18

It was a month before the Centre was reopened under its new title, the The Otherly Abled Resource Centre. There was much dispute between the insurance companies and the Council as to who was to pay for what in the general refurbishment of the Centre, and even some suggestion that the disabled should be left to fend for themselves and the building reopened as a tourist information centre to service Sir Bernard’s new Eastern Coastline Development, but in the end reasonable funds were made available. The Centre was reopened, its exterior unchanged but renovated to suit the conservationists, its interior intelligently converted to provide proper ramps for wheelchairs, a kitchen fitted out to suit our needs and a physiotherapy room. There was a heated pool in the garden and easy access to the back door for dropping off and even parking. The Mobile Library came twice a week and we now had an ever-changing supply of recently published books, and read what we wanted to, not what we were obliged to, and were bored as a result. And I knew all these things to be a blessing, but nevertheless many of us lamented the gritty energies of the haphazard past, when we had so much to complain about: it is very boring to have bureaucracy as an ally; it is more fun to have it as an enemy. But this is not my story. I will go back to Laura, Annie and Carmen, and what transpired in my absence from the Centre. The tale goes as follows:

‘You’ll see,’ the Devil had said to Carmen, ‘you’ll soon change your mind,’ and it was certainly true that domestic matters, bad enough already, took a turn for the worse.

Carmen went home to find her parents in residence and herself, like Annie, relegated to the sofa in the living room.

‘Dark, pokey little place, this,’ said Raelene. ‘From what you wrote, I thought it was going to be something special. And filthy! Couldn’t you have got something better with the money? Well, we’ll just have to make the best of it. Your dad and I have had enough of travels. We’re home for good, you’ll be glad to hear. How about a cup of tea, Carmen? We’re parched.’

She had a leg in plaster – it seemed she’d had a very nasty break, tumbling down one of those steep flights of steps used to disembark passengers from aircraft if there isn’t space in the bays. She’d just been unlucky, they said: nothing inherently dangerous in the steps: millions used them daily without disaster. No, it hadn’t hurt much: she’d had a drink or two on the flight. It did mean she’d have to be waited on. And what was a daughter for but to help her old mother in the hour of her need?

‘Mum,’ said Carmen, ‘I suppose Andy is my father?’

Raelene turned pink, then white, and said of course he was; who’d been talking out of turn? She refused to say any more, on the grounds that it wasn’t fair to Andy, who’d always been a good father to her, so that Carmen felt she’d somehow pulled a carpet out from under her own, Carmen’s, feet. Her whole existence, she now understood, rested on so shaky and shifting a foundation it was hardly surprising her body kept changing shape in its attempt to keep its balance. She might be anyone’s, she could see, from the Devil’s child to the milkman’s, and had always known it in her heart. If she pressed Raelene, she would just be told that Raelene had no idea at all who her father was; she’d been conceived in an alley at the back of a pub somewhere, by-product of fun with a stranger, and she didn’t want confirmation of it. So she dropped the subject.

Andy and Stephen sat drinking beer in front of the telly and working out betting systems. At least Andy had got rid of Paul. He wanted no punks in his house, he said. Idle layabouts, the lot of them.

And not only was home invaded: the trouble spread to work as well. Carmen went to Mr Snape, the Personnel Manager, as she did from time to time to ask for the morning off to go to the dentist, though what she intended to do was to go round to Laura’s to cheer her up. Mr Snape looked embarrassed and said that dental and medical appointments must henceforth be made outside working hours; otherwise proper confirmation in the form of a letter would be required, and adequate notice of intent would have to be given.

‘Since when?’ asked Carmen, and who but Poppy should step out of the shadows to say, ‘Since I went on the management team, Miss Wedmore. You will, I imagine, already have noticed some changes. Peckhams is now a slim, efficient, cost-effective organisation. We are about to announce staff cuts at ten per cent of total levels; we will achieve this wherever possible by natural wastage, but there will inevitably be some compulsory redundancies as Peckhams moves to face the recession and falling markets. Times are hard. We may even go on to short-time.’

‘But we’ve just announced a twelve-million pound profit,’ said Carmen. ‘I thought we were doing so well!’

‘I’m glad you have the concept of “we”,’ said Poppy. ‘Peckhams expects loyalty from its staff, and does its best to deserve it. The profit-share principle has proved unworkable, alas; that is to be withdrawn in favour of achievement-related bonus incentives, and the presence of staff members on the Board is no longer deemed necessary: the numbers were proving cumbersome. The smaller the management team, the more efficient.’

‘You mean no more outings to Newmarket for me,’ said Carmen, and Poppy smiled, but her eyes were remarkably cold and hard. ‘I think when you say that,’ said Poppy, ‘you go straight to the heart of Peckhams’ problems, don’t you think so, Mr Snape? Too many employees out for themselves, grabbing what they can get, not working for the greater good.’

Poppy was having an affair with Shanty Cotton. Everyone knew. She had been seen advancing on him, little frilly skirt up to her waist, wearing no knickers, in his office after hours: while he backed away, crimson in the face, terrified but helpless. A cleaner had barged in on them and reported the incident to the whole works canteen, and might not have been believed had she not been fired that very week for negligently performing her duties and putting product hygiene at risk. Everyone knew she was the best and most responsible of all the cleaners. Carmen tried to persuade her to sue for unjustifiable dismissal but she refused. ‘I know when I’m beaten,’ she said. ‘That young woman is the Devil’s spawn, and if I were you,’ she added, ‘I’d get out too. She’s got it in for you. I’ve overheard a thing or two.’ Which only made Carmen the more determined to stay; the more determined to face and surmount whatever further problems Driver had in store for her. For the more she thought about Sir Bernard – and she did think about him, studying his face in the newspaper or on the TV screen, for the Eastern Scheme was attracting a great deal of media attention – the less willing she felt to oblige Sir Bernard, enemy of her native heath, let alone Driver. If it was her fate to remain loveless all her life – she had no doubt but that Driver kept suitors at bay – so be it. She had rashly kept company with Driver, shared an oyster and a conversation or so with him, accepted car rides here and there and he had eaten a little way into her soul; she could only hope that given time it would repair itself.

Sir Bernard had been down to the ancient graveyard and pronounced it worthless.

‘Just a mess, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Neglected, rubbish soil! Nothing grows. The sooner the hard core’s down the better. We’re not going to be plagued by protestors, are we, Driver? Sacred sites, ancestor worship, the conservation hysteria of the middle classes?’

‘Not if they don’t know about it,’ observed Driver.

Sir Bernard looked at him a little sharply, and said he had no wish to infringe any regulations, he meant to play this by the book, he hoped Driver was aware of this. He didn’t want too many short cuts taken.

‘Look,’ said Driver, ‘let me put it like this. The professional protestors won’t have a leg to stand on. We have excellent lawyers, who specialise in working within the law. Ordinary people round here need and want these developments. Shouldn’t we get out of here? From the look of it, this was just some kind of plague pit.’

They retired to the BMW. The wind whistled and moaned in from the sea and slung sand into Sir Bernard’s eyes.

‘I have no one to talk to, Driver,’ he said. ‘No one who really cares for me.’

‘You have me,’ said Driver. ‘I look after you.’

‘Only because it’s in your interests,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘I need a woman I can love, not just a woman who loves me. Where is Carmen? Why do I have to wait so long?’

‘Carmen’s on ice,’ said Driver. ‘Wait and see. Only a few days left to go.’

The BMW drove off and Sir Bernard’s minions gathered the teams together and said it was henceforth a firing offence for anyone to hold up work because of ‘remains’. Jed Foster felt wholly unappreciated and indeed insulted and told his wife, who told his sister, who was in treatment with Mr Bliss for her smoking problem. Mr Bliss was now enjoying a relationship with Mrs Baker – that is to say he and she ‘were an item’ – and he told her, and by the next evening the protest groups were out in the sand dunes with posters, cameras and pet archaeologists, and collecting names for a petition to the Ministry of the Environment outside Fenedge Post Office. The Devil never has it all his own way. Not quite.

Carmen, thwarted in her dentist excuse, simply got Stephen to call Mr Snape the next morning and say she was ill, and took the bus out to Landsfield Crescent to see Laura, who described herself as alone in the house, although all four children, for once, were with her. But to a depressed mother children are no company. Rachel and Caroline were off school (it was closed for the day to facilitate a teacher refresher course); Sara had stuck a coin up her nose the evening before and had spent much of the night in hospital with Laura, and the baby, now resentful of her plastered hip joint, was grizzling. Laura had been crying. She was accustomed to having Woodie in the garden workshop, available to come and help her with the children whenever emergencies arose. But now Woodie had rented an old warehouse in Fenedge, where there was more space and less distraction, without a thought of her, Laura, left at home.

‘They’re his children as well as mine,’ complained Laura. ‘He seems to forget that.’

‘He has to earn,’ said Carmen, defensive of Woodie, for she was a worker herself and understood what it meant, though Laura did not.

‘Take his side,’ said Laura, ‘that’s right. Along with everything else.’

‘What do you mean,’ asked Carmen, ‘by everything else? I’ve risked being fired to see how you are, and how you are is like this. It isn’t nice at all.’

‘It’s all your fault,’ said Laura, ‘that things aren’t nice. When they bury you, I hope it’s face down.’

Carmen had to sit down to recover from this. Laura cried and said she was sorry. It was just that Kim was a hopeless baby-sitter and she wished he’d gone away and stayed away and never come back. It was thanks to him that Sara had stuck a coin up her nose. Kim had started saying he wanted the house to himself, and he drank too much; what if he took it into his head to throw Woodie and her and the family out? If there was a Woodie to throw out. On her way back from the hospital she’d called in at his new workshop to surprise him and found him there with Angela, kissing. They hadn’t seen her. She’d slipped away. She didn’t want any advice from Carmen, because it was bound to be bad. What should she do? She had four children to think about, and they needed their father, she couldn’t think about herself.

Then the phone rang. It was Mavis for Laura, to say Annie had been taken into hospital. Annie had something called anorexia and she was in intensive care, and asking for her friends, though, as the Count/Mavis added, no one could say Carmen and Laura had been very supportive friends. Mavis went on to trace back Annie’s troubles from the time she’d failed her exams due to keeping the company of these alleged friends. Mavis was upset. ‘It makes you wonder,’ said Mavis, ‘why you ever have children. All that work, all that orange juice, all the sacrifices, and still it turns out badly,’ and she slammed the phone down.

Carmen and Laura had a brief discussion as to who should look after the kids so they could go off to the hospital. Laura refused to ask Angela, though Carmen thought she should, and since I was sitting across the road waiting for the Centre to reopen, and Alison was visiting me, all four were lugged over, grizzling and snivelling. It was, they assured me, an emergency. It wouldn’t happen again.

‘That girl,’ said Alison after they’d left, ‘was far too young to get married and is far too young to be in charge of anything, let alone anyone. There should be a law to protect people from themselves. Poor little mites, left in the care of a cripple and a crone –’ As soon as their mother had left the room and was no longer a witness to their distress, they stopped grizzling. They fiddled with the controls of my chair instead. Alison then stood on her head to entertain them. The sight of her upside-down face, around which her full skirts fell, displaying her skinny legs and her white interlock bloomers, started them crying again. Standing on her head was Alison’s party trick. Her mother had stopped doing it at ninety. Her daughter, it seemed, meant to outdo her. Alison was so light – in fact, barely six stone – it was not the problem it would have been for someone fifty years her junior, as I am. I am still not too old to have babies myself – not quite. My problem is not merely the biological clock, but how to regain the use of my legs and find an agreeable and useful father for my potential children before it’s too late. I can see these problems might be insurmountable. I was twenty-three when complications following a bodged pregnancy termination required emergency invasive surgery, and a wasp bit the knife-wielding hand mid-stroke, and a section of my neural fibre was inadvertently severed. So you understand why I am preoccupied with concepts of ‘lucky’ and ‘unlucky’, and the ethical links which join them. ‘Lucky’ to be alive, ‘unlucky’ to be paralysed; ‘deserving it’, as Dr Grafton would say. But deserving what? The luck or the unluck? Forget it.

Laura and Carmen arrived at the hospital to find Annie indeed in the intensive care ward, Mavis and Alan at her side. A drip fed into her veins; she was linked up by wires to an ECG machine. Another measured her blood pressure, tightening around her stick-like arm every few minutes or so. Her chest was bare the better to service the machine, but she, once so plump, now had no bosom at all to speak of, so no one bothered to make her decent. ‘That blood pressure’s too low, doctor,’ said Alan.

‘I am well aware of that, sir,’ said the doctor.

‘That pulse is too slow,’ said Alan. ‘I know about these things.’

‘So do I,’ said the doctor shortly.

‘We don’t want her having any of your pills,’ said Mavis. ‘They kill more people than they cure. Healing is a matter for the spirit, not the body.’

‘Just allow me to get on with it in my own way,’ said the doctor, ‘if you please,’ and then to Mavis, ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Mavis. ‘She’s been out of the country.’

‘It’s a cry for help,’ said Alan, ‘that’s what it is.’

‘But didn’t you notice her getting thin?’ the doctor asked.

‘I want Tim,’ said Annie to Carmen and Laura. ‘Tell Tim I love him. I haven’t heard from him, nothing. No phone call, no apology, nothing.’

‘I thought she hated him,’ whispered Laura to Carmen.

‘It was only a lovers’ spat plus air fare,’ whispered Carmen.

‘Don’t make jokes,’ said Laura, but Annie had smiled and a little pink came into her cheeks: and her systolic blood pressure was up two points next time the machine hummed and squeezed her arm.

‘Get me Tim,’ commanded Annie, and closed her eyes, exhausted.

‘Well,’ said the doctor, who was of the new holistic school, ‘people can die of broken hearts as well as anything else.’

‘She might die?’ asked Carmen, to whom this had not occurred.

The doctor just shrugged and went off in response to some other emergency, and Carmen hoped he was being like this to keep Alan and Mavis in their place, but could not be sure.

Count Capinski spoke from Mavis’s mouth. He said, ‘The omens are bad. There is a Jonah amongst us. She must sacrifice herself or be the sacrifice,’ and then Mavis clamped her mouth shut and opened it again to say in her own voice, ‘You girls are so selfish and so preoccupied you didn’t even notice your own friend had galloping anorexia.’

Alan said, ‘Fair’s fair, Mavis, we didn’t notice either, what with one thing and another.’

– to which Mavis replied, ‘You mean your toy trains,’ and Alan said, ‘I meant that man you make me share your bed with.’

Annie opened her eyes and said, ‘Home Sweet Home, goodbye’ and closed them again, and a nurse came along to change the drip and shooed the lot of them out.

When Carmen left the hospital she was crying.

‘Well?’ asked Laura.

‘Okay,’ said Carmen. ‘I give in. I’ll sleep with Sir Bernard. Anything.’

On the way home Carmen passed Mr Bliss outside the Post Office. He was collecting names for the petition organised by the ‘Stop the Sacrilege’ section of the ‘Save Our Past’ group. The protest movement had split, within days, into factions, which, while not overtly hostile to one another, had trouble getting along. New Agers felt antagonistic to the Christian groups, who were complaining about the desecration of Christian remains but ignoring the pagans: archaeologists did not wish to offend the developers more than they could help: the respectable Heritage people did not wish to be involved with the only just respectable Green Peace party, which, along with the SPB (Society for the Protection of Birdlife), wanted the wildlife parks preserved, or with Friends of the Earth, who objected on principle to marinas; but all agreed in this: that they did not want Sir Bernard’s earth movers to roll on another cog, that here was an area of public concern, and all were prepared to lie down, indeed almost looking forward to lying down, in front of the giant machines. After that, any coincidence of ambition stopped, and argument began.

‘These nutters can’t put a stop to the whole Eastern Scheme, can they?’ asked Sir Bernard. He’d never known anything like it. Every environmental organisation in the country seemed to be turning out and The Sun’s headline yesterday had run ‘Bellamy Boobs’. He hadn’t liked that.

‘I doubt it,’ said Driver. ‘Too busy cutting each other’s throats, as per usual. What we need is some big PR stunt.’

‘I need a new girlfriend,’ said Sir Bernard. ‘Get me Carmen.’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Driver. ‘What will you give for her?’

‘Anything,’ said Sir Bernard.

‘Done,’ said Driver.

‘And clean up those headlines while you’re about it,’ said Sir Bernard.

‘No problem,’ said Driver, or at least I could only assume from the next day’s headlines – ‘Stand Up To ’Em, Bernie!’ – that their conversation had gone thus. Some subeditor may have been bribed, of course, but I don’t like to believe that: I would rather conceive of a conversation of cosmic intent.

Yet here was Mr Bliss battling on, stopping passers-by in the face of the inevitability of defeat, ignoring his own sore feet. It was an October day and very windy. Carmen’s hair, which was growing longer and redder by the minute, whipped around her face. Mrs Baker, sitting at her folding table, on her folding chair, had a hard time keeping leaflets and questionnaires from flying around the square. The public was obstinate this morning: they trusted no one: they were on Bernie’s side: they didn’t want to be laughed at in the popular papers.

‘What we need round here is jobs and houses,’ said one passer-by, ‘not meddlers like you.’ And the next said, ‘I hope you have a licence: you’re causing an obstruction: I’ll report you for this.’ After that a number said, in effect, ‘What’s good for Sir Bernard is good for Fenedge,’ and others, ‘There’s only old bones up there. Dead for ages. So what?’ and the librarian, who should have been sympathetic, refused to sign, saying, ‘There’s more than enough talk about ghosts and curses in this town. Don’t say you’re infected too, Mr Bliss, Mrs Baker.’ It was depressing.

Then Carmen came by and luck changed. ‘Keep at it!’ said the passers-by, queuing up to sign. ‘This is our town, not theirs. A crying shame what they’re doing up there,’ or ‘The little people against the big company! Good for you!’ or ‘Hopeless, but let’s give it a try.’ Eddie from the Welcome-In came over with free cups of tea. ‘Had enough of these lorries,’ he said. ‘It’s time to act. Someone in the disabled place could have been killed. Supposing it had been bricks not balsa?’ A languid wasp, the last of the season, struggled in a cup of tea. Mr Bliss rescued it with one of the leaflets. This one read ‘Bellamy’s Triumph is Britain’s Shame’.

‘Good morning, Carmen,’ said Mr Bliss, looking up from his task.

‘How goes it? Like the hair! What is it? Henna?’

Carmen looked at her reflection in the glass of the Post Office window and said, ‘Yes, I’m a redhead,’ because she could see she was. She’d started the morning mouse.

‘Mrs Baker,’ asked Carmen, ‘you remember the Faust legend? All that stuff about Mephistopheles?’

‘Yes, I do,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘and so would you if you’d paid any attention to me at school. It’s a terrible thing for me to sit here and watch the young women of this town, whom I am meant to have educated, get into the state they are, especially you, Carmen. Helpless and hopeless.’

‘Why didn’t Faust ask to stay immortal, and cheat the Devil that way?’

‘Because Mephistopheles had set the goal posts: that is to say a trap. If ever Faust wished the day would never end, on that day he would die.’

‘You mean he wasn’t allowed to put life on Pause: stop it at the dirty bits?’ Andy and Stephen were for ever doing that. Pressing the Pause button on the video remote control: moving the picture frame by frame. Girls with spread legs in the 18 Certifícate: was that flicker of flesh what they thought it was? Usually it was.

‘Nothing to do with dirty bits,’ said Mrs Baker tartly. ‘Goethe’s Faust was engaged in earthworks: moving mountains and so forth. Employing an army of workers: irrigating dust bowls, making the desert bloom: putting right what God had neglected to do. I even remember you doing an essay on it. You got the one A you ever got.’

‘Sometimes Annie and Laura and I used to steal Antoinette Ridley’s essays and copy bits out of them,’ said Carmen. ‘Perhaps it was one of those.’

‘You three were the reason I gave up teaching. Why do you want to know about Faust?’

‘No real reason.’

‘It’s quite cheering,’ said Mrs Baker, ‘that you’re interested, and can still get your tongue round the word Mephistopheles. I might even go back into teaching once Mr Bliss and I are married.’

A puff of wind caught up the leaflets on her table and rearranged them. ‘Despoliation Rampant!’, ‘The Vandals of Waterland!’, ‘Stop the Sacrilege!’

‘I brought in a dress for Oxfam,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘You can have it if you like. Nineteen forty something. I wore it only the once to a dance. I think it might do for you.’ She had it rolled up in a plastic bag beneath the table. ‘Mind you, I was an altogether different shape from you,’ she said, ‘when I was a girl. We used to go in more at the waist and out at the hip, but I expect you can alter it.’

Carmen shook it out. It was white taffeta, scooped low at the neck, oddly bridal in effect.

‘I expect I’ll fit it,’ she said sadly, ‘by the time I come to wear it.’

‘It’ll need steaming out,’ said Mrs Baker. ‘Perhaps your mother will do it for you?’

‘I can do it myself,’ said Carmen. ‘I’m a big girl now.’

In the letter box Carmen found a letter from Mr Snape at Peckhams. It had been delivered by hand. By her continued absences from her place of work, it declared, Carmen had broken the terms of her contract. She was hereby relinquished: let go. This too seemed a deliverance.

Carmen called the hospital and Staff Nurse told her that Annie was off the critical list but still dangerously ill.

‘Tell her she’s going to be okay,’ said Carmen; she had hoped to hear of a miraculous recovery; she was disappointed not to.

‘We don’t take messages,’ said Staff Nurse. ‘This isn’t any old ward, this is Intensive Care. We’re too busy.’

‘Just tell her,’ said Carmen.

‘But it mightn’t be true,’ said Staff Nurse, and Carmen recognised the voice. It was Antoinette Ridley, of course, who had been at school with Carmen, passed all her exams and clearly been passing them ever since. ‘Anyway,’ said Staff Nurse, ‘we have a lot of people in here who really do need attention.’

‘So does Annie,’ protested Carmen.

‘Anorexia!’ jeered Staff Nurse. ‘A self-inflicted disease. I’ve no patience with it,’ and put down the phone, and it was clear to Carmen that no-one was really out of the woods yet. Driver was holding Annie as a hostage to good fortune. Antoinette Ridley was famous for drowning her sister’s pet guinea pig because it had chewed a hole in her best jumper. Antoinette had not been popular: she was too clever and seldom smiled.

Carmen went into the bathroom and tried on what had once been Mrs Baker’s best dress. She hoped Driver would turn up soon.

‘Moulds itself to your figure!’ said Raelene, coming in to find some aspirin, though in truth Carmen’s figure seemed to be moulding itself to the dress. ‘I’ve never seen you wear white. Mind you don’t drop anything down it. And whatever have you done to your hair?’

Carmen felt quite comforted. There were advantages to having her parents home again. It is better to be nagged than forgotten. She put her arms round Raelene, who was surprised but pleased. They seldom touched.

‘You’ve changed,’ said Raelene. ‘You used to be so prickly. We should go away more often, your dad and me. That chauffeur fellow was round again this afternoon asking for you. He said he’d call back at seven. I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before.’

And she puzzled about it a little and then seemed to come to a worrying conclusion. Since her leg had been in plaster, and she’d had nothing to do but eat, she’d put on at least a stone. Her flowered blouse strained over her bosom.

‘Carmen,’ she said, ‘I don’t want you to have anything to do with that man. For all you know he’s a close relation.’

‘You mean he’s my father?’

‘Of course I don’t mean he’s your father. He’s much too young. Your father’s my age or older. He has to be. I was only sixteen when it happened.’

‘You mean he’s my half-brother?’

‘I’m saying no more,’ said Raelene. ‘Just there is a resemblance.’ It occurred to Carmen that if her unknown father had been in the habit of fathering children, any number of young men in Fenedge might be her close relation, her half-brother, but she supposed that was the same for any young woman, any place, any time. You just had to take your genetic chances.

‘Right little cuckoo in the nest,’ said Raelene. ‘You never fitted and it was no one’s fault but my own.’

She wept a little into Carmen’s shoulder, so Carmen took off the dress, put her jeans and bomber jacket back on and went downstairs to make her mother a cup of tea. It is never nice to discover you are not who you thought you were, but it has its compensations. She felt more charitably towards her father and towards Stephen, knowing they were only half the responsibility they had been, and fetched them cans of lager quite happily when they shouted through to the kitchen for them. Let them go to hell their own way: she was three quarters there already; who was she to protest? ‘Sugar?’ she asked Raelene, preparing to spoon it in, but Raelene said no, she’d have a sweetener, she was going on a diet.

On her way home from the hospital, Carmen had put her hand in her jeans pocket and found a ten-pound note there. On impulse she’d gone into Boots and spent it on cosmetics; the expensive kind, not tested on animals. Her face would have to live up to Mrs Baker’s dress. But Boots must have given her someone else’s bag because now when she opened it up in the kitchen she found it to be full of even more expensive creams, and essences and perfumes, as well as a far fancier brand of make-up than she’d dream of using; and a little black beaded bag − a free offer, but not too bad − inside which was what could only be a packet of condoms.

She thought she’d call the whole thing off it was so vulgar and just go to the cinema instead and not be there at all when Driver turned up, but on her way to the door she heard Raelene telling Andy to shut up, Mavis was on the phone, and Mavis had been to the hospital and Staff Nurse had said Annie was back on the critical list, and this was the worst day of Mavis’s life.

‘Might be the worst day of Annie’s life,’ said Stephen, who had a keen ear for parental insensibility if nothing else.

‘Not to mention the last,’ said Andy, and they both laughed.

There was nothing for it. She went back upstairs to fill the grimy bath − except someone seemed to have cleaned it lately − with appropriate essences, which were so oily that when she was in the bath drops of water slipped and slid off her skin as she lifted her arm to look at it: a long slim arm to match the legs. Her muscle tone was good, she noticed. Sell your soul to the Devil and never have to do aerobics again! The Devil was all short cuts: he did a good editing job on your life. In fact what he was really good at, Carmen decided, was turning people into the video of their life. He left out all the boring bits. When your soul was sold you would no longer have to live in real time; you would not have to cut your nails unless it was of dramatic import, or ever go to the toilet again (unless there was someone lurking there, to make it a good scene). You could open a teach yourself book and close it in the next frame, having learnt everything in it. She could tell Laura was good, so very far from losing her soul, because of all the slow, boring things she had to do, and do without any capacity to fast-forward, just plodding daily through nappies and baby food. She wondered if she, Carmen, would soon be able to rewind − replay lovemaking, pause at orgasm for ever; or would it be the newest technology, so it could switch itself to Play again after so many minutes on Pause, for fear of damaging the tape, just wobble and sparkle and begin again? But you could slow-rewind from time to time, if you were careful never to get to the end of the tape and so let yourself in for automatic fast rewind, which was presumably what happened when you were drowning and your life flashed before your eyes. You could stay young for ever, presumably by playing only the first section of the tape: and you wouldn’t end up bored, because you could constantly reedit events to make them more satisfactory. The thing was not to press the Eject tab inadvertently. Then Driver would step forward and retrieve the cassette of your life: claiming not just world rights in it but universal rights, rights throughout the universe, for all infinity (terms used in the contract I, Harriet, had to sign for Paramount when they were making the film of the life of the famous surgeon whose hand slipped when he was operating near my spine. They were buying me out of the film, not into it, not unreasonably. I used the three thousand dollars they paid me to buy my wheelchair). Then Driver would just stack the cassette in his video tidy along with all the others. All the world a screenplay, and all the men and women in it bit part players, and free will just a minimal chance of rewriting your own lines if the Director didn’t notice. Driver as Director: Mephistopheles become Videostopheles.

Carmen stepped out of her bath. She was used to Radox Herbal Salts in the water. She suspected that whatever was in the expensive green globs of liquid from the gold bottle discovered in her shopping bag was making her mind work faster than usual. It was not altogether pleasant: as if a million little sparks were making connections. She thought perhaps it was a side effect, something inadvertent: she didn’t think Driver had planned it: if you thought too much, what use would you be to a man like Sir Bernard? He wanted presumably what she could see now in the bathroom mirror, toothpaste-spattered as it was: a person, a female, settled down into a Madonna body, only with a stupid, pretty face − wide-set eyes, high forehead and bruised mouth, and a Michael Jackson look about the eyebrow, and a Dallas hairstyle, and nails which even as she looked were turning from crimson-painted to palest pink. She did not think she could respect or admire a man who could only love a girl like her, but that was not the point. If she did not do what was expected of her, if she did not agree to take her proper place, lie down in front of him, be the missing jigsaw piece that made sense of the puzzle, the wind would blow so thick with sand through Fenedge that it would blot out the sun altogether. She had been called to the Devil’s safe house and had to go. The towel on the back of the door was clean and dry. Oh yes, her lucky day: everyone’s lucky day, even Annie’s. That it might be Annie’s good luck to die, her bad luck to live, was too hard to contemplate.

She put on lipstick and eye colour since it was there. She put on the dress, which made more sense of her face; or perhaps it was the cosmetics which did that. She took up the black bead bag, which would never have been her choice, and looked really stupid with the white dress, and went downstairs. It was five to seven. She had not been watching the clock. She suspected time had adjusted itself to her. As she went downstairs she heard Stephen say to Andy, ‘But we’ve just had this programme. Those cops were singing that song half an hour ago, I’ll swear it.’ They did not see Carmen pass. She had lost her visibility: perhaps it went with her singularity, and now she was to be like everyone else. She opened the door. There was no BMW.

The phone rang in the hall. Carmen went back inside. It was Laura. She said she’d taken matters into her own hands. She’d rung Tim in Southland, New Zealand. Mrs McLean had answered the phone: Laura reported the conversation to me the next day. I had to wait: since Annie’s return, I was further down her list of confidantes.

‘Mrs McLean,’ said Laura, ‘I don’t know what your son is playing at, but my friend Annie is dying for love of him. Can I speak to Tim?’

‘Men have died and worms have eaten them,’ said Mrs McLean surprisingly, ‘but not for love. And in the meantime our sheep are being eaten alive by a new kind of worm too and Tim’s seeing to them. So you can’t speak to him: he’s drenching.’

‘Tell him to stop drenching and get over here to Annie at once,’ said Laura.

‘I might at that,’ said Mrs McLean, even more surprisingly. ‘He’s miserable without her. Come to think of it, we all are. She made a lovely scone, when she put her mind to it. Whatever got into her? Was she ill?’

‘Yes, she was,’ said Laura. ‘She was anorexic’

There was a short silence, into which the waves of distance squeaked as the breathing of the two women bounced up to satellites and back again and the oceans that divided them washed over an earth somersaulting through space.

‘You can get like that,’ said Mrs McLean, ‘if you do too much baking. It happened to my sister. Now she’s fit for nothing but to play bridge. Is Annie bad?’

‘Yes,’ said Laura. ‘She might die,’ and she began to cry.

‘Whinge, whinge,’ said Mrs McLean, not unkindly. ‘All you pommy girls, always crying. I’ll see what I can do. No worries.’

Woodie had come in as she put the phone down and said it was a good thing they only knew people in Fenedge: if Laura wasn’t gadding about she was on the phone. The bill was atrocious.

‘I actually gave him a piece of my mind,’ said Laura to Carmen on the phone. ‘I don’t know what got into me.’

Laura said she’d been calling the other side of the world and would do the same thing again if Woodie went on whingeing, and keep the phone off the hook all night, what was more. What was Woodie playing at? All Woodie did these days was moan and groan and find fault. Why was he trying to put her, Laura, into the wrong? What was he doing so wrong that she, Laura, had to be worse than him, Woodie, in Woodie’s mind? Well? Woodie looked quite shocked. Was it Angela? And Woodie needn’t open his mouth to say she, Laura, was (a) jealous, (b) insane, because she, Laura, knew what was going on, and she, Laura, was fed up. If Woodie didn’t stop it at once she was walking out and leaving the children for him to look after, and Angela too. See how Angela’s sandwich business went if she was up to her armpits in kids.

‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ asked Woodie, impressed, and he was the old Woodie, marvelling at her, looking at her as if he were part of her, but that she was the best part. She hadn’t noticed that Woodie had of late stopped doing that; only now, when it began again, did she feel the lack of it.

‘I would,’ she said. ‘Well, I might.’

‘It wasn’t really anything,’ said Woodie. ‘Angela’s just like that. She has a good heart, and if you’re alone in the room with her it just seems so natural.’

‘Then don’t be alone with her ever again,’ said Laura, ‘or I’ll cut off what matters with the carving knife.’

‘I wouldn’t want to lose that,’ he said. ‘Or you. You were so busy with the kids I didn’t think you’d notice. I’m sorry. It’s stopped anyway. She likes older men, really. Whenever she was with me she talked about Kim.’

Laura said she didn’t want to know. She would take time to get over it but she supposed she would. She’d have to: what choice did she have?

All this Laura said into the phone while Carmen stood on first one high white satin heel, then the other. Raelene had lent her the shoes in which she had won the tango competition with Andy. Lucky shoes, she said.

‘So that’s my news,’ said Laura. ‘I just had to tell you. It’s better and worse. Better because it’s in the open, worse because now I have to get over it. How’s Sir Bernard?’

‘I’m seeing him tonight,’ said Carmen.

‘About time too,’ said Laura, without even asking what Carmen was wearing, so preoccupied was she with herself. ‘Woodie wants to take me out to dinner, but I’ve been so upset and my eyes are too puffy. But I feel kind of washed out and purified.’

‘I’m glad,’ said Carmen. The BMW was outside: Driver sounded the horn.

Alison was detaching me from my chair and into her car as the BMW drew up: always a difficult task − made by Alison to look so very difficult that passers-by would stop and help. Today Alison all but dropped me. I squeaked in alarm and Driver came over to help. His arms were strong. He looked at me as men seldom looked at me; as if anything were possible. He said nothing. He smiled: did what he had to, and returned to his car, leaving me quite breathless with desire, a sensation I have tried to train myself out of: better to be deaf to the speech of the space between the legs than to hear it, if the brain is in no position to relieve the body’s residual clamouring, stop its nagging.

‘I hate the way men patronise women,’ said Alison. ‘Who asked him for help anyway?’

Carmen came out of the house, radiant in white, and I mean that: it was a trick of the light, of course.

‘That girl’s got an aura,’ said Alison. ‘Eighty-seven years in the world and I’ve never seen an aura. Now I have. A white one too, very special. But isn’t that Carmen?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Every town has its bad girl,’ said Alison, ‘but they don’t usually have auras. Fenedge is looking up.’

Her mother saw auras, said Alison to me on the way home. She’d sometimes pretended to do so herself, as a child, just to keep up, but it had never been true. An aura was a kind of light like a halo which shimmered around people, if only you had eyes to see. Sensitive people, as her mother was, could see them; the problem had clearly been that Alison just wasn’t sensitive. Auras came in different shades, depending upon the mood of the person wearing them and the beauty and feeling tone of that person’s soul, and white was the most spiritual and the most transcendent of the lot. Alison was glad she had finally seen one, and a white one too. Her mother had never seen a white aura; she’d complained about it: now her eyesight was so bad she never would. The incident had upset Alison. When she stopped talking about auras, she was silent all the way home. I think she was crying. It is upsetting when the old cry: there seems to be so little time for things ever to come right for them. I cried too. I had, through Carmen, cast Driver as Mephistopheles, or Videostopheles, Satan of the new fictional world so many people lived in, or tried to, but only because I fancied him, this swaggering young man in uniform and breeches, and could never have him; never have anyone. I might as well be dead. I had gone to Chicago hoping never to come back, except in a coffin. A bad night for Alison, a bad night for me. The crone and the cripple, weeping into pillows for things that might have been and never would be now.