9

From my bed in the Clinic I can see out over the lakes to the office spires of Chicago. I am on the twelfth floor; there are thirty above me, eleven below. I try to find some significance in this, but fail. I like it here. Years pass. I know the pattern the sky makes: I watch the mists gathering and dispersing on the lake: the changing shades of its green fringes as the sunlight comes and goes: the flux and flow of traffic along the lake road. I hear only the muted average of city noise: all excesses – shrieks, wails, the whispers of plots, the firing of guns, the popping of champagne corks, the squeals of brakes, the revving of engines – are through the double glazing, calmingly evened out to a determined, competent purr. I’d rather be here than in Fenedge, any day, don’t think I wouldn’t. We all have our ways of getting out.

Surgeons are transplanting neural fibre from some wretched frog into my backbone in the hope of achieving some degree of nerve regeneration. These days they don’t have enough to do. Physicians are taking over; invasive surgery is unpopular. Taking heart from my reports of tingling in my toes, these surgeons will not now give up on my legs, though I’m sure I did long ago. They treat me for free – or, look at it another way, though I try not to, being grateful, I allow them to experiment on me free of charge. It would be very interesting if the experiment succeeded, I can see that: it would have all kinds of significance, bring hope to the hopeless, all that. We make jokes about whether I’ll start leaping around the room, froglike, or whether I can see undue signs of swallowing in my throat. They are easily entertained, these doctors: the feeblest of jokes and their serious faces light up as if some great gift had been bestowed on them. Then the door closes behind them, and I find myself sad, watching the traffic patterns lace below, wondering what the monstrous sorrow can be: the one which lies at the roots of the universe, so that we’re left with such poignant echoes of it in our lives, and have to work it through, so patiently and painfully, aeon after aeon; child grieving for parent, husband for wife, each afflicted with grief for the other, not just the self, which, God knows, is bad enough. What happened once to spoil everything so? I daresay the story of Adam and Eve is not as laughable as most of us sophisticates suppose; perhaps it has the seeds of truth in it. Perhaps once there was indeed a Garden of Eden, and we were turned away from it, and left with what is bound to seem imperfect and spoiled, a disappointment, since we have in our bones, our genes, that glimmer of perfection. But I think it must be the sin and sorrow of gods, not of humankind, which afflicts us, since we find even its mere shadow so intolerable. We have been wrongly accused. Humankind were just dragged in tow like servants, lowly subjects of whichever God turned up, obliged to share his troubles, sop them up. I don’t think the belief in one God, not many, was the philosophical advance we were told it was in school: I think it’s more tolerable to believe we are suffering whimsically, because once Jupiter or his like erred.

When I got back to Fenedge, having failed to grow sufficient neural fibre to carry commands from my brain to my knees, though I could now tense and relax the muscles in my thighs and repair just a soupçon of the wastage of years, I found little had changed. It was as if the place and the people had simply marked time, waiting for my return, for my ongoing observation of them, before doing anything to alter their lives.

Laura had three children, not one, but she hadn’t had to do anything to achieve that: just lie there with her legs open. It is a great pity that women, being as it were opted into pregnancy by instinct, then have actively to opt out if they don’t want to mother a child. It requires great nerve, foresight and endurance so to do – more than Laura possessed. Three babies within four years! But at least she’d learned to drive. In my absence Alison had her driving licence removed: she had put her foot on the accelerator, not the brake once too often, and gone through the window of the public library. She was appealing against the decision, however; she was claiming ageism: others who were worse drivers even than her, she maintained, managed to retain their licences in similar situations. The matter was going to the High Court. Because of her age and status she was entitled to Legal Aid.

So Laura, in the meantime, took on the task of escorting me daily to the Handicapped Centre. Driving the new baby around in the car was one of the few ways, it seemed, of putting the child to sleep, and since Laura could claim a transport allowance, petrol money, for rendering me assistance on the way in to Fenedge and the shops, such as they were, she was happy to do so. So once again I found myself sitting at my window in the Centre, far too many days a week, watching life go by, or not go by. But at least a new batch of nature books had been donated, I assumed from the same source as before.

‘So, what’s been happening?’ I asked Laura, shortly after my return.

‘Nothing much,’ she replied. Rachel and Caroline flanked the carry cot in the back. They of course had to come too. Our journeys were noisy and sticky and frayed my nerves. Caroline, from the back seat, liked to tangle her fingers in my hair. Laura was looking pretty enough, but stolid, the way girls are when life closes in on them too soon, and she had put on weight. She favoured cotton dresses as being the easier to wash, and woolly cardigans for warmth, and flat shoes for sense.

Woodie had speeded up with the garden sheds, she said, and there was now just enough money to get by on, so she mustn’t complain. Audrey had had six operations, but was now in remission, so they had to be grateful. Laura hadn’t heard from her father, but so far as she knew he was still with Poppy; that was something. I thought Laura was rather overdoing her Polyanna act and said so. She said somebody round here had to stay cheerful. I remarked that the car was rather full of fumes and could this be good for the children? and Laura said Woodie kept soldering the exhaust system back on to the car but it kept shaking loose. But wasn’t she lucky to have such a handyman for a husband?

‘Oh yes!’ I said.

Annie was still working up at Bellamy House. She had been promoted to Floor Chambermaid and was on an incentive bonus. She had had a desultory boyfriend or so who always broke with her, or she with them; she still corresponded with Tim, the sheep farmer from New Zealand, and this Laura felt spoiled her chances with other boys, or theirs with her. But Carmen was doing really well at Peckhams Poultry: she had been promoted out of the production line and was now a delivery manageress and a union rep.

‘Boyfriend?’ I asked, and Laura shook her head.

‘She’s too picky for her own good.’

Laura had this to say to Carmen:

That she’d got to be a bit peculiar: she went to church sometimes. That she didn’t care what she looked like any more: that she knew she, Laura, didn’t either but she had an excuse and that she, Laura, knew that I, Hattie Upton, pitied her but she, Laura, wasn’t to be pitied, honestly: she was happy with Woodie and there was a kind of richness in doing the right thing. (She didn’t say that she, Laura, thought I, Hattie Upton, husbandless, childless, sitting in a wheelchair day in, day out, had a nerve to pity her, Laura, who had a husband, children and the use of her legs, but I knew what she was thinking.) And she, Laura, didn’t believe in abortion and she’d hate Woodie to have a vasectomy. That Carmen was still a virgin and must be the only one of her age in all East Anglia. That perhaps Carmen had some kind of sexual hang-up.

That sometimes Carmen went with Annie to the disco but only because, Laura feared, Carmen was still hoping to run into the elusive Ronnie Cartwright.

(Carmen was living in a caravan on Mr Bliss’s Horse Farm. She had to walk five miles to work every morning and back again. In the height of the season, when Peckhams had their production line running twenty-four hours a day, she would do a twelve-hour day and a seven-day week, on basic hourly rates.)

That if you asked Carmen why she put up with it she said she was the only one on the staff who actually liked working at Peckhams, which was why she kept getting promotion.

That Carmen’s parents were still away: how they’d gone to New Zealand.

Strange, I said, how New Zealand keeps cropping up.

‘It’s the far ends of the earth,’ said Laura. ‘They say it’s like paradise. The Garden of Eden, still operating. If you want to get out of here, wherever here is, it’s the obvious place to go. As far as you can get.’

Sir Bernard? These days he lived in London: Mrs Haverill ran Bellamy House, and Sir Bernard seemed to have lost interest in the hotel. Some kind of planning decision had gone against him. He’d wanted to build a sea wall at Winterton including a marina, but they wouldn’t let him because of the wildlife. A kind of hiccough in his upward and onward career. He’d married Lady Rowena in the end. Boring, boring. Sometimes he came down to the Bellamy House Arts Festival – they’d tried doing opera in the grounds a la Glyndebourne, but it hadn’t taken off. Nothing happened and nothing took off round here. There was a kind of curse on the neighbourhood, said Laura sadly.

I asked about Driver. Laura said, ‘Don’t mention him.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Because if you think of him he turns up,’ said Laura. ‘It’s happened twice to me. I spoke of him once and dreamt of him once and the next day he whizzed past me in the BMW. It was spooky.’

‘Did he stop?’

‘Of course he didn’t stop. What would he stop for? This is the place where nothing happens.’

I thought it was just as well I was back in the area. A period of rest can do no one any harm, but you don’t want events just to run out altogether.

A couple of weeks later Laura said to me, ‘I told you not to mention Driver, because he did turn up.’

Laura had been standing at the bus stop at the end of Landsfield Crescent with the three children. Rachel had just begun nursery school and Woodie had taken the car to go to an interview with a local cabinet maker who was advertising for a part-time assistant. Audrey was now on liquid foods, which needed to be supplemented by evening primrose oil – a substance not available on the National Health and expensive, so that the household outgoings were finally exceeding its income, no matter how long and hard Woodie worked. Regular employment was beginning to seem the only option open to Woodie – and everyone knew how once you took that path it ran straight, narrow and boringly through to old age, with never a penny to spare or hope of a breakthrough into the world of artist/craftsman. So Laura was feeling dejected enough as she stood and waited for a bus which never came, Rachel on one hand, Caroline on the other, and the baby in the pushchair. All girls. She’d have liked at least one boy. Woodie said why didn’t she try again, try for a boy. Was he insane? And the BMW glided to a stop beside her and Driver slithered out. The lines of the car were smooth and glossy; it glittered; it was amazingly clean. And Driver’s eyes were bright and blue.

‘If it isn’t Laura,’ he said. ‘Would you like a lift?’

‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘The kids would only be sick in the back.’

‘True,’ he said, wincing.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘the neighbours would have a fit. What would they say? Getting into a strange man’s car.’

She was flirting. She couldn’t help it. She was not as lost in domesticity as she thought.

‘Don’t be so boring,’ he said.

‘I am boring,’ said Laura. ‘This is Fenedge, remember.’

‘Well,’ said Driver, ‘don’t blame me. I tried to cheer things up and got snubbed for my pains.’

Driver was wearing jodhpurs and a blazer in navy blue with rather a lot of brass buttons all over: so he seemed to be in uniform. His shoulders were square. His hair was glossy and smooth and a little too oily for her taste. She couldn’t meet his eyes, and didn’t know whether to look above them or below them. She wished she weren’t wearing a shapeless cotton dress and a well-washed cardigan. She wished she hadn’t eaten so many biscuits with her tea for so long, but how else was she to keep herself cheerful?

‘A lovely young woman like you,’ said Driver. ‘You could have had anyone. Still could, without three children round your neck. Why don’t you leave them behind? Forget them, slip into my car and begin a new life.’

‘What, just leave them standing at a bus stop?’

‘Why not? Someone’s bound to look after them. They’ll think a flying saucer took you off; they’ll never blame you. Your husband would make a good mother: a better mother than an earner any day. Those children are his idea, not yours. He took advantage of you at a weak moment in your life. He shouldn’t have done it. If you don’t do something, your life is finished.’

‘I wouldn’t even think of abandoning my children.’

‘You’ve thought of it many times,’ said Driver.

‘Besides,’ said Laura, pretending not to have heard him, ‘they might wander off into the road, under the bus. I couldn’t possibly.’

‘Have it your own way,’ said Driver, and got back into the BMW and drove off, and Laura wished for a moment he’d stayed around just a little longer, persuading. She could see her last chance in life retreating, vanishing, a tail light round a corner. Driver was right: if you don’t do these things on the spur of the moment you never do them at all.

The bus turned up. Its back doors folded open. The bus conductor stood there on the step. Laura lifted Rachel and Caroline up on to the bus; the conductor did not help her. She took the baby from the pushchair and put it under her arm. The baby started crying. Laura turned to fold the pushchair with one arm and one foot and failed.

‘Get a move on,’ said the conductor, and then, ‘Can’t wait about all day,’ and replaced first Rachel and then Caroline back on the pavement. They started to grizzle. The conductor rang the bell; the doors began to close.

‘There’ll be another bus along in a minute,’ said the conductor. ‘We’re late in.’

Laura, looking up from the pushchair, thought for a moment the conductor had Driver’s face, but how could it be Driver?

‘Like hell there’ll be another one along in a minute,’ said Laura, as the doors folded to, but she didn’t think he heard.

Laura gave up waiting after a further ten minutes and turned back towards home. The second bus passed without stopping. Rachel didn’t get to nursery school, and later that day nearly killed Kubrick by picking him up out of his tank to show him to the baby, but fortunately Laura came along in time, so that Kubrick was merely traumatised, and not dead. She was glad Kim wasn’t around to witness it. Woodie didn’t get the job. He auditioned for it by turning a chair leg on the spot. The cabinet maker said he was masterly but soo slow.

But one step up from nothing happening is things almost happening.

The next Fenedge almost-event was the moving in of a couple of youths, yobbos or punks, with white faces, ringed flesh, tortured hair, leather jackets with studs and chains, and dirty hands, into the house which had once been the greengrocer’s on the corner of the Centre. The owner had had to close due to increased rent and lack of business. The lads, Paul and Tony, forced an entry and set up a squat inside, complete with candles, mess and mantras. The town was fearful of violence and disorder, but the boys turned out to be disappointingly gentle and even helpful – they’d help with my wheelchair of an evening (they were never out of bed in the morning or I daresay they would have lent a hand then as well) – and the landlord – his revenge upon the town – declined to turn them out, so there they stayed; the happening would have drifted from almost-event into non-event, sucked down into the general flatness of the landscape, I daresay, except the whole pattern of the times changed; and before you could say Jack Robinson or ‘Thank God Hattie’s back in town’, events began to erupt, to pile one on top of the other.

Carmen moved into the squat: came in a van on her Thursday afternoon off and took over Tony’s room when he moved off to join ‘The Travellers’ and do the rounds of the summer pop festivals. She brought a bed and bedding, a table, a chair, a mirror; she came over and spoke to me. She said she couldn’t go on walking the long distance to work every day from Mr Bliss’s caravan. From here in Fenedge she would catch a bus; and the rent she had to pay was marginal. She had been promoted on to the night shift at Peckhams, working as Delivery Supervisor. She had given herself two years to save enough to move out of Fenedge altogether, and she reckoned she could do it in that time, though the cost of living and inflation made saving increasingly difficult.

Peckhams had a new managing director, one Shanty Cotton, who was a great believer in worker participation: she was beginning to get some administrative experience which might stand her in good stead in the wider world. She did not look unhappy: just too sensible and practical for her own good. She wore a headscarf, which I hoped was just because she was moving house, but I feared might have become a way of life. People round Fenedge wrap their heads in scarves a lot: the wind blows hard and long over the waterlands and ears get cold and the mind defensive. I would like to report that Carmen put the squat into instant order, cleaning, sweeping and tidying, wiping the encrusted glass of the windows (although ardent vegetarians, Paul and Tony smoked a great deal — both tobacco and other substances), but I am sorry to say she did not. She was not, she said, ‘interested’ in housework. She had to worry more than enough about hygiene at Peckhams: she could not be bothered at home. She only had to look at Laura, with her preoccupation with washing and mending, to see where that kind of thinking led.

I enquired about Annie. Annie, I discovered, had that very week received a letter from her Tim McLean, enclosing an Air New Zealand ticket, Club Class, to Wellington, on to Christchurch, and had flown out on the first available flight.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘things are certainly beginning to move,’ and Carmen said, ‘About time too.’

Tim McLean lived with his parents on a sheep station of twenty-five thousand acres, running some twenty thousand sheep. They were grazed, he wrote to tell Annie, in three mobs on six different blocks for six months at a time. He would explain more when she arrived. The McLean station was most southerly, being in the Southland of South Island, inland from a place called Moeraki, which I was able to look up in the remaindered volumes of Flora & Fauna Around the World. The area, I learnt, was called the Scotland of the South, not just because of the Gaelic place names (Karitane? Tutakahikura? Uhimataitai? Scottish? What were they talking about?) but because of its landscape: ‘rich, evergreen pastures, in spite of the harsh climate which gives such a short grain-growing season’ where the winds blow over a flat, fertile coastal land. I had the feeling Annie was flying to the ends of the earth to a place pretty much like home. Mind you, in East Anglia there were never any moas, those huge flightless birds, now extinct, nor moa hunters, nor the whalers and traders who came, as the skuas come to the terns in the summer, to make the lives of the long-term inhabitants, the Maoris, miserable. The Maoris, who preferred to live in the north by cultivating kumeras or sweet potatoes (Safeway sells them; Alison, when she shopped for me, would always buy them, because once, just once, I said I enjoyed them) down here in Southland, such is the climate, had perforce to become hunters, fishers and gatherers. It is important to remember that in the Southern Hemisphere the further north you go, the warmer it is; the further south, the colder. That their summer is our winter, and our night their day: as if nature were just experimenting, once more, to see what would happen if everything expected was reversed.

Put on your walking boots (serious New Zealand walking boots, well dubbined: no trainers, please) and hike inland, leaving behind the coasts with their abundance of fish, the kanakana, the yellow-eyed flounder, the eel, the koura, the snapper, the dogfish, the mullet, the maitahi (or adult whitebait), the grayling, the upokoroa (though some say all of those have gone now: eaten every one). Pass through the old gold fields, where once grains of actual gold glittered in the black, black sand – for the shores along here are formed from the moraine of the glaciers which once crept down from the Southern Alps to fight and freeze the very sea, but now retreat, retracing their steps, inch by melting inch, season by season, sullenly, leaving a dead, metallic land behind. But further inland a thin fertile soil begins to cover the moraine, and the plains and the foothills are covered by tussock – a short red grass which manages to grow where almost nothing else will. Clamber yet higher, to the steep rocky ridges of Southland, and once again plant life becomes uncommon, though, as they say in the specialist books, full of interest. But what plant was ever not, to those whose preoccupations such things are? Up here, let me tell you, you will come across the tree daisy (Olearia avicennifolia), the toetoe (Cortaderia richardii) and, if you’re lucky, the wine berry (the coprosina), the southern rata (or Metrosideros umbellate) and the ubiquitous kamaki.

Don’t think that down here in Southland you’ll find an easy land for anyone to inhabit; the skeletons left behind by the moa hunters show that the earliest settlers led hard lives, bones and joints eroded by digging and paddling, and few lived to be thirty…

And to this our Annie is going? This wild wasteland where plant and glacier fight it out? Was this the paradise promised to her by Count Capinski, once upon a time?

Yes, certainly there is birdlife here enough to satisfy the keenest ornithologist – the kapake, the kiwi itself, the weka, the pigeons, the parakeets, the tuis, the korimako or bell bird – but whenever did Annie bird-watch? The bush and the rainforest must be noisier here than anywhere else in New Zealand, but that’s not saying much, since the norm is such a profound deep green silence, in which the fall of a leaf can make you jump, and besides Annie is accustomed to the clattering of pans in the Bellamy House kitchen and the whirring of a dozen vacuum cleaners in mid-morning distress, and what noise does a kiwi make anyway? Some even deny that this, the patron bird of New Zealand, the Apteryx mantelli, lives down here at all; but Keri Hulme, the Booker Prize winner, has seen one and that’s all the evidence I need. The young of the koekoe, or long-tailed cuckoo, are called mimi – and their droppings are sweet and edible. Oh wild and wondrous land! But when will I ever put on laced walking boots, to see these things for myself; though I long to be there, who is there to buy me a ticket? Alison, whose mother is a hundred and four, says that when she comes into her fortune she will take me round the world, but I expect Alison’s mother is immortal. And how, in the meantime, will Annie fare? Will she appreciate this wild paradise, by turns deep green, tawny gold and rust red?

I’ll tell you how Annie’s faring. She’s out riding with Tim – not the gentle, formal riding of the few lessons she took with Mr Bliss in anticipation of one day, one day, actually getting to the Land of the Long White Cloud, but the vigorous, impatient riding of those who use horses in the course of their work. Tim is out searching for some twenty missing sheep who may or may not have got into an area known as Saunders Creek, where the terrain is pockmarked by ravines and craters (though you can find the black stilt lurking in the shallow backwaters, so it’s worth a visit) where it is not prudent for the McLean sheep, the McLean livelihood, to wander. They will lose their footing, fall, die. The McLeans will lose profit, though of course Tim will also feel for their sorrows. If sheep fall on their backs, and there is no one to rescue them, they just lie there struggling and pathetic, legs helpless and hopeless, until they die of despair, or of thirst, or of the collapse of their lungs, whichever comes first.

‘Come with me, sweetie,’ Tim said that morning to Annie. She did not mind him calling her sweetie, although it seemed oddly old-fashioned, even condescending; she did not mind anything he did: she did not mind the pain and stiffness consequent upon her getting on a horse. She just went with him. She looked very good in jeans, plaid shirt and her swannie, the universal NZ anorak, a gift from Tim. (‘An engagement gift,’ he said. Was he joking? Did he mean it? If he did, where was her ring?) The outdoors suited Annie more than ever did the indoors, let alone the frilly bib-apron to which Mrs Haverill had of late doomed all the female staff at Bellamy House, with ‘Be Proud of the Spirit of Service’ embroidered in yellow over everyone’s bosom. Annie had not worked her notice out at Bellamy House. ‘Come at once’ said Tim’s letter, so at once she’d gone. Just not turned up at work: left no message; made no apology. Her future called. She’d worried on the flight that so quick a response on her part might be imprudent — wasn’t it better to feign indifference in matters of the heart, rather than admit enthusiasm? – but came to the conclusion that since she wasn’t the sort to play flirtation games, she’d better not start trying now. It would only go wrong.

She had no difficulty recognising Tim at the airport: she had worried in case she’d dreamt about him so often that the original guest at the Bellamy House Hotel would bear no resemblance to the man in her dreams or the writer of such perceptive and affectionate letters, but it was not the case. All she had to do was shut her eyes briefly, envisage the hero in a teenage comic strip, open them, and there he was: taller and squarer than anyone else in sight, reliable yet tender, his eyes bright and caring and, what is more, directed straight at her, the heroine of her own life; he was at home and at ease in this country as he had not been at Bellamy House. Taller, skinnier, more glamorous girls by far travelled with her, came through Arrivals when she did, girls with high heels, bronzed legs, clearly defined bosoms and smooth arms, but he didn’t seem interested in them — what he appreciated, it seemed, was the workaday, the serviceable, the useful. That is to say, Annie wore comfortable clothes – it was only sensible to travel across the world feeling comfortable, not, as Mavis would say, ‘gripped about the waist’. Her hair had fallen out of curl; she had spilt Coke down her blue blouse on the journey and where she had attempted to wash it out the colour had bleached; all these things he ignored: he went straight to the heart of her. It was a rewarding yet disconcerting experience. Why me? Why me? Of all the girls in the world? What did I do to deserve this? Is it enough, after all, to simply be?

‘Oh, Annie,’ he said, heartfelt, and that was just about all, or all that was apparently needed. He was not given to talking about his feelings. Sheep, yes; his native land, yes; both could render him lyrical, but in matters of the heart it was what you did, and how you did it, not what you said, that counted. Annie was relieved. She too was rendered awkward by too much emotion. Anyone could safely bring Carmen a rose between their teeth, quite safely throw Laura a surprise birthday party; but Annie found gestures suspicious. It came, she confided to Tim in a letter, from once, when she was sixteen, being embraced by her mother and finding she was looking into Count Capinski’s eyes. She’d suffered dreadful anxiety once she’d sent the letter, but a reply came quickly and reassuringly. He expected the event had played into a whole set of already existing fears: no one event could form a whole character, could it? She was surprised that he was both so thoughtful and acute, and so uncondemning or rejecting of her mother’s capacity to be two people at once. It was not what you expected from a sheep farmer.

The Glen Trekker Station, which Annie had envisaged as exactly that – some long low clapboarded outback building with a ticket office, long disused – turns out to be a rather grand squat quasi-Georgian mansion, brilliant white against a bright blue sky, standing alone in green lawns behind paling stock fences with pillars and a porch where others had verandahs; it is the only habitation for twenty square miles. There is an elaborate TV aerial on its roof. Annie supposes, rightly, that reception around here will be bad. There are geraniums and nasturtiums in the flowerbeds; green willows droop around a pond. White, blue, green, red: strong colours to an eye accustomed to the misty greys and duns of East Anglia. She feels bolder. Outside the front door stand a Volvo and two Range Rovers. Dogs bark a welcome. Why me, why little me? Without even a fortune to my name? Are you to be Rochester, Tim McLean, to my Jane; am I to control you with the power of my will, my quietness, my virtue? How is it done?

His mother stands at the door, for all the world like an English county lady, of the kind who so intimidate Annie back home: the ones who are so kind and understanding when Annie is on chambermaid duty at Bellamy House but never leave tips. She has neat, brown-to-grey hair, a weatherbeaten face, a lively expression, white and even teeth (they’re obviously false; she likes them like that: uncompromising), big competent hands and feet; she has a sensible and profoundly rational air – Count Capinski would never be allowed inside that head, not for one moment. Mrs McLean is old stock: the McLeans are used to running things round here; for centuries they’ve been telling people what to do. She is the opposite of Mavis, who has somehow to be sneaky to survive.

‘We’ve heard so much about you,’ she says. ‘Welcome!’

Annie is shown the house — the wide hall with its polished board floors and rag rugs, the Victorian umbrella stand without umbrellas, the parlours leading out of the hall – large square rooms where nobody goes, with antique furniture, family heirlooms, and real paintings by European artists on the walls; everything well dusted and lavender-polished. Flies buzz at the windows; voices echo; shoes squeak. It is very quiet. The real life of the house goes on at the back, Mrs McLean assures Annie – in the kitchen. Who has time to sit down anyway? There is always so much to do. Everyone’s hands are always busy. If Mrs McLean has a spare moment she weaves rag rugs. If Mr McLean sits – and he has a bad hip, he sometimes has to – he cleans his guns. As well as keeping the accounts and the stockbooks, buying farm machinery and new animals, supervising the dagging and dipping, the drenching and docking, he trains sheepdogs for shows in his spare time. Marjorie McLean, it becomes apparent, as well as weaving rag rugs, cooks, bakes, sews and bottles fruit with one hand, while publishing the local WI’s newsletter with the other. She can mend a leaking gutter, wire a shearing shed, says her son, milk a cow, deliver a baby and a political address, and dress up to be a Top Table Lady at the local dinner dance, without thinking twice about any of it. She makes Annie feel helpless and hopeless by comparison, though at home Annie always seemed more competent than most. Annie has, Annie notices, been put in a bedroom as far as can be from Tim’s, and there are no carpets on these upstairs corridors either: it is a very echoey house, one way and another, except for the kitchen, which hums and rumbles with very expensive major kitchen equipment as well as minor — ice-cream mixers, milk-shake makers, automatic lamb feeders, sixties classics and the clock, clock, clock of the loom on which the rag rugs are made. The kitchen needs constant servicing, constant cleaning. It is an enormous room, with many subsidiary rooms off it, in which dogs are groomed, chickens hatched, dough put to rise. Bellamy House was nothing to it. Annie and Tim have not yet slept together, and though he kisses and cuddles her even now, when they are alone, he puts her from him should their embraces become too intense. He has changed. Now it’s she who wants to and he seems not to. Why does he delay? Is there something wrong with this paragon or is he just thoroughly nice and good, and feels he needs to know her properly first now matters have become serious? And how many years will this take? He is, she notices, reading a book called The Return of Victorian Courtship: How to Love One Person For Ever. Is this what it’s about? Annie finds that here at the other end of the world there is no one to talk to about these things. She longs for Carmen and Laura, her friends. They’d put everything in some kind of context; explain to her why it’s so impossible to get out of Tim a clear answer to a simple question, if only she could formulate the question. Is there some culture block going on here, some traditional New Zealand custom, or is it, as usual, her? Annie sits eating whitebait, whole tiny little pink-white fish, fried in batter, with black pinhead eyes still showing through the coating, wishing she didn’t have to, and wondering whether she’s meant to be marrying him or whether she’s just a friend, no more than that.

Or, as now, she sits on a tussocky hilltop on a horse next to Tim and he calls her sweetie, and she is even suddenly afraid. So far from anyone, in this strange if beautiful land at the far ends of the earth.

‘You’re brooding, Annie,’ said Tim. ‘I don’t like to see that. No use blaming your mum and dad for what you are.’

Is he using her confidence in the letter against her? Surely not.

‘It’s a hard life, Annie,’ he said, ‘here or anywhere. But we don’t want anyone saying you’re a whingeing pom.’

‘What’s a pom?’

‘You are. Mind you, the kids will be kiwis.’

‘So we’re having kids.’

‘My word yes,’ he said. ‘Any objection?’

‘We’d have to get married first,’ said Annie boldly. His horse fidgeted. No one on horseback is ever completely still. He stared into the wind: so frequently having to do it that it seemed to have carved the planes of his face. He was wonderfully handsome.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you and me know each other by now, and you get on all right with my mum. So I reckon we could take the plunge.’

No one can take this away from me, thought Annie, whatever happens next. Tim McLean’s proposed to me. We were on horseback together on a hill somewhere in the world, and this handsome man proposed to me. Do you hear, Carmen, Laura? In the end I was the one to get out of there, the one least likely to succeed; if you could only see me now!

‘I reckon we could,’ said Annie nonchalantly: her toes curled in her dubbined boots. ‘But I think you’d have to ask me properly. You’ll have to get off your horse, for one thing.’

He did, which enabled her to get off hers, and ease her aching buttocks.

‘You do like sheep?’ he asked her. ‘You weren’t just saying it? Being a station wife is a full-time job. You have to like sheep, and horses.’

She couldn’t remember having said she liked sheep. It was not like her to tell so downright a lie: wouldn’t she have been more evasive?

‘Of course I love sheep,’ she said.

‘Okay, Annie,’ said Tim, ‘please will you marry me?’

‘Shouldn’t we sleep together first?’ asked Annie, but he seemed disconcerted, even embarrassed by that, so she added, ‘though I can see we could be old-fashioned about this, if we decided.’ She didn’t want to put him off.

White dots moving on the plain below attracted his attention. ‘We’ll talk about it all later,’ he said. ‘Those sheep will be in Saunders Creek if we’re not careful,’ and he hopped back on his horse, just as two vigorous, handsome, wide-jawed, curly-haired men, Maoris, galloped up and over the ridge on violent, stocky little horses. Tim, by sudden contrast with the other two, seemed almost washed out, too pale, too finely drawn of countenance to be altogether convincing as a leader of men, too indecisive, though still, by virtue of some secret power (perhaps just money in the bank), he was conceded by all to be in charge: he the master, they the station hands.

‘Bloody hell, Tim,’ called one of them as they thundered past, ‘they’re heading up Saunders Creek.’ Without a further look at Annie, the love of her life set off behind them. The three men hollered and shouted sheep-language – to which the sheep seemed deaf − as the horses, which seemed more hot-headed still than their masters, descended the hill slopes towards the plain. They were having a wonderful time. It will always be like this, thought Annie: a woman in this land, indeed in any land, will be the spare-time pursuit: some necessity will always arise to which she will take second place. Do I care? No. I want him. I’ll change him. Just because he was born to sheep, doesn’t mean he has to stay with sheep.

At least I assumed that’s what Annie thought that day, on horseback on a hilltop, because that’s what women so often think, presented with a man whose perfection is marred by a single fault. For example, he drinks. Or he’s a philanderer. Or he gambles. Or he’s unemployable. Or he doesn’t want children. Or he’d rather look after his sheep than them. I’ll change him, whispers the little gnome of wishful thinking who lodges in Everywoman’s brain, feeding off True Romance until he grows so fat he pops right out of her head, leaving her sane again; I’ll change him. And sometimes she succeeds, though mostly she doesn’t.

And meanwhile, back home, Audrey lay in a hospital bed, which was nothing unusual, but this time the sister said she might not be going home again, and Laura and Woodie, checking out her chart when Sister was out of the room, perceived that Audrey was on heavy doses of morphine, which meant that her addiction or otherwise to the drug was irrelevant. It is from such clues that relatives of the very ill come to understand that death is imminent: the word is seldom mentioned, as if the uttering of it brought it nearer, and the whole point of the institution, after all, is the struggle against it, to which all are sacrificed.

‘I want to see Kim before I go,’ said Audrey.

‘No one knows where he is,’ said Laura. ‘If he knew you were ill I’m sure he’d come.’ Though they all knew by then that he wouldn’t.

‘Tell you what,’ said Audrey, ‘take a small ad in the newspapers. Say that Kubrick’s dangerously ill; that’ll flush him out,’ and she actually laughed, which was enough to make her catch her breath and, in the catching of it, die. It is something to die laughing, especially if you’re Audrey.

Laura and Woodie sat by her bed for some five minutes before they called a nurse. They didn’t want anyone to attempt her resuscitation and, to everyone’s credit, nobody did. They went together to collect the children from the neighbour who’d offered to look after them. Her name was Angela. She was a single mother, and she lived across the way from Laura, next door to Mavis and Alan, in Landsfield Crescent, in the house which had once been Carmen’s. Angela was blonde, buxom and had an easy, amiable nature. More men, in Mavis’s phrase, went in her front door than ever came out of it, but her little daughter Effie played and sang up and down the Crescent, and was a good friend of Rachel’s; and Angela was a good neighbour, prepared to feed cats and look after children in an emergency. In fact she’d do anything for anyone – ‘especially’ (Mavis again) ‘someone else’s husband’.

Woodie went off to the undertaker to arrange the funeral and Laura went through her mother’s drawers and cupboards, sorting out the best for Oxfam, the worst for the black rubbish bags. There is something extraordinarily miserable about the intimate possessions of the newly dead: they are denatured, wretched, the energy of their existence suddenly stolen from them; they hang listlessly from hangers, cluster greyly in drawers, overwashed. Laura looked out of the window and saw that the black BMW was parked outside the door, or she thought it was. Or perhaps it was a hearse? She went downstairs and opened the front door, but there was nothing there. It had been a vision, an apparition, a hallucination. It hardly mattered which since it was all in her mind, not in the real world. At least, since Audrey was already dead, a ghostly hearse could not be prophesying her mother’s death.

Laura came over to me and wept on my knee for a time and then perked up and said, ‘Well, at least Woodie won’t have to live with his mother-in-law any more. We’ll have the house to ourselves; all ours!’ And she snivelled and cheered up a little. ‘Only somehow,’ she said, ‘I only have Woodie and the kids because of Audrey, and now that Audrey isn’t there, I feel peculiar about them, as if we’re all in the wrong place at the wrong time. What have Woodie and the kids got to do with me, really? How did they come about?’

My toes were tingling; my skirt was damp with her tears. I had not set out in life to become any kind of counsellor, but that is how women trapped in wheelchairs often end up. They can’t get away. And the black BMW really was parked outside Laura’s door; I could see it, and Angela was leading the four little girls up the street towards it, each one with a nose white and frothy from a Mr Whippy soft ice cream.

‘I do wish she wouldn’t,’ said Laura. ‘I try to bring them up sugar-free.’

Driver leant out of his window and said to Angela, ‘My, what a lot of little girls! Makes you wonder where all the men are!’ and Angela, whose Effie was the result of a long affair with a married man, everyone knew, said, ‘They’re all married to someone else,’ to which Driver replied, ‘Well, what the mind doesn’t know the heart can’t grieve over.’

‘What do you want?’ said Laura to Driver sharply. She was quite dangerous. The recently bereaved often are: they’ll stand no nonsense. The perceived margins between life and death widen: it’s important to stand well back, take no risks. Driver seemed quite disconcerted by her sharpness.

‘Just to say hello to everyone,’ he said. ‘And to little Rachel, Caroline and Baby Sara. And of course Effie. I know little Effie well.’

Little Effie had wide blue eyes and a slender body and she put her finger in her mouth and smiled at Driver and danced her little bottom this way and that. She was only five. Too many uncles, Laura concluded, but at the same time a helpful neighbour was a helpful neighbour and now Audrey was gone she couldn’t afford to criticise Angela.

‘I’m not in the mood for socialising,’ she said to Driver, but didn’t wish to give him the satisfaction of knowing why.

‘I was really sorry to hear about your mother,’ he said, nevertheless.

‘How do you know about my mother?’ asked Laura. He had been visiting Mavis, he said, to have a wart on the sole of his foot treated, and Mavis had just heard from Alan, who was now working at the morgue, collecting bodies from hospitals all over the county, that Audrey’s corpse was amongst those collected. Morgue provision had recently been rationalised and centralised: a whole county can collect a lot of corpses in a single day, but friends and neighbours still get noticed.

‘I wonder if you’ve any news of Carmen?’ asked Driver. ‘I can’t find her address. I can’t somehow sniff it out. I have something to tell her to her advantage,’ but Laura just snapped, ‘You needn’t think I’m going to tell you a thing,’ and snatched her children from Angela, and shovelled them inside the front door and then left them to their own devices and shut herself in her bedroom and wept. She had to call Angela later and apologise.

‘Poor thing,’ said Driver kindly to Angela, ‘I expect she’s upset,’ and Angela said, ‘Well, Audrey’s well out of it. What had she to look forward to? Nothing but pain and disappointment.’

‘Quite so,’ said Driver.

A couple of days later, as I sat consulting my books on the lifestyle of New Zealand sheep, I watched Laura knock on the door of what was still known in Fenedge as ‘the old greengrocer’s’. She knocked gently, though bravely, since the windows were scrawled with words such as ‘Hate’, ‘Destroy’, ‘Destruct’, and ‘Fuck the Pigs’, and someone had splintered the door by kicking it with a boot with reinforced metal toes. I had watched him do it. One of the resident lads had taken in a white-skinned female waif who apparently did not belong to him, and someone else, a youth from out of town, was after the pair of them. They’d escaped out of the back window and come over the roofs to half jump, half fall to the ground right in front of my window; then they loped off. Without a doubt, Driver was back in town and we were all feeling it. And if Driver was back, would Sir Bernard be far behind?

The door was flung open by a boy with a white face and orange hair who was hung with chains. There were rings in his nose and his ears. Laura looked through to a sodden mess of old blankets, clothes, electrical equipment, squashed cans of lager and graffitied walls. A thin dog came out to sniff up Laura’s skirt. She had noticed that since she had children dogs seemed to do this all the time. Or perhaps it was only that now she came in contact with dogs more often than she had in her pre-domestic phase. Who’s to say?

The boy first denied that Carmen lived there, then admitted it, or at any rate if she didn’t exactly live there, at least that she squatted there, and said she was working nights, she wasn’t in. ‘Working nights?’ asked Laura in alarm, but the lad, who called his dog off and even offered her a cup of tea, explained that she was a wage slave up at Peckhams, and on night work, and it was to Peckhams that Laura proceeded, declining the tea.

These days they take school parties around Peckhams. The chicken works have been in the forefront of the lateral diversification movement in light industry: nowadays one division breeds chickens, lovely little fluffy things: another produces free-range eggs (more or less), smooth, brown and perfect, from these chicks, once grown. The food product facility processes the eggs into ‘extruded egg’ – yard upon yard of cooked and reconstructed yolk encircled by cooked and reconstructed white, so that when your ham and egg pie is sliced everyone gets a perfect, even, properly presented section of egg in the middle of that slice, never the little unfair end section of white with no yolk you might very well get if you trusted to nature and chance. School children love to see ‘long egg’ being made, oozing out of the extruding pipes. The great steel drums in the Overall Product Faculty (sic) that churn night and day to meld chicken and herbs and flour properly to make the famous Peckhams Patties are another great favourite: the plop, plop, plop as patty after automated patty falls into its neat little polythene home, ready for freezing, seems to hypnotise. PR, I hear, is thinking of changing the name from Peckhams Poultry to something that smacks rather less of feather and the farmyard, to, perhaps, simply Peckhams Products. Sir Bernard, having diversified into food products, is now a major shareholder of Peckhams Poultry: integral cog in the machine that’s the Bellamy Empire. The road beneath your feet, the patty on your plate, the pillow on which you rest your head – Bellamy’s, all Bellamy’s.

The only part of the process which is off limits to the school children, and not shown in detail in the Info Pack which so helps them in their essays on the food industry, is the slaughtering sheds, where the birds move gracefully from a state of life to a state of food. With the best will in the world, blood, feathers and entrails get everywhere. The creatures will struggle; it is impossible to have them adequately tranquillised and still keep the food chain free of unwelcome drugs. Whatever’s in the hen ends up in the human. There is a big enough problem with oestrogen and the other hormones which, when used in tandem with bright lighting and careful breeding, encourage the eating birds to grow plump and soft, and the laying birds to produce five or even six eggs a day, but can interfere with the fertility of humans.

‘Only a happy bird lays eggs,’ says Peckhams’ PR, but I’m not so sure. My Enquire Within on Everything (1789) suggests otherwise: ‘If you want to keep a hen laying all winter,’ says the author, ‘don’t let it run with the cock.’ But we have other things to worry about beyond the happiness of hens.

At the time we talk about, Peckhams had only just begun its progress into lateral diversification. Shanty Cotton, with his views on worker participation and profit sharing, had only recently taken over as Managing Director. He was not of the new lean managerial classes, not at all. He was a vigorous, portly, handsome, red-faced, cigar-smoking, dandruffy businessman of the old school, though he’d recently learnt a new trick or two, which the Peckhams Board of Directors thought might come in handy. The firm, though already a major employer in Fenedge, at the time I speak of occupied a two-acre site only. Later a couple of acres of old wood were razed to build the Patty Plant. But what’s a couple of acres when you consider the plight of the rainforest?

(We’ve had a further batch of reference books turn up at the Handicapped Centre: these ones are all stamped ‘Conservation Library’. One day I will discover who our benefactor is.)

Nevertheless, the Peckhams factory at the time had enough to occupy it to remain active night and day: the appetite for frozen chicken in the nation was keen and getting keener as who but Peckhams under Shanty Cotton led the way in competitive pricing. If you make employees work harder and longer for smaller wages in a time of high unemployment it is not difficult thus to lead the way: you just have to be more ruthless in these matters than the factory next door. The fish finger as the favourite convenience food for children was giving way — as the seas became depleted, and fish scarcer and more expensive – to the crumbed chicken leg. At one end of the plant at the time Laura visited Carmen and set the next set of events rolling, living chickens were delivered, crated up by breeders all over the land to be transported thither by road; at the other, via the slaughtering sheds, frozen chickens, either whole or sectioned, with or without giblets, emerged in packs ready for the refrigerated vans which would distribute the white fibrous flesh throughout the country. Laura found Carmen in a loading bay, at the cold dead birds end rather than the living squawking one, and was grateful for that at least. It is hard to feel sorry for dead fowl – all too easy for one about to die. Carmen was working in a supervisory capacity. You could tell: she had a clipboard and looked pained. Her hair was tied up in a white Peckhams turban. She looked up when Laura approached, and was startled.

‘My God,’ said Carmen. ‘This is no place for a sensitive soul like you. Where are all the kids? You seem kind of half finished without them.’

‘They’re at home,’ said Laura. ‘I’ve got a baby-sitter in.’

‘I’m really sorry about your mother,’ said Carmen. ‘I’m trying to get time off for the funeral, but they’re being very sticky. There’s a new management. You have to get a chit from the officiating priest to say you’re entitled to go. I may just have to be ill and forge a sick note. There’s a doctor working here who signs them for twenty-five pence a time. He was struck off years back, but his signature still has that certain something.’

She wasn’t quite looking at Laura. She seemed tired and flattened. She ticked off boxes as the forklift trucks moved them from one place to another. She wore gloves and a scarf but still seemed cold.

‘So why have you come?’ she asked. ‘To gloat?’

‘Of course I haven’t,’ said Laura. ‘I just thought I’d warn you. Sir Bernard’s chauffeur is back in town and looking for you.’

‘Is he indeed!’ said Carmen, and put down her clipboard and to Laura’s dismay sat down on a crate and looked as if she were about to cry.

‘Hey, Miss!’ shouted a forklift operator, ‘you’re holding us up.’

The reproach revived her. ‘Hygiene problem,’ shouted Carmen, on her feet again. Her voice was surprisingly loud. The moon seemed to shake in the sky. She blew a whistle. She clapped her hands. ‘Stop the line,’ she cried. The moving bands slowed and stopped. Laura thought it was wonderful to have so much power. Motors were switched off; hands went into pockets. Men went for coffee; others stood and chatted. So much for Shanty Cotton. ‘Why hygiene problem?’ asked Laura.

‘Temperature rise is best,’ said Carmen. ‘No obvious source. Needs a technician. They can’t afford the risk of food poisoning. It’ll be at least six hours before the lines can get going again. That’s six hours more life for a few thousand chickens, and thirty-three men back home to their beds, unexpectedly. There’ll be a baby boom nine months from today. Well done, Laura, trust you!’

‘But what is it to do with me?’

‘I can’t talk and work,’ said Carmen. ‘I’d rather talk.’

‘Won’t they fire you?’ asked Laura.

‘They never put two and two together,’ said Carmen. ‘And if they do I’ll just say it’s because I’m on my toes and vigilant. Health and Safety’s the last scam in the world. Shanty Cotton is a pushover.’

She went away to write a report on a detected brink-of-thaw in one of the bird-plus-giblets crates. These birds, she told Laura, stuffed as they are with a plastic twist containing the giblets of total strangers, are the most prone to inadvertent warming on their journey from point of death to point of sale.

‘It all sounds fascinating,’ said Laura politely. She was rather shocked.

‘I nearly lost a finger through frostbite the other day,’ said Carmen. ‘See this as natural justice. I am righting wrongs in the only way I know.’

‘So what do I say to Driver if he turns up again?’ asked Laura. The night shift had closed down: the workers gone home: management had been informed, the technicians roused from their slumber to detect the source of yet further trouble, which Laura knew could only be the result of the way Carmen had just had an assembly line rinsed down with boiling water from the sterilising plant, instead of using cold. Laura drove Carmen back home through the moonlit evening. Angela was baby-sitting. Woodie was at night class, studying Small Business Method and Aims. The moon was yellow and round; the beet fields made flat patterns of silver and black to either side: a chess-board pattern, said Laura. Carmen said it looked like draughts to her; nothing as complicated as chess.

‘Tell Driver I give in,’ said Carmen. ‘Tell him in the end what a girl succumbs to is boredom.’ The skin over her finger was peeling where the frost had damaged it. She tore at a shred with her teeth and cried out in pain as it took away flesh as well.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Laura in alarm. Carmen, whimpering, showed Laura her finger.

‘I can’t see anything the matter with it,’ said Laura, and indeed it seemed perfectly whole and perfect, a flawless finger on a prettily shaped and delicate hand. Carmen stared at the finger too, as if it belonged to a stranger. Laura forgot to steer and drove the car into a ditch at the side of the road, which was at least better than going into one of the poplars which lined it everywhere but exactly here. The ditch had been artificially extended into a pond; it was a habitat of the natterjack toad. A notice, glimmering in the moonlight, indicated the creatures were a protected species. Their mating cries rose to a crescendo as the car splashed nose-down into the ditch; then there was an abrupt silence.

‘I am sorry,’ said Laura, and got out of the car, knee-deep in muddy water, her long skirt wet and trailing. Carmen was able to get out on to dry land. They left the ditch, and the car and the toads, and began to walk. Carmen’s face, profiled, seemed to Laura to change shape even as they walked: the nose became narrower and longer, the hairline more decisive, the run of chin to ear smoother and cleaner. She said as much to Carmen.

‘Just a trick of moonlight,’ said her friend, and who should come along behind but Driver in his BMW?

‘Had a little accident, I see,’ Driver said. ‘You go back and stay with the car, Laura. I’ll drive Carmen into Fenedge and fetch help.’

And Carmen got into the BMW just like that, and they drove off.

And Laura went back and stayed with the car hour after hour, worrying about the children and hoping Carmen would have the sense to ring home and let them know she was delayed, until she gave up and walked on to Mr Bliss’s stables, where she had to rouse him in order to use the phone. A terrible night! She was angry with Carmen; who wouldn’t be? She didn’t get home until three, and no one had waited up for her. Even Mr Bliss hadn’t been particularly friendly. The horses had been restless all night and he’d only just got to sleep.

As for Driver, he said to Carmen in the car, ‘Now you know what it’s like to be everyone else, no one special. That’s what happens if you stand between Driver and his plans for you. Driver has all the time in the world, and you haven’t.’

‘I liked working there,’ said Carmen.

‘No, you didn’t,’ he said. ‘A lesson to keep you in order the rest of your life. How to go to work like everyone else, yawn, yawn, short of money like everyone else, no one to talk to, ditto; every path out of here blocked by your circumstances or your own nature. Your own nature being the biggest obstacle of all. Just as well you’ve accepted my offer.’

‘What offer?’ asked Carmen but, even more than Tim ever had on the hilltop, Driver seemed to become vague; so much so, it was as if no one were driving the car; just a vague shape, an outline as of a head, only the view out of the car window could be seen right through it, and what a blotchy, patchy version of the moonlit view – as if the moon itself, the source of all light, were covered with mould, splitting its skin as if attacked by the athlete’s foot fungi (tinea pedis) and its glow accordingly ruptured and disturbed. Poor Carmen!

‘Accept the offer,’ said Driver, ‘and it won’t only be you who will prosper. Your friends can have a share of the good times too. Always wise, that. Placate the friends, avert the envy. If you get promotion, find a boyfriend, come into money, always throw a party!’ His face was back again: teeth white, gleaming and solid as he smiled; cherubic lips, crimson, dark and full.

‘I’ll do for them,’ said Carmen, ‘what I won’t do for myself.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ said Driver, ‘but it’s nonsense. You do it for yourself.’

This, at any rate, is what Laura told me Carmen told her of what went on between Carmen and Driver the night Carmen failed to send a garage out to retrieve Laura’s car from the ditch.

‘If you believe that,’ said Laura, ‘you’ll believe anything. I prefer to believe he’s her ghostly lover: they had it off under an ash tree in the moonlight.’ She was still cross. ‘What is more,’ she went on, and told me how the very next day, what was more, Carmen and Driver were seen together in a boutique in Kings Lynn, the most expensive shop in town – the kind which, when it first opens, makes people hoot with derision at the prices asked, but which seems to flourish nevertheless. Customers are seen going in who have never been seen before, and probably never will be again. County ladies with spaniels at their heels, and women who look as if they might be the mayor, and girls with long legs – and who should be there that day but Carmen, standing shameless in the middle of the shop, stepping out of dingy clothes – the kind favoured by Peckhams staff, wash-and-wearable and never shrinking out of shape because they have no shape to begin with – for all the world as if she hadn’t been home all night and needed to get out of them fast. There she stood in bra and pants for all the world to see – but since her figure was so perfect, Witness announced, it was hardly sexy at all, and the whole exercise perfectly decent, for all Driver stood in his navy uniform, braid and navy leather boots, leaning against the counter watching, hand on hip, like a brothel master. Who but Carmen!

Carmen apologised to the assistant, a lanky girl with a superior stoop, short dark hair and no bosom at all, for the state of the clothes she took off, thus without ceremony.

‘Junk them,’ she said. ‘They don’t fit anyway.’

Witness described Carmen as long-legged and ravishing: very much a bimbo type. She asked for a size twelve plain black skirt and a plain white blouse, ditto, which surprised Witness, who would have said a ten any day. Carmen said to Driver, ‘I’m only here because I don’t like upsetting anyone’s aesthetic sensibility, even yours.’

Mrs Baker would have been proud of her. Four years in a chicken factory and ‘aesthetic sensibility’ still came tripping off the tongue. ‘I can pay,’ said Carmen. ‘I have money set aside. If you choose to pay, that’s your funeral.’

‘Ah, funerals,’ said Driver wistfully. ‘Few and far between!’

‘No one wants to live for ever,’ said Carmen, taking the skirt and blouse, the most sensible garments in the shop, into the cubicle and shutting the curtain.

‘They might,’ murmured Driver. ‘The time could come when they just might,’ and he sat down on the little plump sofa provided for the purpose, and gazed at the curtain with the foolish, rather endearing expression men have at such times, a mixture of anticipation, anxiety and self-consciousness.

Carmen stepped out of the cubicle. The skirt was too loose at the waist and the blouse far too tight. Fabric stretched between the buttons. Witness reported she went in like a clothes prop and came out like an hourglass.

‘God,’ said Carmen to Driver, ‘you are so old-fashioned!’ as the assistant went off to find a size eight skirt and a size fourteen blouse. When she came back she had a red satin dress over her arm as well.

‘I just thought –’ she said. ‘So few girls it would suit –’

The skirt and blouse fitted Carmen just fine if she belted both in, but the red dress fitted really perfectly, if, as Witness remarked, you cared for that kind of thing. It plunged to the waist at the back, curved out at the hip, in at the knee with a kind of red bobbled bounce, and covered the bosom, just, while emphasising a cleavage. It had thin shoulder straps, one of which was ready-made for slipping.

‘It’s made for you,’ said Driver. ‘Or shall we say you’re made for it? Look at yourself in the mirror.’

Carmen did. She was gratified.

‘This is what my dad wanted for me,’ she said. ‘If my friends could see me now!’

‘You only have to say the word,’ said Driver, ‘and they will.’

‘I’ll pay for it myself,’ said Carmen. ‘Though it’s madness. Wherever will I wear something like this to?’

‘Ah,’ said Driver. ‘That’s always the problem. Not the dress, the occasion. But I’m the King of Occasion. Just watch how I step out!’

Carmen paid for the dress herself with her credit card. The assistant had made a mistake. It wasn’t in the sale after all. It must have set Carmen back, said Witness, four weeks’ wages.

There wasn’t a breath of air that night, I remember. The moon had lost its perfect roundness. It was waning. The high tides of yesterday had been very high, but somehow languid. A smooth silky sea had lapped over groins and breakwaters, slipped quietly over the coast road so that the flood signs went up, but no one seemed unduly agitated. The terns bobbed about in the water, unconcerned, looking down at grass instead of sand; and the tide went out as gently as it had come up, leaving a thin coating of silt behind it. Just on occasion the tides of the East Anglian coast behave like this, taking advantage but without rancour, affectionately, as a husband might roll over on to a sleeping wife; the land is possessed by a boredom so profound it can infect even the elements. I couldn’t sleep. I sat at my window. Angela had in another uncle for Effie; I could see his shape and hers embracing the other side of the blind. But even that seemed slow and stately, not passionate. I think he was the greengrocer, whom high rents had driven out of Fenedge, but could not be sure. Perhaps I just imagined it.

Then the sky was lit up by more than the moon. Blasts of coloured light crisscrossed the sky: lasers, I presumed − the same, I daresay, as the kind directed into the neural fibres of my backbone, only these weren’t a neutral, hygienic, glimmering white, but purples, reds, yellows, mauve – and out of control they raced a whole series of crisscrosses from horizon to horizon. White balloons began to drift overhead; a wind came out of nowhere to flurry them along – I recognised the Bellamy logo – one bobbed down almost to my window. And a burst of music far away, the bass notes throbbing, the higher ones hardly heard, echoed over the fields to Landsfield Crescent. Sir Bernard Bellamy was back in residence at Bellamy House. Party time!

And the very next evening, it was said, Carmen and Driver were seen at Bellamy House, dining together. I could envisage the scene. Carmen, in the red satin dress, still believing she can somehow cheat the Devil, that no transaction is valid that depends entirely on bribes and threats. She has, as we know, a sense of natural justice.

Now the red dress, naturally, attracted many stares. The Bellamy House restaurant (four-star) had seen many a stare-worthy dress − the clientele included Australian ice-hockey stars and the wives of Texan ranchers, as well as those espoused to the more boring and conventionally wealthy, whose husbands liked them to display a diamond or two, or a tiara, not to mention their secretaries, or their Other Women, whom they liked to dress down so as not to attract too much attention − but this particular dress, Carmen feared, took the biscuit. She could see it in the face of Mrs Haverill, who flitted in and out of the restaurant, maîtresse d’hôtel, a point of bleak and disapproving reference. And every second she sat there it seemed to get tighter.

No one, mind you, dined more often than they could help in this particular room, no matter how good the chef, or how smooth the service, or how the central chandelier (a million pounds’ worth) revolved and played a sparkly tune on the hour every hour, so there was something for everyone to talk about. Those who dined herein felt scratchy and difficult through their meal, and often had indigestion afterwards. The point being that it was in this room that the First Sealord had held his disagreeable orgies, or so Mavis, who had once been here to visit Annie’s workplace, claimed. Mavis had shivered and shaken when she’d entered the room, and said a child had died here long ago and was still around, a particularly powerful and angry personality.

‘Don’t talk such rot, Mum!’ said Annie. She’d been on her hands and knees, scouring the floor. There’d been an outbreak of food poisoning, and official fingers had at first pointed to the Bellamy House hollandaise; and though the fingers had very quickly pointed elsewhere, away from the heart of the Bellamy Empire and not into it, Mrs Haverill was taking no chances. The special operations squad was sent into action to scrub.

‘There’s more tummy trouble comes from haunting,’ said Mavis, ‘than ever did from botulism,’ and Annie, though scoffing, had scrubbed her way out of the gloomy room as fast as possible. The turning mechanism of the chandelier was switched off out of peak periods: there was not even its wistful tinkling to look forward to.

Tonight the restaurant was three-quarters full, and from Mrs Haverill’s looks there would be two diners less if she had her way.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ asked Carmen.

‘She’s jealous,’ said Driver, ‘silly old bitch,’ but of whom and what she was jealous he did not say.

‘Can’t you make this dress less tight?’ asked Carmen. ‘I can hardly breathe.’

‘Looks okay to me,’ said Driver, ‘and since I’m the one paying that’s all that matters.’

‘You are not so paying,’ said Carmen. ‘I’m only here because I’m hungry, and I’ve eaten nothing but fish and chips for years, and I’ll pay for myself. I have a credit card. I’m not going to be obligated to you, Mr Driver; don’t think I am.’

‘Of course you shall pay for yourself,’ said Driver soothingly. ‘I have nothing up my sleeve.’

He lifted one arm at a time and showed her his sleeves, and she thought for a moment he was right, there was indeed nothing in them. Just black space. But how could that be?

‘You’ve got to learn to trust,’ said Driver next. ‘There is such a thing as a free lunch, just you wait and see.’

‘Yes, but this is dinner,’ said Carmen cunningly, though her eyes were so large and bright it was hard to detect cunning in them, or indeed anything but romantic compliance. It is difficult, as she complained to Laura later, to maintain your disagreeable feelings when your facial expressions seem to respond only to cerebral commands of a specifically agreeable nature. ‘You’re sure Sir Bernard isn’t here?’

‘Of course he’s not,’ said Driver, and his eyes were so crinkly and friendly you could hardly tell that he was lying. ‘He’s abroad. I should know. I’m his driver, his factotum, his éminence grise, the whisperer in his ear, his astrologer, his batman, his exercise coach, his nutritionist, his financial advisor, his personal manager. In fact, I am all things a perfect chauffeur is meant to be.’

‘His pimp as well,’ said Carmen, but she said it so charmingly – she couldn’t help it – he didn’t take offence. Besides, it was true.

The waiter, Henry, brought a large silver dish of oysters, as ordered by Driver. Carmen made do with melon and Parma ham. The Parma ham was hard and stringy, as it must be meant to be or it wouldn’t be served in this state in so many good restaurants. There was a time when I dined in them.

‘Do have an oyster,’ said Driver to Carmen.

‘I’d rather not,’ said Carmen, suspecting a trick. If you share an oyster with the Devil, all hell breaks loose.

‘I don’t know why you’re so stroppy with me,’ he complained. ‘I did so much for you and still you’re ungrateful. Didn’t I send your parents on an interminable world cruise? Didn’t I make your brother a genius? Didn’t I try and provide you with a rich and famous husband? What can you possibly hold against me?’

‘Three years in a chicken factory,’ said Carmen.

‘But you told me you liked it,’ he replied. Carmen thought perhaps this was what it was like to be married: wouldn’t there be perpetual conversations similar to this one, as each tried to persuade the other that they were right and the other was unreasonable? It must be dreadful. Driver quickly ate seven of his ten oysters, tipping the shell between his lips, sucking, swallowing, smacking. She really wanted to try one. She’d never eaten an oyster. If he went on eating at this rate it looked as if she never would. She took one from his plate and squeezed a little lemon on it. It looked disgusting, both flabby and chewy, and amazingly raw, but others seemed to admire them.

‘That’s the way!’ he said. ‘Now dislodge its little towbar, and one, two, three, swallow!’

‘That felt good,’ said Carmen, surprised. ‘Even the sea water with it.’

‘Nearest thing to sex that isn’t,’ said Driver, and Carmen was not in a position to argue. What did she know? The oldest virgin in all East Anglia, so far as she could see (which wasn’t far: quite a number of us in the Handicapped Centre are without sexual experience, as it happens), but who would think it, in the light of the red dress? She was guilty of the sin of hypocrisy; she could be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act. She was aware of male eyes upon her from all quarters of the room, and not only male, female too.

‘More wine?’ asked Driver, and poured it without waiting for a reply. She did not drink it. Instead she pushed away the glass, and asked the waiter for the bill. She had to leave in a hurry, she said; yes, they would pay separately. She handed him her credit card. Mrs Haverill came over to ask, quite unpleasantly, if everything was all right, and to observe that Bellamy House did not accept credit cards.

‘I’m paying for us both,’ said Driver kindly. ‘When I’ve finished my meal. One melon and Parma ham, three glasses of Chablis and one oyster, Mrs Haverill. Not much, but enough! Such a pity she has to go, but she’ll keep.’

And off into the night went Carmen, without paying, for she had no cash and Driver would not lend her any, and the waiter Henry offered to, but was sent scurrying back to the kitchens by Mrs Haverill.

These days the grounds of Bellamy House were formal and restrained, their flowers and shrubs flown in from London and arranged in neat rows, lit by orange globes on concrete posts. She was frightened by a voice which seemed to come from all around, not any one point in particular; it was Driver’s voice saying something like ‘Gotcha!’ and laughing, but perhaps it was some night bird she’d never heard about that had taken refuge in these parts – because of the changes in the world temperature all kinds of unheard-of birds now turned up in East Anglia. She could feel the gravel path crunching and tearing at her slim high heels; they’d cost seventy-two pounds – madness in the first place. She thought it was worse than being Snow White in the Night Forest, who had gnarled trees leaning in to leer and tear at her: the trees here in Bellamy Park had been so efficiently lopped and truncated that a far nastier energy was now free to sweep through unhindered. The lights of a car came towards her. She stepped into shadow. It was an old Mercedes 450SL, and at the wheel, driving, was Sir Bernard Bellamy. He was looking good: slimmer, younger, happier, bolder. He was in a hurry. He passed without seeing her.

‘Missed me!’ said Carmen aloud, in answer to Driver’s Gotcha, but no trick of the universe took it up and magnified the sound: it fell helplessly into silence.

In the morning she woke up as usual in the pile of bedding which did for her repose, but when she looked at herself in the greasy mirror propped up on the kitchen table she found her face had remained in its excellent night-out-on-the-town mode, and stretching a leg to observe it, turning her ankle this way and that, she saw that the leg was still long and slim. Her bosom, thank heaven, had shrunk a couple of cup sizes.

A friend of Paul’s slept in a drug-induced stupor under the table. She kicked him awake. The new slim feet were tough and serviceable. He shambled out into the morning. She called Peckhams’ Personnel and said she was ill and wouldn’t be in that day. Personnel said she didn’t sound ill to them. Carmen said ‘Too bad,’ and put the phone down. She went into the room where Paul slept. It was a really smelly room. She threw the windows open so savagely the sash cord broke. She had more strength than she knew. He stirred.

‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘You are,’ she said, and started throwing his belongings out of the window – pipe of peace, rusty tins of dope and allied substances, little grinning images and skulls, old greasy jeans, cheap silver earrings, incense, ragged embroidered jackets, condoms, comics…

Alison, driving me into the Centre, her licence restored, seeing this scattering of objects out of the greengrocer’s window, braked so savagely I hit my head on the windscreen, but never mind that. (The disabled are excused the wearing of seat belts if it’s difficult. It’s not as it happens in the least difficult for me, but Alison gets offended if I put mine on. She complains I don’t trust her.)

Paul stood up. He wore torn jeans and a T-shirt: he seldom took off his day clothes to go to bed, merely his shoes.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, hurt and bewildered.

‘And you can go too,’ said Carmen. ‘This is my house.’

‘It’s our squat,’ he protested, ‘and I was here first.’

‘I’m stronger than you,’ she said, and it seemed to be true, for she propelled him easily down the hall, out of the door and into the street, resisting the temptation to lift him with one hand and throw him out of the window, for she thought she might have the strength to do that too. He hobbled for shelter to the Handicapped Centre, where he knew he would find people who understood just how difficult it was to be alive.

A letter came through the door as Carmen stood in the corridor – whose grime and despondency she hadn’t noticed till now – wondering what task to undertake next. Perhaps she could make a bonfire in the small backyard and burn all the bedding in the house? Dig a hole and bury the torn plastic bags, the junked takeaway packs, the discarded empties? The envelope was addressed in her mother’s handwriting. Carmen thought perhaps she should burn or bury that too, unopened. She had no reason to be grateful to her mother: on the contrary. But she relented and opened it. The envelope contained a cheque for twenty-two thousand pounds; it was made out to Carmen and signed Raelene Wedmore. The letter which came with the cheque asked Carmen to buy her parents a property in Fenedge. She and Andy had won a major tango competition on Blue Line Cruises. She was sending the prize money to Carmen before Andy could book them on yet another cruise to Monte Carlo. ‘Your father,’ she lamented, ‘has developed quite a taste for roulette. I can’t stand it. The horses were one thing, but casinos are another. I never know what to wear or where to stand.’

Carmen came over later in the day to ask me if I knew of any houses for sale in Fenedge. I had, it appeared, the reputation of knowing practically everything that went on in the town. I did not enjoy having such a reputation. I do not have a particularly prying or inquisitive nature: I am merely obliged to sit at a window all day. If I don’t, people say, ‘Wouldn’t you like to sit near the window?’ and move my chair nearer it without even asking my permission. Sometimes I would be glad just to sit and stare into a dark corner, but that upsets people, so I don’t.

I suggested to Carmen that she try asking the greengrocer whether she could buy the premises in which she and her friends had been squatting – ‘No friends of mine!’ she said − inasmuch as I thought he and his wife would soon be divorcing, and he might be glad of the money. Her eyes quite lit up at the thought – which was remarkable because they were so large and luminous already — and she went off in pursuit of her erstwhile non-landlord. I had no doubt but that the world would fall in with Carmen’s plans. A sigh of regret went through the Centre as she left. There was some talk of her likeness to Princess Di over tea and biscuits (donated by the local supermarket − after the sell-by date but not too limp) and it is true that Princess Di looks good and kind as well as beautiful, but there the resemblance ends. To me, Princess Di looks as if some inner grief might presently snap her in two if a whole lot of people aren’t careful: that there are tears only an inch or two away from her eyes. Carmen, in the brilliant light of Driver’s countenance, had the air that day of someone who would never snap, but bend for ever; who could see no reason why the world should not be as good tomorrow as it was today. Good heavens, how the girl had cheered up!

Laura came to me during the course of the afternoon, having dropped Caroline off for a couple of hours at nursery school. Now, this being the burden of the full-time mother, she had two and a quarter hours to fill in before collecting both Caroline and Rachel from separate educational institutions. To drive all the way home to Landsfield Crescent and back would have been, she said, a waste of petrol money. Barely there, and she’d have to return. She still, of course, had Baby Sara with her, not yet ripe for public education, and Baby Sara was feeling tetchy. Sara had been in a really bad mood, said Laura, sighing, ever since her, Laura’s, last spat with Driver. Well, I wasn’t in such a good mood either and I told her she was being absurd; no doubt Sara was just teething or bored at being at home all day when her sisters were off in the big world, and Laura unexpectedly said what did I think she felt, at home all day while the world went on without her, and then felt obliged to apologise because of course my plight was so much worse than hers, etc… And Sara cried louder and the other disabled persons in the room were disturbed and I felt responsible. Fretting babies are, I imagine, even more annoying to the childless than they are to those who are accustomed to them, but I have no doubt Laura felt she was doing us all a favour by thus exposing us to a taste of real family life: Sara’s crying seemed the least of her worries and the greatest of ours.

Laura, I am bound to admit, is one of the sweetest people in the world, and this morning I was just not. All my nerves were twitching. My left foot jerked. My mind seemed to lurch in one direction or another, out of control. Laura had had a letter from Annie, which she’d come to report, and I took refuge in the vision of her life in Southland, New Zealand. Other people’s lives, if you’re me, are often easier to contemplate than your own.

So let’s take a look at Annie as she arrives back at the Glen Trekker Station, Tim and the men having abandoned her on the hills overlooking Saunders Creek. Fortunately her horse seems to know the way home, for she’s sure she does not. It ambles comfortably, snatching at a rare blade of juicy grass here, a leaf there. Once it even stops to stare at a lizard. Annie is happy to stare at it too. She and the horse, whose name is Tigger, but whose nature seems to be rather more like that of Pooh Bear, develop an easy, almost friendly relationship. Tigger stops outside the back verandah, and silently suggests that she dismount, so she does, and slips the reins on to a ring clearly there for that purpose. Tigger snuffles his contentment. She begins to feel she can cope with this new land. She is quite proud of herself, though her limbs are beginning to stiffen fast.

She goes into the kitchen where pots and pans clatter, and there finds Mrs McLean whipping white of egg into a froth using a wire beater.

‘Stiff!’ says Annie. ‘I think I’ll break,’ to which Mrs McLean says briskly, ‘There’s some muscle ointment in the second drawer along of the dresser. Put it on tonight after your bath.’

The ointment is easily found since it smells strongly of eucalyptus of the most powerful, medicinal and unromantic kind. Annie’s view of it must show on her face.

‘Though we’re not the kind,’ says Mrs McLean, ‘to make a fuss about aches and pains.’

‘I don’t mean to fuss,’ says Annie. ‘I just don’t like the smell of eucalyptus.’

She fears she is not showing herself as the kind of potential daughter-in-law Mrs McLean would like, and enquires, to show willing, though she is not in the least interested, ‘What are you making?’

‘Meringues for tea,’ says Mrs McLean. ‘The men will come home hungry.’

‘You never stop,’ says Annie, meaning it as a compliment, but it is not taken as such.

‘Of course I never stop,’ says Mrs McLean. ‘What would I want to stop for? When you stop you’re dead. When you and Tim are married’ – What? Hold on! You mean we’re to be married? And everyone knows for sure but me? Oh, Carmen, Laura, where are you now? This surely needs some discussion – ‘Jock and I are moving on down to Rongaroa: we’re opening up another station there. Only ten thousand head. We’re not as young as we were. You’ll be glad to be on your own, not with your in-laws. It’s only natural. Here, you finish the meringues.’

Annie takes the mixing bowl and whips on, not knowing what else to do. Mrs McLean opens wide the bottom oven of the big cooker, which has been standing open, and there looking out at the world is a small white lamb. Mrs McLean scoops it out and begins to feed the creature milk from a baby’s bottle. The lamb looks at her lovingly and with absolute trust. With her free hand Mrs McLean manages to unhook the rope which controls the clothes drying rack suspended from the ceiling, lower it gently, and, with the help of her teeth, manoeuvre one of Tim’s shirts off it and on top of the laundry table. Annie marvels.

‘Don’t overwhip those whites,’ says Mrs McLean. ‘Best to add the sugar now.’ Fortunately the sugar has already been measured out. Wishing she had not ignored the offer of the Bellamy House pastry chef to teach her the arts of cake making – she had longed to learn, but knew his large clammy hand would lay itself somewhere or other on her while she did, and his large belly in the stretched white vest would bump into her, and he had a habit of wiping his nose with his fingers and flinging the product into whatever mixture he was busy at, which made her feel quite ill, so she had declined – she stirred the egg white into the sugar.

‘So that’s the pommy way!’ remarked Mrs McLean. ‘Here in Southland we always put the sugar into the white. Still, no reason your way won’t work as well!’ She was always scrupulously fair.

‘Yes,’ Mrs McLean went on in her cheerful, positive way, ‘Tim always likes a good tea. Are you good at scones? Tim’s partial to a good date scone.’

‘I expect I could learn,’ said Annie. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t even know how to make meringues.’

‘Didn’t your mother teach you?’ Mrs McLean seemed surprised.

‘We didn’t go in much for cake baking.’ Annie couldn’t recall Mavis ever making a cake. She could see there was something magical about it. You flung these varying powdery and glutinous substances together with some kind of liquid, and lo, the whole melded in the oven and rose into an edible love offering. Annie thought she would practise and become very good at home baking, the best around.

‘Well,’ said Mrs McLean enigmatically, ‘if the young go abroad they marry abroad, and that’s the truth of it. But I expect we’d all die of stagnation if they didn’t. You did stable the horse, I suppose?’

She took the meringue mixture from Annie, fretted a little over its texture, added a splash of vinegar, and slapped it into perfect shapes on a baking tray and put it in the oven the lamb had just vacated. She gave the oven a wipe out first. The lamb was deemed fit enough to sit in a cardboard box on the windowledge, where it had a good view of what was going on.

‘I thought one of the boys would see to the horse,’ said Annie.

‘Boys? You mean Jack and Ben? They’re full-grown men, not boys. You ride a horse, you look after a horse. Rub him down if he needs it, though if it’s Tigger he won’t. Take him to the stables yourself, and unharness him, and mind you wipe the harness properly, but I’d like you to do the potatoes for the potato cakes first. Jock’s partial to potato cakes. Well, you’ll do, I daresay. You’re handy enough. A bit odd, like most people from abroad, but you can’t help that. Jock and I said to each other just last night, well, Annie could just about get her arse in gear if she had to. Tim’s made a good choice there, we said. Trust our Tim.’

And she smiled, a really sweet smile, with her perfect teeth, and a face that had never seen face cream but only good honest water, and Annie felt warm and accepted, and that she had come home, and took up the potato peeler.

I went to Audrey’s funeral. Alison took me. We were late. The coffin bearers, or whatever they are called, felt obliged – because Alison called out to them so to do, crying aloud that surely the living deserved more attention than the dead – to put down the coffin and help me out of the car. Funerals are like this, I know: anything human and improper that can happen tends to, but one does not like to be the source of the untoward event. No one seemed to mind: people are very good, these days, about what Alison, who likes to be in with the trend, has taken to calling the Otherly Abled.

Laura and Woodie leant into each other, she weeping copiously, he trying not to, the three little girls wailing around them. He was a great prop to these women, I thought: rightly a wood carver, being so naturally and agreeably solid himself. Slow to move, slow to earn, but conscientious and good.

I watched with amazement, as did the many friends and family who clustered outside the chapel waiting for the previous funeral service to conclude (they were running half an hour late), as Audrey’s husband – they had after all never been formally divorced – walked towards us up the gravel path that wound from the car park through the Memorial Gardens. He had a beard. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt and sandals. His face was narrow and agreeably haggard. On his arm came a girl who could be none other than Poppy. She was little and lithe and wore a bright blue silk suit through which you could see her nipples. She looked like, and was, the kind of nasty girl men love. The men don’t know they’re nasty, but other women do. ‘Poison Poppy at school and Poison Poppy now,’ as Carmen was presently heard to say, but that was when she’d run off with Ronnie Cartwright.

Laura stopped mid-sob as her father came up to her.

‘I want you to meet Poppy,’ said Kim. ‘We’re just back from abroad. This is a grim day indeed.’ He seemed cheerful enough himself.

‘I’ve already met her,’ said Laura. ‘We did our O levels together and she cheated.’

‘Now, now,’ said Kim.

‘Don’t you now now me,’ said Laura. ‘This is my mother’s funeral. Why have you come?’

‘To pay my respects,’ said Kim, ‘to my wife.’

‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘all I can say is you’ve left it rather late. This is my husband Woodie, and these are our children. Say hello to your grandfather, kids.’

‘He won’t like being called Grandfather,’ said Poppy, giggling into Woodie’s eyes. She could never resist an opportunity.

‘You mean,’ said Laura, ‘you don’t want to be called Granny,’ and Poppy trilled with fright at the idea and Kim remarked that the passage of time hadn’t done much for Laura’s nature, which left Laura speechless at the injustice of it all, outraged, for who was to blame for her nature anyway if there was anything wrong with it but Kim? Yet she was overjoyed in spite of herself to see him again. And how was Kubrick, asked Kim: the fish should have another twenty years in him if he’d been properly treated.

The funeral before Audrey’s was concluded. Other mourners crunched away; the officiating priest came out to gesture the next uneasy group into the chapel, and the organist played the Dead March rather fast to hurry them all in. Kim stood next to Laura, Woodie and the children. If it hadn’t been for Poppy clinging to Kim’s other arm it would have made quite an ordinary family pewful.

Alison kept saying, ‘Speak up, I can’t hear!’ in a loud voice. She had just had her eighty-seventh birthday, her mother her hundred and fifth. She and her mother shared a birthday. They had both recently been on television together, in a programme called ‘All in the Genes’.

After the funeral, Kim told everyone that Poppy was having a baby.

‘I’m terrified for my figure,’ said Poppy, staring at Laura’s comfortable waist, the hips that these days did so well to sit a baby on.

‘That’s really nice,’ said Woodie. ‘A little aunt or uncle for our three!’ He felt so defensive of Laura he’d become almost witty.

‘We’re in very crowded accommodation,’ said Kim.

‘What he means,’ said Poppy, ‘is that the Landsfield Crescent house is his now that Audrey’s dead. It was in joint names and since you’ve had the use of it all this time, it’s only fair that you move out smartish, because we need somewhere to live.’

‘Poppy,’ said Kim, ‘there was no need to put it quite like that. I was only sounding out the ground.’

‘Facts are facts,’ said Poppy, ‘put them how you like. And the fact is that that house is ours by right.’

Kim smiled goodbye, saying he’d be in touch, and led Poppy off. She was grinning and dancing about and seemed more than pleased with herself. This was a crematorium, so flowers were laid around a named plaque on the stone paving at the back of the chapel. The plaque was made of cardboard. The ashes would be available for collection in due course or could be scattered in the rose garden. The late roses were spectacular.

Laura felt a familiar feeling: a kind of clutching in her lower stomach.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. She always knew almost at once. What she felt, Mavis once told her, was the moment the fertilised egg fixed itself to the side of the uterus, digging in its tiny grappling hooks, securing itself. Now that yet another risk had been overcome – the one of being washed away by the general wombic tides – setting itself in for the next set of battles for life, and the mother registered as pain this moment of triumph.

‘I can’t be pregnant,’ she said. ‘I just can’t be,’ but of course she was.

‘I expect it’s picked up Granny’s soul,’ said Rachel, which made Laura feel better.