4

As Mrs Baker observed to her friend Mr Bliss in the pub, over a glass of wine and a plate of mashed potato and sausage, ‘I don’t know what it is about parents! They wait for the weeks just before A levels, and then they divorce, or die, or break up the home, or sell the house, almost as if their sole intent is to blight their children’s lives.’

To which Mr Bliss replied, ‘I don’t have children myself; I only have horses. But I’ve noticed how often they fall lame just before a race. They blight their own lives without any help from anyone.’ Mr Bliss was in his late fifties. He ran a centre for ailing horses; he used natural herbs in their treatment, though, as he was the first to admit, it might merely be the passage of time which restored them to health, rather than comfrey, or feverfew, or borage. He had a puzzled, gentle air. Mrs Baker and he met in the pub from time to time. Mrs Baker was a widow, he a bachelor. He considered her wilder statements calmly, gave them due attention, and contributed to the discussion his own experience of the world, although that was on the whole limited, as he would explain, to horses. Mr Bliss visited me from time to time in Landsfield Crescent, and I always enjoyed his company. Sometimes he came on his horse, Snowy, and would tether it at the gatepost, which always created an agreeable flurry up and down the Crescent.

Now I am not arguing that Laura, unlike Carmen, was specifically singled out by the Devil to fail her exams; I am merely remarking that the more girls who failed to get through them the more staff would be available to chambermaid up at Bellamy House Hotel, and the more competition for the jobs there would be – which would lower wages. The Devil, unlike God, works in not so mysterious ways as you might think. When self-interest rules, motive is always apparent.

The very day that Fenedge High reopened after the fire, Laura came home from school to find her father on the landing, replacing the waterweed in the tropical fishtank which stood in the window, and sorting out the confusion of wires that service such tanks – a line each for heater, thermostat, airstone pump, filter, and two for its neon lights. In the tank swam a large black ornamental carp, its elaborate fins stirring gently, its big eyes goggling, backed into a corner by the intrusion of a human hand and arm into its home. ‘Poor Kubrick,’ said Laura. ‘He hates change. Why are you home, Dad?’

Kim replied that he was home to make sure Kubrick was all right, and that he was entrusting the fish to Laura’s care. She would find feeding instructions on the cork noticeboard in the kitchen. And he had something to tell Laura.

‘Don’t say it,’ said Laura.

‘I have to, puss,’ said Kim, ‘and I want you to remember that whatever happens between your mother and myself, we both love you very much.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Laura sourly. ‘You love me so much you are going to get a divorce.’

‘No one’s saying anything about a divorce,’ said Kim. ‘That’s just a piece of paper. Your mother and I are going to live apart for a while. Now don’t make things difficult for me, puss.’

‘Don’t call me puss,’ said Laura. ‘And if you did get a divorce it would be a great relief. You’re not invisible, you know. You’ve been seeing Poison Poppy for more than a year now, and the whole world knows it, especially my friends. It hasn’t been very nice for me, I can tell you.’

‘Your generation is too prudish,’ complained Kim. ‘The thing is, she’s going to have a baby.’

‘That is disgusting,’ said Laura. ‘She is my age. I went all through primary school with her, and she was poison then and she’s poison now, and I don’t see how a baby could survive inside her.’

‘I know you’re upset, puss, but I have to do what’s right,’ said Kim, putting his forefinger under Laura’s jaw and lifting her head so he could look into her eyes, thus greatly embarrassing her. ‘You do see that – it isn’t a happy situation for me. I love your mother very much, but Poppy is having a baby.’

‘Yuk,’ said Laura. ‘If you go off and live with her you just take Kubrick with you. Let Poison Poppy look after it.’

‘Poppy doesn’t believe in keeping pets,’ said Kim, ‘and that’s a very silly and childish nickname you call her by,’ and by the end of the evening he’d packed and left, leaving Audrey sitting at the kitchen table staring into space, and when Laura tried to focus on the reasons for the First World War her eyes blurred too and it all made a great deal less sense than usual, not that it ever made much.

As for Annie, she was so tired in class that on one or two occasions Mrs Baker actually had to shake her awake. Annie declined to give the reasons for her exhaustion; it was left to Carmen to explain that Annie lay awake at night, fearful of hearing the Count as a third party in the parental bedroom. And on occasion the Count tried to chat her, Annie, up: Mavis’s mouth would open and instead of her mother’s voice asking her to do the shopping, or make tea, or get her nose out of her book, which was bad enough, the Count would be telling her how long it was since he’d had a woman, and asking her to give him a little kiss. There had also been some poltergeist activity in the kitchen: Annie’s favourite cup had hurled itself across the room and broken, and Alan had blamed Annie on the grounds that poltergeists were only ever active in the presence of neurotic teenage girls. Annie’s claim that she was not the neurotic one in the family – on the contrary, wasn’t she Head Girl of Fenedge High? — was taken by her parents as a personal affront. One way and another Annie’s home life was not conducive to study.

Nor was Carmen’s life tranquil. Andy, Raelene and Stephen all came down with food poisoning. Dr Grafton came and went at number 19, and the Borough Epidemiologist too. Raelene had purchased six chicken pies at half-price because they were a day past their sell-by date; she had put them straight away into her freezer. Alas, Andy had unplugged the cabinet in order to use his battery charger and forgotten to reconnect it for a day or two, and quite what had happened inside the freezer during that time Raelene didn’t know; nevertheless she was convinced that the pies would be okay warmed up. Carmen, who declined to eat the pie her mother served her and was mocked for her prudence, was the only member of the family not affected. She was therefore the better able to nurse them through their illness, cleaning up after them as their bodies appeared to deliquesce, spooning water into their fevered mouths. Raelene, who had eaten the pie Carmen refused, was obliged to spend a couple of days in hospital. For some ten more days Carmen got no school work done, nor were her family grateful; rather they seemed to feel Carmen had somehow unjustly cheated fate.

Annie, Laura and Carmen, in the week before their exams began, bunked off school and went down to sit on the banks of Sealord Brook – the very same stream which ran through the grounds of Bellamy House Hotel where it was being widened to provide a jet-ski pond – to lick their wounds, lament their fate, and wonder why they were all so suddenly thus afflicted. Down here the great hairy willowherb – Epilobium hirsutium – grows, and marsh valerian, and milk parsley, and sometimes – in the month of May — swallowtail butterflies hover and dance. It was a bright, bright afternoon and it was difficult to feel miserable, but they tried.

‘We’re not going to pass,’ said Laura.

‘We’re going to let Mrs Baker down,’ said Annie.

‘We’ll never get out of here,’ said Carmen. ‘We’ll have to take local jobs and marry local boys.’

‘That’s if we’re lucky. Who’s ever going to marry me?’ said Annie, and it was true that in those days, when other girls are at their prettiest, a kind of unbearable plainness suffused her, a muddiness of complexion, a puffiness of skin, a lankness of hair. Or perhaps it was just depression. Carmen and Annie stared at their friend and could see that she was indeed a worry.

‘There’s always someone for everyone,’ said Laura comfortingly.

‘You’re okay,’ said Annie. ‘You’ve got Woodie.’

And so it seemed Laura had, one way or another. Woodie had returned not as suitor but as family friend, to be supportive in the bad times which followed her parents’ separation. He was kind to Audrey, in the lordly charitable way of very young men who cannot understand what all the fuss is about, and brotherly to Laura. He even once persuaded Audrey to go to the cinema with him in spite of the stomach pains which made her think she’d just rather sit at home and suffer. Her doctor, Dr Grafton, the one who sees illness as God’s punishment for lack of serenity, told her the pains were due to stress and she should pull herself together, eat more and cheer up.

‘All I’ve got,’ said Annie, ‘is Count Capinski saying come here my little milkmaid and chasing me round the kitchen.’

‘You’re making it up,’ said Carmen.

‘He did it once,’ said Annie. ‘He did.’

‘Your mother ought to see a counsellor,’ said Carmen.

‘She is the counsellor,’ said Annie, and laughed, and looked better at once.

‘We’ll all get jobs and save up so you can have a nose job,’ said Carmen.

‘It’s not how you look that matters in the world,’ said Laura primly, ‘it’s your personality,’ but they all knew it wasn’t so: that was just the kind of thing people told them. Would Prince Charles have married Lady Di if she hadn’t been pretty?

Annie said, ‘The only good thing that happened all last week was that while Count Capinski was having yet another bath – he’s the only one allowed to use all the hot water he wants, because of the dungeon – he had this kind of flash from heaven that a horse called Yellowhammer was going to win the three o’clock at Newmarket. So Mum leapt out of the bath and went to find Dad – she didn’t even wrap herself in a towel – and told him to put a ten-pound bet to win. Dad doesn’t believe in gambling, so I had to go all the way to the betting shop. And Yellowhammer won. And then I had to go all the way back again to pick up the winnings. Two hundred and twenty pounds. They only gave me two. The rest went to the Temple of Healing Light. That’s the Wednesday afternoon do; it’s half-price when the rich pay for the poor. Dad says no one should benefit from gambling.’

‘If the Count can predict the future,’ said Carmen, ‘and if you asked him nicely, would he give us our exam questions? Then at least we’d know what to revise.’

‘I expect he’d want to steal a kiss,’ said Annie. ‘I hate the way he puts things. I’m really glad I didn’t live in the past, if that was what it was all like.’

‘A kiss is a small price to pay,’ said Carmen, ‘for our key to a successful future. Look at it as a mother’s kiss.’ Annie just stared at her, so Carmen said, ‘Well, we’ll all go then, or at any rate we’ll think about it.’

And they put their plan on ice for a whole twenty-four hours.

Now I had checked various Count Capinskis out with the help of the Fenedge Mobile Library, soon to be demobilised, and had indeed traced a fairly nasty specimen of Capinski back to fourteenth-century Cracow. This one seemed to be some kind of early Polish Rasputin, a man alleged to be both a practitioner in the black arts and the Queen’s lover; he had led a general uprising against the King, burned alive a church full of people, and been thrown into a bottle dungeon and left there to languish, since the general belief was that to put a magician to death would merely increase his powers. It is perfectly possible – though not likely – that Mavis had read the same book — Bad Men in History — and absorbed its contents unconsciously, as those people are said to do who are regressed by hypnosis into remembering the lives they believe they lived before death. The history books and chronicles used to check out their stories turn out to be the very ones which initiated the fantasy in the first place: what is occurring is a kind of living plagiarism. I do not believe Mavis consciously deceived her family and clients when she spoke with the Count’s voice; nor do I believe he was really in there with her; she just thought and acted as if he was. She and he had been over on occasion to try to heal my legs; she would lay on hands and I would feel the familiar healer’s tingle, and the Count would invoke the Powers of Light in his guttural broken English, but nothing of a healing nature ever actually happened. But Mavis did it out of the goodness of her heart: she came over with the Count several times and didn’t charge a penny for it. And at the time I for one, in spite of the Count’s historic past, had quite grown to trust him. Mavis said he was company for her while Alan was away; Alan said he added class to the Temple of Light; and as for Annie’s allegations, well, girls as plain as Annie are prone to sexual fantasy. And something had to be done. Matters were going from bad to worse. Mrs Baker summoned Annie, Carmen and Laura to her office. Their essays on Lady Macbeth were in front of her.

‘What is the matter with you three?’ Mrs Baker demanded. ‘You use family trouble as an excuse for idleness. It’s disgraceful. If you do that now, what chance have you got later on in life, when you have husbands and children? The brightest girls I have, and their heads emptied out of all sense, all information! You are on the road to self-destruction. If you do not get to college you will be dependent on a man forever, for the wage of an untrained female is never enough to keep her in dignity or comfort. So you will marry, and what is marriage, as George Bernard Shaw said, but legalised slavery? Unpaid work in return for your keep, attended by daily humiliations. Who gets the best piece of steak, the only egg in the fridge? He does! He’s bigger than you and more powerful than you, and he allows you to wheedle and charm a little pleasure from him now and then, and the law offers you a little protection, it’s true, but not much. All you have to bind him with are chains of love and duty, and they’re pretty flimsy, believe you me.

‘And don’t tell me,’ added Mrs Baker, ‘that the world has changed since I was young, for it hasn’t.’

The three girls stared at her, unconvinced. And Mrs Baker looked from one to another of them and picked at the layers of dusty black fabric she wore and said, ‘I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking if you pass exams you’ll end up like me. I tell you this, you pass exams and end up like me if you’re lucky.’

Still they stared.

‘Life is short,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘and life is shit,’ and stalked out of the room.

And that clinched it. The next day Annie, Carmen and Laura sat in Mavis’s hall on the row of chairs kept for patients, and waited. On the door handle of the front room hung a notice which said ‘TEMPLE OF HEALING – DO NOT DISTURB’.

‘Fancy having to line up to see my own mother in my own house,’ said Annie.

‘Look at it this way,’ said Carmen. ‘It’s not your mum you have to see, it’s Count Capinski.’

‘I want my mum back,’ said Annie. She was near to tears, and Laura was not happy either.

‘It feels like cheating to me,’ she said. ‘I expect this was what my dad felt like while waiting for an assignation with Poison Poppy.’

The others felt it would be unkind to contradict her.

The Temple door opened and an elderly man with a florid face limped out. He was smiling. ‘She’s a wonder,’ he said to the girls. ‘It’s a miracle. I am completely cured. And that Count is such a gent. He adds real tone to Fenedge. He says you can go in now.’

And in they went and Mavis looked up from the hard chair in which she sat enthroned alone in the room, and said, ‘Oh, it’s you three. What do you want? We’re doing Temple. It’s very tiring,’ and then the Count spoke from her lips: ‘Never too busy for your daughter and her charming friends, dear lady. What can I do for you today? Warts, arthritis, colds in the nose? Puppy fat, a thing of the past! God sends his healing power through me, into this blissful age of plenty.’

‘We just want a little glimpse of the future, Count,’ said Carmen.

‘We want to know what questions will come up in our exams.’

‘The nerve of it!’ said Mavis. ‘That’s cheating.’

‘Nem problemi,’ said the Count, in the same breath, quite crowding out Mavis’s disapproval, and a voice which they recognised as Mrs Quaker’s of the French department referred them to Flaubert and the justification or otherwise of Madame Bovary’s suicide, and Tom Ellis (History) suggested they compare the Corn Law and the Poll Tax riots, and Mrs Baker (English) said forget Banquo and concentrate on Lady Macbeth, and so on throughout the range of their subjects while Carmen took notes.

Now we must remember Mavis had once or twice been to Open Evenings at the school and had encountered most of Annie’s teachers at one time or another, so these revelations, this speaking in the living voice of others, may have been the real thing, a genuine exercise of clairvoyance, or it may have been a mixture of hysteria, exhaustion and mimicry. I will not say malice, for Mavis was not malicious, or only unconsciously so. I cannot answer for the Count. But incarceration in Eastern Europe in the fourteenth century can’t have done much for his temperament.

After some twenty minutes the Count’s voice seemed to run down; like a tape on a sticky spool, it became slower and slower and deeper and deeper and finally stopped, and Mavis slumped over the table. The girls filed out.

‘I wish she were someone else’s mother, not mine,’ said Annie, but Laura and Carmen said they envied anyone whose mother could tell the future: Annie must not look a gift horse in the mouth. They were all elated. It seemed to them they had their ticket to leave, their escape route clean out of Dullsville, Tennessee.

So elated were they, so word-perfect by the end of the week in the questions suggested by their favourite man, the Count, but not so perfect as not to build in sufficient difference of phrase to avoid the charge of cheating, that the night before their first exam – in English Literature – they felt they could well afford to go to the disco.

I know that three girls going to a disco when they shouldn’t is not the stuff of drama in Chicago, USA, but here in Fenedge it is of significance. And perhaps Fenedge is in some way pivotal to the great cosmic conflicts of good and evil — not for nothing did Driver patrol the flatlands in his big black silky car; for all he described himself as Sir Bernard Bellamy’s chauffeur, I reckon that was just a front. A kind of idle occupation, to snaffle a soul or so, while thinking of other things. It is tempting to believe one is always at the heart of things, even in Fenedge, East Anglia, central to the drama – even creating it – when actually one is in all likelihood just some bit part player, at the very edges of the stage. I will be humble.

Be that as it may, Laura, Carmen and Annie went to the disco that night. Carmen and Annie’s parents couldn’t care what they did, or when and how, but Laura’s mother did, for once.

‘Don’t go out,’ begged Audrey of Laura, ‘I feel really lonely; I think something terrible is going to happen. I have such a pain. And, besides, don’t you have an exam tomorrow?’

It was the first mention in weeks Laura’s mother had made of her exams. As for Kim, there’d been neither sight nor sound of him since the evening he left Kubrick in his daughter’s care, and had packed and gone. Kubrick was flourishing: Laura dosed the tank from time to time and every white-spotted scale was now velvety black again, and pure.

‘I’m going to the disco,’ said Laura, ‘and you can’t stop me.’

But when she got there Woodie was waiting for her on his new, more powerful motor scooter, and all his zits had gone, and she drove off with him to the fenland, above which the yellow moon hung long and low, to a bed of mosses and red campion (Silene dioica) underneath a canopy of birch, sallow and willow, intertwined with reed mace (Typha latifolia) and hawthorn, and here he and she made love. A willow warbler, misled by moonlight into believing it was day, began to sing.

Woodie said, ‘I suppose you are on the pill or something?’ and Laura said, ‘Of course I’m not,’ and they both fell silent, except that Laura, half hoping, half fearing, spoke to her mother and father in her head and said to them, ‘Now look what you’ve done. You’ll be sorry.’ Laura wasn’t at all. It hadn’t even hurt. Her future in the natural world of love, delight and procreation was that night assured.

I stayed by my window till the early hours, watching the arc of the moon. I saw Carmen and Annie come home on the last bus, and hoped they’d get at least some sleep that night. And I waited and waited for Laura to come back, but she didn’t, not until dawn was in the sky and the yellow moon turned little and uninteresting. And then I heard the putter-putter of Woodie’s bike, and Carmen and Annie’s doors opened and out they both came into the Crescent, Carmen in a T-shirt down to her knees, Annie in a nightgown buttoned at the wrists. And Woodie left Laura at her front door and waved at her friends and put-putted off into the dawn.

‘Where have you been?’ demanded Carmen.

‘I couldn’t sleep a wink,’ complained Annie.

‘I never need to sleep again,’ said Laura, and went on into her house, and found Audrey waiting up for her, if you can call spending all night leaning over the kitchen table clutching your stomach waiting up.

‘Make me some tea,’ said Audrey to Laura.

‘I ought to get some sleep,’ said Laura. ‘It’s A level English today. I’ve been out all night, Mum.’

‘You’re old enough to look after yourself,’ was all her mother said. ‘The pain’s getting worse. Ring the doctor.’

‘It’s too early in the morning,’ said Laura, but her mother insisted, so she called Dr Grafton, and woke him from his sleep. He was quite kind to Laura, saying he understood what a hard time she had with her mother, and explained that the pain was not functional but neurotic, and had in itself been a contributory cause for Kim leaving home, and could he now go back to sleep? So Laura put the phone down and Audrey, so drained of colour that even the dawn light couldn’t drain it any more, fell off her chair and under the table. Laura rang Dr Grafton back to describe what had happened and asked what she could do, and this time he was really angry and said Audrey no doubt had an alcohol problem too, so Laura called the ambulance service — who should only ever be called by a doctor – herself, and they came within five minutes since it was a call from Landsfield Crescent and Alan Horner was one of the duty crew that night. His uniform suited him. He looked, and was, kind and helpful. It was only Annie, and sometimes Count Capinski, he ever had problems with.

‘Stomach cancer, most like,’ he said to Laura. ‘Takes a long time to get going, but when it does, pow! Collapse of thin party, if not stout.’ And he laughed. ‘Well,’ said Alan apologetically, ‘if you don’t laugh you cry.’ Laura laughed too. She assumed she was in a dream. The crew persuaded themselves that Audrey was still breathing. They rolled her onto a stretcher, and carried her out to the ambulance. Laura went along too. The siren sounded all the way, not just at traffic junctions, but Laura was so tired she fell asleep, propped in a corner as she was, which at least made the dream stop. I watched the ambulance arrive, and go, and listened to its sound fading into the Fenedge distance. Dramas happen everywhere, if only you hang around for long enough.

As for the questions in that year’s exams, nothing the Count had predicted came true, not a single thing, almost as if the error was not accidental, but intended. No mention of Madame Bovary’s death, not a breath of Lady Macbeth, or a hint of the Poll Tax riots. Laura turned up from the hospital halfway through the exam and, for all the sense they wrote, Annie and Carmen could have stayed home altogether.

Carmen left the examination hall early and decided to walk home to Landsfield Crescent, although ‘home’ seemed to her a place she had long ago grown out of. But where else could she go? The day was hot. The road was dusty. She was angry. She thought she would hitchhike but no cars came along the long ribbon of road she walked. Even the trees which lined its sides seemed indeterminate and without name, and the only birds around were the crows, which circled, and cawed, and yelled defiance and could only cooperate in anger, when they dive-bombed and forced out of their sky a little tremulous passing creature, some wretched peewit or blackcap that had strayed into their airspace by mistake.

Carmen began to feel nervous, as if the power of her anger had moved her out of one reality into another, dumped her and a flood of crows into an empty world.

So when she heard a car behind her she was relieved. When she turned and saw it was Driver coming up fast in the big BMW, she was pleased. He was someone she knew, if only vaguely, and she was still not old enough to understand that the danger to a woman comes mostly from someone vaguely known. Driver slowed down and stopped beside her and the window slid down without any effort from him at all.

‘It isn’t safe,’ said Driver, ‘for a young lady to hitch rides; it’s asking for trouble.’

‘I’ll do what I want,’ said Carmen. ‘I’m not scared.’

‘Who are you angry with?’ asked Driver, and Carmen replied, ‘God.’

Driver looked at her with interest, as well he might.

‘Why are you staring at me?’ Carmen asked.

‘I’m wondering if you’d shriek and cry rape if I offered to give you a lift. A driver can’t be too careful these days.’

So Carmen got in, of course she did, and he drove her to Landsfield Crescent.

Now it was the first time I’d actually seen the BMW, though I’d heard tell of it. The sight of the big black car, as it nosed round the bend that lunchtime, made my toes tingle, which was strange because I normally had no feeling in them at all – the state of my spine forbade it. I was eating my lunch – bread and cheese, pickle and apple, brought to me on a tray by my carer Alison. Alison is eighty-six, and a keen ornithologist, though her vision is not as acute as once it was. Whose is? The BMW stopped outside Mavis Horner’s house and I watched while Carmen got out; and Driver got out too and bent his head and seemed to kiss her neck, though perhaps he bit it, because she jumped and squealed a little.

What really happened between the time Driver picked Carmen up and the time he dropped her off, who is to say? I know what Carmen told Laura and Annie, which was that she’d met the Devil on the way home from school, and he offered to buy her soul in return for wealth, success and soul-searing beauty, but she’d refused. And I know Laura and Annie had trouble accepting (a) that Sir Bernard Bellamy’s chauffeur was Mephistopheles and (b), if he was, that she could have resisted him, but I was prepared to go along with Carmen’s version. I heard with my own ears, I’m sure I did, what Driver called after Carmen as she marched up Mavis’s front path to give Count Capinski what for. Nip, he went, with his sharp, even, handsome teeth, and then he said, ‘All the joys that flesh is heir to, yours all yours, and all for such a small, small price. Something you don’t even believe in.’ And I’ll swear I heard her reply, ‘Oh go away and tempt someone else. I like to do things my own way.’

And Driver drove off in a silken fury – I could almost swear the BMW’s wheels were an inch above the ground – and Carmen rubbed her shoulder where he had nipped it and continued unabashed in her mission. She knocked upon Mavis’s door − bang, bang, bang — and Mavis answered it, and would have reprimanded Carmen for her noisy impertinence but Carmen got in first.

‘Why did you let your friend the Count mislead us? It was spiteful and malicious.’

Carmen came into the little dismal hall, which always seemed smaller than those of the other houses in the road, though if you measured you’d find them all exactly the same size. Perhaps it was the row of chairs that did it, or the unframed New Age posters depicting mystic light sources, unicorns and so forth, all rather badly executed, stuck up on the walls with Blu-Tack. Mavis backed away from Carmen and the stamp of Count Capinski firmed and formed on her face.

‘Is something wrong, dear lady?’ Capinski asked Mavis. ‘I feel your alarm.’

‘She’s brought in something nasty with her, Count,’ complained Mavis, ‘something really dreadful. Can’t you feel it?’

‘I do, I do,’ and Mavis/the Count’s teeth began to chatter. ‘It’s cold, so cold. Make your eyes clear for me, dear lady. There is black, there is wet. Oh, the stench! I am slipping back –’ and he began to moan most terribly and roll his eyes and his hands clawed and shrivelled. ‘You’re just trying to get out of it,’ said Carmen, though she was quite alarmed. ‘You did a dreadful, spiteful tiling.’

At which the Count/Mavis fell squirming and shrieking on the mat, waving his claws about, and Alan came running from the kitchen. He’d been back to the hospital to check on Laura’s mother. They were operating immediately. She had stomach cancer, advanced but not, they thought, quite terminal: it’s always good to have an instant diagnosis confirmed when, even though the news is not good, it’s not as bad as it could be. It’s pleasant to be right, even about tragedy.

The Count wailed from the floor, ‘I’m going, I’m going, oh my darling, your soft sweet bed –’

‘That’s enough of that now,’ said Alan, kneeling on the floor beside his wife. ‘We won’t have talk like that –’ and he slapped her face, at which Mavis sat up, quite herself again.

‘I really think he’s gone,’ said Mavis brightly. ‘What a relief. It’s been a nightmare. In bed, on the bog – and not even a spirit of the departed; someone still alive, if only just. My nails kept getting dirty, all by themselves. I must write it up for Psychic News.’ Her face darkened as she turned to Carmen. ‘As for you, miss, the sooner you’re out of here the better. You bring trouble with you, always did. If Annie fails her exams, it will be all your fault. I told her so but she wouldn’t listen.’

And those were the circumstances in which Annie, Carmen and Laura all failed their English exam, and most of their other papers thereafter – sufficient to make them ineligible for further education grants – and in which Mrs Baker was moved sideways to make room for a male head of department, and Laura became pregnant, or thought she was. But at least thereafter Annie slept more peacefully by night. For a time.