8

‘What price dream kitchens now?’ laments Gemma. ‘Who dreams of kitchens except those who have given up dreams of love?’

What can Elsa reply? She holds her tongue. Gemma has taken Elsa down to the heart of the house, to the kitchen. Here Johnnie and Annie work, in the dignified dress of their native land, in a great sweep of shiny-white hygiene – cooking areas leading to pantries to utility rooms to laundries – peering with their alien eyes into the detail of Western domestic preoccupation, padding on soft soles, supervising the clumsy work of a handful of dull-eyed local servants.

Down here machinery whirrs, purifying the air, disposing of smells, sterilising dish cloths, sucking up dust, spewing out ozone – and at the moment shredding cabbage for the evening meal, and dripping oil at calculated intervals into churning egg-yolks to make its mayonnaise.

Gemma is going to make Elsa’s birthday cake – the one Elsa must share with Wendy, Victor’s daughter.

Gemma points out the travel posters on the walls – distant scenes of golden shores and pounding waves, and laughing native women bearing produce on their heads.

‘I’ve been to all those places,’ she says sadly. ‘I don’t have to cheat and get them from travel agencies, like some people do. But the places are never quite like the posters. Just rows and rows of new hotels and oil on the beaches. So much better to want, than to have! I am afraid we are all at the end of our dreams. Aren’t you?’

‘No.’

‘But what do you hope for, Elsa, in the end?’

‘Not to be like my mother,’ says Elsa, ‘that’s all.’

Gemma steers her chair into an alcove especially designed for its accommodation, and waits for mixing bowl, wooden spoon and ingredients to be set in front of her. In her hand she holds Great-Aunt May’s cookery book, its tattered pages spattered with the mixtures of past ages, carefully preserved between perspex sheets.

Gemma weighs her ingredients with care, taking the weight of three eggs in flour, butter and sugar.

‘Of course this isn’t a proper sponge,’ says Gemma. ‘A proper sponge is made without butter, but is rather dry and rubbery as a consequence.’

One of the eggs slips and breaks between her fingers, as, automatically, she clutches to save it. The shell is unusually brittle and paper-fine.

‘What a horrible egg,’ Gemma cries. ‘It’s unnatural! Nothing’s right! Nothing’s what it should be, any more.’

She stretches out her sticky hand for Elsa’s attention. Elsa wipes it with kitchen paper, between the slender fingers and round the unsightly stub of the missing ring finger.

Annie fetches another egg. The weighing process re-starts.

‘Does my finger repel you?’ enquires Gemma, as she flicks a switch and butter and sugar blend.

‘No,’ says Elsa, poor Elsa, and then – ‘well, not much.’

‘I can’t really think what I’m doing alive at all,’ complains Gemma. ‘Not only am I of no possible use to anyone but I positively repel people as well. As for poor Hamish, he should never have married me. It is a great misfortune for a rich man to have a barren wife.’

‘I don’t think having children is all that important,’ says Elsa. ‘The point of life can’t just be to hand it on, can it?’

‘But it is, it is,’ moans Gemma, adding eggs, one at a time. ‘You’re quoting Victor, in any case, I know you are.’

‘Anyway Victor and I don’t want any children. He has one already, and as for me, I know what I’m missing, don’t worry.’

Gemma looks quite taken aback.

‘I hope not many girls feel like you, or what will my friends do for grandchildren?’

Gemma sifts the flour into the now white and creamy mixture in the bowl.

‘I thought you told me you loved Victor? In which case, surely you want to pledge a token of your love, to future generations? To join your genes to his and see what happens next?’

‘It’s not Victor’s child I don’t want,’ protests Elsa. ‘It’s any child. I’m not interested in the future. I’m interested in the here and now. There are far too many children in the world, anyhow.’

‘Not as far as I am concerned,’ says Gemma, sharply. ‘Though I seem to remember thinking the same when I was your age, and looking after Hermione, Hannah, Hortense, Helen and Alice. But now I begin to feel like one of nature’s dead-ends. Nature has observed me, and decided against me. She will breed eels which give electric shocks, and seagulls with internal desalination plants, and fish which turn red at the approach of the opposite sex, but she will not let me hand on my inheritance. I am the weakest, and she will not let me survive.’

‘You could always adopt,’ says Elsa, with that streak of practicality which both irritates and refreshes.

‘It’s not the same,’ says Gemma, not to be comforted. ‘Though I have tried. But there’s such a shortage of babies to adopt: only idiots go through with unwanted pregnancies these days, and who wants an idiot’s child? After hostilities ended in Vietnam Hamish flew me out there – he had a consignment of mutated orchids from the defoliated areas to collect – but I couldn’t see a baby I liked. Then I came across Annie, who was widowed and pregnant, and flew her back here to oversee the pregnancy, but I’m afraid her husband turned out to be merely foxing dead – he’d been in the Southern Government – and the baby was born prematurely and died, and I was left with Annie and Johnnie, and no baby. All my life I have been dogged by the unexpected. Nothing turns out right for me. Even this cake I am making now – I have to take the most stringent precautions, or else it will most certainly not rise. When I was with Great-Aunt May I could throw them together and they never went wrong. Now the light has failed me and I must put my faith in domestic science. My mother could never bake a proper cake, according to Great-Aunt May.’

Gemma clutches the pendant she wears. It seems a cheap and shoddy thing, to Elsa, containing an old-fashioned artificial pearl.

‘But at least,’ says Gemma, ‘I have never had to endure the swelling up, the grossness, of pregnancy, or the humiliation of giving birth.’

‘It’s not that part I mind,’ says Elsa. ‘I think I’d rather enjoy all that. It’s just afterwards. Never going anywhere without a bottle and a bagful of bits and pieces, and disturbed nights, and never really doing what you want, or as you like, ever again.’

‘I’d have a nanny to see to all that,’ says Gemma. ‘If only I had your temperament.

‘If only,’ adds Gemma, ‘I had your body.’

Gemma eyes Elsa speculatively. Elsa shuffles her large and shapely feet, none too clean between the toes.

‘For all I know,’ says Elsa, nervously, ‘I’m completely infertile. I’ve been on the pill since the beginning, so how would I know.’

‘I am quite sure, Elsa,’ says Gemma firmly, ‘that you are abundantly, gloriously fertile, and if I were you I’d throw away your horrid pills and find out.’

Elsa is too shocked to reply. Gemma bears the cake tin, lined, greased, and floured (although clearly non-stick) and two-thirds full of a light, white, swirly mixture which seems barely to contain its own energy, in its impatience to be rising and hardening, and is clearly of the male gender, to the oven in the wall. The oven has especial magnetic doors, to prevent any inadvertent slamming and consequent collapse of the rising batter following upon sudden loss of carbon dioxide.

‘And are you looking forward to meeting your stepdaughter tomorrow?’ asks Gemma, lightly.

‘I mightn’t stay,’ says Elsa. ‘Victor’s not too keen on my staying.’

‘I hope he’s not ashamed of you?’

‘No. If he’s ashamed of anyone he’s ashamed of them,’ says Elsa, with brilliant clarity. ‘And since I’m not married to Victor, and don’t want to be, I’m not Wendy’s stepmother. We’ve finished with all those titles. Wife, husband, in-laws, steps and so on. They were the cause of all the trouble.’

‘You may change the system,’ says Gemma. ‘You may do without the bits of paper – the marriage certificate, the birth certificate, the deeds of the house, and the mortgage papers – but the people involved remain much the same. There is really no escape.’

Gemma summons Johnnie, and says something to him which Elsa cannot hear, and then leads Elsa through to the buttery where the evening’s mayonnaise is in trouble. A fault has developed in the oil-drip feed, and the egg-yolk has failed to coagulate.

‘Will you do it by hand for me?’ asks Gemma to Elsa. ‘I’m afraid my wrists tire so easily! It’s rather a tedious occupation, but I’ll go on with my story while you do.’

So Elsa sits, with aching left wrist, dripping oil, drop by drop from a jug, into a bowl of egg-yolk held steady at the base by a damp cloth – fetched steaming from the steriliser in wooden tongs – and beats with aching right hand, and Gemma, cursed or blessed, sits and smiles, and talks, and fingers her cheap pendant.

1966.

Years, years ago.

Mr First was gone, back to his office.

Gemma’s happy mood was spoilt.

Gemma took the paperknife and stabbed it into the lime-green desk, causing flakes of plastic to leap into the air. Again and again, she struck, and wished the desk was human flesh. But whose? Her own? Mr First’s? Or even Mr Fox’s? Gemma hardly knew. It was the flesh of all the living world she hated, and wished to hurt. And would no one come to stop her?

Surely. Great-Aunt May, where are you now?

No one. Stab, and stab again!

Perhaps the blade would break and fly into her face and blind her.

For such was Gemma’s conviction that she led a charmed life, that she could afford the luxury of such dreadful thoughts. And where was Mr Fox? Gemma had dreamed of him all night, and imagined that such dreams must surely be reciprocal. Had it meant nothing to Mr Fox?

Mr Fox, where are you? Gemma needs you, wants you.

Her need, her want, rings through the universe.

Mr Fox, I am unused, I am waiting. Defy my need, defy your own existence. I am the empty vessel of the Almighty.

Mr Fox, do you hear? Are you deaf?

Where are you?

Hidden away upstairs in your penthouse, watching Wimbledon on the television screen which nestles in the heart of a great yellow knitted orchid? Or gone out the evening before, to spend the dark hours in nameless debauchery, and not yet returned?

Mr Fox, you are unfair.

Stab, and stab again.

‘Destruction is not pretty,’ a voice behind her said.

Mr Fox.

‘Don’t damage things, Gemma. Value them. Temper fades. Weals in wood endure forever, witness to the dark side of our nature. People heal. Things do not. Has Mr First upset you?’

‘Yes.’

‘He upsets me too, my dear, but holds a purse-string or so, so bear with him for my sake. But perhaps, don’t be alone with him too long. A bad temper and a mean nature is more infectious than an attack of measles. As with ugliness, it rubs off. Too long exposure to Mr First might be dangerous, Gemma, in more ways than one. See, already, how you are driving the knife into that poor pretty desk? I’m sure that yesterday you would not have dreamt of doing such a thing.’

Gemma turned slow luminous eyes upon her employer. Mr Fox stretched out his elegant, manicured hand and touched his typist’s cheek.

‘Gemma,’ he said. ‘Gemma. It is a lovely name. I’m glad we found you, or at least that Miss Hilary did: she is very good to us and understands our needs. Now kindly feed the parrots and give them fresh water. Not from the tap. They prefer bottled spa water from the Midi: they have a natural discrimination which must be encouraged. It keeps their feathers spruce. And at mid-day – neither earlier nor later – you will come up to the penthouse, Gemma, for dictation.’

‘My shorthand isn’t very good.’

‘I am pleased to hear it, and not at all surprised. Language is too beautiful, too serious, too subtle in its proper form for a sensitive person to easily reduce to scrawls upon a page. Mr Pitman is responsible for more cultural debasement than was ever laid at poor Genghis Khan’s door.’

‘Yes, Mr Fox.’

Genghis Khan. Who’s Genghis Khan?

‘All the same, I do hope you are a fast writer. I don’t want my words to be wasted, lost in thin air.’

‘No, Mr Fox.’

‘Thank you, Gemma. Pretty child.’

And Mr Fox danced away on light feet up the circular stairs, coloured lights from the ever circling chandelier catching upon his pale suit, with its interwoven hint of glitter. And his diamonds, or what passed for diamonds, flashed as he went; the lapel pin, the ring, the bracelet, the pendant lurking in the bushy hairs of his chest; could they be real?

Yes. They could. They were.

Mr Fox, dandy.

The absurdity, the glory of the extreme.

How Mr Hemsley would have snorted: how the doctor, the dentist and the butcher would have sneered. Yet how they would all have envied.

Mr Fox, oh, Mr Fox, you are an idiot, and Gemma loves you. She has searched the universe, and found you.

People heal, things do not. So Mr Fox spoke to Gemma, falsely.

Did Gemma heal, after the death of her mother? Gemma was only three years old when her mother died, absorbing sorrow into growing brain, and bone, and tissue. Did her nature take a twist and a turn, like a gnarled pear tree branch grafted on to a young apple tree? For all that Great-Aunt May took little Gemma into her own bed after the funeral, and consoled the small cold body, by night, with the warmth of her older, tougher being, did little Gemma really heal?

Little Gemma, waking, in spite of Great-Aunt May, would see her dead mother’s face pressed against the windowpane, calling to be let in.

Or do you think Gemma withstood, without some alteration in temperament, the sight of her earlier, living mother, coughing blood into the cracked scullery sink, her gaunt face reflected back from a window rattling in the cold north wind?

Do you think Gemma survived, unscathed, the anonymity of her father, that roving repertory actor, who scattered his seed backstage, or in the alleys round the theatre, or in theatrical lodging houses: children springing like flowers where he walked, or at any rate thrust his procreative loins? Growing up to live, and partly live.

Damaged people go on living: hide the damage from themselves; eat, sleep, most fervently reproduce themselves, laugh, cry, even offer up some verisimilitude of love, but are never what they could have been, should have been.

Mr Fox, Leon Fox, dancing up to his penthouse, partly living, mostly dying, clinging to illusion, power, and grandeur with his well-manicured fingernails, how he snatched at the surface of other people’s lives!

Mr Fox, Leon Fox, up in his penthouse room, stared at his face in the Art Nouveau mirror, and feared the falling of his hair and the rotting of his teeth.

Downstairs Gemma fed the parrots their daily ration of birdseed, and refilled their cut-glass water bowls.

‘Mr Fox’s father was a waiter at the Ritz,’ said Marion, back in the office after making a pendant delivery to the Dorchester, where a visiting film-tycoon had touched down on his way to Tokyo: touching here, touching there, living on front-money for a film which never would be made, never could be made.

‘Only nobody’s supposed to know, so don’t let on I told you.’

‘A waiter! I don’t believe you.’ Gemma was shocked.

‘A very bad waiter too,’ said Marion. ‘He hated food and he hated rich people. They say Leon is over-compensating. That was a very rude pendant Mr Fox did for that film-tycoon. In gold, too. A naked girl sitting on a fat man’s knees while he was doing goodness knows what, I didn’t look too closely. There was a magnifying glass in the box – there always is – but I didn’t use it. Our clients seem to love to be insulted. It was a portrait, if you ask me. Mr Fox couldn’t bear to deliver it himself, I had to go. You know what he’s like about other people’s physical appearance. I don’t know how he puts up with me. Mind you, it’s fat people he can’t abide, most of all. And I suppose I’m just stocky, not really fat.’

‘Mr Fox must be wonderful with his hands,’ was all Gemma would say, and it was then that Marion caught sight of the paperknife, sticking point down into the lime-green desk. It quivered, as she looked. What made it shudder so? Was it the seagulls, which now thudded, in a sudden spasm of senseless flocking against the convex sheets of glass; or the nearer, gentler flutter of parrots’ wings? The birds were lively today. Sometimes they would perch silently on their bare branches, hour after hour, beady eyes flickering, sulking behind silver mesh, which they could all too easily evade, if they had the wish. Then some impulse of light or noise, or distant rhythm, would animate them, as now, and they would flutter, squirm, squawk and eventually, defying the symbol of their servitude, fly up and over the silver mesh, and about the room, and batter against the windows. Sometimes the birds inside and the birds outside would, between them, shatter the glass with the clash of their discontent, and feathers and even specks of blood would fly.

The knife, held in the flimsy flaking plastic, toppled and fell even as Gemma turned her attention to it. Marion’s stolid face, drained of colour, was given an unexpected pattern of light and shade, of grief and gauntness, as if the marks of daily experience, daily endurance, daily horror, lingered only marginally beneath her pallid skin.

‘What are you doing with that knife?’ asked Marion, in dead tones.

‘Nothing,’ said Gemma, much like little Alice, surprised in mischief. And she went across and picked it up and tested the sharpness of the blade.

‘Put it down,’ said Marion.

‘Mr First said he’d cut my throat with it, Marion,’ said Gemma with haughty blitheness, ‘if I didn’t go out to lunch with him.’

Marion neither smiled nor relaxed.

‘Then perhaps you’d better,’ she said, carefully.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Gemma, startled. ‘He’s only a dirty old man.’

As if dirty old men were not to be pitied, understood, and had no right to the satisfaction of their needs, but could be dismissed out of hand!

‘No older than Mr Fox.’

‘I can’t believe that. Mr Fox has lots of hair.’

‘It’s woven hair.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A plastic surgeon takes strands of pubic hair and grafts it on to the scalp. That’s why Mr Fox’s hair is so springy and curly. It’s woven. Gemma, I don’t think you can go on working here.’

‘Why not?’

This job, her shared room with Marion, her love for Mr Fox – these were all Gemma had in life: the foundation blocks on which her future was to be built.

Why not? Why not, indeed?

‘It’s not safe.’ Marion’s head was lowered. Again the gauntness, the look of madness. Well that, of course, was what it was. Marion was mad. Her parents knew it. And that was why there had been talk of homes, or putting away: why Marion still lived with her parents, hadn’t broken away to start her own life. Marion was mad.

Oh, God, thought Gemma, now what have I got into? Will Marion take the knife and plunge it into my heart? That was the kind of thing, in Gemma’s experience, that mad people did.

Mrs Dove had been mad. Mrs Dove the butcher’s wife had killed her two children, and then herself, to save them all (or so she whispered, dying) from the Roundheads. Mrs Dove lived in a wooden house halfway up a hill at the end of an unmade road: the butcher used to come home in the evenings up to his elbows in dried blood. It was his joke. He had a round bald head, and little puffy eyes, and drank a great deal of beer. Mrs Dove had a four-mile walk into the village, and suffered from phlebitis; few people cared to visit her. The cottage smelt. The children, girls, had long hair, which she arranged carefully, with curling tongs, into Cavalier ringlets. Poor little dead girls, saved forever from the Roundheads; good dead butcher’s wife, mad as a hatter.

Nothing wrong with her, a few said, except him. Poor him, most people said. Married to a mad woman. Worse, a mad woman who gave herself airs, to the extent of putting her death before her life. What arrogance! That’s the worst of madness – the arrogance that goes with it. The determination to keep others out, to see the world as you choose to see it, not as others assure you that it is. Peopling the world with Cavaliers and Roundheads! It all ended in death, and more blood than even the butcher had dreamt of: of course, it did. Death is the only sensible way out for people who will not, cannot, relinquish their belief in a world that others do not see.

‘Not safe?’ Gemma humoured Marion. Gemma was restored, brave as a blind bat tangling in a lion’s mane. Thus she had humoured little Alice when the latter saw visions. Dead Mr Hemsley, at the top of the stairs, shaking his fist at his fifth, his youngest daughter.

Mad!

‘But yesterday you were so keen on my staying here.’

‘Yesterday was different.’

‘You want them for yourself, don’t you.’ Gemma was spiteful. ‘Mr Fox and Mr First. You’re jealous, because Mr First wants to take me out to lunch, and I took Mr Fox’s coffee up. You just don’t like competition.’

‘It’s not like what you think. Please put the knife down. It turns me over to see you with it. Put it back in the desk drawer where it belongs, and forget it.’

‘But there’s blood on the blade,’ said Gemma, and so indeed there was. A few flakes of rusty brown still clung to the pitted blade.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Marion. ‘It’s not blood, it’s rust. It must be rust. I had a dream about that knife, if you want to know. It’s been about the office for a long time. It’s very sharp. Ophelia, the last girl, broke a fingernail, and didn’t have her nail scissors, and tried to smooth it with the knife, and it slipped, and she cut her finger. There was blood everywhere. But we wiped it really clean. So it must be rust. It was after that I had the dream.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Come closer. The walls are very thin. They always are in new buildings. And the ceilings. Sometimes Mr Fox has model girls up there in working hours. The floorboards creak. Not like my parents’ bed creaks, though. A different pattern of noise altogether. I don’t know what happens, or what they do. I don’t care.’

‘Your dream,’ said Gemma, gritting her teeth. Presently she would go up to Mr Fox and take dictation, and nothing would do but that she, Gemma, would make the floorboards creak, in whatever pattern Mr Fox chose, and the more unlike the Ramsbottle’s creaking the better. Gemma would offer Mr Fox her virginity, and that surely could not be refused? In the meantime, there was Marion’s madness to be dealt with, disposed of.

Oh, foolish Gemma, foolish virgin.

‘I dreamt I was working late – overtime,’ moans mad Marion. ‘I was down in that corner, sorting out the bottom filing cabinet. The pink and black one. The drawers stick, I’m afraid. I’d stopped for a cigarette; I was sitting on the floor in the almost dark, having a little think about going to Scandinavia one day and seeing fiords. I’ve always wanted to see fiords. Mum and dad love beaches and garlic, but, as for me, I love towering mountains and deep, still water. You never know what’s there. In the Mediterranean you know all right. It’s all floating about on the top of the water. French letters and worse. None of your mystic samnite swords, mysterious, wonderful. One day I’ll get north, by myself. I’m not very good at being by myself. I get dreams.’

‘Is it a dream you’re telling me about, or can I get on?’ So Gemma chided little Hannah, who chattered night and day. ‘Because personally it’s nearly mid-day. I’m supposed to be going upstairs to take dictation from Mr Fox.’

And that’s not all I’ll take. Mr Fox will undress me, button by button, zip by zip, and stand me naked before him as I have stood before a mirror a thousand times, and his eyes will see what no man has ever seen before, and his hands go where no hands have been before.

Except the doctor. Damn the doctor.

‘Oh yes,’ said Marion. ‘The dream. Anyway there I was in the dream in that corner in the half dark dreaming of still water, when I heard a scream, and a woman came running in here, completely naked; and all the birds flew up suddenly, screaming and battering – though you know they can get out whenever they please – and she had no business being naked: she was very fat and all blobbing about, buttocks and breasts, and I saw it was Mr First’s sister –’

‘The one who killed herself?’

‘Mr First’s sister, that’s right. And he came running in after her, this man in my dream, from Mr First’s office, and he hit her on the head with that lamp. It’s alabaster.’

Alabaster is tricky stuff, prone to marking and discoloration. The round globe of the lamp which Gemma now regarded, was veined and mottled with a darkened patch where a head may well have hit. What a blunt instrument it would make, in the fevered, mad imagination of a disturbed typist!

‘It’s a very lovely, very gracious lamp,’ said Marion, ‘but heavy, I’ve noticed that. The woman fell, and that seemed to make him angry, as if she should have risen again, seeing stars, like a comic fat woman in a cartoon: and he bent over her and tried to get a ring off her finger, but he couldn’t. You know what rings are when you’ve put on weight. And he just picked up that knife and he sliced at it in a temper, and the finger and the ring still on it flew across the room and landed in my lap. I was wearing my best beige skirt. I just crouched, terrified. I thought, now he’ll murder me. But he didn’t look for the finger, or the ring, or see me. He just opened the window – you can, you know, there’s a special lever for the window cleaner, which pivots them open; terribly dangerous – and he toppled her out. There was blood all over the floor from her finger, you can see the marks still, though I’ve scrubbed and scrubbed –’

‘That was where Ophelia cut her finger. You told me so yourself. You’re mad, Marion.’

‘I’m not mad. It’s not mad to dream. It’s very good for the persona. And while his back was turned I nipped out and I heard the squeal of brakes and shouts, and when I got down to the street there was this crowd and oh, Gemma, Gemma –’

‘It must have been very upsetting for you, Marion, Mr First’s sister jumping the way she did. No wonder you have dreams.’

‘But I think I had the dream before she jumped. I don’t know. It’s all muddled up.’

‘Perhaps you should see a psychiatrist.’

‘I did. He gave me valium. The worst part of the dream was what I did with the finger. I took it home and put it in the top drawer in my bedroom. With all my nice things. You know, scarves, and belts and nail-varnish. I wrapped it in tissue, with a bit of cotton wool at the end in case it leaked blood.’

‘Your mum and dad are right,’ observed Gemma. ‘You need a holiday.’

‘If it was a dream.’ Marion was tearful. ‘If it wasn’t for real. How can a girl be sure? I remember what happened in the dream much more clearly than I remember what happened last year at the Canary Isles. There was this waiter. My mum and dad are always going on at me to have a holiday romance, so I did try, with a bottle of red Spanish and the waiter behind a windbreak, but I could hardly remember a thing the next day to tell them. They do like to be told things. If you could find a fault with my mum and dad it’s the way they like to be told things.’

‘Of course it was a dream,’ said Gemma. ‘You’re frightened of Mr First in real life, so you’re frightened in dreams. Now I’m going up to Mr Fox to take dictation.’

Marion opened her mouth to speak, but shut it again: a look of spite crossed her face, as would cross Hermione’s when she blew down Hannah’s card houses and pretended it was the draught that did it.

‘Go on up,’ said Marion. ‘See if I care.’

You care all right, thought Gemma. You love Mr Fox. Clearly, the whole world loved Mr Fox, since Gemma did. And Gemma, with a hardness, a coldness she did not know she possessed – well, all of us are nice, charming enough people, until tried by circumstances and hard times, and then, and only then, do we find out what we really are – adjusted her hair in the mirror, and pursed her lips and made – and all for poor plain Marion’s benefit – the faces any pretty girl does make in the mirror, and took a shorthand pad, and Marion’s freshly-sharpened pencils, and ran upstairs to Mr Fox’s lair.

Round and round, up and up.

Fifteen stairs to destiny.

‘Alice!’ cries Gemma, here and now stretching out her thin arms in welcome. And Elsa’s hand slips, so that a whole dollop of oil falls into the egg-yolk, and the thick mass instantly curdles and thins. ‘Alice, at last! How I’ve waited for you.’

Alice Hemsley, bold and beautiful, in black trousers and white shirt, tall, tanned and handsome, hook-nosed, swaggers hands on hips. Her hair is black, short and curly, and her cheeks full and pink beneath their bronze. Her voice booms huskily. Her bosom is high and very full. The eye searches it out, in the attempt to define male or female, and finding it, is both surprised and gratified.

There are tears of welcome in Gemma’s eyes. Elsa is unaccountably jealous.

‘I was angry with you,’ says Alice. ‘So I waited.’

‘What for? What have I done?’

‘You weren’t at your great-aunt’s funeral.’

‘She was dead. What difference did it make?’

‘You should have gone.’

‘I sent money for the burial. I’m crippled; it’s difficult for me to get about.’

‘You get off on holiday all right.’

‘If I’m going where I want, if there’s pleasure and warmth at the end of the journey, I manage quite well. If I don’t want to get where I’m going, the pain in my legs is intolerable. Do you want me to suffer?’

‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t,’ Alice is brisk. ‘Everyone else does.’

‘Were there many people at the funeral.’

‘The matron of the Nursing Home and myself.’

‘You see! I couldn’t have borne it.’

‘You never visited her. You left it to me.’

‘You’re good with the old and sick – I’m not.’

‘She gave up everything for you, and what did you do for her?’

‘Kept her company for sixteen years of my life. My life! A young girl cooped up with an old woman.’

‘Now you coop yourself up, since she’s not here to do it.’

‘I’m glad she’s dead,’ says Gemma, savagely. ‘Her whole life was a reproach to me. She was so good – and where did it get her? Ten years crippled with arthritis and two people at her funeral.’

‘And how many will you have if you go on like this?’

‘I’ll pay an attendance fee. Then I’ll have hundreds.’

Elsa is forgotten. Elsa leaves, before the state of the mayonnaise is noticed, and goes to her room, to take her forgotten pill, quickly, before worse befalls. But she cannot find the packet in the otherwise empty desk drawer where she put it, and though she searches everywhere it does not come to light, which, thinks Elsa, puts an altogether different complexion on everything.