about this field and gathered mushrooms, but I no longer own the house. You do. I live here by your courtesy. I never wanted you to put it in our joint names. When you offered, I resisted.’

‘Yes, why did you do that?’ he asked. ‘I used to think it was your desire to be dependent.’

‘I married you for your money,’ she said, ‘or rather for your ability to buy back the house I loved. Then I came to love you more than I loved the house. I thought I should be punished.’

‘I’ll have to think about that one,’ he said. They picked more mushrooms. He no longer held her hand.

‘Now when we sell the house I love,’ she observed, ‘the money will be yours.’

He thought a little. The basket filled to overflowing. Still they wandered.

‘But you and I will live on it,’ he said. ‘I could put half in your bank account, if you prefer. But I have been supporting you for many years, and you have never worked.’

‘When the mortgage and the overdraft are paid,’ she said, ‘there won’t be much left. How uncomfortable change is, that it should oblige us to have such difficult conversations.’

The dog set off a rabbit. The rabbit raced down one side of the hedge, the dog down another. The rabbit won. The dog sat down and panted, looking daft, which he was.

‘Of course,’ Defoe said, ‘the English landed gentry always lived by selling their sons and daughters in return for land and money.’

‘I sold myself,’ she said, ‘being an orphan and having no one to sell me.’

‘We’re too near the hedge,’ he said. ‘We might mistake a death cap for a mushroom.’

‘Or vice versa,’ she said. They moved back towards the centre of the field, in the bright light where the death caps never grow.

Later in the day the phone rang. It was Weena.

‘Hello, Miss Dodds,’ said Elaine.

‘How did you know it was me?’

‘I recognised your voice,’ said Elaine. ‘You were here only the day before yesterday. Do you want to speak to my husband?’

‘Yes,’ said Weena. ‘I would like to speak to Def, Mrs Desmond, if that’s okay by you.’

‘I should warn you,’ said Elaine, ‘he doesn’t like being called Def unless he has given express permission.’

‘That’s strange,’ said Weena. ‘He didn’t seem to mind the day before yesterday.’

‘So you have some kind of problem today?’ enquired Elaine.

‘My editor’s looked at my piece and isn’t too happy. He wants some changes made.’

‘It seems some women have editors the way some women have husbands,’ observed Elaine.

There was a pause while Weena considered this.

‘You’re really quite funny, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘Thank you for the compliment,’ said Elaine.

‘I really admire that in you,’ said Weena. ‘People say I don’t have a sense of humour, and then I feel bad. But humour goes with being smart, doesn’t it, and I guess I’m not all that smart. I think it’s more important for people to feel, and respond.’

‘Then that’s just as well,’ said Elaine, ‘isn’t it?’

‘What I’m trying to say,’ said Weena, ‘is that I’d like to come back and ask Def a few more questions.’

‘I’m sure you would, Miss Dodds. I’ll get my husband to call back if he’s interested.’

‘Do you have some sort of problem with me, Mrs Desmond? I get the feeling you’re hostile to me. What have I done?’

‘Miss Dodds,’ said Elaine, ‘most journalists manage to get what they want in the time allocated. That said, I am not in the least hostile to you.’

‘I’m not really a journalist,’ said Weena. ‘I’m more sensitive than that. I’m a writer. I was trying not to be personal, not to ask him what it feels like to be a has-been, that kind of thing, and these are all the thanks I get.’

‘Defoe is taking the dog for a walk,’ said Elaine. ‘I’ll get him to call you back. Can I have your number?’

‘Def’s got that.’

‘He’ll have lost it,’ said Elaine. ‘You know how it is; people write numbers on bits of paper and then the cleaner tidies it up.’

‘In my world,’ said Weena, ‘we do our own cleaning. Tell him I look forward to hearing from him.’

‘Oh I will,’ said Elaine, ‘I will.’

Francine stopped Weena as she was going out of the apartment.

‘Weena,’ she said, ‘I am tired of doing your laundry. Is it too much to ask for you to put your own washing through the machine?’

‘It’s in the laundry basket waiting for me to get round to it,’ said Weena. ‘Do you have a problem with that?’

‘Just that the laundry basket is overflowing, and smelling,’ said Francine. ‘And has been for weeks.’

‘You resent me being my own person,’ said Weena. ‘You want me to keep to some kind of mythical timetable, in which you are always the mother and I am always the child.’

‘I am always the mother,’ said Francine, ‘and you are always the daughter; there is no denying that. And now I am a widow, not even a wife, and you are still jealous. Just get that laundry basket cleared.’

‘I will not be spoken to like that,’ said Weena. ‘And I do my own washing in my own time.’

But she could feel her mother getting nearer and nearer some essential part of her being, and she could tell that, if she wasn’t careful, she’d be the one to move out.

When she’d slammed out of the house she paused and pressed the bell of her own apartment.

‘Hello?’ enquired Francine.

‘It’s my dirty knickers you can’t stand,’ said Weena. ‘It’s the smell of sex. You need treatment, Mother.’

‘My dearest,’ said Francine, ‘I don’t. You do. I had an excellent sex life with your father, and you had better face it.’

There were no more doors to slam, so Weena strode down the street towards the bus stop, head held high, glowing with anger and frustration, and attracting many a glance, both male and female.

Defoe returned from his walk with the dog.

‘Anything happen?’ he asked.

He professed to love the country, but lack of event bothered him. Anything happening is better than nothing happening. Who wants the last days of peace, when they could have the first days of war? Most things are good at the beginning.

‘Very little,’ said Elaine.

‘What am I meant to do with my day?’ he asked.

‘Sell the house and move to town,’ she said. ‘Invest the money, and live near to our children: pick up what work you can. We have reached the end of the line. The end of the cold war put thriller writers out of business: the end of the arms race is the end of those whose business it was to comment on it.’

‘It hasn’t ended,’ he said. ‘It has just gone underground. I need to say that to people.’

‘They’re not listening,’ she said. ‘There are other threnodies being sung.’

‘You’re very hard,’ he said.

‘We should never have hoped for permanence. Even this house won’t stand. If they do away with the local line, the road will come instead, bear everything away. What are five centuries in the history of a house, the story of a family? Let’s leave with dignity, while we can, before the others realise.’

‘But I love this house.’

‘You love the theory of this house, and the history of the house, and the way you came into possession of this house. And the way it reflects status upon you. But the house itself? Harry Wilcox was right. It needs modernising. It could burn down tonight, and us with it, the wiring’s so bad. Let Lila Swain fight the closing of the branch line. She won’t win, and if she does, worse will happen. In fifty years this house will not be here; or you and me either. We will be underground, or burned and scattered. The cities eat up the countryside: it is time they did. People must eat, must have space to move in and air to breathe: they’ll kill to get it.’

‘So nothing happened in my absence,’ he said, ‘except you started brooding. What you say is nonsense. The cities are more dangerous than the countryside: everyone knows that.’

‘To live in isolation anywhere is a luxury,’ said Elaine, ‘without a perimeter wall, steel gates, and an entry system.’

He yawned. He was bored. He was accustomed to sound bites, not stretches of speech. What would he do now the dog was walked?

* * *

Peter was Defoe and Elaine’s son. Now the phone rang in his penthouse. Peter was thirty-one, and an investment broker for a direct insurance company. He had a cold in the nose, or so he said, and was not going in to work today. His new partner Rick, aged twenty-three, had stayed home from his antique shop to keep him company. Rick picked up the phone and handed it to Peter.

‘It’s your sister Daphne,’ said Rick, in his soft, sweet voice.

‘I called the office,’ said Daphne accusingly, ‘and they said you were ill. Are you shirking again?’

‘I’ve made enough money for them lately,’ said Peter. ‘I’m taking a day off.’

‘Was that your new young man?’ asked Daphne. ‘If so, it sounded suspiciously like a girl. Can I meet him/her soon?’

‘It’s a him,’ said Peter ‘and I’d rather leave it for a while. I am not sufficiently convinced of your gender orientation to risk losing him to you.’

‘Honestly,’ said Daphne, ‘these days I am only interested in hers.’

Daphne and Peter had looked so similar when young, one had often been mistaken for the other. They had enjoyed that. There was a mere ten months between them. She was the younger. Peter would have his hair cut short: Daphne would take the scissors and do the same to hers. Peter would grow his: so would Daphne.

‘Did you know they’re going to sell the house?’ asked Daphne. ‘Mum’s already showing people around.’

‘Dad won’t like that,’ said Peter. ‘What, sell the old homestead? Out of the family? That’s terrible. Why?’

‘There isn’t a family left,’ said Daphne. ‘Only you and me, and we’re not going to propagate. We’re the end of the Drewlove line: the Desmonds are nobodies – they go on and on, but mostly in America, believing they’re somebodies.’

‘But selling the house!’ lamented Peter. ‘Without reference to you and me!’

‘They’re like that,’ said Daphne. ‘Entirely selfish. Just an announcement. Five hundred years in the family and just like that – our family home, our childhood refuge – to be sold!’

‘But do you want to live in the middle of a wood?’ asked Peter.

‘Certainly not,’ said Daphne. ‘It’s okay for weekends, I suppose.’

‘I don’t want to live in it either,’ said Peter, ‘and Rick gets dreadful hayfever.’

‘Then that’s that,’ said Daphne. ‘They’ll get a good price and leave us the proceeds.’

‘If they don’t spend it first,’ said Peter. ‘They may have been living beyond their income. I hope they haven’t run up too many debts.’

‘I hope they’re not upset. Dad won’t have liked losing his job.’

‘He’ll have liked the fuss that went with it,’ said Peter.

‘Ought we to go down?’

‘Oh God!’ said Daphne.

‘Oh Jesus,’ said Peter. ‘Heaven preserve us from these turbulent parents.’

He sneezed so much they had to abandon their conversation. Rick brought Peter herbal tea: Alison, Daphne’s partner, brought her coconut cookies she’d made herself that morning, and served them with grubby hands. Peter and Daphne always attracted simple, loving, dedicated others. It was their talent.

Back at Drewlove House, Defoe came downstairs again.

‘You’re sure no one called?’ he asked. ‘While I was out walking the dog? The phone was completely silent?’

‘Actually the boring girl from the New Age Times called,’ said Elaine. ‘I forgot about that. She wants to come back and do the interview again. For all you and I know, she is in league with robbers and is simply casing the joint. I should be careful if I were you. I did what I could to put her off, but obviously not enough.’

‘Pity. Witness to my humiliation. Vis-à-vis your jibe about the avocado bathroom suite,’ he said.

‘It isn’t like you to be so sensitive.’

‘You think I am without sensitivity?’ he asked, prickly.

‘I did not say that.’ She was patient.

‘So is she coming back?’ he asked. He looked in the crazed glass of the mercury mirror and thought he looked good.

Early nights and a domestic bed and less stress opened the eyes and firmed the skin. He would leave the decision to his wife: whether Weena came, or stayed away.

‘I said you’d call her.’

‘Then I hope she left her number? She gave it to me but I think I lost it.’

‘I took it again,’ she said, and found it for him, and left the room. Mrs Mary Hadfield was at the front door, to beg Elaine to join the committee which was to defend the branch line.

‘Your wife wasn’t very nice to me, Def,’ said Weena on the phone. ‘She seems to have some problem where I’m concerned.’

‘I can’t think what that can be,’ said Defoe.

‘It’s not as if she knew,’ said Weena. ‘At least, I presume she doesn’t.’

‘Know what?’ For a moment he was baffled.

‘That we fucked,’ she said.

‘Hush!’

She laughed. ‘You’re so guilty!’

‘Of course she doesn’t know,’ said Defoe. ‘Tell me, in your world, would Elaine have a right to object if she did know?’

‘She might come at me tooth and claw,’ said Weena. ‘That would be real. That would be okay. But objecting in a clinical way, no. People have no right to be sexually possessive.’

‘No? Give me the wisdom of your generation. I love it!’

‘Because that limits lives, Def. It’s the opposite of liberation. We’ve got to learn to love one another.’

‘What, all in one great flower-strewn bed together? I am back in my youth.’

‘Don’t mix me up, Def. It isn’t fair. I’m not very smart. Anyone can take advantage of me. Please don’t you, Def.’

‘Sorry,’ said Defoe. ‘What are you wearing?’

‘Nothing,’ said Weena, which was a lie. She was wearing a designer white satin blouse of her mother’s. It had gold embroidery down the front and Weena wore it over her jeans and a black T-shirt, the better to save the latter from the slops of cornflakes and milk she had consumed before making the phone call, lying on her front on the floor; the black fabric too easily picked up cat hairs from her carpet. Her mother had worn the white satin blouse to her father’s funeral underneath a tailored black suit. Weena had thought the outfit unspeakably vulgar. The crematorium chapel had been hot. Francine, her taste for once impugned, had taken off her jacket, and thereafter glittered like a beacon in the funereal gloom, attracting eyes away from the coffin as it slid on its rollers into its suggested immortality behind pink silk curtains. ‘She never loved him,’ Weena thought, finally seeing the proof she sought. ‘Never, never.’ Now she thought that the sooner the blouse was accidentally ruined, the better: certainly before the anniversary of her father’s death, fast approaching. ‘Don’t do this to me,’ said Defoe. ‘You are provoking me on purpose.’

‘No clothes at all,’ said Weena, ‘and I am lying on my back on a white carpet. When I do this my breasts turn into kind of fairy cakes, but at least not pancakes, as, for example, my mother’s do.’

‘I know that,’ said Defoe. ‘I remember your breasts well. And is your hair all spread around? Over your shoulders, framing your face?’

‘I guess so,’ said Weena.

‘Just tell me when you’re coming to visit me,’ said Defoe, ‘before someone interrupts us. For God’s sake!’

‘We have a right to talk,’ said Weena. ‘Even people in prison are allowed to talk. Wives don’t own a man’s soul. All no-no’s exist to be broken. The brave break them. I’ll come down on Tuesday.’

‘Monday,’ said Defoe. ‘Come in the morning: stay to lunch. Elaine goes to her pottery class on Monday afternoons.’

‘Pottery! Wet clay draws the spirit out of people. After that they develop a kind of hard crust. Sometimes they get crazed. Lots and lots of little lines.’

Elaine had never shaded her face from the sun. It was indeed lined, and could be thus described. But she remained attractive: intelligence animated her and gave her grace.

‘That way there’ll be time between Elaine going to her pottery class and the 5.15 train.’

‘Time for what?’ asked Weena. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and wiped that down the front of the satin blouse.

‘I don’t know what for,’ said Defoe. ‘I don’t care. Just for us to be together, in whatever way you like.’

‘I haven’t much time to think about any of this,’ said Weena. ‘I’m trying to get an article on fluoride pollution to Dervish in by Friday afternoon.’

‘Is that your deadline?’

‘No. The editor’s usually in a good mood then, that’s all.’

‘I never knew anyone in a good mood on Friday afternoon,’ said Defoe. ‘Peak time for good moods is Tuesday afternoon.’

And so they chattered on, as lovers, or almost lovers, will.

‘What can you see in a man like me?’ Defoe asked.

‘Charisma,’ said Weena. ‘Brains, good looks, charm and practicality.’

‘You don’t mean that, Weena.’

‘I do,’ said Weena. ‘I’ve always moved amongst pygmies. But you’re a giant amongst men. My editor would say careful, persons of restricted growth or look for another way of saying what I mean, but that’s the way it came out. He gives me a really hard time, sometimes.’

‘Fuck your editor,’ said Defoe, and there was a short, surprised silence from Weena.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Defoe. ‘Bad language on the phone is never a good idea.’

‘That’s okay,’ said Weena. ‘A giant with a wife who wants to cut him down to size. Avocado bathroom suites! Perhaps your mother was the same? What was she like?’

‘A nightmare,’ said Defoe, ‘but someone’s coming. I must go. Monday morning? I’ll meet the train at Abbots Halt at 12.15.’

Weena put the phone down, took off the blouse and went along to the bathroom where the laundry basket overflowed with her dirty clothes – blacks, reds, navies and greys. She carefully shoved the blouse into the sleeve of a sweatshirt, so no glimmer of white could be seen, and dumped both back in the basket. She knew that presently her mother’s nerve would give and she would shove the lot, unchecked, into a too-hot wash. And serve her mother right, and Weena could play the innocent when the blouse was discovered, grey and ruined, its sheen and its memories gone for ever.

Francine answered the telephone to Dervish, Weena’s boss. She held her ruined, once-white blouse in her hand. ‘Can I speak to Weena?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know who she is,’ said Francine, and put the phone down. It rang again.

‘Wrong number,’ she said this time, but before she could hang up Dervish spoke.

‘You’re Weena’s mother,’ said Dervish, ‘and I don’t know who she is either, so we’re on the same side. Is it a child, is it an employee, is it Superbitch? Since her father died, she’s been a nightmare! I’m her employer. Hello.’

‘She’s been a nightmare since the day she was born,’ said Francine. ‘Daddy’s little jail-bait. So why don’t you fire her? Does she have some hold over you?’

‘She’s a good little writer,’ said Dervish, ‘with a certain flair, and has a future in journalism if she can get over this bad patch.’

‘She has a hold on you,’ said Francine, flatly.

‘But if she doesn’t deliver her piece on fluoride pollution by Friday afternoon, she loses her job. Will you tell her that?’

‘No,’ said Francine. ‘Supposing I were to deliver a piece on fluoride pollution by Friday afternoon in her place, would I get her job? Literary style is inherited too, you know; part of the genetic gestalt.’

There was a pause at the other end.

‘Well, you’d better come up and see me sometime.’

‘I’ll be there Friday afternoon,’ said Francine.

‘That was Weena,’ said Defoe. ‘I think you upset her.’

‘And why should I not upset her?’ asked Elaine. ‘She irritates me.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t let it show. It’s always unwise to upset the press.’

‘When you had a TV show to run, perhaps. Now it can hardly matter.’

‘Thank you very much, Elaine,’ said Defoe, with irony.

‘I didn’t mean it like that. I meant you were doing her the favour. When is she coming?’

‘On Monday,’ said Defoe. ‘I asked her to stay for lunch. I thought she should be pacified.’

‘But I go to pottery class on Monday,’ said Elaine.

‘Oh goddamnit, I forgot,’ said Defoe. ‘Call her up and put her off.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Elaine. ‘I’ll serve something simple and go, and you two can linger. She won’t think I’m too rude, I hope. It’s not as if her generation sets much store on manners.’

‘No, but she’s an Eloi,’ said Defoe. ‘A throw-forward. They are easy to hurt; prone to bruising. Unlike the Morlocks. Those of us who have dwelt too long in TV studios can’t help being Morlocks.’

‘She would make an insubstantial lunch, I fear,’ said Elaine.

‘You know your problem, Elaine?’ asked Defoe, and answered the question himself. ‘You suffer from high self-esteem.’

‘I didn’t know I had a problem,’ she said.

The telephone rang. Defoe took it. It was their daughter, Daphne.

‘Well?’ barked Defoe. His daughter, who had delighted his younger years with her wide-eyed charm, her curly-headed, little-girl ways, had little by little turned square-jawed and mirthful: she had ceased to adore him in a way he understood. She was too like her mother – the irony had entered her soul. It had descended when she was seven, as a soul descends into a five-month foetus. He remembered the occasion. Daphne had fallen down a well in the garden. She crouched twelve feet down, unharmed, her little face grimy and tear-streaked, the bones of dead cats about her. Fire appliances, ambulances, police cars were assembled: their crews milled about: media men arrived: ‘Defoe Desmond’s Daughter Takes Plunge’. Peter wailed his distress about the garden, rightly; he being the one who had removed the well’s protective planking. Up above, the noisy business of her extrication began: down below, Daphne stared up at her distraught father.

‘Are you all right?’ he enquired.

‘I’m bored,’ she called up, and they laughed together. But he knew it was the beginning of the end. She double-took the world, experiencing it in its shifting experience of her: this was not a gift a woman should have. To be all jokes and intelligence – the world got worse and worse: the dawn of self-awareness came earlier and earlier: these days even infants sprung into the world fully post-modernised, gave you a glance before latching onto the nipple as if to say, ‘Look at me! I’m a baby, but I won’t be for long.’ For both his children, heterosexual relationships had seemed too head-on, too upfront to be properly real: they preferred the inbuilt jokes of same sex love: the brushing of breast to breast, penis to penis, like to like; the very lack of outcome of such intimate encounters appealed. For some reason Defoe found Peter easier to accept than Daphne.

‘Well?’ barked Defoe again.

‘If you want phone calls from me,’ said Daphne mildly, ‘you will have to be more polite.’

‘Why are you calling? What do you want?’

‘I don’t want anything,’ said Daphne. ‘People do sometimes call home. You are my family.’

‘You know your mother and I disowned you years ago,’ said Defoe.

‘Can’t be done,’ said Daphne blithely. ‘Your blood is my blood. All you have to do, Dad, is reconcile yourself to your genetic responsibility. Can I come home for a few days?’

‘You and Alison?’ Defoe was wary.

‘Is something wrong with that?’ asked Daphne. She allowed the frown in her voice to be heard. These days she worked for Her Majesty’s Customs as a senior European negotiator: the youngest ever in the service. She was both ruthless and light-hearted: talks which had dragged on for years found themselves completed in weeks. Bureaucratic stumbling blocks dissolved beneath the astonishment of her gaze.

‘Nothing at all,’ said Defoe hastily, ‘except your mother doesn’t like the dog.’

‘I need some space to sort out a personal problem,’ said Daphne.

‘What’s the problem?’ asked Defoe, as a father should.

‘You know Alison used to be Alistair before the operation –’ said Daphne.

‘The entire yellow press of this country obliged me to notice,’ said Defoe.

‘Well, we’ve now just about decided I want to change to being a man.’

‘What?’ asked Defoe. ‘Sew on to you the bit they took off him? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to both stay the way you started out?’

‘Simplicity is not the object of the exercise,’ said Daphne. ‘And I think you misunderstand the nature of the surgical intervention, which in any case is symbolic rather than sexual: more to do with gender integrity than anything else. But it’s a big step, and I’d like to come home and brood about it for a few days. Now don’t get all old and stuffy, Dad.’

‘When do you want to come?’ asked Defoe, defeated.

‘The beginning of next week?’ suggested Daphne. ‘The Brussels talks broke down and I have a window.’

‘From Tuesday on is okay with me,’ said Defoe. ‘I’ll put you through to your mother,’ and he called for Elaine to take the phone, and went upstairs to use the mobile in his office.

‘Dad says it’s okay if Alison and me come to stay,’ said Daphne.

‘Is it essential?’ asked Elaine, not unkindly but wanting to know.

‘Yes it is,’ said Daphne. ‘Our apartment’s being de-flea’d by the Department of Health. We have an infestation. We had to have something done. The hall rug seemed to quiver whenever you looked at it: it turned out to be fleas leaping about. But the stuff they use is poisonous, so we thought we’d come and stay for a couple of days.’

‘With Alison’s dog?’ asked Elaine. ‘I love it but your father hates it.’

‘We can hardly put her in kennels. Jumper hates change. She’ll be traumatised. And they’re not her fleas. It’s a local epidemic.’

‘Perhaps Jumper started it,’ observed Elaine. ‘If Jumper comes too, your father will only kick her.’

‘Then Alison will kick him. Only three days, Mum. We’ll come on Saturday, leave Monday on the 5.15 train. Dad wanted us to come midweek but that was just his power-trip. Don’t mention the fleas. I told him I was contemplating a sex-change operation. That quite moved him.’

‘Oh?’ Elaine was interested. ‘What to, male or female?’

‘Cheap jibes!’ said Daphne amiably.

‘You shouldn’t tease your father,’ said Elaine. ‘I don’t know how you came to be so good at lying, Daphne.’

‘It’s in the blood,’ said Daphne. ‘You and Dad have to decide which one of you it’s from, and reconcile yourself to it. It comes in handy for the job: a past spent playing one parent off against the other. See you on Saturday.’

‘Please don’t bring Alison or the dog,’ said Elaine. ‘I’m trying to sell the house.’

‘That’s another thing we need to talk about,’ said Daphne. ‘Peter and I feel we should have been consulted. So that’s settled. We’ll come Saturday, leave on Monday evening, then. If Alison and Jumper come, we’ll go by car, otherwise by train.’

‘Bring Alison and then you can drive the Red Mercury girl back to the station,’ said Elaine. ‘Save your father doing it.’

‘Who’s the Red Mercury girl?’

‘Weena Dodds. Some young fan of your father’s drifting into our lives and out again.’

‘I thought all that kind of thing would be over now,’ said Daphne.

‘What kind of thing?’

‘Never mind,’ said Daphne. ‘You never could see what was under your nose. It made coming out a real problem, for both of us.’

‘Coming out of where?’ asked Elaine.

‘Never mind,’ said Daphne. ‘And what’s Red Mercury?’

‘Some kind of sinister nuclear substance,’ said Elaine, ‘half-way between a catalyst and an explosive, man made, which if used properly destroys life but not property. Your father knows all about it, and Weena Dodds wants to pick his brains.’

‘She sounds quite bright,’ said Daphne.

‘Second division stuff,’ said Elaine.

‘Pretty?’ asked Daphne.

‘I haven’t really looked,’ said Elaine.

‘Are you offering her as some kind of alternative to Alison? Does she not smell perhaps? Does she not have dogs?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Elaine, ‘she’s too self-centred. You could even drive her back to town, if you left Alison and still brought the car.’

‘Lesbians are not like heterosexuals,’ said Daphne. ‘They do not jump people.’

‘I just thought in my quaint old-fashioned way,’ said Elaine, ‘you might like some company on the way home. And you could both leave before the 5.15. It’s such a bad service. They don’t even man the station, except on Friday and Sunday nights.’

‘I don’t believe this! You were trying to throw us together,’ croaked Daphne, whose voice lately had been getting deeper and deeper.

‘For a trained negotiator, you can be very tetchy,’ said Elaine. ‘And I’m sure I never complained of Alison smelling, but it does rather get into the upholstery, along with the dog hairs.’

‘I wash too much,’ said Daphne. ‘Alison doesn’t wash enough. I’ll come by train, and that’s that, but I won’t bring Alison, or the dog. Okay?’

‘Okay!’ said Elaine.

‘Jesus!’ said Daphne, as she put the phone down.

Francine Dodds sat in Dervish’s office. Dervish was a good-looking young man run so much to plump that his thighs spread of their own accord. Unmade-up nice girls with straight hair, soft voices and unblinking stares ran in and out of their editor’s office, with faxes, copy and cups of herbal tea. Some were tall and gangly, others very short: many had buck teeth. A proportion wore saris or ethnic dress of one kind or another.

‘This is an equal opportunities concern,’ said Dervish, ‘as you may notice. We run things on a point scale here. We make an exception for Weena, who is white and privileged and would not normally be eligible for employment, but she comes from a broken home and was a child-abuse victim. But we see the perpetrators as victims as well; and one of my staff pointed out we must not become ageist – no one on the New Age Times is above thirty and we need to address that – so I felt able to call you in, Ms Dodds. You are a widow, too.’

‘Call me Francine,’ said Weena’s mother, perched on the desk, legs dangling, high heels half-on, half-off her elegant little feet. ‘And let me point out that Weena is the victim of no more than her whiteness, her privilege, as loving a family as she would allow, her education and her looks, all of which have hopelessly spoiled her until now, she is as poisonous as a pampered rattle snake. That is not chatter you hear, that is the noise made as the scrum is working through. Weena’s home was broken only by death, and no abuse occurred, although her father and I occasionally wished to beat her to death. Sometimes, if the truth be told, and though it is unfashionable to say so, a monster springs from the loins of the nicest people. Weena may have picked up on the vibes, I don’t deny it. For that I take responsibility. In my time, as I think you know, I have run a chain of magazines from Management Consultancy to Industrial Strategy, all of which did very well under my management. I am now training further in the field of Clinical Psychology with a view to research work, but could be tempted back into the commercial field. I abandoned my career when my husband fell ill; the better to nurse him, to devote myself to his last days. This Weena may have told you.’

‘No. She implied you were sacked for forging your timesheets and shuffling your expenses. But the expenses we offer here are minimal –’

‘So it seemed a risk worth taking? Of course it is! Fire Weena, employ me as a contributing editor. I need the money. You need me. Circulation is falling. Fifty per cent of your staff need to go; I expect you know that. You just lack the courage to do it. Make me assistant editor – I’ll do it. Years with Weena have toughened me up.’

‘But they’re such nice, good girls,’ said Dervish helplessly. ‘What would I fire them for?’

‘For being too young, inexperienced, half-starved and in need of animal protein to liven them up, but which they are too principled to cat. The media is no place for principle. Even the New Age Times must be a hot-bed of expediency and cynicism if it is to succeed. Look at it clearly – their T-shirts are grey and stiff from ecologically sound washing powder, but they are too full of integrity and regard for the environment to throw them away. Even Weena has this unhealthy obsession with old clothes. But at least she eats meat.’

‘Weena eats meat?’ Dervish was startled.

‘Weena eats meat at home, and she can sleep herself into a job anywhere.’

‘So could you, if you wanted it enough.’

She stared at him; he stared at her.

Weena was on the phone to Hattie. She lay in Bob’s bed. It smelt agreeably of toothpaste, old socks, lust and despair. He had snivelled and wept into the pillow. Now he was gone to work.

‘Hattie,’ said Weena, ‘I think I can see my way through my life.’

‘I’m really glad for you, Weena,’ said Hattie. ‘I can’t. I have my niece to stay. She’s three.’

‘Why are you so masochistic? Why do you do it?’ asked Weena.

‘To help my sister out, I suppose,’ said Hattie.

‘I think you’re being the opposite of helpful,’ said Weena.

‘Parents should be left to get on with it. Then they’d have fewer children.’

‘Whose phone are you using?’ asked Hattie.

‘Bob’s,’ said Weena. ‘I’m in his bed.’

There was a short silence.

‘I thought you’d finished with Bob,’ said Hattie.

‘I have,’ said Weena. ‘This was just a one-off.’

‘Do you think that’s fair?’ asked Hattie. ‘You ruined his life: now just to go scrabbling about in the ruins!’

‘The problem with Bob is he never had much of a life to ruin,’ said Weena. ‘His wife is well rid of him. I don’t suppose his children want to see him anyway. I don’t mean ever to fuck an employed person again. Employment saps a man’s soul. They’re forever having to get to work or find sicknotes. A man must be self-employed if he’s not to end by sweating like my editor or grovelling like Bob. Status games make lovers sweaty and grovelling. In future, I’ll stick to the self-employed.’

‘Then what are you doing there, Weena? In his bed?’

‘I need a commission. Bob can get it for me. I need to write Defoe Desmond’s biography. I’m tired of my job. I’m tired of living with my mother. I want to live quietly in the country in a grand house and be a chatelaine. I want to be acknowledged, Hattie. I want to take my proper place in life. This bed is just a starting point. The sooner I’m out of it the better. This bed is damp, sweaty and full of crumbs.’

‘Then you will be out of it soon?’

‘Of course. I just need to make another phone call. Why?’

‘Those are my crumbs, Weena. Bob and I had toast and marmalade in that bed yesterday morning.’

Again a short silence. Then Weena spoke.

‘Your problem, Hattie, is you try to be good to men. Men prefer it if you’re terrible.’

Weena made another phone call.

‘I really ought to be at the New Age Times,’ said Weena to Defoe. ‘But it’s such a boring place. No one there likes me, except the editor. And he just lusts after me. Sometimes he writes my pieces for me. But since I met you, he’s rather gone off me.’

‘Why’s that, Weena?’

‘I guess it sort of shows I’m into someone else, Def. So if I lose my job, it’s your fault.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t work for a boss who lusts after you,’ said Defoe.

‘A good job’s hard to find,’ said Weena. ‘And a hard boss is good to find.’

‘What did you say just then, Weena?’

‘Forget it. Just a saying. I feel really soft and happy and lazy today. It’s the thought of seeing you on Monday. I’ve been so upset about my mother.’

‘What’s the matter with your mother?’ asked Defoe.

‘She used to abuse me when I was a child, but we won’t go into that. I got away for a couple of years, but somehow I drifted back. People say she has an unhealthy hold over me. I had a pure white satin blouse and she put it through the hot wash on purpose, with all her dark things, and of course it’s ruined.’

‘That certainly seems a symbolic thing to do,’ said Defoe. ‘I know if anyone shrinks a shirt of mine, I get very wound up indeed. Shouldn’t you leave home?’

‘I can’t,’ said Weena. ‘I can’t afford anywhere on my salary. I need someone to take me in.’

‘Drewlove House has lots of rooms,’ said Defoe, ‘and I’d love to, but you have your work to do and I don’t think Elaine would like it.’

‘But why not? Is she very jealous?’

‘She can be,’ said Defoe.

‘But not of us, surely,’ said Weena. ‘You shouldn’t give in to her. It’s so low and ungenerous to be sexually possessive. And it smacks of a bad sex life. I’m never jealous because I know I make men happy.’ She yawned, languorously, the smell of the male bedsitting room and its desperate sex flowing into her nostrils.

‘Where are you?’ asked Defoe.

‘At my friend Hattie’s,’ said Weena. ‘Shall I go to work? Tell me what to do.’

‘Stay where you are, sweet as you are, and talk to me,’ said Defoe. ‘Forget the New Age Times.’

‘But if I lose my job?’

‘I’ll look after you,’ said Defoe.

‘I’ve always wanted to do a biography,’ said Weena. ‘I have such an inquisitive nature, I think I could really make it work. I suppose I could always do one of you. I feel I know you so well yet there’s so much more to know. You’re so deep.’

‘Who would want it?’ asked Defoe. ‘An old has-been like me!’

‘All kinds of people,’ she said. ‘I’d have to come down and stay, wouldn’t I, if I was working on your biography? I’d have to know everything, go through old photographs –’

‘You would,’ he said, his voice lightening. ‘Indeed you would. We’ll talk about it on Monday.’

‘If you like,’ said Weena. ‘But I wasn’t thinking of doing much talking. Well, only over lunch, when your wife’s there. Before pottery.’

Defoe came downstairs to find Elaine brushing out the ashes in the grate.

‘Cinderella!’ he said.

‘Daphne’s coming down by train for the weekend,’ said Elaine, ‘without Alison or the dog. She’ll be leaving Monday on the 5.15.’

‘I thought she was coming down on Tuesday,’ said Defoe. ‘She can’t be here on Monday.’

‘Why not?’ asked Elaine. Her face was smudged with soot.

‘I have an interview,’ said Defoe. ‘The journalist’s staying to lunch, you’re going off to pottery. Call Daphne now and re-arrange it.’

‘No,’ said Elaine. ‘You do it.’

‘I don’t like having my time taken for granted,’ said Defoe.

‘Daphne doesn’t need entertaining,’ said Elaine. ‘She’s family.’

‘I suppose she is,’ said Defoe. ‘Perhaps she’s Saunders’ child.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Saunders had a queer brother. I always thought he was a bit of a poofter himself. Saunders, your Australian lover?’

‘He was not my lover, Defoe.’

‘Then I don’t know where Daphne gets it from. I certainly don’t want Daphne round the same luncheon table as a journalist. “Has-been Celeb’s Old Age Shame Crawls Out of Closet.”’

‘I’ll call Weena Dodds and put her off, shall I?’

‘I don’t have her number.’

‘I do,’ said Elaine.

‘Then please don’t use it. Weena Dodds is thinking of writing my biography.’

‘Your biography!’ exclaimed Elaine.

‘Why not?’ asked Defoe. ‘Do you think no one’s interested?’

‘But all you’ve done is interview people,’ protested Elaine.

‘You want to pull me down,’ said Defoe. ‘You think finally you’ve got me to yourself and defeated me and I can’t get away. Well, you’re wrong.’

‘Defoe, I think nothing of the kind.’ Elaine stood up to face him. She struck the ash-filled dustpan against the fire irons, by mistake, and fine pale grey powder swirled up and around her in a mist before settling on hair, face, limbs, dress. It was wood ash; almost white. ‘I have waited many years for us to be together, that’s true enough. What is the matter with you?’

‘You are the matter with me,’ said Defoe. ‘You make me doubt myself. You always have. You stand there like a ghost. You are my old age. You make me decrepit before my time. You drew me away from the power source of the universe: you doomed me to mediocrity. You are right, all I ever did was interview people. Oh, you have a low opinion of me!’

‘The power source of the universe! When I met you, you were developing nuclear weapons,’ stated Elaine. ‘Your ambition was to destroy the universe, so far as I could see.’

She shook her dress. Wood ash puffed around. He stood further away from her so as not to be infected.

‘At least on TV,’ she said, ‘you have done no harm, though I can’t see you have done much good.’

‘You are polluting me!’ he cried. ‘I don’t want to be a ghost.’

‘Though it’s rare for one person on their own to do much good, so don’t reproach yourself,’ she said, ignoring what she clearly saw as his childishness.

‘Did you say Weena Dodds of all people wanted to write your biography?’ she asked. ‘And you’re encouraging her in this madness?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Isn’t she rather young?’

‘The nation is full of young people,’ he said.

‘But not young ones who read biographies,’ said Elaine, ‘or can afford to. I think we’re quite safe. I don’t think any publisher will see their way to doing it.’

‘Safe! I want it done. My life needs to be written. Those people, those experts, I “only” interviewed hold all existence in their hands. The human race is at the end of the line, the doomsday clock ticks on. It’s stopped for a decade at four minutes to midnight, but there the hands still stand. Any minute now they’ll begin to move again. Red Mercury gave the clock a nasty judder, quite a jar: perhaps all that was needed!’

‘My dear,’ said Elaine, ‘I am not a camera, and not a sound boom. Pray do not address me as if I were a TV audience.’

‘Bitch!’ he cried. ‘Bitch! You’re so circumscribed here in your life, in your rightful place. So serene in your self-righteousness. So unemotional, so reserved, so without self-doubt. We hear a quaint tale or so about your mother the aristo alley cat, the gambler, the child-deserter. But they’re stories told to make people laugh, not cry. To keep the yobbos out, not let them in. Here we are, so quaintly eccentric. Why, even our children are gay! Have I ever made you cry? Never!’

‘You’re my husband,’ she said. ‘Why should you want to make me cry?’

If he put his foot forward and stamped, just a little, the floorboards carried the movement through. He tried it again. Yes, when the floorboards vibrated, yet more ash puffed out of his wife. For some reason this phenomenon reminded him of Hiroshima. You never get rid of radioactive elements. Never. Plant a dahlia in Hiroshima, even today, turn over the earth, apply a geiger counter and hear its ruthless rise. You could vacuum Elaine’s dress one day and still next day the stuff would ooze out. He longed for Weena, who at least had spent fewer years in the world than anyone else around. So little strontium in her bones!

‘Well,’ said Elaine, ‘I do what I can for you. I am selling this house so you don’t have to live here. I won’t go to pottery on Monday, if you prefer.’

‘But I do want to live here,’ he said. ‘I just don’t want to live here with you.’

He awed himself with his capacity to say it. It came out as a howl. He’d been reared in the back streets of Deptford. The howl contained the notion of estuary flooding the mouth of the Thames, and the snarling and yapping of dogs at swirling and unusual water. In extremis his origins showed. So did Elaine’s.

‘I’m such a mess,’ she said vaguely. ‘All over ash! I think I’ll take a bath.’

‘And if you don’t go to pottery,’ he said after her, ‘I’ll kill you.’

‘In that case I’ll go,’ she said, startled. ‘But why?’

‘You have to keep your own life going,’ he said. ‘You don’t want yours to get swallowed up in mine. We agreed.’

‘Did we? I expect you’re right. Anyway, I like it. I’ll try to go.’

As she went she pressed her lips lightly on his cheek, leaving a lurid cupid’s bow of powdery ash upon it.

‘Poor old darling,’ she said. ‘It’s no fun growing old.’

He went upstairs and did press-ups, and felt the sofa cushions to see if they were soft. They were.

‘Justice, constancy, endurance, honesty,’ said Elaine to her daughter Daphne, as she put salad from the garden on to the table, ‘those are the virtues. Those and a few others, abstract terms of a kind unknown to contemporary youth, but which those of us who learned the classics threw around with ease, are what we are on earth to pursue. They now cluster, undetected, only vaguely understood, under the heading “good”. Just as under the heading “bad” come minor vices such as procrastination, dishonesty, capriciousness, falsity – as in “we must teach our children the difference between good and bad. Thus we will put an end to all juvenile crime.” But without the ability, the inclination, or indeed the intellectual wherewithal to break down good or bad into their component parts. The language of distinction ceases to be available; is no longer available. We must search CD Rom for meanings which once were clear, but now are obscure. The words are too big for the narrow column of the contemporary newspaper. We are all one-syllable people now, two at most. So we mumble and stumble into our futures. But it is still our task and our reward to scavenge through the universe, picking up the detritus of lost concepts, dusting them down, making them shine. Latin was the best polishing cloth of all, but we threw it away.’

‘Shouldn’t Dad be back by now?’ asked Daphne, who had learnt to ignore a speech perfected when Daphne refused to learn Latin and Elaine thought she should. ‘Perhaps the train was late?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Elaine. The vinaigrette was made: the egg mayonnaise prepared. Dishes were displayed, rather bleakly, on the round, polished mahogany table.

‘It doesn’t look very lavish,’ said Daphne. ‘But then it never did.’

‘I have the habit of my class and generation,’ said Elaine. ‘We were never a particularly sensuous lot. So your father complains.’

‘It’s been a really sticky weekend,’ complained Daphne. ‘I haven’t enjoyed it much.’

‘You only have to stick it out till the 5.15 train,’ said Elaine. ‘It was your idea to come here, to hide out from the fleas. Don’t complain. Your father and I bicker. It isn’t serious.’

‘I made up the fleas,’ said Daphne. ‘Actually I came for a little breathing space. Alison’s putting pressure on me. She thinks I ought to turn into a man. I need to be sure. Though my operation would be reversible, just about, as it isn’t for Alison.’

‘But you wouldn’t be a fertile man?’

‘No. Of course not. I am fertile now. That’s one of my main problems. As it is, I could have a hysterectomy, but I’d still be just a woman, only without even a womb. I’d rather have a bit put on to balance it all up. And then we could adopt. If Alison has legal female status, I can argue that I want male status.’

‘I can go so far in understanding,’ said Elaine, ‘no further. Frankly, I don’t want to. Work it out yourself. Which bit of you and Alison go into one another is neither here nor there, but then I am not an interested party.’

‘I knew I shouldn’t have brought the subject up,’ said Daphne. ‘I might have known you wouldn’t be interested.’

Elaine groaned.

‘Are you like this at your meetings?’ she asked.

‘Of course not,’ said Daphne.

Defoe and Weena came in. Both were flushed. Defoe’s longer piece of hair fell not across his scalp but down behind his ear. He did not care. Weena put her hand on Elaine’s arm. She wore a black T-shirt and no bra beneath it, and a pair of skimpy blue faded denim shorts with frayed hems around the thighs. A big green leather bag was slung over her shoulder. Her hair had been shaved well back from her brow.

‘Behold your husband’s biographer,’ said Weena to Elaine.

‘How nice,’ said Elaine, removing Weena’s hand. ‘I must go and drain the potatoes. But do meet my daughter Daphne.’

Daphne regarded Weena with more interest than Weena regarded Daphne. Elaine went through to the kitchen.

‘Not only is Weena to do my biography,’ said Defoe, following her to the door, ‘but a Sunday newspaper is to buy it in instalments, for a sum well into five figures, which Weena and I will share, fifty:fifty. So your doubts were unfounded, Elaine. I am not a nobody; I am still a somebody.’

‘I’m so glad,’ said Elaine, bringing in the boiled potatoes. ‘And the train was late, I take it?’

‘Very late,’ said Defoe, sitting at the head of the table, in a high-back upholstered chair which had been given to Elaine’s great-grandfather by a nephew of the King of Denmark.

‘Actually,’ said Weena, ‘it was on time. Defoe and I had a celebratory fuck on the way to the house, down in the reeds by the river. Why hide it, Defoe? What’s to be ashamed of? I hate lies.’

‘Don’t make jokes like that, Weena,’ said Defoe. ‘Don’t try and shock people.’

‘There’s only one shocking thing round here, Def,’ said Weena, sitting down at the table on a chair bought by Elaine quite recently, at an auction. Very few things in the house actually matched any more, but had been chosen with care and sensitivity to fit in. ‘And that’s your hypocrisy. Well, people are easily cured of that. Just don’t tell me what to do: and don’t patronise me. Can I dig in? Sex always gives me an appetite. Def says I can stay here, Mrs Desmond, while we work on the book. I hope that’s hunky-dory with you.’

* * *

Defoe went upstairs to fetch his glasses. Elaine looked at Daphne for support and advice. These two women were still on their feet. Daphne seemed flummoxed, but presently said to Weena, who had helped herself to egg mayonnaise, potatoes and salad, and was now eating well – ‘I think you should withdraw your remark about fucking down in the reeds by the river. I think it was the Great God Pan did that – “What was he doing, the Great God Pan, down in the reeds by the river?” The answer, to the horrid children, being obvious!’

‘The way this whole family speaks alike!’ said Weena. ‘It’s too much. I might make recordings. We might market the books of Def Desmond with tapes attached. He’s such a listening-to kind of person, isn’t he? Brilliant! It’s what first attracted me to him. And a good fuck, too, to coin a phrase, if a little slow at the beginning. But that might just be his age.’

‘Withdraw the remark,’ said Daphne.

‘No,’ said Weena. ‘It’s true. Def and I have been having an affair for almost a year now.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Elaine. ‘My husband wouldn’t do a thing like that.’

‘Well, he would,’ said Daphne.

‘Not with someone like her,’ said Elaine.

‘He said yours and his sex life was over anyway,’ said Weena to Elaine. ‘You don’t want to do it any more.’

‘The liar!’ cried Elaine, but Weena did not want to hear that.

‘I suppose that’s natural as you get older,’ said Weena, ‘though I don’t see it happening to me. It’s been hard on Def. So I don’t see I’m poaching on anyone’s territory: if anything, I’m a help. Don’t you put mint in your potatoes?’

‘It’s vulgar,’ said Elaine. ‘Too obvious.’

‘Def says you never notice anything,’ said Weena, ‘or you might have noticed he’s on the vulgar side himself, not to mention the obvious. You do to Def what my mother did to my dad: you shame him and expose him and laugh at his achievements. You suck his life out of him to keep yourself going.’

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ said Daphne. ‘It’s the other way round.’

‘I’m the one who loves Def properly,’ said Weena. ‘I’m the one who can make him happy.’

‘I want you to leave my house,’ said Elaine. ‘I want you to leave it now.’ And she looked round desperately and automatically for help from Def, who wasn’t there.

‘The thing is,’ said Weena, ‘it isn’t your house, is it? It’s Def’s. He told me so. So it’s not up to you whether I go or stay, it’s up to Def. And he needs me to stay because he won’t get his money otherwise, and the money is enough for him to pay off his debts and stay here in the house he loves. With me to love him and look after him.’

‘She’s insane,’ said Daphne, ‘or seriously disturbed. But ever so fanciable. Perhaps I should borrow your car, Mum, and drive her back to London for treatment.’

‘No thanks,’ said Weena. ‘Not if you’re as dykey as Def says. I’m not sitting in a car with you!’

Defoe returned with his glasses.

‘I want to make it clear,’ he said, ‘that Weena was merely using a tactic common to biographers today. Her train was late – check with the station if you like – we came straight here. Our relationship is, of course, perfectly proper. The rest is shock tactics, designed to sweep away our conventional habits of restraint and repression when it comes to our own lives. After this, we will all be as frank and open as she requires.’

‘And you’re old enough to be her father,’ said Daphne.

‘It’s the last station at the end of the line,’ said Elaine. ‘It’s unmanned, as you well know. I couldn’t check if I wanted to. Either way, Daphne will drive me back to London now. I will stay with her and Alison.’

‘Peter has a bigger apartment,’ said Daphne. ‘Rick is smaller than Alison. There is no dog. You’ll be happier with Peter.’

‘I will stay with one of my children,’ amended Elaine, ‘until you’ve come to your senses, Defoe.’

‘One dyke and one queer,’ said Weena. ‘Even my mother didn’t do as badly as that!’

‘Shut up, Weena,’ Defoe had the grace to say, but Weena made a dive for his crotch and he giggled. ‘That is so profoundly politically incorrect. God, I love you!’

‘What have you been taking, Dad?’ demanded Daphne. ‘What has she been giving you? Shall we go upstairs, Mum, and put a few things in a suitcase?’

But Defoe was smiling too hard to hear. Elaine seemed to be in shock: ashen. Daphne helped her from the table. For the first time, Daphne envisaged her mother as old: and what was more, quite possibly old without a husband. Defoe would quickly find a woman to nurse him, even one of the likes of Weena. But who would Elaine have? Daphne? Peter? The needs of an older generation would not spark sympathy in Rick’s mind, let alone Alison’s. Jumper would not mind. Daphne must get home to nurture Alison. She had been away too long.

‘No need to make such a scene, Elaine,’ Defoe reproached his wife. ‘Weena’s just an Eloi. She’s easily upset. You’re turning this into a real embarrassment. It’s unforgivable.’

‘Is she really going?’ asked Weena, watching Elaine and Daphne leave the room, leaning into one another for strength and comfort. ‘Just like that? She’s not exactly Boadicea. Do you know about Boadicea? I was reading up on her the other day.’

‘My wife has her dignity,’ said Defoe. ‘Let her live by it. And constancy, endurance, honesty and all the rest. Me, I have you.’

‘And the house to ourselves,’ rejoiced Weena. ‘What an innocent Elaine is. It never pays to leave the matrimonial home: doesn’t she know that? Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Once she’s out, it’ll take her a year and ten thousand pounds at a minimum to get back in. If she ever does. Not so much an innocent, more of a fool.’

Defoe’s hand travelled up Weena’s thigh and under the edge of one of the frayed denim hems, but she pushed his hand away.

‘Not while Daphne’s in the house,’ said Weena. ‘A daughter’s a daughter and they suffer. My mother and father never closed the door. They never cared what noise they made. That counts as abuse, doesn’t it?’

‘Poor little Weena,’ said Defoe. ‘I’ll make it up to you.’

And he took his hand away and gazed in admiration at the angel taken Weena’s form he saw, though she floated a little before his eyes. Down in the reeds by the river she’d given him a tablet or two to take, and he’d swallowed them because she’d said so, and took a step backwards away from him for every second he dithered, her naked body translucent, greeny-white and firm like some plump serpent, miraculous in its existence, threatening to disappear. Once he’d swallowed, she came nearer: her turn to swallow him up.

Hattie tried to lull her niece Amy to sleep. She sang every lullaby she knew; that is to say ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’ and ‘Hush, my darling’.

‘Boring, boring,’ said the child, and used the remote control to get to Sky and the Pop Channel. Then she put the volume up really loud and fell asleep contentedly. The telephone rang. It was Bob.

‘You’ll have to forgive me, Hattie,’ he said. ‘Let me get this over. It’s Bob. I’m not worthy of you. Last week I asked Weena round. She stayed the night. It won’t happen again. It’s taken me three days to get up the courage to tell you. I don’t want it to spoil things between you and me. Please God it won’t.’

‘Are you at home?’ asked Hattie.

‘I got fired,’ said Bob. ‘There was a letter on my desk Friday morning. Now I’m so far down I guess there’s no way left but up, and I’m almost glad.’

‘But why?’

‘I guess it was Wednesday’s management meeting. First of all I was late – that was Weena’s fault, the little bitch. I know she did it on purpose –’

‘Don’t tell me; just don’t tell me,’ begged Hattie.

‘Then I said how about Defoe Desmond’s biography, and there was a kind of silence. Well, it was a crazy idea, I know, but Weena wanted me to put it to them, so I did. In the letter it said my editorial suggestions weren’t in tune with managerial and financial goals, so I guess that was it. Suggest a has-been to the powers that be, get to be a has-been too.’

‘I see,’ said Hattie. ‘So now you’re fired you’ll go on the dole and there’ll be no maintenance for your wife.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Bob.

‘I bet Weena had,’ said Hattie.

‘You used to be her friend,’ said Bob.

‘Not any more,’ said Hattie. ‘And I’m glad she suffered from our crumbs. If you promise to change the sheets, I’ll come round.’

‘When?’ asked Bob.

‘I’m looking after my sister’s little girl Amy,’ said Hattie. ‘I’ll wait till she wakes and then take her home and come on to you.’

‘Wake her up now,’ said Bob.

‘Certainly not,’ said Hattie. ‘That would be immoral. She has to wake naturally.’

Elaine moved stiffly round the bedroom, frowning and inefficient. Daphne stuffed the more obvious items of clothing and personal necessities into a suitcase.

‘Dad’s been taking something, Mum,’ she said. ‘He’s not himself. Let’s just get away, shall we?’

‘Perhaps it would be better if I stayed,’ said Elaine. ‘It doesn’t feel right just to go.’

‘I can’t leave you here on your own,’ said Daphne. ‘And I can’t stay, so you’ll have to come.’

‘Why can’t you stay?’

‘Because Alison is taking Jumper to the vet at 7.45, and the vet’s a woman and just her type. I’ve been away for three days and I want to get to the appointment too.’

‘Do you mean the vet is Jumper’s type, or Alison’s type?’

‘Alison’s type,’ said Daphne patiently.

‘Oh,’ said Elaine. ‘And then you could have an operation to get to be an animal and then you could be Jumper’s type. Just a thought.’

‘Not a very good joke, Mum,’ said Daphne.

‘Probably not,’ said Elaine gloomily, and waved at the furniture.

‘What are you doing, Mum?’

‘Waving goodbye to the matrimonial fourposter,’ said Elaine. ‘I was born in that bed. I had you in hospital. Peter too. Perhaps that’s what went wrong. Lack of faith.’

‘You’re talking strangely even for you, Mum,’ said Daphne. ‘Let’s just get out of here.’

‘No, wait a moment,’ said Elaine, clinging to one of the four posts of the bed. ‘I could compose a curse. I could curse your father and all his line.’

‘He doesn’t have a line. Just Peter and me.’

‘My mother cursed my father and all his line before she went,’ said Elaine. ‘Before she jumped in the river. They found her down near the reeds. Why shouldn’t I do it too? It obviously works.’

Daphne tried to prise her mother’s arms from the post, but failed.

‘Jesus, what a nightmare!’ she said. ‘Compared to home, International Relations is a piece of cake.’

The phone rang. Elaine let loose the bedpost and answered it.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Yes, as it happens, someone called Weena is in the house. An Eloi. We’re just Morlocks.’

‘Is that Mrs Desmond?’ asked Hattie.

‘Lady Drewlove to you,’ said Elaine. ‘Who ever wanted to be married to a mere commoner?’

‘Lady Drewlove! Wow!’ said Hattie. ‘I thought you were just a Mrs. It was you I wanted anyway, not Weena. I need to warn you. Weena’s no well-wisher. I know: I’m her friend. She’s after your husband. She’ll drive you out, suck him dry, spit him out as a husk. I can’t go on, because you’re out of town and this is my friend Bob’s phone. One of the husks I’m talking about. There are hulks and there are husks.’

‘She’s writing my husband’s biography,’ said Elaine. ‘She seems to be plumping him up well enough, making him rich and famous again: I see no sign of any husk –’

Downstairs, Weena said to Defoe, as she helped herself to raspberry mousse with a meringue topping, done to a turn overnight in the Aga’s plate-warming oven – ‘As soon as she’s gone, call the locksmith, change the locks. Then she can’t get in without breaking in, and you can call the police if she tries. Communicate only through lawyers. Accuse her of violent behaviour. She’ll soon give up and go away and leave you in peace, to be yourself at last. I’ll be here to help you; it’s all going to be just fine!’

Defoe’s head was clearing. The fronds of Weena’s shorts were beginning to separate out, lie still; had ceased writhing and weaving round her leg.

‘Wasn’t that the phone?’ he asked.

‘Not any more,’ said Weena.

Defoe picked up the silent instrument to hear Hattie’s voice.

‘Weena’s got no commission to do Defoe Desmond’s biography. She tried but she failed. There’s no Sunday newspaper serialisation. All that’s for your husband’s benefit. A commission just acts as a pregnancy used to, when a girl wants a man and a home. When she’s got what she wants, the baby, the commission, just somehow fades away. She has a miscarriage: the editor changes his mind. She’s installed, though. She’s okay. Too late for the guy to go back. It happens to the good guys, not the bad. Don’t give up on your husband just because Weena’s around.’

Defoe put the receiver down. The words might have been real, or they might have come from heaven. He did not recognise the voice, but the statements made were the more convincing for that. His hand tightened round Weena’s thigh.

‘You’re hurting me,’ she protested. ‘I bruise so easily. I’m Weena the Eloi. My mother named me after the girl in The Time Machine, did I ever tell you that? She wanted to diminish me from the moment I was born.’

‘I’m the King of the Morlocks,’ he said, picking up the bread knife, ‘and I’m going to eat half of you for lunch, and the Queen shall have the other half for tea.’

The knife was at her throat and she was on her feet in an instant.

‘Get out of here now,’ Defoe said. ‘Just out.’

‘I’ll tell everyone,’ Weena said. ‘I’ll tell the press. I’ll tell them you raped me. I’ll tell them everything.’

‘Tell away,’ he said, ‘because who’s interested? No one. It’s the end of the line, Weena, for you and for me, and you’re lost and I’m saved.’

‘Take me now,’ Weena pleaded, thrusting out her chest at him, but the T-shirt seemed unerotic, the breasts pointless. ‘This is so exciting! I’ve never wanted a man so much –’

‘It won’t work,’ Defoe said, brandishing his knife, pursuing her. ‘It worked once, it worked twice; three times and you’d have me. Serpent! Slimy, cold creature. I’ll cut your head off!’

And Weena turned and ran out of the house. He followed her to the door and flung her green leather bag after her, and the bread knife after that, so it glinted in the air and almost got her: she stared up at it, mouth open and paralysed, as it arced towards her, over and over, and down, Elaine’s best bread knife with the serrated edge. But the knife missed her, and buried itself haft-deep in the lawn. Weena grabbed her bag and ran. Defoe slammed the door after her and turned the locks just as his wife and daughter came down the stairs.

‘I reckon I was just in time,’ said Hattie to Bob. ‘If I’d come straight round, if I hadn’t waited for Amy to wake, I wouldn’t have bothered to get through to Defoe Desmond’s wife.’

Bob had found no clean sheets, but had straightened those already on the bed and brushed away the crumbs, ready for next morning’s breakfast. She could forgive him.

Weena went to her office and found her name off the door and her desk gone. She had no job: she was one of many similarly made redundant. Nor was Dervish there to cajole and persuade, blackmail and charm. He had left a message to say if she attempted to stay, she’d be thrown out. She could collect her wages the following week.

Weena went to her apartment and found the lock changed and her suitcases out, and the white satin blouse, now the same grey as Elaine’s wood ash, hanging on the doorknob by way of explanation.

‘She can’t prove it,’ said Weena aloud, ‘she’s got no proof!’, but no one was listening. She thought she heard the sound of Dervish’s voice, Dervish laughing in his particular pleasure, and knew that she had lost. She had gone too far.

Weena went to Hattie’s apartment but there was no one there. So she went round to Bob’s to cadge a bed for the night but Hattie was there and Bob wouldn’t let her in. It was no good going to Bob’s wife, who once had been Weena’s best friend, because she wasn’t speaking either.

Weena used the last of her money taking a taxi to the crematorium where her father was buried, but it was so vast, so many crosses, so many plaques, it seemed there were more people dead in the world than alive. She lay face down on the grass and tried to commune with her father, but failed. She reckoned he had gone and she was on her own. She had driven everyone away.

A man with a good profile in a good suit stood alone by a grave: the sky was rosy pink, the moon rising. She thought everything was beautiful. She would begin again. She felt reborn in goodness: her spirits rose: she was elated.

‘I spent the last of my money on flowers for my mother’s grave,’ she said softly to the man with the profile. He was perhaps in his mid-forties. ‘I didn’t stop to think how I’d get home.’

He turned his face to hers. He looked quite like her father, as she expected: intelligent, personable, interesting. It was the pattern fate made in front of you, laying out its crazy paving slabs. You got to anticipate what the next one would be. First you stepped on one, then on another: there was scarcely any choice. You tried not to fall between the cracks, and the attempt was the only free will there was. Lately they’d taken to shifting beneath her feet: she’d got things wrong. But you lost some and won some: you couldn’t blame yourself.

‘Otherwise it’s the end of the line for me too,’ said Weena. ‘I might as well join those here gathered.’

‘They wouldn’t have you,’ he said, having studied her for a little. ‘You’re far too alive for that. Let me give you a lift in my Rolls. In the presence of the dead the truly living must stick together. And so few of us are truly alive.’

They walked off together into the sunset, if not hand in hand, at least hip to hip; defiant, in anticipation of things to come.