CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

USING TWISTED LOGIC

Milly’s bad mood was not lifted by the welcoming response that her story received. Sensing her need for additional support, the members tried even harder than usual to put her at her ease, but she seemed unable to respond.

As soon as they were alone in the car, Milly let out the mother of all sighs. Steve estimated that it must have beaten her previous personal best by several cubic centimeters of exhalation, but even that didn’t seem to bring her any relief.

“I’m sorry,” she said. It seemed more like an expression of bitterness than genuine apology, and it made Steve feel even more uncomfortable than he already was. He wanted to make her feel better, but had no idea how.

“It’s okay,” he said, tentatively, and he steered westwards. “I know it’s a bad time. I’m the one who should apologize. I should be able to offer you more comfort, more support.”

“Do you even know what I’m apologizing for?” Milly asked, scathingly.

“Probably not,” Steve admitted. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to apologize for anything. Not to me.”

“We’re not in the meeting any more,” she said. “You don’t have to follow the rules now that it’s just you and me. If I’d wanted that kind of support twenty-four seven, I’d have picked someone from the group for a boy-friend.”

“You did,” Steve pointed out.

She sighed again at that. “So I did,” she agreed. “What I was apologizing for, by the way—what I thought I ought to apologize for—is the lousiness of my story. I don’t know why it was so lousy, given that it’s the only one I’ve heard in months that had dinosaurs in it, and ray guns, and anything that a reasonable person might call action, but I have to admit that it was lousy. It was upside-down, for one thing. The conversation bit should have come before the action, not after. After is always bound to be an anticlimax. Nobody else’s subconscious makes that kind of mistake—I bet yours didn’t.”

“It wasn’t lousy,” Steve said, without responding to the final remark. “In fact, I found it extremely interesting, and tantalizingly puzzling, too.”

“Well,” she said, sourly, “I’m glad it provided fodder for your theories. Did I mention that I have to go back to Bath tomorrow?”

“Not specifically,” Steve said, “but I assumed it.”

“I suppose I shouldn’t have left—Mum certainly thought so. Dad doesn’t know anything about it, thank God, but Mum needs me, so she says. She doesn’t. She just disapproves of me deserting what she thinks of as my post. She doesn’t believe I came back for the meeting. She thinks I’m such a nymphomaniac that I couldn’t stand another night without getting shagged senseless. She has no idea—not that you can’t shag me to your heart’s content, mind, given that I don’t know when we’ll find another opportunity, but I hope you’ll forgive me if my brain’s not fully engaged.”

“We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to,” Steve said.

“If we don’t,” she said, ominously, “I’ll only worry about what you’ve been getting up to while I was away. Not that I have any unique claim on you, obviously. You’re free to make your own arrangements while the cat’s away.”

“Contrary to popular belief,” Steve said, nettled by her tone, “I’m not a sex addict. I haven’t done anything untoward while you’ve been away. I didn’t exchange two words with Janine at that stupid quiz night, and I didn’t make a pass at your friend Alison when she came looking for you.”

“Alison came looking for me?” Milly sounded astonished, but her tone didn’t freeze up the way it had when Steve had mentioned the Royal Oak.

“Yes. She want to make things right. She told me what really happened.”

“And you believed her?”

“Yes, I did. You really ought to talk to her, Milly. I know you don’t really think that she’s lying about letting the cat out of the bag accidentally. I think you’re just ashamed about the letter you wrote.”

“She told you about that too?” Milly said, carefully keeping her tone as neutral as possible.

“Yes.”

“You must have had quite a chat. Did you really turn her down when she ripped her clothes off and begged you to screw her?”

“She didn’t. She never even took her raincoat off. We just talked.”

“You liked her, didn’t you?” Milly said, accusingly. “She got round you. Did she cry? Did she tell you what a beast I’ve always been to her, and how Janine’s always lorded it over her because she’s so plain? Did she make you feel sorry for her?

“As it happens,” Steve admitted, “I did quite like her, although she didn’t go out of her way to play on my sympathies. I think you like her too, in spite of the fact that the jokey insults got way out of hand for a while. For what it’s worth, I think you should make up with her.”

“Well, I suppose you might as well fuck her too,” Milly said, after a pause, her voice recovering its bitter taint. “Then you’ll have the unholy hat-trick to your credit. Maybe we can all make up, and you can have us all in perpetuity. It’s every man’s dream, isn’t it, to have his own private harem? Secret of the universe: men are polygamous, women monogamous. Evolution’s little joke—no wonder we’re scheduled for early extinction. Does Janine know that Alison’s been crying on your shoulder.”

“Janine gave her my address,” Steve said.

“Of course she did,” Milly said, striking her forehead in a mock-melodramatic fashion. “She sent her round to pay me back, didn’t she? She wouldn’t lower herself to get her own knickers dirty, so she sent Ali the Slut. Perfect. You really should have gone along with it, you know. I’m not much good to you, for the time being, and you’ll need to get your end away somewhere, won’t you? Abstinence isn’t really your thing, is it? We don’t want you being driven to distraction by all that juicy jailbait up at the comp, do we?”

“Don’t be like that, Milly,” Steve said. “I thought we were past that stage. Walter Wainwright gave me a long lecture last Saturday on the benefits of friends supporting one another unquestioningly, refraining from judgment or skepticism. Actually, he talked a lot of sense. If you and Janine and Alison could fix things up between yourselves.…”

“Oh, shut up, Steve! It’s easy enough for Walter Wainwright to talk sense, now that he’s way past the age of competition. I bet it wasn’t so easy when he, Amelia and Neville were locked in passionate complications, with or without their respective spouses. You do realize, I suppose, that if Janine, Alison and I were to repair our three-way friendship, the price of peace might be that none of us would ever have anything further to do with you, this side of the end of the world?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Steve admitted.

“And then you thought that maybe you’d be better off without us—good riddance to the whole unholy trinity?”

“No,” Steve said.

“Just me, then. You want me to make it up with Alison so that you and Janine can get back together?”

“No,” Steve said, a little less certainly than before. He expected more bile in response to his uncertainty, but Milly fell silent. She stared out of the window in the passenger door, although there was little enough to be seen. The stretch of road along which they were traveling had no street-lights.

After a three-minute pause, Milly pulled herself together again, and repeated: “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” Steve asked, cautiously

“For everything. Being such a cow. Taking it out on you. It wouldn’t be fair, even if you’d done something, but you haven’t. I let things get on top of me. Dad, leaving to come back here, the meeting…everything.”

“It’s not your fault,” Steve said. “The situation with your Dad’s about as bad as such situations get. It’s bound to take its toll.”

“No reason why it should take its toll on you too,” she said. “I’m not actually trying to drive you away, you know, whatever it looks like. You’re all I’ve got—the best thing I’ve got, at any rate. I’m sorry I wasn’t as pleased to see you as I should have been, and that I’m still spiky now. I can’t help it.”

“It’s okay,” he said, inadequately. Then, desperate to find something to say that might ease the situation, he said: “Your story really was interesting. You might not care any more about my theory than Walter or the rest of the group, but it’s important to me, and your story fit in very nicely. It raises some very pertinent questions, which I need to think about before I do my party piece in a fortnight’s time. God, it’ll be nearly Christmas then—it’s the day school breaks up. I haven’t given Christmas a single thought. I must tell Mum that I absolutely can’t go home this year, or she’ll be buying food in for me and including me in all her silly plans.”

“I can’t think about that yet,” Milly said, flatly. “I can’t make any plans at all, although I’ll try to be here for the meeting. Tell me about these pertinent questions that you’ll have to think about. I probably need the distraction.”

“Okay,” Steve said, hoping that his relief at being beckoned back to safer ground wasn’t too obvious. “I can’t help wondering why the time police wiped out everyone except you—why they felt it necessary to put you, and you alone, back where you belonged in the time-stream.”

“I wasn’t involved in the actual incident,” Milly reminded him. “I was just an innocent bystander, caught up in it by accident. I didn’t break any laws. That’s what the shadow-lady said.”

“That would be one possible explanation,” Steve conceded.

“Do you have a better one?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you think there’s something wrong with hers—I mean mine?”

“Not necessarily,” Steve said. “But I’m not so sure that time police can afford to be as interested in matters of guilt and innocence as a dutiful traffic warden. If their job is to maintain the integrity of the time-stream, why weren’t they just as concerned to make sure that the lizards and the insects got safely back to where they belonged as they were to take care of you?”

Milly thought about that for a few moments, then said: “Maybe they did get safely home. I just saw them vanish—I don’t know for sure that they weren’t sent back, although the shadow-lady said they weren’t. Then again, maybe time-travelers don’t belong in the sense that abductees do, Maybe, once they’ve abstracted themselves from the time-stream in order to skip through some other dimension from one time to another, they’ve already broken the chains of true causation.”

“Both perfectly plausible hypotheses,” Steve conceded. “I wonder whether there’s something else at work, though—something your time-traveling traffic warden was trying to explain when she said that there’s an eternal if confusing the fact that there’ll always be a now and a then. Do you remember Jim’s deer? There may be forces at work deliberately disrupting the time-stream as well as forces repairing it. Maybe those were involved in what happened to you.”

“Except that in your theory, nothing actually happened to me at all,” Milly said, her tone changing again as she lost the ability to lose herself in what seemed to her to be an idle flight of fancy. “Or to Jim, or Megan, or anybody else. It’s all just dreaming.”

“Not just dreaming,” Steve said, trying to prolong the intermission in her suffering.

“Unjust dreaming, then,” she said, with a brief flash of her customary wit. “The collective unconscious trying to remake itself, and fucking us over while it does it, by feeding us all kinds of pseudoreality tripe. I’m sorry, Steve, I know you’re only trying to help—to save me from thinking about Dad, or about Janine and Alison, for that matter—but it isn’t working.”

“It’s okay,” Steve said, again. “No need to apologize. Not your fault.” He gripped the steering-wheel a little harder, glad that the lights of the city center were now in view, as well as the reddish pall that always hung over the city on cloudy nights, like a hazy umbrella.

Milly sighed again. “There’s no soothing me tonight, I’m afraid,” she said. “Too tightly wound to unwind. Sometimes, I think I might never unwind again. You ought to be thankful, really, that I’m only here for the one night. I can do one night, I think—but I’d be a really lousy lay these days if we were together all the time, and that would be a really bad move, relationship-wise. I’ll do my level best not to go away again leaving you glad that I’ve gone, desperate to find a replacement before I come back. You must have had much easier girl-friends than me in your time.”

“One or two,” Steve agreed, figuring that there wasn’t too much risk in admitting it, “but there are worse things in life than not being easy.”

“I hope so,” Milly said, with yet another sigh. “I wish Dad had chosen a better time to hover between life and death. It would be a lot more convenient all round if he’d just make up his mind. And please don’t tell me that his mind probably isn’t in a fit condition for making itself up—I do realize that.”

“If it turns out that you can’t get back a week next Thursday,” Steve said, as he slowed the car down and looked or a parking-spot, “shall I tell my story in your absence, or do you want me to wait until the new year? I can tell you tonight, in private, if you like, so you won’t need to worry about it at all.”

“I’ll try to get back,” Milly said. “If not, I’ll tell you when the time comes. I’ve done mine properly, and it’ll be best if you can do yours the same way. Then Janine can do hers, if she wants to.”

“Janine isn’t an abductee,” Steve said, as he pulled the hand-brake on. “She’s only coming to hear your story and mine—to get some weird sort of closure.”

“No, she’s not,” Milly told him. “I thought she was, but that was before I talked to her. She says she kept on coming because she’d begun to remember. That’s the only reason. She says she’s not trying to pay us back for betraying her, however much we deserve it—not in that way, at any rate. I still have my suspicions about her sending Ali round to see you, but I think she’s telling the truth about the meetings.”

“You’ve talked to her?” Steve repeated, wonderingly, with his hand frozen on the door-handle. “I thought she wasn’t talking to either of us. When? Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Yesterday. We talked on the phone. She couldn’t bring herself to blank me, because I wanted to tell her about Dad. She didn’t want to talk about anything else—she certainly didn’t tell me that she’d seen you at the Royal Oak’s quiz night, or that she’d given Alison your address—but she did want to tell me that she wasn’t coming to meetings just to upset us. By the way, in case it gets back to you by some other route, I really did tell her that she could have you back if she wanted you.”

Steve felt as if the head of a claw-hammer had thudded into his heart, although he didn’t know exactly why. He clutched the door-handle even harder, but didn’t attempt to turn it in order to open the door. “What did she say?” he asked.

“She said she doesn’t.”

Even Steve, who would never have considered himself a good judge of the subtler nuances of female conversation, knew what a world of difference there was between “She said she doesn’t” and “She doesn’t”.

“I’m not some piece of carrion that you two can quarrel over like a pair of stroppy scavengers,” he complained.

“Of course you are,” Milly retorted, although there was no trace of bitterness in her tone now. “But we’re not going to fight. We’re going to try to be better than that, if we can. I don’t think she means it when she says she doesn’t want you back. I think she might take you back, if you went about it the right way.”

Which is what? Steve thought—but he didn’t say it, because it would have been ungentlemanly. On the other hand, he didn’t immediately leap to say that Milly was the only one he wanted, and the only one he ever would want. He knew that she wouldn’t believe him. He finally opened the car door, and got out. Milly got out too, and looked both ways before crossing the road.

Steve followed her. He knew that he didn’t dare ask whether she really would simply allow Janine to take him back, if that turned out to be what he and Janine both wanted, and if they went about it the right way—but he dared to think that it might be possible.

He had completely lost track of Milly’s mood, now, and had no idea what was going on between them. He followed her meekly up the stairs to the front door of her flat, and then paused on the threshold, not entirely certain that he was about to be welcomed in. She held the door open for him, though, and closed it behind him.

“Home sweet home,” she murmured.

“Would you rather I went back to my place?” Steve asked.

“No,” she said. “unless you want to, of course.”

“No,” he said.

“That’s settled, then,” she said. “For now. Tomorrow is another day, as the book says.”

“I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to say,” Steve confessed, as she took his coat and hung it up on the rack.

Milly headed for the bathroom, but she paused long enough to turn round and say: “Maybe Dad’s stroke has put things in a different perspective. I just want to like myself a little better than I’ve been able to do of late, while I’ve been the kind of person who’d hijack her best friend’s boy-friend while her friend was away on a training course. All I’m saying, Steve, is that you don’t owe me anything. You certainly don’t have to stay with me, if you’d rather be with someone else.”

She disappeared then, without giving him a chance to reply, and didn’t reappear for quite some time, after various sounds of running water. When she emerged again, she had taken off her make-up and was wearing the kind of expression that forbade him to take up the thread of the conversation where it had been left dangling, demanding that he let the matter lie and start anew. He had to use the bathroom himself, so that was easy enough to do. When he came out again she was in the kitchenette, making a cup of hot chocolate.

“My experience was very different from yours,” Steve said, out of the blue, “but once you’ve heard it, you might understand me a little bit better.”

“Are we talking about abductions again?” Milly asked, rhetorically, keeping her tone conspicuously light. “I suppose I ought to look forward to it, then—even though we both seem to have been working thus far on the principle that people might like us better, and maybe even love us more, if they didn’t understand us at all.”

Steve drove Milly back to the railway station early the next morning, and then drove to school, where he found Friday far less taxing than he usually did. Afterwards, he drove out along the A30 to the far side of Wilton, then turned round and came back again. He suffered no ill-effects at all—which was a small triumph, but a significant one.

“One step at a time,” he murmured, when he got back to his own flat. “Nullify the symptoms, and there’ll be no need for a cure.”

The next day, after doing his shopping, he took his courage in both hands and drove to Southampton, where there were much bigger bridges to be found. He went back and forth across the stretch that broadened the Test into Southampton Water no less than four times, then stopped off for a late lunch in the new national park. He wasn’t about to tackle the Clifton Suspension Bridge just yet, but he felt that he was getting on top of the situation.

Milly called at four to report that there was no further change in her father’s condition, but Steve didn’t tell her what he’d been doing. She didn’t drag out the conversation for long, but before hanging up she said; “I called Ali, by the way. We’re on track to make up. I promised I’d have a drink with her next time I’m in Salisbury, so that we can sort it all out.”

“That’s good,” Steve said.

“I called Jan again, too. She was at her parents’ place, so we couldn’t really talk, but I think she might come along—to meet with Ali and me, that is.”

“Even better,” Steve said, automatically, although he remembered what Milly had said on Thursday night about the price of the three girls restoring their relationship might be that none of them would ever talk to him again.

“Maybe you can come too,” Milly concluded.

“Maybe,” Steve agreed. There was nothing thereafter but a few conventional exchanges of gestures of affection.

Although he wasn’t planning to go out, Steve took a shower, as was his habit on Saturday evenings. He was just wondering whether to spend an hour on the Internet before making himself some dinner when the phone rang again. He didn’t recognize the caller’s number.

“Hello?” he said, warily. He was always paranoid about the possibility that the year elevens might somehow have got hold of his number, so he never surrendered his name to unknown callers.

“Steve? It’s Alison—Janine’s friend.”

“Oh,” Steve said. “Hi.”

“I just wanted to thank you for talking to Milly. She said you’d told her I called round and you’d advised her to make up. I’ve just had a long chat with her.”

“That’s okay,” Steve said. “It was nothing, really. Milly told me you’d talked.”

“Did she tell you that she talked to Janine, too, and that we might all get together when she’s next in Salisbury.

“Yes, she did,” Steve said.

“Did she tell you that she suggested that I might ask you to have a drink with me in the Pheasant tonight?” Alison went on.

Steve looked at the phone quizzically. “No, she didn’t,” he said, speaking very carefully. “Why would she do that?”

“You can probably think of as many reasons as I can,” Alison told him, “but the one she gave me was that if we’re going to have a big summit conference to decide whether we can still be friends, and if you’re included, then perhaps you and I should get to know one another first. That probably seems as unlikely to you as it does to me, but I’m not lying. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, but I figured that if I’m being put to the test, I ought not to duck out.”

“You think you’re being tested?” Steve said, skeptically.

“Of course. You too, probably, but me definitely, and perhaps primarily. I told her I’d been round to your place looking for her, and that you’d let me come in, but she said she already knew. I told her nothing happened, but she said she already knew that too. I think she thinks that the only way to be sure that nothing will happen in future is to set up the experiment and see. It’s a bit convoluted, I know, but that’s the way Milly’s mind tends to work. Straight as a corkscrew—in the nicest possible way, of course.”

“I’d noticed that,” Steve said. “In the nicest possible way, of course. So, the idea is that you and I meet up, and nothing happens—which will prove to Milly that it’s possible for her to keep on being friends with you, and that it’s not yet time to give me the elbow.”

“That’s the idea,” Alison confirmed. “Her idea, remember. When I mentioned the possibility to Janine, though, she told me to go ahead. I’m not entirely sure what she expects. If you feel that you’re being pushed around, by all means say no. I’d be off the hook, because I could say that I’d tried.”

“I don’t know whether I’d be off the hook or not,” Steve admitted. “I don’t know what Milly expects me to do.”

After a slight pause, Alison said; “You don’t actually have to treat it as a puzzle to be solved. If it helps you make up your mind, you’re not in any moral danger. Believe me, this is not Milly’s nightmare version of Alison the Slut talking. It’s Alison the Chastened, who’s having a really tough time at work just now, and doesn’t even have a pub quiz to go to. A quiet drink with someone I don’t have to impress, entertain or drop my knickers for would be a real godsend.”

“Okay,” Steve said, not entirely sorry to have been put in a position in which he couldn’t really refuse without seeming churlishly ungallant. “Shall I meet you in there at half past seven?”

“Fine,” she said.

She was ten minutes late, but that was only to be expected. She wouldn’t have wanted to take the risk of getting there ahead of him and standing there on her own. She asked for a glass of red wine, and he told the bartender to make it two. They retired to a corner opposite the one in which she and Mark had surprised Milly and him, on the fateful night when the proverbial cat had escaped from the bag—as it had been bound to do, eventually.

“I like it here,” Alison explained. “No plasma screen to bring in the football crowd, and no video jukebox. Not the sort of place to attract hen parties, thank God. A bit too convenient for the Town Hall, maybe, but if I’m seen, it’s no bad thing for me to be seen with someone who doesn’t work there.”

“I’m more likely to start whispers going than you are,” Steve reminded her. “The regulars are bound to have seen me here with Milly. It probably isn’t a secret that she’s in Bath, nursing her sick father.”

“Is she nursing him?”

“Not literally—but you know how rumors go. I’m sorry you’ve been having a tough time at work. I know what that’s like. I’ve only just been let out of Coventry at school, although my crimes were committed way back in June and July.”

“You’re lucky,” she said. “Mine extended over every month in the calendar, and not just this year. Never again, though. You always think you can get away with it forever, until…” She passed her forefinger over her throat.

“Never again,” he agreed, raising his glass as if the phrase were a toast.

“Actually,” she said, “it wouldn’t do me any harm at all to be seen with you. You’re a substantial cut above my previous best, let alone my average, looks-wise.”

“Are you fishing for compliments?” he asked.

“Don’t be daft. I’m under no illusions about my ability to compete with Milly and Janine. You must have a hard time at school, if teenage girls are anything like what they were in my day.”

“Not as bad as all that,” he told her. “There’s safety in numbers, I think. One girl with a crush might turn into a stalker, but when there are four or five.…”

“Or forty or fifty.”

“…they’re too busy comparing notes and competing for attention to cause any serious difficulties.”

“And besides which,” Alison supplied, “you must get quite a kick out of basking in all that adolescent admiration.”

“I’m just a science teacher, not a singer in a boy-band or some football player. At the end of the day, that fact that I’m still fairly young and fit can’t compensate for the fact that I’m just one more bullshit-spouting bastard they have to call sir.”

“False modesty is just vanity in disguise,” she told him. “If I’d had a teacher like you when I was fifteen, I’d have wet my knickers dreaming about you, even if I’d known that you were terrified of flying and went to a support group of alien abductees.”

Steve gave her a hard stare while he worked out that the former item of information must have come from Janine rather than Milly. “Well,” he said, eventually, “we’re supposed to be getting to know one another, aren’t we? I’d prefer it if you didn’t keep mentioning knickers, though—it’s a bit provocative.”

“Sorry,” she said. “If I tell you my life story, though, it won’t be easy to avoid it. Except that that’s not me, really. It’s just someone I invented, and now have to put away. Perhaps we should make a deal—I’ll tell you about the real me, if you’ll tell me about the real you. That way, we won’t overexcite one another, and we’ll both know something that Janine and Milly don’t.”

“Okay,” he said. So that was what they did, for the remainder of the evening, until Steve walked Alison home, and said goodnight without so much as giving her a peck on the cheek. She said thank you for that, and probably meant it. Then he walked back to his own place, and put his relaxation CD on to play while he lulled himself to sleep.

Milly’s father continued not dying throughout the following week, although Milly returned to Salisbury on the Wednesday evening, having finally persuaded her mother that she couldn’t afford to continue missing work. She spent Wednesday night with Steve, but told him that she was going to have to do overtime in the office on Friday, Saturday, Monday and Tuesday in order to make up some of her lost income. On Sunday, she’d arranged to meet Janine and Alison—but Janine had insisted that he not be invited.

“Alison and I had a long chat last Saturday,” he told her. “Just to get to know one another.”

“I know,” she said.

“Did we pass the test, then?”

“What test?” she said, disingenuously. “I think she’s forgiven me for writing that letter. She says she has, but she might just be saying it and not really mean it.”

“I think she means it,” Steve said.

“Of course you do—but I’ve known her a lot longer than you have, and I’ve seen her turn over new leaves before. Anyhow, we can get together late Saturday, if you want, and maybe have a proper date on Wednesday. I’m sorry it’s a bit thin, as sex-schedules go.”

“It’s fine,” he assured her. “I might drive up to Reading on Saturday, and visit Caversham. Next Wednesday’s out, though—it’s the school Christmas party and I can’t get out of it. The sixth-formers are included, so it’s more a matter of acting as a policeman than having fun, or I’d invite you along. I can see you afterwards, though, if you like—at your place or mine.”

“Reading will be hellishly crowded the Saturday before Christmas,” she reminded him. “Be careful not to overdo it—you don’t want any setbacks before Thursday. I suppose I could switch my overtime from Tuesday to Wednesday, if that would help.”

“It wouldn’t,” he said. “I’ve got an appointment with Sylvia—I’ll need the booster even if things go well in Reading, because of Thursday. I could do Monday, though.”

“I’m firmly committed then,” she said. “No matter—can’t be helped. Saturday and Wednesday nights at my place will be fine, no matter how late. You can pick me up on Thursday at the usual time.”

Steve was careful on the Saturday, and contrived to go over Reading Bridge as well as Caversham Bridge in a moderately relaxed state of mind, before braving the Christmas crowds in the Oracle. He bought presents for Alison and Janine as well as Milly, although he hadn’t the slightest idea whether any of them would be considered appropriate, let alone welcome. He had a session with Sylvia Joyce on the Tuesday, which went well, although he played safe by refusing her offer to regress him. The school Christmas party went as well as could be expected, in spite of all the mistletoe and the extreme determination of his sixth-form groups to explore the limits of permissible misbehavior.

“You look nervous,” Milly said, when Steve picked her up to drive her to the meeting at which he was due to reveal all about the recovered memory whose exhumation Sylvia Joyce had begun. “You don’t have anything to be scared of, you know. Compared to a class of fifteen-year-olds, the AlAbAn crowd must be the easiest audience imaginable.”

“It’s not like doing a science lesson, though,” Steve said. “All that comes straight out of the textbook. This is different.”

Steve had spoken to Milly on the phone several times since she’d met with Alison and Janine on the Sunday, as well as hooking up with her on the Wednesday night, but she hadn’t said a word about the outcome of the big discussion, and she didn’t say anything about it while they drove to East Grimstead. She was more even-tempered by far than she’d been a fortnight before, but she still couldn’t pass for cheerful. Steve couldn’t help feeling that he was being gradually edged out of the relationship, in the process of being discarded by slow degrees. He’d been tempted more than once to call Alison and ask her what had happened at the meeting, but he hadn’t dared. Milly would undoubtedly have regarded it as going behind her back.

“I broke my personal record for booking four-by-fours this week,” Milly remarked, as they turned left in Alderbury. “I hadn’t been away very long, but the school run scum had already got used to taking liberties. I wrote so many tickets my wrist got sore. If I were paid on a commission basis I’d have made up all my lost income.”

“Is your vendetta against gas-guzzling vehicles, or women with small children?” Steve asked, indicating by his tone that it was a joke rather an accusation.

“Both,” Milly told him, not taking the least offence. “I’m against all emitters of toxic substances, whether liquid, solid or gaseous. By the way, did you know that the council are thinking of introducing a parking permit system for your street? I had to review the paperwork on Tuesday evening”

“I got a leaflet through my letter-box,” Steve said. “It won’t make any difference to me. If I need a permit, I’ll get one. I’ve never parked illegally in my life. I’m a teacher, after all—I have to set an example, just like you.”

“Yes we do,” Milly said. “That’s why I’ve never learned to drive—so I’ll never be tempted to add to the world’s burden of exhaust fumes. Before you jump on me for collaborating in your sin, remember that you’d be making the journey anyway.”

“It would be a slightly shorter journey if I didn’t call for you,” Steve pointed out, and threw caution to the winds by adding: “Mind you, it was a considerably longer journey when I used to pick Janine up as well, so I suppose you can take credit for reducing the margin—although I suppose we ought to factor Walter Wainwright’s detour into the equation too. The arithmetic of virtue’s quite complicated, when you really get down to it, isn’t it? Sometimes, it almost gives one a sense of relief to remember that the ecosphere’s fucked and the whole human race is doomed to imminent extinction.”

“Doomed we may be,” Milly countered, “but in the meantime, the rules still apply. People can’t just park wherever they want to, no matter what sort of excuses they have. People have to have consideration for other people, no matter how fucked up the atmosphere is.”

Steve had no idea whether she was really talking about parking, or about people screwing other people’s boy-friends and girl-friends, or both. “I know,” he said, anyway, as he found a legal parking-spot within easy walking distance of Amelia Rockham’s cottage. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

As they walked into the meeting together, Steve tried to compose himself, or at least to persuade himself that he wasn’t undertaking a metaphorical walk to the scaffold. He was amazed to see, when he got inside, that Janine wasn’t alone in the green armchair. Alison was perched on one of the arms, with her arm outstretched along the back, behind Janine’s head.

Alison nodded a friendly greeting, which seemed to take in both Steve and Milly. They both nodded back, and Steve even risked a glance that attempted to inform Janine that she was included in the greeting too. Janine didn’t nod back, but her gaze wasn’t hostile, or even coldly indifferent.

“There you are,” Milly whispered in his ear, as they settled into their familiar settee. “One more supportive skeptic to add to your audience. That’s what I call pulling power.”