II

It took several months for Matthew George to leave his family. He did it in stages. After he inherited the Hepples’ house, he spent longer days away on site visits or at work in the Chapel. Christie continued to work with him and Tom continued to live in the Dip. Letters came to the Chapel originally addressed to ‘The Occupier, Back House, Ingfield Dip’, which Tom had scribbled on and redirected to ‘The Owner of’. After a while, Matthew opened them and filled in and returned the forms, and then they began to be addressed to him directly.

At Easter, he took Mary and Stella away for a few days on the coast. Each afternoon they had walked along an endless exposed beach, and the more Mary delayed them by picking up a shell, or by getting sand in her shoe, the faster he hurried away. Mary watched him getting smaller and disappearing, something she found hard to believe when she thought of it later, as her eyes had grown so weak since then. On the first afternoon, Stella had hurried after him, calling out and pulling Mary along and snapping at her if she couldn’t keep up. The next day, when Matthew disappeared again, she had sat down and suggested they build a sandcastle with such intense enthusiasm that Mary took it as an order and obeyed. From then on, they separated from Matthew almost as soon as they reached the beach.

When they returned home, everything that had gradually been changing became suddenly different. Matthew didn’t unpack his suitcase but left it by the front door. There were times when he didn’t speak for days on end and then one evening he would start pacing around the room, picking things up and putting them down, running a finger along the mantelpiece, a windowsill or tabletop, walking into the kitchen and back, and when Stella was so agitated that she could do nothing but wait for him to start, he would begin. ‘What did you make me put those big windows in for?’

‘I didn’t, you …’

Matthew stood back in outrage. ‘God, Stella, you are unbelievable! You insisted!’

‘I didn’t, it was your …’

‘Don’t quibble! Why do you do this? Why do you always blame other people for your decisions!’ This would go on for hours, with Matthew attacking Stella for the white walls, or the garden, or their coming back to live in the village in the first place. When he ran out of surroundings to complain about, he began on her. Why did she always look so miserable? He’d given her a home and she had her own business. Her hair was too long, too girlish for her age and who did she think she was wearing those pathetic ribbons and beads? Why did she always look at him like that? Like what? As if he’d caused her some terrible injury. Why was she so fucking indignant? She’d taken over his childhood home and was forcing him to find somewhere else. Otherwise, he’d have nowhere. She’d made him take the Hepple house. Want, want, want. Grab, grab, grab. Greedy, heaving cow. He had to go out, he couldn’t stand her fat, righteous face any more and when Mary came rushing downstairs, weeping and clinging to his legs, he pushed her away because he couldn’t stand her terror, either.

He said nothing about his work, so it was from May that Stella heard he was involved in the plans for the reservoir. Everybody in the village knew, but no one said anything to him directly. They watched Tom in the Dip, Christie in his new home and Matthew up at the Chapel. They heard the shouting and they knew that official letters were being sent. They waited.

That summer, Stella and Mary went to London. Mary liked being fussed over by Stella’s friends, and being taken on rides on buses and in a boat down the Thames. She was pleased to see her mother looking lively and happy again. Matthew came to get them in the orange Mini. Mary curled up in the back trying not to think about the lorries overtaking them, so much larger, heavier and faster that they could roll over their little car and not even notice. It was getting dark when Matthew pulled onto the hard shoulder.

‘I need a piss,’ he said as he got out. Mary was startled by his language. When Stella got out as well, Mary clambered into the front and followed her. They had stopped beside some open wasteland, riddled with paths and patches of scrub. When Matthew reached the first clump of bushes he didn’t stop. He was walking away again and when Mary realised this, she began to follow, calling ‘Daddy, wait! Daddy, stop!’ as she stumbled through tufts of grass, brambles and rabbit holes. She was falling and hurting herself over and over, and nobody stopped her. The last time she picked herself up, it had got much darker and she couldn’t see Matthew any more. She looked back and could only just make out Stella in the deepening haze. Mary made her way back to the car. Stella turned towards the traffic and Mary waited beside her and then screamed as her mother threw herself forward into the road.

A police car swerved, braked and pulled in. Two officers got out, fixing the straps of their helmets under their chins. ‘You could have got hurt there, missis,’ one began, shaking his head, as his fingers fiddled with the helmet’s buckle.

Stella was finding it hard to speak, her voice veering from high to low, loud to quiet, rushing and catching. ‘I had to stop you, had to, my, her father, walked away, over there, you see he didn’t want her house but now he’s got it and he won’t let go because she, can you find him, can you find him now, can you take us home?’

Mary remembered making herself stay very still because Stella was so frightened, something she had never seen before. She also remembered having to wait a long time. Clouds pressed down through the dark. The policemen wrote in their notebooks and talked on a radio. A van came, and another man got out with two big dogs that had chains round their necks attached to thick leather leads. The man was wearing shiny black gloves and was waving a dazzling torch around. The dogs terrified Mary. Then she realised they were going to hunt her father and she wanted to stop them, but everything was beyond her now. She couldn’t remember anything else Stella said or did, or how they got home.

Three days later, Matthew reappeared when she was doing a puzzle on the table. He helped her for a while and then said that there were some pieces missing and there was no point in trying to put any more of it together. Mary got upset, saying they were there, just mixed up with her other puzzles. He left again but she looked through and found them, and put the completed picture out for Matthew to see. He didn’t come back that night, at least not before Stella had made her go to bed. When she came down in the morning, Stella had cleared the puzzle away.

After that, Matthew spent most nights at the Chapel. Once or twice Mary woke to hear someone coming in or out of the front door, but it was Stella, and Mary was shaken to realise that she had been left alone in the house as she slept. Stella said little to Mary these days. She played with her, fed her and got her to school, but Mary knew she was miles away.

By Hallowe’en, the reservoir was becoming visible. Huts were being replaced by brick buildings; huge machinery, pipes and pumps, were installed; there were channels and tunnels, ridges of concrete and the growing raw wall of the dam. All of this would disappear again behind trees, under earth and water, like secrets.

The Compulsory Purchase Orders arrived. All the explanations and warnings that had preceded them did nothing to reduce the shock. Bill Bennett out at Goose Farm received his and had a stroke the next day. He was in Camptown General, the whole left side of his body crumpled and limp, and whatever anyone remembered of a man who’d been drunk and furious and purple-faced half his life, they nonetheless put the blame on the Order. Over the winter, others in the Dip moved out although the money they were offered was not enough for a new home. Some moved into Allnorthover and others to Ingfield, absorbed by the neighbours they had in any case known for years, but adrift in their new council-houses packed together on new roads. Some liked these houses because they were light, warm and neat, but others felt exposed. Living in the Dip had meant a view from the window of grass and trees that rose up above your house to the faraway sky.

Apart from Bill Bennett, the people of the Dip were shy and dutiful. They didn’t question the judgement of authority nor could they imagine what it meant for their homes and land. The idea of the Mund and the Soley turning and pouring a torrent of black and white water into the Dip was so apocalyptic as to be unreal. They moved out, not quite realising that they were doing so.

Mary had got used to the idea that Matthew was at the Chapel. She had one parent at a time now – her mother in the mornings and at night, and her father, when he appeared at the school gate or took her off somewhere at the weekend. On Guy Fawkes Night, he turned up in a new car and drove her to Camptown Park for the fireworks. When he took her home, he said goodnight on the doorstep and drove away so fast that she worried that he would shoot past the Chapel and have to turn back. It was then that Stella explained that he had bought a house on the coast. He came once a week, always collecting her from somewhere outside the village, till the reservoir was finished and then he joined an architects’ practice in London. He refused to speak to Stella, to answer her letters or return her calls. Sometimes he remembered Christmas and Mary’s birthday, and sometimes he didn’t. There were times when he phoned her every other day and then weeks of silence. A postcard would arrive from a foreign city.

One morning, Stella took Mary to Mortimer Tye station and as the new commuter train from the coast sped through, she held the child high in the air. They were close to the tracks and Mary felt the noise of the train through her body, a deep vibration, as if her blood were separating. Stella looked at Mary’s terrified face, running with tears, and held her tightly, saying ‘Sorry, sorry, I wish, I can’t, I only wanted, sorry, sorry.’ They both cried on the drive back to Allnorthover and Stella kept Mary off school. The next day, they were back at the station again and Mary pulled away when she heard the train coming, but Stella held on to her hand. She had a large yellow umbrella with her this time and as the train came through, she opened and raised it above them both. ‘He can’t not see us now.’

The yellow umbrella haunted Mary’s dreams. They had gone back to the station every week, all through that winter. She tried to remember seeing her father’s face in a train window once, but decided she must have imagined it. Later, she heard her parents argue about money and the cottage and Matthew going away, but neither of them ever mentioned those vigils. For years, the umbrella was kept under the bench in the hall and Mary measured herself against it. When she grew old enough to be able to go out alone after dark, and to carry it and not be afraid, she took it over to the Common where a bonfire was being built for another Guy Fawkes Night, and pushed it deep into the pile of broken chairs and bits of fence, boxes and branches. It had disappeared that night in the spitting yellow flames.

The heatwave continued into August and held the village under constant pressure. The boredom of the summer holidays was concentrated by the monotony of equally hot days and nights. The dark made little difference to children who could not settle in their airless rooms and then could not rest in the bright day but ran around, red-eyed and hectic. Games became more dangerous. The little ones chose higher trees to climb and higher walls to jump from. They built fires in the woods because the grass and twigs were so dry, they crackled underfoot and fire suggested itself. They moved on from salting slugs to throwing stones at chickens and tying up cats. The older ones were bored with the bus stop, the sign post, and the trips into Camptown with no money, where they just walked up and down the precinct and the High Street, and then got the bus back home again. The boys took their air rifles into the fields and shot rabbits that were riddled with myxomatosis and dying anyway, or tiny birds that made a pathetic handful of feather and bone. Dissatisfied, they took pot shots at farmers and walkers, and someone lost an eye. The girls tried on each other’s clothes and lay around stewing in bedrooms with shut curtains, reading each other’s diaries in the pink light, plucking eyebrows, borrowing each other’s make up, and betraying secrets.

Kevin Lacey was twenty and was four years into his printing apprenticeship. He had saved up enough now to buy his own car. He would cram in five of his friends and speed off down the lanes, thrilled to be so suddenly and easily away from the village. They would find a pub that would serve them, and maybe meet some girls and squeeze them into the car too, then set off again, Kevin half-drunk and a bit scared but proud and ready to go faster than anyone would expect him to, skidding round corners, racing blind across junctions, making the girls sitting on boys’ laps in the back lurch, shriek and beg him to slow down. The best bit was the straight stretch that ran all along one side of the reservoir. You could get some speed up there.

If they made it to Camptown, there would be gaggles of other teenagers as bored, drunk and ready for anything as they were. Some of the boys waved broken bottles around. They might come across hippies or arty student types, whom they mocked. Skinheads, Teds and bikers they stayed away from.

Mary slept most mornings and was awake much of the night. She read books and listened to records. In the evening, she watched television if she could get decent reception on their battered old black-and-white portable set. The aerial had been broken a long time ago, and replaced with an extruded wire coat-hanger. Allnorthover was on the cusp of broadcasting regions, so London-based channels clashed with local eastern ones. Sometimes Mary could get both, sometimes neither.

Or she met Billy. The less there was to do, the more they focused their attention. They could spend hours lying on their backs in the church fields, ‘watching the earth revolve’. When the evening finally grew dim, swallows circled and dived to feed on the gnats. Billy and Mary would count them and compete to be the first to spot a bat, then the lowest flying bat. The bats and swallows might briefly be in the air together, the bats slewing past at abrupt angles, bouncing around in their sonar net; the birds repeating and repeating their circles. Billy and Mary could use up more time later, arguing over whether it was better to be a bat or a swallow, the merits of flight, and who had the most insect bites. Then there would be bursts of childish energy during which they would take over Billy’s mother’s big kitchen and experiment, trying to make things they’d never known to be made at home such as coconut ice and butterscotch sauce. They would eat these sticky messes in front of the television and if it was too early in the day for there to be anything on, they would watch the testcard and argue over which one of them looked more like the girl beaming out from its centre. Billy usually won, on the basis of his long blonde hair.

Daniel had sent another card, this time from Italy. He was on holiday there with his family and wouldn’t be back for three weeks. Mary did not see or hear from Clara, although something made her half expect to. Stella was at the shop all day, selling pine spice-shelves, bunches of dried flowers and jars of salt to people on their way home from the sea.

Perhaps because she was so bored, Mary got out the bundle of letters Ray Cornice had given her. She hadn’t forgotten about them but had rather been avoiding them. She was not surprised, now, that just holding them made her hands shake. Mary recognised the type-face. It was that of the machine she had in her room now. The one that had been downstairs in Matthew’s study. The characters were clenched and narrow with slab serifs, and printed themselves unevenly apart, making the words look unsettled on the page. The ‘i’ was slightly raised and the ‘s’ clogged almost into an ‘o’.

There were five letters. They had been slit open along one side (Ray Cornice or some Post Office official looking for a return address?) and then taped shut, like a trap opened and re-set without being sprung. Mary held the first one up to the light. The envelope was thick manila. She turned the letter round and round, over and over, wanting to solve the mystery without having to open it.

If Matthew had written to Iris after her death, what would he have had to say? Would it be about her sons? The house? The reservoir? There was so much that Mary couldn’t remember. How the Dip had been before, was beyond her. Her memory reached back and then stopped. Her father’s leaving was a muddle of fragments and she could only just remember Tom Hepple and when he had left, but the idea of him being forced out of his home made her think of a snail being torn from its shell, a tortoise prised open, something vulnerable and raw.

These letters might help. Her father might have told Iris why he had left, why he sold the house and made Tom go too. ‘Just ask him,’ Billy had said, exasperated, when Mary had tried to explain. ‘Ask anyone.’ But it wasn’t as simple as that. There were other things Mary remembered like the hospital visits and seeing her father lying on the bed with that withered old woman in his arms. How could she ask him?

As Mary considered all this, her feelings about the letters began to change. They were not bombs about to go off but something precious and secret, something of her father’s that she had been trusted with. She would show her father that she was grown up, sensitive and discreet. She took the letters downstairs and put them in a larger envelope, sealed it without adding a note, addressed it to him and took it straight to the Post Office, where Ray Cornice weighed it, tore the right stamps out of his book, took her money, and said nothing except ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you’.

On Saturdays, Mary helped Stella in the shop. It never went well. Stella told Mary to dust everything and then hovered close by, worrying that she would knock a pot over or break a handle or scratch a veneer. If the phone rang while she was serving someone, she would let Mary answer it, then interrupt and instruct Mary on what to say until nobody could follow the conversation, and then she’d grab the phone and leave Mary to deal with the customer who smiled pityingly at her.

One day May Hepple came into the shop and asked Mary if she could help out in her hairdressing salon. Mary was surprised. Stella had talked several people in the village into giving her work and it had always gone wrong. She tried babysitting for the Baskin triplets but could not keep up with their trail of clothes, food and toys. Melanie Baskin had quizzed her on her secondhand clothes, thinking that she was forced to wear them by Stella. She felt shabby in the Baskins’ new home. She’d tried a paper round but got in a muddle and delivered the papers at random which led to refreshing arguments between neighbours who’d undergone equal and opposite changes of view.

May was looking for someone to help out over the summer as Tracey, the shampoo girl, had gone off to a pop festival and had not come back. She thought Mary was quiet enough but not as hopelessly shy as June. She was bright and spoke well. Mary agreed to start on the following Monday.

May Hepple’s salon was tucked in between the newsagent’s and the King’s Head, in the Square. It wasn’t a square with buildings round the outside and space in the middle, but the opposite. The buildings backed onto one another, facing four ways, skirted by the High Street and three lanes. The Head was where the gentry drank, old and new. Its whitewashed walls were three feet thick. May’s salon huddled alongside, a converted cottage with a sign in art-nouveau script, ‘Marie’s’, and a woman’s pert profile in silhouette. May had refused to let her girls put a sign in the window saying ‘Unisex’.

The first morning, Mary was to sweep up and make tea. The salon was the two front rooms of the cottage knocked together. Its pink paint was flaking in the damp corners of the low ceiling and peeling from the beams. The linoleum floor’s geometric design of thin lines of lavender, cream and beige was now puddled with grey. The little windows were covered with frothy net curtains and their deep sills were lined with framed photographs of royalty and hairdressing models cut from magazines. The reception desk was a compact wicker affair, behind which May positioned herself like the captain of a cramped and rickety vessel. She had everything in reach – the appointments book, the telephone, the saucer of boiled sweets, the jar of pencils, the hand mirror and the clothes brush. The tight silk rosebuds in a pewter vase were so old, they had yellowed like teeth. She thought of her salon as a feminine and relaxing place but unlike Mary, who’d never been inside before, May had long stopped noticing the noise and the smell. Three vast hairdryers droned over customers trying to enjoy themselves and read magazines while their heads ached from the drag of curlers, the boring in their ears and the scorching air. The atmosphere had a sour-sweet, eggy tang made up of ammonia from dyeing and perming solutions, and sugary droplets of hairspray. Underneath this, was more than a hint of decay. The cottage was damp, the customers mostly geriatric, the plumbing leaked. Everyone who worked there wore perfume, talc and deodorant, and took little breathfreshening pills, thickening the air with synthetic scents of lily of the valley, parma violet, lilac and mint.

May’s girls, Jeanette, Felicity and Suze, had calloused and tough hands, as if they worked outdoors. They were used to it all, used to May and each other. They worked well in the small space, moving neatly past one another and never getting in the way. Their conversation was as choreographed as their movements. Mary interrupted their sequences. She hovered, trying to be in the right place, but jogged Suze’s elbow as she passed her the pink rubber perm curlers, which then spilt from their tray onto the floor and wriggled through Mary’s fingers as she tried to pick them up. She knocked against Felicity’s ankles when sweeping up hair and slopped tea as she carried it from the cubicle kitchen. They would reprimand her, not raising their voices, just tightening the cooing tone in which they chatted to their customers.

Jeanette was tall and tanned, and wore short, sleeveless dresses with a gold chainbelt hooked round her skinny hips. She had a cap of brown hair, cut into points on either side of her face and tinted every week so that it looked glossy and hard and, in sunlight, had an iridescent gleam. Her long fingers, which Mary would watch raking and fiddling with thin grey hair, were stained with nicotine. She had a deep, dry voice and a bossy, offhand manner that her customers loved. Suze was also tall, but fair and round. Her skin was apricot coloured from regular sessions on a sunbed, but slack and dull like that of the fruit starting to rot. She had a big smile and a swaying arc of brittle, backcombed hair. It was Felicity who taught Mary how to shampoo. Mary thought she was more like a PE mistress than a hairdresser – compact, brisk and plain. Felicity had an unfussy cut, the kind that women came in and asked for after they started having children.

After a couple of days, Mary was allowed to shampoo a customer. It was a Mrs Baker, from the caravan site, someone Mary was grateful to realise she did not know. Mary placed a towel round her shoulders and folded a smaller one under her neck. Mrs Baker settled her head back, shut her eyes and smiled. Mary fiddled with the taps, running the water from the shower-head over her hands, muttering about getting the temperature just right. Mrs Baker clucked and smiled, settled herself some more and waited. Mary spread her left hand across the top of the woman’s forehead as she had been shown, to protect her face from the spray. She was taken aback to realise that she had never touched old hair before. It was crisp and light, and felt as if it might come away in her hand. And as she began to run the water over Mrs Baker’s scalp, it did seem as if her hair dissolved as the colourless strands were quickly soaked and plastered themselves to her scalp. Then Mrs Baker, who had looked to Mary like any other powdered, wrinkled, grey little old lady when she came in, began to look monstrous. Her opened out, upside-down face came alive. Her pulled-back hair revealed a line where her foundation ended in a tidemark. Mary imagined peeling it off like a mask. Her face powder caught in the down on her cheeks and in the thicker hairs that had coarsened to whiskers on her chin. Her thin mouth had puckered and collapsed and her orange-pink lipstick, the sort of colour children use when painting skin, had sunk into the hard lines that hemmed her mouth. Mary saw the tiny knot of veins throbbing at her temple and the thick corded veins among the crumpled skin of her neck. She poured out the shampoo and tried to concentrate on massaging it into Mrs Baker’s hair. The old woman groaned dreamily and muttered, ‘Lovely’, and Mary thought, Nobody ever touches her, this must be the only time she’s touched, and tried to stop hating what she was doing. Although she did not admit it to herself, Mary would see all the customers like that from now on, as old people who were not so much decaying as drying up, silting up, withering into dust, sand and stone. Because of this, it shocked her when her lowered face was caught in their warm breath, or if they burped or farted, as some of them did either unconsciously or in pained submission to their loosening bodies.

The kitchen was reached through a small room in which the hairdressers took their breaks. When they were free at the same time they stayed back there, squeezed together, drinking coffee, smoking and talking. This afternoon there were no customers and May was out, but they stayed in the back room. It was too small a space to sit down in, so it was like being in a lift where people had got stuck together and felt compelled to talk. Mary was there too, taking up as little space as she could. The cooing voices of the salon were released in hisses, splutters and shrieks, as they grabbed one another and doubled up to stop the noise they made from carrying. Jeanette was avid, hawk-like, pouncing on the beginning of a confession or piece of gossip. She was also generous with her own revelations: ‘So Father Barclay stood there talking to my tits!’; ‘I laughed so hard when Malcolm couldn’t get it up, I wet myself!’. Suze would offer herself up too: ‘I’ve got the itch. Can’t get rid of it. Been to see that Dr Kill Off twice.’ Felicity was still quieter than the others, but more violent: ‘Better get down the clap clinic before you scratch it off!’ and they would gasp and giggle some more.

Mary breathed their smoke and tried to laugh at the right moments. She was fascinated. It was like the changing rooms at school, where someone was always patrolling, looking for something to mock, only here she was safe, not picked on but overlooked. Then Suze said something about Sophie Hepple. ‘Gagging for it!’ Jeanette smirked. ‘That Christie goes home at closing time each night, full of beer. Brewer’s droop, I’ll be bound!’

‘Perhaps she’s getting it from the Loony! If you didn’t know he was cracked, I mean you might, mightn’t you, with looks like that?’ It was Felicity who said it. They all looked at Mary.

‘Says he has a thing about you,’ Jeanette began. Mary wished she was by the door and could slip away. Jeanette’s voice softened. ‘Don’t let him bother you, love. He’s always been cracked, that one, but he’s no harm, really. Take no notice.’

‘No more walking on water, heh?’ Felicity was smiling as she said it but, again, nobody laughed. The end of Jeanette’s cigarette sizzled as she dropped it into her cold tea.

Suze began, awkwardly, ‘I mean, it’s like May says, right? If he knew it were all nonsense, if the girl told him straight …’ Jeanette’s eyebrows shot up and Felicity gave a small, rapid shake of her head. Mary began to move through them, to the door. Suze stopped her with a hand on her arm and continued: ‘Don’t get me wrong, love. Says you’re a good girl but, it’s like they say, Tom’s never been right in the head, but he can be put straight. You could just say –’

Mary pulled herself free. She grabbed the broom and made for the salon, overhearing Jeanette mutter, ‘And what if she did, Suze?’

The three women appeared in the salon. They followed Mary round, cleaning brushes and collecting up towels, curlers and pins – jobs that Mary was supposed to do.

‘Don’t worry love!’ Suze tilted her head and gave a pouting, apologetic smile. ‘The place is full of odd ones, always has been. That boy’s nothing to be troubled about. I’ve known him donkey’s years!’

‘After all,’ Jeanette said. ‘There’s my Uncle Bob. Too scared to so much as pick up a kitten since he left the Special Services! Thinks he’ll break anything he touches!’

‘Wasn’t Dr Burgess called in to get him sent off to hospital last Christmas?’

‘Yeah. Sectioned, he was. Stayed there till Easter but doing fine at home, on the medication. Aunt Em’s the man of the house now!’

‘Not so much of a man as Dot Grieves!’ Felicity put in, picking up the thread. ‘I’ve begun to think her old man’s clothes suit her!’

‘Now he was a case as well,’ Suze remembered. ‘Haunted, he was, by his time in Japan. Dot used to find him curled up in a ball in the field behind the house. I thought she’d be relieved when he was gone!’

‘The old ones aren’t ever what you think, are they?’ Jeanette sounded proud. ‘Mind you, our lot had some crackers, didn’t it, Suze?’ They’d been at secondary school together. ‘Remember Hilary Thropton Smith?’

‘Hilary Thropton Smith!’ sang Suze. ‘The posh girl who married that Indian chap!’

‘She turned up once, with the baby,’ Jeanette recalled. ‘Parents wouldn’t let them inside the door.’

‘Says the baby was a lovely little thing.’

‘Oo, and what about Lady Kay?’

‘I remember that!’ said Felicity. ‘That was all over the papers!’

‘She was in our class!’ Suze and Jeanette chorused and Jeanette went on. ‘You’d never have thought she had it in her. So quiet and dull, with those kneesocks and that violin. She must have been having us all on even then!’

Mary was curious. ‘What did she do?’

‘You never heard of Lady Kay?’ said Suze. ‘Kay d’Arcy, actually. Sounds posh but her father were only a hand on Factory Farm. She went down to London, called herself Lady, even managed to get it on her cheque book and that. Worked for a politician and took him for thousands. Went to prison, didn’t she?’

‘And there was her sister, Beverley. Poor old Beverley.’

‘Wasn’t it to do with her glands?’ asked Felicity. ‘That court case made the papers, too.’

‘What happened?’ asked Mary.

‘Let’s just say it wasn’t her glands and that butcher should have been locked up,’ Jeanette explained tartly.

‘She died, you see,’ simpered Suze.

The names they conjured up were almost familiar but Mary had never been told these stories. She had heard these people mentioned in a telegraphic shorthand passed between grown-ups, with raised eyebrows and knowing sidelong looks. Hearing such garish dramas was like seeing the village coloured in, made foreign and more unknowable than ever.

Jeanette caught Mary looking in the mirror and leapt behind her: ‘Don’t move!’ Mary did what she was told. ‘What would you care for today?’ Jeanette trilled in her best salon voice. Mary frowned as Jeanette reached for the wigs arranged on polystyrene heads with the same profile as that on the sign outside.

She pushed the blonde one onto Mary’s head and they all laughed, even Mary who could not now be cross. ‘I look like a sick sheep!’ she managed and they roared. She blushed, pleased to have entertained them. Then the red wig went on. ‘A shy carrot!’ Mary was enjoying herself. Lastly, Jeanette turned her into a brunette and Mary forgot to make a joke as she saw herself with this incongruous but wonderful thick, shiny hair.

‘Deep … dark,’ Suze ventured and the others gathered round Mary, taking off her glasses, pulling the wig a little from side to side, fluffing out and smoothing the hair.

Jeanette regarded the pale, skinny girl in her old-fashioned shift dress. ‘We could make something of you,’ she grinned.

‘Oo! Would you let us?’ Suze was excited. ‘There’s no one in the rest of the afternoon and Madam M’s pushed off.’ Felicity was smiling, too.

Mary was charmed. ‘OK.’ They wrapped her in a gown and led her to the sink.

While Jeanette washed her hair, Suze announced she would give her a French manicure. Mary closed her eyes and enjoyed the rush of more water than Stella would ever let her use at home, where they had no shower-head for the bath, just a tin mug with which to wet and rinse. Suze pulled over her little manicure trolley, laid a tissue on a velvet cushion and arranged Mary’s hand upon it. She separated her fingers with puffs of cotton wool and rubbed cream that smelt of almonds into them, murmuring about her ‘lovely soft skin, so elastic …’. Mary’s hands grew long and light, just as Jeanette’s brisk massage of her scalp was easing her head. When her hair had been washed, they moved her in front of a mirror. Suze followed with her trolley, and began to file and dab. Jeanette combed her hair through and Felicity came over with a colour chart.

The three hairdressers considered their options expertly: ‘Just a rinse, give her a bit of colour, but subtle.’

‘She wants something to make it a bit more definite, but she’s a pink not an olive so watch the aubergine end of things.’

‘Autumnal, rather than winter, don’t you think? Something woody with a bit of warmth to it? A touch of sun?’ They weighed up Copper Beech (‘too light’), Walnut Gold (‘too orange’) and decided on Midnight Chestnut (‘subtle but deep’). Mary wanted to say, ‘Black. Just dye it black,’ but when she squinted at the square of Midnight Chestnut, it looked as good as black to her. While Felicity swabbed the purple dye onto her head, Suze continued with her nails. First, she put little paper crescents on her fingertips and applied the ‘bottom coat of natural’. Then the strips came off and the bare rims of the nails were painted white. Then a ‘top coat of clear’. Mary held a finished hand up to her face. Her nails looked like an image of naturalness – shiny pink and white. She rather liked it. Her scalp began to itch and burn but she didn’t want to say anything to spoil all this and before long, Felicity announced it was time to rinse the dye off. When she was returned to the mirror, Mary asked for her glasses but they said no, she should wait and then get the ‘full effect’.

Jeanette put out her cigarette and took up her scissors. She stood to one side of the mirror, scrutinising Mary’s face. ‘Girls, I’ve been thinking Mary Quant or Audrey …’ Suze clapped and squealed. Felicity nodded hard. Mary tried to watch but although her hair looked darker and more substantial now, even at this short distance it began to blur. When Jeanette had finished, Mary went to get up but they pushed her back down. ‘Patience! Patience! We’ve to do your face, yet.’ Felicity plucked her eyebrows and coloured them with pencil. Suze applied foundation with a wet sponge and then painted Mary’s eyelids and mouth with tiny flicks of various brushes, in several colours. ‘It’s ever so subtle,’ she reassured her. Three coats of mascara followed and a dusting of powder and rouge. They told her to close her eyes and stood her up. Felicity handed her her glasses.

At closing time, they all spilled out of the salon together, laughing and patting Mary’s hair. She loved them, loved being surrounded by them and waved them off as they got into Felicity’s car. None of them lived in the village. Suze had grown up there but married an accountant who caught the Mortimer Tye commuter train, so they lived there. Jeanette was divorced and was saving up to buy herself a studio flat in Camptown. For now she was back with her parents, in a tied cottage on the Ingfield Road. Felicity was from Mortimer Over, two train stops down towards Crouchness.

‘Mary?’ It was Clara. She was bronzer than ever, her hair more firey. She had scraped it back and secured it in a messy knot with what looked like skewers. The ends, which sprung away in all directions, had been bleached blonde by the sun. She had on a black t-shirt with a studded hem and tight black jeans. ‘I only knew it was you from the dress,’ she laughed. ‘Been and had your hair done?’

‘No, I …’ Mary pulled off her glasses and rubbed at her face. ‘I work there, see. They just wanted someone to …’ She ran a hand through her hair, trying to mess it up a bit but it fell back into its sleek new shape. ‘Have you been away?’

‘Italy. Famiglia. You know …’ Clara was looking away now. ‘Christ, this summer is dragging and with Paulie away with his car, it’s almost impossible to get into town.’

‘The buses are going back to normal this week.’

‘I meant London.’ There was a pause. ‘Anyway,’ Clara continued and there was another pause before she asked, ‘What’s this about a Harvest Festival Disco? Any good?’

Mary copied her droll tone. ‘It’s hopeless. Cheesy music, mums and dads, orange squash and lemonade.’

‘Are you going?’

‘Never miss it.’

‘Good! It’ll be a laugh. By the way, Daniel’s back as well. Has he been in touch?’

‘Yes.’ Mary thought of the card, then realised Clara might mean since his return. ‘I mean not since … Since your dinner … he has, I mean.’ All this time, she had been facing into the light, and already she could feel her make-up clot and run. ‘I’ve got to go, good to see you, bye.’

Mary hurried past The Head and round onto the Green. Once home, she stood back from her bedroom mirror, still wearing her glasses. The effect was good. She felt more definite. Then she took off her glasses and moved closer. Her skin was a matt biscuit colour. Her bottom lip had been enlarged by a brownish line that ran round and up to her Cupid’s bow, which was exaggerated into two high points. Inside the line, her lips were coated with a beige pink and finished with gloss that made her look as if she had dipped her mouth in icing that hadn’t dried yet. Mary leant forward and kissed the mirror, and was surprised by the print she made. She quite liked her eyes. The pale lids and black lines were not so different from what she did, anyway. It was just that Suze had wanted to make her pretty and, as she said, ‘Open them up’, whereas what Mary wanted was to look artistic.

When she had scrubbed the make-up off, her hair looked harsh against her sore, pink face. It was shockingly smooth and flat. ‘Washes out,’ Felicity had promised. So Mary got her radio and turned it on loud to cover the noise of running water, and managed to wash her hair four times before Stella knocked on the door.

After Mary had been working at the salon for two weeks, Tracey the shampoo girl came back from her festival. May Hepple and her girls had become fond of Mary, but she had never managed to get the hang of things. There were always spills, missed heaps of hair, forgotten towels and a customer complaining of soap in her eyes. They patted Mary, clucked and shook their heads, but were glad to see Tracey back. Mary was kept on as Saturday girl.

‘You a hairdresser now?’ Lucas asked her the next morning over breakfast.

‘On Saturdays.’

‘Could you give us a trim, then?’ Stella came in with his egg.

‘I don’t cut hair, I only wash it.’

‘Just a trim?’

Mary knew what her mother would expect of her. It was only more old hair. It would be like straightening a hem. ‘OK.’ Stella was smiling at her, but she wouldn’t look up. ‘I’ll fetch some scissors when you’ve eaten.’

Stella found a towel before she went to open the shop and Lucas sat back with it tucked like a bib around his shoulders and under his chin. His hair was so lank, the grooves made by Mary’s comb stayed visible. The acrid whiff of his skin reminded her of the salon. She thought of May’s girls. ‘Been away this summer?’ she chirruped.

Lucas chuckled. ‘Well, I’ve been to the water.’

‘The coast?’

‘No, the Dip.’ Mary began to comb and snip. Lucas went on. ‘There’s fellows out there’ll let me have a fish from their buckets.’

‘You cook fish in the shed?’

‘On my bonfire. Wrap it in newspaper, and into the embers. Old army trick.’ Scurfy flakes and yellow-grey clumps of hair fell on his shoulders. ‘Water’s right down, you know …’

‘Low?’

‘Low as I’ve known it.’

‘Can you see anything?’

Lucas cackled. ‘Well, still a lot of water, that’s for sure!’

‘I mean, the buildings –?’

‘Saw Tom Hepple out there, you know. Writing and measuring, he was. Boy needs to leave well alone.’

‘Is it still there?’

‘The Hepple place, you mean?’ Mary’s hand shook so much, she held her scissors and comb away from his head. Lucas snorted. ‘Funny business, that. Old Iris hated the place, you know, hated being stuck out there!’

‘But I thought –’

‘And those boys, all grown up and not moving on. Drove the woman mad!’

‘But my Dad –’

‘She was good to him, wasn’t she? He was like a son, after all. And he was the one who did go, off to university on a scholarship, and a year early. By God, old Iris was proud!’

‘But the house –’

‘Nasty old place, that. If I were those boys I’d have been glad to see the back of it – pokey, mouldering, miserable pile.’

‘But the money?’

Lucas shifted in his chair and lowered his head, even though Mary was behind him. ‘That were up to your Dad, weren’t it? Between him and them. No one else’s business.’

‘Are you just saying that?’

‘I just said it, didn’t I!’ and he chuckled till tears leaked from his clotted, rheumy eyes. Mary quickly trimmed the last strands at the nape of his neck. He left still wearing the towel, and she let him. She put the scissors in the sink and the comb in the bin. She swept the floor and washed her hands.

Two mornings later, just after Lucas had finished breakfast and gone, in the back and out the front as usual, there was a knock on the door. Stella answered it. Mary was still asleep upstairs.

‘Mrs George?’ It was a small man, already sticky in his shiny grey suit. A vest showed through his white nylon shirt. He had a folder under his arm. He put out his hand and grinned, showing small, pointed, stained teeth.

A survey, Stella thought. He wants an opinion or a donation or the promise of a vote. ‘Ms Lupton, actually.’ She didn’t take his hand.

The man spat out a brisk ‘Ha!’ and a spot of his saliva landed on Stella’s cheek. His breath smelt of cabbage, milk and baked beans. She wiped her face and stepped backwards. He moved towards her. ‘Mzzzz Lupton? Your maiden name? But once Mrs George?’

‘What is it you want?’

He looked covertly and obviously from side to side, then opened the file and showed her the top page. ‘Shall we discuss it indoors?’

‘By all means.’ Stella’s voice was flat as she led him through and closed the door.

When Mary was woken by her mother’s shouting, she thought for a moment she was a child again and, half asleep, she did what she had done then, crept to the top of the stairs and listened.

‘He gives me absolutely nothing!’ There was someone else there, murmuring. The door flew open and a man stumbled into the hall. Stella pushed papers into his hands. ‘Take your damned file and go see him in his smart new seaside home! If he’s not there, you can always catch him in the offices of his smart new London practice!’ More murmuring. ‘Yes, he did leave years ago and I do have my own business but it is going down. You want to see the books again? You people have been through them already! And what the hell do you mean, turning up at this time of the morning? Are you spying on me? What the hell for?’

The man’s voice was getting stronger: ‘Reason to believe … cohabitation … seen leaving your home three consecutive mornings …’

‘Lucas!’ Stella screamed. ‘You think I’m living with a tramp?’

‘Three consecutive mornings constitutes –’

‘Get out!’ Mary hid behind the banisters but caught a glimpse of Stella yanking open the front door and throwing the file out onto the Green. ‘Take your government filth and get out!’ The man scuttled out the door. Stella followed and Mary rushed into her mother’s room and was at the window in time to see May Hepple hurry away from her gate, and a ripple of withdrawing shadows, and windows and doors being closed all round the Green.

‘Did you think to ask me? Did you think to ask my neighbours?’ Stella screeched as the man stumbled about, picking up spilt papers. ‘Ask them now!’ There was no movement among the doors and windows, and around the noise that Stella was making, the Green held an unusual silence. ‘You say there’s no shame in coming to you for help!’ she shouted at the man who was hurrying towards his car. ‘Ask anyone about me!’ She scanned the houses.

Mary watched the man drive away and her mother turn and turn on the spot, her fists raised and her hair all over her face. She was still wearing the purple kaftan she used as a dressing gown. Her feet were bare and Mary could see the chain of bells round her left ankle. Mary went back to bed and stayed there till she had heard her mother come indoors and leave again for the shop. It was only then that their neighbours began to come out of their houses again.

Now that it was full of water, people thought of the Dip as a bowl, but it had never been that shape. It was a crooked valley that had come about through pressure and fissure. Its sides were steep in some parts and, in others, almost level. The valley floor had been broad and flat around Goose Farm, but narrowed almost to a point behind the church. In between, it curved and swelled and shrank again. Iris Hepple’s house had been built on a shelf, high up one side of the valley, behind which the ground rose so steeply that it had been left wild. To reach the house, you had to take the lane into the Dip and then make your way up the track. Her boys had hung a knotted rope from the long branch of the oak that Mary now walked out on, and had swung themselves down, crash-landing in the bracken.

In the Chapel, Tom Hepple went over and over the arc of that swing, trying to remember how deep and how wide it had been, and how far you had to scrabble up the bank from behind the house to get back to the tree. He drew a line out from the bank and another up from the house, and tried to think himself back to his boyhood scale of things. He thought about floating, jumping and flying (had she been on the water or in the air?). He drew diagrams and made calculations on the backs of bits of paper that had spilled from the filing cabinet. Some had got stuck together when those candles had burned right down and dripped everywhere. Among them were some photographs he’d tried to separate, only they had torn. He found one of a little girl with plaits, in a woolly hat. A stream of wax had run across her face. He levered it off as carefully as he could, but a whole strip of the picture came away. Nonetheless, Tom liked the old-fashioned tones of the unstable colours, how her thick red coat had taken on a blue sheen like plums, and how the snow had yellowed to fleece. He set the picture on a shelf. On one clump of paper, a puddle of wax had dried with a strange shape in the middle of it, almost like a footprint. Tom put that on the shelf as well.

An alarm clock went off. It was the big old enamel one from home that shook as it hammered at its two bells. Tom reset the clock, rewound the alarm and put it back far enough away for him not to hear its solid tick. He went to the sink, counted out the capsules, and took them with some water. He needed to drink a lot to feel they had really gone down, and then they left him thirsty. He went back to his work, but could get no further with his sums. There was too much to check. He pushed some paper and pencils into his pockets, and set off for the Dip.

The narrow pavement ran out just after the phone box. From then on, Tom walked on the lumpy strip of wilted grass that bordered the hedgerow. The sky was changing, though the weather stayed the same. High grey clouds were beginning to churn overhead. Too insubstantial to be stormclouds, they were more like steam accumulating under a low kitchen ceiling. The atmosphere was becoming dimmer and closer, making it easier to see and more difficult to breathe. Tom looked for shade to walk in, but there was none. He felt a constant itch in his throat and a swelling of his tongue that made him swallow and swallow and drink all day – water, tea, soup, coffee, water. He felt like the man in the myth condemned to insatiable hunger, who finally ate himself. What helped was a couple of pints with Christie in The Arms. He knew not to overdo it now and Christie kept an eye on him. Tom liked the ease he felt at the end of those evenings, the slow walk back to the Chapel, the long satisfying piss in the outhouse, two glasses of water, a few of those capsules and the certainty of sleep. Then there were the evenings when Valerie offered to walk him home.

As he reached the Verges, Tom could feel sweat flooding his chest and back. His shirt clung to his armpits and his face ran with wet. He raised his hands to wipe it and the idea burst into his mind that his face was coming away; it was melting. At this, Tom stopped and crouched down. He held his breath and concentrated on the thought of the capsules he had just taken, pushing their cool magic into his veins. He gave himself a sum to do, calculating body weight, temperature, absorption and circulation. When he had all the numbers in place, he felt better and continued on till he turned off by Temple Grove.

The reservoir looked dull under the new sky. Tom walked away from the jetty, in the opposite direction to the house, to where the bank was shallow and he could clamber down to the water’s edge. Sweat prickled his eyes and his chest ached, but he would neither drink nor swim nor wash himself. He cupped his hands and dipped them in, surprised by how a surface that looked so opaque could give way so readily. He studied the water, looking for clues, but it ran through his fingers, painfully clear.

Even though it was what had brought him here, Tom couldn’t face walking along to the tree to take more measurements. He was exhausted. The overcast sky had left him with no sense of time, and he was surprised to realise how late it must be, that the grey was turning purple already.

When Tom reached the Verges, he was walking in near darkness which would have been alright, but the road was confusing just here. He had to stick to the edge of it, more so because the long drop back from the road to the bushes darkened and dissolved any further edges.

If a driver didn’t bother to dip their headlamps, he was swept away by each passing wave of light. He crossed the road so as not to walk into the oncoming traffic and found it better when the light came from behind him. He walked faster, hoping Christie might pass and pick him up, and offer him a pint at The Arms. Tom followed the edge of the road by feel alone. There was no painted line or curb, rise or fall, just a point where the tarmac ended and the grass began.

The car was parked just off the road. Tom would have to pass close by. He had not seen it till he was almost upon it as although there was someone inside, there was no light or noise and the car itself was stripped down to a grey-green like camouflage. The bushes behind it were deep and tall. The road was empty and Tom set off into it, as far away as he could get from the car while still feeling safe. He could hear the erratic rumble and chug of the Camptown bus as it rounded the bend towards him. The weak yellow beams of its lights were already visible, but he knew the bus was slow and there was time to get past the car and step back onto the grass again. Then, somehow, there were more lights, faster and brighter than those of the bus, coming from nowhere, from the wrong place. He heard a loud, dull noise and a crack, and felt himself stopped in his tracks by a wall that doubled him over and shovelled him sideways. There were other noises, some big, some small: screaming, tearing and crunching, and a shredding, a crackle, an intense hum like a tuning fork, a sigh and a gurgle, but these sounds were far away. That was all.

Stella and Christie met in one of the long corridors of Camptown Hospital.

‘I gave Shirley Lacey a lift,’ Stella began. ‘Kevin’s not able to say much yet, but she likes to be there.’

‘Does he know about his mates?’

‘No. They’re waiting. How’s Tom?’

Christie shrugged. ‘His leg was a clean break – it’ll mend. Otherwise it’s just cuts and bruises.’

‘And shock?’

‘I suppose so, but he didn’t come off worst did he?’

‘No, but still … I mean, it’ll set him back a bit.’

‘He’ll pull through. What were those boys playing at?’

‘I believe it’s called “Chicken”.’

‘God, yes. We all played that one, didn’t we? But on our bikes, going along walls or down the Dip, not overtaking bloody buses on a blind corner in someone else’s car.’

‘Was anyone in the bus hurt?’

‘Just cuts and bruises. One or two of the old ones were near done in by the shock. They all had to get off, see, and those lads were half hanging out of the wreck – blood everywhere. They’d swerved away from Tom, straight in front of the bus.’

‘Who was driving?’

‘The Hotchkiss boy; he was only fifteen. Kevin was in the back.’

‘And Tom? What was he doing?’

Christie’s face set. ‘Walking home. That’s allowed, isn’t it?’

‘I didn’t mean to suggest …’ Stella faltered and reached out a placating hand.

‘That’s how it is, isn’t it?’ Stella had never seen him look so angry. ‘There’s a loony wandering all over the road so it has to be his fault, right? Not just a man, minding his own business, walking home. If he’s a bit cracked, it had to be him that forced those boys onto the right and stood in front of them laughing, yes? Surprised he wasn’t wandering about naked and all?’ Stella didn’t know what to say. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs George. My brother’s back in the hospital now, where people like you think he belongs!’ He marched off.

Stella couldn’t stand to be thought of like that. She rushed after Christie and caught his arm. ‘No! No!’ She realised she was shouting and lowered her voice. ‘I know Tom, remember? I think what you’re doing, trying to keep him where he belongs, is … right! I’ve explained to Mary how it is, with the water and seeing her. She’s almost grown up now and she understands. No one wants him back in one of those, those … prisons of the mind, Oh no!’ She shook her head earnestly.

Christie was puzzled. Prisons of the what? He patted her hand and left.

Stella continued to wait, knowing that Kevin was just the same and Shirley Lacey would be just as she had been these last few days: angry, frightened, overjoyed he wasn’t dead and ashamed of her luck.

When Shirley appeared, she was with a man Stella recognised. If there had been a corner or even a cupboard nearby, she would have hidden from him.

‘Mrs George,’ Shirley began in her tidied-up voice. The man, whose face had been lowered and softened in sympathy, looked up and gave a thin but toothy smile. Stella gave a flick of her head, which he acknowledged with a jerky nod.

‘How’s Kevin?’ Stella asked, avid in her nervousness.

‘Same.’ Shirley was exhausted. ‘This is Mr Sedge. He was there. He’s a witness. He’s a lawyer, too, wants to help, says we can get special aid.’

‘A lawyer?’ Stella’s surprise was too obvious.

‘Yes. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just make myself comfortable for the journey.’ Shirley Lacey hurried off.

‘A lawyer?’ Stella stepped back, away from that familiar, rotten breath.

‘Not currently attached to a firm, you understand, Ms Lupton.’ Tough-looking strings of saliva hung across his open mouth. ‘Between practices, you might say.’

‘So they took you on as a government snoop?’

He didn’t rise to her. ‘Temporary and part-time. I am here to aid Mrs Lacey, in a professional capacity.’

‘And as a witness, Shirley said.’

‘That’s right.’

‘It was your car, wasn’t it, parked by the road?’

‘It was.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘Notorious black spot.’ The Adam’s apple in his puckered and ill-shaven throat bobbed urgently.

‘And why were you there?’

‘Notorious black spot,’ he repeated.

There was a long silence as Stella made sense of what he’d said. ‘You creep!’ As she put it together, she moved towards Frank Sedge, who backed into the wall. ‘You were waiting for an accident to happen, weren’t you?’

‘Well, I –’ he spluttered and pressed himself harder against the wall.

‘Did you have your business card? Did you leave it in the pocket of that dead boy’s shirt? Or does everyone have to have been there three consecutive nights!’

‘Sorry to keep you!’ Shirley called, as she reappeared in the corridor. Stella strode off to meet her and steered her so firmly and quickly the other way, that Shirley only had the chance to give her lawyer the briefest of waves.

‘What would settle you?’ Father Barclay asked, after a long silence. It was the end of visiting time. Through the curtains drawn round Tom’s bed, he could hear the nurse who wheeled round a trolley each evening, doling out a mug of pale cocoa made with homogenised milk and a couple of musty biscuits to each of the patients, who were doing what they could to bring on sleep.

Tom smiled. ‘Not cocoa.’ The nurse trundled past without slowing.

‘Does it really help, being back in the village?’ Father Barclay felt at ease in Tom’s company, not agonised by the shyness that compelled him to manic heartiness when he had to play the village priest. Here was someone he knew and understood, and perhaps could help.

‘I shouldn’t think so … really. But the idea … of it.’

‘You mean how it was?’

‘No, no. It were always tight and there was … ever trouble. I mean what I might have found it to be … for me.’ Father Barclay waited and eventually, Tom went on. ‘You grew up … in the city, didn’t you, Harry?’

‘In a boys’ home.’

‘You said. They put the homeless in a home.’ They both laughed. ‘Says you look like a farmer!’

‘They do.’ The priest blushed. ‘Who knows? It might be in my blood.’

‘So why come to a village? Because your … face fits?’ They laughed again. Then Tom shook his head. ‘That matters, though, doesn’t it?’

Father Barclay nodded. ‘You’re right. I was drawn to Allnorthover because it seemed that everything belonged, and had belonged for centuries. People don’t lock their doors. They know and help each other. There are old houses and old families. I liked the notion of unbroken lines, of things that stay in place.’

‘And what if your face fits but you don’t?’ Tom enquired. ‘When you belong to it, the place holds you so tight, you might not notice how it squeezes.’

‘If it’s like that for you, why come back?’

Tom looked along the high narrow bed, across the cage that protected his plaster cast from the pressure of his blankets. The pain of his leg left the rest of him clear. He had never felt so clear. ‘You know, Harry. There are things … out of place. I did nothing to put them right back then. If I can settle it, it won’t hurt to … be held here.’

‘Tom. There’s things out of our hands. You have to let go and move on.’ He knew he was sounding soothing now.

Tom frowned. ‘How can you let go of something that’s out of your hands?’ (That blinding light and somewhere in it, the girl and her gift of walking out onto the water to show him where.)

The priest chuckled, leaned forward and hugged him awkwardly. ‘I’ve missed you, my friend!’

Tom lay awake, enjoying their conversation long after Father Barclay had gone. He would soon be home. He was getting to know the girl through where she went and when. At the right moment, he would catch her. And there was much to do before the first frost.

‘Dear D,’ wrote Mary, gauging the scale of her writing to an imagined square far smaller than the size of the card itself. ‘The Harvest Festival Disco on the 20th? Clara thinks it might be a laugh. M.’ She paused and then followed her initial with the rest of her name. The disco was three weeks away. Perhaps she should wait a few days till school started and she was in Camptown, and might bump into him anyway. If she waited, he might phone. She found his address in the telephone directory and copied it out. She thought of how it might arrive stamped by the sorting office – ‘Remember Your Postcode’, and of how that might obliterate part or all of her message, something crucial like a name or date. Should she try to find out his postcode? She remembered how he had addressed her as ‘Mary George of Allnorthover’, and left the card as it was. The picture on the front was of a sculpture of a blue tree. It had a frothy top, a spindly fluid trunk, and a puddle of roots at the bottom. The shadow it cast on the white wall behind it was like the neck of a full jug from which a trickle of liquid poured. Mary had seen this sculpture at an exhibition once when she was small and had been so captivated by the foreign shade of blue that Stella had bought her the card.

Beside her on her desk were two rejected versions of her note. One was a picture of a woman in white, carrying a man on her shoulders. They were floating over a green river and they were smiling. His right hand covered her right eye, and in his left was a raised glass of red wine. His head had slipped to one side and looked as if it were about to be carried off by the winged woman in purple who was swooping past. ‘Dear Daniel,’ this card read. ‘What a summer!!! I’ve been washing half the village’s hair, hearing all sorts of scandal, and praying for rain. How about the Harvest Festival Disco? I was talking to Clara and SHE said it should be an absolute hoot!! Believe me, it is surreal. It’s on the 20th, so let me know what you think, love from Mary.’ There was a cross, a kiss, after her name. It was another card Mary had had for years, but only now did she notice that the woman in white’s dress was slashed at the front, a purple-stockinged leg was exposed and that her low-cut bodice was falling off one breast. The third card was a photograph that reminded Mary of somewhere she had been to, marshes near the coast. It was of a narrow boardwalk disappearing into rushes. On the horizon, at the other end of the path, was the silhouette of a house. It had one tall chimney, like a periscope. On the back of this one Mary had written: ‘Après la récolte, la danse. The Harvest Festival Disco on the 20th? An experience.’ No names, initials, ‘dear’ or ‘love’. The French was something she’d read somewhere. She had to look up ‘récolte’, ‘harvest’, to check the direction of the accent. Perhaps she’d made it up. Mary put all three cards back in a drawer.

When June Hepple found out that Tom was going to be coming to stay again, she put away her ornaments, packed a bag and went back to her Great Aunt May’s. The twins, Darren and Sean, were home and Sophie was busy getting them new shorts, shirts, blazers and shoes, haircuts and pencils. She didn’t mind June being out of the way.

If people tried to ask June about her mad uncle, she had nothing to say because she didn’t see him, she wasn’t there. May liked her company and approved of Christie keeping Tom with him. The Chapel was not a place to live.

Sophie kept the bottles of capsules lined up on the kitchen counter, along with the painkillers and antibiotics the hospital had prescribed. Each morning, Christie helped Tom into the bathroom and then downstairs. He spent the day in the big armchair, his broken leg in its cast, as rigid as the rest of him was limp. Sophie bustled around, feeling the need to go in and check on him frequently.

Although Sophie left the windows open, little air came through the nylon lace curtains. The high-backed armchair had been in the old house, but Sophie had given it a smooth new cover and once Tom had sunk into it, it was impossible for him to get up again. If he needed to use the downstairs toilet when Christie was out, Sophie had to help him up. She did this by taking his wrists rather than his hands, pulling him quickly onto his feet and then, as he straightened, faltered and leant towards her, she would slip a crutch under each of his elbows and hurry off. But Sophie never really hurried. She was always careful, made-up and dressed up. Tom liked to see how she placed herself in a room, how she leaned back on her high heels and how her hips rolled from side to side. Whenever she walked away, he watched her.

Outside, all day, Darren and Sean kicked a ball against the side of the house. They took it in turns to try and keep the ball in the air, so it hammered against the wall in long volleys. Then there would be a disappointed shout, silence, and the hammering would start again.

‘Let’s go in on the bike!’

‘Billy, I am not turning up at school in your bloody shoe!’

‘You don’t have to. I’ll leave it behind. Just ride pillion.’

It was the day before the beginning of term. Billy and Mary were sitting in the Catholic cemetery, smoking dope. It was still hot, but the sky had begun to move. One minute the poplars cast tall shadows and the next, the light was even again.

Billy, as usual, was lounging on his great-grandfather’s grave. ‘It’s our last year, our last start. We might as well do it in style,’ he persisted.

‘I just want to get on with things now,’ Mary tried to explain. ‘No fuss.’

‘Worried your boyfriend will see you?’ Billy didn’t usually tease her and she didn’t like it.

‘Fuck off. Anyway, who said he’s my boyfriend?’

‘Excuse me! First Crouchness, then a little al fresco do in the doctor’s pool?’

‘What do you know about that?’

‘Little bird …’ he chanted.

‘Christ, you’re beginning to sound just like Julie!’

Billy sat up. ‘It’s a small world.’

‘If you’re going to talk in clichés, Billy, I’m going home.’ He looked unperturbed, but followed Mary as she stomped out of the cemetery.

‘Forget about tomorrow, then. Let’s just go for a ride now. No one will see you in the sidecar, anyway.’ He knew how much Mary liked to get away from the village. She shrugged and continued marching, but Billy saw her clenched fists relax and then, when she reached the bike parked on the road, she clambered ungraciously in.

As they passed the Chapel, the rear wheel of the motorbike hit a pot-hole where the heat-cracked road had erupted. Billy rode on for a minute or two, until he could no longer ignore the violent hobbling of the burst tyre. He pulled over at the end of the Clock House drive. As he was taking off his helmet, they could hear someone running towards them along the gravel. Mary thought it might be Clara, and tugged with one hand at the chin-strap of her helmet and at her glasses with the other. The strap was frayed and its buckle stiff, and her glasses were held fast. As the figure approached from behind, she could not bear to turn round and be seen. There was nothing for it but to sink as low as she could in the sidecar and to hope whoever it was would pass.

‘Tobias, man!’ Billy was waving his arms, flapping the extravagantly flared sleeves of his t-shirt like semaphore flags.

‘Recognised the engine, Bill, then I heard you had a limp. Must’ve hit that crater back by the Chapel.’ Mary was baffled but also pleased to hear Tobias’s voice again and its accompanying clatter of tools as he squatted down by the bike. But although she was on the other side of the machine, in plain view, she wouldn’t turn her head.

The two boys knelt beside the wheel, probing and testing and then Tobias stood up and stretched, casting his shadow across Mary’s back. She shivered. ‘Wheel it up to the lawn and we’ll find a spare. You can leave the side-car here.’ He leant across the bike to uncouple it. Mary felt a jolt. She wanted to face them after all, even just so that she could take the helmet and her glasses off but, by this time, it seemed less embarrassing to stay put. She didn’t see Billy frown and open his mouth to speak to her, or Tobias smile and put his finger to his lips. Mary listened as they pushed the bike up the drive. She was too confused to notice that the slow crunch of the motorbike’s wheels had given way to something faster and stronger. When she realised that there was a car coming down from the house, she tried not only to remove the helmet and take off her glasses but also to climb out. She managed to get herself free while yanking at the helmet, the strap of which abruptly gave way. Her loosened glasses tipped forwards so she dropped the helmet and lurched to grab them, lost her balance and fell sprawling as the car braked hard and stopped, its nearest front wheel just inches from Mary’s outstretched hand.

‘Darling!’ Clara leapt from the passenger door and helped Mary up. She was shaking, but more out of humiliation than shock or pain.

Paulie came sheepishly forward from the driver’s side. ‘Sorry, sweetheart.’ A flush was spreading messily over his throat and up into his cheeks. ‘You came from nowhere.’ He held out his hands in a wide shrug.

Clara, her arm still clamped round Mary’s shoulder, tittered. ‘Not quite nowhere.’ She pointed at the sidecar. Paulie snorted, held his breath, saw Mary smile and then giggled, and Mary began laughing too, laughing and crying and shaking, and all the time feeling Clara’s strong arm round her.

‘You need a drink,’ Clara pronounced and pushed Mary into the car.

Mary decided not to ask where they were going and was relieved that Paulie didn’t stop at one of the High Street pubs, where she knew no one would serve her. The car continued out along the Mortimer Tye road and stopped instead at The Crown, the last pub inside the parish boundary. Although this meant that it officially belonged to the village, few thought of it as such. The Crown, with its carvery and banqueting hall, was for occasions.

They sat in the garden and drank gin and tonics, while the clouds quickened and moved over them, making Mary pull off her cardigan only to put it back on again a minute later. Her trousers were ripped across one knee (but so were Clara’s black jeans), and one shin and both hands were grazed. Mary was happy. She listened to Paulie and Clara’s languid chat and turned from one to the other, fascinated by how they were both – Clara with her witch’s face and Paulie, so smooth and bland – so attractive. Mary felt sleepy and talkative at once, and began to join in. She told them about Hilary Thropton Smith’s racist parents and Kay d’Arcy’s scam. She described the tramp who comes for breakfast, bringing his egg, and who sold a caravan that didn’t belong to him. They were laughing, and she was pleased and thinking up other stories when Clara yelled, ‘Over here!’

It was Daniel, Julia and Ed. Mary squinted up at Daniel as he approached, forgetting to smile because of not being able to see that he was smiling at her, which made him hesitate and sit away from her, next to Paulie. Mary leant back in her chair, and was grateful that Clara talked on, about Italy and the term ahead.

‘How’s your summer been?’ Daniel leant forward and Paulie leant back.

‘Oh, sort of boring and sort of lively … you know …’ she stared down into the glass clutched in her hands.

‘Mary’s been telling us fabulous stories about the village!’ Paulie said.

‘Really?’ Daniel sounded interested or piqued – Mary couldn’t tell.

Then Clara got up and Paulie, Julia and Ed too. They all sang their goodbyes, blew kisses and left.

A bell rang in the pub. ‘Another drink? That’ll be last orders. It’s almost half past two.’ While Daniel was gone, Mary moved into Paulie’s chair. Sitting next to him made everything easier. They lit cigarettes and spun out their drinks, managing to talk a little but mostly happy just to sit together. Daniel took her hand and stood up. ‘Looks like we’ll have to walk back across the fields.’

‘Fine. I’ll just …’ Mary rushed off to the toilet, a converted stable that ran along the side of the pub. She peered into the speckled mirror, unlit by the dangling bare bulb, and tried to animate herself, stretching her lips, baring her teeth, flicking her hair and wrinkling her nose. Then she went back out to meet Daniel with the wide smile she’d practised still fixed on her face.

‘Are you alright?’ he said. Mary faltered and nodded. ‘It’s just you looked for a moment as if you’d seen a ghost!’ This made her laugh. Daniel took her arm and led her over a stile and onto the footpath back to Allnorthover.

‘Do you know the way?’ she spluttered, still giggling and now beginning to hiccup.

He could see the spire of Allnorthover’s first church. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it!’

By mid-afternoon, the sky was harsh and clear. The light that had in just a few dull days been forgotten, returned. Lying in a hollow in the meadow behind the church fields, Mary woke feeling not just burnt but scorched, like paper hit by a beam concentrated through a magnifying glass. Daniel was kneeling beside her. When they had lain down, the world had been revolving in jerky repeated lurches. She didn’t remember going to sleep, just waking up full of heat, her eyes swollen and her stomach both churning and empty. Her shirt was open. Mary did not move as Daniel leaned forward, kissed her mouth and undid the last two buttons. He pulled down her bra straps, carefully, as if arranging her, then ran a finger between her breasts and licked it.

‘Salt.’ He smiled, but Mary, now conscious of the sweat that had collected on her chest as she slept, made to get up. He leant down to meet her. Unable to push back and raise them both, Mary pulled his head hard against her instead.

He tugged himself free. ‘Let me look at you.’

‘No!’ She hadn’t meant to shout. The sun would exaggerate her pallor and emphasise every pimple and freckle and hair. She could see the tracery of veins along her arm. ‘It’s too bright.’ She yanked at the straps of her bra and rolled onto her front.

Daniel laid her shirt across her. ‘Put this back on then. You’ll burn.’ As she dressed, he turned away. They got to their feet, Mary stiff and blinking.

‘How long did I sleep?’

‘A couple of hours.’

‘You, too?’

‘On and off.’

‘Why didn’t you wake me?’

‘I wanted to look at you.’

Mary was silent: to say the wrong thing or anything that assumed anything could shatter this precarious intimacy. She didn’t want to ask Daniel how he had come to be in The Crown, nor to question Clara’s peculiar kindness. It might not be luck or fate but something altogether ordinary and nothing to do with her that had brought him here. They walked in silence past the church and round the Common till they met the far end of the High Street, where Mary led Daniel to the bus stop. Daniel drew Mary to him, but she stiffened.

‘Don’t look; then nobody will see you.’ He held her head against his chest, and she believed him and gave in completely as he kissed and stroked her hair and said, ‘You’re a strange and lovely creature, Mary George.’

The bus arrived, just ahead of Mim. The old dog almost fell over herself in her attempt to make it stop before it chose to. When she heard Mary’s sharp call, she wobbled, confused, sat down and whimpered.

‘Mimosa!’ Mary repeated sternly. ‘Don’t come the hit-and-run with me, my girl!’ The dog slunk towards her. When Mary had her by the collar, she realised Daniel was waiting to say goodbye and had one foot already on the platform of the bus. She started towards him, but Mim, thinking she was being forced to submit to her enemy, would not budge. Mary knew if she let go of her collar, the dog would follow and taunt the bus all the way out to the Verges. She tried again and this time, Mim ungraciously followed.

Daniel leaned down and kissed Mary. Mim hung back, panting noisily and baring her raddled tongue and brown teeth in a smelly yawn. Daniel looked at the dog (‘Goodnight … Mimosa!’) and then back at Mary as the bus conductor pointedly rang the bell three times and the bus juddered into life.

‘A strange and lovely creature,’ Mary heard Daniel say again but softly, so perhaps not really as, once more, he disappeared quickly and easily out of sight.

At the end of the first week of term, Mary received a note from her father. ‘Dear Mary, I will be in Camptown next Tuesday afternoon and was wondering if we could meet for tea after school? Say, 4.30 in C & L’s? If not poss, leave a message for me at home. Love, Daddy.’ She was so anxious and excited that she went for a walk, something she only did these days to get somewhere. It was early evening. As she got towards the end of Low Lane, she could see orderly plumes of smoke rising from the harvested fields where the farmers were burning stubble. Mary was drawn by the odd tameness of these fires, how the farmers decided on lines and the flames obeyed. The cropped straw glowed orange and charred black. There would be a glimmer of fire well into the night.

Mary walked along a track to one side of a field where the fire was still high. The earthy autumnal smell of burning made her wish for cold. Then the wind turned sharply, almost at right angles, as if it had bounced off Temple Grove, and the smoke had Mary surrounded. She couldn’t breathe. A second later, it was blown back.

Charlemeyne & Lere’s was Camptown’s snobby, dowdy and only department store. The tearoom was on the top, third, floor. The ground floor was crammed with departments that prided themselves on the variety of their stock and the expertise of their assistants: haberdashery, millinery, stationery, hosiery, jewellery and perfumery. Expert at judging customers, none of these slight men and formidable women bothered to offer Mary any help, and they prickled when she ran her hand absentmindedly along a shelf of ribbons, riffled a heap of vellum or stroked a jar of feathers. She scurried into the lift, pulled the concertina door shut and pressed the button. Chains clanked and cables sighed.

On the third floor, Mary made her way through lingerie, electrical goods and soft furnishings, towards the corner roped off with swagged gold cord, where a counter was staffed by a waitress. There were ten tables covered in glassy beige cotton that passed for linen at a distance and fell in awkward folds to the floor. Peach-coloured napkins, starched and pressed into pleats, were fanned out in plastic clips. Each table held a laminated menu, a bowl of sugar lumps with tongs, and another filled with sachets of salad cream, mustard and tomato sauce.

Mary could tell from the set of her father’s back that he was not happy and realised how much she’d been hoping for from this meeting.

‘God!’ He jumped, turned and quickly smiled. ‘You gave me a shock, creeping up on me like that!’ He looked well, though.

‘Sorry, Dad!’ She leant down and kissed his cheek. ‘I didn’t mean to. You looked like you didn’t want to be disturbed.’

‘Never mind, never mind.’ He waved a hand impatiently across the table. ‘Sit down, dear. What’ll you have? A milk shake? Would you like that?’

The waitress loomed. Mary addressed her directly, ‘A cup of coffee, please.’

‘Filter or instant?’

‘Filter, please.’ It was what Matthew had just had brought to him. The water was still seeping through the grounds in the paper cushion in its plastic ring, into the cup.

They looked at each other, and then around the empty room.

‘How’s school?’ He patted his jacket pockets and brought out a box of matches and a case. She waited for him to light his cigarillo, only to be overwhelmed by the familiarity of its smell.

‘It’s my last year.’

‘Is it now?’ He’d been caught out. ‘Of course it is!’

Mary’s coffee arrived and dripped. It was weak, sour and lukewarm but she drank it religiously, in tiny mouthfuls. They talked about school (‘OK, you know, they’re piling it on, at least we can wear what we like, within reason’) and work (‘Red tape, preservation orders, international competitions’). Matthew leaned back and puffed. Mary was as impressed as ever by his air of authority, but she thought she saw his hands shake.

‘How’s your mother?’ he asked suddenly, his head veering closer.

‘OK, I think.’

‘Wary Mary!’ he chanted and, pleased with himself, relaxed again.

She screwed up her eyes to stop the tears coming. Matthew was busy rummaging in his leather satchel. He had something in his hand but kept it by his side, grinned and shook his head. ‘You don’t have to protect her, sweetheart. After all, you clearly know now how … impossible she became back there for a while. It must have been a shock finding out like that and you were right to, how shall I put it, let me know, but if we are going to help her, you’ll have to be straight. It’s no betrayal, love.’

Mary stared. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

Matthew put an envelope on the table. It was addressed to him, in Mary’s writing – the package of letters to Iris Hepple.

It took some time for Mary to make any kind of sense of it. ‘You mean they’re not from you?’

Matthew’s face hardened and his hand flew into the air and just as quickly, fell again. ‘Did you seriously, for one moment, imagine they were?’

‘But I haven’t, I didn’t look …’ This was bad, all wrong, really wrong, and Mary couldn’t work out why.

Matthew continued. ‘There’s so much you don’t know and, to be frank, that you don’t need to know, sweetie. Iris took me in and brought me up. I wasn’t going to be put off by a bit of blood, shit and vomit.’ Mary shuddered and her father smiled. ‘They couldn’t take it, you see. Couldn’t think of that kind of closeness as being anything other than … nor could they do the other right thing, and go and get on with their lives.’ Then, more to himself, ‘Hung around like watch dogs, terrified I’d – how did good old Father B put it? – “replace them in her heart”. Replace them in her house turned out to be more like it!’

He laughed drily, ground out his cigarillo in the glass ashtray, looked at his watch and rose. ‘It’s nice to see you but I have to say, I am most disappointed.’ He turned to the waitress, gave her a charming smile which was met with a blank sneer, and left a pound note on the table before ruffling Mary’s hair a little too fiercely and hurrying out.

Mary felt sick. She stuffed the envelope into her bag, ran out of the tearoom and straight into the ‘Powder Room’, where Dorothy Spence was sitting by the door arranging a shelf of air freshener and disinfectant beside a delicately flowered saucer in which she had placed a small card neatly printed with the words ‘Thank you’. Still sobbing, Mary rushed out back past her. Mrs Spence, unmade-up and unnoticed by Mary, regarded the swinging door. ‘Thank you.’ She was still rehearsing it. ‘Thank you.’

Once the reservoir had been filled, the machinery driven away, the builders’ huts taken down, the signs put up and the fence completed, the villagers stopped coming to look. Those who had lived in the Dip kept away and later, those who had watched remembered it differently. No one recalled the roar and gush they had expected. ‘A great pipe, like a hose filling a pool for days on end, weeks even.’ ‘It was like a seeping, a slow leak, a muddy puddle getting a bit bigger every day.’ ‘So fast, you blinked and you missed it and then it seemed natural.’ ‘So slow, it seemed natural by the end.’ ‘It took a month’, ‘a year’, ‘ages’. ‘The buildings? That falling-down church and that farm stuck in the Middle Ages? Says it even had a moat! Fat lot of good that did it in the end!’ A delighted, strenuous wheeze.

It was same with Matthew, his absence seeping and rising and finally levelling. ‘Didn’t he stay up at the Chapel after that wife of his got so difficult? The man had work in the city, on the coast. He has a place out there now, doesn’t he?’ ‘Matthew George the architect? Joe’s son. He grew up here. Doing very well for himself. Nice car. One child, a girl; looks nothing like either of them.’

Tom Hepple’s departure was not a story that people wanted to be close to, let alone part of. Papers had changed hands and so, then, had the house. It wasn’t right, but it was the law. He had no right to stay, not any more and the place was going anyway. The boy had no need to disappear completely. There was help close at hand, housing and the hospital, and family, plenty of that.

Tom remembered the day Matthew finally came to tell him himself. Otherwise, he’d have never believed it. On the wish of his mother and the say of his oldest friend, his home slipped away, like Iris herself, not quite gone but out of reach. He’d felt his skin break then, an unbearable lack of edges. Nothing helped, only going and staying far away, in any opposite place that would have him. The police had traced him and told Christie which hospital he was in, but also that the doctors felt that, for now, he was best left alone. So for the next ten years that was what Christie had done, for Tom’s own good – left him alone. (The days and nights of it. The dreams and voices and determinations, the fearful hopes, the fears.)

Stella was cutting out something at the table. Everything was laid neatly around her: large pointed and small rounded scissors, and pinking shears; the sewing machine that had belonged to her mother, so ancient it didn’t even have a treadle let alone a plug; a tin of needles, another of pins; tape, ribbon, stiffener and facing; buttons, a box of cotton reels and another of wool. To untidy Mary this looked like instruments laid out for an operation.

There was safety in her mother’s preoccupation and right now, she wanted her mother. She offered to make them both a cup of tea and Stella, pleased and surprised, accepted. Mary laid it all out on a tray and poured milk from a bottle into a jug.

‘What are you making?’ Mary asked, as she poured the tea carefully through the strainer, for which she had thought to provide a saucer. Stella didn’t even do that when they had company.

‘A dress for Billy’s Dad.’

Mary giggled. ‘They’ve roped you in for the Christmas panto again?’

‘You know our Violet …’

‘I’ve never dared call her Violet!’ Old Eely. ‘She looks down on us, Mum. Why help her out?’

‘I don’t mind. And it’s Morris I’m helping right now, isn’t it?’ She held up the voluminous pink dress to which she’d been adding a frill. ‘Just his colour, no?’

Mary wanted to hug her. I love you, she thought, watching her mother sew and snip, making instant choices from everything laid out around her. Tonight, her mother’s face didn’t look plain. Her scarves and beads were softness on a body in which every last bone was strong. She’s made from girders, Mary thought gladly.

‘You’re back late,’ Stella remarked.

‘I met Dad. For coffee. He asked me to.’

‘Well, that was nice.’

‘Not really …’ (Wary Mary).

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Stella said it so diffidently that Mary found, for the first time, she wanted to tell her mother everything.

‘Oh, Mum. I did such a terrible thing. I didn’t mean to, I thought they were Dad’s, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. You’d every right …’

Stella looked at her, baffled. ‘Slow down, love. What terrible thing?’

‘The letters. I got given them by Mr Cornice, to give back!’

‘What letters?’

‘Your letters! I thought they were Dad’s. I didn’t look, I mean I know letters are private and I thought they were Dad’s!’

‘What letters?’

Mary pulled the envelope from her bag and handed it over. Stella studied the five identically typed addresses and the postmarks.

‘Where did you say you got these?’

‘Mr Cornice. He said they were to be given back to you.’

‘To me?’

‘Well, he said to be given back.’ Mary shook as she reminded herself of why she was doing this, not to hurt her mother as she had her father, just to say she knew and that it was alright.

Stella picked one up. ‘Have you read them?’

Mary shook her head and watched as Stella turned the letter over. It had been opened. ‘I didn’t look, really. I just sent them straight to Dad. I thought they were his.’

Stella wasn’t listening. She read the page of dense type that Mary could only just make out through the translucent paper. ‘What does it say?’

Stella crumpled the letter back into the envelope and snatched up the other four. ‘You thought I wrote that?’ Her face was mottled and she was breathing deeply.

‘Not me, Dad. He said –’

‘He said what?’

Mary felt as if someone had hold of her and was turning her very quickly in one direction and then the other, back and forth. ‘He didn’t say, I mean he realised you must have –’

‘Must have what? Written this?’

‘Written what? Mum, I told you. I haven’t looked.’

‘Don’t give me that!’ Stella snapped. ‘You believed every word he said, didn’t you! That I would do something like that! What was the tea for? Felt sorry for your mad old Ma, did you?’

Mary tried. ‘There’s nothing wrong with wanting to express your feelings, even to someone who’s dead.’

‘Well! What a wise little woman you’re growing up to be! I tell you what, listen to your father. He’ll teach you how to look after yourself!’

‘Mum. I’m not on his, anyone’s, side.’

Stella wasn’t listening. ‘Why have you always behaved like some little ambassador? You’re not the United Nations, remember? You’re Airy Mary! Isn’t that what they called you at school? Not the girl who walks on water but the girl who walks into walls!’

Mary was pleading, ‘Stop it now! Stop it now!’ but when her mother did stop, suddenly shocked by herself, Mary still couldn’t stand it. Next came the super-soft voice, the cooing, the outstretched arms, ‘I didn’t mean it, honey, I was just …’

Stella came round and Mary moved away, and so they circled the table until Mary made a break for the door then changed her mind and turned, and for the first time in her life shouted at her mother, ‘Now do you see why I thought it was you?’ She made a grab for the letters but Stella got to them first.

‘If they’re not yours, you can’t keep them,’ Mary faltered.

‘You’ve grown quite a tongue, haven’t you?’ Stella slumped and looked exhausted. She turned away. ‘Just go to bed, why don’t you?’

The Village Hall where the Harvest Festival Disco was to be held, was out along Low Lane. It was a flimsy building set on brick piers and squashed between a pitched roof and an excessive number of broad front steps. All the village halls Mary had been to looked like this. They must come as a kit, she thought, or arrive ready-made on the back of a long truck, the way houses did in America. The hall accommodated most village groups. It was used for jumble sales, fêtes, playgroups, coffee mornings and pensioners’ clubs. The Cubs and Brownies met there, as did the Parish Council and the Women’s Institute. It acted as classroom, church or shop, and the conversations that were held there about money, families and health, were an extension of those heard in Allnorthover’s surgery, pubs, kitchens and front rooms. The hall could be as dim as the Post Office or as brightly lit as the school. It adjusted itself to the formal murmur of councillors at their single long table as well as it did to the shrieks of toddlers with their rushing about and toys. The floor was polished every week with a machine, and so the place smelt of cedar with undertones of old food, old clothes, baking and sweat. The windows were not often opened, and their aluminium frames had warped and set. There was a small kitchen with a serving hatch, an enormous tea urn, and cupboards full of the same cheap crockery and glasses that were used in the school.

Jumble sales were tricky as no one wanted to buy their neighbours’ cast-offs. They would pick something up and carry it round the hall till they could pay someone they barely knew. Mary had always loved jumble sales and hadn’t thought about wearing secondhand clothes till Dawn stopped her in the corridor at school once, when she was twelve. ‘Julie says she saw you get that tat at a jumble sale!’ Mary had found a fashionable, if rather worn-out, black smock coat edged with brocade.

‘That’s right, Saturday.’ Mary was perplexed. Stella had always bought things at charity shops and jumble sales, and didn’t hesitate to say so.

Dawn looked taken aback – as far as Mary could tell beneath her back-combed hair and her chalk-white eyelids. Even Mrs Rike had given up scrubbing Dawn’s face and taking acetone to her frosted fingernails. ‘Wouldn’t catch me wearing someone else’s rags. My Mum wouldn’t let me out the house in that!’ She strutted away with her gang. Only later, at home, did Mary begin to see what had happened and it was as if she had just cracked a code that everybody else had long understood. Doing so brought something the opposite to relief. In those adolescent years, she had felt herself wrenched slowly out of her head and into the world, made to think and worry about things she’d never noticed before. She put on her glasses and looked in the mirror. The coat was a cheap version of what had been modish that last autumn. One pocket was torn, the cuffs were threadbare, the brocade faded and coming apart.

The Harvest Festival Disco was organised by a subcommittee of the committees for the Church Restoration Fund, the Young Farmers, the Sunday School and the Ingfield Youth Club, together with representatives of the Rotary Club, the Licensed Victuallers’ Association and the Small Tradesmens’ Alliance. The Restoration Fund supported both churches, as well as one in Ingfield. They split the proceeds with the Youth Club whereas the other groups organised donations from their contacts as a show of power and good will: cheap printing, window space for posters, books of tickets, and a wholesale deal on beer, crisps and soft drinks. WI members and the women of other churchgoing families sent along cakes and sandwiches with their children. Several teenagers turned up early, skulking along the lane, trying to hide a tray covered with a teacloth or doily which they would shove into the hands of the nearest person at the hall before hurrying off to make a second entrance with their friends.

Terry Flux had DJ’ed for this disco for so long that he’d seen some of the teenagers disappear and come back as early arrivals, engaged or married and now serious, dignified and careful with their money. He started the evening with jaunty, familiar tunes that would encourage the girls gathered in threes and fours around the walls to begin swaying and nudging one another to join in. Then a bit of rock ’n’ roll that got the older ones tapping their feet – ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Runaround Sue’. Somebody’s parents stepped half-way towards the middle of the room to jitterbug, the woman blushing and letting herself be led by the man, who was good and proud of it. He kept his head down and concentrated on his flourishes.

The dancing spread. The eleven and twelve-year-olds, allowed to accompany their parents for the first hour or so of the evening, began with giggling imitations of the grown-ups. The girls in versions of their older sisters’ outfits, rushed from one corner to the next, watching everything avidly. The boys stuck close to the kitchen hatch, clubbing together for another fizzy drink and grabbing handfuls of crisps and cake when no one was looking. As the rock ’n’ rollers began to falter, Terry played novelty songs, ‘The Laughing Gnome’ and ‘Lily the Pink’, which brought some of the younger ones into the middle of the room, parading, gesticulating and singing along. The adults queued up to buy plastic glasses of white wine or lemonade, or beer poured from a big tin with two holes punched in the top. The women gathered up chairs and arranged them in circles, balancing their drinks and cigarette packets on their knees, while the men leaned against the walls.

The room began to get properly dark by eight thirty. The children were taken home and most of the older adults left too. More and more teenagers arrived from the surrounding farms and villages, and soon the hall was full. Most people there were between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four but even if they lived next door to or had known each other all their lives, under Terry Flux’s coloured lights and revolving mirror balls, they were abashed.

Terry Flux wanted to bring the crowd together, so he started with the girls and some hard funk that would have them united on the floor. Earth, Wind & Fire’s ‘Saturday Nite’ brought them forwards, gesticulating and singing along, punctuating the staccato blasts of brass with jutting hips or jabbing fingers. Each cluster of girls threw down their clutch bags or shoulder bags, nestled their drinks among them and formed a tight ring. They danced to please themselves and to entertain one another, giggling and clowning, and very simply happy. To break open the circles, Terry Flux switched to ska – ‘Johnny Reggae’, something with a straight enough beat for the boys to start moving to, and then, faster, ‘Al Capone’, the screeching, squealing brakes that announced the song, the warning: ‘Al Capone’s gun don’t argue!’ bringing gangster imitations and echoes from the boys, and yelps of recognition from the girls as they worked themselves into a long line down the room and set about a dance somewhere between tribal and country, right over left foot, back and forth, left over right, back and forth again, but only half a skip each way, all stomping their feet on the wooden floor, then a jump and a quarter turn, landing heavily together on their platform shoes. Their hips and bellies were undulating but their upper bodies and raised arms were stiff. Terry led them into something slower but just as punchy, ‘Me and Baby Brother’, to which they adapted the same dance, three heavy sways then the jump and turn to punctuate the chorus: ‘Me and baby brother’ – SLAM! 1–2–3 – SLAM! In the middle of the row was Julie Lacey in a glittery halter top and slithery pencil skirt, big curls and high stiletto heels, hardly dancing at all, just making small mocking gestures that captivated everyone watching her. At the near end, June Hepple followed the others by watching the feet of a neighbour, caught her long skirt on the heels of her clogs, flung her arms out and never quite managed to get in time. By the door was Mary George, swaying a little. Terry could see her mouthing the words of the song and noticed her look along the line, smiling but resisting, and then turn back to the people she had arrived with, the art-school lot. Mary looked neater than usual, more sophisticated, in a short black dress and high heels. She had smoothed back her hair and made it look particularly glossy and dark. She set off across the hall, glancing anxiously back at her friends, only to be reeled in by Julie, who shoved her into the line. Mary, for all her shyness, loved to dance and knew these steps from the time, only three years earlier, when she had tried to hang around with Julie at Youth Club discos and on Saturday nights.

After a couple more crashing dances, during which Billy, already drunk, whirled into the line and was half swaying, half being held up by June, Terry cooled things down with a slow punk number that had the familiarity of a reggae beat – ‘Police and Thieves’ by The Clash. Then he sped it all up again, differently this time, bringing in the boys and the art-school lot. He found a song that counted as New Wave, but that still gave the girls already on the floor a rhythm they could dance to – Blondie – and before anyone could go and sit down again, he ran it straight into Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes and ‘Get Dancin’: hard enough and camp enough to count as ironic. It worked – the art students were rolling their eyes and raising their eyebrows at one another but they stayed on their feet. The girls carried on bumping and grinding, oblivious. A few songs later, everyone was looking red-faced and frayed, and the local boys were spending longer outside. Someone out there was selling the cans of cider they had brought into the hall inside their jackets and poured it into the plastic cups in which they’d bought their squash. Terry Flux lowered the lights and began the slow dancing with a number that had a long and subtle enough intro to give them all a chance to decide what to do.

As the first bars of The Chi-Lites’ ‘Have You Seen Her?’ filled the room, the girls were quick to disperse and make themselves busy, not looking or waiting. Mary wandered over to where Daniel, Clara and Paulie were sitting, deep in conversation. Each of them had their hands in the air, a drink in one and a cigarette in the other. Mary hesitated, not knowing how to find a way in. She was about to tap Daniel on the arm, when somebody caught her shoulder.

‘Mary, my love!’ It was Martin Lacey and even though Mary knew now that he was not her type, she still felt the attraction that had led to her long adolescent crush on Julie’s brother. He wrapped Mary in his arms and moved her forcefully into the centre of the floor. Martin was confident and he danced well. Nothing could detract from his good looks, not his tight white cap-sleeved t-shirt with the cigarette packet tucked into one sleeve, or his streaked jeans, his sprayed hair or the citrus and soap smell of his aftershave. As he twirled her round, Mary tried to catch a glimpse of her friends each time they came into view. Once, she saw Daniel and Clara looking towards her, smiling or laughing. Then Paulie and Clara were dancing next to her. Clara had her eyes shut, her head flung back and her long arms reaching straight into the air on either side of Paulie’s neck; her odd profile quite lovely, her clasped fingers exaggerated by their black-painted nails. Paulie’s face was impassive as he stared rigidly past Clara’s shoulder but he was transformed by his dancing, which was so elegant that it made him appear mysterious and sexual, unlike his everyday self.

Mary was so fascinated by this that she forgot to look for Daniel, and then the record finished and she saw he was standing alone, looking awkward with his long black raincoat still belted and buttoned up, lighting another French cigarette and staring, not at her, but at Paulie’s hand on Clara’s bottom. She, too, was wearing a black dress and it ended not above the knee, like Mary’s, but high on her thigh, just meeting the top of her fishnet stockings. Her loose hair was cut at the front so that sprays of ringlets framed and almost hid her face. As the next song started, Chicago’s ‘If You Leave Me Now’, Martin turned from Mary without a word and started towards Clara who smiled and reached out a hand but moved past him. Mary saw Martin tense and swerve away, and Daniel stub out his cigarette and come forward. Confused, Mary turned slowly round on the spot and was relieved when Paulie appeared (‘Dance, sweetheart?’) and drew her lightly to him with one hand, the other holding his cigarette away to one side. He did dance beautifully, but he kept his head turned towards his cigarette. Again, as they revolved, Mary tried to watch Daniel and saw, as if in a series of photographs illustrating how to do something step by step, Clara undoing the belt of Daniel’s coat, then the buttons, and then shucking it off his shoulders and letting it drop. He looked entranced as she wrapped his arms round her waist and began to dance. The song ended, Paulie and Mary drifted apart, but Clara kept hold of Daniel till the music began again.

Terry Flux had his eye on the girls who’d had nothing to do for the last half hour and gave them a fast-paced dance number, an excuse for some energetic shaking and twirling – more Blondie, ‘X Offender’. Clara broke away into a scything, sinuous dance of her own. For a while, Daniel tried clumsily to mirror Clara and stay with her but he soon got lost, and when he looked to her with a pleading smile, she shrugged and turned her back on him and found herself opposite Martin Lacey who caught her by the hand and easily matched her. Mary went and sat down where she was joined by Daniel, who had been to the bar and came back with four glasses of orange squash. He reached a hand into a black velvet bag – Clara’s – and produced a bottle of vodka, with which he topped up each glass. He handed one to Mary, ‘Cheers’. The music was too loud to talk over, so they watched the dancers: Clara with Martin Lacey, Paulie absorbed and on his own but attracting a small crowd, and Julie at the centre of her gang.

Daniel leaned over and said something in Mary’s ear.

‘What? I couldn’t hear you!’

This time he shouted: ‘I said look at those old hippies over there!’ He pointed, and she saw he meant Billy and June who had slung their arms round each other and were executing an unsteady can-can at the back of the hall. They were laughing and staggering, and Mary knew that another time, she would have joined them. She blushed.

Clara broke away from Martin in the middle of a song, and dashed over. She threw herself into a chair next to Mary and took a gulp from a glass. ‘Thank you, darling,’ she gasped. ‘I’m worn out! That boy’s quite something, isn’t he, Mary? An old flame?’

‘No!’ She was horrified. ‘He’s just … we only …’ but Clara wasn’t listening.

‘Quite a freak show, isn’t it?’ Her voice, always loud, carried over the music. ‘That yokel wanted to take me out the back for some “cider”! Oooh, look at Hippy Corner! And that fat tart with the frizzy perm. She’s falling out of her tinsel top!’ Mary pretended not to hear.

Paulie joined them. ‘God, this is a dump!’ He looked livid. ‘I went for a piss and there were these animals in there who went all shrieky and limp-wristed when they saw me. One tried to grab my earring!’

‘Jealous, darling,’ shrugged Clara.

‘And then he groped my balls!’

‘They’re all dying to grope you, really,’ Clara drawled. ‘What did they say when you got your cock out?’

‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding. I went outside instead!’ They were both laughing. ‘Let’s go,’ Paulie stood up.

‘But it’s just getting interesting!’ Clara tugged at his sleeve. ‘I’ll find you a nice girl to pursue. There’s a fabulous blonde …’ They set off across the floor together.

Mary had sat through this saying nothing, and concentrating on her drink. She was shaking as Daniel turned her head gently towards him. ‘They don’t mean it.’

‘They’re such fucking snobs!’ Mary was furious. ‘And anyway, Julie’s hair isn’t permed, it’s natural!’

‘I expect your friends can give as good as they get.’

‘They’re not my friends!’

‘Then why are you …?’

‘I mean, Oh, for god’s sake!’ Mary was shocked to find she was crying. She rushed off to the toilet where she found both Clara and Julie in front of the mirror.

‘Mary! Come here, you daft baggage! Your eyeliner’s all over the place!’ Julie saw her first and began rummaging in her handbag.

‘Here, I’ve got a tissue.’ Clara dipped it under a running tap and wiped hard at Mary’s eyes.

‘My lens!’ The one in her left eye had slipped. The two girls huddled round, tipping her head back and forth.

‘Oh my god, it’s halfway round your eyeball,’ Julie murmured.

‘Let me see.’ Clara pulled Mary’s head back towards her. ‘Oh, yes, there it is. Yuck! Your eye’s going all bloodshot!’

Mary shook them off and squinted into the mirror. She coaxed the lens into place then stood back and took in her red face, limp hair and the smears beneath her eyes. ‘I look a state!’

Clara and Julie considered her and then set to work. Clara held her wrists under the cold tap to cool her down while Julie fussed at her hair, back-combing and twiddling strands which she then set with hairspray. They turned her round and cleaned her face with Julie’s cold cream and another of Clara’s tissues. Then Julie patted on some powder, and Clara relined her eyes. They both produced lipsticks and Mary took them both, smudging Julie’s shiny pink over Clara’s red. Last of all, Clara produced a vial of perfume and used her little finger to dot a drop behind Mary’s ears. Mary sniffed and muttered thank you, then went back into the hall. Julie and Clara returned to the mirror in silence, finished what they were doing and left one after the other, not having exchanged a word.

The room was beginning to empty and those who remained were all drunk. Terry Flux turned down the lights, a kindness to the couples who’d found themselves a corner. Terry had his eye on Billy and June, who were sitting on the floor, smoking a joint, something June had never done before. June could drink anyone under the table, and remain as prim and sober as ever. She felt different now though, elated and unsteady.

June’s hair was long and straight and centre-parted just like Billy’s, only hers was dark and coarse. Until this summer, she had dressed to oppose Sophie, her feminine mother, choosing heavy fabrics and staid cuts and colours. If she added anything fashionable, it was to pacify Julie and the gang. Then with Tom coming back and her having to live at Aunt May’s, and being in Camptown after school while Julie was still busy at work, she’d begun to choose for herself. And what June found she liked was what the shop assistants called ‘peasant’ or ‘ethnic’. She had an embroidered cheesecloth smock and a maxi skirt with little mirrors sewn round the hem. She pulled her hair forward from behind her ears, across her face, and dabbed what Julie called her ‘pulse points’ with patchouli oil. Tonight Billy had called her hair ‘wild’ and said she looked like ‘Janis’.

Terry Flux put on the Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’ and, sure enough, Billy pulled June up onto her feet and they slumped against each other and inched round. Paulie had persuaded Julie to dance, and found he was enjoying himself at last. ‘God, you smell wonderful!’ he sighed into her hair, meaning it. Julie sniggered and put her hand on his bottom.

Although Daniel had been holding and kissing her since she had sat back down, Mary couldn’t get rid of her uneasiness. She kept wanting to look over at Paulie or Clara, or Billy and June, Julie, even Martin. When Daniel got up to go to the toilet, she escaped outside and then felt unable to go back in. There were too many different people all in the same place and Daniel – to be drawn so powerfully to someone she barely knew, to whom she found it difficult to speak and whose friends were so glamorous and awful – it was all too confusing to bear.

Her heart was racing and her skin prickled in the damp, electrified air. She concentrated on slowing her breath and held her hands to her cheeks in an effort to cool them.

At last, the pressure that had weakened over the last few days gave way and the sky broke with a splintering of thunder. A strange warm wind gusted through the trees and Mary drew back along the side of the hall. She heard the doors open. It was Daniel. She could see his face caught in the light and was shocked again that she could have a boyfriend, if he was her boyfriend, who was so lovely. It frightened her. Everything he made her feel, frightened her.

There was another slam of thunder as he disappeared back inside. I love your voice, I love your face, Mary whispered into her fists. The place shook as those who remained stamped and sang. Terry Flux had decided to enjoy himself and finished the evening with a wild combination of his favourite punk, jazz, reggae, glam rock and funk. Mary crept along a ledge and looked in and saw Daniel with Clara, but not very clearly as the window was dirty and the hall half-dark. They were dancing together again and Daniel looked more animated than she ever felt he was when he was with her. Clara reached up and smoothed his hair, or ran her fingers through it; she stroked his cheek; she whispered in his ear or was it a kiss? Mary’s tired eyes strained to make sense of the flickering scene. Watching them, she felt pain fill her chest and cramp her gut. Uncontrollable tears were coming to her eyes again, as the thunder returned with such endless deep thuds and slams that Mary thought buildings were falling down. There was going to be a storm and Mary was not about to go back inside when the weather matched her feelings so exactly. She turned away from the window, closed her eyes and lifted her head, but the rain didn’t come.

Terry played the final track, cutting the volume for the chorus as he had done at the end of every disco he’d DJ’ed, and leaving the drunken, overwound girls and boys to bellow ‘And it’s hi ho silver lining …’ Then they knew it was time to go home.

People came drifting out of the hall, stumbling and shouting. Somebody was arguing and someone else managed only a few steps before being sick. Mary wanted to get home quickly, before Daniel appeared.

‘Mary, are you alright?’ It was Billy, carrying two crash helmets.

Mary was overjoyed. ‘Thank god, Billy. Take me home!’ She grabbed one of the helmets. ‘Where’s the bike?’

Billy hesitated. ‘Just behind you, further up the alley, but I was …’

June Hepple appeared from behind him, and gave Mary a firm smile. ‘Well, I’ll be getting off!’ She turned to go, but Billy caught her arm.

Mary was still trying not to cry. ‘Yeah, goodnight June, see you. Come on, Billy! We’ve got to go now! I need to!’ Billy turned towards June, who shook her head and slipped away. He followed Mary to the bike.

‘So, where to?’ he asked, flatly.

Mary gabbled, ‘Well, not back into the village or we’ll meet them, and not home, so away, Billy, I don’t know, but quick!’ There was another roll of thunder and the first blanching sheet of lightning, in which Billy caught the look on Mary’s face.

‘Get on, then.’ He turned the bike on the gravel, revving it noisily and reaching the road just as Clara, Paulie and Daniel emerged from the hall. They had waited for Mary and were looking for her now, but in the wrong direction. Cheers greeted each blast of thunder. They climbed into Paulie’s car and drove slowly away as Mary clutched onto Billy and cried into his back.

Billy struggled to steer the bike through the web of narrow lanes that spread like capillaries, meeting and diverging, going everywhere you might want to go from Allnorthover, only indirectly. He didn’t decide on a route; that wasn’t the point. He was enjoying the ride, the jumpy lightning and the quickening thunder; he wanted to think. He liked the challenge of the hairpin bends, sudden gradients, abrupt dips and double curves; the humpback bridge which he could meet at just the right speed to propel his bike into the air. There was no one else on the road. It was midnight, so the drivers who fell out of the pubs and into their cars at closing time had had their hour to get home, and they were the only ones who chose the lanes, for the same reasons Billy did.

Rain fell. A few heavy drops streaked Billy’s visor and he heard Mary shout, and looked back and saw she had raised one arm and felt it too. From those first drops, the rain intensified and came down as suddenly as floodwater bursting through a swollen ceiling. Billy pushed back his visor but the rain still blinded him. Just as he started up the humpback bridge and, out of habit, accelerated, he thought to slow down and confused himself. A fork of lightning struck a nearby field, illuminating the already charred earth. There was a hiss like the flaring of a huge match. The air screamed in Billy’s ears, only it was Mary screaming as the bike flung them sideways and skidded away beneath them.

The storm was right above them – the rain, thunder and lightning together – so that although Billy and Mary were too drunk and floppy to have been badly hurt, they did not get up, but huddled in the long yellow grass where they had landed. This was where Billy’s father, Morris, found them, after Billy had not come home and someone mentioned him going off on his bike, and he’d met Stella George soaked through, halfway to the hall, looking for her girl.

‘Two fledglings drowned in the nest’, was how Morris later described them. Mary didn’t remember screaming, only falling and landing and finding it altogether natural to cling onto Billy, giggle and sleep.

The rain continued through Sunday and into Sunday night and on Monday morning, the village woke to a world it couldn’t remember. It was too late in the year for the rain to revive anything. Instead, it laid things bare. Leaves that had turned were pelted and blown free. Precarious heavy-headed flowers, chrysanthemums and pansies, became waterlogged and collapsed, snapping their undernourished stems. The Green gave way to mud. All the warmth was washed out of the brick, stone, whitewash, tile, timber and thatch. The rain needled its way in, exposing new leaks and cracks. Gutters babbled and choked while clogged drains belched up ammoniac pools. Damp spored behind the heat-cracked paint of window-frames. The fields had dried out so deeply that even the newly turned earth was too dry to hold much water. Top soil ran off the land in urinous streams.

People hobbled along slick pavements. Drivers braked late, swerved along the lanes, blinding themselves with the spray of puddles that spread from one hedgerow to the other, like sheets. Dr Clough was kept busy treating flare-ups of rheumatism and arthritis. His morning-round visits to the dying and the newly-born were prolonged.

Mary George had stayed awake for most of the night, for the pleasure of listening to the rain. By six o’clock she was too tired to sleep, so she got dressed and crept downstairs, planning tea and toast over a book before school. She could hear Stella in the kitchen, though, so continued out through the front door.

The morning astonished her. The rain had just stopped, and the sun was still a low pink light that suffused the wet houses with a foreign rosiness and made leafless branches shine. Mary strode out along the High Street, sure she would make it at least halfway to school before a bus came. She was wearing her boots and one of her father’s jerseys over flannel trousers. For once, the weather suited her.

By the time she passed the Chapel, the sun had risen but had not dried anything yet, so the world just glittered more brightly. Mary was walking round a flooded corner glazed in white light when she met Tom Hepple. He leant delicately on his stick. ‘Good morning,’ he murmured. He was dressed in wool and tweed, all of which looked damp.

Mary nodded, then added, ‘I mean, good morning.’

‘It’s a fine light.’

‘It is.’ It occurred to Mary that they could have been any two villagers and they would have had the same conversation, and she smiled. Tom said nothing but smiled back. She wondered. He looked fine, just frail as Billy said Valerie had said.

Mary felt grown up. ‘I was sorry to hear about the – your – accident.’

Tom shook his head, as anyone would. If he could just keep the girl here, persuade her, take her. Her pale skin glowed so that he wanted to reach out and touch her, knowing his fingers would go right through her because at moments like this she wasn’t the silly girl everyone said she was but his angel, all light. His hand began to reach out but a sleepless night, no food and all those pretty capsules restrained him.

His head dropped. ‘It’s only my leg and it’ll … mend but … Kevin Lacey’s still in there being put together with metal … pins and as for … the Hotchkiss boy, a terrible … waste.’ His broken phrases were charming. Mary made herself smile widely and said a firm goodbye before setting back off for school. A tiny thought, that she was safe because he couldn’t chase her with that leg, flitted through her mind. The clean adult feeling of a moment ago collapsed and Mary started to argue with herself in an effort to shore it up. By the time she reached Temple Grove, she had Tom Hepple back as just needy, not very well and practically a relative.

Dorothy Spence from the scrapyard was at the Temple Park bus stop, wearing a see-through raincoat and hat, the kind that folded away into your bag. She had a blue overall on over her dress and Mary deduced that she must now have a cleaning job in Camptown. Mary was curious but said nothing. Mrs Spence did not appear to recognise her. The summer was over and people had other things to talk about now.

By the time Tom reached the Chapel, he was trembling. The morning’s observations were scribbled on bits of paper he’d stuffed into his pockets. Each detail and statistic Tom had noted had a glint of significance that he knew, from experience, could evaporate. He had to transfer the information to his book right away or things would not connect and the whole thing would slip through his fingers. He fumbled the red ledger open and began to write. This book had fallen out of the broken filing cabinet. Tom had torn out the few pages that had been used and had adapted the double-entry columns to his system of ‘Submergence’ and ‘Disturbance’. Among the scraps from which he was now copying, he found the smashed glasses that he’d picked up at the end of the Clock House drive. They had been lying like a broken bird with one wing adrift and the other folded. The crazed lenses were almost intact. He put them up on the shelf, next to the torn photo and the puddle of wax.

Tom had been at the reservoir for an hour before sunrise, finding it easier to try and make sense of things in the cool half-dark before the water took on reflections. He was sure it was rising already, after just two days’ rain, and so his calculations would have to be revised. He had limped the two miles home, his head bubbling with numbers. Meeting the girl like that had been a piece of luck. She was still nervous but he’d managed not to upset her, mostly because he was tired and muzzy. She’d been trying so hard to disguise herself, to look like any other daffy young girl, clutching the sleeves of her jersey as they swallowed her hands. Only he’d heard about her and Billy Eyre, and how she’d come off his bike in the storm and landed without a scratch. She was so light.

Tom lay down on his back and tried to sleep. His leg ached. He had thought too much about the girl and had lost some of his ideas. He warmed himself with the memory of afternoons in Sophie’s airtight living room: the unintended scent that seeped from beneath her arms as she reached out to raise him; and the intended scent of peach and vanilla that he caught from the burnt and feathering skin just above and between her breasts. Tom pushed his hand into his trousers, shut his eyes and tried to think of Valerie Eyre’s cropped head and rosy mouth but what came to mind was peach, and then vanilla, then burst buttons on a tight white dress, wet with a new stain.

Stella caught her hip on the corner of the table, making herself lurch and sending Lucas’s toast sliding from the plate. She knelt down and scrabbled it up in her apron. ‘I’ll make fresh.’ She shook her head at Lucas’s protest. She came back and snatched the egg as he took it from his pocket, but he didn’t quite let go in time and they smashed it between them. Mary was shocked to see her mother tearful and frantic. Stella ran to find a cloth and began to dab at Lucas’s filthy coat while he tried to calm her. ‘Mrs G, it’s just an egg.’

‘We’ve got half a dozen in the fridge, Mum. I’ll put another one on. An egg’s not going to do any harm.’

‘Eggs used to be used in paint, to make it shine. My coat’ll shine!’ Lucas mumbled through his toast. ‘And my Mum used to paint egg white on the little one’s bottom if it got sore. Kept the you-know-what out. So my coat’s going to be waterproof too!’ Stella gave up wiping. She hurried back into the kitchen and Mary followed.

‘Mum,’ she began, feeling irritated and responsible. ‘Like he said, it’s just an egg. Who cares?’

Stella swung round and Mary flinched as she saw a tremor run through her face, a knot that caught in her forehead, creased her eyes and dragged at her mouth. Mary stepped back as her mother reached out, but all she did was stroke Mary’s cheek. Mary wanted to tell her to get off but wasn’t brave enough, so she made sounds instead of words and shook her away. When Morris had delivered her home in the storm after the disco, Stella had been standing out in the rain on the Green and had held out her arms, but Mary slipped through them and went upstairs to run a hot bath. Since their conversation about the letters, Mary had not wanted to hear her mother say another word.

Now, Stella was gulping and snivelling. ‘Mary, love, you know it wasn’t me. I’d never, however desperate, have done something like that.’ She looked so pitiful that Mary was appalled. Then in a different, more familiar voice, ‘Your father has a tendency to, what do they say, displace …’

‘Fuck it!’ The words shot out of Mary’s mouth. ‘Fuck your jargon and fuck you!’

‘As I was saying –’ Stella tried to continue.

Mary turned in the doorway. ‘And fuck Dad too, fuck the reservoir and the house and fuck those fucking letters!’ She barged past Lucas. ‘And you, always playing the wise old fucking fool, fuck you too!’ She slammed the front door so hard, a bowl jumped from the sideboard and shattered on the floor. Lucas shook his head admiringly and settled down to his tea.

‘Do you want to do something on Sunday?’ The line fizzed and buzzed.

‘Sunday? Yes, alright, fine, I’d love to.’ He’d rung. Mary bit her lip to stop herself spoiling it.

‘Anything you’d like to see?’

‘The sea? Why not?’

‘The what?’

‘Like you said, the sea.’

‘I said the sea?’

‘I thought. Oh, never mind.’

‘But would you like that?’

Mary couldn’t bear to ask Daniel what he meant so she said ‘Yes’, and arranged to meet him at midday at Camptown Station. When she put the phone down, the buzz was still in her ear.

He was wearing his big raincoat and a tall felt hat that he referred to as ‘my grandpa’s Homburg’. Mary had never known a boy to have so many accessories. As well as the hat, Daniel had a silk scarf, leather gloves, sunglasses, a fob watch in his waistcoat pocket and a flat pewter flask of whisky inside his coat. When she remarked on any of these things, Daniel explained that the object in question had belonged to his grandfather or had been found in a junk shop or flea market, and that it was ‘Thirties’. Even the oval tortoiseshell sunglasses were Thirties.

Camptown Station was built on a viaduct and there was a long climb up to either platform. Mary headed for the ticket office but Daniel caught her arm and steered her past the station master who was standing in the dim hallway at the foot of the stairs. ‘No need to pay.’

The station master touched his cap. ‘Good morning!’

Daniel replied so charmingly, adding ‘And which side for the sea?’ that the station master called him ‘Sir’, and gave a small bow as he gestured through the foot tunnel to the other staircase.

You could go straight through to Lodenum or change onto the other line at Procklewell for Crouchness or Thende. Mary wanted to ask where they were going to, but her anticipation of going anywhere alone with Daniel made her so happy and anxious that she held her breath.

They got on the first train that came in, which was only going as far as Procklewell. There, they caught a stopping train to Thende. They were getting into a closed carriage when Mary missed her footing on the worn wooden step and slipped, grazing her shin. Daniel picked her up and lifted her into the carriage while she blushed and muttered something about being able to manage.

It was like having a room to themselves. There was no corridor; the carriage itself was like a short corridor, with two facing banquettes that would seat four or five people each, and a door at either end. Daniel sprawled on one of the seats and Mary lay down on the other.

‘What do you feel?’ he asked as the train waddled and swung out of the station.

Mary wondered if this was a test or just a game. ‘With my hands, the cloth on the seat, like bristles.’ She dragged her fingers across it, against the nap, and there was a small explosion of dust that made her sneeze. ‘Under my back, the springs, spirals I think, and clumps of stuffing. Horsehair?’

‘Princess!’ Daniel teased but Mary frowned. He reached over and stroked her shin, circling the graze. ‘So pale …’ Her coat was open and her blue dress rucked up round her knees. She raised herself and looked down at the shocking white gap in the torn black tights that made her skinny legs look even thinner as they disappeared into her big boots. Daniel pushed his finger under the hole, tracing broader and broader circles. ‘What do you feel now?’

The train pulled into a station. ‘I hope no one –’

‘Shhh …’ Then Daniel was lying on top of her and putting a finger to her mouth. ‘Be quiet. People will think this carriage is empty and then they won’t get in.’

‘Don’t you mean they’ll get in because it looks empty?’ She felt his belt buckle press hard into her hip. ‘Ssshhhh …’ His mouth made a full round ‘O’ as he hushed and kissed her.

The last time Mary had been to Thende was with Julie, when they were fourteen. They had gone to the Roller Disco in the dilapidated dance hall on the front. They were both good at skating and circled the rink at some speed, chatting and giggling. The rink was an old wooden dancefloor, still dotted with slim columns that had once held extravagant arrangements of flowers. Mary and Julie had invented a game of hooking an arm round these columns and spinning off in the opposite direction, against the general flow. They annoyed the best skaters who were practising their fancy steps and turns in the centre; and alarmed the beginners teetering round in twos and threes with their arms linked, which meant that if one of them wavered, they all fell down. For some reason, the rest of Julie’s gang hadn’t come on this trip. Mary couldn’t remember any other occasion when they had done something alone together. They had had a good time but they never did it again.

It was Mary who knew how to get from the station to the sea. A strong wind had taken hold of the town and caught them as she led Daniel over the footbridge. Mary’s fringe was flattened over her eyes, and Daniel’s Homburg was lifted in a gust and thrown down on the tracks, where it rolled under a departing train. He hurried off down the steps and waited till the train had gone in order to retrieve it, but the hat had disappeared. He came back up onto the bridge, his face screwed up against the wind, his shoulders hunched and his collar turned up. Mary was about to make a joke of it (Julie would have been squawking with laughter) but saw his irritation and hesitated. They made their way down the ramp that curved round the multi-storey car park and through the shopping precinct. Here the wind had concentrated and channelled itself into walls of air that came slamming through the wide walkways, ripping off more hats and tossing, rattling and loosening anything it could get in its grip – signs, posters, tiles, sweet wrappers, squashed cans, plastic bags.

Daniel and Mary continued across the hotel car park and the dual carriageway, through the municipal gardens and into the fun fair. The seafront was closing down for the winter. The lights were out. There was one man in charge of the three rides that remained open. He was huddled in a booth, smoking and reading a paper, and came out when he saw them, scowling expectantly and half-heartedly jingling the change in the sack bag that hung from his waist. (Julie would have flirted with him and got them a free ride and made the whole thing fun.) He had a thin, sunken face over which hung a lank crest of greased curls. Twenty years ago he would have been king of the waltzer boys, astounding the girls as he posed casually on the rippling floor of the ride, spinning their carriages as they shrieked and clung together and tried to keep singing along to ‘Runaround Sue’. When he found the girl he wanted, he would lean in close, whisper, and catch her, a different one every night. The posh ones had been particularly easy. He met them at closing time and took them down under the pier, rain or shine. They lay on his chest afterwards, captivated by the pattering of his heart, which he let them think was due to them and not to the long lines of sulphate he snorted just before cranking up the waltzer each night.

Mary hesitated, Daniel looked away and the wind prodded at the carriages on the ferris wheel, making them swing and clank.

‘Oh, a ghost train!’ Mary had only just noticed it.

‘Come on, then!’ Daniel sprung into action.

The man sidled his cigarette to one corner of his mouth and spoke out of the other, ‘That’ll be two bob apiece.’ He took their money and shouted, ‘Wayne! Two for the train!’

A chubby boy’s face blinked out from behind the crumbling entrance, an arch caked with papier-mâché painted black and studded with crumbling rubber Hallowe’en masks. ‘Shall I wait for it to fill up a bit?’

The man jerked his lip in a sneer and the last half-inch of his cigarette toppled to the ground. ‘Don’t be fucking daft!’ He turned his back on Daniel and Mary and returned to his booth, grumbling and blowing on his hands.

The ghost train trundled into a tunnel that smelt of stale hot-dogs mixed with the tang of fried onions and pickled shellfish. As they rounded the first corner, Daniel and Mary could hear Wayne and half-see his shadow keeping up with them on the other side of the papier-mâché wall. He desperately wound something which gave a wild mechanical whoop. Then a spotlight came on, revealing an elongated and flattened ghost painted on the tunnel roof. They moved slowly through a curtain of shredded black rubber, while Wayne waved things about that cackled and hissed. A red bulb lit up the inside of a plastic skull and Wayne squirted water through a cobwebby mesh. There were more ghosts and skeletons and dangling rubber creepy-crawlies.

When Wayne appeared to let them out of their carriage at the end, he was purple-cheeked and exhausted and looked upset. Neither Mary nor Daniel had moved or made a sound during the ride. They thanked him and turned round to find the man from the booth observing them balefully.

‘Something else?’ he called out.

‘I don’t think, I mean thanks, and we, you know …’ Mary faltered.

‘Have you got a hall of mirrors?’ Daniel asked.

‘The Hall of Mirrors is shut.’

‘That’s a pity.’ Daniel took Mary’s arm.

‘Two bob each!’ he called after them.

‘What for?’ Daniel countered.

‘The Hall of Mirrors.’ They started back towards him. ‘Only, if I’m to get the keys and all, you may as well see the Crooked House.’ They looked at each other and nodded. ‘And that’ll be another two bob. Each.’

The man took a padlock off a plywood door and ushered Mary and Daniel through into the dark. He fumbled on the ground and flicked a number of switches. With each switch, another part of the room was lit, and the darkness filled up with mirrors that came closer and closer until they had Mary and Daniel surrounded. ‘Off you go then.’ The man gave Mary a nudge and she looked down to see a strip of carpet, a kind of path. She took Daniel’s hand and led him towards the first mirror only to find that it wasn’t one, just a frame, beyond which was a real one. They stepped through and went right up to the glass and traced their reflections as if they couldn’t see at all and were trying to make out a shape. There were no reflections to either side, so Mary decided to turn left and bumped hard up against blank glass. They turned a corner to the right, and now there were reflections on every side, bounced back and forth like a trapped echo and then frittering away, getting infinitely smaller. It took a long time to find a way through the maze as each step became more tentative and although they could see, it was only their hands that told them which way to go. They came out looking as shaken and impressed as Wayne might have hoped they would be after their train ride.

The man noticed the swelling on Mary’s cheekbone and looked proud. ‘That’s shop-front glass that is, near enough unbreakable.’ He had already taken the padlock off the Crooked House and turned on its lights, but these were only strings of small bulbs that drooped along the walls. After the multiple brightnesses of the Hall of Mirrors, it took some time for their eyes to adjust. Mary liked this best of all. It was like being at sea, or how she imagined it would be to be at sea. The staircase forced them to stumble and stretch as if it were rolling over high waves. The tilted floors threw them from one side to another. There was a mirror that made you tall and thin, one that made you short and fat, and another, the best, in which your body was bent wildly out of shape into a drawn-out serpentine ‘S’.

Afterwards, they walked along the pier. It looked solid and straight from a distance, when in fact it had given way in places to the sea. A smashed strut dragged one side downwards; a missing plank left a sudden gap underfoot through which you could see slack, colourless waves jostling around slimy foundations. Thende Pier was, famously, the longest in Europe. There was a train that ran along it, but only in summer. It took forty-five minutes to walk to the end and when you got there, there was nothing much to see or do, just a flat view in which you might make out the smudge of a freighter, ferry, trawler or aeroplane. There was a penny arcade and a bandstand that was rarely used now, except by sheltering seagulls and fishermen wanting to eat their sandwiches out of the rain.

The wind hurtled inland. Mary’s head ached with cold, her eyes and nose ran, and she pulled the sleeves of her jersey over her hands and buried them in the deep pockets of her coat. It was a leather flying coat that had belonged to one of Matthew’s uncles, so seasoned and worn that it draped softly around little Mary and rumpled on the toes of her boots. Daniel kept one arm round her and clutched the collar of his coat with the other.

They reached the end of the pier, where they crouched on the wet bandstand step and huddled together. Mary tipped her head against Daniel’s chest and listened to the wind rattle a loose pane in the arcade window. A door slammed shut, then flew open again. The wires that anchored the bandstand’s awning in summer were singing.

Clara came into the salon the next Saturday. She marched up to Mary who was trying to keep in order the three sizes of perm curlers and the tissue squares she was alternately handing to Felicity. ‘You and D weren’t at The Stands last night.’

‘No, we went for a drink.’ Mary almost went on to apologise but Clara was rearranging her fringe in the mirror, leaning over Felicity’s customer’s head. Felicity raised an eyebrow and continued her work.

‘Come over later?’

Mary stopped herself asking why. ‘Sure, I finish at three.’

‘See you then.’ Clara stalked out.

‘Lovely hair, your friend’s got,’ Suze murmured dreamily. ‘Really, really lovely.’

‘Looked brittle to me,’ Felicity snapped. ‘Come on, Mary, concentrate. You’re not taking tea with Little Miss Whatsername yet, you know.’

‘Madame Whatsername,’ put in Jeanette, striking a pose that was just like Clara’s haughty slouch.

‘Mademoiselle, actually,’ Mary dared. Felicity raised another eyebrow.

As Mary started down the Clock House drive, it began to rain hard. The tall trees that met over her head dripped heavily. The house looked even more dank and the front lawn had been churned to mud around Tobias’s heaps of machinery. Mary was shivering as Clara let her in. They passed the kitchen, where Mary glimpsed Tobias sitting at the table with Billy. She was going to stop and say hello, she was certainly curious, but Clara swept on down the corridor. They came to another set of stairs, narrower and plainer than the ones that led up from the hall with their elegantly curved banister.

Clara’s big bedroom was a mess. Clothes spilt off the brass bed and out of cupboards onto the floor, a tangle of orange, pink, red, purple and black. Mary trailed her hand through one heap and found a feather boa, something studded, silk and then fur, which wriggled and mewed and revealed itself to be a spitting Persian cat, a white and fluffy creature missing half an ear and most of one back leg. The cat limped out, ignoring Clara’s call: ‘Lucretia! You old bruiser! She was only making friends! Sorry, Mary. She loves a spat!’

Clara’s dressing table had a gilt-framed vanity mirror, a smaller oval mirror on a stand and three hand mirrors of different sizes. A powder compact stood open and it, too, had a dusty mirror. Scattered among this were lipsticks, perfumes, mascara wands and cakes of eyeshadow, all left open or undone.

‘Where are your paints?’ There were no pictures on the walls, just another, full-length, mirror.

‘In my studio.’ Clara drew out the word into a long pout.

‘At college?’

‘I have a studio here, too, in one of the attics.’ It was the first time Mary had thought of Clara as a painter, perhaps because today she was wearing splattered dungarees and her hands were filthy.

There were three cups next to the bed and another three on the floor. Mary peered into the one nearest her and at its bottom was a curdy blue mould. The record-player, a sleek chrome stereo with enormous speakers, was surrounded by records, empty record sleeves and full ashtrays. Mary picked out a cover, ‘Oh, you’ve got this! I love this!’

‘What’s that?’ Clara was rolling a joint. She glanced at the cover. ‘Oh, I think that’s one of Tobias’s. In fact they’re probably all his, you know, he just passes them on.’ Mary remembered Tobias turning off the water.

Clara put on the record Mary had found and settled back beside her against the bed, so close that their shoulders and elbows were touching. ‘So …’ Clara drawled. She flexed her toes and inhaled hard, then blew out smoke through her nose, the way Matthew had when Mary had wanted him to be a dragon when she was a child. Clara passed the joint to Mary. ‘Julie Lacey.’

Clara said her name as a statement but Mary knew it was a prompt. She tried to say two things at once. ‘She’s very bright, a bit tacky, a good laugh and can be a complete bitch but means well.’

‘Are you two friends?’

‘Sometimes. Why?’

‘Her brother.’

‘Kevin? He’s getting pins in his leg after the –’

‘No, no, no! The older one!’

‘Trevor?’ Mary passed the joint back. She was enjoying herself.

Clara winced. ‘Trevor?’

‘Well, he’s the eldest. Runs some kind of business: reproduction furniture, I think he calls it. He must be pushing thirty now.’

‘He didn’t look that old at the disco!’

‘The disco? Trev wouldn’t be seen dead at any village disco!’

‘Then it wasn’t him who …’ She looked directly at Mary who leant her head back and shut her eyes. For some time neither of them spoke, then Clara stubbed out the end of the joint. ‘You’re quite a story around here, aren’t you?’ Mary gave no response. ‘Something to do with that lovely man I see walking up and down all the time, limping up and down since those yobs almost bumped him off!’ She sniffed. ‘Something to do with your father, isn’t it? Did he try to bump off the lovely lunatic as well?’ She was laughing rather messily. ‘Doesn’t he tell everyone you walked on water or something and something to do with his old house? It’s positively gothic!’ She slung an arm round Mary’s shoulders.

Mary shifted forward. ‘He doesn’t tell “everyone” anything. As far as I know, he keeps himself to himself.’

‘In a place like this, you don’t have to tell anyone anything. They tell each other.’ Clara wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve, and was fumbling around for her dope, papers and cigarettes when the loud clackety-clack of a football rattle came from downstairs. Clara stood up: ‘That’s Mama calling us for tea.’

The kitchen table was covered with plates of cakes and biscuits, cheese, chopped white cabbage, sliced oranges, and seeds and nuts Mary couldn’t put names to. The whole Clough family was there, except little Freddie: the doctor, the doctor’s wife, Clara, Tobias, Juliette and Bobo. Mary couldn’t put them in any obvious order. Tobias was taller than Clara; fourteen-year-old Juliette’s spectacles gave her great poise (Mary wished she’d chosen heavy frames like hers); and Bobo was a beaming bun of a boy whose plump cheeks made him look younger than Freddie, an angular and serious-faced child of eight, three years his brother’s junior. Clara was the boss, Tobias the mender, Juliette the brains, Freddie the wise child and eleven-year-old Bobo, everyone’s doll.

Billy was ensconced between Tobias and Juliette, sifting through the biscuit tin, wondering where to start. Francesca Clough, pouring tea, waved Mary towards the table, where she took a chair. It gave way beneath her, folding and collapsing. She landed hard on her bottom and found herself holding an arm-rest in the air, and looking up into mildly concerned faces.

Billy was shaking his head in admiration. ‘Good one, George.’

Freddie appeared through the door that gave onto the garden, wearing a dripping mackintosh and sou’wester. ‘If I’d known you wanted to sit in my chair,’ he said slowly and clearly, ‘I’d have explained. You need to approach it from a certain angle, you see, and not disturb the string.’

Mary nodded seriously. Clara threw a chocolate biscuit fast, hard and accurately at Freddie’s head. ‘Don’t be a creep, bambino. He refused to let Ma replace that chair when she got these others. No one else knows how to deal with it. Come by me.’ She nudged Juliette, who sighed and rose.

The next half hour was a whirl of eating, talking, teasing and argument. Everyone chattered at once, getting their conversations so confused that Tobias would find his question about the relative merits of different stroke engines answered by Juliette’s retort to Clara’s insistence that it was still radical to wear black. ‘But it’s such old hat, so Left Bank!’ (Clara, not getting it, ‘You mean left wing, Jules.’)

Dr Clough joined in with a dry aside (‘Jules should know, being named after La Greco.’) and caught hold of his fluttering wife as she jumped up to boil another kettle, fetch more fruit or open more biscuits, ‘Francesca, darling, sit and drink your tea.’

Suddenly, everyone was getting up. Dr Clough returned to the surgery and the children dispersed, leaving their arguments in mid-air. Only Mary said thank you to Francesca Clough and nobody stayed to help her clear up.

This time Clara led Mary to the other stairs and along the corridor to Tobias’s room. Late afternoon sun exposed the house as more neglected than it had seemed the night of the swimming-pool dinner. Mary ran her finger through the dust on a side table and across a mirror. The parquet floor was dull, and the rugs were thin and torn (but real, thought Mary, lived with and passed down!).

Clara didn’t knock. Tobias was bent over another large record-player, the workings of which had been added to and exposed. Billy was stretched out on the floor among heaps of tools, lighting a joint. ‘Just in time!’ Clara flung herself on the bed.

‘Smoke your own.’ Tobias didn’t bother to turn round. Clara dangled her hand over the side of the bed, and Billy passed her the joint. Tobias relented, turned round and gestured to Mary, still hovering in the doorway: ‘Sit down. Listen to this.’ Clara passed her the joint and Mary, already lightheaded from what she’d smoked earlier, took a deep drag. Tobias lowered the needle onto the record and settled himself on the floor. ‘Concentrate,’ he said, and they did. The music began with a sparse melody then broadened with a lilting bass, a full horn section and tantalising fragments of voice, the whole spinning itself out and out, and bursting into wild over-embellishments. It went on and on building up, and took as long to die down. By the time the last whoops and twiddles faded, Mary was lying back against the wall, her eyes closed, smiling at the sheer, ridiculous delight of it.

‘Wow …’ Billy exhaled.

‘Earth, Wind & Fire,’ Mary murmured. She waited for Clara to make some cutting remark but it didn’t come. All they heard from her was a deep snore. Tobias played a Bob Dylan duet with Johnny Cash, then Joe Cocker, The Cars, Can and the Velvet Underground’s endless ‘Sister Ray’. In that white room with the rain coming down, all this sounded wonderful to Mary, both for being familiar and for being heard as if for the first time.