Part I

The garden squares of this particular area of West London are unique. Here, as in no other part of a city full of green spaces, the houses back directly on to the squares. Residents can walk straight out and find in front of them several acres of tended garden, with trees, bushes, lawns, flowers, sometimes even a tennis court or two. In the larger gardens you could pasture a herd of cows (as, no doubt, people did until the town came out from Marble Arch a hundred and fifty years ago); you could grow enough potatoes to feed a large family for a year, stage a Live Aid concert, build high-rise flats for thousands. The only reason such squares exist is that when the Victorian speculators came to build their solid Victorian houses, with plenty of room for large families and their servants, they found the land too boggy and unstable for intensive building. Thus, they set the streets far apart, across the squares.

The whole neighbourhood is in fact in a valley. The houses are built over a network of small rivers and streams. One householder, digging the foundations for a tasteful conservatory, struck water but hastily covered over his incipient well in case of possible interventions by the Council’s Planning Department, the local Preservation Society or even some lively local entrepreneur who might want him to turn his house into a spa – an unthinkable idea, for law, commerce, politics and film-directing, not trade, are practised by the residents away from the garden squares. Twenty years ago many of the houses were slums. Now they have been restored to what they once were – Victorian family homes which men leave in the morning and return to gratefully at night, knowing that they will find their wives appreciating art, their little girls on the lawns in rather long frocks and white socks and their little boys waiting to play cricket with them.

At one particular time of year the particular garden we are concerned with looks particularly beautiful. The trees are green and red and gold, also brown. The grass has that patchy, but still green look of lawns which are chilled at night but struggle on gamely during the day, when it is still warm. Late roses bloom, the air is gold. At dawn a chill mist, a foot high, on the grass disperses when the day grows hot and the sky blue. And everything is to be appreciated more because, after all, these are the last days of summer – winter’s on the way, with its dim days, grey, late mornings and long, dark evenings; evenings which favour and give more character to the dark streets outside the railings of the square, where the muggers do overtime and chilly people throw down more chip-papers, polystyrene hamburger containers and empty crisp-bags; the evenings of the invisible dog-turd on the pavement, the invisible group of alcoholics in their favoured corners under the motorway further up.

As winter comes on and the street takes over, residents of the garden squares withdraw into well-lit and well-heated houses, turn on the patio lights and burglar alarms against the robbers, rapists, drunken hooligans and other malefactors now ready to come sneaking over the railings or through gaps between the houses left unprotected by the building workers always labouring on these increasingly valuable bits of property. Now they can come in dark clothing, even balaclavas, creeping over the dark lawns, hiding in the darkness of the bushes bringing the wicked streets of inner London into the enclave. With the sunshine gone, the paddling pools and garden furniture hauled inside, the garden darkening, as in a theatre, the scene has changed.

So, during these last days of summer, first of autumn, small children collect conkers in the mornings after windy nights. After supper groups still sit in the beautiful resigned light of the evenings but the garden, like its own plants and trees, is conserving, drawing into itself, resting.

Joe Coverdale’s first glimpse of Mrs Polly Kops, owner of number 1, Elgin Crescent, was not encouraging but then he, while glimpsing, did not look very dignified himself. Making his way after many years to the front door of the legendary number 1 which backed, as a house agent would say, and later did, on to the well-maintained communal gardens described above, he saw, because his eyes were dropped, scanning the pavements for dog-turds and bits of paper, movements in the basement of the house. Not a man to reject the opportunity to sum up a situation quickly, he bent his knees by the railings in an effort to see what was happening inside.

In the long kitchen, which let out, at the other end, into the garden, stood Mrs Polly Kops in a jersey and corduroy trousers, slightly stooped over the table in the window near the street, on which still stood the remains of a Sunday lunch – vegetable dishes, abandoned plates and knives and forks, a big bone on a plate. Joe saw that Polly Kops was not just standing at the table, she was obstinately dipping the paw of a small black and white kitten into what looked like a gravy jug. As the kitten struggled she held it on the table and tried to persuade it to lick its gravied little paw. As the kitten refused and continued to wriggle and try to escape, she attempted to force its paw into the gravy jug again. Appalled and agitated, though not just about the cat, Joe Coverdale remained stooping at the railings. Was it cruelty to animals or attempted kindness? Was Polly Kops really trying to teach a kitten to drink gravy from its paw while standing on a table, drink it from a vessel used by human beings, standing on a table used by human beings for their meals? What was going on at once-fabulous, legendary number 1 Elgin Crescent? Joe was upset. He had a dream, a plan for the future and Polly Kops was part of it. Her appearance and the scene in general carried no assurance the dream could ever come true. She had some grey hair, tired lines on her face, an old sweater and trousers without any style except that of a woman going about some heavy duties, whether feeding chickens or clearing out cupboards. The dream was of glamour, even sex, since Joe Coverdale had once slept with Polly Kops, years before. Meanwhile Polly gave up on the kitten, which sprang from the table with the velocity of a ping-pong ball.

Joe straightened up and took his six feet of fading handsome blondness along the pavement, mounting the steps of the house and trying the bell. After he had done so he read the postcard secured under the bell by some peeling-off sellotape. Pam and Sue Kops, 2 rings, Margaret Turnbull Goldstein 3 rings and underneath, an intrusive hand had written, Clancy Goldstein, 1 ring. Underneath this in magic marker someone had written ‘Pam and Sue – where are ya? J.’ Joe flinched. Clancy Goldstein might be living here – even answer the door, but it was too late now to turn back, with the sound of feet in the hall inside the door. He clung to the idea there still might be something to be done or got inside.

It had been about fifteen years since an Aeschylean mingling of family relationships and sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll had produced the terrible family tragedy of the Turnbulls on this very spot. Polly and her two cousins, one being the very Clancy who had written himself in on the doorbell, had somehow been responsible for killing Polly’s father, the uncle of the other two. Clancy, meanwhile, had turned out to be the father of two of Polly’s children while her husband, father of the twins, Pam and Sue, had, not unnaturally, left the scene. Then there’d been some vast inheritance, purloined by cousin Clancy. These sordid and melodramatic events, involving sudden deaths, illegitimacies and imprisonments, had all taken place some years before Joe Coverdale and his previous family had moved into the neighbourhood but they were widely and impressionistically discussed by the neighbours, and, though the details were complicated and confusing, the consensus was that although much too much had come out at the time, even more of this unsavoury business had been suppressed. The consensus further ran that, in ranking order, Clancy had behaved worst, Polly only a little less badly and that the conduct even of the betrayed husband Alexander Kops had been nothing much to write home about. So, pondered Joe on the doorstep, Clancy, having run off with the family fortune, appeared to have returned, though not bringing much of the fortune back with him, if the condition of the building was anything to go by. The once-white front door was grubby and the paint was cracked. Along the bottom and halfway up there were black marks where, evidently, people had kicked it impatiently while waiting to be let in. The run-down condition of the building was more noticeable in contrast to the chic, pastel painted, parking-bayed, flowering-cherried atmosphere of the rest of the street.

Polly, in the doorway, said numbly, ‘Oh, Joe.’ He had taken her from the despairing ennui of a timeless wet Sunday afternoon in autumn, when sufferers imagine they can feel no worse, into the moment when an unwelcome arrival suddenly makes them realise they can feel a lot worse and probably will.

‘I was in the area, having lunch with your near-neighbours, the Greenwells, actually, so I thought I’d drop in and say hullo,’ declared Joe and, having presented credentials he thought passable, now stepped into the hall, The hall, the hall, the deplorable hall. There were sleeping bags, one rolled, one unrolled, on the floor. It had been used as an auxiliary bedroom for friends of the children who had sneaked into the house late at night. ‘It’s all right. They only slept in the hall because it was too late to go home.’ The coat rack groaned with anoraks, coats and hats, left behind by others or too small for the residents, or dragged groaning out of cupboards they had been stuffed into years ago, on the grounds they would ‘do’. Underneath lay trails of trainers, wellingtons, shoes, boots in profusion and bad condition.

Elsewhere were plastic bags containing books, swimming and sports kits, and items overdue for the cleaners. The once-expensive gilt and black embossed wallpaper was scuffed and marked. There was a huge brown damp patch on the ceiling and walls in one corner. Someone had written ‘Pam is a punk’ in black felt pen across a photograph of Geronimo. A poster for a gig at Acklam Hall hung crookedly beside the coats. It also seemed that someone might have thrown a pot of tea or coffee at the wall from the top of the stairs which led upwards to the first floor (they had). At the end of the hall stood the skeleton of a pram, lacking the carrycot which was meant to go on top. Instead, a guitar lay across the top of the frame.

Polly, walking ahead of Joe Coverdale through all this evidence, said wearily, ‘Come upstairs.’ Joe walked after her, beginning to feel tired himself. He had hoped for some glamour or, failing that, something seemly and important he could tell others, like an interesting fatal illness, a major scholarship to Oxbridge, a fascinating career change or a legacy. Instead everything spoke of chaos and decline. Upstairs, light flooded into the room through huge windows. On a sagging sofa lay a large baby, or small child, asleep with the empty carrycot beside him and a big panda on top. By the window stood a blue armchair surrounded by bits of paper with writing on them. In front of the chair were a television and a video.

‘Drink, Joe?’ suggested Polly. ‘There’s only whisky.’

Joe shook his head. ‘Drank quite a lot at lunch,’ he told her. ‘I was rather hoping for a cup of tea.’

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Don’t bang about and wake the baby.’ When she had gone Joe stood contemplating the child. Obviously it couldn’t be Polly and Clancy’s. But what was she doing, Polly, having yet another child? And who was the father this time? She must be forty-five if a day. No wonder she was teaching the cat to suck gravy from its paw. No wonder the mantelpiece was covered in bills. He walked over and read a page on the arm of the blue chair. There was one line on it, in black handwriting. It read: ‘Everybody’s got problems in Casablanca’. For Joe, it all added up. She had had a fifth child by God knew whom, the provenance of this one being even more doubtful than that of the other four. Then she’d gone mad, then she’d gone broke. Back at the blue chair he read from a page on the floor, ‘with the whole world crumbling we pick this time to fall in love’. Then, Joe added to himself, Polly’d evidently decided to bale herself out by writing a Mills and Boon novel. Oh dear, oh dear, he thought, reading another page, under the first, ‘Believe that I love you. Go, my darling –’ Unless the child belonged to one of her daughters, he speculated – an early mistake, an early disaster in fact. Oh dear, oh dear. Joe decided to drink his tea and clear out quickly afterwards. But the step on the stairs he thought was Polly with the tea, proved to be a thin man in jeans and a Bob Marley T-shirt. His red hair, faded like Polly’s, gave Joe the idea this was the dreaded Clancy Goldstein. He froze by the chair. Clancy was too old to be wearing a Bob Marley T-shirt and he looked rough, obviously felt it and was still wearily calculating the degree of roughness he was feeling and how far he could push it on before it became dangerous or even terminal.

‘Oh well,’ he said, advancing on the bottle of whisky, ‘what else is there to do on a wet Sunday afternoon?’ He poured a tot of whisky into a glass. ‘Or a fine bright Monday morning in April for that matter?’ he said as if to himself. ‘Seen Polly?’ he asked the visitor.

‘She went downstairs to make some tea,’ Joe said. ‘I’m Joe Coverdale, a former neighbour, hoping to become a neighbour again. Just looked in to say hullo.’

‘I think I’ve heard of you,’ said Clancy Goldstein, unpleasantly, drinking. His small wave of aggression passed. He flopped down on the other sofa, opposite the baby, and stretched thin legs and feet in battered trainers out on the upholstery. Joe, having nowhere to sit but in the blue chair, remained standing with his feet in all the papers.

‘Aah,’ said Clancy, on a long-drawn-out note of satisfaction. ‘It makes you think, though, doesn’t it?’

‘What does?’ asked Joe after a pause.

‘All of it,’ said Clancy, fixing his eyeballs, so torn by thirty years of long nights, jaded dawns, and crisis-filled days that it seemed they might never look at anything normally again, ‘All of it, mate.’ Outside the rain came down steadily on the quiet autumn trees. In an effort to deal with the animal in Clancy which, Joe knew, might be on the verge of an act of aggression, he said only, ‘That’s right.’ As Clancy lay there silently he then ventured, ‘Polly seems to be writing a book. Am I right?’

‘Very right,’ agreed Clancy energetically. ‘Very, very right indeed.’ He lapsed again and then said, in a dreamy, menacing voice, ‘What’s a poor woman to do? By Polly Kops née Turnbull née Goldstein. That’s the problem. We know what the book’s called, but what’s the name of the author? What will she call herself? Molly Bloom?’ he said. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Molly Bloom.’ His face sagged and his voice trailed away. Polly came into the room with a tray containing a teapot, milk in a jug and two mugs. She stared blankly at Clancy, on the sofa. ‘I thought you were out,’ she said.

‘I’m in now,’ he said. ‘I won’t have any tea, thank you very much.’

‘Could you move your feet so that Joe can sit down?’ she asked. ‘Oh,’ said Clancy, springing to his feet and standing pitched slightly forward, ‘Oh – forgive me. I’m so sorry. Am I taking up too much room? Shall I rearrange the furniture while I’m at it? Let Joe sit with the light on his good side? Or, better still, shall I leave? That’s a good idea. I’ll leave. Then Joe can do what he wants – have a bath, Joe? Splash in some Badedas. Help yourself to the aftershave. Don’t mind me, I only live here. Stick a few things in the washing machine while you’re at it. No – on second thoughts I don’t recommend it. My advice is, don’t do it. Otherwise she’ll make your smalls so very small, not to mention pink, you’ll never be the same man again. Next thing, darling, you’re singing Bellini.’

He began to sing an aria in a high-pitched voice. Polly said, ‘I think I ought to go upstairs and have a rest,’ but since both men had been her lovers, neither took any notice.

‘Why don’t we take the tea down to the kitchen, out of the way,’ suggested Joe.

‘All right,’ said Polly glumly.

As Joe picked up the tray Clancy began to laugh, got up and poured himself another drink.

‘He’s a bit upset,’ Polly said on the stairs. She did not say why.

In the kitchen Joe sat down at the kitchen table and said, ‘This is nice. Like the old days. If these kitchen walls could only speak –’

‘What old days?’ asked Polly.

‘You don’t remember?’ said Joe somewhat archly.

‘No,’ said Polly.

‘Well –’ said Joe. ‘And did you hear – I got married?’

‘No,’ said Polly. She added, ‘Quite honestly, I can’t sit here chatting about all this. The way you treated Katie Mulvaney was disgusting. She loved you, you said you loved her and then you let her down. She was very upset. Very upset indeed. Now you’re here and I don’t know why –’

‘Come on, Polly,’ said Joe. ‘It was impossible. She had three children – how could we have managed? I couldn’t have stood that household for five minutes. And Kate and I are very different people – it wouldn’t have worked out.’

His dialogue was so convincing she believed it. She thought of Kate, her friend, getting paler and thinner, unable to deal with Joe’s duplicities. He had told half the truth. She told the other half. ‘You acted in bad faith,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t even tell her. You kept on having affairs and letting her suspect, or find out. You fed your ego on her.’

‘I couldn’t tell her what I didn’t know myself,’ he responded. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing. She had the choice. She could have done something about it.’

‘What?’

‘Well – what women do – threatened me, or made me take her on holiday – given me an ultimatum –’

‘She didn’t know anything about all that,’ Polly declared. ‘I suppose she thought you were over nine years old. You wouldn’t go cramming down cakes to make you sick until she dragged you away from the table –’

‘It’s what women do,’ Joe said impatiently. ‘That’s what they do to get what they want.’

‘What do you do?’ Polly asked him.

‘Generally speaking,’ he said, ‘sweat my guts out in the Talks Department of the BBC –’

‘I meant, what do you do while Kate’s doing all these threats and ultimatums and checking the holiday brochures – still, it doesn’t matter. She’s all right now. If you say she should have done all this, then I suppose that’s what she should have done. Of course, she couldn’t.’

‘I can’t see why not,’ said Joe, nettled.

‘Didn’t know how, I suppose.’

‘All women know how,’ he told her.

‘So you say,’ Polly said. Joe looked at her. It was all very well to say women shouldn’t use their age-old wiles on their menfolk. Not doing so had lost Kate what she wanted – himself – and Polly Kops looked as if she was going nowhere in particular, not attending to her appearance – what a mess – not being very pleasant, challenging him, in fact, while upstairs her evidently broke and drunk lover made a pig of himself. If the child was hers – well, thought Joe, that only made it worse. A drop of scent and a few women’s wiles wouldn’t have done her any harm. In fact Joe was still niggled by how Polly had behaved following what in retrospect could be termed little more than a one-night stand ten years ago. But he had been her partner. She had not responded well. The only thing which had seemed to worry her at the time was when he had revealed he was having an affair with her friend, Kate. ‘Go round and tell her,’ she’d insisted, like a child. ‘Tell her I didn’t know.’ Joe’s pride had rebelled at being treated like a bone from which one dog was backing off, politely recognising that it was, in fact, another dog’s dinner. He was by then high on women competing over him, although still technically married to his weary wife, Naomi, who was living with their children in the country. But by that stage he had learned to expect the start of an affair to be followed by a desire for commitment, followed by tears, reproaches, and phone calls from the woman in the middle of the night. In many ways Polly hadn’t been satisfactory and, although it was behind him now, it still rankled a little. Therefore he wasn’t completely sorry Polly was on hard times, although it was a disappointment in one way. He had hoped to re-enter and be accepted by a household with some class. It had, after all, been here that the SDP was invented at a party, Polly’s Cabinet Minister father had toppled to his death, naked, from a balcony, rock stars had lain about stoned – the place was a small part of that canon, longer than the Odyssey, but not so structured, which constituted the myth of the 1960s.

‘Caroline and I were thinking of moving in round here,’ he said.

‘Cost a lot, these houses, these days,’ Polly told him.

‘Caroline has some money of her own,’ Joe said.

For some reason, Polly sniggered.

‘We’d like to get somewhere for the lad to play,’ Joe continued remorselessly – this was another reason for his visit. ‘He has several friends round here already. Oh – do you know Anna Lombard? She and Caroline were at school together. She’s a Beresbury.’

‘What’s a Beresbury?’ asked Polly.

‘The Kydds’ family name is Beresbury,’ Joe told her.

The dishes remained on the table. The kitten had fallen asleep on a huge pile of clean laundry. ‘I don’t know anywhere that’s going, Joe,’ she said. ‘I think I can hear the baby crying.’

‘If ever –’ began Joe, above the sound of many feet on the stairs. A lot of girls came in, all dressed in black as if they had all been bereaved at an early age. A second glance at the heavy make-up, patterned tights and big earrings raised thoughts of a prostitute’s funeral. Joe was stunned by their massed loveliness. ‘Some of you must be Pam and Sue,’ he said. They looked at him, instantly identifying him as a youngish dirty old man. Polly made no introductions and the five girls turned as one young woman to the stove and fridge. A conversation started about toast, tea, cheese, hot Bovril and hot chocolate. The grill and the kettle went on. Pot noodles were produced. Clancy Goldstein came in with the wriggling baby in his arms. The child’s Start-rites struck the floor like two small magnets hitting steel plate, then he dived into the massed black legs of the girls and disappeared. Terrible if the child belonged to one of Polly’s daughters, thought Joe. They were so young, only about sixteen or seventeen, and there was no doubt that the child was half black. A tragedy, thought Joe, the Channel 4 emotion making him feel somewhat better about his own misdeeds. Polly had very little excuse to lecture him, he decided.

‘Well then,’ he asked. ‘How is Katie these days?’

‘She qualified as a doctor. She’s just been in Africa for famine relief or something. Save the Children, I think it was.’

This silenced Joe for a moment. He rallied. ‘I never thought of Kate as a doctor,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know they trained them at that age. I’m surprised they took her. What about the children?’

‘Plague,’ said Polly lugubriously, guessing Joe’s desire for some bad news about the set-up he had abandoned. ‘Kate brought back this horrible tropical disease – of course, she didn’t know she was a carrier. But the effects – I can’t tell you!’

‘My God –’ said Joe.

Polly nodded mournfully. Then she said, ‘No – they’re fine. Of course, even Ajax is fourteen now. Their aunt’s been looking after them while Kate was away. She’s a nun on some sort of compassionate leave.’

The thought of sturdy, incessant Ajax, who slept in fatigues, put a plastic helmet on before he got out of bed in the morning, named his Action Man Hitler and lived exclusively on peanuts, actually growing up and joining the human race made Joe pause. He suddenly remembered clearly what that life had been like. He felt not remorse, but, worse, the feeling of an opportunity missed. He had a little painful thought, then repressed it.

‘So – what is he?’ he asked. ‘National Front?’

‘Vegetarian – joined Militant Tendency,’ Polly answered. Meanwhile one of the girls thrust the baby on Polly’s lap and said, ‘We’re taking all this stuff upstairs.’

The party, carrying a tray and various cups and plates, disappeared, leaving behind many crumbs, a selection of jars with their lids off and a cheese paring.

‘Pampam,’ the child remarked confidently.

‘And how are things – basically?’ asked Joe.

Clancy had turned on a small television set on the other side of the room and was sitting, legs astride a kitchen chair, singing along with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, who were standing on a haystack, in colour.

‘Well,’ said Polly. ‘I think it speaks for itself, really.’

‘I’m always reading about Alexander,’ Joe said, meaning that she must be receiving large sums from her ex-husband, and if not, why not.

‘He’s in this Big Bang, now,’ Polly said, ‘I think.’

‘Yeah, the Big Whimper himself,’ Clancy said to the TV.

‘Well,’ Joe Coverdale said neutrally. He was respectful and cautious about people with money, partly because he thought they must have some merit hidden from the rest, partly out of that unadmitted fear of the power of the rich which is learned at mother’s knee. Meanwhile he hoped there might be more than met the eye in this superficially depressed and poverty-stricken situation. The news about Kate Mulvaney had done nothing for him. His own news had been greeted without curiosity, with, it seemed, incomprehension. He came originally from a small village in Yorkshire where everyone knew everyone else. He still felt uncertain faced with the variety of big-city life, the large, unknown groupings. The grammar of this city world was too imprecise and complicated for him to understand. Even the few sentences he could comprehend seemed to translate in more than one way. Everyone spoke too fast. It was a social Tower of Babel. In reality he had married the daughter of a deputy Minister of the Crown, a young woman with some money of her own. She had borne him a son. He wanted this feat acknowledged and wished to take his place among the great and the good, but, if possible, also among the interestingly raffish, at a safe distance. Their how-d’you-dos would convince him of the basic worth of a steady life with money behind him, their names when dropped give him cachet. He continued doggedly in pursuit of the dream.

‘Which were Pam and Sue?’ he asked.

‘Pam’s the blonde, Sue’s the dark one,’ said their mother. It was not enlightening, especially as all the girls appeared to have dyed their hair and he could not be sure whether Polly was reminiscently describing their original colouring or identifying them by the colouring they had chosen to adopt.

‘See anything of your own children?’ Polly asked.

‘Harriet and Paul aren’t all that welcoming,’ Joe admitted. ‘Obviously, we’ve grown away from each other. Paul’s at Trinity. Harriet’s doing a Cordon Bleu course. What are Pam and Sue doing?’

‘Oh – courses, of course,’ Polly said. ‘It’s the middle-class way of being unemployed these days. They’ve got an all-girls band.’

‘Following in father’s footsteps,’ said Joe.

‘As long as he takes them into the family business in the end,’ said Polly. ‘So they can go from heroines of the revolution to merchant banker when the joke’s over.’

‘Funny times, the ‘sixties,’ said Joe.

‘Yes,’ said Polly.

‘Set up plenty of expectations which can’t be met now,’ Joe mentioned.

‘Unemployment, heroin, AIDS, schoolgirl mothers,’ said Clancy, from the TV. ‘You doing a programme on it, or something, mate?’ he said, turning round belligerently. ‘And, second question for ten points, are you staying long?’

Joe stood up. ‘Just leaving,’ he said.

‘That’s good,’ said Clancy.

Joe said, keen not to leave empty-handed, ‘If you should hear of anywhere in the neighbourhood for sale, could you give me a ring, Polly? We’re in the book. In fact,’ he added, ‘if you should ever think of leaving this house –’

‘Oh, piss off,’ Clancy said.

Polly said, ‘I think I’ll take Rufus for a walk round the garden,’ and went down to the french windows at the bottom of the room. Clancy caught up with her as they walked among the leaves. The child tried to catch one as it drifted down.

‘Has he gone?’ Polly asked.

‘Mealy-mouthed sod,’ declared Clancy. ‘Comes in on Sunday afternoon, next thing you’re making him nice cups of tea and asking about his health –’

‘He took me by surprise. I know he’s rotten but here’s a man who fell on his feet by marrying a rich woman, he’s got hundreds of thousands to play with and I’ve got an overdraft of £100,000, the bank’s on to me all the time to sell up, we’re at rock bottom. Joe Coverdale could be a gift horse –’

Clancy disliked these conversations and always hid his guilt about living in the condemned home with rage. ‘Sell up or shut up,’ he told her. ‘It doesn’t mean we have to have every prick in the world sitting around the house on a Sunday afternoon asking questions. People like that kill me.’

‘Just enjoy the sunshine,’ Polly advised. ‘While you can,’ she could not resist adding. She knew it was pointless to attack him. More than that, it was often dangerous. Clancy’s moving in had been a bad idea which had, as they say, seemed like a good idea at the time. Clancy, in fact, had seemed like a good idea at the time. He had come bouncing in the year before, just after she had set up her little junk business, saying that he and she had always loved each other, that he was Margaret’s father, and Max’s for that matter, that she was alone and could do with some help. He had money, he said, coming in from royalties on his old recordings. He could help out when she drove her van around collecting junk for her Saturday stall in the market, he could help with the children. Like any woman alone with children she’d fallen for it, despite the warnings of friends, and she’d got what women in sore need of a knight in shining armour normally get. Clancy’s armour fell to pieces after a fortnight, the night he got drunk, smashed a lamp and told her she was a whore. His charger, a new Range Rover she had been counting on to take over from her old van when it finally fell apart, was reclaimed a week later by some large men in suits. If there were any royalties she never saw any after the first cheque and, as for the children, he quarrelled with them, seeming to think he was their older brother, the one who had to take on the responsibilities while they, being younger, were over-indulged and given privileges he was denied. One summer day Polly had found herself hurrying home with four choc ices for the children, since she had realised, with terror, in the shop, that if she just bought them for Pam, Sue and Margaret, and didn’t buy one for Clancy, there might be a row, even though he probably wouldn’t want the choc ice when she gave it to him. Some weeks after that she’d told him she felt the arrangement wasn’t working out. ‘You’re not happy,’ she’d told him, adopting the placatory attitude of a woman who means she’s not happy. ‘This probably isn’t the place for you.’ He had, predictably, become angry, to hide the fact that he had no money and nowhere else to go. Lately he’d had a number of phone calls, but had taken care she shouldn’t overhear them. She didn’t know what they were about. He’d bought himself two new pairs of shoes, but when she’d showed him the gas bill he’d expressed only sympathy and said she ought to keep a stricter check on Pam, Margaret and Sue. He was sure they went to bed, even on fairly warm summer nights, without turning off their gas fires. ‘Blazing away all the time,’ he’d said. ‘Bad for them as well – all the fumes.’ Then he’d mentioned a gas leak he suspected.

Polly realised all her children were orphans, even Margaret, who was Clancy’s own child. He’d hardly seen her since she was born and now lumped her in with Pam and Sue, twin daughters of his former rival Alexander Kops, showing the same camaraderie or resentment to her as he did, by turns, towards the others. Meanwhile her financial situation was critical.

Kate Mulvaney had advised her to get Clancy out of the house quickly. She said she felt he was a positive danger. Polly said she was afraid of him, and when she wasn’t afraid of him she was sorry for him. She was also running too hard to earn money and pay the bills to face the problems he’d cause her if she asked him directly to go. All she wanted was a little peace and quiet so that she could find a solution to her difficulties. Also, she explained, sometimes he was nice and if he was nasty, well, look at the state she was in – wouldn’t anyone lose his head? But, ‘I don’t like it,’ Kate Mulvaney had said, seriously. Then she had to go back to Africa, probably too soon for Polly, who reverted to her old desperate, anxious, terrified and guilty behaviour – the place was toppling round her ears, the wife of the civil servant next door was always on to her about her roof, which was contaminating their roof, the hot water system broke down, she had it repaired knowing she couldn’t pay for it, bills flooded in, even the vacuum cleaner broke down, she was dropping with exhaustion and each morning got up, bent like an old woman, shoulders hunched under the weight of her own bills. And it was all her own fault things had got like this, and all her own fault she couldn’t find a solution.

Every day, thought Anna Lombard, I come into my beautiful hall where the Audubon birds hang over the small table grandmother gave me when they sold Kellinthwaite. I can smell, faintly, the beeswax-laden furniture polish Mrs Adams uses on some of the furniture and I take off my gloves and lay them on the table and go upstairs past the watercolours and the dim (thank goodness) picture of Geoffrey’s great-great-great grandmother. I peer into the living-room, where the early hyacinths in the blue bowl are opening, and the books on the wall have, today, been dusted. The room smells faintly of hyacinths. I put my plastic bags, with the wild mushrooms and the blackberries for the mousse on the counter in the kitchen next door to the living-room. I walk upstairs, take off my shoes, put them in the cupboard, put on others. Before Geoffrey comes back I shall make up my face again and change these old shoes for a better pair. I look at myself in the gold-framed old mirror by the dressing table – the real mirror, the one which tells the truth, is in the bathroom, where the light is fierce. I take off my make-up and put on some moisturiser, take down my hair, brush it, put it up again, this time with little gold combs. Today is one of the two days a week when my lectures at the Institute end at 3.15, so today, I can concentrate on cooking a really good supper for us. Geoffrey has been looking preoccupied lately. We both need to slow down, be together in a relaxed way.

I have anxieties, too. I worry. I don’t know why. I think it’s little things, like Harriet. Pauline’s at the back of it, I’m sure. I think she’s encouraging Harriet, to get at me. Without Harriet, I might feel better.

Then there’s that stupid woman next door, Polly Kops, and her roof. Then there’s Julie Thompson – without her, life would be a lot different. It’s not her fault she lives in our basement flat. We wanted the house, couldn’t afford, at the time, to buy a whole house but having her there with those children makes a difference. I’ve asked Geoffrey about it dozens of times …

‘Can’t we get rid of her somehow?’ said Anna Lombard to her husband Geoffrey, as he took a final helping of the blackberry mousse. ‘We didn’t plan this to be permanent and we’ve been here four-and-a-half years now and still nothing’s happened.’

Geoffrey ate his spoonful, perhaps rather quickly, and put down the spoon. Anna said ‘Cheese?’ When he shook his head she automatically placed the coffee on a tray which already contained cream, sugar and cups and carried it into the other room.

They sat with their cups in the long pale-carpeted room. There was the faint smell of hyacinths. Unfortunately, as they discussed what music to play Julie Thompson, down in the dark and windy garden, was urging her children in. Kevin, the oldest, was crying. ‘Come on, Kevin. It’s too dark now to find any conkers. You can come out early on and look.’

Both the Lombards, without looking at each other, knew what the other was thinking. What a noise. Would they be woken by the Thompson children shouting at a quarter to seven tomorrow? It summed up the whole unsatisfactory situation. They were sharing a house, effectively, with someone with whom they had nothing in common, whose habits were irritating and whose presence reflected no credit on them. The days had long gone when it might be acceptable to have a sitting tenant in the basement. Now it merely proved that you were inefficient, too broke to buy the tenant out and too uninventive to find some loophole by which to get rid of her.

Geoffrey pointed out again to his wife that Julie Thompson’s position was unassailable. She had inherited the flat from her parents, who had lived there since 1942. She had lived there all her life, first as a daughter, then with her husband and the parents, after she married. Now she had two children and no husband and her parents had retired to the South Coast. She paid the rent, rent-controlled at twenty pounds a week, she gave no trouble and, Geoffrey said, Judge Jeffreys couldn’t get her out. She had refused offers made by the previous landlord and had, six months before, also refused the Lombards’ offer, knowing that she was infinitely better off, with children aged four and seven, in a rent-controlled flat paid for by the DHSS than she would be searching for a flat in London with that sum of money and no prospects of a mortgage. When making the offer Anna Lombard had insinuated that the sum would cover the cost of a small house in Margate, where her parents lived, to which Julie had said that as soon as the children were a little older she would be looking for a full-time job. There was, she said, less chance of finding one in Margate.

‘It’s that boyfriend of hers,’ Anna had told Geoffrey gloomily. ‘That’s what’s keeping her here. She wouldn’t see much of him in Margate.’

‘Perhaps he’ll marry her and they’ll take our offer to put down on a house,’ suggested Geoffrey.

Anna shrugged. ‘To think we’re hanging on the decisions of Julie Thompson and that hooligan,’ she said.

‘He seems quite respectable,’ Geoffrey had said. ‘He’s a builder. He usually seems to be in work, from what you can see.’

‘Nevertheless –’ Anna sighed.

‘The plain fact is, Anna, that if we want Julie to go we’d have to offer her more money. Which we don’t want to,’ Geoffrey pointed out.

It was true they were lucky to have got this pretty period house at a price they could afford, after Geoffrey’s previous wife, Pauline, had taken the lion’s share of the price of their old flat, so that she could buy a three-bedroomed house in Bromley for herself and their three children. Only a generous donation from Anna’s parents, and Geoffrey’s good job at the Treasury, had secured them the house. At first they congratulated themselves on having it. Now, territoriality being what it is, they resented having to share the garden with Julie, the noise she and the children made. In hot weather Julie and her friends lounged fully clothed about the garden in elaborate pastiches of ‘50s styles playing music on a transistor, while the Lombards, stripped down, on smart lounging furniture, attempted to start a good tan for their holidays in the Algarve. Julie cooked a lot of chips. Julie accepted state assistance, a ludicrously low rent and a general lack of forward planning as the norm. The households were incompatible. The Lombards felt that one way or another they were paying for her entire life, and, being now settled after the divorce, they wanted to get rid of Julie Thompson and start on some rebuilding. The snag was – Julie wouldn’t go.

Downstairs, after some more argument between Julie and the children, the door slammed.

‘If I said I had to take in Jessica’s children for a while –’ Anna murmured. She had suggested this before. Geoffrey said what he had said the last time she proposed it. ‘Jessica’s children aren’t pathetic little mites – they’re huge. And an unsuccessful move would only stiffen Julie’s resistance. Anyway, where would she go?’

‘The Council –’ Anna murmured.

‘Well,’ said Geoffrey, unwilling to say again what he had said before about temporary accommodation in firetrap hotels which they both knew about from documentaries on TV. A man with some imagination, Geoffrey saw Kevin coughing bronchitically on a small bed in the corner of a damp room, while Julie went for the doctor with the other child and flames began to take hold in the basement.

‘I suppose you’re right,’ Anna said easily. Geoffrey wondered as usual if he was being unintelligent or weak in the face of a normal difficulty. For some reason his mind went back to that morning’s meeting at the Treasury. Reluctantly he stood up and said. ‘I’ve remembered an hour’s work I have to do. I’ll get it over with, then come down and we can listen to some music.’

Anna smiled at him and sat perfectly still until the door closed. Then her smile faded and her expression became more resolute. She stood up and went to the window, studying the dark garden with the air of a woman looking at a rail of blouses in a store. She really wanted to get rid of Julie, as long as it wouldn’t make anything go wrong for her and Geoffrey. Julie, after all, would be a lot better off somewhere a bit further out of London, where the air was fresher for the children and the roads less dangerous. Geoffrey would be happier if he had a garden to look after, if they could sit out on summer evenings with friends. And to think of the madness of that woman, refusing a large sum for which she had done exactly nothing – it didn’t make sense. They owned the house didn’t they? Paid rates, paid out for repairs? And she just sat there, on the dole, paying £20 a week and waiting for a better offer. Anna, planning the garden in advance, said to herself, ‘She’s got to go.’

‘Phew,’ said Polly Kops, breathing out heavily, ‘another one from Alexander Kops.’ She crammed the letter back in the envelope, as if to pretend she hadn’t opened it, then pushed it into the pocket of her blue candlewick dressing-gown. She was sitting at the kitchen table where lay eleven used cups, a teapot, a milk-bottle, a jar of instant coffee, a heavily cut-at loaf on a breadboard, a packet of butter, opened and attacked, a jar of marmalade and some cheese. She lit a Silk Cut.

Pam Kops, child of the man referred to, was putting hairspray on her hair in front of the kitchen mirror. She said nasally, trying to avoid breathing in too much of the spray, ‘Don’t tell me anything, Mum. I don’t want to be dragged into it.’

‘Tell me that when we’re all in the street due to your father’s manipulations,’ said Polly.

‘What do you think?’ she said to Sue, who had just come in. Sue, head on one side, studied her sister’s hair and said, ‘Bit too punk.’

Sue’s hair was organised bird’s-nest style. This and her swathed dark clothing and startling make-up gave the impression she was an unfortunate, about to be crept up on in a dark alley by Jack the Ripper. Pam had gone for a starker style. Her hair stood up spikily as if she had just come from the hands of outraged French patriots after the Liberation. In spite of the dark clothing, the chalky faces, the heavy eye make-up and the attempt to look wasted and degenerate, their appearance betrayed a long history of wholemeal bread, orange juice and educational trips to the Natural History Museum. They were on art and printing courses but Polly, their mother, was not hopeful that the end of these courses would coincide with either of them being employed as artists or printers. Now, here in her pocket was a letter from Alexander’s solicitors, a heavy-sounding team with offices in the City of London, Paris, Tokyo and New York, stating that in the event of a sale of number 1, Elgin Crescent, their client would expect an equitable share of the proceeds, the house being in his name as well as Polly’s. Polly remembered putting it in his name as well as hers although she couldn’t remember why. Guilt, no doubt. What with her debt to the bank and Alexander’s claim, and his lawyers probably getting a piece of the action, there wouldn’t be much left over from the sale of the property to re-house the family. She’d be lucky if Clancy didn’t make a claim as a live-in lover. She and her children would be stripped to their socks. It was funny, she thought, how men always ended up with the time and money and women with the children. Then when the situation almost inevitably deteriorated into a muddle of debts and mortages and part-time jobs it was generally held that the woman had arrived at this state through muddleheadedness and a poor head for figures, instead of through lack of training and experience, Brownie uniforms, chickenpox, hospital appointments and badly paid jobs which did not cover the outgoings. How to tell all this to Pam and Sue, she wondered. Would they believe her if she did? She decided they knew already, then plodded up the stairs to turn on the video.

As soon as she sat down with her pad and the set running – ‘In Casablanca, human life is cheap’, it said – the phone rang. Arnold Simpson, who had put her on to this job in the first place, as often she wished he hadn’t, since otherwise she might have gone and got another job with proper wages, said to her, ‘Jay Honeycutt’s just a little disturbed he hasn’t heard from you.’

‘Yes,’ said Polly. ‘The trouble is, I haven’t finished yet.’

‘Well, I hear he’s very eager to see what you’ve done –’

‘I thought I might as well finish it first,’ Polly said.

‘OK – right – that’s right,’ agreed Arnold. ‘But – and I don’t want to hurry you – is there any chance you could give him some kind of date? Or maybe a draft, some part of what you’ve done? Well, put it another way, are there any problems? I mean, I’d be very happy to –’

‘Er –’ said Polly. ‘It’s difficult. I’m right in the middle – I mean, I think I can get finished quite soon. Why don’t you,’ she said ingeniously, ‘ring me back in a week or two. Then I ought to be able to give you a progress report.’

‘Er – right – right –’ he said without any certainty. ‘But call me if you need any help. Will you do that?’

Polly promised. She thought Arnold’s mid-Atlantic accent was a bit much, seeing that he’d only ever written a series of sit-coms for Thames TV and a few unfilmed films for Hollywood. She knew she’d only got the job of writing the script for the remake of Casablanca because he was too fed up to do it, which meant that there was something wrong with it. Probably he knew the film would never be made. Still, she ought to have finished it a month ago, and now instead of proceeding with it she put her head in her hands, while on the set Humphrey Bogart said: ‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she had to walk into mine –’ Polly rocked to and fro, saying ‘Oh God, Oh God.’

The three women lecturers from the Simpson Institute of Fine Arts were having a lunchtime meeting, called by Victoria Churchill-Smith, at Tiffin’s Wine Bar, Dover Street, to discuss how to make the Simpson system fairer to women. The subjects to be discussed ranged from the provision of a crèche for staff and students to the sexist questions asked by Professor Hugh Fairclough at the admissions interviews. The bepalmed wine bar, with its overhead fans now static on the ceiling, was full of young execs of both sexes in suits, trying to impress each other, and it was in this atmosphere of tired competitiveness that the women met over Caesar salads and a glass of white wine. They resolved, firstly, to take personal testimony from woman students about the course of their interviews, with particular reference to the questions asked by Professor Fairclough; secondly, to ask for a breakdown on promotions over the past five years, which would almost undoubtedly prove that two men had been promoted to every one woman; and, thirdly, to address a letter to the governing body asking for a crèche. Their last request had already been turned down by the principal, Miss Jennifer Stokes OBE, who had said the children’s nursery in the vicinity of the Simpson ought to be enough. ‘Try getting into it,’ Victoria Churchill-Smith had said. ‘That old Jennifer Stokes is the queen bee – I’m here, you get back, that’s her motto.’

Anna Lombard, although she did not say so, failed to see why the women at the Simpson expected a crèche. Surely if they wanted to have children they should make proper arrangements for them? On a deeper level, where thoughts and emotions fight each other in the swamp, the winners being allowed out, washed and brushed and taught to eat with a knife and fork before being presented to the conscious mind, she knew that her life was being ruined by children – Geoffrey’s – that he had to pay for, especially Harriet, who was a mess, and Julie Thompson’s two noisy sons in her basement. She was tired of paying lip service to the proposition that children and their mothers had to be specially looked after. People shouldn’t have children, she thought, if they were going to need all these concessions.

‘I won’t forget the way they asked me at the interview if I was planning a family,’ said Victoria Churchill-Smith.

‘Not such a stupid question, considering present circumstances,’ said Angela Sims staring over the table at her colleague’s billowing skirt. She had two grown-up children, had never stopped work and was allowed to say these things.

‘Am I taking any more leave than my annual due?’ Victoria asked fiercely. ‘I’m not even taking my full entitlement of maternity leave. This is my decision. It won’t affect anybody else.’

Angela Sims, who knew about broken nights, childhood ailments and absconding au pairs and nannies, said nothing. She knew colleagues at work had a great deal more tolerance for a sick dog or cat or even a hampster on a mercy-dash to the vet than was ever forthcoming for a child with an urgent appointment in the fracture department. People would enquire for ages about the pet. No one wanted to hear about the results of the X-ray or how long you’d had to wait.

Anna Lombard changed the subject to the complaint of the women students that the staff, male and female, spent more time on the men students’ work. She averted her eyes from Victoria’s stomach. One side of her wanted and needed to bear a child, although she flinched from the swelling up, the sore legs, the general pregnant-woman air of being a burdened animal. At the same time a child would turn the marriage into a family. A child would carry Geoffrey’s blood and, if a boy, his name, forever. Although she knew Geoffrey turned to her with relief after the complications of a badly run home and three disorderly children, she sometimes saw herself, not as his companion, lover, producer of an easeful home, but more like a self-supporting mistress, while the real business of life, unbearable as it was, lay elsewhere. Wasn’t the fact that he did not seem to want her to bear his child just a sign that to him she was a less than serious part of his life? At the back of her mind the feeling that the birth of a child would give her more status in Geoffrey’s life warred with the fear that if he had once failed under the burden of domestic life, might he not do it a second time? Not, she told herself, that her situation, if she had a child, would in any way resemble Pauline’s. Pauline had been inefficient, resentful, bringing up three children in the overcrowded flat in Camden Town, where the baby crying and someone’s piano practice prevented Geoffrey from working during the evenings, where a fresh shirt and a pressed suit were by no means instantly available, where Pauline’s anger had spilled over constantly, leading to terrible rows. When she met him, Geoffrey had been desolate.

Whatever his fears, she, Anna, would not let things develop like that. Yet, she reflected, she couldn’t really make a decision as long as Geoffrey didn’t say anything. He had responded to none of her tentative probings about a baby. Either he couldn’t see what she was driving at, or, if he did, he didn’t want to discuss it.

Anna resolved the confusion by strongmindedly refusing apfelstrudel or chocolate cake and saving her companions from weakening. Hungry but resolute they walked back to the Simpson, to which men who had spent their lunchtime in pubs or clubs would return later full of beer, beef, wine and bread and butter pudding. They would unalertly give lectures or conduct the business of the Institute, uneasily and intermittently aware that like some corrupt and slothful old Empire they were subject to incursions by a resolute tribe trained on hard exercise and scanty rations.

Entering the brightly lit building Anna explained that she would have to leave the next moves in their campaign to the others, on account of her heavy workload, caused, as they all knew, by the fact that her immediate superior in the Fine Arts department was a heavy drinker involved in his second divorce; ‘until George sorts himself out –’ she said. They nodded, although, just as they knew about George, they also knew that Anna did not want to have too much to do with the campaign. Angela Sims was married to a surgeon and solid as only a woman can be when she has held down her job while bringing up children at a time when the climate of opinion at the Institute was fairly overtly against it. Victoria Churchill-Smith was having a baby by a research student all knew to be unreliable. Angela had nothing to lose by challenging the establishment and was tough and respected enough to hit back hard if touched, and Victoria, with everything to gain, had to risk it. Anna’s safest position was to support the moves in principle, but stay away from direct action.

Back in her over-bright office, where the white paint and neon quarrelled with the prints on the wall and other touches she had applied to make the room look less severe, Anna sat down at her desk and pulled towards her a pile of students’ essays for marking.

At the same moment Polly Kops, who had been forced to go out and buy new towels, since the old ones were actually tearing as people wiped their faces, was, as she came back from the tube station in the dim light of a November afternoon, accosted in a blurry Irish accent by a drunk young man, sitting, unshaven, in an old anorak and cracked shoes in a cleft in the wall next to the bank. She had just given twenty pence to a young man with a shaven head and camouflage jacket at the entrance to the tube station. She ignored the drunk and the subsequent abuse. She went down the busy street, where the cars and buses already had their lights on, looking at the old coats people were wearing, the pale women with pushchairs, an old man with an old dog, a couple of boys who ought to have been at school, swinging a ghetto blaster. ‘The place is getting worse,’ she thought despondently. ‘What’s going to happen?’ Answering her own question she thought, ‘Nothing.’

There was scaffolding everywhere, old houses were being done over, ripped out, painted up, for use as smart little flats, but the activity seemed to be only on the fringes of a centre of sadness, disillusioned apathy and confusion. When completed the flats would be let off to struggling, besuited young, ‘yes – I am ambitious’ people. But, behind their small white partitioned rooms, pot plants and glass coffee tables still lay the dreaded council flats, huge and ill-lit, where all but the strongest had to watch out for themselves on these long dark nights. And in a block like this, thought Polly Kops, the young woman she called her daughter-in-law for the sake of convenience, though she was not married to her son, and her eighteen-month-old grandson were struggling to live. A young black man twisted and turned on skates through buses and vans watched by two punks in black leather, heavy studs and coloured hair.

Now she had reached the streets where the Council put in Victorian lights, pollarded the trees and generally made graceful gestures to owner-occupiers. She’d nothing to complain about. Two neighbours, as well as Joe Coverdale, had mentioned that her house would be ideal for friends in Chicago or a cousin in Gloucester. She sensed they were afraid she might sell out to a speculator, who would turn the place into flats, or to a sinister man in the arms trade, or to some latter-day Sex Pistol. Naturally they wanted to keep up a full complement of families headed by film distributors, the chairmen of public boards, bankers and other like-minded persons with children and au pairs. The place was a laager, now, and you had to feel confident about the family in the next wagon.

Polly simply intended to sell to the highest bidder. She entered her threatened home, picking a number of bills of the redder than red kind from the mat, her head as usual flooded with the logistics of the move. The girls were on courses in central London – tricky to move too far out since, for one thing, they might take to never coming home. Val, Rufus’s mother, lived on the nearby Thackeray estate, another reason for not going too far; Clancy would probably leave if put down in some leafy avenue in Greenford; and, for herself, she had to stay near the business. Perhaps you couldn’t call a Saturday junk stall in the market a business, but, after all, it was the only business she had. As to Clancy’s departure down the leafy avenue, she thought, hearing him thud down to the landing at the top of the stairs, glancing up and seeing him standing there, looking menacing – well, perhaps that departure would be no bad thing. There’d been more of the secret phone calls. Was he just organising a deal she wasn’t supposed to know about in case she asked for money? Was it a woman? She was sure he wasn’t planning a surprise party for her, anyway. When she found out what it was about, she wouldn’t like it. It was all a far cry from the old days – the love affair, the resumed love affair ten years later, each of which events, she reflected, had left her with a child to support. Swaying on the landing Clancy demanded, ‘What happened to my Belize T-shirt?’

‘What?’ she said.

‘It’s pink,’ he said.

‘What happened to that cheque for three hundred pounds you were supposed to sign over to me?’ she responded. ‘Look at these – this one’s a final, final from the electricity. If I don’t take the money there in cash in twenty-four hours we’ll be singing round the piano by candle-light tomorrow evening. I’m not joking, Clancy.’

She sat down on the bottom step of the stairs with her back to him. For all she knew he would hurl himself down at her and kick her in the back, but she didn’t care. The house being full of young people, why should Clancy not think he could be another teenager? A more unpleasant one, admittedly. But by all the tokens he was closer to being a child. He played the guitar. He enjoyed messing about with computers. He enjoyed ping-pong, space invaders and, as long as he emerged as the best player, football. At twenty, even thirty, few people would have condemned this lively, mischievous, gifted child for his mistakes. He was promising. Now he was older, lines had appeared on his face, grimmer times had come and the promise had never been kept. And as Clancy had less fun his resentment grew and his charm faded. He was becoming bitter, and it didn’t suit him.

Ignoring the question about money he fluttered the pink T-shirt about. ‘But what happened to this T-shirt?’

‘You’re wearing a suit!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s new!’

She looked at him with a horror she couldn’t explain to herself. It was grey, fairly expensive, she’d never seen it before. He wore a blue striped shirt and a tie the same colour as the suit. She peered up. His black slip-on shoes looked new, too. She was so frightened she got up and went downstairs into the kitchen.

Pam was in there. She opened the fridge door, closed it, then opened it and looked inside again, as if it might have filled magically with pizzas. Clancy came in with the T-shirt and shouted, ‘What are you planning to do about this?’

Polly said, ‘If you can buy yourself a complete new set of clothes you can buy yourself a new T-shirt. How can you do that – with all these bills to pay?’ She began to chop onions. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘It’d be madness to start pouring money into this place,’ Clancy said. ‘You could go on for ever, like throwing money down the drain. Before I’d been here five minutes I was replacing the immersion heater, then this, then that, then the other.’

Sue came in, saying, ‘The LEB went down All Saints Road to turn off the power and they had to have two police vans to protect them. They thought there’d be a riot.’

‘Well, they won’t have any trouble here,’ Polly said. She stopped chopping the onions, ran upstairs, got an envelope from her bag in the hall, wrote a cheque and stamped the envelope. She carried envelopes and stamps in her bag all the time, and had become an expert in leaving the bills until the last possible moment, and knowing how long the cheques would take to bounce. She went quickly to the pillar box and posted the gas bill. She came back and went on chopping the onions. Clancy was still in the kitchen.

‘I’d better finish that script before the snooty purchasers start tramping round the house,’ she said, half to herself. ‘They’ll pay something when I’ve finished. It’ll help with the removal.’

‘What removal?’ asked Clancy.

‘I’ve got to sell the house,’ she said. ‘That means moving.’ She had said this often before.

‘You could do with somewhere smaller, in better condition,’ Clancy said as if it were a new theme. ‘Leave a bit of money over.’

‘You must be joking,’ said Polly. ‘Not with Alexander claiming a percentage.’

‘Tell him to get stuffed,’ Clancy said.

‘Get stuffed yourself,’ muttered Polly.

‘Don’t you fucking talk to me like that,’ Clancy said viciously. ‘You keep a civil tongue in your head.’

Hands on hips she faced him. ‘I don’t have to do anything, Clancy,’ she said. She knew he might hit her but didn’t care. He turned round to leave the room. There was a big thump from some way off.

‘I wonder if that’s a bomb,’ said Polly, counting up who was in and who was out. Had Val told her what she was doing this evening? Clancy went out of the room. Polly went on cutting onions. She put them in a pan.

‘I think I should go to another school,’ Margaret said, coming in with some books under her arm.

‘They’re usually on strike,’ Mrs Kops said.

‘That’s the point,’ Margaret said. ‘Can I go to another school?’

‘If you can think of anywhere, let me know,’ Polly said, throwing mince in with the onions, hardly knowing what she was doing. Clancy was artfully avoiding a full confrontation, even though he couldn’t bring himself to be normal. He was also turning a blind eye to any domestic problems. She wondered if he had damaged his brain with drugs or was just plain selfish. She almost wished she had been blown up herself but went on cooking supper without noticing her teeth were clenched.

I felt the gap between us widening; there seemed to be nothing I could do to close it. It was like a nightmare, where you fall and fall, scratch and scrabble to haul yourself up again. But you can’t. I tried harder in the ways you do – I joined a club and spent two lunchtimes a week exercising. I worked on my appearance and bought disastrously expensive sweaters and skirts, shoes and stockings. I abolished the rota system where we cooked supper on alternate evenings and instead did it myself every night. I scamped the students’ essays and the work on my lectures because I didn’t care. What was the point of a successful career if, in some way, it was affecting my home life? I did everything a woman can do to restore peace and harmony in her home, regain the love of her husband. Was there another woman? How could there have been? Geoffrey’s life was exactly as before and in any case women know these things even before they happen. Meanwhile I refused to extend my hours at the Simpson and hoped that the refusal would mean that they wouldn’t offer me the full lectureship which was going to be available shortly. I didn’t want to have to make a decision about promotion and extra duties while things were so uncertain. I needed all my time to concentrate on Geoffrey while pretending not to. Christmas was all-important to me now – that would be when I could reclaim my husband from wherever he had gone.

Polly Kops had accidentally turned the video of Casablanca over to the one o’clock news while reaching for a pen and found herself watching men struggling and cars on fire in Belfast. Outside, a November drizzle came down over the trees. She wondered why Ingrid hadn’t sent a more effective message to Bogart at the railway station when her husband had suddenly turned up.

‘Richard. I cannot go with you or ever see you again. You must not ask why. Just believe that I love you. Go, my darling, and God bless you.’

Surely she could have made it a little bit plainer? What stopped her from going to the station and whispering the story in his ear? This lack of common sense had caused a lot of trouble and the making of a film Polly now heartily wished she’d never heard of. Well, those were the days when women were expected to be a bit dim-witted. But then Ingrid was a little bit too fast at covering the fact that she’d known Rick before they met in the American café Casablanca. ‘Who’s Rick?’ she says, quick as a flash, pretending to her husband she’s never known Rick. Too experienced, Polly thought, but then she was married to a Czech with a Hungarian surname, so who knew who was up to what?

Then there was Rick, who couldn’t go back to the USA for reasons never properly explained, and then proposed to go anyway – they seemed a fishy sort of trio, Polly thought, and she ought to know.

Then there was the fact that Bergman was obviously a lot tougher than she was pretending to be. She was working with the Resistance – she’d been on the run. Polly decided to rewrite the whole thing. Bogart, Ingrid and her patriot husband would all go off arm-in-arm to fight the foe. To preserve the romance one of them would have to die. Honeycutt mightn’t like it, but he’d have to put up with it. And in the meantime she numbly watched a real African dying on TV while revolving bills, the latest letter from Alexander’s solicitors and Rufus’s cough through her brain. Rearranging the simple affairs of the denizens of Casablanca was no problem at all.

Polly had been up since six sorting out her goods for the Saturday stall, then gone round to collect a couple of pictures from a woman in Peckham who’d heard of her from a friend. The washing machine had then broken down; she’d had to take the money for the electricity bill before last to the office in cash; she’d been watching Casablanca on the video for an hour-and-a-half and all she’d had to eat was a cup of tea and a bun. Someone would have to go to the laundrette before nightfall, and it would probably be her. She planned a nap to sustain her and got instead Joe Coverdale, let in, presumably, by Margaret who was watching TV in the basement, having been sent home from school at 10.30.

‘Joe,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you got a phone?’

‘I have – yours is temporarily disconnected.’

‘They must’ve caught up with me,’ said Polly. ‘Still, you’d better leave. Clancy’s in a rotten mood and I’m busy.’

‘Just came round to tell you we’ve been successful – just exchanged contracts on number 22.’

‘Pity I’m moving so soon,’ Polly said. ‘Joe – I wish you’d clear off. I told you I never liked what you did to Kate. I mean – you’re all right. You wisely married money when it became unsafe to be poor. You’ve made the right move at the right time and we all see the point. And if it’s a bit boring – well, there’s a price for everything. You may feel the blood’s travelling a bit slowly round your body, and the light’s a bit dimmer these days, but at least you’re safe. Also you aren’t going around wrecking women’s lives for pleasure any more, which has to be a plus. You had a vice – women’s pain – just like heroin. Now you’re off it the world may never seem the same again, but that’s life as a reclaimed addict. Anyway, I can’t help you. You won’t meet Mick Jagger here. Pam and Sue won’t show you their garters –’

‘For God’s sake, Polly. You’re extremely nervous. You’re going over the top,’ he told her. Then, sympathetically, ‘Are things so very hard?’

‘Everybody in Casablanca has problems,’ she said. ‘Joe – I’m worn out. Please leave. I’d ring the cops if I had a phone.’

‘Same old Polly,’ he said, standing up. ‘I hope things start improving for you soon.’ In the doorway he said, ‘I loved her very deeply, Kate, you know.’

Polly shouted ‘Clear off,’ weakly and tiredly threw her pad at him, but it fell short just as he left and hit the floor in a shower of loose pages. When these characters from staunch and incorruptible parts of the country like Yorkshire went wrong they really went wrong. It was probably better to get inoculated with deception and ambiguity early than meet these items later on in life and go down with the full dose of self-corruption, petty ambition, ruthlessness and greed. She’d met Joe Coverdale first when he was an unhappy civil servant helplessly wrecking his own marriage. He was tougher now; his illusions had gone. Come to that, she’d known Clancy when he’d been a dedicated musician and Alexander when he’d been a hero of the revolution instead of a merchant banker.

Time had taken its toll of all of them. As for her, she’d never had anything to betray, like her Yorkshire principles, or music, or the revolution, which was one of the good things about being a woman of her generation. You weren’t expected to be a success, make a mark or stand up for the right. She’d just taken up various men and had children. Now she was like the British Empire, done for but still dealing with the consequences of the past; the men had gone with the money, the children remained. A relief, in a way, thought Polly, not to have to set yourself up as an icon for others to look at, then betray your own standards and justify it, or say you hadn’t. She felt quite cheered, and turned back to the script. The phone being off, Arnold couldn’t call her, worrying about her wrecking his credit with Honeycutt. She was back in the timeless world of war-torn Algeria. They were singing the Marseillaise in the bar, now. It was grand. It always was.

She went on scribbling for a bit, then went downstairs and sorted out a few more black plastic rubbish bags full of old suits, men’s shoes and lampshades, a collection of items which had not been improved by being first squashed under four dining-room chairs, and then neglected for five weeks. The small pile of good items – a rug, an art nouveau lamp and a Molyneux dress – in one corner, compared with the ten sacks of stuff, from false teeth to old saucepans, destined for the War on Want, was slightly discouraging. Nevertheless she had a call to make at Redcliffe Gardens that afternoon, later, and hoped, like someone panning for gold, that there she’d get a better proportion of yellow dust to dross.

Her system was quite simple. One week she took her van to a network of streets in almost any part of London where the houses were over a hundred years old. Then she delivered xeroxed leaflets at the houses stating that she would buy items, or take away discarded items free and would return in a week’s time. A week later she returned and rang doorbells and knocked on knockers. Half the people were out, the other half, mostly, had nothing for her. But some had items they wanted to sell, and to encourage them, she took items she didn’t want. She saw now that the whole world had always run on the basis of people wanting things they hadn’t got and trying to get rid of the ones they had. Meanwhile, she heard bits of people’s life stories and tried to refuse to buy false teeth. In this way, she got very tired and made a bit of a living. One or two things assisted her – she wasn’t obviously greedy, didn’t bully, didn’t get annoyed when she wasn’t handed priceless items by ignorant owners. Her biggest advantage was negative. She was no threat. Nearly everyone would trust a middle-aged woman on her own with an old van, let her into the house to look at things.

Upstairs, Clancy Goldstein was sitting by the phone on the top landing, waiting for a call he would never get, since the phone was off. He was depressed and angry, dropping ash from a roll-up on the floor beside his chair and thinking, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’

At the Simpson Institute Anna Lombard was packing her papers into a briefcase to take home and work on after she had put the casserole of pheasant in the oven. With efficient movements she ordered her pictures and notes and dropped the folders into her case, took the stairs down, in case she met Victoria Churchill-Smith in the lift and got held up by a long chat on strategies towards the crèche or some other campaign topic. As her heels clacked down the stairs she thought, I can’t deal with all that while I’ve got this crisis on my hands. She felt Geoffrey was wilfully drifting further and further away from her, letting the current take him until in the end he would not just be out of her reach but off on some lonely separate journey of his own. At the bottom of the stairs she dashed past Victoria, muttering that she was late, and got into the car, heading for Sainsbury’s. She had given up asking Geoffrey to help her with the shopping on Saturdays. Now, she did it by herself on Friday evenings, so that Geoffrey could relax over the weekend.

On Saturday morning Polly was standing by her stall, tired but content in the watery sunshine. By 9.30 that morning she had shifted half the haul picked up in Redcliffe Gardens, to other dealers. She had got more on the colour TV than she expected but was suffering from dealer’s angst in case the brass lamp, hardly dented, was worth more than the £50 she had let it go for. Meanwhile the large plastic bagful of 1950s clip-together beads, poppits, which had come from a very unsavoury bag of junk given to her by an old man, was selling like hot cakes to girls keen to look like Debbie Reynolds in her heyday. In addition she had a nice heap of embroidered satin cushions, made by a woman who had sold them to her at 7.30 that morning, also ten Hardy Amies hats, two brass clocks, a selection of old earrings which no one ever wanted, a crocodile handbag, three pairs of riding boots, three pairs of tiny kid boots, a set of encyclopaedias, a lamp with a pink silk shade and a few opera cloaks hanging on a rail beside the stall. Later that legendary market figure, the man from the production department of a TV company, came up and bought the tiny kid boots for a series about Victorian orphans. Next to her, the second-hand-book seller looked at her enviously. The Nigerian woman behind her, who was selling amber, congratulated her. By midday she had £300 in her pocket and sauntered off, leaving the stall in her daughters’ care.

Susie McLintock was standing at a stall selling badges and posters for the Greenham Common women. Polly gave her a pound and said ‘How’s it going?’

‘I’ve only been here for ten minutes,’ Susie said. ‘I’m out shopping really only the woman who runs it had been standing here since eight and she wanted to go off for a pee and a cup of coffee.’

Polly shook the collection tin, which was only half full.

‘People aren’t that interested,’ said Susie. ‘Women wrestling in mud has more appeal than women demonstrating in mud, somehow.’

‘You should have a raffle,’ Polly remarked.

Another woman in an anorak and moonboots came up and said, ‘I’m back – do you want to get away?’

Susie picked up her shopping basket, full of vegetables and fruit, and said to Polly, ‘Do you want to come to the pub?’ As they walked along Susie’s son saw them as he skated up the road and came after them. ‘Shoes?’ he said. Susie turned round and gave him some notes from her purse. ‘Make sure they’re waterproof, this time,’ she called after the skating figure. ‘I hope he does,’ she said. They stood outside the pub in their coats, drinking lager. A woman came up and talked to Susie about the protest about the hospital closure, the leafleting about the presence in the neighbourhood of a rapist. ‘The police are beginning to do something now,’ she said.

‘There was a helicopter beaming lights into our garden for half an hour last night,’ Polly said. ‘It frightened me. It frightened our cat. They could have seen us picking our noses.’

‘Makes you think,’ said the other woman. Susie pulled a file from the bottom of her shopping basket and said, ‘If you’re including public health in that course you’re teaching do you want these comparative figures about the developing countries? Take the whole file and copy what you want.’

‘I’ll let you have it back by Tuesday,’ said the woman. ‘I’d better go. I think Fred’s finally coming round to look at the lights.’

‘I saw him in the Warwick half an hour ago,’ Susie reported. ‘I hope he turns up.’

‘So do I,’ the other said with feeling. ‘It’s been three weeks now.’

‘I doubt it,’ Susie said, when the woman had gone.

‘She could be lucky,’ Polly told her.

‘So – how’s it all going?’ asked Susie.

Polly shrugged. ‘As well as can be expected. It’s all my own fault. I’m the author of my own downfall and so on and so forth.’

Susie looked slightly puzzled, seemed about to ask her something and then paused. She said, ‘What’s that terrible woman next to you doing to Julie Thompson?’

‘Anna Lombard? What’s happening?’ asked Polly.

‘Well, apparently she’s trying to get her out. She appeared yesterday evening, just as Julie was putting the tea on the table, said had Julie thought about the offer of cash they’d made a year or so before and started talking vaguely about the condition of the place being unsuitable for children. Said she’d seen a big crack in the building. Then she went as white as a sheet, Julie said, and muttered something about thinking it over and suddenly went away. Julie’s very worried about it because of course she knows if they can get the place declared unfit she’ll have to go. Also the woman seemed a bit mad, she says. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen.’

‘I think it’s a one-off by Anna Lombard,’ said Polly. ‘Of course they want the flat, it’d add £50,000 to the price of the house. But I don’t think they’re the sort to go in for serious harassment. And there’s nothing much wrong with the building. If there were they’d have scaffolding round it in one minute. They never stop nagging me about my roof. It’s an obsession with them. How’s Greg?’

‘He says he wants to move in with us.’

‘Don’t do it,’ Polly advised.

‘I wasn’t planning to,’ said Susie, giving her a neutral look. ‘How are Pam and Sue and Margaret? Nice picture of Val in the local paper posed against the graffiti, holding Rufus, next to the caretaker holding a dead rat in each hand.’

‘She never told me she was in the local paper,’ Polly said. ‘I must order a glossy copy and send it to Rufus’s grandmother, Lady Kops of Kensington, W.8.’

Susie put down her glass, picked up her shopping and said, ‘I must go. The washing’s still in the laundrette.’

As Polly left she saw Susie’s son skate past her, carrying a plastic bag, signalling success. Why hadn’t Susie asked after Clancy, she thought, then forgot about it. The day wore on, the pale sunshine failed to disguise the weariness of the crowds pushing by the stalls. Now the summer tourists had gone, with their money and their holiday mood, the natives looked more obviously tired and fed up. Standing there during the last hour of business, more on principle than in the hope of selling anything, she began to review again the string of events and decisions which had somehow stranded her on these shores, middle-aged and struggling to keep her feet against the incoming tide, selling old items to weary people about to be engulfed themselves. She said to Kate Mulvaney, who came past with a large frozen turkey, like stone in a plastic bag, ‘If there’s anything left after the sale of the house, once the bank loan’s paid off and Alexander’s done his worst, I’m going to get a bloody shop and become a proper dealer. I know all about it now – the family’ll have to squash in over the shop, as many of them as the place will take, and the others’ll have to shift for themselves. What else can I do?’

‘Nothing,’ said Katie. ‘But I can’t see how Alexander can get anything.’

‘It went in our joint names when I bought it years ago, God knows why,’ said Polly. ‘I think I felt guilty about what I was doing to him. I told him if all failed he’d always have a home. He told me to get stuffed at the time, in the ’sixties style, but of course it’s the ’eighties now. He’s coming round in a top hat twirling his moustache. The problem is that he’ll have a good solicitor, even a barrister, and I doubt if I can even produce the right paperwork to prove I need legal aid.’

Kate looked drawn. ‘You all right?’ asked Polly.

Kate said doubtfully, ‘Yes – yes. I think so.’ Then she went off to get something to go with the turkey.

If he gets me, he gets me, Polly thought of Alexander. Overhead the motorway drummed traffic along to Oxford. She thought she saw Clancy talking to a man by the café, mimicking the nervy energy of his youth, now somehow out of synch with the movements of the inner man. She turned to answer an enquiry from a passer-by thinking Clancy ought to be leading a less uncertain life, we all should be. When she looked back, he was gone. ‘Polly!’ said Kate. Beside her was a bearded man. Suddenly her blue eyes were very blue in her brown face. ‘It’s Dermot,’ she announced. ‘Dermot – this is Polly.’ They shook hands. ‘Dermot’s just back from Africa – he’s staying with us. Come round for a drink tonight.’

Polly nodded, wondering who the man was. With any luck, unlike Kate’s former husband he would be able to contend with a woman whose preoccupation had been with the unfeminine subject of virtue – not domestic virtue, but general virtue. Still, how could he have been expected to cope with a wife who was insouciant about the toys on the floor, was never petty, jealous or greedy, and saw them both as moral beings in a moral universe? She made life impossible. After him had come the opportunistic Joe Coverdale, who had fallen in love with her, but out again fairly quickly. Probably, like her husband, he could not take Kate’s fatally unattractive combination of Irish housekeeping and belief in her own soul, a terrible sign of spiritual pride in a woman, and about as seductive to the average man as a glass eye or a wooden leg. But here she was, Kate, after all that, having somehow managed to qualify as a doctor, doing good all over the place, a credit to herself and all the labouring women in the world. Irish life being what it was, Polly reflected, Dermot was probably some kind of ninth cousin to Kate and might tolerate her improbable belief in her own spiritual autonomy. In Polly’s world, where husbands and fathers, as in a science fiction novel, tended to dematerialise after a few years, re-materialising some years later in Tudor houses in the home counties or with heiresses in the USA, and where women consequently had to reorganise and lead independent but knife-edge lives between the labour market and the fracture clinic, the sight of Kate was a tonic.

She went on packing her unsold goods into her battered white van and, as if to confirm her view that men have magical powers, one minute they’re watching Match of the Day in their socks, the next they’re running advertising agencies in New York, saw Clancy seeming to hurry towards her, then disappear into a cluster of stalls. Or perhaps he ran up a tree and was clinging to a branch and gibbering at her, she vaguely thought, then slammed the doors of the van shut and went home for a cup of tea and a sit down, before her nerves got any worse.

As she went into the kitchen she found the table blocked by tall girls in black, all clustered like a flock protecting a wounded bird round a plump girl with frizzed pale brown hair, who was crying.

Unnoticed, Polly made her tea, hearing only her daughter Sue say, ‘What a bitch. She acts like the princess in a fairy story but she’s more like the wicked stepmother.’

Upstairs Polly, with her sore feet on the sofa, was jotting down a few lines on a pad – ‘As I suspected, you’re a rank sentimentalist,’ said Claude Rains, who was obviously the only sensible person in Casablanca – when Pam put her head round the door and said, ‘Mum, can Harriet stay for the rest of the weekend?’

Polly said, ‘Who is she?’

‘Harriet Lombard,’ explained Pam. ‘You know – she’s the daughter of Thingy Lombard next door, always hurrying down the path with his briefcase – looks like Jim Hacker in Yes, Prime Minister – he’s married to this beautiful woman with the gold hair, like Princess Diana, the one who’s always ringing about the roof. You know. Anyway, our science master’s brother lives with her mum, in Bromley. But it’s only a semi and there’s three of them, Harriet’s brother and sister, then her mum, then this social worker who’s our science master’s brother – so finally she had a row with her mother and came dashing up here to ask if she could move in with her dad and Princess Di, because she’s at the Slade and there’s no room for her to do her paintings or anything and they’ve got this big house, the Lombards – so, I’m coming up the street with Fiona and we find her leaning against a tree outside their house, sobbing her eyes out. Fiona recognises her because they used to go to the same primary school years ago, before she moved – Fiona – so we asked her in and said what’s the matter –’

‘Well, look,’ said Polly. ‘As long as it’s only –’

‘I told you, just the weekend –’

‘All right, I’ve been on my feet all day –’

‘Well, thanks Mum,’ said Pam.

Polly yawned and looked back at the pad. With any luck, she could leave for Katie’s before Clancy came back from wherever he had gone. If he decided to come with her, he could fatally damage the evening. He’d probably be drunk when he arrived: if not, he’d be drunk after fifteen minutes at Kate’s. He’d then roll joints in front of the children and offer them drags, droning on about the utter harmlessness and life-enhancing qualities of grass, a statement which, with any luck, would be received with scepticism by young people observing his wrecked face and distressed frame of mind.

Further remarks about drug abuse being the hallmark of the cool, laid back, unselfseeking and loving would no doubt be treated with similar scepticism, coming from the lips of a man plainly gripped by malice and hatred as some are gripped by arthritis. Still, how she’d loved him, she thought. Now she wondered what had come over her. If it wasn’t for him, Polly thought, having arrived in her bedroom, to stare self-pityingly at her own face in the glass, picking up the huge crack in the wall behind her, background and comment on the state of her life and appearance – if it wasn’t for him I’d be Lady Kops, living in Mayfair with children at Oxford and Cambridge, greeting the Chairman of the Board in the immaculate hall, under my Hockney, on top of my Carrara marble tiles, ‘How nice to see you Sir Rodney, such a pity about the mine incident in Bolivia, which killed ninety, and the consequent hiccup in production.’ Contemplating the alternative worlds a woman can imagine when working out what would have happened if she’d said ‘I love you’ to one man or another, Polly changed her tights and hopped out through the garden to Kate’s, thankful that she’d evaded Clancy.

It was peaceful now, for the builders who were taking every other increasing-by-twenty-five-per-cent-per-annum residence to pieces, had gone for the weekend. The sky shone with the lurid glow of the reflected neon, but she could still see the stars up there, through the haze. There was grass under her feet, she spotted her cat stalking her, concealing itself under bushes, leaping out and skittering off to find more cover.

Kate was stirring a pot on the stove in the kitchen when Polly banged on the window, calling, ‘Don’t worry. It’s only me.’

‘Sit down and have a drink, Polly,’ said Kate, who was wearing a woolly dress with an apron over it. ‘The others are all upstairs but it’s not going well.’

‘Dermot, I suppose?’ Polly said politely.

‘Mm,’ Kate said. ‘I’m in a predicament, really.’

‘I’m assuming he’s an old childhood friend and distant relative and several of your uncles were in Sinn Fein together,’ said Polly.

‘Ireland’s a small place,’ Kate pointed out.

‘I imagine that the heavy hand of the Irish church is also involved,’ said Polly.

Kate handed Polly a glass of red wine and sat down at the kitchen table with her hand in her pale brown bird’s-nest hair. ‘That’s accurate,’ she said.

‘Is that a pheasant you’re cooking?’ Polly asked.

‘It’s supposed to be a celebration. The children aren’t behaving particularly well to Dermot. It’s a bribe.’ She paused. ‘I’m no good at it. It’s Patrick and Ajax, really. Siobhan doesn’t care. She’s got herself a temporary job at the Royal Court until she can get a job – forty applications she’s sent in and only four replies, three of them flat turn-downs and one interview that didn’t work. Anyway, she’s working all hours and doesn’t worry about a thing. Well, Dermot’s married, you see, and a devout man. And I’m still married and a devout woman.’

‘Your husband’s divorced, remarried and had a two-year-old,’ Polly said bluntly, ‘but you’re still married to him. That’s Catholic logic is it? How’s Kevin, by the way?’

‘Long Kesh,’ Kate said of her brother. ‘You’re right about me being Irish. But at least he’s safe. They can’t kill him or maim him there.’

‘Let’s hope not,’ Polly said without confidence. ‘Anyway,’ she said, also without confidence, ‘you don’t have to get married, do you? I mean, things can go on much as they are.’

‘We’re committing what’s known as mortal sin,’ Kate said. ‘And if we can’t sincerely declare we’ll give up, we can’t receive absolution and can’t go to mass.’

‘What about if you get married in a registry office,’ said Polly, ‘and some liberal priest gives you a blessing – that’d be all right, wouldn’t it?’

‘We don’t have handy compromises like that in the Catholic church,’ Kate told her.

Polly knew this anyway. ‘Well –’ she said.

‘Anyway, Dermot doesn’t want to hurt his wife. They’ve been married for fifteen years – he’s been away most of the time, but it’s a small town and a divorce would upset her position. There’s Irish respectability to be considered. Still, I’m lucky – I’ve got a lot–’

‘And a terrible conscience,’ Polly added.

‘What about you?’ Kate said.

Polly shrugged. ‘Same old story,’ she told Kate. ‘Too many children, too little common sense, a lack of steady effort, sense of responsibility; a general belief that the sun will always shine on Polly Kops. Now I’ve dragged us all into a pit. Sell up, fresh start, that’s all I can do.’

In Kate’s sitting-room an uncongenial party had got together. Kate’s sister, in a grey dress and grey stockings, was talking to Patrick, Kate’s son, on a sofa by the window, while Patrick cast odd sharp looks at Dermot O’Brien, who was playing chess with a wooden-faced Ajax. As they came in Ajax took a piece of Dermot’s from the board, with a vengeful air. Dermot looked up and said, ‘He’s well ahead.’

‘You’re trying to lose,’ Ajax told him.

‘You must be joking,’ said Dermot, turning back and moving a piece, whereupon Ajax said, ‘Now tell me you’re not playing to lose.’

‘That’s perfectly all ri— Oh Christ,’ said Dermot, looking more closely at the board. Then he bent closer, looked harder and said, ‘Yes, that’s it, then.’

Ajax turned his eyes up to the ceiling and sighed. ‘I told you I couldn’t play,’ Dermot said.

‘You were right,’ Ajax said.

Dermot joined Kate and Polly. Kate said to Polly, ‘How are the children? And Rufus?’

‘Val’s fighting the Council about the conditions on the William Thackeray Estate. I wish she’d marry Max and go up to Cambridge. Living conditions couldn’t be as bad there as they are here. She’s sticking it out to get this degree but I wonder if it’s worth it, considering what both of them have to put up with. That bloody place isn’t safe. They have two muggings a week, on average. The lights are always smashed so you can’t see what’s coming up behind you. It’s like Dodge City. Everyone’s been given a Chubb lock as well as an ordinary one because of the break-ins, but the doors are like matchwood – it’s shocking. I grew up in a sweetshop off Brixton Market and I can remember robberies, lads in gangs, half-bricks chucked, people even carried razors, but, I don’t know, this seems worse. Maybe it’s my age. The trouble is these estates are so isolated. At least in my day as long as you got out of some streets and never went into an alley you were OK. These things happen on estates, where people live. They’ve got to go there. I suppose Val’s young enough to cope, if she’s lucky.’

‘At that age you think you’re immortal,’ Dermot said.

‘Another year and she’ll have her qualification,’ Polly said. ‘I don’t know. I sometimes look at Rufus and tell myself not to get too attached to him. In two years’ time he could disappear into the wild blue yonder. A disagreement between Max and Val and bingo, that’s it, Val’s off with Rufus and it’s as if he’d never been. I can’t imagine why I’m demanding all this stability from them, when God knows, I’ve never produced any stability for anybody around. Has it ever struck you that having to grow up is a mean trick someone played on you?’

The phone rang and it was Polly’s daughter, Margaret, sounding shaky. ‘Can you come back, Mum?’ she said. ‘I think there’s someone prowling around in the garden. I keep hearing these noises and the cat’s just dashed in through the cat-door, looking scared.’

‘Right,’ Polly said. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told the others. ‘There’s a rapist breaking into houses from the back. I expect you’ve heard. They can’t catch him. I should have thought before.’

‘Why don’t you both come back?’ suggested Kate.

Polly said, ‘I’ll try,’ and left with Dermot, who offered to come with her in case there was a real prowler outside in the garden when she got back.

‘Katie was worried about that man while we were in Africa,’ Dermot said as they crossed the grass. ‘She knew her sister would be as careful as she was, if not more so, but she felt her magical mother’s presence was required. Still, she’s back now, and that’s that.’ He sounded gloomy.

‘A decent housekeeper,’ suggested Polly, who was in fact beginning to despise herself for constantly offering brilliant but impossible solutions to the Mulvaney predicament. More truthfully, she said, ‘Well, I suppose not. It’s a dream really. Who’s going to handle the normal business of the household, plus knowing that peculiar thing that happens to the cistern which means you have to kick it three times and replace the Elastoplast on the joint unless you want a plumber to charge £300 and dig up all the floorboards and who’s going to make sure the homework gets done and remember to ask why the history teacher’s suddenly teaching ‘A’ level biology, and make sure people go to the dentist from time to time and know they come up in a funny rash if they eat this and that? Then there’s checking for drugs, anorexia, pregnancy etc., which any child can conceal until they suddenly collapse in a bus or have a baby at King’s Cross tube station – you can’t cope with it yourself. You’d have to pay someone else a million a year to try.’

In the doorway a tall, anxious figure with red hair streaming down her back was peering cautiously down the garden at them. ‘I think he’s gone,’ Margaret said.

‘If he was ever here in the first place, which I doubt,’ said Polly. To Dermot she said, ‘Thanks for coming. Have you got time for a drink?’

He accepted saying, ‘I ought to be getting back.’

‘Five minutes,’ said Polly. ‘No harm in that.’

Upstairs, the video of Casablanca had been playing. Margaret, to take her mind off her fears, must have been driven to showing it. ‘I don’t know what’s right any more. You’ll have to think for both of us, for all of us,’ said Ingrid. Polly turned it off, shuffled her papers together and threw them behind the table in the window. She poured a drink for herself and Dermot. Margaret settled down with a Coke. She found herself talking about the Casablanca project. To her surprise he took it fairly seriously. ‘If they buy it,’ he said, ‘your problems are virtually over.’

‘That’s what I keep on saying,’ Margaret told him. Polly, a woman incapable of believing anybody but herself, looked at them incredulously. ‘Things aren’t like that,’ she said. ‘You’d better believe me, Margaret.’

‘You always think you’re right,’ said Margaret. ‘I’m going to bed. Are you in, now, Mum?’

‘Yes, I’m in,’ said Polly.

‘Take care about the rapist,’ Margaret warned.

‘What makes you think, the way I’m feeling, that I wouldn’t kill him?’ asked Polly.

Dermot was looking at her kindly. She said, ‘Honestly, Dermot, if you’ve spent so long in different countries among people with completely different religions, don’t you wonder why you and Kate are letting yourself be crucified by all these rules and regulations?’

‘I don’t suppose I’d be there, facing all that suffering, trying to help, if it weren’t for my own rules and customs,’ Dermot told her. ‘I can’t accept one bit of my faith and discard the rest because it’s inconvenient.’

‘I suppose not,’ Polly said. ‘Still, I’d have thought you and Kate deserved a little happiness.’

‘So do I,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t make the rules.’

‘Well, the rules aren’t my speciality,’ Polly said.

‘As well as telling you what to do,’ he told her, ‘they do lay down guide-lines about how other people should behave towards you.’ Then he said, ‘I’d better go. If I go round by the street I may be able to stop Patrick from letting my tyres down.’

‘Does he?’ she asked.

‘Some extensive scratches of the kind made by keys have recently appeared on the paintwork – put down to local vandals, but I’m afraid I saw him doing it out of the lavatory window.’

‘You didn’t say anything?’ asked Polly.

Dermot stood up. ‘I didn’t think it would help. But now I suspect he’s planning another assault – if I could catch him it might be a chance to open, as they say, a dialogue.’

‘Siobhan’ll open a dialogue with him shortly, I should think,’ Polly said. ‘All you’ll have to do is put cotton wool in your ears.’

After he left she wondered what he’d meant about rules also laying down how other people should behave towards you. It sounded like one of those gifted analytical things total strangers say on trains, just before getting out at Watford. Perhaps it didn’t mean much, but it sounded as if it did. The thought made her feel a bit sick. If she started asking herself who’d been entitled to do what to whom, there’d be no end to it. At that moment she heard the door open and Clancy’s steps coming upstairs. She dreaded the confrontation and, as she prepared for it, heard Dermot’s words in her head.

I was furious when I heard that Harriet, instead of going back to Bromley, had moved in next door for the weekend. I didn’t object to the Kops girls, although I couldn’t imagine where their lives were going under the guidance of their mother, who, I must say, I did dislike. She seemed such a silly woman, always dressed in that untidy, out-of-date hippie style, all huge fur coat and boots and flying scarves. She ran some kind of a market stall, had, in fact, approached some friends of ours in Camden for junk, I knew it was her from the description. She’d apparently stood on the step haggling for an Edwardian enamel bowl and jug they no longer wanted – ridiculous, they’d said. It was obvious she couldn’t keep up the house and all I wanted was for the sale to come soon, so that more reasonable people could move in. I’d spoken to her once about a fellow art historian at the Simpson who wanted a house in the locality for himself, his wife and two children. She’d looked at me vaguely and said she’d bear it in mind but it was quite obvious she didn’t intend to. Still, Polly Kops, I thought, when the crunch comes you’ll be asking for their names all right, no doubt about it. Apparently she’d once been married to Sir Alexander Kops, the banker, before his father died and he took over his father’s position. What had happened of course was that he’d moved on and she’d remained stranded in the past, peace and love and never mind the state of the roof. Someone told me at least one of the children wasn’t his. The father was that incredibly seedy musician who also lived in the house, with whom she sometimes had rows so loud that you could hear them through the wall, thick as they are in these houses. Frankly, it was like living next to a camp of gypsies and I was horrified when I found out Harriet was there.

She’d turned up without warning at nine on Saturday morning and I could tell from the overstuffed bag on her shoulder that she was planning to stay for at least a night. I didn’t want it, particularly that evening, when we had friends coming to dinner, even more so because I’d decided that Geoffrey and I should start seeing more of other compatible couples. So I had carefully composed a party – Charles Fenton, a colleague of Geoffrey’s, and his wife, Harry and Joan Johnson from the Slade and Vivian Morton, an old schoolfriend of mine who’s an archaeologist and had just got back from Pakistan. The last thing I needed was Harriet sitting in judgement at the table. – Not that the party went well, or that’s to say, it did until after dinner when Vivian began to drone on about the high mortality rates for Pakistani girls between five and nine, how they were being killed by their parents, their screams ringing round the villages and so on and so forth, and then, to crown it all, produced a wallet of marijuana, rolled a joint and started trying to pass it round. No one but Harry Johnson accepted, thank God, and I suppose he’s famous enough to feel he can do as he likes and old enough to think these habits are smart. Then Vivian began to hint that while she had been away Casper had taken up with someone else and was now planning to divorce her – not what anyone really wanted to hear and no doubt everybody thought that a woman who goes off on field trips three months of the year is quite likely to get that kind of an unpleasant shock when she returns.

Anyway, at the time I didn’t want Harriet about creating an atmosphere at the dinner party. And to put it bluntly, I didn’t want to have to explain who she was. So although I had to ask her in I told her that Geoffrey was out shopping and offered to make her some coffee while I went out for some last-minute items. I didn’t need to, but the last thing I wanted was a conversation with her. She countered quite bluntly by saying could she have a word with me, so what could I do? And before I’d even had the chance to think she launched into an obviously prepared speech about what a nuisance it was to have to get the Southern Region train daily back and forth to the Slade and how they were overcrowded at her house, there was nowhere to paint, she had to put her easel up in the garden shed, the windows were too small, it was too cold in the winter and so on and so forth. I tried to interrupt before she got to the punchline, since I knew too well what this was all leading up to, but, again, she rushed on like a train and before I knew anything about it she was putting her scheme to me – inevitably, that she was planning to move into the top floor, would only be there in term-time, wouldn’t be a nuisance, would pay a small rent, get a small electric cooker to use up there, would pay for an electric meter to be put in, would only use the lavatory on the top landing, bath elsewhere, if necessary, move out and go home if we needed the rooms for visitors – I had to sit and listen to this, very much regretting that I’d never got round to furnishing the other small room at the top of the house as a kind of private work-room and sitting-room. I’d been quite happy doing what marking and letter-writing I had to do at the desk in the sitting-room, there at the centre of the house. In fact I hadn’t wanted to tuck myself away at the top of the house like some hard-pressed executive, where I’d be unavailable to Geoffrey, if he wanted to talk to me. Now I wished I’d fitted the room up properly, so that at least it looked as if I used it. In the end I just said it wouldn’t be very convenient for any of us if she moved in, and that Geoffrey and I weren’t in a position to take proper responsibility for her because we were so often away, which would leave her alone at the top of a large house in London, which could be dangerous, and that in the end I was sure she was better off with her family. She sat there, looking pasty and a bit overweight but as I went on I could see her expression hardening and finally she burst out, interrupting me, ‘So you don’t want me? I thought it’d be like that.’ So I said, ‘Harriet – it’s not like that.’ And she said, ‘Oh no? What is it like then?’ and told me she was going to wait and see Geoffrey and ask him herself if she could move in. I knew quite well that if she caught him unexpectedly and probably began to cry – she was on the verge of tears already – he might agree without thinking about the consequences. Which would be for me to deal with in the end, needless to say. I had visions of evenings sitting with Harriet, or doors banging, music playing upstairs and her friends trekking in and out, her going to Geoffrey for advice and help every time she had a problem. Who could believe that once she was settled in there, up at the top of the house, she’d even go back to Bromley in the holidays? There’d be one excuse after another – she’d never go home. I couldn’t face it. I simply couldn’t face that great big girl lumbering about the house bleating for her father and the constant interruptions and disturbances to our life, especially when I was so worried about our marriage. And don’t tell me it wouldn’t have cost money – I would have been working to fund Pauline Lombard’s child, not at a distance this time, but close to. Goodness knows why she’s never married that ghastly social worker she lives with and plonked some of the financial responsibility on his shoulders. Why shouldn’t she marry him? And frankly, I hate sharing my name with her. She’s no right to it now.

Anyway, the long and short of it was that I had to get rid of her at once, before Geoffrey came back and committed himself in the heat of the moment, before we’d had a chance to discuss it. I couldn’t have him submitting to tears and blackmail before we’d talked about it properly. So I told her she’d better go now and I’d discuss it with Geoffrey later and he’d ring her. She shouted, ‘You’ll turn him against me like you’ve always done. You know you can do that – that’s why you want to get rid of me first.’ I told her she was becoming hysterical and if she thought her father would be influenced by her in that state she was mistaken. She’d better go away and calm down. Then we could talk it over rationally. I felt awful, though, very cold, as though everything and everyone was plotting to take away my happiness. I just had to get her out of the house. I talked and talked and by sheer will-power I got her to leave. Actually I was more desperate than she was. I was shattered, and even more so when I went to the kitchen window later and saw her standing under a tree outside the house, talking to the Kops girls. All it needed at that point was for Geoffrey to come back and ask what she was doing. Then she went in with the girls and I was angry, so angry I nearly frightened myself. If I talked to Geoffrey about her and didn’t have time to explain things properly before she left the Kopses’ he might go racing round and offer her a home with us. If I didn’t tell him she’d come, and why, he might run into her anyway and wonder why I hadn’t mentioned it. In any case, I needed time. And Harriet could pop round and ring the doorbell whenever she felt like it. I pulled myself together and decided if I tackled the matter in haste I’d say all the wrong things and trigger just the wrong response. I needed to get Geoffrey in a peaceful mood, and rushing things wouldn’t help. Luckily that afternoon after lunch he said he had a bit of a headache so I told him to go upstairs and lie down, whereupon I switched off the doorbell and was downstairs to answer the phone if it rang. Then it was dark, then the dinner party – after I’d let in the guests I quickly switched off the doorbell again. Small wonder, with this problem on my mind (it was as likely as not that Harriet would have gone out with the others and gone back with them to spend the night, so I wasn’t out of the wood yet) – small wonder I hadn’t got the strength of mind to prevent the dinner party from deteriorating, with Harry Johnson and Vivian smoking pot and carrying on about the bourgeoisie, and divorce, like a couple of drunks while the others’ faces froze and they tried to change the subject. Harry Johnson on the evils of the present government and witchcraft, plus Vivian on the way her husband had betrayed her and the slaughter of little girls in Pakistan for good measure – what an evening. Also, couples can often laugh about these things afterwards, but Geoffrey wouldn’t even talk about it when they’d all gone home, didn’t seem to think it worth mentioning. He went into his frozen condition, as he was seeming to a lot at the time, said he felt he’d had too much brandy, went upstairs and fell asleep while I was clearing up.

Next day I couldn’t stand the thought that Harriet might still be about, so I rang the Kopses’ and asked if she’d got back to Bromley all right, she’d been upset when I last saw her. That stupid girl Margaret showed all the brains and efficiency you could expect from the Kopses and said yes, as far as she knew. In fact, of course, she hadn’t left at all. Believing she’d gone I got Geoffrey to come for a walk to the park with me when the worst thing in the world, as it seemed to me at the time, happened. We rounded a bend in the path and there was Harriet, with the two Kops girls, all laughing their heads off and trying to entice a rabbit towards them through the fence. And Geoffrey dropped my hand the minute he saw her, the smiles were wiped off the faces of the girls and my heart turned to a stone inside me when I felt the warmth of his hand leave mine. How could he do that to me? Suddenly I saw that dreadful Pauline, Harriet’s mother, standing in her kitchen at Bromley stirring up a cauldron of Bolognese sauce. I could almost smell the awful smell.—Then, as Geoffrey called ‘Harriet,’ sounding pleased to see her, the Kops girls were urging her away. Pam had her hand and Sue was sort of jostling her from the back and they were both talking to her in low voices, like a couple of witches. Harriet, allowing herself to be pulled away, called ‘I’ve got to get back, Dad. I’ll ring you in the week.’ And Geoffrey, a bit stunned, called ‘All right!’ and then they were gone. All I knew was that the Kops girls and Harriet had laid a plan, Harriet was going to try to get Geoffrey on his own, for lunch perhaps, and put her story to him while I wasn’t there. It was a conspiracy against me.

‘I wonder why she didn’t call in,’ Geoffrey said, as we went on walking.

‘She rang the bell yesterday,’ I said. ‘But you weren’t there. She was quite upset.’

Geoffrey didn’t like upset women, one of the reasons he preferred me to Pauline, who was always yelling like a hooligan and flinging things about. So he didn’t ask why she was upset, which was a relief. I left him to draw the conclusion that Harriet had adopted her mother’s way of behaving, and said, ‘Perhaps we should be going back if you have all this work to do for Monday.’ He agreed and we turned for home.

Later in November, as a foggy half-light filled the basement, Polly Kops was talking to her tall, common-law daughter-in-law, who was parking the baby so that she could get to her university lectures.

‘They’ve cut back on a cook,’ she said, putting a plastic bag of toys and disposable nappies on the table. ‘We think that’s the reason for the outbreak. First they cut the cleaner’s hours, then the other cook. The remaining one’s been complaining for ages she can’t do her work properly. She says she’d go, only she needs the job and what’s the point – they could replace her with someone who didn’t even try as hard as she was. It’s the hygiene, you see. No one notices the kitchen isn’t properly cleaned. If she hasn’t had time to do the tea towels she uses a slightly dirty one – with that sort of thing and a nursery full of babies and toddlers there’s always a risk. The mothers have tried to help out but most of them are working – what can you do? If I give up this course and stay at home to look after Rufus neither of us will have any future in the long run.’

‘Yes,’ said Polly.

‘My Mum won’t help,’ Val said. ‘According to her I should get a little part-time job, cash in hand, claim social security and stay at home. That’s the sort of thing her Mum did, back in the Caribbean, and her Mum’s Mum and her Mum before her. I don’t want to join the ranks of the toiling, put-upon black woman. It’s all very well celebrating these women in verse and prose but the women who write about them so admiringly haven’t brought up six children wrinkling their own hands in the white woman’s washtub and scrubbing her floors. Good luck to them.’

‘Anyway, your mother works at the Abbey National,’ Polly said.

‘That’s it,’ said Val. ‘She hasn’t seen a washtub since she left Barbados – even then she didn’t use it herself. She’s got her own washing machine. Fact is, she married my Dad respectably, had us respectably, went to church, got a good job and unless I’m prepared to do exactly the same she thinks I should be pitched back into the days of slavery. Of course, she thinks I’ll go on to have several other children by several other fathers, so she’s trying to make me suffer to put me off.’

‘Well, I can understand that,’ Polly said with feeling, thinking about her own past.

‘Well, there’s another thing, which is embarrassing,’ said Val. ‘Can you lend me a pound for a lunchtime coffee? I was counting on collecting the family allowance from the Post Office as I came past but when I looked the place was full of coppers – Mr Patel got broken into last night and he can’t do anything until the situation’s sorted out. I haven’t got time to go to the building society or the other Post Office now.’

Polly gave her a pound from her purse. ‘Also,’ said Val, ‘I’m afraid I left your number at the Town Hall. I said you’d take a message. I had to phone them very early. This poor old woman downstairs was banging on my door at five in the morning. She felt something running over her in bed. When she put the light on this big grey rat ran across the floor and disappeared. She lay there for half an hour before she could summon up the courage to get out of bed. She said she could imagine them all attacking her feet. I’m sure they’re still in the pipes. They said they’d got rid of them, but no way. I mean, poor old thing – then there’s Rufus – he’ll have to sleep with me from now on. Imagine how he’d react – well,’ she said, glancing at Rufus, who was creeping up on the cat, who was pretending she didn’t know, ‘I’m sorry, but I thought if you were going to be in, you could sort of say I was out for a minute. Then if I miss the last lecture I can ring them before they go home.’

‘What about the old woman, though?’ asked Polly.

‘She says she can borrow this old terrier from this old boyfriend of hers,’ Val said. ‘And the terrier’ll protect her from the rats. But pets are forbidden, so she needs to be covered in case someone makes a fuss. Not that the whole place isn’t full of Alsatians and Dobermanns people are keeping as guard dogs but you never know – Rufus, she’ll only scratch you. Well, that’s it, Polly, I’m sorry to throw all my problems at you at once.’

‘This is no time to give up your degree,’ Polly responded stoutly.

‘Quite honestly, I’d put him to bed for a bit,’ said Val. ‘He was up at five – weren’t we all?’

Polly found an old jigsaw puzzle in a box under the stairs and sat vaguely doing it with Rufus. He could have a sleep after he’d eaten his lunch and she could take another crack at Casablanca. She’d have to finish it before Christmas and also keep the stall running because after Christmas she’d have to clear up the house, now ten years overdue for a spring clean. Prospective purchasers might start coming to view as soon as the place was on the market and the spectacle of a disorderly woman as vendor would cheer them into dramatically low offers.

This Christmas they’d be eating and drinking up the family home, as they had for several years now, each bottle of wine represented a brick, each portion of chestnut stuffing an inch of waterpipe, each slice of Christmas pudding a bit of plaster off the ceiling.

They’d been close, last week, to electronic death, total systems failure, no TV, no videos, guitars, no computers or record players. She’d pledged the top of the mantelpiece at the bank to prevent that catastrophe which was, as the poet Virgil so beautifully put it, nobody’s fault really. Pam and Sue and Margaret were only teenagers with no experience of life, and Clancy was congenitally irresponsible, as she knew, having as a child once watched him take a carving knife to all his stuffed toys, and his pillows and his own best shirt and trousers, a memorable moment. By now, too, he was probably mentally unstable through natural instability and its closest friends, narcotics and alcohol abuse.

Even Max, her oldest child, who had been reared by her mother, had managed to join the shipwreck. When Val had become pregnant just after her ‘A’ levels, at eighteen, he had offered to marry her and take her away to share his postgraduate student’s income in Cambridge but Val, who had a place to study economics at London University, refused the offer, dreading marriage, dreading financial dependency, being a burden to Max, and the wreck of her own future. Now she, Polly, had become part-time common-law mother-in-law to Val and granny to little Rufus. Val and Max had each in their own way done the right thing. Nobody’s fault, really, as the poet said, but, as a later hand interpolated, somebody always had to pay.

‘I’m not much good at being noble,’ Polly Kops remarked to herself, ‘but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’ How could you translate that into modern English over forty years later?

As Rufus was completing the vandalisation of his dinner, with the cat on one side scooping up the odd bits with its paw, Margaret came in with a plastic bag full of books saying, ‘Strike action.’

‘Mind the baby then,’ said Polly, seizing an advantage. ‘I must get on. Just a couple of hours.’

‘I was going to do my homework!’ Margaret told her. ‘I asked for extra work like you said. Now you say mind the baby.’

‘I can’t help it,’ said Polly, ‘I’m desperate.’

‘Oh well,’ said Margaret, ‘I’ll take him upstairs and play him some tapes.’

‘He’d be better off going for a walk in the pushchair,’ Polly told her.

‘Babies are supposed to be included in people’s normal, everyday activities,’ Margaret told her. ‘It socialises them.’

‘Do as you please,’ said Polly, leaving the room quickly to get back to the plane to Lisbon.

‘I’m just a gymslip auntie,’ said Margaret and, scooping up Rufus, took him upstairs to her room.

Half an hour later Clancy put his head round the door chanting ‘Everybody’s got problems in Casablanca. Casablanca’s giving everyone problems. Pram in the hall – where’s the baby?’

Polly knew he would either play enticingly with Rufus, his grandson, or complain bitterly and demand attention until the baby was out of the house. The horrific network of blood ties in the house didn’t worry him at all. He didn’t believe in any of it. She watched the once-intelligent amber eyes harden and said, ‘Don’t start any trouble, Clancy. I’m busy, Margaret’s minding the baby for a bit, everything’s all right.’

‘Why isn’t she at school?’ he demanded.

‘Ask them,’ Polly said. ‘It’s a strike. I think I got a note. The teachers have gone off to lobby Parliament.’

‘So that means she has to spend her time as an unpaid child minder?’ Clancy said. ‘I’m going up there to tell her to stop. What about her ‘O’ levels? I’m not having my daughter used.’

‘He’s her nephew,’ Polly cried as he rushed out. ‘He’s your own damn grandchild. She likes him. You never went to school anyway, not unless you could help it.’

He probably did not hear much of this. Polly stood with her hand on the banisters wondering what he was doing in the house. Each of them had helped to make the other what he or she was now – probably neither of them, like Dr Frankenstein, enjoyed what they had made. Clancy was no longer the attractive, insouciant, fascinating man, excused all because of his talent and potential. He had aged, his potential was now a not very impressive actuality, he had grown sour. Things had gone wrong, times had changed, life was harder. There was not much room for an old hippie in the music business now. His heirs abhorred the ’60s mix of sentiment and machismo, the ethic and the style which had self-indulgently led them without warning into the ’80s. Their own style was very different from the leg-thrusting, groin-twisting, guitar-jerking, tight-jeaned, big-belted appeals for peace and love. The parents’ minds had been blown; their children were addicts. They had had sex; their children had AIDS. The long-locked Cavaliers were out of business and Clancy was angry about it. Of course, his rage had its practical side – it inhibited her from asking him to make any useful contribution to the home he lived in. She slid her hand in front of her down the banisters, speeding towards a confrontation in the kitchen. She wasn’t going to let him get away with yet another uncontested row.

Downstairs, he was upsetting Margaret and wiping the chocolatey smile off Rufus’s face. ‘You go upstairs and get on with some school work, Margaret,’ he was saying. ‘I’m sick of you minding the baby all the time. Let his mother do it. She had him.’

‘Val’s trying to get a degree –’ said Polly.

‘In third world economics, so she can help her people,’ said Clancy. ‘Well, charity begins at home. She can start here by taking care of the kid.’

‘As if you cared,’ said Polly. ‘All you want is to hold women back by quoting their maternal duties at them. You’ve never felt you had to take care of anybody but yourself, and you haven’t made a very good job of that. You haven’t seen your mother for three months and she’s got a bad leg – my mother’s looking after her. You’ve never cared about me or your own children. Where did you get your exemption from? Tell me where the office is – I’d like to go there. My mother’s got a bad leg, too. You don’t care who looks after who as long as you don’t have to. You’re only talking about it in order to make trouble. We’re all struggling here and doing the best we can.’

‘I didn’t realise I was part of the cast of Grapes of Wrath,’ Clancy said. ‘I mean, I thought this house was worth half a million pounds. Fact is, this place is a shambles, you’re a shambles. You had a lot, you lost it –’

‘You took it,’ interrupted Polly.

‘What’s the difference? You wasted all the rest,’ he retorted. ‘You’re just going to have to sell up, get a sensible job, get things organised. All I want to do is protect my child from some of your consequences.’

Polly choked. The injustice was cruel. So was the justice. She had got herself into a muddle, committed crimes against mankind. She had behind her the inflated property prices, but no work record at a time of heavy unemployment and no proper training. The only jobs she could get would be low-grade, low-paid work in a canteen, shop or a school, paid at women’s rates, about two pounds an hour.

With her responsibilities and overheads it would hardly be worth while. And on a good day, Saturday, she could get a week’s wages, almost, in cash, from the stall. She told Clancy, ‘If you want to protect your child you could start by bringing in some money. She needs new shoes. And a lot else. We all need a lot else. You’ve been here nearly a year and I’ve been keeping you most of the time – roof over your head, heat and light, spaghetti and all that. I see you with money but you aren’t giving me any. I don’t even know where it’s coming from. I may not be much of a success but look at you.’

It was the word ‘success’ which drove Clancy mad. He yelled, ‘You’ve wrecked everything, you stupid bitch. You give me no support – you never have. This place is a tip. There’s a muddle and confusion all day long. You’re hunched over that bloody video all the time like a maniac. That script’s a disaster area.’ And he picked up a pottery vase containing a few yellow chrysanthemums and threw it on the floor. The vase broke, the flowers fell out and yellow petals lay in a spreading patch of water on the floor. The cat came up, sniffed at the puddle and walked away. ‘Amazing!’ Clancy shouted. ‘Asking anyone to pay to live here. Most people would pay to get out.’

‘Right,’ shouted Polly. ‘You can put your cheque in the post. Pack up now and piss off.’

‘I’m packing now, before you change your mind,’ he shouted.

Polly sat down heavily and stared at the cups on the table. It would be a relief if he went but she was apprehensive about being without a man in the house. In theory it ought to be better but what happened if the rapist broke in, or there was another kind of threat? But, she thought, Clancy’s the worst threat there is. She said to Margaret, who was still standing there, ‘Sorry, Margaret. You know how it’s been. We need a breathing space.’

‘I’ll get a dustpan and brush,’ said Margaret. She began to sweep up the pieces.

‘Perhaps it’ll work out,’ Polly said.

Margaret told her, ‘Don’t worry. It was obvious. Pam and Sue were getting fed up with it. They were talking about asking him to push off, or trying to get you to tell him to go. I couldn’t do anything because he’s my dad.’

‘Oh,’ said Polly, at a loss. ‘Well, I’m glad no one’s going to be too upset –’

‘I don’t think you realised,’ Margaret said, ‘he’s dealing.’

Polly stared at her daughter. ‘What in?’ She saw the reason for the phone calls, the goings in and comings out. She’d been a fool not to see. What else had she missed?

‘Heroin, a bit of cocaine,’ Margaret told her. ‘We thought you didn’t know.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Polly said. ‘I suppose everybody knew and thought I knew.’

‘Not everybody,’ said Margaret.

‘You miss a lot when you’re worrying about money.’

‘You probably couldn’t believe he’d do it,’ her daughter said sympathetically.

‘You must be joking,’ Polly told her. ‘Well, this is very nasty for you. He hasn’t been selling to anybody you know, has he?’

Margaret shook her head. Polly stared at her hard. If she’d missed this, what else had she not noticed?

‘I should turn him in,’ she said. ‘Look what he’s doing. Why didn’t I suspect? Why didn’t one of you tell me? How did you find out?’

‘Nige at school told me. His brother knows some of the people. Then I told Pam and Sue – they said they’d heard rumours.’

‘Heroin,’ said Polly. ‘He should have his arms torn off.’

‘We were going to tell you,’ Margaret said. ‘We only found out a few months ago. Val said she’d tell you.’

In more refined, less hard-pressed circles, Polly would have been put to bed for a week after hearing that her lover, the father of her children, was trafficking in heroin. But now she swept visions of fourteen-year-old addicts and funerals out of her head and said, ‘I’ll wait for him in the hall and make sure I get the keys. Then you’ll have to come and help me make some calls in Chelsea and Fulham and put the goods in the van. Ring up Fiona and ask her if she wants to come. I’ll give you a couple of quid each and supper at McDonald’s.’

And this was done. Polly went and stood grimly in the hall until Clancy came downstairs with his bag. As he rounded the bend in the stairs he readied himself for attack. He hit the hall floor saying, ‘Look – this simply wasn’t –’ Polly said only ‘Keys,’ holding out her hand, and Clancy, who had been through many scenes in his life and knew when there was no point in saying anything, handed over the keys. He shut the door quietly behind him.

Polly stood there for a moment, then got her coat. She said in the van, ‘He’ll stay clean for a bit, in case I turn him in, so there’s no point in reporting him. There wouldn’t be any evidence. Also he’ll lie low. No point in a hue and cry. They’d only go round and upset his mum.’

They bought some old vases, a set of cutlery with the carving knife missing, an evening suit and two stools. There had been no need for the girls’ help, really, but it grew dark early these days. There was no point in her getting murdered. It was a nuisance but she’d have to be careful, going into people’s houses after dark. In McDonald’s she looked at her daughter, bent over a hamburger, and hoped it would be all right. She had spent years looking at her children and hoping for the best.

It always pleased me, coming down my stairs, soft and pale-carpeted past the Chinese water colours. Geoffrey would be late tonight. He had a meeting. I had sat at my beautiful mirror, in front of my beautiful dressing-table. There was a rose in the case there, and the cut glass bottles left by Geoffrey’s mother. I had done my hair a new way, I had looked at my face and not found the finest line. I could smell the light scent I wore mingling with the smell of new bread as I came down the stairs. Beef, tomatoes and mushrooms were stewing quietly in their casserole. I felt quite happy, that day.

Nevertheless, when I went into the living-room and drew the blue curtains against the dark outside, I felt dissatisfied again. The fact was that, nice as it all was, we were still eating in the kitchen; and that was far too close to the sitting-room. The smell of food tended to linger during the evening. The kitchen should have been downstairs, overlooking the garden. We could perfectly well eat there, at a table near the french windows over looking the garden, or in the garden in fine weather. Summer evenings could be spent pleasantly in the garden, winter evenings upstairs. It was nice, with a few pieces from Geoffrey’s old home I’d captured from his sister Ursula (who would have got her daily spraying the wood with plastic furniture polish and let her children run their cars across the little table) and the fresh paint and flowers – well, it was very nice, but the garden was needed for the summer.

All I had to do was hold off Harriet and then think of something to do about Julie. It didn’t make sense, her living there in the basement, at that ludicrous rent. I dreaded to think what was happening to the building.

Meanwhile, I lit a sly cigarette and began to contemplate Christmas. I didn’t want to go to my parents in Scarborough much, although that was what we’d vaguely agreed in October. But my father wasn’t in good health so I thought we’d only be an extra burden on my mother and I’d much have preferred to go down to Wiltshire, where Geoffrey’s uncle Roger lived in a big old eighteenth-century house. He had interesting friends and some competent staff. He was on the board of the National Theatre, so he tended to know directors and actors and arts administrators, people like that. There’d be the chance to dress up a bit, meet some stimulating people, play charades with a famous actor or actress. But in Scarborough, in that huge, ugly house, all we’d get would be the saga about how Mrs Enwright had to get away at eleven to cook her own family’s dinner and start ‘shifting for ourselves a bit’. Not much chance to keep up my diet and exercise regime there, either, while being pressed constantly to Christmas pudding and another mince pie and another glass of wine – ‘Come on – it’s Christmas and you’re too thin anyway.’ All that nonsense. At Roger Lombard’s no one was going to check every bite and there’d be other people there who preferred to eat healthily. The point was, I was down to eight stone four pounds now and I didn’t want to sacrifice the weight loss because I had to pretend to be a greedy child again.

Geoffrey and I couldn’t afford a Scarborough Christmas, with my father not well, and my mother fussing and the weather doing its worst. It would be too gloomy. We needed a little luxury, a little glamour and as much privacy as possible. You could get that at Roger’s. There were lots of rooms, bathrooms attached to each bedroom and a group of guests, like a house party, afforded a couple more peace than a family gathering with everybody staring at each other and God knows what skeletons coming out of cupboards. I needed to restore my relationship with my husband, not have to defend it against gloom and despondency. I knew when Geoffrey looked at my mother he suspected what I’d be like twenty years from now and didn’t like it. I didn’t want that.

At this stage I quickly put out my cigarette and got rid of the evidence. All I had to do, I thought, was get Geoffrey to agree to ring Roger and say we’d like to come and then tell my mother Roger wanted us to come because he needed some advice on a picture he was going to sell. She wouldn’t be very pleased but it got us off the hook, that was the chief thing.

Then Geoffrey didn’t come, not at seven thirty, when he said he would, or at eight, and by quarter to nine I was getting frantic. I rang his number at the Treasury, but nobody answered. I had visions, somehow, of him sitting there and not answering the phone. It was awful.

After they got back from McDonald’s at eight, Polly, time being short, began to watch Casablanca again while Pam, Sue and Margaret, huddled in jumpers in front of the electric fire, discussed Clancy’s leaving. Polly, scribbling, heard Sue say, ‘Bet he’s got a spare set of keys, though.’

‘Poor old Clancy,’ Pam said.

‘He ought to be in prison,’ said Sue.

‘So should lots of people,’ Pam said. ‘Oh, what about Harriet? Mum – can Harriet come for the weekend? She can sleep in my room. She says she’ll take a turn on the stall. We need the help with Christmas coming up and it being so cold.’

‘I suppose that means you’re not coming so you’re sending a substitute,’ Polly said.

‘Well, sort of,’ Pam told her. ‘Anyway, Harriet’s trying to get a folder together for her exams and she can’t get any space in her own house.’

‘All right,’ Polly said.

‘She’s got to see her dad, you see,’ Pam explained.

‘What’s that got to do with helping on the stall?’

‘She’s got to keep on trying. Her stepmother won’t let her in the house. She thinks if she stays here she can catch her dad off guard and get to talk to him.’

‘Why can’t she just ring him up at work?’ asked Polly.

‘Because he’ll arrange to meet her, then he’ll tell her stepmother, then she’ll block it or just turn up herself. She wants to make a surprise attack. All she wants is a little room in the attic for term-time. You can’t say they’re overcrowded.’

‘The woman’ll say she was planning to turn the room into a sauna,’ Polly said. ‘Or might have to take in her cousin’s orphan children.’

‘There’s even a bathroom they don’t use,’ Pam continued remorselessly.

‘I wouldn’t bet on Harriet if she’s got Anna Lombard against her,’ Polly said, turning back to the video, thinking the chances of this branch of the children’s crusade to be less than good.

Clancy’s friend Arnold, the man who had got her the scriptwriting job, rang. ‘Jay Honeycutt’s keenly looking forward to receiving the script,’ he told her.

‘I suppose he is,’ bluffed Polly. ‘And it won’t be long.’

‘If anything’s holding up progress maybe we should meet,’ he offered. She realised his anxieties, but if they had a meeting she would have a breakdown. She looked at the scattered notes. She knew every person in every corner of Rick’s Bar and wished she didn’t. ‘If you need me, I’m here,’ he said.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I’ll be through by Christmas.’

‘Can I tell them that?’

‘Oh Christ – all right. Tell them.’

She ran her hands through her hair, picked up her old handbag from the floor and paper-clipped her bills together in order of priority. On second thoughts, she paid a red letter from Thames Water, put it in a brown envelope with a second-class stamp on it, designed to delay its inevitable refusal by the bank, while proving to Thames Water that she was still in residence, conscious of their demand and capable of signing her name. It comforted creditors to know you were still there, still caring. She added up the bills on the back of the envelope of one of them, worked out her possible profit from the stall that Saturday, came up with the normal shortfall. The bank would cover all this once the house was definitely on the market, she thought. All I want is a little lock-up shop, a few hundred quid to get started and no debts, she thought. Perhaps there’d be a couple of thousand dollars from Honeycutt when this Casablanca débâcle was over. It might help to buy some stock. Anyone who could fit in over the shop could fit in, anyone who couldn’t would have to go elsewhere. She could put up a summerhouse in the yard and pretend it wasn’t accommodation – run a cable, maybe get a plumber who was a friend of somebody to bung in some plumbing at dead of night. That would be another room for someone. It wasn’t a problem when you thought about other people’s problems these days. The problem was that she felt like the scattered remains of a takeaway some animal had dragged out of a dustbin – silver foil container, old bones, bits of rice scattered round the bin. On the other hand, she was trying, because it was slightly better than not trying, and lucky to have the chance when you thought about other people’s problems these days.

By nine I was very anxious about Geoffrey. He’d told me he’d be late but he’d said 7.30. But if he’d gone out for a drink with colleagues after the meeting, he would have phoned. Had he had an accident? If so, there was nothing I could do. You can’t start ringing the police because your husband’s an hour or two late back from work. In any case, I didn’t believe there had been an accident. I knew he was with someone, and if he was, why hadn’t he phoned? Who was he with? Colleagues – James? Robert Smith? Julia Chumley? What did Julia Chumley look like? I’d tried, unobtrusively, to find out, but Geoffrey hadn’t told me. About thirty-seven, he’d said. Divorced. Exactly what every wife dreads in fact – the desperate, late thirties divorcee who works with her husband, the last chance to get a new husband and no scruples about whether he belongs to someone else or not.

I started to add up how often he’d been late recently, how many after-work drinks he could have scored up without my knowing, not to mention the lunches. I had to admit it didn’t come to much of a total. And when he came in from work he had obviously not gone out for a drink. He just looked tired. But then there was Gillian Jacobson, from the Foreign Office, though I couldn’t see Geoffrey going for a woman who dressed like that, all old black skirts, badly dyed hair and teenage children in trouble. But there were the others, the ones I never heard of – the temp from the typing pool, the actress taking round the tea trolley while she waited for a part, people’s sisters, the women friends of other men at the Treasury. Suddenly I saw Theresa Montague, wife of Geoffrey’s immediate superior whom I had met – about twenty-seven, wearing enviable pearls, family money, probably, long slim legs and a complexion like a schoolgirl’s. Breasts, too. I could just see her with those legs curled round a bar stool, running those pearls through her beautiful ivory hands, leaning forward towards Geoffrey. I felt sick when I thought how easy it would be to deceive me, if he really wanted to. All he had to say was that he’d been to someone’s club.

I stood in the window, looking down at the garden, the rusty tricycle Julie left out as often as she brought it in, the hole her children had dug right in the middle of the scruffy lawn. There were their plastic spades beside it, a couple of toy cars – you could see them in the light from our windows. The tree-tops were visible in that muggy, lurid glow you get from the sky in London in November. Why were we here, I thought? We ought to be together in the country somewhere.

I moved to the other window and drew back the curtain just a little bit and looked down into the street. ‘Men don’t like to think they’re being spied on,’ Mother had told me. Nevertheless, she always managed to find out everything – the name of my father’s secretary and where she lived, who he played golf with and details of the men’s wives and families, even the personal history of the man who serviced the car. She found out, she remembered and she put a stop to anything she thought threatened her home, stopped him drinking a Sunday pint at the Feathers when she found out something dubious about the landlord’s wife, simply by going with him every time. Once she’d caught that jovial masculine reference to the landlady of the Feathers she’d had to pay Mrs Enwright extra to come in and do the Sunday dinner, but by the time some of the other wives caught on, and started to turn up at the pub too, the men transferred their custom to a quiet country pub seven miles from the town – and mother had won. ‘Discreet supervision,’ she called it. She went through my father’s pockets regularly, clearing them out for the cleaners. I don’t suppose he realised she scrutinised every railway ticket or bill he’d stuffed carelessly in his pockets. She cleared out his wallet, too, to save the leather from becoming overstretched, and went through that, too. She tidied his desk, scrutinising everything with a brooding air, going through the bank statements thoughtfully, although she publicly claimed she had no knowledge of money or business, that my father kept her in complete ignorance of his working life and that she had no head for figures – ‘I can just about add up the household accounts,’ she used to say. All this attention used to baffle me slightly, because my father seemed the least likely man in the world to go off the rails. It seemed a bit like keeping a close eye on the family cat, in case it suddenly turned into a tiger. Still, who’s to say that this probing, checking and steering didn’t prevent something from happening? She told me plenty of stories of respectable couples breaking up in unsavoury circumstances. Men you’d never believe had the desire for anything but a whisky or two too many, suddenly, it seemed, took off with their secretaries or were discovered to be regular clients of a call-girl in Manchester. She’d say things like ‘Thank goodness your father’s not like that. Still, his wife was a fool to trust him, that’s what I’ve always thought.’

It was probably this sudden memory of my mother chatting on like this in her chintz chair which sent me upstairs – by then it was twenty past nine – to the study, where I found myself looking at Geoffrey’s desk, then opening the file marked ‘bank statements’ in the drawer. Although I had money left to me by an aunt on deposit at another bank, this account was a joint one in both our names and both our salaries were paid into it. The bank statements came addressed to both of us but Geoffrey always opened them and paid the bills. Now I stood in his dark green study, where the Roman bust of some old senator stood, gleaming white, on a shelf in an alcove with a light over it. It had been a wedding present from his Uncle Roger – I appreciated it but I didn’t really want it in the living-room. Now the bust of the old Roman, with his badly-mended nose and little cold eyes, stared down at me as I went through the statements. He looked as if he’d been staring at people secretly looking through documents for the last two thousand years. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at first, then I spotted it. I suppose I was looking for a large unexplained sum. The only thing like that I came across was one for £750, which I remembered was the bill for my own winter coat. But the bust kept on staring at me. I had my ears pricked for the sound of the car drawing up at the front of the house. It must have sharpened my wits. I suddenly noticed the standing order payments to awful Pauline, Geoffrey’s previous wife, had gone up from £200 a month to £350. What mattered wasn’t so much that Pauline had extracted more money from him – although I begrudged it to her, I must say; after all, she was working and so was that dismal social worker she was living with, you’d have thought they could have managed – but that she must have made contact with Geoffrey, and he hadn’t told me, and then he’d decided to give her more money, and hadn’t told me that either.

I felt very cold. I put the statements back carefully, just as I’d found them, closed the drawer and went downstairs again. I had to accept that Pauline had to be paid but, I thought, fancy increasing the sum for Sainsbury’s plonk and velours track suits for her and her saggy lover and, above all, fancy not telling me. And I was very upset. It was the first secret Geoffrey had ever kept from me and it involved his ex-wife. What else might be going on? He might be with Pauline now. He must have been when this agreement was made. And if he’d signed the form for the increase by himself it wasn’t even legal, because I was co-signatory to the account. I took a grip on myself and decided to say and do nothing. Not until I understood better what was going on. And just then in he came, full of apologies, saying he’d had to take some papers to Bob Montague’s house in Hampstead that afternoon, since Montague’d broken his ankle the day before digging some trenches for potatoes. He’d tried to ring me to say he’d be delayed but he found out our phone was out of order. It was, as it turned out, so everything he said was probably true, but after what I’d discovered about the bank I wasn’t able to believe anything he said completely. I pulled myself together and acted normally, poured him a drink, asked questions about his day, got the casserole, a bit worse for wear, out of the oven and we sat down. I didn’t eat much. He asked me why not and I said I wasn’t hungry. ‘You eat too little,’ he told me. ‘Sometimes it worries me.’ I felt a little better then. Then I thought of Pauline shoving some huge dishes of pasta or rice on the table, with some other bowl of yuck to go with it, and some vast bowl of natural yoghurt or heaven knows what, and five people filling their plates, then pouring out gallons of coke or litres of cheap red wine – all of them tucking in and slurping away with gusto on our £350 a month. I had a hard job not to burst out. Instead I just said, ‘Well, you’d hate it if I got fat, wouldn’t you Geoffrey?’ Geoffrey didn’t like fat women. I always hoped this helped to put him off Harriet. I think it did.

The next Saturday saw Polly standing in the yellow light of the overhead lamps at four in the afternoon, as fog-laden dark came down, wearing boots, gloves, an anorak and a woolly hat, dreaming of her lock-up shop and debtless existence. Suddenly the thought of abandoning the high, in-need-of-decoration rooms, the crumbling plaster, the damp walls, the rotting window frames, the cold passages and landings, the graceful crumbling portico, began to appeal to her. All she wanted was a little shop she could open every day, and little brown envelopes she could also open, without fear, every day, instead of that great crumbling place, wolfing her earnings down like a big, greedy dog, and then looking round for more it could grab and steal, gnawing the table, the curtains, chewing holes in the sheets. She looked blindly at Mrs Ofani on her jewellery stall, Christian with his second-hand books, Heliotrope with her ’40s and ’50s dresses and coats. They stared back, not seeing her either. There was a limit to the amount of interest you could take in the neighbouring traders when you were all cold, with runny noses, stamping your feet to keep warm, half hypnotised by the hazy lights above.

Harriet had looked after the stall for three hours that afternoon, getting £35 for a lamp clearly marked £25 and shifting a nasty fur coat which had spent weeks lying in Polly’s back room like a sick animal. Pam and Sue had considered, obviously, that producing Harriet released them from any obligation, Val had an essay to write, Margaret had gone off at eleven o’clock to see an old lady in Bedford Square who had, she said, promised her something if she came back. She had not returned, which was worrying Polly. She began to pack up the stall. ‘Look, Mum!’ Margaret cried out. She was dragging up a tapestry Victorian nursing chair with one arm, while under the other she carried a small matching footstool. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she reported, ‘the old lady gave me some lunch. Then two conductors wouldn’t let me on to the bus with this lot. Finally one took pity on me – he said his brother dealt in old furniture.’

Polly stared at the chairs. ‘I’ve told you not to go into people’s houses,’ she said, realising the risk she was runing in sending a fourteen-year-old girl out to collect for her, even in daylight, in respectable areas. She must be mad.

‘I rang to tell you I was stopping to lunch,’ Margaret said. ‘I told Sue to come up and tell you only she was going out and she wouldn’t. Well – I wanted a hand back from somebody but all she said was she was late. So I said she’d better leave a note on the kitchen table. I wasn’t going to leave this lot behind, so I decided to get it here somehow. Course,’ she said, looking round disappointedly, ‘it’s too late now. Plus, of course, when I got on a bus there had to be a hold-up while the conductor had two drunks arrested. We were stopped in Ken High for a good half-hour waiting for the police. I couldn’t get off because of the chairs.’

‘I’ve turned my daughter into a totter,’ thought Polly. Then she remembered that at Margaret’s age she’d been serving in her mother’s sweet shop and couldn’t see why she expected her own daughter not to help out – she must have some post-war feeling that each generation would naturally improve itself in terms of status and education until in the end everyone in the country would be a brain surgeon.

‘You’ve got to promise me you won’t ever go into a stranger’s house and start accepting meals and God knows what,’ she said. ‘I don’t care if she was a nice old lady. I don’t care if it’s Mother Teresa. These things are antiques – they’re in perfectly good condition. I can’t understand it. I’ll have to check it’s all right. I don’t want the son or daughter coming down on me because I’ve robbed some old lady who doesn’t know what she’s doing –’

‘Oh, Mum,’ said Margaret, nearly as tall as Polly and extremely impatient, ‘you must think I’m barmy. You act as if I was nine. The old lady said she knew you, that’s why she was giving you the chairs. That’s why I was livid when Sue wouldn’t come up here with a message – it’s her granny, Lady Kops.’

‘Bedford Square,’ said Polly. ‘Of course – I never thought. That’s where they went to live, years ago.’ She said, ‘I wonder why she wanted to give me anything. She never liked me and we haven’t kept in touch. I’ll have to thank her. It’s very kind.’

Alexander’s mother had always thought Polly a disastrous wife for her only son and Polly had done little to impress her by having twin daughters six months after a register office wedding to which Alexander’s parents were invited at the last moment, and which had been attended by hundreds of people in jeans and kaftans, including an entire heavy metal band. She had not been any more impressed when Polly took up again with her cousin Clancy and bore him another child. The only compensation, from her point of view, was that this affair ended the marriage. Perhaps she had forgiven and forgotten, thought Polly.

‘She sent her best wishes,’ reported Margaret. Polly, imagining the items in the centre of her new shop, was profoundly grateful. She gave her daughter a fiver and said, ‘Thanks, Margaret. It was nice of you to get them back. Let’s put them in the van – I want to decide what to do with them. They’re too good for me really.’

‘Time you went up-market,’ Margaret said. ‘You can’t make any serious money this way.’

‘Marks and Spencer started with a market stall,’ Polly said.

‘Started, yes,’ said Margaret.

‘Come on,’ said Polly. ‘Consider this stage one. Tomorrow, Rome, Paris, New York and Dallas, Texas. One day, all this will be yours.’

‘I want to be a vet,’ said Margaret.

‘Let’s get the stuff into the van,’ said her mother.

All over the neighbourhood coloured lights and Christmas displays were going up in the shops. Women were carrying home bulging plastic bags through the darkness; they were queuing in the Post Office, pulling toddlers away from displays of toys and sweets, pushing wire baskets of groceries, crackers, boxes of chocolates up supermarket aisles.

Later she said to Kate, who had brought round a bottle of wine to escape from the excitement in her own home, ‘I think Adela Kops has had a change of heart – decided to treat Alexander’s wives and girlfriends like relations you have to try and get along with, instead of deadly rivals and personal enemies.’

‘People’s attitudes have had to change,’ said Kate, ‘with the rise in the divorce rate. Can’t go on any longer treating every broken marriage like Henry VIII’s, chewing over the bones, starting feuds in court, everybody blaming everybody to their dying day, and so forth. I suppose it’s getting institutionalised.’ Her tone indicated some regret that she was barred from this cheerful, barbaric party.

‘All right, as long as no one refers to the realities,’ said Polly. ‘Women bringing up their children in poverty and so forth. There’s a deep and profound silence about the fates of the first wife and her children. It’s all right as long as they go away and bury themselves silently on some Council estate on social security. It’s a bit too easy to pretend that every first wife’s got some way of earning a decent living, if she asks for money she’s just too lazy to go out to work – fact is, in any situation like this there are quite a lot of people who wish the woman and her children would go away and die decently, leaving Harry a respectable widower – nothing to explain and nothing to pay, flowers placed on the grave annually, respectful mentions of the departed in pubs and clubs. “Cholera, was it? Frightfully bad luck, old chap. We’re all so pleased you met Muriel.” Don’t envy us our customs too much, Kate – we call yours cruel and hypocritical, but the same can be said of ours. No one should join in the first place. That’s why I’m backing Val.’

‘Sue said Clancy’d left,’ said Kate.

‘And the whole neighbourhood failed to mention to me he was dealing in heroin,’ Polly said bitterly. ‘Did you know?’

‘Well, I’ve only been back a little while –’ said Kate.

‘So they sent a message to Heathrow saying if you wanted any stuff try No. 1, Elgin Crescent, and you didn’t let on either?’

‘Polly – I’d only just worked out you didn’t know –’

‘People must think I’m very strange –’ Polly said.

Kate said: ‘Polly – women do anything where men are concerned. You know that. You know why –’

‘I know. I know,’ said Polly. ‘But I must say it hurts to have people assuming you’ve got no feelings just because – oh well, never mind. Here’s to us all, then. Happy Christmas.’

Kate smiled. Her calm, pale face looked happy.

‘I don’t know how you do it,’ Polly said. ‘It isn’t as if you didn’t feel uncertain about everything. No one else round here looks like that. The poor are too poor and worried about how to get through the festival of commerce without money and all the kids asking for something else every day and they can’t get treatment on the National Health and they’re shutting down the old folks’ home, and the rich are just their usual malaise-full selves with their wives running away and a leaky roof in the holiday cottage and a nasty feeling somebody over there is doing better – what’s your secret?’

‘Satisfying work, reasonably all right children, a regular income and the love of a good man,’ returned Kate.

‘Oh well –’ said Polly. ‘Oh well, never mind. Still – if we can get over Christmas – God, here he is.’

Betrousered legs and a briefcase were coming up the steps. The doorbell rang.

‘Who is it?’ asked Kate.

‘Moore-Biggs of Arbuthnot Sims, house agents,’ Polly told her. ‘Phase one of the sort-out – sell house.’

‘I’ll miss you,’ sighed Kate.

‘I won’t be far away,’ said Polly. As the doorbell sounded again she realised there was no one to answer it, so she went up herself. ‘Can you go round on your own?’ she asked the striped-shirted young man. ‘I think it all speaks for itself.’

Polly sat down again with Kate in the kitchen. ‘Now he’s banging on the water tank, now he’s found all the knickers under the bed, now he’s found Margaret’s old stuffed rabbit and he’s throwing it up against the wall in disgust, the stuffing’s coming out all over the place, he’s poking a pencil into the rotten floorboards on the landing at the top. It’s going through the wood like putty – Oh God, this place may not be much, but it’s my home. Why don’t they just buy the places themselves and then sell them to other people? The transaction is only just beginning. Now we’ll have to have an imaginative conversation about who might buy it. Then they’ll all start coming. It could go on till spring – people coming round just as the cat’s been sick.’

Now she saw a pair of big legs in dark stockings and practical shoes ascending the steps outside. The doorbell rang. She went upstairs to find Ruth Fevrier, Val’s mother, outside. She said, ‘Can I have a word?’ Polly said, ‘Of course,’ and knew it was not a social call. Ruth Fevrier had been furious when Val insisted on having the child and not marrying the father. Later, once Rufus was born, her attitude had softened but she was still unhappy about the situation and without the formal link of a wedding or a christening no relationship had been struck up between Polly and Ruth. Polly suspected that in addition Ruth Fevrier disliked the fact that her only grandson’s father was white, and so, naturally, was his other grandmother. Downstairs she introduced Kate to Ruth and added, ‘She’s backing me up while the house agent goes round. I can’t face him alone.’

Ruth Fevrier, sitting there looking tired, said, ‘That mean you’re selling up?’

‘I can’t afford it any more,’ said Polly. ‘I don’t earn enough. I should have hung on to my money when I had it. I don’t think my mother told me about all this – either she thought I’d never have any, or she’d never had any, or she was too socialistic to like to mention it.’

‘Don’t the children help you?’ asked Ruth.

‘They’ve got no money,’ said Polly. ‘They’re still studying. Anyway, it’d take a big income to keep this place going.’

‘And Mr Kops?’ asked Ruth.

‘Mrs Fevrier –’ Polly said, appealing to other women’s common sense and knowledge of the world.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she said. ‘I came to ask if you’d take in Val and the baby. That place, Pendennis Tower, she’s in, is horrible. One of the rooms is so damp. The rats are winning. People break into the flats all the time. She shouldn’t be there.’

‘I’d like to,’ Polly said. ‘Mind you, even if I weren’t selling up I think she’d tell me to mind my own business. She wants to be independent, and, horrible as that place is, I suppose she thinks at least it’s hers.’

‘She won’t come to me,’ said Ruth. ‘I’m worrying about the baby. He has a cold all the time. Even she can see that.’

‘God knows what the Council thinks it’s doing,’ said Polly. ‘Round here there’s soft Victorian lighting. Those estates are pitch black and full of rubbish.’

‘It’s the tenants – they don’t care,’ said Ruth. ‘I’ve pleaded with her. It’s no good. Your son should do something.’

‘He can’t afford to have her in Cambridge and she wouldn’t go anyway. She wants to finish this course she’s on. You can’t really blame her. You can’t blame him. You can’t blame her for being independent.’

‘I suppose that’s right,’ said Ruth Fevrier, not wanting to make a quarrel about Polly’s son or her daughter’s legendary independence. ‘But none of that will help if Rufus gets any more of these colds and bronchitises. A woman can’t afford to be too proud in this world.’

‘More’s the pity,’ agreed Polly. ‘Look – I didn’t want my son to have a child so young, before he’s got a proper job, and you certainly didn’t want Val tied down this way, but what’s done is done. I’ll talk to Max about it when he comes back for Christmas but he can’t tell Val what to do.’

Ruth Fevrier said much what she’d said when the row broke out about Val’s pregnancy. ‘If your son does something for Val, that’s a little bit better than nothing at all.’ Polly had the idea Ruth Fevrier saw men as a graceless, irresponsible lot, a barrel full of rotten apples where a woman was lucky to find a sound one.

‘If Rufus gets really sick,’ she said, ‘Val’ll have to give up this degree to look after him’

‘If it’s as bad as that,’ said Kate, ‘they can have a room in my house. It isn’t a room, more of a cupboard, but it’s dry and safe.’

‘Better than nothing,’ said Ruth. ‘She might go somewhere if it wasn’t with me or Polly.’

‘Tell her,’ said Kate.

‘Trouble is, she wants to stick it out with this Council tenancy,’ said Ruth. ‘Then when she’s got the degree she can transfer somewhere else.’

At this point Moore-Biggs, the house agent, tapped tentatively on the kitchen door and came in, looking intimidated by the group of women or, perhaps, merely staggered by the state of the house.

‘Well,’ said Polly, ‘what do you think? You can speak freely, we’re all involved.’

He coughed. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well – obviously we’d be delighted to put the house on the market –’

‘How much?’ asked Polly.

‘Obviously, a lot of attention is needed –’ he said.

‘That’s obvious,’ said Polly.

‘I think – I think we’d be looking for something in the region of £350,000, given the condition. I’ll discuss it with my colleagues and perhaps I could telephone you tomorrow –’

‘Yes,’ said Polly. ‘Fine. How long do you think it’ll take to sell? I’m in a hurry.’

‘Impossible to say. It’s not a good time of year, of course, but if the right client comes along – it could take months or weeks.’

After he had gone Ruth Fevrier said, ‘That’s a lot of money.’

‘I owe a lot,’ said Polly. ‘And my ex-husband is getting ready to sue for a proportion. It’s pure meanness, but there you are. I want to get a little shop with living accommodation over the top. I can’t go far because of the children’s education, if you can call it that. I’d willingly include Val and Rufus but I can’t see there’d be enough room, unless I’m very lucky.’

‘Hullo,’ said Coverdale from the doorway. ‘Moore-Biggs let me in as he went out. We bought our house from him – pity, I like yours better but ours didn’t need anything doing to it, so we were able to move in immediately. I came round to see you yesterday,’ he told Kate, ‘but you were out. You must have changed your phone number.’

‘I did,’ said Kate, who had changed it years ago to avoid the pain of listening to her lover, Coverdale, saying he loved her and making excuses about his relationships with other women. She thought he might have remembered this. He was, however, the same old psychopath and showed no sign of recollection. ‘Siobhan’s grown up into a lovely girl,’ he said. ‘I thought it was the young Jacqueline Bisset.’

Polly quite enjoyed the expressionless face of Ruth Fevrier, turned to Coverdale, her eyes recognising the gone-to-seed plantation owner who has had the mother and now, without wondering who her father might be, is beginning to eye the daughter.

‘Caroline’s dying to get to know the neighbours,’ he told her. ‘I was wondering if your lot, and yours,’ he said, turning to Polly, ‘would like to come round for lunch on Sunday.’

‘Not the way things are,’ said Polly.

‘I don’t think I can,’ said Kate.

Coverdale, who had not been welcomed or asked to sit down, and whose offer of hospitality had been refused unceremoniously, was no more prepared to remove himself without a bit of news than a child is prepared to leave a birthday party without a going-home present. ‘Where are you going after this?’ he asked Polly.

‘The Lebanon,’ she told him.

‘The Lebanon?’ he said, staring. As his mouth opened the phone rang.

‘Mrs Kops,’ said the voice of Moore-Biggs. ‘Quite amazingly I have an offer for your house from a client who rang just as I got back to the office. They’re prepared to go straight to the asking price. I’m sure you’ll want to consider – they’re prepared to go ahead immediately and I gather there are no problems over finance.’

‘They haven’t even looked at it,’ Polly said.

There was a slight pause before Moore-Biggs said, ‘They’re very keen to move into the area.’

‘Well, this is welcome news,’ said Polly, as she was meant to, ‘I’ll think it over carefully.’

‘Perhaps I could give you a ring tomorrow –’ he said. ‘I really think this is a good offer, but they do want a decision quickly.’

Polly had a feeling she was being manoeuvred. She put the phone down and said, ‘That was fast – an offer.’

‘I’d put the price up,’ said Kate. ‘They’ve got a list and someone’s jumped at it without looking.’

‘He said someone rang just as he got into the office –’ Polly mused.

‘Something funny going on,’ declared Ruth Fevrier.

‘How much did they offer?’ asked Coverdale.

‘Not your business, really, is it?’ said Polly.

Undeterred, he said, ‘I expect the prospective purchaser is Alexander. Somebody said his wife was keen to move in round here. I hope I haven’t given away any secrets,’ he added. Polly gave a groan and, having achieved a reaction, Coverdale left.

‘What a worm,’ Kate Mulvaney said as they heard his feet going up the stairs. ‘Did I fall in love with him – was he like that?’

‘He was only in the making, then,’ said Polly. ‘Just sketched in. He might have gone another way at that time – you know, turned out all right. It wasn’t your fault,’ she added hastily.

‘I hope not,’ Kate said.

‘I bet it is Alexander,’ Polly said. ‘He knows I’m selling up, or suspects it. I’ve already had a letter from him making a claim. That’s nice, isn’t it? I sell up the family home with his children in it and he dashes in and buys it. To think he used to tell everybody property is theft.’

‘Say you need to know who it is, because you don’t want undesirable people buying your house,’ suggested Kate.

‘They’ll say it’s a company,’ said Polly. ‘Well, it will be – one of Alexander’s. Then he’ll fight me for his percentage of the money he’s due to pay me. But he’ll have it in his pocket, so it’ll be easier not to hand it over. He’s gone from property is theft to possession being nine points of the law.’

‘Oh my Lord,’ said Ruth Fevrier. All three women sat feeling uncomfortable, knowing that Polly’s home, the kitchen they sat in, was threatened by a tiger.

‘Well, that’s it, I got to go,’ Ruth said, adding, ‘Don’t any of you worry. I got a feeling things will turn out all right.’

‘Dear God,’ said Kate, after Ruth had left. ‘It’s hard to believe it’s really Alexander.’

‘Well, it isn’t, is it? I mean – we both know it is.’

‘I used to like him,’ said Kate into the silence.

‘People did like each other in those days,’ Polly said, ‘when the living was easy. Now it’s dog eat dog.’

The phone rang. It was Lady Kops, inviting Polly and Margaret to tea on Sunday.

By Sunday she was relieved to be leaving the house in what remained of her best clothes. Max, on vacation, with Val and the baby, had all turned up at eleven that morning, Harriet had arrived for the weekend and was still there. Polly, faced with trying to produce some food out of two pounds of mince and four pounds of pork sausages, had forgotten that Max was a vegetarian. Various groups had wound up taking responsibility for their own meals – producers of spaghetti bolognese tried to stir the brew while Val heated up the baby food and Max tried to edge a tray of cold vegetable samosas into the oven. The draining board beside the sink seemed to be generating its own supply of dirty pans and dishes. The house, a sea of moved mattresses, sleeping bags on sofas and used cups and plates, looked like an overcrowded, badly-run refugee ship, broken down and stationary many miles from shore.

Polly, on the bus with Margaret beside her, breathed a sigh of relief and then felt a pang of depression when she realised her situation was so bad that the prospect of Sunday tea with her ex-mother-in-law, who had always hated her, was looking like a treat.

The house in Bedford Square loomed up as awesomely as ever, Polly recalled having meals there years before while Alexander sat in T-shirt and jeans, with his hair halfway down his back, making it plain that if he had his way the Filipino maid serving them would shortly take over the house. Polly herself, who normally functioned as Alexander’s personal Filipino servant, only no one thought she needed liberation, was only grateful she was enduring Lady Kops’s spiteful remarks while eating a meal she had not cooked herself and would not have to wash up.

And now, the maid was older, as Polly noticed when she opened the door. So was Lady Kops, in her drawing-room with the big Canaletto on the wall. Her face was much more lined and her posture, though erect, tired. When Polly apologised for the absence of Pam and Sue, Lady Kops just said, ‘I only half hoped they would come – at that age they have their own lives to lead.’

During the exchange of enquiries that followed, much emerged. Polly, who had resolved not to complain about money, found Lady Kops plumbing her resources carefully. She seemed to know a lot about prices. Lady Kops, who was going to be too polite to talk much about Alexander, revealed a conventional, numbing breach between herself and her only son. Plainly she was being kept at a distance by Alexander and his wife, and the wife being over forty, the only grandchildren Lady Kops could be sure of were the twins Pam and Sue, whose births she had once awaited and greeted in agonies of jealousy and rage.

‘The house is too big for me now, of course,’ she said, looking round the large, very quiet room. ‘I ought to turn it into flats, but at present, quite honestly, I can’t be bothered. I’ll have to eventually. I can’t afford to keep the place up otherwise.’

Polly nodded polite agreement, although she knew one of the habits of the rich was to claim they were unable to afford to live in their own homes.

Tea came in and Margaret, who had been behaving well, quietly examining the pictures and ornaments in the room with what Polly hoped was an aesthetic and not an acquisitive eye, delightedly ate the smoked salmon sandwiches, petits fours and chocolate cake.

‘Don’t have any more,’ exclaimed Polly as she went for a third slice. ‘It was for her,’ Lady Kops said. ‘Why doesn’t Maria pack up the cake for the others? I shan’t eat it myself. Would you like to go and look at the books in the library?’ she asked Margaret, who, like a girl brought up in the best of circumstances, thanked her and went off with Maria, clearly now, in her own mind, the young and pampered daughter of the house.

Lady Kops said: ‘She has a taste for good things.’

‘I think you’re right,’ Polly said. ‘Perhaps she’s a natural antique dealer. It’d be nice to think I’m making the right move.’

‘It hasn’t been easy, I know that. Is Alexander doing anything for Pam and Sue?’

‘Not really,’ said Polly.

Lady Kops sighed. ‘I thought that might be the case. Well, I’ve left them some money in my will. No need to mention it to them. I can’t guarantee when I’ll pop off, and, perhaps it’s not a good idea to know you’re going to come into some money when you’re young.’

‘I won’t tell them, if you’d prefer it,’ said Polly. ‘This is very generous of you.’ She felt quite upset that she’d made a point of hating Lady Kops for almost twenty years.

‘Shall I tell you the terms?’ said Lady Kops.

‘I’d rather you didn’t, if it makes no difference to you,’ declared Polly. ‘Information like that usually makes everybody turn nasty. You might remember the results of my own inheritance – first I grabbed at it – then disaster.’

‘It put a roof over the heads of four children for some time,’ her former enemy charitably pointed out. She paused. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Not really,’ said Polly. ‘It’s kind of you –’

‘Do let me know,’ said Lady Kops. ‘Actually, I’ve got a feeling things are mending for you.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Polly. ‘Where are you going for Christmas?’

Lady Kops was going to the West Indies. They agreed she should come to see the family when she returned in the New Year. As they parted she said, ‘There are a few things I’d like to get rid of here – nothing important, a pair of quite nasty art nouveau candlesticks, a dinner service, the sort of things you come by at my age when people start dying. They might give you a start when you’ve bought the shop.’

‘I’ll buy them properly,’ Polly said.

‘Of course,’ said her former mother-in-law. And Margaret and Polly left.

‘She’s quite a nice old lady,’ Margaret remarked on the bus. ‘You should see the stuff she’s got in that library. It’s like the Victoria and Albert.’

‘I hope you didn’t pocket anything,’ Polly said dourly.

‘Oh Mum,’ said Margaret impatiently. Then she said gloomily, ‘I suppose she’ll leave it all to Pam and Sue.’

It was Polly’s turn to become impatient. ‘Shut up!’ she said. ‘I don’t want to hear any more about who’s got what.’

‘The sixties speaks out,’ Margaret said.

The fat girl, Harriet, sat and blubbered at me. She was wearing a dusty black top, black skirt, thick black tights and trodden-down black espadrilles. Her hair was frizzy – a bad perm. I was conscious of my own slenderness, my long, smooth, gilded hair, my slender legs tanned by tights subtly matched to my heavy silk dress, my large, amber eyes, well-kept hands, on one finger of which my grandmother’s diamond shone, on another, the golden band representing my marriage. It felt as if Harriet’s disorder might contaminate me and my orderly room – as if my own hair might become unkempt and bushy, my flowers begin to wilt and shed their petals.

Geoffrey sat at the other end of the room, by the window, plain-suited, almost two-dimensional, like someone in a film, a stranger, with his paper, a briefcase at his feet. He said afterwards, ‘I didn’t want all this. I wanted a peaceful weekend, a springboard into next week.’ I apologised. I didn’t say what I thought – that Harriet was his daughter, not mine, and that his feeble attitude to his marriage break-up had brought this on him. Why he had let his wife move to Bromley I don’t know. At the stage when the divorce took place she could have got a job anywhere, further from London. Admittedly, she had wanted to stay in London itself, but since he was putting up half the money for the deposit on her house, he managed to get her out of central London; but I thought if he could manage that, then he could have gone further. And so could she. Of course, at that time the children were younger and I couldn’t imagine the day when they’d be able to start coming up to London alone on the train.

That Sunday afternoon Geoffrey and I had, for once, gone upstairs after lunch for a rest together and I saw, at last, a break in the clouds. The situation was fairly awful – sometimes, not very often, Geoffrey would make love to me at night, mutter a few affectionate sentences, then go to sleep. The Sunday afternoon move upstairs might mean some real communication between us, some real discussion of ourselves, what we felt, our lives. We hadn’t even sorted out where to go for Christmas. If we were trying to evade Christmas at my parents’ it was nearly too late. It should have been decided weeks ago. I didn’t want to go to Scarborough. And I wanted him to tell me why he was giving more money to his old wife, too, as well. I wanted the silence between us to end. I didn’t want to be the person who kept a husband on his feet, serviced his wants, never had his attention or anything other than the affection some people give to dogs, rather like my own mother and father. I wanted a real relationship. But, as I sat at the dressing table, Geoffrey, with a sigh, had taken off his shoes and lain down in the dimness of the room, there came a ringing at the bell downstairs. Before I could stop him Geoffrey was on his feet complaining, pushing his feet into his shoes, saying, ‘I’ll get rid of them.’ I was left at the dressing table, staring at my reflection in the beautiful old glass. Although you can’t hear much from upstairs I heard Harriet’s voice of course. I even heard the words, ‘I’d like a bit of conversation –’ I wasn’t prepared to sit there and let her get away with this. I put my brush down and went down. She was sitting in the drawing-room looking rather solid in one of my chairs. Geoffrey was smiling at something she’d said to him. ‘Harriet!’ I said, ‘How nice – but why didn’t you phone to say you were coming?’

‘Because you wouldn’t have let me,’ she said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘Why would you think that?’

She couldn’t really answer. I sat down, asking her ‘How are you? How’s the course?’

‘Fine,’ she said. There was a pause. ‘I was wondering if I could talk to Dad privately.’

It crossed my mind that if I said I’d make some tea I’d appear willing, but I’d be back in the room in less than ten minutes. And in less than ten minutes I was. Geoffrey had lost his smile. He was saying, ‘I’m really not sure. You see, Anna –’

‘Anna what?’ I said, coming in with the tray. As I juggled with the cups and plates, offering Harriet a biscuit – ‘Go on,’ I said, when she refused, ‘they’re all cane sugar,’ and she took one, fat pig, she couldn’t resist – Geoffrey was saying, ‘Harriet’s still very keen to move into the spare room upstairs. I was explaining you were about to turn them into a studio.’

Harriet’s face changed. ‘You’re not a painter,’ she said. ‘You’ve never painted a picture in your life.’ Obviously she thought she was a painter, and had the right not just to live, but paint, in my house, because of it. ‘I’ve always wanted to paint,’ I told her. ‘There are reasons why I haven’t up to now. Geoffrey’s very kindly said he’ll back me up if I want to start. So you can see, Harriet –’

‘Yes, I can see,’ she said. ‘You don’t want me here. All this painting business is to use up those attic rooms. It doesn’t matter if I haven’t got any room to live, let alone paint – I have to paint in the garden shed, next to the lawn mower. In the winter I have to stop and go back in the house every half-an-hour to warm up. But I suppose I can’t expect you to care.’

‘This approach isn’t getting us anywhere, Harriet,’ Geoffrey said. I was annoyed he didn’t tell her off.

‘I think there may be reasons why you’re so upset,’ I told her. ‘You’re an intelligent girl. It isn’t the rooms. It’s maybe to do with your relationships at home. But listen – it won’t be very long before you’re qualified. You’ll be independent and able to leave.’

Harriet stared, wildly, at Geoffrey hoping for some helpful comment, but he said nothing. ‘You see,’ I said, ‘it isn’t really possible for you to come here but all you have to do is stick it out at home for a bit.’

‘I’m not unhappy at home,’ she said. ‘I just don’t get enough peace and quiet. I’m sick of the shed. I just thought you and Dad could help. You’ve got plenty of room. You’ve got a cupboard out there, with a window, which is bigger than the space I’ve got at home – and I wouldn’t have to share with Deb. I could pay you some rent –’

It was at this point that Geoffrey got up and went to the window, leaving me to face Harriet on my own. I said, gently, ‘Harriet – does your mother know you’re here?’

‘Yes,’ said Harriet. ‘She thinks it’s quite a good idea, if you accept it.’

‘It’s not me, Harriet,’ I said. ‘It’s a question of practicalities.’

She said, ‘Roger and Mum and Deb and me and Richard all live in a three-bedroom semi. It’s perfectly practical.’ Then she looked round the drawing-room. She said, ‘You’ve got Dad, so you’ve got all the money, that’s what’s happened.’ I glanced at Geoffrey. I was sure he had heard, but he pretended not to have.

‘Geoffrey is generous to all of you,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think I want to talk any more about all this.’

And that was when she started to blubber and make incoherent statements about how selfish I was, and how I’d turned their father into a stranger and other things I couldn’t bear to listen to. I had to turn my head even to see Geoffrey. I cut in, as loudly as I could without shouting, ‘Harriet, I’m very upset and I think we should talk about all this another day, when we’re all a bit calmer. I’m going upstairs now.’ Not that I wanted to leave them alone. I was too afraid Geoffrey might yield to her entreaties, which I would of course have countered later, but it would have complicated things. Still, there was no point in my staying in the room arguing because Harriet had reached the point where she was going to say some very nasty things. So up I went, and stood on my nearly-gold bedroom carpet, staring out through the net curtains into the garden and then, at that very moment Julie Thompson came marching in from the communal gardens with her two children, dressed in anoraks and wellingtons, and started going into the basement and I got even angrier. Not just because she was there, but because, even if I could get her out, I’d have Harriet round my neck again demanding a room. I felt trapped, I began to think of having a baby and, perhaps, if I did, Geoffrey would be the same to me again and there wouldn’t be room for any of them. Julie was yanking one of the children in. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘don’t give me any more aggravation.’ I’d seen her going out at regular intervals in the mornings and one afternoon a week, without the children, and I was pretty certain she had a job as a daily. She’d be getting cash in hand and not telling the Social Security, I guessed. I thought, if I can get Geoffrey to say he wants a child once the pregnancy is confirmed I’ll need that basement so my child can go out into the garden and play. First I’ll tell the Social Security I think Julie’s earning, then, when she has to repay them, Daddy will give me enough money to buy her out at a good price, and this time she’ll have to take it. I sat down at the dressing-table again, feeling a bit better, still worried about what Geoffrey and Harriet were saying to each other downstairs, but now I had a plan.

When Geoffrey came up I was wearing the long kaftan-like dress we bought in Turkey. I didn’t let him tell me about Harriet. After we had made love I said, ‘Geoffrey, would you like it if we had a child?’

He said, ‘One day. One day, Anna, love, if we both think it’s a good idea. Oh God, I’m so tired, would you mind if I fell asleep for a bit?’

And there was nothing I could do but kiss him, then lie there, staring at the ceiling, wondering if I’d conceived. This time I was covered. I’d been upset, it was the middle of the afternoon, after a family difficulty. No wonder I’d forgotten to put in my cap. But I couldn’t go on doing it and Geoffrey’s statement, careful as any civil servant’s, hadn’t left any loopholes for misunderstanding. He’d be angry if I was careless in future. On the other hand, I thought, men were usually pleased, in the end, if they had a baby. I thought, it makes them more settled. A baby’s the final proof that you’re married, and your husband loves you. Once a baby’s born you’ve become a family, which is a very strong thing. Very strong, I was thinking, watching Geoffrey lying there asleep.

Polly, now sitting at an old Remington portable she had picked up for five pounds in Portobello market twenty years earlier, smoked one of the bitter cheroots she had bought to put herself in the mood and heard familiar sounds boding no good, first the doorbell, then the voices, then more voices raised in agitation, then, worst of all, another ring at the bell, meaning that the first party was being joined by someone, or others, who would probably add to the confusion. She heard Rufus crying, then another ring at the bell. She had only got to page 10, and the next day she had seven calls to make to collect items for the stall, another lot of leaflets to put out, the rates were unpaid, Christmas was in seventeen days’ time and there were only two more Fridays and Saturdays trading in the market before the holiday and she had to make as much money out of the stall as possible, just to get the tree, the Sony Walkman, the dump truck, the turkey.

Feeling gaunt, drained, sapless, a child’s puppet kept going by levers connected to wires in her arms and legs, she left the room and leaned over the banisters on the landing. Below the hall looked like a public meeting where disparate people had come to discuss a common complaint. Harriet was crying, Pam and Sue were consoling her – all wore black, Sue’s blonde hair was spiked, Val, in a pink tracksuit with Rufus in her arms, had evidently joined in and was addressing the group rigorously, Max was folding up Rufus’s pushchair and trying to reply to something Joe Coverdale, wearing a thick-knit sweater and middle-aged jeans, was saying to him, while a pale pregnant woman holding the hand of a small child looked on, and seemed to be making efforts to get Coverdale to leave. Joe, who had come round to demonstrate his connections in the neighbourhood, would not go.

Polly, seeing all this, looked round and tried to sneak back into the sitting-room. But Joe saw her, so did Pam; one shouted ‘Polly!’, the other ‘Mum!’

‘What’s happening here?’ Polly called down. The Coverdales were coming upstairs. Polly went into the room and fell on the sofa. They’d have to go, she thought.

‘I brought Caroline round to introduce her.’

‘This isn’t really the best possible moment,’ Polly told him. This phrase, code for a state of serious disorder, was received by Joe with an indulgent, ‘Well, I can see that,’ but Caroline, who was about thirty, with a pale bun and maternity dress which made her look like an earnest schoolgirl, captain of the Remove, showed some sense and said, ‘I wasn’t sure Sunday evening was the best time to call. We’ll go now – I’d love to see you one day, when you’ve more time.’

Max came in and said, ‘Sorry to interrupt. Mum, we’d better stay possibly until after Christmas. The Council’s just started pulling asbestos out of all the flats. Even the workmen haven’t got proper protection. I’m getting on to the local paper and the councillors, but in the meanwhile we can’t stay there, especially with Rufus. I’m really sorry. I’ll look round for somewhere else –’

Polly said, ‘Yes. Look on the bright side. Perhaps the asbestos will give the rats cancer.’

‘It’s not funny,’ Max declared.

‘I know. I know,’ his mother told him. ‘But I’m sorry, I’m in no position to join the protest committee. If you get some posters organised, I’ll put them in the window. You break it to Pam that she’ll have to go in with Sue. Sort out who gets that futon, but don’t involve me in Hirohito’s revenge.’

‘Already done,’ said Max. ‘Can I pinch the corner by the french windows downstairs? I’ve got to organise my thesis.’

‘Well, don’t expect me to mind Rufus a lot. I can’t. The situation’s grave here.’

Caroline Coverdale, Polly was impressed to see, had stood up. She was looking startled, concealing it politely, and on her way. Polly felt that she was not the kind of neighbour Caroline Coverdale would want to know, anyway, nor would she be a neighbour much longer, a fact to which Coverdale referred as he, too, stood up, asking, ‘What’s the news on the sale?’

‘What?’ Max said. ‘Selling up?’

‘Got to,’ his mother told him.

Max nodded philosophically. ‘You’ll get a good price these days anyway.’

‘Some friends of ours at UCLA are thinking of moving here,’ Joe persisted. ‘I said I was sure you wouldn’t mind if I put them in touch with you. You might be glad of some lovely fat dollars.’

‘Best if they ring the house agent,’ Max said.

‘You’re a writer?’ suggested Caroline Coverdale, seeking a respectable explanation for the collapse. It might be Bohemian disorder.

‘No, no,’ said Polly, standing up. ‘I’m just helping out a friend.’

‘Well then,’ Joe Coverdale said, adding to his wife, as if she’d kept him waiting, ‘Come on darling. We ought to be getting Sam to bed. I’m a sharing, caring parent,’ he told Polly quizzically.

‘Good,’ said Polly, showing her teeth like a chimpanzee.

Caroline Coverdale said, ‘Goodbye. I expect we’ll meet soon, one way or another.’ She led out the child. Polly pulled Joe Coverdale back into the room and said in a fierce undertone, ‘Joe,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to see you again for a long, long time, if at all. I admire your act, but I know all about you. So fuck off.’

‘Caroline and I have no secrets –’ he began.

‘Clear off,’ said Polly, her voice getting louder.

‘Joe?’ came Caroline Coverdale’s enquiring voice from the stairs. Joe Coverdale was angry now, and all the angrier because his wife’s presence meant he couldn’t argue anyone into confessing their attitudes to him were a mistake. Looking perfectly calm he left the room. He spoke to his wife on the stairs, she replied. Before the front door closed Polly relit her bitter cheroot and flung herself on the sofa, raking her hair with her hands.

‘The bugger,’ she said. ‘The stinker. He comes dragging round here, without phoning, to see what’s going on, bringing his wife and child as if he was taking them to the pictures. While he’s here he starts trying to sell my house off to friends of his. My God – talk about bloody awful neighbours – and it’s not the first time. What the hell does he want to come back here for? He’s like What’s-his-name – Christie – this is his Rillington Place. What a nerve! What a little shocker!’

‘I wouldn’t let him upset you,’ remarked Max. ‘Listen – I’m sorry about staying.’

‘Don’t want asbestos in the family,’ said Polly. ‘We must have had everything else. Well – I’m going to make a cup of tea.’

In the kitchen she said to Harriet, ‘I dare say your Dad feels even worse about this row than you do.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Harriet.

‘Well, I do,’ said Polly, who had sometimes seen Geoffrey Lombard’s face as he went off to work or came back. He stooped a little and his briefcase, which had earlier on seemed a shiny badge signifying worth and status, now looked like a big stone he was forced to carry about with him.

The next week was terrible. A summons arrived for £700 in rates, the gas was only not cut off thanks to a man from the Gas Board who said to her in a friendly way, as she stood on the step, ‘I suppose you’re denying me access.’

‘Well, I suppose I am,’ said Polly. He looked doubtful so she added more firmly, ‘Yes, I am definitely denying you access.’

‘That’s all right then,’ he said. ‘But you’d better pay it, or it won’t be so easy the next time.’ He looked at his piece of paper, ‘£193,’ he said. ‘What are you doing in there, welding?’

‘Just living,’ she said. ‘It costs, these days.’

‘You can say that again,’ he said, turning round and going to find someone worse off than she was. In the meantime, the fridge was full of juice and jars of home-made babyfood and plates of things left over from meals Polly was planning to recycle to provide more meals, although she never found time to manage it. Even Margaret began to complain about the constant jacket potatoes, ‘It’s like living in a Spud-U-Like,’ she told Polly. Max took pity on them and started cooking at night, but he stuck to a regime involving expensive purchases of tofu, nuts, Vecon, vegetable pâté and vegetarian margarine from the health food shop. Polly helped to pay, moaning to Sue, ‘We’re not well off enough to be vegetarians,’ while Sue moaned back, ‘I need meat. There are scientific reasons why people need meat. I’ll have to take turns with Max or I’ll start biting people.’ From then on they had vegetarian meals and sausages or spaghetti bolognese alternately. Polly didn’t care. She was too nervous to eat. She just ate currant buns from the breadshop.

Meanwhile, Arnold, Clancy’s friend, who had got her the scriptwriting job, phoned: ‘Jay Honeycutt’s a little bit uneasy –’ ‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ Polly told him. ‘Look – I’ve got my stall, my house is up for sale –’

‘If there are too many problems …’ he said warningly.

‘I’m telling you, I’m doing it.’

‘Well, for Christ’s sake, get some priorities worked out,’ he exclaimed.

‘What are priorities?’ she asked wildly. ‘It’s all priorities.’

He concluded, ‘Polly, I don’t know where you’re coming from.’

‘Who cares where I’m coming from? Where am I going?’ she said and put the phone down.

Rufus got bronchitis. Val was distracted. Moore-Biggs, the house agent, was pressing her hard for an answer for the client he had so luckily found less than an hour after he had looked round the house. Polly said, still believing the client was Alexander, ‘I’d like some other offers first.’ He sounded reluctant and she realised her house agent was Alexander’s man, charmed, bribed, or probably just so impressed he was doing his dirty work for nothing. At much the same time she had another letter from Alexander’s solicitor, restating Alexander’s claim that as the house was in his name also, he was entitled to a percentage of the sale. She went to the Law Centre, where they told her she would have to produce her accounts for several years back in order to get legal aid. Polly knew it would take her weeks to produce a sensible statement of her financial position, if she ever could. She imagined Alexander leading the hunt as it closed in on her.

All the others in the house were on breaks from school, college or university. She didn’t notice they were worried about her and trying to help. To her it seemed she had assembled her entire family under the cracking roof at Elgin Crescent, where they would all be killed when it fell in.

Clancy also rang up, sounding conciliatory. Polly spared him nothing. He said, ‘You need some help there.’ ‘I’ve got as much as I can handle,’ she told him bitterly. Margaret, doing some ironing, had fused the electricity. She couldn’t go on typing until Val had repaired it. It was nobody’s fault, but it was dark.

A postcard arrived from Lady Kops, showing palm trees and wishing the family a happy Christmas.

Finally, there came a call from the producer, Jason Honeycutt himself. She told him copies of the script were in the post to New York and California, but there was a postal strike in Britain, then sat up all night finishing it. She was on the last pages next morning when Margaret said her hamster had died. Polly said she wasn’t surprised. Margaret said she had asked Polly for money for the hamster’s bedding and Polly had said she’d give it to her but hadn’t and she thought the hamster had died of pneumonia. Polly said anyone with £15 a week pocket money ought to be able to save up and provide their hamster with a handmade pine bed, sprung mattress and a personal duvet. Margaret cried and said smart talk wouldn’t bring the hamster back to life. Polly felt ashamed of herself and went on typing. The ribbon on the typewriter faded as she hit the phrases. ‘But what about us?’ ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ ‘And I said I would never leave you. But I’ve got a job to do, too, and where I’m going you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do you can’t be any part of –’ Sod this, remarked Polly to herself. Who does he think he is, anyway? She changed the lines around, so Bogart said ‘But what about us?’ and Ingrid said ‘I’ve got a job to do. Where I’m going you can’t follow.’ She’d changed it all, but she didn’t care.

She posted the scripts on the way to an old house in Kilburn where an elderly Irishman was getting rid of things belonging to his mother. In the dark hall, with its faded wallpaper and the smell of cats she gave him £100 in cash for items she could hardly see, pictures, crockery, old clothes, a tin box full of buttons, a load she thought would probably fetch only £100 when she sold it, but by now she was reeling with tiredness, afraid of the man’s hall, the darkness, the funny smell and of what might come out of the door on the left. She drove the van home, went upstairs and lay down. She slept, dreaming of old houses. She was being pursued. She woke, now afraid of herself, what she was doing, what she had become. She looked in the glass – she was gaunt, lined, her eyes stared back at herself in fright. Her hair, a bad mix of brown and red and grey, hung round her pale face like a lunatic’s. She thought, at least Clancy isn’t here to tell me what I look like. Was there any man in the world, when you were in a bad state, who wouldn’t find himself mentioning your broken nails, crow’s feet, lank hair, nervous, unsoothing manner? She sat down to drink a cup of tea in the, for once, empty kitchen. She looked out of the window and saw that the van had gone. Stolen. She felt panic, then the relief of knowing there was now nothing she could do. She couldn’t collect any more. She couldn’t even get what she had to the market. She couldn’t make any more effort. Two minutes later the relief had evaporated. She rang the police. She rang Julie Thompson to ask if her boyfriend Alan, who was a builder, would lend her his van over the weekend. This kind of thing gives you cancer, she thought. When Val came in carrying Rufus, who was coughing, she generously shared this idea with her. Val said, ‘Who knows? Maybe it’s what prevents it. Why don’t you go to bed, Polly? The script’s in the post. You can’t do any more without the van. I’ll take care of anything that crops up.’

‘Alan’s going to phone – the police might come and ask what was in the van –’

‘I can talk to Alan. I can talk to the police. Jot down what was in the van,’ Val replied. She put on the kettle for Rufus’s drink.

It can hardly be said that, as she lay in bed, Polly Kops’s life suddenly flashed before her eyes. It was in the habit of passing before her eyes regularly, not in flashes but in long, slow-moving episodes which bored even her. Now she saw herself, young and energetic, at university on a river bank with friendly young men and women; then in Clancy’s arms, at night on a boat, moored at some steps by the Thames; in hospital, bearing her first child, with Clancy away with the band, his brain in flight from the reality. Then marriage to Alexander, the births of Pam and Sue, the night when her father had died falling off her own balcony – birth and death, scandal and outrage, this, that the other – it had worn her out, she thought. She was like some ship of the line, once trim and brightly painted, which had fought too many engagements. Now battered and patched she was just a hulk full of convicts now, moored and fog-bound off the Kent coast. Oh Christ, said Polly Kops to herself, look what it’s all come to. Just look. Then she fell into a long and dreamless sleep. Outside in the big gardens trees rattled and the black and white cat stepped on the frosty ground.

I felt much better on Monday. Geoffrey had said it would be a nice idea to go to his uncle’s for Christmas. I’d phoned my mother and she’d been a bit upset and said Daddy would miss me too, but luckily my brother and his wife were coming over from Holland to join them. There was some prospect of the two of them going back with Rob and Liz at the New Year, which relieved my conscience and I must say, when I heard they were coming I felt even more grateful I wasn’t going to be there. The thought of Christmas with Liz going on and on about her terrible women’s art gallery in Amsterdam was absolutely awful. It isn’t as if she had to do it – with her private income and Rob’s salary they must have been twice as well off as Geoffrey and me. It gave me an idea, though, Liz being a vegetarian. I decided to go to see Dr Robertson and ask him to give me a prescription for an allergic condition which meant I had to cut out all dairy products in my diet, that way I could evade half the heavy food at Geoffrey’s uncle’s and not put on any weight. With that I popped down to see the dreaded Julie. What a mess – dying flowers and toys everywhere, and I’m sure the place is damp. It made me cringe when I thought of the effect on the building. I’d spotted her boyfriend leaving so I just sat down and offered her £10,000 to get out. It was a bit risky, because of course I didn’t have all of it, but I knew even if Daddy wouldn’t let me have the rest Geoffrey could easily borrow it from the bank because having the whole house, instead of just part of it, would be a wonderful investment. I thought Julie’d be just a little bit pleased or grateful, but she just sat staring at me, with this child in a matted jumper on her knee, eating an apple, while the other watched the TV. Her skin was very dry. I noticed little lines round her eyes, although she’s only thirty. ‘But where could I go?’ she said. That staggered me. I’d offered her a very large sum of money, and she was asking me what to do with it, silly fool. I just said, ‘Well, that’s really for you to decide. But with all that in your pocket you’ll have plenty of choice.’

The child who was watching the TV turned round and gave me a blank stare. ‘Wipe your nose,’ said Julie automatically. She looked blank. I could see she wasn’t concentrating. I talked for a bit then said, ‘Is it nice working for Jacquie Eberhardt?’ I’d happened to find out I was right, she did have a little job, cleaning for a friend of Cynthia Webber’s, who’s the chairperson of the garden committee. She told me one Saturday morning, when I mentioned my problem with Julie while we were on communal leaf-raking duty in the garden. It’s not a job I like, but it’s fun to meet the neighbours, and their friends, all kitted up in their wellies and so forth, with rakes. There are people like Sir Hugh Browne, from the Department of the Environment, and Roger Brabham the playwright, all lending a hand – anyway, now I knew Julie was getting social security and doing a job, and she knew I knew. I saw her flinch. She said, ‘Yes. I do occasionally. She’s a nice lady.’ I let a long silence go on, then I stood up and said, ‘I expect you’re busy. I’ll leave you to think it all over.’

Small wonder by that Monday morning I felt pleased with myself. Geoffrey was being much nicer. We weren’t going to have to go to Scarborough – I might even be pregnant – I’d even lost another pound. I felt good, for once.

While Polly slept the house agent rang, the police rang about the stolen van, Julie’s boyfriend rang to say Polly could have his van at two o’clock on Saturday, Councillor Brian Casey from the Labour Party rang Val about the asbestos on the William Thackeray estate, Clancy Goldstein rang to pass on his love to Polly, various friends rang Margaret, Kate Mulvaney rang Polly to say a friend wanted to get rid of a pair of brass candlesticks and Julie Thompson rang Pam to ask her to babysit. Polly’s mother, Mrs Turnbull, rang to check that she was still expected for Christmas, otherwise she would go to Malaga unless Clancy had come back, in which case she would definitely go to Malaga. Polly’s Auntie Daniella rang to speak to her son, Clancy, who she obviously believed was still living in Elgin Crescent.

Polly, still worn out, took in some of this on Saturday morning, while piling the goods for the stall single-handed into two taxis, because no one else was up. She thought vaguely, I’ll sort it all out on Monday morning, and put out her stall in the chill, murky atmosphere of a slow December dawn. The other stall-holders already looked pinched. The brisk traffic between dealers began.

By eight, as she stood with her hands wrapped round a mug of tea, a policeman came up to her. The stall-holders nearby stopped what they were doing and watched. ‘Mrs Polly Kops?’ said the policeman.

Polly nodded, ‘That’s right,’ thinking of Clancy, the unpaid rates, and that peculiar vase a man in a torn coat had sold her a few weeks before, opening the coat to reveal the dull tone of unshined brass, then sliding it on to the stall from the protection of the coat, as if slithering unhatched eggs into an airing cupboard. ‘You do own a blue van, untaxed, number ASD 207S?’ And road tax, she added to the list of her involvements. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Have you found it?’

‘Dumped in Acton,’ he said. ‘If you’ll bring the papers to the station we’ll let you have the keys.’

‘Well, thanks,’ said Polly. ‘I’ll come later in the morning, when trade gets quieter.’

The others watched the policeman leave, as cats on a wall watch a dog go past them. Then they went back to stamping to keep warm and staring in front of them with the imprisoned look of people there to sell what no one’s buying.

Polly phoned Alan to say she wouldn’t need his van and drove her own back. She found Harriet in an anorak and woolly hat, loyally in charge of the stall. Everyone, stall-holders and customers, looked tired and down; everything on the stalls looked drab, the clothes on their railings looked what they mostly were – old clothes, worn by people who were probably dead. Even the new clothes looked threadbare To cheer herself up Polly went into a callbox, rang up Moore-Biggs at the house agent’s and fired him. She then rang two other agents, accused Moore-Biggs of being in collusion with her ex-husband and made appointments to see them on Sunday morning. Then she took a few items the Irishman had sold her at random from the van and put them on the stall. There was a black coat with a fur collar the man’s late wife had probably kept for church and funerals, a large plate with a swan painted on it and a small Victorian oil painting in a nice gilt frame, showing two cows standing in a field. The picture had been propped on the stall for five minutes when a man in a green anorak said ‘How much?’ Polly looked into his face, saw the weary lines of a dealer inscribed on it, checked his haircut, saw a good barber had been involved and said quickly, ‘A hundred and fifty pounds.’ ‘Sorry Polly, I’ve sold it,’ said Harriet. ‘Customer’s paid already. ‘She’s collecting it later.’ Polly, who had been standing with Harriet the whole time, opened her mouth to protest, thought better of it and told the man, ‘Sorry – I didn’t realise. It shouldn’t be on the stall at all.’

When he had gone she said to Harriet, ‘Do you think it’s worth more than £150?’

‘I didn’t realise I did until he tried to buy it,’ she said. ‘I’d take it to Sotheby’s if I were you.’ Polly took it off the stall. You could imagine the small, pretty oil painting hanging peacefully on anyone’s wall. Later, she saw the man in the green anorak eyeing the stall from a distance. The day, a long day of cold, of pinched faces examining her goods, filled her with the bleak sense of trying and often failing to scratch a living from people who were trying, and also failing, to do the same. She could see the situation getting worse and worse, more effort chasing less and less money, all of them in the same, sinking boat.

The impression did not lift that evening as she showed two house agents round the house. They were well-dressed and confident but still, she thought, they were in the old house business, just as she was in the old clothes business and the old film business. They were recycling tired items, just as she was; they were all aboard the rubbish ship together in a sea of junk. Their estimates of what the place was worth were slightly higher than Moore-Biggs’s, but, she thought, if Alexander had been thwarted he might become keener to insist on his share. If only she could buy the little lock-up shop, to provide some housing and get some kind of a living, she thought. She wouldn’t ask any more than that. Gradually, as unemployment figures mounted and the national assets got sold off, No. 1 Elgin Crescent and the less prosperous parts of the neighbourhood inched towards Christmas.

Down in the basement Julie Thompson got a frightening letter from the DHSS, asking for an interview. ‘She’s told on me, that bitch upstairs,’ she cried into a callbox phone while her children, looking anxious, waited outside. Alan, her boyfriend, on the phone in the plaster-covered empty drawing-room of a house they were doing up, squatted on the floorboards saying, ‘Come on, Jules. It’s probably nothing.’

‘I know the form,’ she said. ‘I’ll wind up in court. She’s been watching me coming and going. The woman I work for’ll make a statement about what she’s paying me – it’s defrauding the DHSS. I’ll have a fine, and a criminal record –’

‘Don’t jump to conclusions,’ he advised her as his mate came in and dumped a sack of plaster inside the door. ‘Look – I’ve got to go. I’ll come straight round at dinner time. Listen to me, Julie, don’t worry – don’t worry, and don’t do anything,’ he cried above the sound of the pips, but too late. Julie rushed out of her front door and up the Lombards’ steps. She rang the doorbell, rang it again and again. Anna appeared, and stood inside the door, smooth face framed in smooth hair, slender body in slender dress. Julie, distracted, said, ‘I want to come in.’

‘It isn’t convenient,’ replied Anna. ‘Can you tell me what you want?’

‘I think you’ve told the DHSS about my job,’ Julie said. ‘It’s a rotten trick, Mrs Lombard. I think you did it to try to force me to go, and I’m not going to. I’m staying where I am as long as it suits me. I want you to know that.’

Anna said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’re in trouble with the DHSS it’s your fault. As to the flat, I’ve made you a generous offer you’d be silly to turn down, and I advise you to go back and think again. And please remember, my offer won’t hold for ever. I’ll need an answer after Christmas. And, quite frankly, I resent your coming here and making accusations. If you do this any more I’ll have to tell my husband. The results could be quite unpleasant for you.’

Julie just stood there, thinking various things. She couldn’t be absolutely sure, now she saw Anna standing immaculately in her immaculate doorway, that Anna had really stooped to phoning the DHSS about her. She looked too far from that kind of world. She couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t be better to take the money, a lot of money, and get out. She didn’t know, if she refused the money, what her rights were. Perhaps Anna could make her go anyway. The horn of her boyfriend’s van honked in the street. She turned round saying, ‘I’d better go.’

To this Anna said, ‘Yes. I think so.’

‘Stupid bitch,’ said Alan, when they were inside the flat.

‘Didn’t I tell you not to do anything? What d’you want to go there for?’

‘Oh Alan,’ said Julie. ‘Do you want a sandwich or something?’

‘Cup of tea,’ he said, as she put the kettle on. ‘Well, what did she say, then?’

‘Just said she didn’t know anything about the DHSS – well, I don’t know, do I, and I ought to take the money. Well – £10,000 – we could get a mortgage like you said –’

‘You told me you didn’t want to end up with me keeping you, and paying on the housing. You said you wanted to be independent, as long as you could get social security, which you couldn’t get living with me, in my house. Now, look Julie, you convinced me. Now you’re saying the opposite. Just think it over and tell me what you want.’

Julie, depressed by Anna Lombard, now began to think Alan had gone off her. True, she had said all those things, and meant them, but now she needed a feeling of security. It looked as if Alan was backing off from the idea of a mortgage. Perhaps he was backing off altogether. She began to cry, thinking she could wind up with nothing, no flat due to the machinations of Anna Lombard, no £10,000, no Alan, just the children.

‘I don’t know where I am now,’ she said.

Alan got up and put his arms round her. ‘It’ll work out, love,’ he said. As he pressed up against her, kissing her, he muttered, ‘Oh blimey, I’ve got to go. We’re running late and the owner’s wife keeps on turning up to check. Plus if we’re not finished by Thursday, the profit starts ebbing away.’ Julie sniffed.

‘I know, love,’ he said, kissing her and pulling her towards him, ‘Oh well –’ Just as she was thinking he would not go back to work, they would go to bed instead, he broke away and told her, ‘Take you out tonight – film and an Indian restaurant.’

Julie nodded. After he had gone she sat down. Then she stood up and went, feeling very shaky, to collect the boys from school.

Later that afternoon Polly, who had gone round to the flats with Val to collect some clothes and books they needed, said, ‘My God, they thought they were doing people a favour when they pulled down the slums. You know, this place must be practically on the site where that man killed all those prostitutes and buried them in the garden.’

‘It hasn’t lost its old atmosphere,’ observed Val, turning to the huge, dirty block she lived in. ‘I don’t recommend the lift – the smell’s awful.’ The smell on the stairs was not too good either, thought Polly as she climbed up, someone had peed somewhere. Rows of flats on the landings were uncannily silent. In one a large dog barked, throwing itself at its door. ‘I suppose every day,’ she said, ‘you have to decide whether to take Rufus into the stinking lift or climb three flights carrying him.’

‘It depends on what else I’ve got to carry,’ Val said. Inside the flat, which was tidy, but chilly, they put family clothing, sweaters, Rufus’s small wellingtons, a few items from the kitchen into plastic bags and holdalls, and went out along the concrete landing overlooking the grass, wrecked building, other blocks, to the stairs. Here they met a woman carrying two shopping bags. ‘What’s happening about the asbestos?’ asked Val.

‘It had to be stopped while they made enquiries,’ the woman said. ‘Well, a lot of women picketed the site in the morning and told the workmen they were at risk; and the workmen decided they wouldn’t go on. But of course they can’t leave it like that. And if they’re going to finish it they’ll have to evacuate half the estate. Course, what they’re saying now is they ought to demolish the whole building and put up small blocks, but there isn’t the money. So we’re all in suspense – meanwhile we’re still stuck here with all our asbestos still in place. Think those councillors would let their wives and kids go on like this? If they lived here we’d get immediate action.’

‘Have you applied for a transfer?’ Val asked.

‘Transfer? I’ve been on the transfer list for three years,’ she said. ‘I want a house. We’re trying to get ourselves treated as a priority because of the risks. But you ring them and they say what can they do, the housing’s not available. Then it depends what they offer you. Half the places are worse than this. You’re between the devil and the deep blue sea here. And they’re sitting on their bums working out how to do the next Royal visit – I’d like the Queen to come here and see it for herself. You’re lucky to be out of it.’

‘I know,’ said Val.

‘Oh well,’ said the woman, who was feeling the weight of her bags. ‘Well, there’s nothing you can do.’

Val nodded. The woman trudged off down the passageway and Val and Polly continued on down the stairs, across the patchy grass with its sprinkling of crisp packets and coke cans. The great grey sky was open, moving, above the other tall buildings. Plastic sheeting blew in the windows of the big, wrecked skyscraper, empty and silent. A raw wind cut their legs. Two women stood chatting near the huge rubbish containers. At the bottom of the chutes, three boys rode past on bikes, a thin black young man walked along with his hands in his pockets. They were all too small against the giant buildings.

‘Thirty per cent unemployed on that estate,’ remarked Val. ‘Mostly under twenty-five.’

‘Yes?’ Polly said. ‘Do you and Max want to go out tonight?’

‘Yes,’ said Val, ‘we do.’

‘Right,’ said Polly. A police car screamed past them into the estate as they turned into the street. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Polly said. ‘You can’t bring Rufus up here.’

‘I’m not planning to,’ said Val.

Polly felt defeated. She had been a child of the post-war days of hope and full employment, and given birth to her own children in the 1960s when in a matter of moments the chains would fall from all their ankles, all would be free. The prisons, madhouses, clinics, even the graveyards so many of the enthusiasts ended up in were only way stations on the journey to this paradise. Surely all this trouble couldn’t be true? But supposing it was? Suppose Alexander and Clancy, who had both abandoned their pretences altogether and were just looking after themselves, were the realists? But with Val beside her, carrying Rufus, how could she tell herself this was all there would ever be, for any of them?