The Colonnel’s Daughter

The Colonel’s Daughter

It is July. In Wengen, Colonel Browne is standing in the shallow end of the swimming pool of the Hotel Alpenrose, preparing himself for the moment of immersion on a late Friday afternoon. The sun, which has shone on the pool for most of the day, is grimacing now on the corner of the mountain. In moments, even before the Colonel has swum his slow and stately six lengths, the shadow of the mountain will fall splat across the water, will fall crash across the copy of The Day of the Tortoise by H. E. Bates that Lady Amelia Browne is peering at on her poolside chair. Lady Amelia Browne will look up from The Day of the Tortoise and call to Colonel Browne: ‘The sun’s gone in, Duffy!’ The Colonel will hear her voice in the middle of his fifth length, but will make no reply. He will swim carefully on until he has made his final turn and his sixth length is bringing him in, bringing him back as life has always brought him in and brought him back to his wife Amelia holding his bath towel. Together, then, they will walk slowly into the Hotel Alpenrose, she with her book and the suncream for her white legs, he wrapped in the towel, shivering slightly so that his big belly feels cramped, carrying his airmail edition of the Daily Telegraph and his size ten leather sandals.

Ah, they will think, as they run a hot bath in their pink private bathroom and see their bedroom fill and fill with the coral light of the Swiss sky. ‘Ah,’ Amelia will sigh, as she takes the weak brandy and soda Duffy has made for her and lets herself subside onto her left-hand twin bed. ‘Ah . . .’ the Colonel will bellow into his sponge, as his white whale of a body displaces the steaming bathwater, ‘Cracking day, eh Amelia?’

At the very moment Colonel Browne finishes dinner, at the very moment Lady Amelia Browne smiles at him with fondness and remembers for no particular reason the war wound on his upper thigh which might have killed him but for a surgeon’s skill, at this precise moment a green Citroen car enters the drive of one of the most beautiful houses in Buckinghamshire. On either side of the drive, great chestnut trees are in full candelburst. Multiple minute pink blossoms are squashed by the car as it comes on, fast, sidelights two glimmerings of yellow in the quiet grey dusk. No one sees the car. Garrod, the only person who might have seen it, had he been standing at the scullery window, might have heard it had he been walking the dog, Admiral, round the garden, doesn’t hear it, doesn’t see it because he is laid up with sciatica and dreaming a half-drugged dream of his days in the desert in his small sparse room at the top and back of the house. So the car comes on as if in silence, as if invisible, and stops soundlessly in front of the stone porch.

Out of the car gets Charlotte, carrying a suitcase – Friday visitor come from London as so many have come on summer evenings before, during and after the flowering of the magnolia on the south wall, getting out gratefully from their cars and smelling parkland, smelling cedar and chestnut blossom and aubretia and rock roses on the stones, then opening the heavy front door as Charlotte opens it now, standing on the polished scented parquet of the hall and thinking yes, this is how it always felt to be here: the portrait of the seventh Duke of Abercorn in momentous place at the foot of the staircase, luminous white face breathing a half-smile through the crust and dust of varnish and time; the stuffed blue marlin, caught by the Colonel near Mombasa, clamped fast to the wall above the massive fireplace, robbed of its body’s dance and sheen – the trophies of lineage and leisure announcing to the tired Friday traveller that here, by a gracious permission only a few of us understand, is permanence, here at Sowby Manor beats one of England’s last-remaining all-to-few unsullied hearts of oak. So welcome, if indeed you were invited. Garrod has lit a fire in the sitting room, drawn the curtains, turned down the beds. Come in.

Garrod sleeps. The dog, Admiral, older by human calculation than Garrod, barks feebly on his blanket-bed in the gunroom, gets up, turns a circle, sniffing his body warmth on the faded blanket and lies down again in the circle he has made. Charlotte stands by the Duke of Abercorn, above whom she has switched on a bar of light, hears the distant barking and sets her suitcase down. Charlotte is tall. The Duke of Abercorn stares mournfully through time at her bony shoulders and small breasts, at the grey of her eyes, pale-fringed with sandy lashes the colour of her hair that has been pulled back and up into an untidy bundle, making the face stark, a chiselled face, a whitewood face but with a line of mouth as thinly sensual as the Duke’s own, a replica, it seems, more moist than his, merely pinker and half open now in expectation, in wonder at her own presence there in the hall, in the summernight dusk . . .

Move, says her voice, begin. So she, who like Saint Joan is obedient to her voices, begins to move out of the hall, opening a door to a dark pannelled corridor. She hears Admiral whimper. So lonely and quivering is the existence of this dog in the stone gunroom, she can imagine, as she carefully removes her shoes, its smooth wiry body tensed to the tiny sound she has made by opening the door and which floods its dog’s brain with the obedient question: who?

Garrod sleeps. The dog sniffs the door, sniffs the dust on the stone in the minute dark space under the door. Charlotte walks barefoot down the corridor, remembering the dog’s name is Admiral; on its expensive collar hangs a brass engraved disc: ‘Admiral’, Sowby Manor, Bucks. The stone flags are cold under her long feet. The house felt cold the moment she entered it. Now, outside, light seeps away, dusk becomes near-dark, the white roses on the wall are luminous. Charlotte opens the door to the gunroom and the dog springs up. The dog’s feet reach almost to her breasts and she pushes it away, careful to fondle its head, to let it remember her, the Friday visitor who once came often to the Manor – long ago, before Garrod was hired, before Admiral grew old – and took the dog for walks in the beechwoods. ‘Good boy Admiral, good boy . . .’

Still holding the dog’s head against her leg, her hands calm, she reaches up into the gunrack, takes down the 12-bore cleaned so perfectly by Garrod since it last popped off the scattering birds in the valleys and woods of Sowby, on the heatherblown moors of Scotland, and places it on a ship’s chest, this too cleaned and polished with Brasso by Garrod. She releases the head of the dog. It returns whimpering, nuzzling at her crotch and she pushes it away: ‘Good boy, Admiral . . .’ The cartridge drawer is heavy. Charlotte takes out two cartridges only, drops them into the twin barrels, clicks the gun shut. Admiral barks suddenly. Charlotte’s heart, so calm until this second, jolts under her skinny cotton sweater. She stares at the dog and at the gun. Dog-and-gun. She has seen them from childhood. Dog-and-gun and the red hands of the men going out into the frost: ‘hurry, Charlotte, if you want a place in the landrover, if you want to watch the first drive . . .’

She closes the gunroom door, closes her thought of dog-and-gun. She slips silently back down the pannelled corridor to the hall, where the light is still on above the Duke of Abercorn. Garrod sleeps. She has never seen Garrod. ‘I was before your time,’ she might say, ‘and, at the same time, long after it.’ She knows the room, though. A man called Hughes slept there all through her childhood. He told stories of the war, stories of missions, crack units, lads with special training, heavily decorated lads, the ones who didn’t die. Then Hughes died and somebody cocksure and young and unsatisfactory came and went with an Italian name and a pungent body odour, and then it was Garrod’s turn, a meticulous man, she had been told, getting on, troubled by winter colds and sciatica, but thorough. And honest. You could leave the house in Garrod’s care and be sure, on return, to find everything in its place, not so much as a sheet of writing paper missing from the bureau drawer.

Garrod sleeps. Charlotte, holding the gun, climbs the back stairs to his high landing. In the hall, near the Duke of Abercorn, the grandfather clock chimes ten. At this precise hour, in Wengen, Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne are served coffee – excellent Viennese coffee – in the comfy lounge of the Hotel Alpenrose, and the Colonel, nodding at the waitress, reaches for his cigar case. In Garrod’s dream, he is lying on a stone. The sky is empty and yellowish white with colossal heat. He tries to move the stone from under him, but the stone is grafted to the small of his back. Charlotte reaches his door. She listens. She can’t hear the agony of his dreams. She hears only her own breaths, like sighed warnings, turn back, leave the gun by the front door, go out into the dark and fly. Garrod wakes to night-time and sciatica pains. He turns over, grumbling, tucks his head into the pillow. Sleeps. The door opens. Out of darkness and sleep come the command, the drumroll, the moment when, from nowhere, the wild animal leaps: ‘Get up, Garrod!’

At ten o’clock on this warm night, scriptwriter Franklin Doyle, born Colorado, USA, 1936, is scratching his chin, trying to save a love affair and failing. Opposite him, across a white table in his rented London flat, a woman called Margaret, sullenly, whitely beautiful, is spilling guilt-corroded truths about her body’s longings for a man called Michael that squeeze and bruise the chest of Franklin Doyle so that he has to gulp for air and begin this repetitious scratching of his face to keep himself from laying his greying head on the table and wailing.

‘It wasn’t,’ says Margaret, ‘the kind of thing I wanted to happen. I didn’t invite it.’

‘Yes, you did,’ says Doyle pathetically, ‘at Ilona’s party you sat at the creep’s feet.’

‘There weren’t any chairs. Ilona never provides chairs.’

‘He was sitting on a chair.’

‘On a sofa.’

‘On a fucking sofa. Who cares? You sat and fawned and I brought you drinks. But you know you’ve gone mad, don’t you? You know he’ll leave you, don’t you?’

‘He says he loves me, Franklin.’

‘And you believe the asshole?’

‘You don’t need to call him that.’

‘Yes, I need. For me! Have you forgotten about me? You’re screwing my life up – and yours – for an asshole!’

‘I told you, I didn’t want this to happen . . .’

‘Why don’t you go, Margaret?’

‘What?’

‘Now. Just go now.’

Margaret is silent, frightened. She’s used to Franklin Doyle, his flat, his fruit press, his lumpy dressing gown, his electric typewriter.

‘Why now?’

Doyle puts his hands round his head and scrapes his scalp. ‘For my sake.’

Margaret feels homeless, adrift, afraid of night-time and cold weather and dreams.

‘Can’t I go tomorrow, Franklin, when I’ve had time to fix something up and pack . . . ?’

‘I’ll pack for you,’ says Doyle, throwing his body up and out of the heavy designer-designed chair, hurtling it breathlessly towards his bedroom where his clothes and Margaret’s, thrown together, softly litter it. He picks up at random a brown bra, a pair of high-heeled sandals, a pink sweater, a copy of Ten Days that Shook the World (a gift from him, unread), a jewellery box and a white nightdress and throws them into a pile on the double bed. He drags a suitcase from the top of a louvered wardrobe and begins tossing things in, scrunching and crumpling them, magazines, boots, tights, shirts, scarves, Tampax, leotards, dresses . . .

Margaret, relieved of her confession, alive to the sudden consequence of that confession, starts to sob for what she has destroyed, starts to weep and weep as her possessions go tumbling in. She feels vandalised, spoiled.

‘I’ve nowhere to go!’ she says. Doyle stops snatching her belongings, slams the suitcase lid on the stuff he has collected, zips it up and hurls it at her. ‘Go to the creep! Go and bawl in his lap!’

So Margaret gathers up the case, remembering item by item all the things she is leaving behind, takes her pale jacket from a peg in the hall, turns, stares at Doyle, at his clenched hands, at his mouth, opens the door of the flat, turns again, sees Doyle through her shimmer of tears, goes out onto the landing lit by a brass chandelier and closes the door behind her. Slowly, and with sorrow she never expected, she walks down the stairs.

Doyle is at the sitting-room window. He pushes back the net curtains which smell mustily of dust and city rain, waits for the sound of the front door and the white figure of Margaret creeping out with her suitcase into the London night. He feels the failure and rage of forty-seven years lift his arm and bring it crashing down onto the window. Margaret slips from view. A cascade of glass fragments hurtles two storeys onto the pavement, startling a middle-aged Bavarian sculptress walking her dachshund on a tartan lead. ‘Mein Gott!’ she exclaims and gazes up. She sees the light at Doyle’s window. Nothing else. She walks on.

Near dawn, which comes early on their side of the mountain, Colonel Browne half wakes and mumbles across the space between him and his wife in her twin bed: ‘Funny old Admiral didn’t get his share of the meat.’

Lady Amelia sits up and stares at her husband’s arm which is dangling onto the carpet. ‘Duffy?’ she says, ‘What’s this about meat?’

Colonel Browne opens a yellowed eye, notices his trailing arm and withdraws it into the safety of the Swiss-laundered duvet.

‘Alright Amelia?’ he asks.

She has put on her bedjacket.

‘I was perfectly alright until you woke me up with some nonsense about Admiral and meat.’

‘Meat?’ The Colonel strokes a few strands of hair into place across his head. ‘Got that damned pins and needles in my hand again. Must be the birds.’

‘Birds?’

‘Vultures or something. Dream, I suppose. Must’ve been. You put a carcass out on the lawn and all these birds came . . .’

‘This is a holiday, Duffy dear,’ says Amelia gently but firmly, ‘No nightmares on holiday.’

Yet at dawn, in his Camden basement, Jim Reese is dreaming his habitual nightmare which no holiday has ever obliterated since he was a Brighton schoolboy and his mother’s house stank of lodgers’ tobacco and frying eggs. He dreams and redreams the day his room is given away to Mr John Ripley, a North Lancashire toys and novelties rep making a summer killing on the south coast, and his boy’s bed is squashed into a suffocating space no bigger nor better than a cupboard, and all his Eagle cutouts are torn down and his drawer of fag cards emptied for Mr Ripley to lay his handkerchiefs and his metal hip flask in.

Jim Reese wakes and stares out at pale light on the area steps. He is sweaty, uncomfortable, suffocated by the dream. All his life, since the Brighton days, he has moved on – place to place, woman to woman – and yet he has always felt contained, fenced up. John Ripley’s ghost and the ghost of his mother frying eggs have gawped at his efforts to understand himself. Now he feels emptied of understanding. Emptied of the will to understand. He has a set of drums. Playing these, he feels intelligent. He soars. He knows life is for living, learning, creating. He wanted to form a band or group. He knew a singer, Keith, getting small-fry gigs but confident, with a cracked black-sounding voice like the voice of Joe Cocker. Keith was interested in the group idea for a while, till he got a US recording contract and pissed off into the big time. Now Keith sings in Vegas and Jim Reese is where he is, looking out at the area wall. The drums are silent most days. Sometimes he polishes the chrome and wood, because if things get tougher than they are, he might be forced, just to hold himself together, to sell them. Two weaknesses have blighted his life and he knows them: he cannot sell himself and he cannot get angry. It isn’t that he doesn’t feel rage. He feels it alright, souring his blood, a poison. Yet he can’t express it, just as he can’t express himself (only through his hands on the drums). Like his person and his will, his anger is contained, walled up, silent.

Jim Reese gets up, lights a cigarette, looks at his watch. He can hear a blackbird in the cherry trees above his window. He begins listening for a car. He returns to the bed and sits on it, still smoking, still listening. High summer, yet his body is pale – kept underneath the road where soon trucks will thunder, kept uselessly out of sight. He is thirty-seven. Far too old, says his mother’s fat-spattered ghost, to be a pop star. You should have put all that out of your mind.

Time passes. He makes tea, sits and waits. Sun glints on the rail of the rusty area steps. Saturday traffic starts to rumble. He feels knotted, anxious. Charlotte. He says her name, listens to the minute echo of her name that hangs for a second in the drab room. When she is with him, he feels breathless, hot. Her intelligence suffocates him. Now, without her, he feels the same breathlessness in his fear that she’s deserted him, as he’s sometimes wondered if, even hoped that, she would. Yet the flat is hers and everything in it except him and his drums. In place on the desk is her typewriter and in place beside it, half finished, is her latest article, Eve and the Weapons of Eden. She worked on the paper all the previous day, he remembers, until seven-thirty when she came and found him sitting by the drums with a tin of chrome-cleaner and a T-shirt rag, crouched on the floor beside him and told him: ‘I’ll be out most of the night. I’m driving to Buckinghamshire, to collect some things. I can’t say what they are. I’ll show you when I get back – probably very late, towards morning.’ He took up the chrome-cleaner and the rag blotchy with stain and didn’t look at her as she went out, carrying a suitcase. I don’t own you, he said to her when she could no longer hear him, don’t imagine it.

The tea is cold. The traffic is loud. The traffic reveals to him, day after day, his own stasis. His air is blasted with the lead fumes of other people’s purpose; they fart their travelling ambitions into his face. He thinks of moving, as he has always moved, on. Somewhere quieter. Wales, even. Go to a mountain and hear the silly bla of sheep. Why not? Quit the notion that you can ever make anything of the city, or the city of you. Yet it is Charlotte who holds him, balanced on the edge of being there and not being there. She stands between him and his own disappearance. She feeds him tiny grains of her own purpose in the meals she makes and a little of herself creeps inside him.

Jim Reese will wait for another twenty-seven minutes before the green Citroen is parked near the gate to the basement and he sees Charlotte come slowly down the iron steps. In these twenty-seven minutes, a brilliant yellow sun rises on Wengen, flooding the balcony of Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne’s room in the Hotel Alpenrose. Lady Amelia, wearing a blue robe de chambre, slips out onto the balcony without waking the Colonel, who has returned to his muddled dreaming, and begins her breathing exercises, gasping in the champagne air, dizzying herself with the cutting breath of the mountain. Into her mind, as her thin chest rises and falls, comes a delicious flowering of appreciation for the well-ordered world spread out like a gracefully laid table before her. Even, she notices, the arrangement of geraniums on the balcony itself is scrupulously wise, colours tossed into each other, growing, spreading, hanging, each bloom excellently placed. For Amelia Browne, order in all things has been an absolutely satisfying principle of sixty-eight years. In her valuable Victorian dolls’ house, given to her when she was four, the little pipe-cleaner men and women she moved from room to room never – as occurred in the dolls’ houses of her friends – stood on the beds nor lay down on the kitchen floor.

Charlotte is lying on the basement bed. The traffic is roaring now. Jim Reese finds her beautiful in the early morning light, with her tired eyes. He touches her with a tenderness he often feels yet can seldom express.

‘Jim,’ she says, pushing away his hand, ‘this is the most important day of my life.’

Jim leaves her body, snatches up the cigarette packet. He stares at the crammed suitcase she has planted in the middle of the room. The explanation, he thinks suddenly, will be worse than what she has done. Because she is grave with achievement. She sits up, pushes wisps of hair out of her eyes.

‘Open the suitcase,’ she says.

Jim feels cross, weary. Revelations have always disturbed and irritated him. But Charlotte’s eyes are pools of red. It’s as if she’s tracked for days and nights across some desert, living only on her will. Her hand shakes as she fingers her hair.

‘Go on . . .’

Bored, resigned, he goes to the suitcase and opens it. As the lid springs back and the case falls with a thud onto his bare feet, bruising them with its extraordinary weight, Jim curses, tips the case, extracts his feet, kneels and rubs them.

Now he looks into the case for the first time and is motionless. Charlotte’s red eyes stare at his crouching back and over his shoulder.

‘Jesus Christ!’

‘It’s for you. Some of it for my work. But most of it for you. There are other things in the car – pictures and a clock . . .’

So he begins to scoop it all out now and pile it round himself: loops of pearls, diamonds stiffly jointed into necklaces and bracelets and inset with emeralds, gold chokers and chains and pendants, a moonstone tiara, rings, earrings, jewelled paperweights and boxes, boxes of amber and onyx and lapis lasuli, an ivory fan, silver knives, forks, spoons, silver tea spoons and napkin rings and salt cellars, silver table birds, bronze statuettes of deer and dogs and naked women with fishes, gold snuff boxes and cigarette boxes, tortoiseshell card cases and combs and brushes . . .

So he is trapped, between this weight of devastating objects at his feet and Charlotte’s burning at his back.

‘We’ll put you on the road now. Pay agents. Find someone to replace Keith . . .’

He looks dumbly down, stirs the treasures and they clink and clack. Minute lasers of light glance off the diamonds. ‘Shit,’ he says.

Charlotte stands up, crosses to him, crouches down.

‘Jim, it’s a simple conversion.’

Conversion? When he couldn’t understand her, he hated her.

‘It’s so obvious, so right. We convert all this artifice into life.’

‘Shit,’ he says again.

‘It’s the most perfect thing I’ve done.’

But Jim stands up, kicks a pearl necklace away from him like a snake and it scudders under a chest of drawers. He can’t look at Charlotte with her eyes like coal, so he turns away and leans his head against the wall. I want to break her, he thinks now. I want to break her for imagining this. For her vanity. She relegates me, miniaturises me: ‘his life is so pitifully small, it can be transformed, reshaped by the selling of pearls and little boxes and ornaments.’ But yes, for once in my life, I want to break someone. I can feel it start. Anger. Starts in my temple, but pushes out across my shoulders and down all the length of my arms and into my hands.

‘I could kill you!’

His voice is a sob, weak, vanquished. But when he senses her moving to him, he is round like a whip and facing her. She reaches out to him, but he binds her arms to her side and shakes her, shakes her till she screams and pulls away, stumbles over the suitcase and almost falls. But no, he grabs her again and his hands cut deep into her arms, so hard does he grip, because he can feel her strength, equal to his and he must keep hold, keep hold and let it mount in him, the new anger so long buried in bone marrow and trapped, but now flooding muscle and sinew, pushing and bursting till it hurtles from him and he sees it arc and fall in Charlotte’s body hurtling over into the air, then falling, falling as slowly as his long cry, her head crunching the grey metal of the typewriter and all her papers crushed and scattered as the body dives to the floor and is still.

Jim Reese gazes at the ribbon of blood threading her golden hair. And breathes.

A blue ambulance light turns. Four thousand miles from the ancient, restless mother he is dreaming of, Franklin Doyle is driven to hospital covered with a red blanket. All night, blood from his flayed arm flowed onto the vinyl floor of his kitchen, where he had stumbled in search of cloths with which to bind it, and where, as he began to wrap it round with a faded jubilee tea towel, a deep unconsciousness tipped him head-first into violent and useless dreaming. He lay with his head in the cat litter tray. The cat (a London stray who lent permanence to his long sojourn in the city) came and sniffed at his nostrils, sniffed at his blood, put a probing paw into it, licked the paw, then went to her milk saucer and drank, leaving a fleck of blood in the little saucer of milk. She urinated feebly near to Doyle’s hair, then wandered to the sitting room, where she went to sleep on the sofa. Mrs Annipavroni, who made a tiny income cleaning the homes of exiles like herself, found Doyle at eight-thirty and rang for an ambulance. By that time, he was near to death. This would be the first time in Mrs Annipavroni’s life that she could claim to have saved a life – unless you included her children, whose lives she saved in her mind many times a day.

As Doyle is received by the hospital, sunlight falls into the gunroom, where the dog, Admiral, has begun a violent barking and tearing of the door, a yowling and whimpering which express its desolate confusion. Its bladder is full. It is yowling for the damp and earth and shiny leaves of the rose beds, yowling for Garrod, jailor and deliverer.

Garrod is lying in the hall. The yellow bar of light over the Duke of Abercorn’s portrait is still on, though the sun is flooding in and glimmering on the dead scales of the stuffed marlin and the post has crashed into the wire basket fitted to the inside of the letter box. It is at this moment when, if Colonel Browne were at Sowby Manor, he would be relishing a substantial breakfast and Lady Amelia toying with an insubstantial one. Then they would separate, he to his study to write letters and orders concerning the estate, she to hers, where she would spend considerable time rearranging her snuffbox collection before settling down at her bureau to ‘tidy up a few odds and ends’. But the thoughts of Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne are not with Sowby. They are certainly not with Garrod, lying under the light of the Duke of Abercorn in the thick pyjamas he’s had for eleven years. Their thoughts are with the Swiss morning that has broken so exquisitely, with such purity of light, on the thirteenth day of their holiday.

‘Lunch at that nice high-up place with the fat owner?’ says the Colonel as he dresses.

‘The Glochenspiel?’

‘That’s it. Fancy that, do you?’

Lady Amelia has put on a lilac dress and new lilac shoes. She feels weightless, young.

‘So pretty, the Glochenspiel.’

‘Cold lunch at the Tannenbaum, if you prefer?’

‘No, no. The Glochenspiel would be lovely, Duffy. What a heavenly day!’

So they go out – the large man and the thin, meagre-breasted woman – into the ‘heavenly day’, while Admiral pees in zigzags onto the gunroom floor and Garrod’s doleful breaths confirm the pattern of his life: through seventy years he has rendered service and found none in return.

But Mrs Annipavroni and Jim Reese are doing the ultimate service – saving lives. Charlotte’s head is bound so thickly the brilliant hair is hidden to all but Jim who mourns it, knowing it will be shaved when the head is stitched. Like Doyle, Charlotte rides to hospital under a red blanket. Like Doyle’s dreams, hers are of her mother. And it is through the same hospital doors that Doyle has been wheeled only moments ago that Charlotte now travels, along the same corridor, nurses pushing, hastening, flat, bright light tingeing her palor with green, Jim Reese, a frayed tweed jacket put on over the vest he has slept in, jogging and pushing with the nurses till green swing doors open and receive Charlotte on the trolley and close on Jim, while a surgeon holds his hands up for the sterile gloves, moistens his mouth before the mask is tied round it. Jim stares at the closed doors. Only then, as Charlotte is snatched from him, does he remember the diamonds, the silver spoons, the gold and onyx boxes that still littered the floor when the ambulance men arrived to take her away.

Just before mid-day on this Saturday which is warm in the Swiss Alps, warm in Buckinghamshire and stickily hot in London, the police arrive at Charlotte’s flat. The door is unlocked and they walk in: Sergeant McCluskie and Police Constable Richards. A voice growls on McCluskie’s intercom. He snatches it and speaks quietly to it, like a man calming a dog: ‘Delta Romeo X-Ray two five McCluskie. Arrived Flat Nine, Five Zero Ballantine Road. Er. Valuables. Liberal quantity of. Pictures and gun in Citroen car. No sign of residents, over.’

By 12.10, Charlotte’s hoard has been returned to the suitcase which is wrapped in a polythene sack like a corpse and placed with the gun and the paintings in the boot of McCluskie’s Granada. Delivering the treasure into the surprised hands of Camden Police HQ, McCluskie is then ordered to find Jim Reese and bring him in for questioning. McCluskie sends PC Richards to buy him a cheese sandwich from Vincente’s Sandwich Shop. Vincente Fallaci is a cousin by marriage of Mrs Annipavroni, who has recently saved the life of Franklin Doyle. But such is the fine mesh of the British judicial system that this extraordinary fact entirely escapes it, and the relatedness of Julietta Annipavroni and Vincente Fallaci swims away from detection like a tiny glimmering sardine.

McCluskie and Richards drive to the hospital. Charlotte Browne is in no danger, they are told. However, the head wound is more than superficial. She is weak. She is sleeping. She cannot talk to them, and no, Mr Reese, who accompanied her in the ambulance, has not returned. Nobody can remember seeing him leave, yet he isn’t there. McCluskie says he will wait and parks his heavy, muscular body on a plastic chair which creaks under his buttocks. Richards is ordered back to 50 Ballantine Road, to ‘clobber’ Jim Reese if and when he returns there. Meanwhile, police at Camden are sifting the diamonds, the lapis lasuli boxes, the bronze statuettes of naked women with fishes and trying to trace their origin. Meanwhile, Charlotte and Garrod and Doyle lie in pools of light and dream of their loneliness.

It’s lonely, lonely utters Charlotte child to her parents on a sand-dune, to be sliced as I have been sliced with Timothy Storey’s metal spade, lonely, lonely to feel the blood of my buried leg flow into the sand as Timothy Storey runs away to his Nanny in a deck chair. I call out – to you, to Timothy Storey’s Nanny with her crochet, to anyone – but no one comes to the bleeding leg in its tunnel of sand, no one comes because I am no longer here, I have slithered away in my own blood and the same tide that washes away the crochet pattern inadvertently dropped by Timothy Storey’s Nanny will wash away the shiny crimson puddle that was once a girl, only child of a Colonel, a girl with hair the colour of the sand which now receives her life.

Far away on the dunes, the wind clutters through the pages of Colonel Browne’s Daily Telegraph, slaps through Lady Amelia’s copy of The Day of the Tortoise which she is reading for the first time. Above and below and round and inside the wind, all is silence.

Garrod has turned. He lies face up to the sun. The stone in his back has turned and grown in size and weight and sits on his white chest. Heat floods his head. His head drips with the pain of the boulder flattening his heart inside the light and brittle rib casing. His heart has become a moth, beating its wings in a glass bottle. Far away where the tanks are massing, where the lads cool their skulls on their ice-blue visions of Rommel’s eyes, a dog called Admiral is yowling for the battles to come, and the dead.

In slatted light, blood drips and fills, drips and fills. The body of Franklin Doyle is returning, drip by drip, from the death gathered up in the wide arms of Julietta Annipavroni and exchanged by this exile for an exile’s life. Doyle is enjoying his journey back to existence. The way is littered with hope. This hope takes the form of glittering stones and flints as dazzling as jewels. He picks his way among their sharp surfaces, treading softly, walking on, on to the beat of a muddled verse twanged out by an old man whose skin has the colour and texture of rust:

‘Fuck the Lord and screw damnation,

Pappy’s bought a gasoline station!’

Only the hand holding his is missing, the quiet hand of a girl called Margaret with shiny eyes and a fawn summer coat. She is hiding somewhere. She refuses to come out and introduce herself to the rusty man, his father, singing his rhyme. She is waiting, out of sight. Why waiting? Doyle doesn’t know. But he walks on. Happy.

Colonel Browne leads his wife onto the cool terrace of the popular mountain restaurant, the Glochenspiel.

‘It’s so perfect,’ sighs Amelia, ‘don’t you think?’

All, all that day is singing and yodelling with joy in the heart of Amelia Browne.

‘They know how to do things up here,’ smiles the Colonel.

Down below, in the basement of number fifty Ballantine Road, Constable Richards, alias Delta Romeo X-Ray two four Richards, picks up scattered papers, some torn, some stained with blood, and begins to read an article entitled Eve and the Weapons of Eden by Charlotte Browne. Constable Richards’s A-level results enable him to understand that the article is talking to him about the oppression of women and their children, born and unborn, by the militaristic souls of the descendants of Adam. Constable Richards takes out a slice of Dentyne from his heavy blue pocket and chews on this anxiously, perplexed as he follows the jumpy words, the capital letters of which keep leaping up above the line, but which begin to reveal to him patterns, looping, diving, zigzagging, the mighty capitals standing over them like irregular trees, patterns of thought for which his A-levels, his obligatory studies of Marx and Mao, his months at the Police Academy have not satisfactorily prepared him. Into the hands of women, say these orchards of words, we commend the salvation of mankind. Constable Richards bites on the Dentyne, sighs, sets the papers down, rubs his eyes.

‘Frightening muck!’ he whispers to himself. But one sentence lurks in his mind. He has arranged this sentence into a rectangle which looks roughly like a door with no handle:

For several minutes he stares at the door, drawing and redrawing its lines in his head. Then he picks up the receiver of a green telephone that sits on Charlotte’s desk near to her typewriter and makes an important call to Camden HQ. Detective Inspector Pitt, CID, a smart, quiet stick of a man, offers Richards his curt congratulations.

And a clean blond waiter arrives. His hand is golden in the tableau of white cloth, crystal glass and green wine bottle that settles picturesquely into Amelia’s mind. Beyond the high terrace, the sun is very hot. Blue butterflies flutter above a bank of euphorbia blooms.

‘I think,’ says Amelia, ‘that these mountains simply must have been the original Garden of Eden. Don’t you, Duffy darling?’

Jim Reese is on the move. As the train hurtles towards Brighton, he makes a simple plan for the recovery of himself. Easy. Everything’s easy when you take control and stop the other fuckers shaping your life. Especially women. First his mother: ‘I know you’ll understand, Jimmy, I need the money and our Mr Ripley’s a very good resident, so I see no alternative, now that it’s a question of a long stay, to giving him your room . . .’ Then, years later, Charlotte: conning him he could be something because of a caseful of stolen glittery shittery richness. The gall. The temerity! The dumb insensitivity! Jim Reese pummels the armrest of the British Rail seat. Strong women. How he has come to fear the smell and flesh and the souls of strong women. Never again will any woman matter to him. They will simply be matter: thighs, breasts, cunt. Dispensible. Uncherished. Sheer matter. And yet, perhaps not even that . . .

‘Ticket!’ snaps the train guard. Jim Reese returns to the stuffy carriage and the fleeting summer fields outside it. As he hands the guard his ticket for clipping, he decides that on arrival he will go straight to the beach.

It is late afternoon when he arrives. Families with rugs and towels and windbreaks on the pebbly sand are kindly lit by the deepening sun. Children make a bobbing and jumping line to the ice-cream van with its little jangle of Italian music. Posters advertise a costume exhibition from some TV Classic Series at the Pavillion. From the stately white houses at the east end of the front, dogs are harnessed for teatime walks by retired people in baggy clothes. Brighton. Jim stares. The sea rolls in, majestic but calm. He fills his lungs and begins to walk towards it.

The sunlight is slipping from the hall at Sowby Manor when Garrod leaves Rommel’s desert at last, leaves his old comrades with their ice-cold visions of German eyes and wakes in the light of the Duke of Abercorn. He is lying with his head on the first stair. Inside his pyjamas, the pain is lessened. Slowly, tremblingly, he pulls a shaky old hand from under him and lets it knead his chest, exploring for pain and stones and weights. Under his hand, now, is his mothflutter of a heartbeat, irregular and thin. His hand sends no message of reassurance, only of confusion. His head lolls on the stair. Inside his head is, far away, the crying of an animal. He stares up. The Duke of Abercorn gazes above his head, out towards the fanlight of the front door and the tender sky beyond.

Garrod sucks his lips, removes his hand from his chest and presses it, palm down, to the cold wood floor. He pushes with this hand and arm till all the top half of his body is raised and leaning on the stair. His body feels empty and cavernous and dark. His heart flaps feebly like a bat inside this cave of flesh. He listens – to his heart, to the dog’s yowling. He knows, yet cannot remember why he is alone in the house. Only the dog, perhaps, is in it somewhere, in a room too far away to find. The grandfather clock chimes six.

‘M’lady,’ he mumbles. Yet he knows she isn’t there. He is merely inviting this cool, once beautiful woman to save him from the desert of his dreams. And there it is, about to form around him again: the terrible sun, the tanks like insects, a circling bird, higher than unimaginable height. So he fights it. He clings to the banister, holds fast to the shape and feel of the banister. The desert blurs, recedes, Garrod is panting, drenched with effort. Yet the banister is there, solid, real, a lighthouse, a mast . . . And the lifeboat is coming closer, closer. Onto the gravel of the drive bounds Detective Inspector Pitt’s white Rover. Beside him, held tightly to herself by her inertia reel seatbelt is WPC Verna Willis.

‘Beautiful house, Sir,’ ventures WPC Willis.

‘Yes,’ snaps the dry Pitt.

And they come on.

Doyle is stitched, bandaged, replenished. He wakes and stares at the bottle of blood sending its drip drip of life into his arm. He does not yet know that Julietta Annipavroni saved his life, yet senses that hours ago, in a featureless darkness, it may have needed saving.

He is grateful. A young nurse is bending over him and he takes her smile into his head.

‘Okay, Mr Doyle?’

The nurse has a fine, thin mouth and an olive complexion. She might belong rightfully to India or even to Italy. Doyle cannot yet say.

‘My oh my!’ he says. His mouth feels parched, like an old man’s mouth. The nurse lifts him with ease, holds a drinking cup to his mouth. He sucks water, his head nudging the nurse’s breast. He lies back on his pillow and tries a smile. The smile cracks him. He feels the need to apologise.

‘Did I say anything about a gas station?’ he asks.

The nurse smooths his sheet. Her arm is covered with a fluff of dark hairs.

‘I didn’t hear it.’

‘Had a hell of a dream – ’bout my Dad. He died in ’63.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Did I miss a day or anything?’

‘Sorry?’

‘What day is this?’

‘Saturday.’ And she examines the watch pinned to her starched apron. ‘Six ten in the evening.’

It is then that Doyle remembers Margaret. Margaret is miles away on the other side of London, snoozing with her new lover, Michael, in her new lover’s new double bed. These bodies are hot and gentle and drowsy, but down the corridor from the room in which Doyle has just woken is the body of Charlotte Browne, cold and formidable under the shaven head, wide awake and angry. She plucks at her bandages. The wound burns like ice. A pink, floppy-breasted woman wearing lipstick is staring at her from the next-door bed. She smiles while readjusting the neckline of her pink nightie.

‘Is there a telephone?’ asks Charlotte.

‘Yes,’ smiles the pink woman, ‘in the corridor, opposite the first of the men’s wards.’

But then Charlotte remembers, she has no money, no handbag, no clothes. She opens her locker and looks inside. It’s empty. Her anger with Jim Reese is infecting her wound and making her body ache.

‘Was anyone here?’ she asks the woman, ‘A man?’

‘Only the policeman. You were sleeping.’

‘Policeman?’

‘Yes.’

So the phone call is useless. She knows Jim has gone, gone heaven knows where, in spite of her will to give his life purpose and shape. Only her strength is left now and she senses that this has ebbed, like Samson’s, with the shaving of her hair. She would like to kill Jim Reese, for the wounding, for his presumption that he could rob her of her will. She remembers triumphantly her drive in the dusk to the great manor smelling of polish and flowers; she remembers the pathetic whining of the old dog in the gunroom, then the feel and weight of the gun, the cottagey smell of the woollen balaclava with which she covered her face, and the scuttling obedience of the servile man, Garrod, going shivering before her down the cellar steps, opening the safe with the same timid hands that have worn gloves to preside at the gross and formal richness of Ascot dinners, Jubilee parties, election night suppers, standing to one side in his thick night attire, head sad and limp as her memory selects the items of greatest value and she arranges them unhurriedly in the big suitcase. She remembers her sorrow for Garrod as she sits him down on the polished parquet of the hall, gags him with a soft scarf and ropes him to the banisters with nylon sailcord. How long, she wonders, will he sit and mourn his failure to protect his employers’ precious things? Before someone comes. A charwoman? A cleaning slave with a key? In her childhood, there were four living-in servants at Sowby. Time has passed. Sowby still stands, protected and protector, yet depleted. Charlotte drives fast away from it, away from the scent of catmint and childhood and trifling obedience to cruel ways. I, she says aloud as she flies down the chestnut avenue, have committed no crime. The fearful unkindnesses of genteel lives make wounds deeper than any I have inflicted. All I have done is to snatch the weapons of tomorrow – for use today. She feels then a rising in her of terrible excitement. She drives badly, blindly, fast, then she stops the car in a quiet lane, walks into the darkness and listens to the whispers of the momentous night. The past is dismembered, like a body, and inhabits only the space of a suitcase; the present is this warm, ripe darkness; the future is growing steadily in her and needs only the slow light of morning to begin.

Yet in the morning, the future changed. It was altered, as the future so very frequently is, by anger. The pink woman takes up some pink knitting. Charlotte senses that underneath the lump of bedclothes this woman is pregnant. She yawns at the terrible boredom of life’s patterns. She curses the ebbing of strength. Jim Reese has beaten her, yet for what? For that drooling dog, pride? For that nameless stray, freedom? She sees his narrow white wrists on her bony shoulders, pressing her headful of understanding into his belly. Probably he loved no one, nor ever would, yet in her weakness, now, she begins to cry for the loss of him. She lies back on the clean pillows and lets her tears fall silently. The pink woman looks away. A ward sister appears at the door, unseen by Charlotte. The ward sister crosses to Charlotte’s bed and, without speaking to her, draws the curtains round it. Charlotte stares at the flowery curtains and asks in a quiet voice to be left alone. The ward sister doesn’t reply. She lifts Charlotte up and forward, plumps the pillows, sets her back on the plumped pillows and says coldly: ‘Alright, Miss Browne. A police sergeant is here. I shall now permit him to question you.’

Having woken so early on the ‘heavenly day’, Amelia Browne feels tired by the long walk down from the Glochenspiel. Her lilac dress is now a little crumpled and there are moist patches under her arms which she feels are ‘most dreadfully common’.

‘You have a swim, Duffy dear,’ she says in the cool of the hotel foyer, ‘I think I’m going to have a bit of a rest.’

Colonel Browne knows he can snooze pleasantly in the sun by the pool, so he changes into his bathing trunks, takes his bathing towel and his airmail copy of the Telegraph, leaving his wife to rest her papery body in the silence of their room.

Amelia Browne doesn’t sleep, however. She lies still and examines her thoughts for the source of a minute trembling of anxiety that flutters round her stomach. She thinks of her Duffy, his heavy body on the pool lounger, his bald head shiny as a conker in the late afternoon sun. She knows Duffy is alright. His war wound has been mercifully quiet lately; there has been no recurrence, thank heavens, of the prostate trouble which threatened a year ago. He is healthy and jolly and she loves him for his health and jollity. No, it isn’t Duffy causing the anxiety. So she searches. For a brief and uncomfortable space of time, she summons Charlotte to her mind. The anxiety is not lessened nor satisfied. Yet Amelia Browne feels glad that she has allowed herself, in this cool, pretty room, to confront this strange and vexing only child, to look at her as she must be now after seven years of absence and seven grim years of silence. She cannot distort or change her picture of the golden hair that scarcely darkened after childhood. She cannot believe that this has altered. But the face? The face will have aged a little, grown more severe no doubt, just as, from the little she ever hears, the life is of horrendous severity, unimaginable, alien, discomforting and cruel.

Amelia’s emotional repertoire is ‘not up to tragedy’, as she once wittily said while eating profiteroles at Government House, Rhodesia. If it were, she might place herself in the role of Lear, more sinned against than sinning by the fierce daughter she has never allowed herself to understand. She has, of course, asked the genial Duffy several times: ‘Where did we go wrong, Duffy sweet?’ But the Colonel mistrusts all analysis, philosophical and psychological in particular, so cannot answer this bewildering question, except to state: ‘We’re not the ones who went wrong, Amelia. Blame the reds. Blame the Trotskyites or the Mao Tse Tungites or the heaven-knows-whatites. But don’t blame us.’ Yet Amelia is not comforted. Her memory returns very often to a windy day at Broadstairs – or was it Woolacombe? – when some loathesome little boy stuck a metal spade into her daughter’s thigh, and the wind took her cries out to sea as she sat with Duffy in the dunes, and when they came at last to the child, the sand was crimson with her blood. She blamed the wind for taking the crying away into the ocean. She blamed the Nanny for allowing the boy to stray from her side. She did not blame herself. But now she suspects, though she doesn’t mention it to Duffy, that other wounds may have been inflicted on Charlotte without her noticing them. Certainly Rhodesia seemed to wound her daughter, though nobody could understand why when it was such a paradise then. But when asking to be flown back to England, Charlotte had used peculiar words: ‘I want you to release me,’ she had said.

The sun nears the edge of the mountain that will extinguish it. The Colonel gets up, feeling chilly, and goes back into the hotel. Amelia Browne sleeps at last for a short while.

And on the beach at Brighton, the sun is getting lower. Canvas windbreaks are tugged up and folded away. The tops of thermoses are screwed on. Children are held and dried. Out in the deep middle distance, a well fitted and elegant yacht makes headway in the evening offshore breeze. The captain and owner of this yacht is a ginger-haired bank manager called Owen Lasky. His wife, Jessica-Lee Lasky, is American by origin and still fond of cocktails. As Owen urges his boat towards the horizon, Jessica-Lee is hauling on ropes and thinking about manhattans.

Jim Reese is swimming. Brought up on the edge of that piece of ocean, sometime pale-limbed member of the Under Elevens Neptune Club, he swims well and strongly, enjoying the immensity of the water. Of water, of this sea, he wants to say: here is my element. He rolls onto his back and floats. The gentle swell is kinder to his head than any pillow or woman’s breast because it moves him forward. Man breaks from the kind fluids of the womb and is dried and wrapped, tottering out his futile years on two dry legs. But the pain of those thousands of days of standing upright! The longings to lie down and be rocked by love or purpose or adulation! Earth. The wrong element. An evolutionary mistake. The root cause of all oppression and the abandonment of children in cupboard rooms smelling of damp laundry mangles and mothballs. WE ARE NOT PEOPLE OF DUST! He mouths this to the clear sky and the wind. A seagull shrieks. He sits up in the wonderful sea and it shows him the beach, grey-yellow, the white houses, the cliffs like crumbly coconut-ice. The people are not even blobs or dots. The people are not there.

So he lies back, comforted. Then he rolls over, holds the fathoms in his arms like a lover and each second the body he rides hurls him forward with its own changing shape. So begins the love affair of Jim Reese with the sea. As the sun sinks and the colours of the sun spread through the water, it grows more intense and harder to relinquish. From the stern of her husband’s yacht, Jessica-Lee Lasky, holding an imaginary cocktail glass in her left hand, sees it for one piercing second: the flesh and dark head of Jim Reese embedded in the body of the ocean. She calls to Owen Lasky: ‘Owen! I saw a man!’ And Owen traipses to the jolting aft section of his boat and stares with his wife at the empty water. They stare and stare. Jessica-Lee Lasky forgets cocktails and starts to feel afraid. Owen pats her shoulder and says in his bank manager’s voice: ‘You must have imagined him, dear.’ But no, Jessica-Lee feels certain that she saw him, this person holding fast to the water itself as if to a raft, and asks her husband to turn the boat round.

Detective Inspector Pitt and WPC Verna Willis have carried Garrod to a bedroom which he, yet not they, recognises as Colonel Browne’s own bedroom. In this lofty bed, the old man is becoming for the second time in his life the returning war hero, the lad who showed courage and initiative, the lad who came through . . .

‘Sailcord,’ he says in a disdainful, tired voice, ‘she tied me with sailcord. There’s give in sailcord, you see, Sir.’

The ambulance has been called. WPC Willis, who did a year’s nursing training before she joined the force, has taken Garrod’s pulse and listened to his heart and both these manifestations of life are fluttery and feeble. She looks concerned as Pitt ploughs on with his questions.

‘Did you recognise the woman?’

‘No, Sir.’

‘We have reason to believe the woman was Colonel Browne’s daughter.’

‘I never met the daughter. I came to this house in ’76. She was on the television that year or the next. Some demonstration. She had red hair. But I never met her.’

‘But this woman was about her age, was she?’

‘I don’t know, Inspector. Her face was covered. And the hair.’

‘How had she got into the house?’

‘Well. She walked in. There wasn’t any noise.’

‘So she had a key to the front door?’

‘I reckon.’

‘The door wasn’t bolted?’

Garrod winces. Now the returning war hero remembers the unfastened safety catch on the rifle, the puncture in the spare tyre of the jeep . . . The circling bird begins its far off turning and Garrod is silent.

‘Mr Garrod? Was the front door not bolted?’

Garrod’s head lolls. He whispers: ‘Dunno how she could have known . . .’

‘Known?’

‘I’ve been ill, Sir. Laid up.’

‘And you believe the woman knew this?’

‘Or I would have remembered the door . . .’

‘The bolt?’

‘Yes. I would have remembered the bolt.’

Detective Inspector Pitt looks at WPC Willis, who has turned on a little green-shaded lamp in the darkening bedroom. Pitt has, in twenty-two years with the police, never felt comfortable with remorse. His look is a signal for Willis to take up the questioning.

‘How long has Colonel Browne been away, Mr Garrod?’

‘Oh. A fortnight. Thereabouts. They’ve gone for three weeks – to Switzerland.’

‘And is it possible that Miss Browne was told about their holiday?’

‘I don’t think so. She wasn’t told what they did.’

‘Perhaps they go away every year at this time, do they?’

‘Now abouts. Lady Amelia loves the Alps. In summer.’

And Garrod is right. Amelia Browne does love to gaze, as she gazes now, at the first stars peeping through their light years at her scented body on the hotel balcony and sense the now unseen presence of the mountains shouldering off the sky. She has dined well. At dinner, Duffy made a very un-Duffyish little speech about companionship and love, and his reassuring large presence at her side, coupled with these resonant words, have helped to quell the flutter of anxiety she had earlier struggled with. She has made no attempt, although it occurred to her to do so, to talk to Duffy about Charlotte. In spite of her protected life, Amelia Browne is like a patient birdwatcher of suffering. She detects it where others detect nothing. And in the spreading woods and rambly thickets of her husband’s contented life she has often seen it, the camouflaged frail body of the bird, suffering. It has built nests in the once radiant part of him, in foliage the colour of her daughter’s hair. But he isn’t a wordy man. Duffy and words seem to be locked in a lifelong struggle – an iguana fighting with the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. So he has never been able to say that Charlotte has made him suffer, nor how, nor why. ‘I just don’t think about her, Amelia,’ he once snapped into his glass of port. Then drained the glass like a bitter draught. And Amelia saw it: some cuckoobird quite alien to him, yet lodged there, and in certain seasons repetitively calling.

Now he lies in the hotel bed, reading a new book about the Falklands War and waiting for Amelia to come in off the balcony. Slightly over-fed, he is content and sleepy. He admires Amelia for admiring the stars. He is indifferent to stars. He is beginning, lazily, to wonder what gulfs of the spirit still separate him from Amelia when the telephone at his elbow jolts him into concerned wakefulness. He picks up the receiver. Amelia’s face appears at the window and stares at him. From far away under the mountains, a dry English voice speaks in a tunnel of silence:

‘Colonel Browne?’

‘Yes.’

Amelia slips into the room. She presses a thin hand to her top lip.

‘Detective Inspector Pitt, CID, here, Sir. I’m calling from Sowby.’

It is morning. Doyle has slept well. He congratulates himself on his refusal to dream about Margaret. He feels well in his new blood.

He hears nurses’ voices whispering together over their dispensary trolley. He hears the words police . . . revolutionary . . . press . . . story . . . His scriptwriter’s heart pauses in its pumping to let these words stream through him like plasma. He feigns sleep. The nurses’ hands continue to measure out pills in little beakers. But over this measuring comes the almost inaudible conversation, patchy, like the shading of a face before the features are pencilled in:

‘Someone . . . hospital . . . told the newspapers . . .’

‘Sister Osborne . . . night duty . . .’

‘The same policeman?’

‘Yes.’

‘. . . in Alexandra Ward . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Charlotte Browne.’

Now they are at Doyle’s bed.

‘Mr Doyle . . .’

He opens his eyes and smiles at the nurses.

‘Sleep well, Mr Doyle?’

‘Yes. I didn’t dream, thank heavens.’

A thermometer is stuck into his mouth. One of the nurses examines the chart at the end of his bed, looks at Doyle, looks back at the chart. Doyle, silenced by the thermometer, wants to compliment them on the quality of the new blood they have given him. He has been replenished with curiosity.

The thermometer is taken out, held, shaken, replaced in a glass of disinfectant. Doyle awaits pills in a red beaker, but he’s given none and the nurses pass away from him, still whispering.

When they leave the ward, Doyle gets out of bed and stands up. In the bed next to his, a bald man who has dreams of tap-dancing is inserting his morning teeth. Doyle walks quietly over the lino to the swing doors of his ward, then out into the wide hygenic corridor where an Indian woman is polishing the floor.

‘Alexandra Ward?’ he asks.

The Indian woman, with a jewel-pierced nose, is a stooped and slow person. She examines Doyle’s bandaged arm, his hospital nightshirt, his hirsute legs beneath.

‘Left,’ she says blankly.

Doyle nods, turns left into an identical corridor. No one sees him yet. He comes to a waiting area, where plastic chairs of the kind which creaked under the pelvis of Sergeant McCluskie are lined up in two rows. To his left, now, he sees a green and white sign saying Alexandra Ward, Princess Anne Ward, Edith Cavell Ward. He has come to the women’s territory.

He hears footsteps approaching the reception area. Without hesitation, he opens the swing doors to Alexandra Ward and finds himself in a shadowy room, where the patients are still sleeping.

But at the far end of the room, he recognises her – the only one awake and staring at the window. He knows the name, the voice, the profile. He has even read her book, with its preposterous title, The Salvation of Man. The minute he sees her, he feels excitement stir, shamefaced, under the ludicrous night garment. He moves gravely towards her. She is, he summarises, one of the stars of dissent.

Still no one discovers him. The pink woman sleeps with her cherub mouth wide and her knitting folded on her feet. All the other Alexandrine women sleep, rasping through the discomforts of the short night. Only Charlotte sees him now, ridiculous in his gown, unshaven, pale and wild. She isn’t afraid. Charlotte is seldom afraid. She wants to laugh. He reminds her of a younger Jack Lemmon. Any minute, she knows, he will be carried off by the day-shift nurses beginning duty.

But the day-shift nurses allotted to Alexandra Ward are busy elsewhere. Burn victims of a tenement fire are being wheeled, screaming, into the hospital. Nurses are running, surgeons are hauled from sleep, lights are going on in anterooms and operating rooms, vents hiss and blow, in the sluice rooms water gushes. And so it is because of a fire, in which two people will have died, because of Sergeant McCluskie’s need to open his bowels after his dreary, caffeinated night, that Franklin Doyle is able to walk out of his ward and into Charlotte’s ward and sit on her bed for four minutes before McCluskie returns, sees him and hauls him away.

‘You’re Charlotte Browne . . .’ he whispers lamely.

She nods, lazily. In this one, unfrightened gesture, she has accepted the stranger on her bed.

‘Franklin Doyle,’ he states hurriedly, ‘scriptwriter, film-maker, bum . . .’

She smiles. In the grey light, she is superb.

‘I dare say that policeman will remove you.’

Doyle ignores this, hurries on: ‘Why are the press interested this time?’

‘Are they?’

‘I heard the press are here.’

‘They may be. They’re always interested.’

‘What have you done, Charlotte?’

‘Something. So I’ll do a stretch this time. Long.’

‘Want to tell it to someone who gets it right?’

‘To a bum?’

‘Sure. Who better?’

‘Then you find Jim Reese for me.’

‘Jim Reese.’

‘He might be in Brighton. Look there first. He’s a drummer, or was. Thirty-seven. Dark. Very thin. Wearing a vest probably. I expect there’s a warrant out. Try to find him first.’

‘Okay. Sure . . . I . . . who is he to you?’

‘No one any more. But if you find him, tell him love is probably stronger than springs.’

‘Springs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Spring as in the season?’

‘No. As in a coil of wire.’

‘With what significance?’

‘Just tell him – if you find him. And then,’ she looks away from him at the day beginning at the window and yawns, ‘you can tell everyone else the story, I suppose: I stole, but I stole nothing of true value. The true value of what I stole would have appeared in the currency I was going to convert it to. The owners of these so-called valuables are my parents. Neither of these people, my parents, have ever offered anything of themselves for the good of anyone but themselves. Even now, their selfishness is intact, so I’ve taken nothing from them. I carried a gun – my father’s, used to kill game for sport – but I wounded no one. Only myself. My sense of obedience which I tried to extinguish long ago had refused to die utterly, until now. I think it’s dead now. Yet its death wounds. Do you see? In a newly ordered world, I would be obedient to the law. I am, always have been, obedient to love. In a peaceful world, I would keep the peace.’

Charlotte pauses, looks away from Doyle, who is trembling.

‘Do you expect to be understood?’ he asks.

She smiles. The smile is gentle and sad. ‘No.’

‘By a few?’

‘Do you understand?’

‘Why did you need the gun? If it was your parents’ house . . .?’

‘There’s a servant there. He wasn’t harmed. He has the key to the safe.’

‘And your headwound?’

‘Nothing. I fell down some basement steps.’

‘Did the servant try to defend the house?’

‘No.’

‘Did you act entirely by yourself?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Jim Reese wasn’t part of it?’

Charlotte turns away again and stares at the cracks of light in the blinds. The day will be hot again. A heatwave is coming. As Charlotte, child, she climbs to the orchard at Sowby. The ancient gardener with his black-creased hands lifts her high into a plum tree. The plum she choses with her chubby hand is half eaten away by wasps.

‘What organisation are you working for now, Charlotte?’

‘Many.’

‘Is Jim Reese part of an organisation?’

‘No.’

‘Jim Reese is not working with you?’

‘No. He needed my help. I thought he did.’

‘With what? With a political set-up?’

‘No. He just used me as a shroud.’

‘A what?’

‘Over his past.’

Disturbed by the voices, the pink woman has woken. She is gawping with round scared eyes at Doyle and Charlotte and pressing her buzzer that will summon a nurse. Doyle feels dismay as acute as grief at the ending of this meeting.

‘Charlotte. Can I come and see you in prison?’

‘You won’t be allowed.’

‘If I find a way?’

She smiles again, touches his hand lightly. Then, with loathing, she whispers: ‘It might be ten years.’

‘No. No one was hurt. It won’t be . . .’

It takes Sergeant McCluskie and Staff Nurse Beckett less than ten seconds to cross the ward and seize Doyle by his arms. In their zeal to remove him, they forget the deep wound in his right arm, and as they lead him back to his ward it begins to bleed afresh.

In brilliant early morning sunshine, the hired car takes Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne down and down the mountain to the waiting plane. Neither has slept for long. They wear their sunglasses and sit in silence behind the Swiss chauffeur who drives with ease and politeness, trying not to jolt his passengers from side to side on the sharp corners.

As they leave the mountains and the road straightens monotonously, Amelia brings out a little scented handkerchief, blows her nose and sighs: ‘What an end, Duffy.’

Duffy coughs. His military mind had planned their holiday with the precision of a campaign. To sacrifice seven and a half days of that campaign has annoyed him deeply. And all night his mind has repeated the clipped utterances of Detective Inspector Pitt. Pitt – ‘whoever this damn Pitt is!’ – also annoys him deeply, because he, who prides himself on his knowledge of men, has marked Pitt for a dissembler. ‘You see,’ he explains now to Amelia, ‘the British police are utterly bamboozled in ninety per cent of British robberies, Amelia. They have no more clue as to who did what than your average orang-utang, your average Maasai warrior. Less, in fact. But in this case, Pitt knows.’

‘Knows what, Duffy?’

‘He’s trying to pretend he doesn’t, but he does.’

‘Does what?’

‘He knows who broke into Sowby. He just isn’t saying.’

‘Why not?’

‘That’s precisely it, Amelia.’

‘Well, I can’t see that it matters much who did it. They say they’ve found the paintings and the jewellery, thank goodness.’

‘So why is Pitt insisting that we cut short our holiday?’

‘Well, poor Garrod. They want to stop this kind of thing happening again.’

‘Oh don’t be silly, Amelia.’

‘Well, how do I know, Duffy?’

‘You mean you haven’t been working it out?’

‘Working what out?’

‘Who robbed us.’

‘How could I work it out? That’s the job of Pitt, or whatever he’s called. And I’m not even in England.’

‘I’ve worked it out.’

‘I can’t imagine how.’

‘It all fits: Pitt’s lying, the summons home . . .’

‘What fits?’

‘It was Charlotte.’

Amelia is rigid in the car. Her mouth is a little scar of puckered lines. Duffy looks away from this petrified face. Yet he feels relief. She had to know. He, not the policeman, had to be the one to tell her.

Minutes pass. The car sways on. Lush fields flank the road. Amelia blinks and blinks behind her glasses. No, she promises herself, this can’t be right. Because this would be it – the ending. The ending she has feared for years, the ending like a death, the death of all hope that the child she brought up in an English paradise would come home to thank her and save her. Save her from what?

‘Ohh . . .’ she wails, ‘Ohh, Duffy . . .’

From guilt.

From her terrible neglect.

From the useless buying of bronze statuettes.

From the language of cliché and cruelty.

From flower arrangements and servants.

From indifference.

From her proud blood . . .

‘Ohh . . . Duffy . . . I simply cannot believe that . . .’

Duffy puts a wide hand out to Amelia. He feels lumpen with dread, in need of comfort himself.

‘I could be wrong, old thing,’ he says in a choked voice.

So of course, in her agony, Amelia is cross: ‘Then why on earth did you even suggest it? How could you imagine Charlotte doing a thing like this? She’s not a criminal!’

Duffy sighs, removes the gift of his pink hand.

‘In this society,’ he says slowly, ‘she is.’

Death. As she leaves the hospital in the police car, Charlotte has not imagined death. To Jim Reese, she had wanted to offer a birthright. This offered birthright would, she had decided, engender a birth: a birth of self-respect, a birth of energy and purpose. In other words, a new life. Because in the basement rooms Jim Reese was sinking, fading, disappearing. In his fingers, in his knuckles, rhythms of his onetime visibility were occasionally heard. But, parted from the drums, from the absolution of his own music, he was thinning, flaking, becoming opaque. How many people, Charlotte wonders, as the police car passes the Camden Plaza showing a black and white Italian film, are obscured by their own uselessness?

She hasn’t ‘saved’ Jim Reese. Pride and anger prevented this. She is punished for her arrogance. And he, in the flood of his male violence, has rendered her useless to the women she has worked with, worked for, when to them too she planned to offer more, on this Buckinghamshire night, than an act of daring. They will come to her in prison, she knows. In their tattered layers of clothes, some with backpacked babies, some spikey and pale in their fierce lesbian love affairs, some weathered and worn into grannies, somebody’s kindly nan in a woollen hat, holding a banner while the relations sneer and gasp at her picture on the nine o’clock news . . . They will circle outside the prison gates, sparrows of women, ravens of women, women with their dreams of peace. With the gold and the silver, they would have printed leaflets, bought newspaper space, funded crèches, financed a conference. Now, nothing is left for them from Charlotte, only her presence, soon, in the massive prison and the story of her crime, falling on them, asking them to stand responsible.

Charlotte is quiet as the car stops and starts in the dense morning traffic. She sends away her sad thoughts of women and focuses instead on the stranger at the foot of her bed, the man Doyle with his wounded arm. Laughingly, she imagines him travelling to the south coast in search of Jim Reese, wearing his hospital nightie. He has become precious to her because he, in all the questioning to come, will be her only secret.

But secret deaths are occurring. Unplanned. Unexpected. Handcuffed to WPC Beckett, Charlotte walks up the steps of the police station. At the same moment, her solicitor, Mr Charles Ogden-Nichols, locks the driver’s door of his BMW and prepares to walk into a limelight he has coveted for some years. At the same moment, Garrod dies.

Garrod dies. The struggle of his hands with a tangle of nylon sailcord is not unconnected with his death. While his hands struggled, his veteran’s heart made a salient in death’s lines. A few hours later, the salient became a bridgehead and his life goes teeming, streaming across the bridgehead, past and fast over the no man’s land of imaginary desert and tanks like mice, racing to death as if his own spirit were death’s batman. In the grounds of Sowby Manor, where a young constable called Arthur Williams is walking in Lady Amelia’s rose garden with Admiral, the dog pricks up its ears and lets out a peculiar whine. PC Williams jerks at its lead. Lady Amelia’s roses are funnelled by bees. A nurse comes running to the straight green line which is the technological death of Garrod. His desert is at last deserted.

Within hours, news of Garrod’s death reaches Camden Police Station. Charles Ogden-Nichols looks grave in the manner of an idle poet as he privately notes that the charge will now be manslaughter. Charlotte is closed like a mollusc with her thoughts of prison-death. Months. Years. Prison-cancer. Release at fifty, old, obese, corrupted, idle, finished. And for what? It was fine, of course, the night of stars, the glint of flowers as she went in, the white face of the Duke of Abercorn watching her through time . . . And the Colonel is punished, her mother is punished at last – for their hearts empty of love and their heads full of silver knives and paperweights. Yet once more, because of them, she will be locked away. As a child, it was her head they imprisoned with sighings after royalty and debutante balls; now it is her body.

Charlotte sits. They allow her to sit. Already, Ogden-Nichols is composing the stirring sonnets of her case. He smiles at her, but she looks away. He and she are given cups of tea.

And at their Brighton mooring, Owen Lasky and his wife, Jessica-Lee, clamber out of their foam rubber bunks, twitch their elasticated curtains to let in a shaft of sun and put on their tin kettle to make coffee.

Until it was dark, they turned their boat in wider and wider circles, searching for the body of the man Jessica-Lee had seen for less than a second, lying with his mouth in the waves. Owen grumbled. What a stupid waste of time, this making of circles. But Jessica-Lee would not let them go back till they were dizzy and tired with their turning in the wind and all the lights had come on in the town. Then they limped in, moored the boat, took down the sails, went to their favourite pub to forget. Owen drank beer. Jessica-Lee drank gin fizzes. That night, they had dreams of Miami.

Jim Reese saw the boat. He saw it tack and turn, tack and turn. He knew that for the second time in twenty-four hours someone was trying to save him with clumsy, futile action. He laughed aloud in the gathering dusk, the laughter and the body that housed it still strong, still riding the water like a lover. He knew that the boat wouldn’t find him. Darkness and his sea would cover and conceal him.

He remembered the exploding toys of John Ripley. One was a boat. You assembled it, piece by piece, deck by deck, around a central spring. You aimed amidships with your three-inch lead-painted torpedo. The boat burst into satisfactory fragments on the hearth rug. John Ripley laughed. Mother screamed a little scream. John Ripley said, don’t worry lad, the whole point is you can’t break it. You put it back together and then you have another go. Easy. Doddle! Like this, around the central spring . . .

The central spring . . . ? The boat tacks, turns . . . Lights come on in it. The central spring will, if you aim too often and over and over again at the area of greatest weakness . . . yes, even there on the hearth rug in front of the brittle white tubes of the gas fire . . . right there, with Mother looking on, arms folded, hip slightly jutted to one side, makeup on, smelling of Blue Grass . . . there, where all had once seemed so exceptionally safe and familiar and comforting and eternal . . . there, the central spring will one day snap. Yet all continues to tack, to turn, to make its habitual movement, just as if nothing had occurred. No one but you perceives that the spring is broken. You reassemble the boat. The boat is whole, deck on deck. Merely, it will no longer explode when hit. And Mother takes up the tea cosy stained by her greasy hands, pops it over the brown pot, struts out into the hall and calls John Ripley down to tea. You leave the dead toy on the hearth rug. You sit at the table and watch their mouths, runny with egg, oily with bacon. They talk and laugh and gobble and suck their tea. You want to say to them, the central spring went. You take a breath, to begin. Before any words come out, Mother reprimands you with her eyes: you have ceased to matter.

When the boat gave up its useless search and returned to harbour, the great depths of the sea began to beat like music in the ears of Jim Reese. The music invaded him, commanding his hands, his arms, his legs, his pelvis to keep time. Water streamed off his forehead and into his hair. The cold of the ocean became, with its new rhythm, a fierce heat. Never had movement been so exquisite a thing. Never in the turning multicoloured lights and the screaming dreams of Vegas had body and music been one as they were now one. And Jim Reese knew that it would last forever. The sky would fill with stars and it would go on and on. Dawn would come and daybreak and autumn and sighing and sunset, and still it would play. Because it was his. His own.

Franklin Doyle discharges himself from hospital and goes home to his flat. On the mat is a note in Margaret’s handwriting. He picks it up, almost without curiosity, and takes it to his desk, where he telephones a glazier and asks for someone to come and mend his window.

Mrs Annipavroni had cleaned out the cat litter tray and scrubbed with Flash and Vim at the bloodstains on the kitchen floor. The whole flat smells of Vim. But it is tidy and quiet. Doyle re-enters it with a feeling of gratefulness. He telephones a florist and orders carnations and cornflowers to be sent to Kilburn, to Julietta Annipavroni, whose address begins: ‘Staircase B’. He feels grateful, too, that his own address doesn’t begin with Staircase B. He imagines the Annipavroni family lugging their Italian life up and down dark concrete steps.

Doyle pours himself fresh orange juice and sits, stroking the cat. He ignores Margaret’s note on the desk. His head is crammed with half-formed plans, jostling each other for place and meaning. His wound throbs. He is sweating slightly. He has a sudden longing to sleep. He imagines Charlotte’s cold strong hands holding his head and laying it gently on her shoulder. She becomes the man, he the woman, content to lie safely at her side. He sleeps and offers himself. She is aloof in her hard body. She crushes him with her indifference, but his yearnings for her only increase.

The telephone wakes him. As he walks to the desk, he knows he has dreamed of Charlotte, yet the dream has left him. All he wants to hear, as he lifts the receiver, is Charlotte’s voice. He is aware, in this instant, that he has fallen in love.

Margaret sounds close, as if she were calling from an adjoining room. She’s been with Michael, she says. She thought she loved Michael, yet in his room, right there in his bed, she began to remember Doyle . . .

‘Oh, Margaret . . .’ Doyle’s voice is weary, irritated, ‘please don’t bug me with this kind of thing.’

‘But it happened, Franklin. I wasn’t consciously thinking about you and I suddenly started to miss you and regret –’

‘Regret what?’

‘I don’t think I can leave you.’

‘You’ve left me. You left me!’

‘I know. But it’s all wrong.’

Doyle sighs. He looks at his wound. Yesterday, he might have died for Margaret. Now, already, he has replaced her.

‘I think I need both of you, Franklin. Can you understand this? Franklin?’

‘Oh bullshit.’

‘What? I can’t hear you, Franklin. Did you hear what I said about needing you both?’

He says nothing. His wound aches. He must buy painkillers. Then his dream comes back to him. He lies, arms and legs spread wide, and Charlotte’s body is above him, moving gently, purposefully, yet almost invisibly in near darkness. Then she lowers her head and whispers to his mouth: ‘This isn’t love. I’m giving you blood, that’s all.’

‘Franklin? Are you there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I know it’s difficult for you. Can I come round and talk to you?’

Doyle isn’t concentrating. The pain of Charlotte in him is as acute as the pain of his unhealed arm.

‘I’m sorry . . .’ he mumbles.

‘Can’t I come round?’

‘I’m sorry, Margaret. Things have happened. I’m going to have to be away for a bit.’

‘I could come round now, Franklin. We need to talk.’

‘No. I’m sorry.’

‘Why d’you keep saying you’re sorry? I’m the one –’

‘Yes, I know. I’ll send on the things I didn’t pack for you.’

He hangs up. He knows this is cowardly. He knows she will ring back. He goes quickly to the kitchen, opens a tin of food for the cat, then grabs a clean jacket from his wardrobe and a pad from the desk. His head is clearing now. He has set the visit to Brighton aside, because he doesn’t want to go in search of Charlotte’s lover: he needs Charlotte herself.

As he closes the flat door, he hears the telephone begin to ring. The sound follows him down the stairs. But moments later he has escaped it. He is out in the hot day. In the street, the air is warm and rich with the smell of privet. Sun gleams on the white fronts of houses and London is transformed into a kindly city. Doyle hails a taxi. His heart races with the engine as it whisks him towards the police station where, already, the reporters have begun to gather, and crews from the BBC and London Weekend Television are setting up cameras.

News is travelling in spirals and loops. Charlotte Browne, celebrity revolutionary, is for the third time in her life under arrest. The BBC’s Home Affairs Correspondent, tanned from a holiday rather far from home, prepares to pass on to the nation facts known and unknown concerning the charges. Here, procrastination by the police is impeding the swift passage of information to the public at large, a public who, within a few hours, will know that Charlotte has robbed the house of her parents and been responsible for the death of an elderly servant. Reporters and camera crews shuffle and smoke and buy cheese sandwiches from Vincente’s sandwich shop and wait in sprawled groups. Passers by, sensing life altering here in a Camden street, hang around to marvel or condemn. They are joined by Doyle, who thrusts himself forward, holding high his bandaged arm like a white flag and pleads with the nervous-seeming constable on the door to be allowed to see Charlotte. His subterfuge – that he is Charlotte’s fiancé – is merely smiled upon. Up and down the country, police are looking for Jim Reese. Even the PC at the station door knows that this middle-aged American is not Jim Reese. Doyle is turned away.

And then, in an hour, the news of the tumbling ashore of the drowned body of Jim Reese comes echoing down the telephone. The fact is as yet kept hidden from Doyle and the gathered reporters. The fact is as yet kept hidden from Detective Inspector Pitt who waits at Sowby for the afternoon arrival of Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne. It is given, however, to Detective Chief Superintendent Bowden, the man who, with the facts of Charlotte’s case slowly accumulating, is now ‘in charge’. Bowden is a lofty, remote man, with a thin moustache and flinty eyes. Articulate and bitter, he’s known as a hard-liner. His favourite meal is shepherd’s pie. Whenever he eats this dish, he takes pleasure in the picture that he conjures of his wife sitting down all day to grind lamb through the mincer. Bowden dislikes women. He makes love to his wife no more than six or seven times a year. Women like Charlotte he would willingly see hanged. What repulses him most about her in particular is her dignity.

So now he walks to her cell, where she and Ogden-Nichols are for the moment sitting in silence. Ogden-Nichols’s long poet’s face is gloomy with certainty; for all his cleverness, for all the limelight that will spill onto his carpeted office in Queen Anne Street, he knows he will fail to alter the verdict of the trial to come.

Charlotte’s cell is unlocked for Bowden. He stares icily at her, sitting straight and calm on the hard bed. Ogden-Nichols stands up as he comes in. Charlotte doesn’t move. Bowden gestures to Ogden-Nichols to leave the cell. Charlotte, for the very first time since she drove to Buckinghamshire, feels a tremor of fear. Ogden-Nichols senses it too. Something has happened.

Bowden knows that Ogden-Nichols is entitled to stay. He knows also that he will leave. Now, he is alone with Charlotte, face to face. She puts her hands round her knees, calming her fear with this quiet rearrangement of her physical strength. She is like the leopard or the lioness, Bowden privately decides: she is savage.

He tugs out a packet of cigarettes and offers her one. She refuses. He puts the cigarettes back in his pocket, but doesn’t sit down, as she expects him to. He stands, folds his arms, clears his throat, announces: ‘Mr Reese has been found drowned at Brighton.’

Charlotte looks away from him, down at her hands. The knuckles are white, transparent she thinks, showing me the bone, the miraculous interior structure of me that will not decay when the flesh is gone. I must not allow myself to imagine the body of Jim on the sand. I must put the death aside and only fill my mind with this picture of hands – mine on his living body, touching, taking, soothing, his on my face and in my hair and on my breasts and at last in their ecstacy on the skin of the drums . . .

‘We have positive identification of the body, and we are assuming suicide.’

Suicide. Of course, suicide.

Well, come to me, she thinks, the women who light their communal fires on perimeter railings, the hard and gentle women with their banners and their protestations, come and absolve me of my failure and my trust in a man. So she is quiet, imagining the gathering of this precious congregation. She still stares at her hands and doesn’t even move her head to look up at Bowden. He stands and waits. He unfolds his arms, puts them behind his back. I have, he thinks, enjoyed every syllable inflicted here. But he is waiting for the physical show of shock and grief. He needs these. He won’t be cheated of them. ‘Come on, you cunt!’ he wants to yell at her, ‘start crying!’

But still he waits and waits. Far away in Charlotte’s mind, the bones of hundreds of women, still fleshed out and lit with life, begin to gather in clusters.

‘Poems, Duffy. Do you remember, she used to send us poems from boarding school?’

‘Did she?’

‘They were all about quite sentimental kinds of things, like dead baby birds.’

‘Don’t think I read them.’

‘Yes you did, Duffy.’

‘Dead birds?’

‘That kind of thing. A lot of death.’

‘Trouble with my daughter, she’s always considered herself clever.’

They are alone now. They are home. The bar of light glows over the white forehead of the Duke of Abercorn. Duffy has poured them strong drinks. It is the hour when Garrod would have entered the sitting room quietly, either to announce dinner or carrying their television suppers on identical trays. At Amelia’s feet, Admiral is sleeping. His flank trembles and twitches in his old dog’s dreaming. Amelia stares down at the dog. He is ancient, she notices suddenly, and smelly and weak. Age creeps on invisible, until one day . . .

‘I’d like to die, Duffy.’

She hasn’t wept. She has held herself as cold and straight as an icicle. Her behaviour has won her the admiration of Pitt and of WPC Willis, whose cups of tea Amelia has stubbornly refused. But now she is alone. The truth of what has happened enters valves and arteries and begins to surge and stream through her. She gulps whisky, as if to dilute the truths inside her. Duffy stares at her: Amelia de Palfrey, great-niece of the seventh Duke of Abercorn, and what a slim beauty once, in her white gloves, smelling of pear blossom and gardenias . . .

‘Don’t talk bunkum like that, Amelia.’

‘Though we ought to do something about flowers.’

‘What flowers?’

‘For Garrod. There should be a wreath. Something to lay on.’

‘Don’t worry about it, old thing.’

‘You’ll organise it.’

‘Yes.’

‘And one for me?’

‘We can send one, Amelia, from us both.’

‘I didn’t say from me. I said for me.’

‘She dismays him now. Amelia de Paifrey. What an ideal wife she has made him over all the years. So good at choosing and arranging and reordering; she has furnished his entire existence. A simple man, he thinks, I am at heart a simple man and Amelia has perfectly understood me. Even at Christmas, in her choice of beige cashmere, she has never erred and in her peculiar love of mountains she has lifted me up.

‘I think,’ he says earnestly, ‘we have to put all these tragedies out of our minds, Amelia, and try to go on as before.’

She doesn’t answer. Her face looks slack, flattened almost, rearranged by some brutal palm.

‘Amelia?’

‘They were all about death.’

‘What were?’

‘Her poems. The deaths of one thing or another.’

‘Stop it, Amelia! Got to keep a grip.’

The dog is woken by Duffy’s voice. It gets to its feet and shakes itself. ‘Siddown Admiral!’ Duffy snaps.

Amelia pats the dog’s head. It is, perhaps, the only thing left in need of her protection. Then she lifts her head and looks out. The evening is deep blue at the window and the room is getting dark. She remembers the day the rose garden was planted and a pedestal built for the sundial. How old was Charlotte then, she wonders. Four? Five? Too small to understand the symmetry of a rose garden. The child used to scrunch the perfect blooms in her fat little hand.

The sky is darkening, too, over Camden. The reporters have gone, notebooks and spools of film replete with facts released by the woman-loathing Bowden, too late for the nine o’clock news. In the morning, the popular dailies will lead with the story, in which they have already taken sides. Editors in search of imagery will invoke serpents’ teeth and thankless children, the while aware of the gulf separating their readership from a work of literature Amelia Browne had only inadequately understood. Charlotte is friendless, alone with the suicide of Jim Reese. His death binds and binds her head, like her bandage. She refuses the supper brought to her. She can’t eat while the body of her lover is unburied. Yet, like her mother silently taking leave of her senses in an armchair by an unlit fire, she doesn’t weep. She has seen the challenge in Bowden’s eyes. She will not cry. If she is alone with the drowned limbs of Jim Reese, so too is she alone with her strength. Jim has failed her. She will not fail herself. When, near dawn, she sleeps, she dreams of Sowby. Her parents, manacled together by the handles of their tennis rackets, go wading into the lily pond like adventurous boys. Goldfish and newts nose their legs, but they stand very still at the pond’s centre, holding up their skirts and trousers with their free hands.

Margaret has telephoned Doyle twice since he returned to the flat, hungry and excited. He has answered neither call. Into his Answerphone she has stammered out messages of her confusion.

Doyle has visited an all-hours delicatessen, bought himself sesame bread, Russian salad, Italian salami and a bottle of wine and has eaten these watching the ten o’clock news, on which the first mention of Charlotte’s crime appears, well supported with photographs and information about her involvement with pacifist and feminist groups and her previous convictions.

Doyle crosses the room and catches sight of himself in a gold-framed mirror. His beard is as long as the stubble growing through on Charlotte’s head, his eyes are vast and bright, his cheeks are blotchy and feverish. Round his neck is the white sling which carries his arm. The ancient mariner slung with the albatross? The comparison slips into his mind and stays there while he stares at his altered image. The weariness in his limbs, the throbbing of his wound, the astonishing clarity of his eyes: all suggest some kind of journey. His rational self, the lazy, cautious Franklin Doyle, argues for sleep and rest. But he ignores the lazy, the rational. He simply removes himself from his own sight and goes almost hurriedly to his desk, where he sits down and begins to write. In no more than a few minutes, he covers a page with a minutely perceived description of Charlotte, focusing on the heaviness of her eyes, the seeming hard strength of her body, the wide spread of her hands. But then he sits back, gulps wine, slows his breathing, forces himself to think not of Charlotte but of himself. ‘Exile (Voluntary. American),’ he begins, ‘Finds himself at centre of case which will shock this nation (in ways particular to this nation and its class system) more than far more terrible things, i.e. deaths in Lebanon. Or so I predict. Propose – yes, I do propose – to put myself in major role (for first time in life) in historic circumstance. Ways to go about this must include a) Visit to parents, b) Visit to parents of Jim Reese, if alive, c) Visit to all groups C. has worked or is working for, d) Access to press archives, e) Seeking legal ways to gain access to C. (NB phone Bob Mandlebaum). Eventual aim must be saleable screenplay and/or book like Mailer and Schiller’s Executioner’s Song.

But here he stops writing. He knows why he feels like a traveller, pain, excitement, fear, mingling in his blood. He knows why he will stay awake till dawn, planning, constructing, ignoring calls on his Answerphone, disdaining sleep: he has entered on the most perfect love affair of his life. In Charlotte, he has found both woman and livelihood, fortuitously joined. Charlotte Browne is not only herself, but her story. Her story will become his. He will make the two inseparable. It doesn’t concern Franklin Doyle on this long summer night that Charlotte the woman has, by giving him this story, put herself beyond the reach of his body. Because his body, with its disappointments of forty-seven years, is already anointed by the brief touch of her in the hospital bed and he will not be denied her. She will be locked away from him, but he will remake her. To Charlotte, prisoner, he will offer the story of Charlotte; in Charlotte, remade as fiction, will he spend his love.

The wine is gone. Doyle goes to the kitchen, hauls out an opened bottle of cheap retsina. With this beginning to slide through his excited blood, he returns to his description of Charlotte. After a while, he abandons it again, continues his note-making, then stops suddenly and looks up. He reminds himself that all, all that is now taking place is taking place because of the interception of Julietta Annipavroni, once beautiful Italian girl, now struggling through middle age ‘saving the lives’ of those rich enough to pay her two pounds an hour. He smiles, remembering the flowers he has sent; Julietta Annipavroni arranges them in a vast green vase, won at a funfair. The blue of the cornflowers reminds her of the sky above Naples. ‘Don’t touch them!’ she yells at her children.

Like Charlotte, prisoner, Doyle sleeps at dawn. The sun comes up on London. The same sounds of blackbirds trilling in cherry trees, so lately heard by Jim Reese in a basement flat, begin in the street, but Doyle is dreaming of fame and money and does not hear them.