4

‘Gemma has no natural taste,’ complains Victor at breakfast. ‘Whoever heard of boil-in-the-bag kippers served on a silver salver?’

The breakfast chafing dishes are munificently displayed on a late Victorian mahogany sideboard: porridge, cereal, rather thin cream, the guilty kippers, stewed kidneys, kedgeree, sausages, toast, marmalade and dusty honeycomb. Hamish has already eaten – oatmeal porridge and salt, Elsa deduces from the traces left behind. Gemma takes breakfast in her bedroom.

‘The coffee’s Nescafé, too,’ Victor groans. ‘The rich do have such extraordinary areas of meanness. Of course, neither of them was born to it.’

Victor’s father was a dentist, and his mother a librarian: they lived in Winchmore Hill, a prosperous outer suburb of London: and although the family were poor by comparison with the neighbours, its members were no strangers to the finer things of life. Vivaldi played on the gramophone and de Buffet reproductions hung on the wall; and for a time, in the thirties, Victor’s family house was a refuge for professional people and artists in flight from Hitler’s Germany. There had been an excitement to life then, quite missing from it now; at any rate until the previous year, when the convulsions in his life had started; his wooing of Elsa, his forsaking of wife and child (in their interest as well as his own – what use to anyone is a marriage founded on hypocrisy?), rendering him alternately elated and anxious, but seldom bored.

‘Gemma was a typist like me,’ says Elsa proudly, piling her plate high with the kedgeree, which she eventually favoured. ‘She was telling me.’

‘Gemma would tell you anything,’ says Victor, ‘if it suited her purpose. Hamish is no better. Did you hear him say the library ladder was his mother’s?’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘He didn’t have a mother, let alone a father. He was brought up in an orphanage, with his sister. Then she died too.’

‘Poor Hamish.’

Victor eyes Elsa narrowly.

‘You have quite a soft spot for Hamish, Elsa, in spite of what you say. It doesn’t surprise me. I know full well I’m just a rung on the ladder in your journey up in the world.’

Elsa’s mouth gapes at the unfairness of it all.

‘You do have a lot of fillings,’ he observes. ‘I suppose your early years were spent awash in a sea of Ribena and ice lollies.’

Victor’s childhood had been severely regulated so far as diet was concerned: brown bread, the Hay diet, carbohydrates and protein never presented at the same meal; vitamin supplements and thyroid extract pills taken as a general tonic, until his heart raced and his brow sweated.

‘You’re in a horrid mood,’ complains Elsa.

‘You’re not behaving very well, Elsa.’ Victor lays down his fork amongst the orange scraps of dyed kipper skin.

Elsa gets up and leaves the table. Her rather heavy jaw is set in mulish fashion. So her mother’s would set sometimes, in obstinate defiance of her fate, her husband, anything that stood in her way.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I forgot to take my pill,’ says Elsa, an excuse which will take her anywhere.

‘Dear God,’ he groans. ‘You’re a mad woman.’

‘I don’t suppose Wendy ever forgets her pill,’ says Elsa, as she leaves. Wendy, in fact, needs to take no contraceptive measure, in as much as she is a virgin and likely to remain so for some time.

Elsa goes, but not to take her pill: rather to make a phone call to her friend Marina, from the furry seat of a sedan chair converted into a telephone booth and set cosily in the panelled front hall, beneath antlers, gargoyles and crossed swords. Marina is a former school friend of Elsa’s who now lives with a married sister, shares a room with her four-year-old nephew, has a clerical job in a department store, and gets much pleasure from Elsa’s worldly exploits, to which she acts, in her own words, as Eminence Grise.

‘What’s it like?’ breathes Marina. She is a dumpy girl with a pale face, wild brown eyes, legs without ankles, and a high, piercing voice which she modulates, not always successfully, to a sexy whisper.

‘Wonderful,’ hisses Elsa. ‘Guess what we had for breakfast?’

Marina guesses correctly.

‘You do manage to play your cards right, Elsa. I’m eaten up with envy. I had the last of the Weetabix. All crumbs. And now their washing machine’s broken down so I have to go to the laundrette, while you go swanning round this millionaire’s house. Is he away?’

‘No. Why should he be?’

‘Rich people usually are. I suppose he fancies you?’

‘Yes. Well, I think so.’ Elsa giggles.

‘Good. Wake Victor up a bit. That man takes you for granted. You must take every possible opportunity to make him jealous, Elsa.’

Marina was Elsa’s head-girl, at school.

‘But I love Victor. I don’t have to play games.’

‘Yes, we all know about you loving Victor. But what about when Victor goes back to his wife?’

‘He won’t go back to his wife. We’re together for ever.’

‘Not unless you play your cards right. Now Elsa, you’re to sleep with this millionaire if you possibly can.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you never know when it mightn’t come in handy. If you’re born a femme fatale, and you clearly are, Elsa, you owe it to yourself to make the most of it.’

‘How’s my mum?’ enquires Elsa, changing the subject. She admires Marina’s enthusiasm but is beginning to doubt the extent of her worldly wisdom. Marina lives down the road from Elsa’s family.

‘She’s all right. Saw her in the pub last night with your dad; She had a new hair-do. Streaks. I was out with Petie – you know, the one with bad breath and all he could afford was cider so I’ve got a splitting head this morning. Haven’t you made it up with your mum yet?’

‘No,’ says Elsa.

‘Quite right,’ says Marina. ‘All they ever want you to do is what they did, and look how they ended up.’

‘Did she look as if she missed me?’

‘No. You should worry: shacked up with an antique dealer and fancied by a millionaire, and all I’ve got is Petie and his bad breath.’

‘Look Marina, I’ve got to go.’

Victor stands outside the sedan chair, his bad humour evaporated, beckoning.

‘Is it Victor?’

‘Yes. Thought so from the change in tone. Randy, is he? Kippers have that effect on men.’

‘I thought it was supposed to be me.’

Elsa puts the phone down. She had meant to ask Marina’s advice as to whether or not to meet Janice, and what to say if she did, but, as usual, had been deflected.

‘Come for a walk,’ says Victor, importunately, putting his arm in hers, leading her past the kidney-shaped swimming pool, where Elsa catches a glimpse of Hamish, black-trunked, skinny limbed, floating upward on the water, like some bloated fish, and through the rose gardens, where long-haired young gardeners work, and through the woodlands to a clearing, where they can be alone, and where stands an ivy-clad (the ivy pot-grown and still in the nursery containers in which the plants were delivered) plaster statue of the Goddess Diana, Queen of Chastity. Here the sunlight catches Elsa’s lovely, tumbling hair (how Marina envies it: how, gazing at it, she sees the manner in which her own life might change, but never will) and he bears her to the ground beneath him, and for once she does not notice – or at any rate makes no complaint about – the rocks in the small of her back, or the nettles against the backs of her knees, but is caught up somehow in his passion – which observed, somehow dampens his own.

‘What’s the matter, dear?’ she asks, concerned. He rather wishes she would not call him ‘dear’. So his mother called him, in her absent, bookish way.

‘Nothing’s the matter.’

‘If you’d rather I didn’t see Janice, I won’t.’ She is never difficult for long.

‘It’s not that.’

‘What, then?’

‘Do you know what I really want?’

‘Anything,’ she says valiantly. ‘Only isn’t it rather public here? I mean, for anything extraordinary.’

Victor has versed Elsa in the many varied tactics of love-making: she is always obliging, if seldom enthusiastic. Well, she is young: she will learn.

‘I want you to make love to Hamish.’

Elsa does not reply. Her limbs go dull and heavy.

‘Don’t be upset, Elsa. Not if you don’t want to.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t want to own you. I want to share you. You’re too much responsibility.’

‘Not because of your deal? The library ladder?’

‘What do you take me for?’ He is hurt. ‘Besides, I know you fancy him. You told me so. You don’t know how wonderful it is to be able to tell you what I want. I never could with Janice! So many important things that could never be said. Not like you, blessed Elsa, under the sun or the stars, in doors or out, it’s all the same to you. Please, Elsa.’

‘If it means all that to you,’ says Elsa doubtfully, but she feels the life flowing back into her limbs, under the pressure of some excitement in her head, not her womb: a kind of bold eroticism mixed with fear; as if she stood on the threshold of some new world, which one step might carry her across, but once taken, could never be retraced.

‘What about Gemma?’ she asks finally, when his mouth is lifted from hers and she can speak.

‘You never said what about Janice, as I remember,’ says Victor firmly. ‘Too late to start thinking that way now. I’ll look after Gemma, anyway.’

He could hardly mean what she thought he might mean.

‘You won’t think less of me afterwards?’ she asks.

Victor laughs.

‘You’re half my age,’ he says, ‘and twice as old-fashioned. I do love you.’

Victor departs by himself, to save any possible embarrassment, to start work in the library with Hamish. Elsa follows some few minutes later, flushed and happy. She pauses in the rose garden, to admire. Around her, still wet with their early morning sprinkler, red and white hybrid tea roses burst into their unnatural, multi-petalled life. Iceberg, she detects, and Ena Harkness.

‘How pink you are, my dear,’ observes Gemma, appearing from the other side of a crimson floribunda in an antique garden chair (with its original caning), which she propels by virtue of small brass handles set in the plump leather upholstery. ‘So different from Janice, who always seemed so pale and distraught. Thank you for the typing; excellently done. I was afraid I might have kept you up too late, and you’d neglect it. I’ve left another pile for you; I hope you won’t mind. I couldn’t sleep last night. I stayed up till early morning making an inventory. I have become anxious about property. I know it’s unreasonable, but I can’t help it. Money is such a tyranny, you’ve no idea. Did you sleep well?’

‘Yes.’

‘The sleep of the virtuous! Did you have the kedgeree for breakfast?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought some of it had gone, at last! We refreeze, and reheat thoroughly. It’s supposed to be safe, but one sometimes wonders. Food’s such a price, though, and it’s a crime to waste food, don’t you think?’

‘Yes.’

Gemma is wearing a pale yellow blouse which reflects unkindly on her complexion. She seems sallow and tired. The morning light, which makes Elsa seem at one with the bounding, procreative universe, merely puts Gemma out of tune with her existence: makes her seem herself like something often frozen, often barely rewarmed, after a previous night’s feast.

‘You don’t have to agree with me all the time,’ remarks Gemma. ‘I expect it was Victor told you to say yes or no and nothing else?’

‘Yes.’ Elsa is surprised.

‘And you paid attention to him! How wonderful! You do remind me of myself when young, Elsa. Come and sit with me by the pool, and the servants will bring us iced coffee and sugary biscuits, and I’ll go on with my story.’

‘I think Victor wants me in the library.’

‘You’ve done quite enough for Victor already this morning.’ remarks Gemma, tartly.

Elsa blushes. Was Gemma there watching? Can she have heard what was said. Perhaps the statue of Diana hides a microphone? Hardly. If Gemma knew the tenor of their conversation, she would not now, surely, be so friendly? She would be hysterical after the manner of Sheila, Elsa’s mother, on discovering a love letter in her husband’s pocket, reducing that nice much-pursued man to instant, abject apology, total remorse. Wasn’t that how wives behaved? Or were the rich different?

Gemma sits Elsa on a tapestry cushion at her feet and continues her story, occasionally stopping to pop a sweet-meat into both their mouths. Elsa has the uncomfortable feeling she is being fattened. But for what?

1966.

Interminable years ago! What have we not suffered and learned since then?

Gemma’s first job. First and last, as it turned out.

The Fox and First offices were on the top two floors of the narrow building in Carnaby Street where we last observed Gemma, falling in love with the tight-buttocked back of young Mr Fox. On the seventh floor were the showrooms, and Mr First’s office: on the penthouse floor, reached by a narrow wrought-iron circular staircase, circa 1860, was Mr Fox’s flat.

An expensive conversion had turned poky rooms into glass-lined expanses where psychedelic fantasy ran riot, sprawling over walls and ceilings in brilliant streaks. Far down below, anyone who had the courage to stand near the sheet glass window wall and look down, could see the flower-children wander, not yet discredited by time, events, and the emergence of their own natures.

The theme within was, as it were, curvaceous. The office desks, lime green, shaped like giant eggs; the filing cabinets were concealed in a series of pink plastic balls, heaped one on the other, as if laid by some other-worldly hen. Fox and First jewellery was displayed in the holes and crevices of mock Barbara Hepworth pieces, in transparent yellow perspex, suspended from the ceiling by gold chains.

In the midst of this, health shoes (especially built for the comfort of wide feet) firmly planted in the orange and mauve streaked carpet, stood Marion Ramsbottle, twenty-eight, stocky, desperate and determined, dressed in cheap black skirt and white blouse; the outward expression of her inner fantasies focused only, one might imagine, in her black net stockings and bright green, satin-bowed, duchess-heeled shoes. Marion’s hair was back-combed and lacquered into a stiff fuzz, resilient to the touch, which stood like a halo round her head; and, angel-like, Marion wore an expression composed of kindness, self-righteousness and patience-sorely-tried, upon her pale and frankly spotty face. In her plump hand was a starry perspex watering can, with which she attended to the many pot plants. Gemma was half relieved, half disappointed to see so familiar and reassuring a person. If you ignored the shoes and stockings, Marion might have been one of twenty girls in the soprano section of the local Handel choir back home.

If one could ignore the shoes and stockings, of course. Perhaps one couldn’t. Shouldn’t.

‘So you’re the new girl,’ said Marion, in her weary voice. ‘The agency rang through. At least you’re a blonde. The last girl they sent, Ophelia she called herself, had red hair. It clashed with the furniture. Mind you, she only lasted a week.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked Gemma, as she followed Marion round the pot plants, learning their names and daily watering requirements. Crocus, Weddellina, Maranta, Passiflora, Oleander, Stephanotis. How sadly the names fell from Marion’s lips. Paphiopedilum Sukhokulii. She had to project her voice over a background din which Gemma could not at first identify, but presently concluded to be the raised voices of a host of parrots, whose aviary, gold latticed, mosqued shaped, was placed like a fragile dome over the splashing indoor fountain.

‘The work doesn’t suit some,’ replied Marion, ‘nor quite frankly, does this style of office. The flimsy’s always damp from the fountain and the ink runs on the files, and the parrots get loose sometimes and shit all over the outgoing mail. But I think it was mostly that she thought she might put on weight from all the tasting. Mr Fox does a lot of experimental cooking and likes to have a second opinion. I don’t much care for foreign foods myself; not outside their country of origin, anyway. It spoils one for abroad, don’t you think?’

‘Oh, quite!’

‘Be careful not to overwater the Salix Setsubra. It’s the devil. It’s crazy to try and grow it indoors. But as they say, you don’t have to be crazy to work here but it helps... I work mostly for Mr First. He’s the brains behind the organisation, and the money. Mr Fox is just the talent. You’ll be working for him.’

Mr Fox! Mr Fox, whoever and whatever you are, Gemma loves you. Are those your footsteps overhead? Yes. What are you thinking, feeling? Do you know about me?

‘But what doing?’ persisted Gemma.

‘Any job’s what you make of it. They keep me for the heavy work – typing, filing, and so on – what nobody else can be bothered to do. That’s my fate in life. Yours is more on the PR side. Customer relations. And a bit of modelling, of course. Mr Fox likes to try out his pieces.’

‘Not with my clothes off?’

‘Not if it’s ear-rings. But you can hardly model a navel stone or a pubic gem fully-clothed, can you? But don’t worry. Mr Fox doesn’t regard working girls as human. You have to be someone special – have a title, or be a famous model, or immensely rich, in the gossip columns – before he thinks you belong to the same species as him.’

Mr Fox. This is Gemma. That is not how you’re going to think of me. Do you hear?

Gemma went to the window and cautiously looked down. Toy people and clockwork cars moved below. There was no guardrail or any sill to the bow-shaped sweep of window, with its squares of thin glass set in fine lead frames, which curved out from floor to ceiling. Through any one of the squares a man, a woman, might easily fall.

‘Keep away,’ said Marion sharply.

‘It doesn’t look very safe.’

‘It isn’t.’

‘Someone might have a nasty accident.’

‘They have, and I’d rather not talk about it, thank you very much,’ snapped Marion. ‘Turn the Amaryllis daily, or else it grows crooked.’

‘What sort of accident?’

‘I was only joking,’ said Marion, but Gemma knew, from long experience of Hermione, Hannah, Helen, Hortense and Alice, that Marion was lying. ‘One of the panes was broken when I came in one morning, that was all. It was a week before anyone would come to mend it: everyone said it was too dangerous. We couldn’t even sue the architect. He’d gone bankrupt – well, Mr First kept him to the penalty clause in the contract. Late completion. These are my hyacinths. I keep them behind the duplicator in case Mr Fox sees them. He might drop them out of the window. Well, they’re ordinary, aren’t they. And now you know the flowers, you’d better get familiar with the stock and the prices in case any of the public call. They do sometimes. Not often. There’s a lot of mail order. Mr Fox spends half his time at Ascot, or Lord’s, or houseparties, making useful contacts, and the rest of the time upstairs in the penthouse, working out designs. He doesn’t like to be disturbed.’

Mr Fox. This is Gemma. You won’t mind me disturbing you. Mr Fox, I will disturb you to the roots of your being.

‘The trouble is,’ said Marion dismally, ‘I can’t keep a straight face. When I see a water-soluble brooch at four thousand pounds it just makes me want to laugh.’

‘It wouldn’t make me laugh.’

‘Mind you, the prices do mesmerise. If you see a lot of pieces at eight thousand, four thousand begins to seem cheap. That’s how it works. Mr Fox designs mostly in solid gold or spun sugar. This head-dress here is in the middle range. Barley sugar flavoured, polyurethane coated for display purposes only. He sells a lot of manacles like these; that’s for the kinky lot. And personally I don’t like looking at the armpit jewels too closely for fear of what I might see. Not that I’m shocked – I’m as broad minded as anybody – I just don’t like to be reminded of what doesn’t apply to me. Sex, and all that.’

Marion looked as if she were about to cry. ‘I just make myself useful,’ said Marion. ‘There’s always room for someone who likes to be useful, don’t you think?’

So the dentist’s wife back home had once, sadly, spoken to Gemma. The dentist’s wife worked as her husband’s receptionist; she mixed the amalgam for him, and was the source of several of his various income tax allowances. Her hands were a great deal more deft than her husband’s; her business brain just as acute; her response to other people’s needs (and her empathy with their pain) considerably more pronounced; but her bosom was flat, her complexion muddy, her teeth protruding, and her legs crooked, so her opinion of herself, at any rate during her husband’s lifetime, was low. ‘Always room for someone who likes to be useful!’ And Gemma looking at the dentist’s wife, had marvelled that she put up with a husband who would dive between the breasts of the young lady patients on the shallowest of pretexts; just as she marvelled that Mrs Hemsley put up with having five unwanted daughters, in order that her husband might have the son he deserved.

Gemma, mind you, was young, arrogant, and pretty.

Now Gemma looked at Marion – that anxious, friendly, unerotic person – and both liked her and despised her; and subtly altered her own stance, so that both bosom and bottom were a little more pronounced and the length of her skirt appeared provocative and wilful, rather than merely provincial.

Mr Fox, come to me!

Mr Fox thereupon came rattling down the iron staircase, took a cursory look at Gemma, said ‘You’re the new girl. You’ll do. Feed the parrots, will you. Bottled water, never tap. Too much chlorine,’ and rattled on up the stairs again, leaving behind him a strong smell of garlic and talcum powder mixed – and a general impression of lithe, small buttocked blue-jeaned masculinity, combined with a face of almost feminine beauty: wide-eyed, red-lipped, clear complexioned, to which a brown silky goatee beard, which seemed to come from another age, and to belong to another person entirely, adding a slight touch of – what? Ah yes. The freak show at a touring circus to which Gemma had once taken Hermione, Hannah, Helen, Hortense, and little Alice, gaining free entrance under an insecure canvas flap – the price of admission being clearly beyond Mrs Hemsley’s purse – and which had caused such an uproar in all their lives. Little Alice, though sworn to secrecy, had finally told her mother about it, thus betraying Gemma, her guilty love; and although Mrs Hemsley, once informed, could have forgiven the excursion, she could not easily forgive the degree of deceit entailed in accomplishing it without her knowledge. Hers were the deceased vicar’s children, after all, and not just anyone’s and since the new incumbent, a lively fresh-faced youth, seemed too interested in his choir boys to set about providing the village with another generation of clerical children, the ex-vicar’s wife felt her responsibility the more. No wonder she made a fuss. Uproar.

Be that as it may, Mr Fox’s arrival, departure, and passing blessing left Gemma breathless with admiration and a strong sense of vindication, as if the disastrous visit to the freak show to see the hermaphrodite, the mermaid and the bearded lady, had after all had a richer meaning, a greater significance, than either she or Mrs Hemsley had at the time realised. Perhaps Alice knew it, somewhere in her heart, and wished then, as always, to protect Gemma from the consequences of her own destructive desires.

‘I’ve done the parrots,’ said Marion, sourly. ‘I’ll show you the filing. If the names are double-barrelled, and they often are, I file under the last names. Pinks in this drawer, green in that, and whites in here. The parrot cage needs cleaning once a week in hot water, once a month in cold. Otherwise things start to smell, and Mr Fox wouldn’t like that.’

‘And Mr Fox? What’s he like?’

‘Don’t be greedy,’ was all Marion would say to that, and there was a look of fear upon her face, which Gemma did not understand. What need for fear is there, after all, in those who minister to the needs of the powerful, be they kings, bishops, business executives, the designers of spun-sugar jewellery? The barber survives the palace revolution, the chambermaid the coup, and the good clean typist is always in demand although blood may flow on the board-room floor. And Marion, her button eyes efficiently if sadly focused on the complexities of the Fox and First card-index, the columns of matching figures which to her have the sanctity of beauty – this side balancing that, in proper harmony – would be abused, exploited, overworked, underpaid, but truly valued, so long, at any rate, as her eyesight lasted.

So why was Marion afraid?

Gemma pauses in her tale. Victor comes striding out of the house from the direction of the library, and passes out of sight amongst the colonnades and statuary.

‘What a handsome man Victor is,’ says Gemma. ‘Some men get so much better looking as they get older. I take it you don’t much care for your own generation?’

‘No.’

‘Who would? I do sympathise. Nevertheless, it seems hardly fair on your elder sisters.’

‘I’m the eldest.’

‘I was speaking of the human family, not your mother’s.’

Elsa blushes and grinds her tiny teeth. She is becoming tired of being condescended to. Some revolutionary spark ignites within her. If she can bed Gemma’s husband, by God she will. To serve her out, if nothing else.

‘Never mind,’ says Gemma, patting Elsa’s large white knee. ‘I know just how you feel. And I know I’m very old-fashioned, speaking of men as goodies to go round. But remember the dark ages in which I was reared – in which man was one’s future meal-ticket. But you have been reared in the brilliant light of self-awareness: you have all the advantages. You are free from the fear of pregnancy, free to choose an equal as a mate, to live with him as and when you please, by mutual consent; you can be as sexually active, or idle, as you wish, and no one to think any the worse of you for that. You can stand on your own two feet. It just seems rather unfair of you to stand on Janice’s toes. She’s not nearly as agile as you. Though, I grant you, half the size.’

Victor, to Elsa’s relief, now approaches them. He is in a good humour.

‘Love your chiffonier, Gemma,’ he says. ‘The one in the library room. But why have you painted it with scarlet gloss?’

‘Because I like scarlet gloss.’ She is stubborn.

‘You’re a big girl now,’ says Victor, indulgently. ‘You’re too old to know what you like.’

‘Advice about what I like and what I don’t like comes expensive.’

‘Not mine.’

‘Is Hamish selling you all that boring stuff in the billiard room?’

‘So far.’

‘Good. I suppose it isn’t boring at all, but valuable, and you’re laughing at us?’

‘Only out of the side of my mouth you can’t see. And did you know your ironing table is oyster oak?’

Gemma laughs, merrily.

‘Elsa,’ she says, ‘perhaps you’d better go and see if Hamish needs you in the library. I want to talk business to Victor.’

‘Yes, run along,’ says Victor, as he used to say to Wendy, run along, from the very first day she rose from crawling position to sway on her tiny feet. Eventually she became good at running, and made a very fine wing at hockey, and even, later, occasionally captained the school team.

‘Run along, Elsa.’

Elsa gets up – her knees creak as she does so – and walks towards the library. Her heart hurts. The kedgeree weighs heavy in her stomach. She is conscious of the pair of them watching her, and of the movement of her buttocks in her jeans. Before breakfast, since clearly it was going to be a hot day, she cut off their bottoms to make knee-length shorts. Now she wishes she hadn’t.

Gemma calls. Elsa turns back.

‘Elsa,’ she says, ‘how many are there in your family, of which you say you are the eldest?’

‘Seven.’

‘How wonderful! How fertile! It runs in the blood, I suppose. Hamish and I are such dead-ends. Childless. It’s a matter of grief to both of us. But it makes us rather more vivid people, I daresay; so much natural energy damned up inside us.’

Elsa opens her mouth to speak. Gemma nods her dismissal. Victor declines to meet her eye. Elsa goes to the library. Hamish sits at the head of the table, in a tall Jacobean side chair. He wears an open-necked shirt, as if to emphasise the informality of the occasion, but his movements are stiff and agonised, and his face is coloured with embarrassment. He toys with a carved ivory-handled paperknife, but carefully, as if to illustrate the sharpness of its cutting edge. Hamish smiles, with difficulty. Smiling does not come easily to him at the best of times, but he has seen other people do it and he knows it has to be done.

‘So you deigned to come.’ His voice is harsh.

‘I was sent.’ Elsa stands first on one foot and then the other. So she stood before her headmistress, who had the same difficulty with smiling, the same rasping voice, harsh with the genuine attempt to be kind.

‘You girls are all the same. None of you are prepared to accept the slightest responsibility for your actions.’ So says Hamish now, as once the headmistress said.

‘If we’re all the same, why pick on me?’ Did she say that then? Or did she merely want to, and lacked the courage.

Hamish stops smiling. He waves Elsa towards a polished pig bench, on which she sits.

‘Well?’ she asks, when his silence becomes oppressive.

‘You don’t seem to like me very much,’ he complains. ‘What was Victor talking about? You know he had the nerve to offer me two hundred for this table? Two hundred for a really majestic piece of oak like this. I’ve seen one like it at Sotheby’s go for over four thousand.’

‘Perhaps it’s reproduction. They sometimes are.’

She knows that much.

‘Nonsense,’ he says. ‘Just look at that wood. It’s got a nice bit of age to it, you can tell... Can’t you?’

He’s unsure.

‘They beat them with chains, sometimes, to age them.’

‘People like Victor?’

‘Of course not,’ she cries. ‘Victor’s the most trustworthy man in this world. He has his hang-ups, more than I thought, but he wouldn’t ever lie about furniture. He loves furniture as he loves...’ Her voice trails away. What does Victor love?

Hamish smiles his cracked smile.

‘… He loves his life,’ she finishes.

‘He loves you? Does he?’ How he grates!

‘He’d do anything for me, and I’d do anything for him,’ she says, but again her voice dies away, its power and passion fading.

These are yesterday’s truths, not today’s. Yesterday she loved Victor, childishly, as a child might love its father within the glory of omnipotence; today she is left with Victor’s reality, and yesterday’s words still leaping to her lips. Tears start into her eyes.

‘You are crying,’ says Hamish, and turns his own head away. Tears glint behind his thick glasses. So, occasionally, her stepfather would turn his head, stumbling unexpectedly into self-pity, saying – ‘The men don’t like me. I have no natural authority. All they notice are the stripes on my arm.’

‘You shouldn’t cry,’ says Hamish. ‘Something as beautiful as you shouldn’t cry. I love beautiful things. I reach for them, but they’re always just beyond me. Do you understand? I’m crippled.’

Elsa stops crying, interested. What does he mean?

‘I’m not much good at the things I want to be good at.’

Sex, does he mean?

‘You can make money,’ she consoles him.

He shrugs that off, irritated. A smell of hot oil fills the air, a dark mist swirls before her eyes. Some of the lamp wicks, she notices, are burning unevenly; others are too high. Elsa is familiar with the problem. Her mother Sheila would light the rooms by oil when the electricity supply, as frequently happened, was disconnected for non-payment of the bill. Now she attends to the lamps. He watches, marvelling.

‘I did your typing,’ he claims. ‘Doesn’t that make you like me?’

‘No. It gives me the shivers.’

‘There’ll be some more tonight. Gemma will want it done.’

‘Then I’ll do it myself.’

‘She won’t think much of your typing.’

Elsa hesitates: she wants Gemma’s good opinion. But then she wants everyone’s good opinion. Some girls do. She knows it, and knows it gets her into trouble.

‘I enjoy typing,’ he says. ‘I love to see it emerging clean and neat upon the page. It’s the nearest I get to painting pictures. To be an artist – now that would be to be a man. To write a book; to have a finger on the pulse of humanity – you’re laughing at me?’

‘No,’ she says, and she isn’t. He takes off his glasses, and rubs his tired eyes. She looks at him, safe in the knowledge that now she can at least see better than him. His face, without its glasses, seems vulnerable: his eyes tired and sad. Yes, I could, she thinks. I could make him better. I could please him, and please Victor, and please Marina and Gemma need never know. And if I don’t particularly please myself, does it matter?

Once Elsa, as a consequence of wearing tight jeans, nylon knickers, and taking antibiotics, developed a nasty case of vaginal thrush. The ensuing inspections, probings and treatments, in a teaching hospital and in full view of thirty medical students, had perhaps eroded her romanticism, and the notion that penetration by the male, whether with the scalpel, the probe, or the penis, must necessarily be accompanied by love. If I could put up with all that, she thinks, I can surely put up with Hamish. It would be selfish not to.

‘All right,’ she says. ‘If you want to do my typing tonight, you’d better.’

‘I look forward to it,’ he says. ‘I really do. I’m not just doing this on medical advice.’

‘Medical advice?’ She pauses, on her way out into the sunlight, and the patio, and the swimming pool.

‘I have some small trouble with my prostate gland. The doctor says sexual activity is the best remedy.’

Elsa blinks, but whether from the sudden strong light, or from astonishment, she scarcely knows herself.