SEVENTEEN

Bridget sits in the black chair. She watches while Rose changes George, washes his bottom, his hands and face. Rose sits down in the Morris chair and George seems quite happy on her knee. Bridget gets a small cassette recorder from her bag. Rose shakes her head and Bridget puts it away. 'Take the tape out,' Rose says, and Bridget, looking a bit surprised, does so. Rose isn't taking any chances.

'Now,' says Rose, 'tell me exactly what you want from me.' Reaction is setting in with a vengeance. It's not just Olga. Rose knows what she did to Knock-Knock is illegal. What if he goes to the police? The real police. I was crazy, she thinks. What they call road rage transformed into loud-music rage. I could be in the cells now. What on earth is the girl saying?

'Some background on my uncle's time here,' Bridget says, 'because it was here that he wrote The Man Who Loved Rain which turned out to be his most popular book. I want to look at the changes in his life which made this possible. I mean something obviously happened.'

'He left an unhappy marriage.'

'Yes,' says Bridget, 'but I think there's more to it. His works before then are obviously his of course, but they lack that particular driving force, that intensity and insight that he achieved in The Man Who Loved Rain. You can see why the earlier works didn't take off in quite the same way. He was trying to be too clever I think, complexity for its own sake, that sort of thing, but in The Man Who Loved Rain he's somehow gained confidence to let it take its time. The first two are, well, overly dense is too strong but — he lost sight of telling the story. The Man Who Loved Rain has a very strong story and while it's probably better known than read nowadays, in a popular sense, you can see why, at the time, it sold very well.'

'Maybe he just got better.' Rose smiles at George as she wipes his chin yet again. Do all babies dribble so much? She knows they do when they're teething, but George is too young for that. Oh shit, she thinks, but it's too late. She sees a little Knock-Knock and he's lying in a small bed and he's crying and crying. You're just being ridiculous Rose, it's just reaction, settle down. You did what you did. A bit late now to feel sorry. She feels bad about Olga. You are a selfish bitch Rose Anthony, all you think about is your own petty revenges, not a glimmer of what it's like to be Olga. After three years you've got no bloody idea. And you've got the nerve to grizzle about her.

'Maybe,' Bridget ploughs on, 'but he dedicated that particular book to your mother, so I wondered if it was her, if — their friendship — made the difference.'

'They were lovers,' Rose says, 'you don't have to pussyfoot around. They lived together for years and years.'

'Uncle Peter never sought a divorce?'

'It would have been pointless even if his wife hadn't made it clear she'd never agree. Ada didn't want to get married again.'

'Do you remember the time when he wrote The Man Who Loved Rain?'

Rose shakes her head.

'He must have been living here about four years by the time it was published, so it would have been written possibly '66, '67.'

'I was too busy being a student. I only got home in the holidays. And even then I had a holiday job. I was probably too interested in myself, in what I wanted to do, you know how it is.' Just watch it Rose, she tells herself, no need to be rude. 'And I didn't really like him so I didn't take much notice,' she says.

'Claude said,' says Bridget.

Oh really, thinks Rose. George looks as though he's getting sleepy, he's certainly got heavier. Rose settles him in the carrycot. George immediately opens his eyes and looks around. 'Go to sleep, George,' Rose says, but her voice lacks conviction and the baby continues to stare at her. Does he know what she did to Knock-Knock? Does he know she's the kind of woman who goes mad with a spray-can?

'What sort of woman was Ada?'

Rose smiles at the baby. 'I'm biased. I think she was a great sort of woman.'

Bridget says, 'So does Claude. He nearly bit my head off when I first mentioned her in what he thought was a derogatory way. Do you have any photos? Any other records? Diaries? Journals? Letters? I understand she was a great needlewoman. Maybe there's something of hers I could see.'

'I've got a few photos. None recent. Although if you look through the old Needlework magazines you'd probably find a couple. She took workshops.'

'And she didn't keep diaries.'

'No.'

'Claude said something about some tapes.'

'Did he,' Rose says. Trust bloody Claude. Is there anything he hasn't told this stranger? Oh bugger, she thinks, what will Claude say when he finds out what I did? Don't be any sillier than you can help Rose, you're a grown woman, what your uncle has to say about your actions is neither here nor there. Yes, but does Claude know that?

'I was wondering if I could listen to them.'

'I haven't even listened to them myself,' Rose says. Will this woman never go?

The baby starts making noises, aha, aha, aha. Soon he will work these up into a full-scale roar. Good, thinks Rose. Go for it George.

'Peter died suddenly,' Bridget says, trying another tack, 'was he working on anything when he died? That you know of?'

Rose frowns. She must make an effort or Bridget will be here forever. Hell is other people. Sartre, misogynist old bastard, was right. Not all people. There are exceptions. At least one. She hopes Olga is OK. Perhaps, if Bridget ever goes, she could ring her. But she's already asked enough of Olga for one day. Besides, what can she say? I shouldn't have done it? A bit late now. Bridget is looking at her, waiting. 'Peter was always working,' Rose says, 'I don't know if there was anything special. Ada didn't say.'

'That's one reason I'd like to hear the tapes,' Bridget says. 'I can't imagine him giving up writing. I think there must have been some sort of work-in-progress. I wondered if you know where it might be?'

Rose snorts. 'You should ask his daughters. Ada said he was hardly cold before they were here, wanting all his things. Vultures, she called them. They took his desk, typewriter, tables, chairs, everything. Yes. Maybe you should ask them.'

'I have,' Bridget says, 'I talked to them before I put my proposal to the committee. And I rang them again before I came up here. They said if there was anything, Ada must have it.'

'Well they would, wouldn't they.'

'There was nothing like a manuscript among her things? When she died?'

'Haven't looked,' Rose says. She can hear her voice. Unhelpful would be the kindest adjective. What she says is true though. She hasn't even cleaned out Ada's clothes. She dusts and vacuums the room, opens the windows so air can get through, leaves the wardrobe door open to stop it getting musty, but that's as much as she's been able to do. The thought of going through Ada's clothes, through her drawers, ferreting through anything else she kept in her room, is just too horrible to contemplate. I'll get round to it, thinks Rose. I'll have to now. I've said Sibyl can have the trunk for her memory box. At the very least I'll have to empty that.

Bridget's a trier, she's not giving up. In any other circumstances, Rose would have liked her. 'What about Manny's story? Where did Peter get it from? Did he make it up?'

'Manny was my mother's grandfather. She told me about him when I was twelve.'

The baby is still aha aha aha-ing, so Rose picks him up. Making a rod for your own back, she hears Ada say. She sits down in the Morris chair and holds him snugly to her. There's something hugely comforting about the feel of the small body. Like a human wheat bag, thinks Rose, although heavier and with a distinctly different smell.

Bridget is awed and delighted. 'Your great-grandfather! How wonderful! I wonder when she told Uncle Peter.' She writes something in her notebook. 'It's always interesting to find the source of things, don't you think?'

Rose surprises herself. 'Yes, but it doesn't take away anything from the skill Peter shows. He took Manny's life, or what my mother told him of it, the little she knew, and made it into a novel. That's what my mother always said. She said it was only when she started reading it aloud that she knew fully just how clever Peter was. She said it was the difference between keeping strictly to a traditional needlework pattern and taking that same pattern and making it your own, adding your own ideas, allowing your own creativity to take over. I think it was her own talent which made her appreciate Peter's, although they were in quite different fields.'

'So if there's a manuscript, the Skeleton Woman will find it.'

'Eventually,' Rose says. She is surprised. 'How do you know about the Skeleton Woman? Don't tell me, Claude told you.'

'He said I might have to practice a bit of patience, let her do the job for me. But I thought perhaps she wouldn't mind if I give her a helping hand.'

'The trouble is,' Rose says, 'you never know whether you're helping or hindering.'

'No,' Bridget says, 'no, you don't.' She sighs, looks across at the baby and smiles. 'He's asleep,' Bridget says.

'Aha aha aha,' says George.

Go George, thinks Rose.

'Claude says you have a second-hand bookshop,' Bridget says, 'that must be wonderful.'

'Has its moments,' Rose says.

'I just love going into second-hand bookshops.'

Rose says people often say that to her. She says they say that because they imagine all you do is sit and read. She says that after you've done the cleaning, pricing, the shelving, after you've cleaned windows, the floors, done the banking, after you've decided how you'll rearrange the window on Thursday and if there are no customers and the phone doesn't ring, you've checked the mail, the email, and providing you're not too worried about cash flow and overdrafts, it is possible to snatch say five minutes to read.

Bridget smiles.

Rose thinks she's not too bad. She says, 'Apart from being your own boss — which is totally great — if you still feel a certain excitement when you pick up a book, if you're still prone to enthusiasms for a character, a writer, a subject, if you can live during the quiet times on the smell of an oily rag, then you'll do well in a second-hand bookshop.'

'Did Ada like books?'

'Loved them.'

'You must have inherited that.'

'Possible I suppose. I like needlework and she did. I've inherited her liking for being in control I think.'

'All sorts of legacies in families,' Bridget says, 'I was reading about Virginia Woolf's — half of them seemed to be mad, so it's no wonder she had her moments. Did you know her mother's grandfather drank himself to death in India and that his body was sent back to England in a cask of rum? On the voyage the body exploded out of the cask and the shock killed the widow and the sailors drank the rum. So the story goes.'

'Probably invented,' Rose says, although remembering Byron and his Ada it needn't have been. 'Heaven knows what intense suffering and agony I have gone thro'; and how mad and bad and desperate I have felt,' Ada Lovelace née Byron wrote. There, there, Rose says tenderly across a century and a half, there, there.