The Lynne Truss Treasury: Columns and Three Comic Novels

The Lynne Truss Treasury




The

Lynne Truss Treasury


C o l u m n s a n d Th r e e C o m i c N o v e l s

B y t h e au t h o r o f t h e #1 New York Times B e s t s e l l e r

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

GOTHAM BOOKS Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First Gotham Books printing, July 2005 Electronic Edition, April 2006 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © 2005 by Lynne Truss All rights reserved With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (originally published by Penguin UK in 1994; reprinted by Profile UK in June 2004) Making the Cat Laugh (originally published by Penguin UK in 1995; reprinted by Profile UK in June 2004) Tennyson’s Gift (originally published by Penguin UK in 1996; reprinted by Profile UK in June 2004) Going Loco (originally published by Penguin UK in 1999; reprinted by Profile in June 2004) Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for. MSR ISBN 1-7865-6328-1 AEB ISBN 0-7865-6498-9 Set in Quadraat Designed by Elke Sigal Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability. www.penguin.com

To Mum




Contents




Preface

xi

With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed Tennyson’s Gift Going Loco

1

145 325

Making the Cat Laugh (columns)

485

Preface to The Lynne Truss Treasury




‘WHERE WAS MAKEPEACE?’ IS A LINE THAT, when it breezily occurs in the second chapter of With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed, is unlikely to strike many readers as significant. To me, however, it is perhaps the most important line I ever wrote. In all editions of my much-beloved first novel, I feel it ought to be highlighted (discreetly, of course) in pink, blue, or gold. Good old Makepeace. He saved my bacon, as the saying goes. The year was 1992, and I was thirty-six. A full-time television critic and columnist for the London Times, I had been encouraged by my agent to attempt a comic novel. I know what you are thinking. Thirty-six is a quite advanced age to start writing fiction. Well, by cruel misfortune, the case was worse than that: at thirty-six, I was old and cynical in equal measure. Professionally speaking, I was Methuselah’s older and more jaded sister. For twelve years previously I had been a literary editor on British weekly papers, including (until just before its demise in 1991) the BBC magazine The Listener. Of course, I had enjoyed the work of running book pages and commissioning reviews, but it had cruelly stripped me of the sort of literary illusions which normally sustain the first-time novelist. After a dozen years in the business, I was all too aware of the essential futility of being a published author. Great miserable quantities of books arrived on my desk every week—written mainly by people you’ve never heard of—and once I had cheerfully cleared them onto the floor, they would hang around my office, mewling for attention and feebly clawing my shins, until I finally produced the moral courage to put them in a sack, take them to the nearest river, and pitch them in. And this wasn’t the only reason I had supressed my desire to write books. Oh no. I was subject to great yawning feelings of personal inadequacy; I also felt, decisively, that I was somehow not entitled. So, to sum up: When it came to writing books, part of me thought I shouldn’t, part of me thought I couldn’t, and part of me thought I’d better not. This was, you might say, a roundly negative frame of mind. However, in order to placate my agent, I finally went on vacation for a week, and in that happy time drafted (without any preparatory thought) a putative first chapter in which a has-been journalist called Osborne visits the offices of an ailing gardening magazine, to write his weekly ‘Me and My Shed’ celebrity interview. I enjoyed it. I got lost in it. Naturally, I drew on my own experience of small, dying magazines, and utilised the topography of The Listener’s editorial offices. Comical results ensued. The characters kept dropping hints for plot development, which I considered extremely obliging of them. At the end of this exercise, my chapter clearly needed a lot of work, and I was slightly disappointed to dis-

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cover that my fictional style bore a strong resemblance to my journalistic one, but my agent told me to carry on, so I waited six months until I could contrive another vacation. And at last we are getting to Makepeace. When the day arrived, I packed my old yellow portable typewriter, a bike, and a hopeful packet of paper, and set off to the North Norfolk coast where there are blustery sand-spits and sea-bird sanctuaries and there is an invigorating amount of fresh air a) to go out and glory in, or b) to hide from indoors with the curtains drawn. I chose the latter. Again, I had done no preparatory thinking. I think I regarded it as cheating not to rely totally on inspiration. Anyway, this time it was harder. Two days later, in my hotel room, I was on my second page. Osborne was in a seedy café, large as life. And I seemed to have hit a lull in the proceedings. Nothing was happening. Osborne stared at the wall and so did I. He stirred the letters on the table in front of him; I had a thoughtful biscuit. He said ‘Ho hum’ and I studied the pattern on the curtains. I had completely run out of ideas. I felt terrible. This was it, then. I was washed up as a writer already. How could this happen? Apart from anything else, I still had five days of vacation left, and I didn’t like cycling. My novel, as it currently stood, was about 2,300 words long, which by any known standards was scanty. I calculated that, even if I went through it again, methodically inserting adverbs, it would fall tragically short of the 60,000 minimum normally required; besides which, with Osborne just staring into space at the café table, readers might assume from its inconclusive ending that I had intended my novel to be modern and experimental. At which point, magically, the line ‘Where was Makepeace?’ appeared on the page in front of me, and I really must emphasize this: I had nothing whatever to do with it. I didn’t know who Makepeace was. I’d never even heard of the bloke. Evidently, deep in my subconscious, some sort of tussle for my novel’s survival had broken out, and the result was, well, a form of automatic writing, as if dictated from beyond the grave. If I were Charlie Kaufman, I’d certainly write a screenplay about it. How astonishing that this could happen. Who wrote that? I looked at the line and assessed its literary value. Well, clearly, if I was channelling someone, it wasn’t Oscar Wilde. But, on the other hand, it was certainly a challenge. ‘Who is this Makepeace?’ I urgently asked myself. And when the answer urgently started to come, I realised I was no longer scared of writing fiction. I was cured. I didn’t care that millions of unworthy books were written, printed and pitilessly drowned every year. This was glorious. It gave you a new bit of your brain to play with! A bit that had a mind of its own! For better or worse, Makepeace was demanding to be born, and I had a job to do. 

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Re-reading these books last year for their re-issue in the UK, I was stuck by certain shared characteristics. First, they are all punctuated to an exceptionally high standard. This goes without saying. Each concerns a group of quite highfunctioning adults thrown into disarray by circumstances they cannot control. Curiously, given what has befallen their author in the past year or two, the theme of unsought celebrity comes up consistently; in fact, the tension between the demands of public and private propels the whole plot of Going Loco. In each book, somebody is struck on the head for comic purposes (I have vowed to break this pattern; it is terribly irresponsible). And finally, the line ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’ appears in some form in each book, although not by accident. Entirely for my own amusement, I decided at an early stage in my writing career that I would try to work this line into everything I wrote—as a kind of signature. Ultimately I abandoned the practice while writing a comedy series for radio set in Ancient Greece (you can’t have Plato quoting Tennyson), but only with regret. Here is a climactic passage from a radio play, in which I feel it is used to quite impressive effect: Hilary grabs something heavy MICK: Put that down, Hilary! Listen! Listen. (Hastily sings ballad) Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat night has flown. Come into the garden, Maud— HILARY (screams): What are you doing, Mick? MICK (shouts): Trying to calm you down, of course! HILARY: Aaaagh! A smash as she hurls something; then pause and tinkles There is one other very noticeable characteristic of these novels. In terms of plot structure, they are all quite rigidly governed by the author’s touching belief that if a plot gets faster and more complicated, it gets funnier. Even though I wrote these books myself, I found myself asking, as I turned the pages last year with exponentially increasing alarm, ‘Where can this all be leading? Ha ha, I hope this woman knows what she’s doing. Oh dear, things seem to be speeding up a bit too quickly here, and I’m just wondering—Oh my God, this whole narrative shebang is running totally out of control!’  Tennyson’s Gift is a period piece, set in the summer of 1864 on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England. It is my baby. Astonishingly, some people are not immediately attracted to the subject matter, since it deals with highbrow Victorians such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the pioneer photographer Julia Margaret

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Cameron. They fear it will be educational, perhaps, but I don’t know. I can’t account for these people. Tennyson’s Gift is, of all my books, my darling, and I won’t hear a word said against it. It lifted my heart and it still does. I loved the research and I loved the writing—which I did almost entirely in situ at Freshwater Bay over three long vacations in the mid-1990s. In Tennyson’s Maud, there is a chokingly beautiful line—‘And the soul of the rose went into my blood’—and I feel that this special little English bay with its sparkling sea and bracing cliffs got into my blood as I wrote the book, and I still shed tears whenever, after the briefest stay on the island, I board the ferry that takes me back to the mainland. I didn’t mention madness as a recurrent theme in my books. I should have. The greatest influence on Tennyson’s Gift is not the poet laureate, or even Mrs Cameron, his wonderfully enthusiastic neighbor who slaved night and day for Art. It is the great Victorian children’s writer Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), who made a real visit to Freshwater in July 1864, and thus supplied a real date for the book’s entirely invented action. Tennyson’s Gift is about love, poetry, the beauty of girls with long hair, the questionable sagacity of men with beards, the language of flowers, and the acquisition of famous heads; but it is mainly about the insane Carrollian egotism that accompanies energetic genius. Through the prism of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (which Dodgson was on the verge of publishing), the Freshwater group’s vigorous eccentricities suddenly make perfect sense. I start the book with Julia Margaret Cameron’s servants outdoors painting her red roses white for aesthetic reasons. Since Mrs Cameron is a woman who once had an entire garden dug up and repositioned overnight just to give her husband a nice surprise in the morning, the Carrollian touch of the painted roses heightens her true nature—but only by a tiny tad. All the main characters are real people who were really regulars at Freshwater: the solemn painter G. F. Watts; the burgeoning young actress Ellen Terry; the two maids; the Tennyson boys; even the little girl Daisy. They can all be found in Mrs Cameron’s pictures from that year. In 1864, William Makepeace Thackeray’s newly orphaned daughters were likewise living at Freshwater, and I still feel guilty about leaving them out, but I had to draw the line somewhere, and I didn’t want grief to intrude on this lively book. Meanwhile, the only imports to the scene are the rather splendid American phrenologist Lorenzo Niles Fowler and his precocious daughter Jessie, who cannot be placed historically at Freshwater in July 1864, but were touring England in the early 1860s, which was good enough for me. Phrenology was the science of assessing a person’s qualities by observing the dimensions and swellings of his cranium. It was otherwise known as ‘having your bumps felt’ and it was a huge and influential fad on both sides of the Atlantic for around eighty years. Reading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre last year, I was

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surprised to find (how had I missed this before?) that even a sheltered little governess in Yorkshire was an expert on the arrangement of the cranial organs and couldn’t help applying her expertise relentlessly to her employer’s fascinating head. Phrenology got into Tennyson’s Gift because it kept cropping up in the background reading. Dodgson was phrenologised and informed that he had a great love of children. Tennyson described a friend as having ‘a large bump of benevolence.’ Phrenology might be a key to these people. It was certainly a key to Mrs Cameron’s large, reverent, head-only portraits of great men, lit from high angles to emphasize their large temples and noble domes. And on a less elevated note, if an author with a weakness for innuendo has the option of including scenes in which Victorians ‘have their bumps felt’—well, how could she resist?  The third novel is Going Loco. It came out of a love of old-fashioned gothic fiction—in particular, a love of the tradition of ‘doubles’ literature, which includes Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair, Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘William Wilson’, and lots of disturbing stories by jumpy Scandinavians. Set in present-day London (with subsidiary journeys to Sweden), it principally concerns a hard-pressed women writer called Belinda, toiling over a book about the history of literary doubles, who achieves her dream and pays the price: She acquires a cleaning lady who is much more than a cleaning lady. The cleaning lady starts to take over responsibility for the cooking, shopping, cleaning and so on. Then, while Belinda nests upstairs, growing fat and wheezy (as authors do), the cleaning lady briskly supplants Belinda in every other aspect of her life. ‘If you don’t want to go to the opera with your mother, why don’t I go instead?’ says the cleaning lady, and in the circumstances the suggestion seems quite reasonable. So she goes fashion shopping with Belinda’s mother; she consoles Belinda’s lonely husband; she sacks Belinda’s agent; she goes on TV on Belinda’s behalf. Far from being outraged by these liberties, Belinda is mainly grateful and relieved. In Going Loco, neither party knows where to draw the line in this benignly symbiotic arrangement, which goes to quite upsetting extremes; meanwhile other double trouble occurs elsewhere. Belinda’s husband Stefan may be an imposter, or even a clone; her best friend Maggie, a failed Shakespearean actress, gets romantically embroiled with a pair of identical twins. The point of Belinda’s story is that, whereas in traditional gothic fiction, men have their identities hijacked by doppelgängers and suffer existential terror about it, for a modern, driven woman the idea of surrendering all this pressure to someone else is actually quite attractive. I mean to say, its merits surely outweigh its disadvantages. The famous work-life dilemma is solved at one ingenious stroke.

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If someone else makes the dinner and goes out with your husband—and she says, genuinely, that she’s doing it for you, so that you don’t have to—how far would she have to go before you said ‘Enough’?  The fourth book collected here, Making the Cat Laugh, is a selection of my columns from The Listener, Woman’s Journal, and The Times. They always say that timing is everything, and I feel that all four titles demonstrate this dictum in one way or another—just as Eats, Shoots & Leaves has done. In the case of my punctuation book, I genuinely thought I was pointing out something that hadn’t occurred to many people; that I was in the vanguard of punctuation concern; and that my book might acquire a small, passionate audience who would, in twenty years’ time when another author’s popular blockbuster on the subject inevitably appeared, be able to say, ‘Oh, this was all in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, you know, but of course nobody read it at the time.’ In fact, as we now know, people had been waiting for about thirty years for someone to write Eats, Shoots & Leaves and were so grateful when I did it that they bought multiple copies—sometimes as presents for other people, but sometimes (when I was doing signing sessions, anyway) just to express how fervently they agreed with it. I had previously been the world’s best timer of journalism and the world’s worst timer of books. Suddenly I lucked out. It was possibly the weirdest thing in the history of publishing. I sometimes think, as the only viable explanation for my book’s success, that I am actually dead and none of this is happening at all. Making the Cat Laugh, by contrast, had quite abysmal timing. They now deny this, but my publishers did argue with me when I suggested, in 1995, that there might be quite a big market for funny books about single women in their thirties. I pointed to the popularity of my ‘Single Life’ column in The Times, which was certainly encouraging. Oh well. Making the Cat Laugh was published in a low-key way, sold out quickly, and that was that. And a year or so later, along came the wonderful Bridget Jones, with the result that, for the next ten years, any funny book by a woman that wasn’t about a single woman in her thirties (such as my own Going Loco) was seen to be insanely out of step, and was marketed as chick-lit regardless. I hasten to say that there is no comparison in regard to subject matter between Bridget Jones’s Diary and Making the Cat Laugh. The humor of the books is different, as is the focus of the agony. While Bridget Jones suffers to get the course of romance to run smooth, I make half-baked attempts at self-amusement, and the only love interest is Buster the cat. I wrote most of these columns in a surge of white-hot energy after my father died (suddenly) and my boyfriend moved out (not before time), and the last thing on my mind was finding a partner: I was

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much more interested in the mechanics of survival. I revelled in singledom. I embraced it. I was excited by it. And the cats just had to put up with it. By the way, I used to assure people that ‘there isn’t too much about cats in that book’, but when I looked at it properly again I was forced to admit that cats are, well, something of a running theme. This tendency did not go unnoticed when they first appeared in the newspaper, either. When I was writing my column in The Times, the British satirical magazine Private Eye ran a little squib entitled ‘The Times 40 million Years Ago’. It included two or three fellow columnists who had evidently outstayed their welcome, writing about the same old stuff even in the Ice Age, and featured ‘Lynne Truss on How My Sabre-Toothed Tiger Is Coping’.  As I write this, I can’t quite visualise the book you are holding. All I can imagine is that it must be quite substantial, and I can’t help remembering a review I once published in The Listener, which said that the book in question (a one-volume Cambridge Companion to English Literature) was so thick that you could stand on it ‘to kiss someone tall’. Please do employ this giant tome in any similar useful way you can think of. On busy, fuggy subways, for example, you could stand on it to reach the better air. On icy days, load this book in the trunk of your car to prevent unwanted slewing! If you find yourself on a yacht drifting towards dangerous rocks, attach The Lynne Truss Treasury to a sturdy anchor chain and heave it over the side. I won’t mind a bit. I have never written anything remotely weighty before. It makes me feel so proud. Thanks are due to a number of people who helped make all this happen. The agent who cajoled me into writing my first novel was Jacqueline Korn of David Higham Associates; the publishers of these titles in their original incarnations were Alexandra Pringle, Andrew Franklin, Kate Jones, Clare Alexander, Fanny Blake and Geraldine Cooke—variously at Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books and Headline Review. My books owe their present revival to the merciful natures of Andrew Franklin at Profile Books, and Erin Moore and Bill Shinker at Gotham Books. Thanks go to my agents: Anthony Goff in London; George Lucas in New York. I still wonder, incidentally, about the identity of the author I was channelling when the line ‘Where was Makepeace?’ came up. He is, in a way, the coauthor of everything in this book. For the record, I am currently guessing Henry James.

The Lynne Truss Treasury




With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed




Chapter 1




Not having a hand free for a more dignified entrance, Osborne gave the swing door a mighty push with his foot, so that it boomed and echoed where it struck the wall beyond. ‘Bugger,’ he said, and shuffled awkwardly through the gap, sliding his back along the door to keep it open. He was distinctly overladen. From each wrist dangled various coloured string bags, bulging with parcels, fruit and scarves; and across his chest (as though to break an expected fall) he wore an old BOAC airline bag stuffed thick with dog-eared papers. The subdued brown editorial offices of Come Into the Garden, though accustomed to having their peace-and-quiet vacuum broken by this weekly intrusion, gave a collective wince at Osborne’s rough approach. The sudden draught of air that sucked the venetian blinds away from the windows and plucked the last rusting leaves from the parched, spindly weeping figs was like a sharp exasperated huff of disapproval. Someone once said you should never trust a doctor whose office plants had died. For some reason this dictum came back to haunt Osborne each week when he made his entrance. By the same token, you see, perhaps you should not pay too much attention to a weekly gardening magazine which looks as though it has just received a visit from Agent Orange. ‘Ah,’ he said (by way of greeting) to Lillian, the editor’s secretary, but she made no reply. Her head thrown back at a tricky angle, Lillian was engrossed in savouring the last dregs of a cup-soup, tapping the vertical mug with a practised hand so that the last shards of soggy croûton came sliding and tumbling mouthwards, like rocks down a mountainside. Osborne knew from experience that there was no point expecting a response from Lillian while a single iota of monosodium glutamate remained at large. To judge from the distinctive aroma that hung like an iron curtain across the office, today’s flavour was celery. ‘Lillian?’ A phone was ringing, and Osborne wondered vaguely whether someone should answer it. ‘Lillian?’ ‘Ngh,’ said Lillian, preoccupied with running her tongue around the inside of the mug. ‘Shall I answer this?’ ‘Ngh, ngh,’ replied Lillian. ‘Right you are, then,’ said Osborne cheerfully, and left it to ring. Heaping his string bags on a free desk, he felt strangely happy. Come Into the Garden had always felt a bit like home to Osborne, a shelter where he was welcome and beloved. As a regular contributor, blown in weekly from the cold, he felt tended, nurtured—like a special potted geranium brought indoors by a car-

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ing husbandman at the first sharp sting of autumn frost. What colour geranium? you might ask, if you were a gardening person. Well, Osborne was not dogmatic on the subject, but in his mind’s eye he leaned towards cerise. But the colour was largely immaterial. The point was that though he might be hibernating (professionally speaking) at Come Into the Garden, at least he was not in imminent danger of rusting, wilting, perishing, or being hoicked out and shredded for compost. And occasionally—to push the geranium analogy to its furthest limit—a colleague with a kind heart and advanced ideas might even take the trouble to stop beside his desk and encourage him with a few kind words. So every Wednesday Osborne came to the office to compose his timehonoured ‘Me and My Shed’ column and soak up the atmosphere. These pieces could equally well be written at home, really (in fact, the idea had been suggested to him more than once), but throughout his career he had always written in offices, from his early days as a staff reporter on a South Coast evening paper, and all through his time as a second-string drama critic in the sixties, so it was how he felt most comfortable. Physically, being a large, broad-shouldered person, he looked slightly out of place at an office desk, as if when he stood up he would tip it over. But Osborne merely felt cosy. He warmed to the very mottoes on the walls—‘Ne’er cast a clout till May be out’; ‘It is not spring until you can plant your foot upon twelve daisies’—and thought of the parable of the seed on fertile ground. Also, not for the first time, he wondered whether anyone on the staff actually had a garden. A man who has been buffeted by life needs a place where he can lay down his string bags. He needs a place where he can sit at an old Tipp-Ex-spattered Adler, treat himself to a free cup of tea, miss his deadline by hours, stand helpless at the photocopier until someone rescues him, fill his pockets at the stationery cupboard, and make hour-long surreptitious phone calls to old journo muckers in faraway foreign parts. Come Into the Garden was that place for Osborne. Today, however, it seemed there was no one about. Osborne removed a few thick, dank layers of navy-blue outdoor garment (the month was November) and hung them on a coat stand, which promptly collapsed under the weight. ‘Bugger,’ he said, and ran his fingers through his short, grey hair. Where was everybody? He looked around for clues. A half-empty mail-sack lay limp in the middle of Reception, but he was aware that little could be deduced from this. Lillian (who had now disappeared) famously claimed to have a medical problem with sorting the post, due to a rare neurotic-compulsive fear of envelopes. Such a condition was obviously unfortunate in a secretary (almost a disqualification, you might think), but there you were. This unfortunate and improbable malady meant that post sorting was an allday process, with a half-empty mail-sack permanently dumped on the floor as a

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kind of endless reproach, and most of the editorial staff sensibly steering well clear and simply learning never to depend too heavily on the prompt dispersal of correspondence. Lillian’s wont was to stoop and sigh over a heap of letters, laboriously examining each one with the aid of tongs, and stopping chance passers-by with faux-naif questions evidently calculated to drive them mad. ‘Look, this says “John Mainwaring, Editor”,’ she might say, waving the ironware in a wild, threatening manner, ‘but the editor’s name is James Mainwaring.’ Here she would pause to ascertain what reaction she was getting (usually uneasy silence). ‘What do you think? Shall I send it back, or pitch it in the bin?’ No one ever knew what to say to this sort of thing; after all, you don’t argue with mad people, especially when they are equipped to clock you with a pair of tongs. So Lillian got away with it, as she got away with everything else. And in between these bouts of petty tyranny, she would sit quietly at her desk, ignoring the phones, and give her full attention to the smoking of a cigarette—on the grounds, presumably, that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. It seemed odd to be in the office on his own. Osborne was assailed by an understandable fear that he had forgotten an important appointment elsewhere— an appoint-ment that his green-ink-fingered friends had evidently all remembered. Even the tireless sub-editors were missing from their work stations, and Osborne marvelled when he peered into their little book-lined room and saw their four empty chairs—a sight, he realized, that few people other than night cleaners had ever previously witnessed. The fabric on one of the chairs turned out to be a jaunty rich tartan—but no wonder he had never suspected it, when a sub-editor’s drab, grey jumper and unkempt shirt (not to mention his drab, grey, unkempt body) had always blocked the view. Like many writers, Osborne was afraid of sub-editors, the trouble being that they had a disarming habit of changing his prose automatically, without telling him. ‘Ah, the further musings of the giant intellect,’ the chief sub-editor might say, with gratuitous cruelty, as she took his copy each week; and then, the moment he had left the room, she fell on it savagely with a thick blue pen, taking out all the bits he was most proud of. In his more gloomy moments, he wondered why he bothered to write the piece in the first place, when the subsequent contribution of the sub-editor so often outweighed his own. He had been known to quote the lament of Macduff (‘What, all my little chicks?’) at the thought of his innocents, massacred. And you couldn’t blame him. ‘Not in my back yard’ he had once confidently typed in a piece about a politician, only to discover, a few days later, in the printed magazine, that it had been rewritten as ‘Not on my patio’, which was not quite the same. In the stealthy, unnatural quiet of the sub-editors’ room, dictionaries and halfcorrected proofs lay open on abandoned desks. Osborne tiptoed guiltily, like a

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schoolboy finding himself alone in an after-hours classroom when everyone has gone home. To stay his nerves, he helped himself to an Extra Strong Mint from a roll next to the chief sub-editor’s typewriter (careful not to disarrange her impressive selection of nail varnishes), and peered from an awkward position at the proof she had been correcting, which was covered in tiny blue marks and explanatory notes circled with a feminine flourish. ‘NOTE TO TYPESETTER,’ he read, upside-down, Far be it from me etcetera, but it seems to me that despite our best efforts a twinge of confusion remains in your mind between ‘forbear’—a verb meaning ‘abstain or refrain from’—and ‘forebear’—a noun denoting an ancestor. May we bid adieu to these intrusive ‘e’s? I hope this clears things up. I have mentioned this before, of course; but how can you be expected to remember? You lead such busy lives, and Radio 1 must absorb a lot of your attention. I do understand. Sorry to take up your valuable time. And far be it from me, etcetera. Michelle

Osborne gulped in amazement at such erudition, which was an unfortunate thing to do. For the Extra Strong Mint promptly closed over his windpipe, like a manhole cover over an orifice in the road. Thus it was that when the three subs re-entered the room in wordless single file a few moments later, they discovered their ‘Me and My Shed’ columnist bent double with a gun-metal litter-bin held to his face, making mysterious amplified strangling noises. Since nothing louder than the whisper of a nail file was usually to be heard in this room, they naturally flashed their specs in annoyance. However, having all received the statutory sub-editor’s training (involving, one suspects, the same kind of rigorous football-rattle personality testing undergone by the horses of riot police), they simply resumed their solemn work of skewering other people’s chicks with their thick blue pens. ‘Are you in difficulties, mon cher?’ asked Michelle, the chief sub-editor, archly, adjusting an embroidered collar and seating herself carefully so as not to rumple her dirndl skirt. Osborne shook his head (and litter-bin) emphatically, to indicate that any difficulties were of only passing significance. The sub-editors swapped glances (or did they signal Morse code with those specs?) and sighed. Osborne discharged the mint with a loud ptang-yang sound and fled red-faced from the room, and all was peace again. It was quite some time before Osborne discovered the reason for the empty office; obviously, if he had asked a few questions, there and then, he might have been saved a lot of the palaver of the ensuing week. Unfortunately, however, he did not. The fact was, there had been a crisis meeting. The magazine had been

With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed

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sold to a new proprietor; a new editor had been mentioned, along with a rationalization of the staff. He did not yet know it, but a cold wind was blowing at Come Into the Garden; his shelter had been torn up and blown away, like so much matchwood. However, since nobody had yet informed him of this, Osborne merely dragged his airline bag to his favourite corner, and from a safe distance waved hello again to Lillian. She was flicking through a mail order catalogue now, turning each page with a practised insouciant finger-technique not involving the thumb, while a motorbike messenger stood in front of her desk, waiting for her to look up. Above her head, Osborne noticed, there was a new sign. It said, ‘What did your last slave die of ?’ He produced his notebook, flipped a few pages and attempted to compose his thoughts. Now, Osborne, old buddy, who have you got for us this week? He typed the words ME AND MY SHED at the top of a sheet of paper, and added a colon. me and my shed: A name ought to follow, but for some reason it failed to come. Osborne frowned. Every week he interviewed a famous person about their shed—Me and My Shed: Melvyn Bragg; Me and My Shed: Stirling Moss. He had been doing it for years. In certain professional quarters people still raved about his Me and My Shed: David Essex; it was said that for anyone interested in the art of celebrity outhouse interviewing, it had represented the absolute ‘last word’. Osborne treasured this praise, while in general being modest about his job, deflecting the envy of non-journalists by saying merely that he had seen the insides of some classy sheds in his time. But today, despite remembering a bus journey to Highgate on Monday morning—despite, moreover, remembering the interior fittings of the shed in some considerable detail—it was only the classiness of the shed that stuck in his mind. He just could not put a classy face to it. The words me and my shed: looked up accusingly from the typewriter. Especially the colon on the end. He flicked through his notes again, but they offered little help. After twelve years of writing ‘Me and My Shed’ he had come to the unsurprising conclusion that all sheds are alike in the dark. Even when the column’s remit had been extended, in the mid-198os, to include greenhouses and any other temporary garden structures (such as the ivy-covered car-port), the interviews had always required a masterly touch to bring them alive. Here, for example, was a sample of this week’s notes:

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Had shed since bght house. Quite good sh. Spend time in sh. obv. Also gd 4 keeping thngs in. Never done anythng to sh, particrly. Cat got locked in sh once, qu funny. Don’t thnk abt sh often. Take sh for grantd. Sorry. Not v interstng. House interestng. Sh not.

Time was pressing, The official deadline was 2.30, and it was now a quarter past twelve. Osborne typed a few words, hoping that the act of writing might jog his memory. He looked out of the window and tried to free-associate about Highgate, but curiously found himself thinking about Marmite sandwiches on a windswept beach, so gave it up. The experience of thirty years in journalism, a dozen of them in sheds, seemed to have deserted him. In fact, he was just beginning to consider turning the column into a kind of mystery slot this week, calling it ‘Who and Whose Shed?’, when Tim, the deputy editor, ambled past, carrying a page proof towards the subs’ room. Tim was one of those aforementioned people who sometimes dropped a few encouraging words in the direction of a torpid geranium, and he did so now. But it was no big deal, actually. Tim was a thin, aloof young fellow (twenty-four, twenty-five?) with a generally abstracted air, tight pullovers and bottle-thick kick-me specs; a young man whose emotional thermostat had been set too low at an early age, and was now too stiff to budge. Now he stopped at Osborne’s side and crouched down to read on the typewriter ‘Me and My Shed’s’ recently composed opening sentence: When the cat got stuck in the shed for 24 hours last year, there were red faces all round at a certain house in Highgate.

Tim wrinkled his nose and chewed his biro. ‘So?’ he asked. ‘How did things go with Angela Farmer?’ Osborne thought for a second. Angela Farmer? ‘Quite a coup getting her, I thought,’ continued Tim. ‘In fact, I made a note somewhere. I think we’ll splash it. Nice to have your name on the front of the magazine again before—’ Tim stopped abruptly, but Osborne didn’t notice. He was experiencing a strange sense of weightlessness. Was it possible to meet Angela Farmer, glamorous middle-aged American star of a thousand British sitcoms, and have no recollection of it? He tried picturing the scene at the door, the handshake, the famous smoky voice of Ms Farmer barking, ‘C’min! What’re ya waitin for? Applause?’ but nothing came. His mind was a blank; it was as though he had never met her. Panic welled in his chest, and in a split second his entire career as a celebrity interviewer flashed before his eyes. ‘So what was she like?’

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‘Is it hot in here?’ ‘Yes, a bit. But what was she like?’ Osborne decided to bluff. ‘Angela Farmer? Oh, fine. Fine, Angela Farmer, yes. Very’—here he consulted his notes—‘interesting. Very American, of course.’ Tim nodded encouragingly. ‘Good shed, was it?’ ‘Angela Farmer’s shed, you mean? Yes, oh yes. Ms Farmer has a surprisingly good shed.’ ‘Did you ask about those hilarious gerbils in the shed in From This Day Forward?’ ‘Did I? Oh yes, I’m sure I did.’ ‘And I think I read somewhere that she was actually proposed to in a shed by her second husband—whatsisname, the man who plays the shed builder in For Ever and Ever Amen—but that they broke up after a row about weather-proofing.’ ‘All true, mate. All true.’ ‘Should make an interesting piece, then.’ ‘I’ll say.’ They both paused, staring into the middle distance, pondering the interesting piece. ‘The cat got stuck in the shed overnight once, too.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘The cat. Got stuck in the shed. Overnight. She said it was quite funny.’ The deputy editor wrinkled his nose again, and changed the subject. ‘Oh, and you ought to mention the Angela Farmer rose. Smash hit of last year’s Chelsea. No doubt propagated in a shed, of course, ha ha. But I expect you covered all that.’ Osborne gave a brave smile. ‘Well, mustn’t hold you up.’ ‘No.’ ‘See you later.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Don’t you ever get tired of sheds, Osborne?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Unlike some,’ said the deputy editor darkly, and girded himself to do battle with the subs.  Waiting for Osborne’s column later that evening, after everyone else had gone home, Michelle donned her pastry-cuffs, strapped a spotless pinny over her outfit, and tackled the reference books, rearranging them in strict alphabetical

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order, fixing them in a perpendicular position, and drawing them neatly to the extreme edge of the shelves. Having accomplished this, she scoured the coffee machine and dusted the venetian blinds, in the course of which activity she deliberately elbowed a large economy packet of Lillian’s cup-soups into a bin. Then she sat down at her typewriter and wrote some much-needed letters for the ‘Dear Donald’ page. She loved this task. Few bona fide readers were writing to the magazine these days, and Michelle’s particular joy was to write the bogus letters ungrammatically and then correct them afterwards. Subbing was a great passion of Michelle’s; it was like making a plant grow straight and tall. ‘Dear Donald,’ she would type with a thrill. ‘As an old age pensioner, my Buddleia has grown too big for me to comfortably cut it back myself . . .’ She could barely prevent herself from ripping it straight out of the machine, to prune those dangling modifiers, stake those split infinitives. How quickly the time passed when you were having fun. The only thing that stumped her—as it always did—was the invention of fake names and addresses, because she could never see why one fake name sounded more authentic than any other. ‘G. Clarke, Honiton, Devon’ was how she signed each one of today’s batch, hoping that inspiration would strike later. She often chose G. Clarke of Honiton. She’d never been there, but she fancied that’s where all the readers lived. Time to check up on Osborne, she thought, when ten letters from G. Clarke were complete, photocopied and subbed within an inch of their lives. She dialled Osborne’s number on the internal phone. It rang on his desk and startled him, so that he dropped an open bottle of Tipp-Ex on to his shoes. ‘Bugger,’ he said, as he answered the phone. ‘Going well, oh great wordsmith?’ Kneading his face, Osborne watched in helpless alarm as the correcting fluid seeped into the leather uppers of his only decent footwear. ‘Anything wrong?’ ‘No, no. Nearly there, actually. Just got to think of the pay-off.’ ‘Oh marvellous.’ Michelle sounded ironic, the way she often did on Wednesday nights. ‘That’s dandy.’ There was a pause. ‘Far be it from me,’ she said sweetly, ‘but have you mentioned that he writes in his shed? And that this explains the repeated use of weed-killer as a murder weapon in the books? You know what I mean: he looks up from his rude desk of logs for inspiration, and there’s the weed-killer, next to the bone-meal. In the one I took on holiday last year, he killed off the prime suspect with a garden rake. One blow to the back of the neck, and that was it. Nasty. In the latest book, I understand, someone is dealt the death-blow with a pair of shears.’

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‘What are you talking about? Who do you mean?’ ‘Trent Carmichael. This week’s “Me and My Shed”. The crime writer.’ Osborne thought a minute, thought another minute, remembered everything—in particular the bestselling author laughing apologetically, ‘Well, er, the cat got locked in the shed once, but no foul play was suspected!’—and said, ‘I’ll call you back.’ Things were looking bad. He unlaced his shoes, took them off, and on bended knee started to scrub them upside down on the carpet, hoping to remove the worst of the whitener while deciding what to do next. He looked up to see Michelle standing beside him. ‘No, you’ve got it wrong,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the floor, his pulse pounding in his neck. ‘Trent Carmichael is next week. You wouldn’t know whether this stuff washes out, would you?’ ‘So who is it this week?’ ‘Angela Farmer,’ he mumbled. ‘Who?’ ‘Angela Farmer.’ ‘No. Are you sure?’ ‘Of course I’m sure.’ ‘That’s very odd.’ ‘No, I met her on Monday. Not odd at all. Nice woman.’ Michelle narrowed her eyes as though to contest the point, and then decided not to bother. She stretched her arms instead; this conversation clearly had nowhere to go. ‘How nice,’ she said. ‘I’d better not hold you up, then. Have you mentioned she’s got a tulip named after her?’ ‘I thought it was a rose.’ ‘No, tulip.’ Osborne looked like he might be sick. ‘Tell you what,’ said Michelle. ‘It’s been a hard day, I’ll look it up for you.’ Osborne sat in his stockinged feet, stroking the keys of his typewriter and staring into space. In all his years as a journalist, he had never before written up an interview that had not taken place. Why ever had he believed Tim? Tim didn’t know. How, moreover, could he extricate himself now he had gone so far? Not only had he cast all Trent Carmichael’s faint and unamusing witticisms into a broad American slang, but he was now also stuck with sentences referring to (a) love being like a red red tulip, and (b) a woman who viewed the world through tulip-tinted spectacles. In fact, he was so absorbed in his confusion and dismay that he did not hear the phone ringing, nor hear Michelle answer it. What he did hear, however (and

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quite distinctly), was Michelle informing him that it had been Angela Farmer phoning to apologize. She would have to postpone their appointment for the following Monday, making it Tuesday instead. She suggested that since she lived in the West Country, he might like to use Monday as a travelling day and stay overnight at a local hotel, details of which she had passed on to Michelle. ‘She sounded very nice,’ said Michelle, studying Osborne’s pole-axed expression. ‘That’s lovely,’ said Osborne. ‘Oh, and she hoped it wasn’t too inconvenient—to ring so late in the day.’

Chapter 2




Osborne dunked a piece of peanut brittle in his coffee and reflected. Perhaps it was time to bail out of this shed business before serious damage was done. From his favourite breakfast corner in his local Cypriot dossers’ café on a bleak November Friday (his belongings tucked around him like sandbags against a blast) he looked mournfully at the bright, mass-produced pictures of mythical Greek heroes adorning the walls and asked himself whether the cutting edge of outhouse journalism had not finally proved too much for him. A vision of Michelle sending him home two nights ago on a tide of unreassuring platitudes (‘It could happen to anyone, Osborne; but funny how it happened to you’), and then expertly recasting his article with firm unanswerable blue strokes (and wellinformed references to Trent Carmichael’s favourite horticultural murder weapons), rose unbidden to his mind and gave him torment. He stared at a picture of Perseus amid the gorgons and emitted a low moan. ‘Me and My Shed’ had had its sticky moments in the past, but nothing ever like this. In the course of a dozen years’ trouble-shooting around celebrity gardens Osborne had been exposed to a variety of dangers—hostile rabbits, wobbly paving and possibly harmful levels of creosote—but none had shaken his confidence to a comparable degree. Not even when he was mistaken for the man from The Times and treated to a lengthy reminiscence of a painful Somerset childhood (none of it involving sheds, incidentally, or outbuildings of any kind) had he felt so pig-sick about himself, despite the extreme embarrass-ment all round when that particular ghastly mistake was finally uncovered. (It had been a terrifying example of cross purposes at work, incidentally, since for a considerable time the interviewee supposed that Osborne’s repeated prompting ‘And did that happen in a shed?’ was evidence of a deep-seated emotional disturbance almost on a par with his own.) Osborne did not particularly relish recalling his past humiliations, but while he was on the subject he was compelled to admit there had been few things worse than the time he was locked in a shed by a hyperactive child, who then cunningly reported to its celebrity father that ‘the man in the smelly coat’ had been called away on urgent business. Luckily, an old woman had let him out, but only after four hours had passed. Interestingly, this was the incident Osborne generally called to mind when he overheard people say, ‘We’ll probably laugh about all this later on’—because he had learned that there were certain miseries in life which Time signally failed to transform into anything even slightly resembling a ribtickler, and spending four unplanned hours hammering on the inside of a Lumberland Alpine Resteezy was definitely among them.

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‘All right, mate?’ A man in a tight, battered baseball cap touched Osborne by the sleeve, and he jerked out of his reverie—which was just as well, because it was turning grim. ‘What’s that?’ ‘All right, are you, mate? Your coffee’s got cold.’ ‘Thanks. Right. Oh bugger, yes,’ said Osborne, and stirred his coffee very quickly, as though the frantic action might jiggle the molecules sufficiently to reheat it. In front of him on the table lay his morning’s post, still unopened, and he looked at it with his eyes deliberately half-closed, so that it looked sort of blurry and distant, and a bit less threatening. None of the envelopes resembled his monthly cheque; most, he knew only too well, would be scratchy xeroxed brochures for self-assembly Lumberland Alpines. He recognized immediately the familiar postmark betokening a personal reader’s letter ‘sent on’ from the magazine, and put it automatically to one side. True, sometimes a reader’s letter could cheer him up enormously (‘Another marvellous insight into a famous life!’ somebody wrote once, in handwriting very similar to his sister’s), but quite often Osborne’s correspondents were OAP gardening fanatics who not only entertained very fixed ideas about the virtues of terracotta (as opposed to plastic), but allowed these ideas full dismal rein in wobbly joined-up handwriting on lined blue Basildon Bond. Where was Makepeace? They had agreed to meet at 11.30, and it was after twelve. Why was Makepeace always late for these meetings? It is a general rule, of course, that the person with the least distance to travel will contrive to show up last. But Makepeace lived upstairs from the café, for goodness’ sake. This was why they had chosen the Birthplace of Aphrodite as their particular weekly rendezvous. He was up there now, in all probability, while Osborne had the job of retaining his claim to the table by the age-old custom of not finishing his food and saying, ‘Excuse me, whoops, I’m sorry—’ every time a table-clearer wielding a damp grey cloth attempted to remove his plate. In fact, he had spent much of the past fifteen minutes holding the plate down quite firmly with both hands, as though trying to bond it to the formica by sheer effort of push. ‘So,’ said Makepeace, sitting down opposite. ‘Where have you been?’ He appeared out of nowhere: just materialized on the seat as though he had suddenly grown there, whoosh, like a time-lapse sunflower in a nature programme. He was always doing this, Makepeace; creeping up on people. It was terribly unsettling. Once, he crept up on Osborne outside an off-licence, with the result that the six bottles of Beck’s that Osborne had just invited home for a little party suddenly found they had an alternative urgent appointment getting smashed to bits on the pavement. Now, at the Birthplace of Aphrodite, the effect was less catastrophic (it

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did not require a dustpan and brush), but Osborne was nevertheless startled sufficiently to let go of the plate, which was whisked away instantly by a triumphant cloth-lady. Osborne sometimes speculated how the world must appear to someone like Makepeace—given the effect he had on it himself. You know the old theory that the royal family think the world smells of fresh paint, that the Queen assumes people talk endlessly on brief acquaintance about the minutiae of their jobs and the distance they’ve travelled to be present? Well, similarly Makepeace, with his unfortunate, disarming habit of misplaced stealth, must surely assume that the world was full of people who greet you by leaping in the air and shouting ‘Gah!’ in alarm. He must also, by extension, know a proportionately large number of people who worry ostentatiously about the current state of their tickers. ‘Gah!’ shouted Osborne. ‘Makepeace! Hey! Bugger me! Phew!’ ‘Well, of course; bugger me, exactly,’ repeated Makepeace slowly, without much enthusiasm, as he gently peeled off his denim jacket, folded it as though it were linen or silk, and adjusted his long, ginger pony-tail so that it hung neatly down his back. ‘But what the hell kept you, my friend?’ Osborne looked quizzically into Makepeace’s blank blue eyes and considered what to say. ‘What do you mean? I—’ ‘We agreed 11.30, didn’t we? Well, I put my head round the door ten minutes ago—ten to bloody twelve—and you weren’t here. I was beginning to think that you weren’t coming.’ ‘Listen, I don’t get this,’ protested Osborne. ‘I was here all the time.’ Makepeace pursed his lips in disbelief. ‘Didn’t see you, pal.’ ‘Well, I was.’ Makepeace put up his palms as if to say, ‘Don’t be so defensive,’ and then changed his tone. ‘Listen, you’re here now and that’s what matters.’ ‘Hang on, you can ask any—’ But Osborne faltered and gave up. In the circumstances, actually, this was the only sensible course of action. Having known Makepeace only a couple of months, he had already learned one very useful thing—that you could never, ever place him in the wrong. Osborne had met know-alls in the past; he had been acquainted with big-heads, too. But Makepeace was both know-all and big-head, with an added complication. Conceivably, he was a psychopath. ‘Son,’ his daddy must have said to him at an impressionable age, ‘never apologize, never explain. Is that clear? Also, deny absolutely everything that doesn’t

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suit you, even in the teeth of outright contrary proof. Now, all right, let’s have it, what did I just tell you?’ ‘Tell me?’ Makepeace must have hotly replied. ‘You told me nothing! What the hell are you talking about? I just came through the door, and you’re asking me a load of stupid questions.’ At which his daddy presumably chuckled (in a sinister fond-father-of-thegrowing-psychopath sort of way) and said, ‘That’s my boy.’ Makepeace was younger than Osborne, thirty-five to Osborne’s forty-eight, but sometimes seemed to aspire to an emotional age of six. Wiry and five foot two, and usually attired in blue denim, he had a long face and a short, flat nose, so that Osborne was involuntarily reminded of a stunted, mean-looking infant pressing his face hard against a cake-shop window. It was easy to feel sorry for the little chap: parents warning their children against the dangers of smoking or masturbation had been known to point to him—unfortunately, in his hearing— as an example of the worst that could happen. Makepeace rose above all this by being clever, of course; and with a couple of good university degrees behind him, he presently made a fairly decent, grown-up living from writing erudite book reviews for national newspapers and periodicals, in which he used his great capacities as a professional know-all as a perfectly acceptable substitute for either insight or style. There was, however, still a tears-before-bedtime quality to Makepeace’s existence, which compelled Osborne to worry on his behalf. The trouble was that this prodigy, precisely in the manner of a precocious child, was utterly unable to judge the point at which he had delighted the grown-ups beyond endurance. Thus, having acquired a reputation for his readiness to write a thousand words on any subject under heaven (he would have written the Angela Farmer thing without a qualm, even knowing that it was all a fraud), he now faced a quite serious problem, in that his extraordinary level of output was beginning to outstrip plausibility. People had started to notice that he wrote more book reviews in a week than was technically possible, yet if you suggested he hadn’t read the books with any degree of diligence, he would instantly offer to knock you down. His various editors guessed that he might not be reading very carefully, but it was difficult to prove; and Makepeace was indeed an extraordinarily compelling liar, with a particular flair for outright incandescent denial. On the regular occasions when he missed a deadline (through sheer bottleneck of work) he would never admit it, but instead swore hotly that he had personally fed each sheet of his review into a fax machine—and without missing a beat he would go on to explain in a regretful tone that he would dearly love to send it again, had it not been: (a) snatched from his hands by a freak typhoon in Clapham High Street; (b) burgled from his flat; or (c) lent to a friend who had just boarded a flight to

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Venezuela. ‘Tell you what, though, I can type it out again by Friday,’ he would offer, fooling nobody. And somehow he always got away with it. The curious thing, of course, was that while Osborne knew all this, he liked him anyway. Makepeace made him laugh. Also, Osborne enjoyed in his company the novel sensation of feeling relatively grown up. So he introduced Makepeace to more editors, and even arranged for him to review gardening books for Tim on the magazine. His one ridiculous error was in thinking he ought to explain a few basic gardening terms that Makepeace might not be familiar with. On this gross, unforgivable insult, their relationship nearly foundered. You just could not tell Makepeace something he didn’t already know; it was as simple as that. Sitting in this very Birthplace of Aphrodite one afternoon, and regarding the Greek pictures on the walls, Osborne had learned this lesson the hard way when a civilized difference of opinion about aetiological myths had hurtled seriously out of control. They had been talking—as all literary people will, from time to time—of the legend of Persephone, whom Hades famously stole from the earth to make Nature mourn (thus proving the existence of winter, or something). Anyway, the question was this: had Persephone eaten six pomegranates while underground, or six pomegranate seeds? Osborne said seeds, and afterwards checked it in a book at the library. And he was right. Naïvely assuming that only the truth was at issue, he made a mental note to pass on the information to his friend when next they met. After all, seeds were probably significant, seeing as the myth was concerned with seasonal renewal, and all that. So next time he saw Makepeace he mentioned their discussion and said, quite innocently, that yes, it was seeds. There was a fractional pause, and then Makepeace said, ‘Yes, seeds. That’s what I said.’ Osborne gasped at the lie, and then giggled. ‘No, you didn’t.’ ‘Yes, I did.’ Makepeace wasn’t joking. He should have been, but he wasn’t. ‘No. You didn’t. You said she ate pomegranates, that’s different. It was me who said it was seeds.’ ‘You’re wrong.’ ‘Look, I’m sorry, but this is really silly, and it’s not worth arguing about, but you really did say pomegranates. You argued with me, don’t you remember?’ ‘I fucking didn’t.’ ‘Makepeace, what’s the big deal here? I don’t understand. Why can’t you admit you were wrong?’ At which point Makepeace stood up so abruptly that his chair fell over backwards, and bellowed, ‘What the fucking hell are you talking about?’ It had been a tricky moment.

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‘What’s all the stuff ?’ asked Makepeace now, reading Osborne’s envelopes upside-down. ‘My post. I can’t face it.’ ‘Do you want me to open it?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh, come on,’ said Makepeace, and picked up the envelope with the Come Into the Garden postmark. ‘Not that one,’ protested Osborne, but it was too late. Makepeace had already taken out two sheets of paper and started to read them. ‘Odd,’ he said, shuffling the pages one behind the other, and frowning. ‘This is dead odd.’ He read them both a couple of times, and then handed them to Osborne. Dear Mr Lonsdale [said the first], I have long been a fan of your column. Being a keen gardener myself, your insights into sheds of the famous fill me with interest. I think you are probably a nice man. I can imagine you wearing a nice coat and scarf and slippers possibly. Also smoking a pipe, quite distinguished. While I am wearing not much while writing this actually. Just a thin négligé and some gold flip-flops. And greenthumb gardening gloves. Phew, it’s hot work, gardening. I am not a celebrity like Melvyn Bragg and Anna Ford but I would let you rummage in my shed if you asked me!! I’ve got all sorts of odds and ends that nobody knows about tucked away behind the flowerpots. If you catch my drift. Yours affectionately, G. Clarke, Honiton, Devon

Osborne was slightly embarrassed. But at least it made a change from the terracotta maniacs. He finished his coffee in a single swig, and shrugged at Makepeace. ‘Mad, I expect,’ he said. ‘There’s more,’ said Makepeace. Osborne shuffled the papers and found the second letter, identically typed, and on the same-sized paper as the first. It seemed to be from the same person, but it had a distinctly different tone. Dear Mr Lonsdale, Having counted no less than 15 errors of fact (not to mention grammar) in your last ‘Me and My Shed’ column, isn’t it time you stopped pretending to be a jour-

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nalist? Call yourself a writer well I don’t think. I could do better myself, and thats saying something. I haven’t even met Trent Carmichael. How much longer must we be subjected to this slapdash twaddle masquerading as journalism? I am surprised anyone agrees to be interviewed by you. Do you know you make all the sheds sound the same? Why does a magazine of such evident quality continue to employ you? Stay out of sheds and do us a favour. G. Clarke, Honiton, Devon P.S. Someone ought to lock you in a shed and throw away the key.

‘What do you think?’ asked Makepeace. ‘Bugger,’ said Osborne.  Lillian lit a cigarette, narrowing her eyes against the smoke, and looked round to check that no one was watching. Coughing, she leaned back and continued to ignore the ringing of the phone. There is a cool, insolent way that blonde, permanent-waved secretaries inspect their fingernails in old film noir movies, and Lillian, a baby blonde herself in an electric-blue angora woolly, attempted it now, arching her eyebrows like Marlene Dietrich; but then suddenly broke the illusion by tearing off the broken top of her thumbnail with a savage rip from her teeth. She looked round again, smiling, spat the nail expertly into a waste-paper basket and tried momentarily to imagine what it would be like to be deaf. Since the announcement of the takeover of Come Into the Garden, the phone had not stopped ringing. The newspapers were not very interested; but readers would phone in panic, selfishly demanding reassurance that the magazine would not cease publication just when the greenfly problem was at its height, or when the monthly ‘Build your own greenhouse’ series reached a crucial stage in the glazing. Lillian fielded these inquiries in a variety of ways. For example, sometimes she simply unplugged the phone. At other times she answered, but pretended to be speaking from the swimming baths. And sometimes, as now, she sat and suffered its ringing, perched on her typist’s chair with her legs crossed and with her eyes fixed steadily on the ceiling. To add to the picture of martyrdom, a new sign hung above her desk, with the legend ‘Is Peace and Quiet So Much to Ask?’ But a keen-eyed observer might also notice that today Lillian was mixing her metaphors, for her corner of the office was adorned with items suggestive less of pietism than of couch potato. A fluffy rug had appeared; also a standard lamp, a magazine rack and a basket with knitting in it. Half a sitting-room, in fact, had blossomed overnight where previously

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had stood only furniture and fittings appropriate to the office of a small magazine. She was not using this stuff yet, but it was there, and it was obviously permanent. It was a statement of intent. Apart from the phone ringing, the office was quiet again. Friday was the day when most of the editorial staff decamped to the typesetters, to sit on broken chairs in a makeshift work-room from six in the morning and wait miserably all day for proofs to correct. Lillian had never visited the typesetters, and imagined it, rather perversely, as some sort of holiday camp. The word ‘buns’ had once been mentioned in her hearing, and this had unaccountably conjured to her mind a scene of great frivolity, like something Christmassy in Dickens. Perhaps she thought the sub-editors tossed these buns across the room at each other, or had races to pick out the most currants or lemon peel. Who knows? Envy can play funny tricks on a person’s mind. Anyway, the fact that Tim and Michelle would return late on Friday afternoons actually stumbling with fatigue failed utterly to shake Lillian’s notion of Typesetter Heaven. ‘No, I’m afraid Michelle is not in the office today,’ she would report to the editor (who sometimes popped in on Fridays to check his post for job offers). ‘She has got the day off, at the typesetters. I expect she will be back at work next week.’ Suddenly, on a whim, Lillian answered the phone. ‘Come Into the Garden,’ she snapped, making sure it didn’t sound too much like an invitation. ‘For heaven’s sake, Lillian, where were you?’ It was Michelle. Lillian pursed her lips and made a series of smoke rings by jabbing her cigarette in the air. ‘Did you say where was I?’ she repeated carefully. ‘Well, I’ll tell you. I was stuck in the bloody lift, that’s where I was.’ Michelle ignored this. Life was too short to argue about it. ‘Listen, could I be a desperate bore and ask you to do something for me? I brought my “Dear Donald” file with me, and a couple of letters are missing. Would you be unbelievably selfless and helpful, and look on my desk for them?’ Lillian prepared to stand up, but then thought better of it. ‘The letters to Osborne from Honiton?’ ‘What?’ Michelle sounded rather indistinct, suddenly. ‘The letters to Osborne. From Honiton.’ ‘No,’ she said, after a noticeable pause. ‘Ha ha, I don’t think I’ve seen any letters to Osborne. No. Not from Honiton, I don’t think. Hmm. I mean, surely they would be sent straight to him, wouldn’t they? Nothing to do with “Dear Donald”. Or to do with me, for that matter.’ ‘I suppose not.’ Lillian waited. She had known Michelle for fifteen years. This pally ‘ha ha’

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business told her something was up. The seconds ticked by. ‘So,’ said Michelle at last, ‘have you got the letters to Osborne? I wouldn’t mind a peek.’ ‘No can do, I’m afraid. I sent them on yesterday.’ Michelle gasped. ‘To Osborne?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’ ‘No, it’s fine.’ Lillian took a deep, satisfying drag on the cigarette. ‘By the way, you haven’t seen my big packet of cup-soups by any chance?’  Osborne turned the letters over in his hands, and felt peculiar. Peculiar was the only word for it. Makepeace meanwhile took a large bite out of a fried-egg sandwich and tried to imagine what it would be like to realize one morning that you had a fan in the West Country who entertained schizophrenic delusions about you while dressed in gold flip-flops and reinforced gloves. It was hard. ‘I don’t like this bit about slapdash twaddle,’ said Osborne at last. ‘Hmm,’ agreed Makepeace. ‘I mean, what does she take me for? You don’t expect Tolstoy in a piece about sheds, surely?’ Makepeace grunted, wiped some egg-yolk from his chin and prepared to contest the point. ‘Except that all happy sheds are happy in the same way, I suppose,’ he volunteered, reaching for a serviette. ‘While unhappy sheds . . .’ But he tailed off, sensing he had lost his audience. Osborne looked nonplussed. ‘I suppose we are sure it’s a woman,’ added Makepeace. ‘I mean, the négligé might be more interesting than it at first appears.’ Osborne looked mournfully at the infant Hercules wrestling with snakes (next to the tea-urn) and shook his head. ‘So who’s the next shed, then?’ ‘Ah,’ said Osborne darkly, as though it meant something. ‘Angela Farmer.’ ‘Where’s the problem? Right up your street. Funny, charming, famous. Didn’t she have a rose named after her recently?’ ‘It was a tulip.’ ‘That’s right. She had a tulip named after her, the Angela Farmer.’ ‘Yes, but you said rose.’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ ‘OK.’ Makepeace changed the subject.

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‘A doddle though, presumably?’ ‘Oh yes. The piece is half-written already, if I’m honest.’ He started fiddling with his string bags. ‘I ought to check where she lives, I suppose, since I’ve got to arrange to get there on Monday,’ he said, and distractedly pulled out a few scarves and Paris street-maps. ‘I’ve got a diary in here somewhere.’ ‘More coffee?’ asked Makepeace, and went to order it while Osborne delved among tangerines and library books, muttering, ‘He said rose, though’ several times under his breath. ‘Ah, here we are.’ The diary was found. ‘Honiton,’ he said. ‘What?’ ‘Angela Farmer’s address. Honiton in Devon.’ They looked at one another. ‘You mean, like, Honiton where the nuts come from?’ ‘Oh, bugger. Bugger it, yes, I think I do.’

Chapter 3




A hard day at the typesetters had left Tim pale and drawn. His big specs felt heavy on his face, and a deep weariness sapped his soul as he trudged back from the tube station with only a few minutes to spare before his Friday night curfew of half-past seven. Being the sort of chap who responds to pressure by withdrawing deeper and tighter into his own already shrink-wrapped body, Tim was often on Friday nights so tautly pulled together that he was actually on the verge of turning inside out. Not surprisingly, then, he carried himself pretty carefully for those last few yards to the front door. After all, the merest nudge in the right place, and flip! it might all be over. It would be unfair to say, as many had, that Tim’s outer coolness masked an inner coolness underneath. But peeling the layers off Tim was not a job many people could be bothered to undertake, especially since Tim did so little to encourage them. Once, when Tim was a small boy, he foolishly dug up some daffodil bulbs from his mother’s flower-beds to see how they were doing (this was a favourite story of his ex-girlfriend Margaret, who thought it so funny she snorted like a pig when she told it). Well, it was Tim’s great misfortune in life that nobody (including Margaret) had ever thought to dig him up in the same way, just to check that healthy growth was still a possibility. Most people, then, considered Tim cool, aloof and just a bit of a geek (because of the specs). And that was it. To his own mother he was a daffodil murderer, a mystery never to be solved. To Margaret (a smug psychology graduate) he was a textbook obsessive. Only his cat, Lester, was really bothered to get better acquainted with him. But then, as the cynics will gladly tell you, any emotional cripple with a tin-opener is of devotional interest to his cat. Today Tim was especially worried about the emotional turmoil ahead. A new proprietor, indeed—good grief, the whole thing spelt change, and he hated the sound of it. Textbook obsessives rarely disappoint in certain departments, and Tim was not the man to transgress the rules of an association. Thus, the past week had seen him dutifully fretting to the point of dizziness about the smallest of matters slipping from his control. The Independent had gone up by five pence! On Tuesday he had forgotten to change his desk calendar to the right day! Tonight he had trodden on an odd number of paving stones on his walk home from the tube! Tim never worried about things he could actually do something about—he never, for example, grew cross with the printers on Fridays, as Michelle did, when they were inefficient or lazy. But powerlessness made him frantic. The selling of the magazine to a new proprietor whose intentions were obscure—well, that was the kind of thing to drive him nuts.

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It was with a genuine lack of enthusiasm that he unlocked the door to the flat. Since Margaret moved out, the place seemed spooky; he kept finding Margaretshaped holes in its fabric. There were gaps in the bookshelves, empty drawers, an exactly half-filled bathroom cabinet, a clearly defined gap in the dust on the kitchen surface where her Magimix formerly stood. If he had been a sentimental person, he would have considered it sad. Nobody muttered ‘For Pete’s sake’ when Tim checked the door for the fifth time before going to bed; nevertheless he heard the words not being spoken. Margaret’s absence, to be honest, was more conspicuous to Tim than her presence had been. Sometimes, when he was changing the bed-linen, he had an awful feeling he would draw back the duvet and find a crude Margaret-shaped outline on the bottom sheet, like the ones the American cops draw around homicide victims on sidewalks. The only thing she had left behind was the cat, a ginger tom with a loud purr, who wrecked Tim’s attempts to work at home by ritually jumping up on every sheet of important paper (with wet paws), and then ceremoniously parking his bum on it. So Tim had stopped trying to work at home (which was a good thing). The only trouble was, he couldn’t quite get the hang of feeding the cat at proper times, so that now, as Tim roved the dark, joyless flat turning on lights, Lester followed him about, making intense feed-me-Oh-God-feed-me noises combined with much unambiguous trouser-nudging. Tim shrugged distractedly and reached for a pad of sticky Post-it notes. feed cat, he wrote on the top sheet. This he peeled off and stuck to the nearest door-frame before continuing his perambulations. As he moved into the hall he barely noticed that on every door-frame there were dozens of similar notes, slightly overlapping, as though left over from some jolly atavistic maypole ritual. He saw them, of course, because they were unmissable — REMEMBER AUNTIE JOAN AT CHRISTMAS DRY HAIR AFTER SHOWER FEED CAT JAMMY DODGERS ON OFFER AT PRICERIGHT CHECK DOOR FEED LESTER TELL OSBORNE NOT TO WORRY ABOUT NEW EDITOR—SHEDS EVER GREEN

—he just didn’t see anything odd.  Something a great deal more lively awaited Michelle when she too reached home that evening, at roughly the same hour. Mother—a nice-looking, grey-haired old

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woman in natty, mauve velour track-suit and trainers—was poised and ready in the darkened living-room, having planned the moment with the precision of a true enthusiast. Just as Michelle’s key entered the lock, Mother tipped a number of smouldering cigarette butts on to the carpet around her wheelchair, pressed the button on the CD remote control (so that Irving Berlin’s ‘Always’ began to play) and finally flung herself back in her seat—in what she hoped was an attitude of death from filial neglect. A momentary quandary about whether her eyes should be open or closed was hastily resolved, so that when Michelle burst into the room shouting, ‘All right, all right, what is it this time?’ she saw her mother’s wide, staring eyeballs reflecting the little blue flames that were just beginning to reach up out of the Wilton. There was artistry in it, undoubtedly, but Michelle had seen it before. Also, she could not help thinking—even as she stamped out the fire and switched off the music—that the gory hatchet-through-the-head accessory was slightly gilding the lily.  Meanwhile, in a nice living-room in south London, Osborne studied the expensive curtains (the words ‘Very Peter Hall’ came to mind, but he couldn’t think why) and pondered the advantages of house-sitting as a way of life. ‘House-sitting’: how calm and steady it sounds. There is nothing steadier, after all, than a house; no posture more shock-resistant than sitting. Osborne, the man who sat in other people’s sheds as a profession, also sat in other people’s living-rooms when he went home. And as far as he was concerned, it was great, because it was cheap. The deal was, he stayed for free in other people’s flats and watered their plants, while they took nice foreign holidays or worked abroad. People trusted him, it seemed; and then they recommended him to other people, who in turn gave him their keys and wrote him chummy notes about fishfood and window-locks, and afterwards overlooked the breakages. Osborne came with recommendations. He was easygoing and honest, though not particularly house-trained. Most people figured that, in a house-sitter, two out of three wasn’t bad. For the past few weeks he had been living in the home of an old journalist friend whose job had taken him to Los Angeles for six months. The Northern Line ran directly underneath this flat, and Osborne liked to listen to the trains rumbling in the tunnels far below. He had noticed that you could feel the tremor even outside on the busy street, and he liked it; it made him feel safe. But tonight he was rattled; for he had had a perplexing day. He could hardly believe, for one thing, that he had really sat helpless in the Birthplace of Aphrodite and agreed to let Makepeace come with him to Honiton on Monday (were they really going in

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Makepeace’s van?). And worse than that, he seemed to remember saying that Makepeace could ‘sit in’ during the Angela Farmer interview. ‘I’ll just observe,’ his friend had said. What? Since when was ‘observing’ such an innocuous activity? Observing counted as threatening behaviour. The thought of Makepeace observing made him almost want to cry. Taking refuge in food, Osborne popped along to the kitchen with the intention of knocking up a tasty meal, an intention which (if nothing else) paid tribute to hope’s triumph over experience, since Osborne had never succeeded in creating a tasty meal in his life. Recipe books scared him, especially when they had jaunty titles such as One is Fun!, so his usual method was to open a few tins of things left behind by the absent home-owner—some tinned spaghetti, say, and a slab of tuna—and mix it up in a bowl, with prunes for afters. This he would place on a tray with a glass of expensive cognac from a bottle found stashed behind the gas meter, and then eat in front of the TV. Osborne entertained few qualms about helping himself to the stuff people left behind in cupboards. Being unacquainted with the notion of housekeeping, he assumed that food and booze just sort of belonged in the house and should be used accordingly. Only once had he encountered hostility to this view, when he pointed out to a returning home-owner that her supply of toilet paper had run out halfway through his six-month stay. He had been obliged to buy some more, he said, the full astonishment of the experience still making him shake his head in disbelief. The woman in question, brown and dusty from six months’ fending for herself in the Australian outback (with no Andrex supplier within a thousand miles), took this news by merely gaping and gesticulating, speechless. It was hard to imagine interviewing someone with Makepeace listening in. ‘The maestro at work,’ Makepeace had said, with an insinuating smile. Was this man mad, or what? Osborne had certainly done some good stuff in his time (the David Essex, as aforementioned, was unsurpassable), but methodology was not his strong point, heaven knew. Osborne was convinced that Makepeace merely wanted to expose him; what other motive could he have? He imagined the scene: himself pretending to consult his notes while panicking what to ask next, Angela Farmer croaking ‘You OK, honey?’ and handing him a clean tissue for the sweat dribbling in his eyes, and Makepeace stepping in with some smart-arse brilliant question and hijacking the whole enterprise. Bluffing was hard work at any time, without being watched. Twiddling some cold Heinz spaghetti on a spoon, he looked up to see that Angela Farmer, by some happy coincidence, was on the television screen right this minute, in her new smash-hit sitcom Forgive Us Our Trespasses As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us. He could hardly believe his good fortune. ‘Blimey, research,’ he remarked aloud, with his mouth full, ‘that’s a bit of luck.’ In the old

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days, of course, when he was young and keen, he would have looked for Angela Farmer’s name in the reference books, got some cuttings from a newspaper library, swotted up, requested tapes from the BBC Press Office. But these days he reckoned that a chance sighting of his subject on the box was quite sufficient to be going on with. A person’s curriculum vitae, he had discovered, rarely had much bearing on their relationship with the shed. ‘Nice-looking woman,’ he said, and got up to look at her more closely. ‘Makepeace is right, she’s great.’ But then, as he got closer to the screen, he suddenly felt all weightless again—and it wasn’t the prunes, because he hadn’t eaten them yet. ‘Don’t I know you?’ he said, and peered at Angela Farmer more closely still. ‘I do, don’t I? I know you from somewhere.’ But of course she didn’t enlighten him. She was on the telly, after all. The sitcom was a humdrum affair (as so many are) in which Ms Farmer played a wisecracking New Yorker called Eve, opposite a limp-wristed British aristo named Adam. Osborne checked the title again in the paper—Forgive Us Our Trespasses—and decided not to worry too deeply about this interesting confusion of Old and New Testaments, because it was probably the product of ignorance rather than design. Adam was played by another famous TV star (in whose sparkling greenhouse it had once been Osborne’s privilege to feel sweat in his eyes); and the idea of the piece was that Adam and Eve did not get on. That was all. The remarkable serendipity of their names was oddly never remarked on, although the title sequence did show an animated naked couple enveloped by a serpent and dithering over a pound of Coxes. What a shame, thought Osborne, that ‘Lead Us Not into Temptation’ had already been snapped up by that game show on ITV, and that this Adam-and-Eve vehicle had nothing to do with original sin (or trespass) in any case. But the audience seemed to like it. They laughed like drains every twenty seconds or so, whenever Eve and Adam had another hilarious collision of wills. ‘Milk or lemon?’ a hotel waiter would ask. ‘Milk,’ piped Adam; ‘Lemon,’ barked Eve (both speaking simultaneously); Hargh, hargh, hargh, went the audience. But Osborne had stopped listening to the dialogue and had even abandoned the delights of his Tuna Surprise; he was peering at the snarling close-ups of Angela Farmer with an increasing unease, his initial frisson of recognition having broadened and deepened until it flowed through his body like a river and leaked out horribly at his toes. ‘Inside or outside?’ ‘In,’ said Adam; ‘Out,’ said Eve; and the audience roared again. Osborne felt ill. Had she said ‘Out’? Where had he heard her say ‘Out’ like that? Perhaps it was his imagination, but he suddenly felt quite certain he had heard

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Angela Farmer say ‘Out’ in that pointed manner before. And the horrible thing was, she must have said it to him.  Back at Tim’s flat, Forgive Us Our Trespasses was also playing. There wasn’t much on the other channels that evening. But in any case, Forgive Us was the sort of television Tim particularly enjoyed: safe, predictable, and OK if you missed bits when suddenly you felt the urge to check that the fridge light still worked. Watching Eve with interest, he found that he rather envied Osborne’s luck in interviewing Ms Farmer; he must ask him what she was really like, beyond the parameters of the shed stuff. He reached for a Post-it pad and wrote TELL OSBORNE I THINK A.F. IS A V. FINE ACTRESS, and stuck the label on the side of the coffee-table. Lester made a noise that sounded like ‘meat’ (but it might have been ‘me, eat’), and arched his back before sinking his front claws into the chair and ripping. Teatime was long past, yet the happy clink of spoon on cat-bowl was yet to be heard, and Lester was running out of hints. Why was Tim so oblivious to feline nuance? It was enough to drive a cat crackers. So it was back to ripping the sofa, even though he didn’t really feel like it. ‘How banal, really,’ thought Lester, as he dug in, and the fabric made poc, poc, poc-opoc-poc noises, like fireworks on Chinese New Year. ‘How stupid.’ ‘Just stop that!’ said Tim in a voice so loud and commanding that Lester sprang back and gave him a look. Tim stirred in his chair, but Lester was right not to race to the kitchen, for it was a false alarm. Tim reached for his pad again. BE MORE PATIENT WITH LESTER, he wrote, and, at a loss where to put it, stuck it on the cat.  Makepeace sat at his typewriter, not watching the TV, and composed the covering letter for his Come Into the Garden book review, every word of which was an obvious lie to anyone who knew him. Dear Tim [he wrote; actually this part not a lie exactly, but read on], Sorry [not at all] you did not receive this by fax on Thursday as requested, but as I explained on the phone I faxed it from the copy shop [no, he didn’t] and then lost my original while gardening [stretching it a bit here, but there you are]. So I have retyped this from notes [yawn] and hope you like it. I actually think it came out better the second time! [clever touch this, the maestro at work, as it were]. Funny, I agree, that we didn’t bump into one another at the launch of the

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Fruit Garden books last week [he wasn’t there]. I was definitely there [see previous note]! In fact, I looked high and low for you, but couldn’t see you [classic turning of tables; never fails to convince]. All the best, M. Makepeace

 Miles eastward along the river, past Greenwich Reach and the Isle of Dogs, Lillian was sitting with her feet up watching Forgive Us Our Trespasses, just like everybody else. From the steamy kitchen she could hear the pleasant sounds of George (the hubby) making dinner, and she looked up in proper feeble-invalid fashion to see him present her with a pre-prandial cup-soup, made especially in her favourite Bunnykins mug. Some people might balk at the idea of cup-soups forming any part of an evening meal, but somehow it had become part of the routine. The idea was that, with God’s help of course, it would keep up Lillian’s strength until the arrival of solid food. ‘Dwarling,’ he said in a singsong baby voice. (I’m sorry if this is ghastly, but it’s true.) Lillian looked up, saw the cup-soup, pretended it was all a big surprise and gave him a sweet, affected, little-girl look that was enough honestly to freeze the blood of any disinterested onlooker. She peered into the bunny-mug and frowned a deep frown. ‘No cru-tongs, bunny,’ she lisped, her mouth turned down in disappointment. ‘Poor bunny,’ agreed her husband (who by day, incidentally, was a used-car salesman). ‘No cru-tongs for bunnywunny.’ He hung his head, extended his arms behind his back and kicked his instep. Fortunately, she smiled her forgiveness, and the moment of conflict passed. Otherwise there might have been a tantrum. But tonight they made secret-society gestures with their little fingers, as proof that the no-crutong incident had been forgotten. Don’t ask. They just seemed to enjoy it, that’s all. ‘Bunny tired?’ asked Mister Bunny, after a pause. ‘Bunny werry tired.’ ‘Did the phone never stop ringing again?’ ‘Never.’ Lillian pouted and delicately picked some fluff off her teddy-slippers, real tears of childish anguish starting in her eyes. ‘Phone went ring ring ring ring ring ring—’ ‘Poor bunny, with phone going ring.’ ‘Yes, poor bunny.’ ‘Nice spinach for tea, make bunny stwong.’ ‘Bunny never be stwong, bunny.’

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‘I know,’ said Mister Bunny, with a tinge of heart-felt regret. ‘Poor poor bunny-wunny.’ ‘Mmm,’ said Lillian, closing her eyes.  Osborne was trying to make notes for his interview on Tuesday, but somehow the usual all-purpose questions about sheds looked rather hollow and unsatisfactory: ‘Old shed/new shed? Shed important/unimportant? Hose kept in shed? Or not? (Any funny hose anecdotes?)’ He looked at the TV screen and there she was again, this amazing blonde woman with the mystery and the scarifying attitude. ‘Singles or double?’ asked a hotel receptionist. ‘Double,’ said Adam; ‘Singles,’ barked Eve. It was the last line of the show, and Osborne switched off just before the inevitable gale of appreciative studio applause. Looking at his notebook, he saw he had written: ‘Bugger the trespasses and bugger the shed. Why didn’t you tell me who you were?’ And now he looked at it, aghast, because he didn’t have a clue what it meant.  Michelle heard the closing music to Forgive Us Our Trespasses from the kitchen, where she had just discovered a cache of trick daggers and tomato ketchup wedged behind the U-bend in the cupboard under the sink. She felt a twinge tired of all this, though far be it from her, etcetera. Nobody at the office knew about Mother; it was such a sad old commonplace for a single professional woman to have a loony mum at home that she simply wouldn’t stand for anyone to know, especially not Lillian; she wanted to circle the offending cliché in thick blue pen and send it back for a rewrite. But life is not susceptible to sub-editing, by and large, and the mad mum remained fast embedded in Michelle’s text. Mother was a liability—mischievous, hurtful and addicted to practical jokes. Underneath the sink Michelle found an invoice, too: evidently Mother’s latest consignment from her favourite mail-order novelty company included a new severed hand which had not yet come to light. She sat back on her heels for a moment and, without undue self-pity, considered what she had to put up with. The irony was unbearable. Here she was, possibly the only person in the world who knew the difference between ‘forbear’ and ‘forebear’, and she was also the only person of her acquaintance who was consistently obliged to put both words together in the same sentence. 

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Tim made a note, WATCH FORGIVE US OUR TRESPS NEXT FRIDAY DON’T FORGET, and attached it to his jumper with a safety-pin, next to GO TO BED AT SOME POINT—which he had written carefully backwards, to be read when he caught sight of himself in a mirror.  Lillian and Mister Bunny pulled faces at one another, trays on their laps, and affected diddums-y thoughts as the credits rolled. (I’m sorry.) ‘Dat wath qw’ goo’,’ said Mister Bunny. ‘Mmm,’ said Lillian, ‘but this spinach was gooder!’  Makepeace wrote another letter, beginning with the words ‘Can’t understand how this did not reach you by post, although I wonder now whether your secretary gave me the correct address.’ He noted without pleasure that he could type this particular sentence as quickly as he could do ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.’  Angela Farmer switched off the TV and consulted her diary. ‘Oh yeah,’ she remarked to no one in particular, ‘the schmuck from the gardening magazine. I suppose I better mention the goddam tulip.’  And Lester the cat, festooned with Post-it notes, made his way to the darkened kitchen, knocked a tin of Turkey Whiskas to the floor, and rolled it carefully with his nose and paws in the general direction of the living-room. If that stupid bastard fails to get the hint this time, he thought, I’ll scream.

Chapter 4




The magazine for which all these people worked was a modest weekly publication, usually running to thirty two or forty pages, with a circulation of around twenty thousand. In its far off post-war heyday—which none of the present staff could remember—it had achieved a sale four times greater, but during the sixties, seventies and eighties its appeal had dipped, declined and finally levelled out; and today it would not be unkind to say that in the broad mental landscape of the average British newsagent, Come Into the Garden was virtually invisible to the naked eye. This vanishing act represented a great lost opportunity. Gardening had become a lot more sexy in the past ten years, the garden centre had almost supplanted the supermarket as a magnet for disposable dosh, and the urgent question of morally defensible peat substitutes had become the staple talk of middle-class dinner tables; yet Come Into the Garden still somehow failed to clean up. Michelle was often struck by the sad image of her beloved magazine pathetically sheltering indoors in the breezy climate of the 198os while other, brighter, glossier monthly publications came stumping heartily into its territory, utterly oblivious to its existence. She imagined these competitors taking a quick glance round, sniffing the wind, and then digging energetically with flashy stainless steel implements, heedlessly scattering the sod. Michelle’s picture did not end there, either. It was remarkably colourful and detailed. For example, Come Into the Garden wore a pair of brown corduroys, tied at the knee with string, and an old jumper with holes, and plimsolls, while the rivals were togged in Barbour jackets, riding boots and aristocratic flat caps, rather like the pictures of Captain Mark Phillips in Hello! magazine. Michelle was good at mental pictures. Once, when she observed Lillian standing tall, knock-kneed, spare-tyred and stupid in the middle of the office, the word ‘Ostrich!’ leapt quite unbidden to her mind, and she had relished the analogy ever since. She had successfully thought of other animal-types for the remainder of her colleagues, too. But luckily—apart from flinging the odd ‘Oink, oink’ noise at a departing back— she kept this personal taxonomy to herself. The depressing thing about working for Come Into the Garden, however, was not the variety of wildlife. It was that the general public had this awful habit of remembering it from years ago, placing it on the same conceptual shelf as Reveille, the Daily Sketch, Noggin the Nog and Harold Macmillan. ‘Blimey,’ they said, shaking their heads in disbelief, ‘my Nan used to read that; is it really still going?’—at which one could only smile weakly and try not to take offence. It was nobody’s fault, this widely held assumption that Come Into the Garden had long since sought

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eternal peace in the great magazine rack in the sky. Nevertheless, it required strength of character for those intimately acquainted with the title not to take such comments personally. After all, it was a bit like being accused repeatedly of outliving your own obituary, or being dead but not lying down. Imagine the difficulty of applying for other jobs. Michelle in particular had tried quite strenuously to outgrow Come Into the Garden, but she had been compelled to realize that citing her occupation as chief sub of this magazine sounded suspiciously like Coronation Programme Seller, or Great Fire of London Damage Assessor: prospective employers simply assumed she hadn’t worked for years. On the whole she bitterly envied the sensible, big-headed young journalists who had joined the title only to use it as a tiny stepping-stone en route to bigger things. They had come into the garden (as it were) and then pissed right off again, with no regrets, and moreover without a trace of loam on their fancy shoes. She did not blame them for this, she just despised them—a feeling she expressed quite eloquently by affecting never to have heard of them (‘Paul who? Doesn’t ring any bells’) whenever their names were raised. Editors too had come and gone, almost on a seasonal basis, but that wasn’t so bad, because mostly they kept themselves to themselves. And if they tried anything clever, Lillian was a highly effective means of damage control, since she paid absolutely no attention to anything they asked her to do. At the time of this story—the early 1990s—Come Into the Garden had seen four editors in five years, but it would be fair to say that ‘seeing’ was literally the limit of the acquaintance. A police line-up featuring all four of them would not necessarily elicit a flicker of recognition. By now, the long-standing staffers had grown quite blasé about meeting new bosses—content merely to count them in and then count them all out again. Indeed, when this dull Mainwaring chap (James? John?) had first settled his ample bum into the editor’s chair in July, Lillian had asked him straight off, day one, what sort of thing he fancied for a leaving present, on the principle that it would save awkwardness later on. Lillian thrived on the chaos of mismanagement. Half the time she had no boss at all (and she refused to work for anyone besides the editor), and the other half she could spend in playing lucky dip with the post-bag, or aggressively blocking the paths of busy, timid people (such as Tim) with sudden rockfalls of inane chat. Lillian’s behaviour was quite easy to predict, by the way, once you realized she was talkative in inverse proportion to the amount of talk anyone cared to hear at that particular moment. It was an infallible gift. Thus, when she was asked to disseminate important news, she automatically clammed up, kept her counsel, went home, phoned in sick next day. Whereas when everyone was bustling, agitated and far too busy to listen, she did the famous Ancient Mariner impression, expertly mooring them to the spot with heavy verbal anchors about sod all.

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‘Oh, look!’ she would announce to no one in particular, flapping an envelope in her tongs too fast for anyone to see what it was. ‘Someone’s written to Mike McCarthy!’ She would look around to see what effect this was having. And she would know, with the instinct of a top professional, that the sullen, negative take-up (people staring at walls, and so on) meant she actually had the room in the palm of her hand. ‘But don’t you see? Mike McCarthy left ages ago!’ At this point young Tim might rashly attempt to tiptoe past, but be tugged forcibly to a halt by tight invisible chains. ‘You must remember Mike McCarthy, Tim!’ she shrieked. ‘He was the editor who tried to do away with the “Dear Donald” page, just because his name wasn’t Donald! For heaven’s sake. I kept telling him, didn’t I, nobody’s name is Donald!’ And not for the first time, Tim would wriggle miserably, like bait on a hook, and think how clever Ulysses had been, in the old story, to lash himself to a mast, with ear-plugs. That Tim did not remember Mike McCarthy, Lillian knew full well. Tim had been deputy editor for only a year, and had taken the job straight from a postgraduate journalism course. In fact, at the time of Mike McCarthy’s ill-fated editorship, Tim had still been a quiet bespectacled schoolboy dreaming of a career modelled on Norman Mailer’s, and wondering how his myopia, general weediness and night-time emissions would affect his chance of success. But it was Tim’s newness, more than his youth, that put him at a disadvantage where Lillian was concerned, despite the fact he had done more for the magazine in a year than she had done since circa 1978. Michelle and Lillian had come into the garden long before everyone else, and the length of their stay was an accomplishment for which they both demanded a high level of respect. At the all-too-frequent leaving parties—for the transient editor (or whoever) whose nugatory role in the magazine’s forty-year history was ruthlessly scratched from the record the moment he hit the pavement outside (‘Mike who? I don’t recall’)—the heroic span of Lillian and Michelle was usually trotted out again, mainly because it was the one single topic either of them could be persuaded to talk about in company. For people with so little in common, it was noticeable how much Michelle and Lillian made comparisons with one another. True, they were the same age, fortytwo; they had both worked at Come Into the Garden for fifteen years; and neither could stick being in the same room with the other. But that was it; these were the only points at which their experience coincided. On this crucial length-of-service issue, in fact, Michelle could just remember life before Lillian, in that same wistful glimpse-of-yesterday’s-sunshine sort of way that some people can just remember being happy before the war, or sex before Aids, or global innocence

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before the Bomb. And when asked politely by craven sub-editors about the changes she had seen (at those godforsaken leaving parties amid the crisps and sausage rolls), Michelle was good at saying, with her eyes fixed musingly on the ceiling, ‘Well, funnily enough I can just remember life before Lillian,’ pronouncing the words with such perfectly judged emphasis that everyone latched on to the war-Aids-and-Bomb analogy without it ever being openly stated. Come Into the Garden was a miserable, inert place to work, no doubt about it. Osborne’s joy in turning up once a week to soak up the atmosphere was a measure of his desperation, nothing more. This was the sort of office where the plants embraced easeful death like an old friend, the stationery cupboard gave a wild, disordered suggestion of marauders on horseback, and nobody washed the coffee cups until the bacterial cultures had grown so active they could be seen performing push-ups and forward-rolls. There is a theory that says if employees have few outside distractions (i.e. don’t have much of a home-life), they will make the most of work, but in the case of Come Into the Garden the opposite appeared to be true. Miserable at home meant dismal all round. The words ‘Get a life!’ were once hurled at an affronted Michelle by a fly-by-night sub as he stalked out one day at the typesetters, never to return. It was a brutal thing to say (the other subs exchanged significant glances before silently dividing the recreant’s bun), yet nobody could deny it was an accurate assessment of the problem. For Michelle’s self-sacrifice was an appalling trap, with glaringly few personal compensations. And unfortunately it affected everyone, because she measured commitment by the yardstick of her own strict voluntary martyrdom. People resented this; it put them in a no-win situation. Besides the sub-editors under Michelle’s control whom we have heard about, there were four colleagues with status equal or superior to hers—art editor (Marian), features editor (Mark), advertising manager (Toby) and deputy editor (Tim)—all of whom periodically took grave offence at Michelle’s continual assertion that she cared a hundred times more about the magazine than they could possibly do. ‘No, no, you go home, Tim,’ she would say. ‘Why should you hang around? I know how you love Inspector Morse. Leave everything to me. I’m usually here until half-past nine anyway. I’ve been here for fifteen years, don’t forget; I ought to be used to it by now!’  Michelle’s big mistake was to suppose she had no illusions. Just because she had seen a few dozen colleagues come and go, loam-free, and had sub-edited several hundred celebrity interviews about sheds (in which Osborne did indeed make all the sheds sound the same), she thought she had seen it all. But alas, she was wrong. A lifetime of rewriting ‘Me and My Shed’ was not the worst hand fate could deal you, not by a long chalk. What she was yet to discover, as she sat on

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the kitchen floor on that Friday night with only the unknown whereabouts of Mother’s trick severed hand to disturb her mind, was that James Mainwaring (or was it John?) had already been declared the last editor of Come Into the Garden. The last ever, that is. If all went according to plan, those anxious readers who had phoned about ‘Build your own greenhouse’ had been absolutely right to worry: they would soon be left high and dry with a stack of panes and a lot of wet putty on their hands. And Come Into the Garden, for all the sacrifice it had wrung from Michelle, would return to the earth from which it came; ashes to ashes, compost to compost, dust to dust. No one at Come Into the Garden would survive to say ‘Michelle who?’ some day; nothing would remain. For while she knew that the publishers, Wm Frobisher, had sold the title along with its lucrative seaside postcards business to an extremely youthful entrepreneur in the West Country, she did not yet know that the said young whippersnapper had decided immediately to close it down, merely retaining the Victoria premises of Come Into the Garden for his own personal headquarters. She did not know that the typesetters and printers had already been contacted by the whippersnapper’s solicitors; or that a personal letter to each of the staff was already sitting on the whippersnapper’s breakfast nook, awaiting signature. The little upstart had already inspected the building with his dad, in fact, and the spooky truth was that he had taken one look at Michelle’s little corner and earmarked it immediately as the proposed position for his own executive desk. He had even helped himself to one of her Extra Strong Mints and admired her range of nail varnish. Come Into the Garden was nothing like paradise, and never had been. But being cast out of it was going to be a pretty grisly business.  The decision to close Come Into the Garden, by the way, had taken only a few seconds. ‘Dad,’ said young Gordon, ‘I’ve bought this old magazine. What do you think?’ Frobisher’s had sent Gordon a few recent issues, with a compliments slip. ‘What’s it called?’ ‘Come Into the Garden.’ ‘Never.’ ‘No, that’s right.’ ‘Blimey,’ said Gordon’s dad, turning it over in his hands. ‘Your Nan used to read this, when I was little. I can’t believe it’s still going.’ And that was it. 

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Gordon Clarke, at nineteen, was a red-headed, freckly prodigy of the computer software business; his father a nice—looking, broad-shouldered ex-fireman running a pleasant B&B. They were good people, Gordon and his dad, and considering their recent soaring fortunes, not a bit flash. Devon was their adopted home, the family having been transplanted from south London when Gordon was ten. Gordon had grown up knowing how to make a bed in three and a half minutes and carry four cooked breakfasts without a tray; apart from that, however, he was no better equipped for a managing directorship than most boys of his age. Given this background, then, Gordon’s acquaintance with magazine publishing was scarcely intimate; and his concern for the continued job security of a bunch of anonymous deadbeat journalists on a dusty old magazine like Come Into the Garden was bound to be in the rough vicinity of nil. His phenomenal early success he owed to a computer game invented in the wonderful summer of 1986, which he had named Digger. It had made him a teenage millionaire and a darling of feature-writers everywhere. In fact, if Osborne had only been more alert to the happenings of the world in general, he would have been down to interview Gordon’s shed. The idea of Digger was simple: it used the principles of the traditional treasure hunt, mixed it up with some significant ancient legend and some primitive three-dimensional virtual reality, and somehow caught the public’s attention so utterly that, overnight, the Digger became a fashionable figure for the first time since the seventeenth century. ‘Where’s young Jason?’ spinster aunties would say on visits to family homes. ‘Oh, he’s upstairs digging,’ would be the apparently meaningless reply. It was one of those instances where the new meaning of a word almost supplants the old, so that blokes heading for their allotments with shovels over their shoulders were obliged to explain to their kiddies what kind of digging exactly they were referring to. Not surprisingly, Gordon’s position at the cutting edge of the games software business was itself usurped, in time, by even younger tykes with even fancier ideas, but by then he had made a decent fortune from Digger and had listened to the advice of his wise old dad, with the result that he now controlled a modest, diversified business empire, with leisure as its loosely connecting thread, and a break-even B&B in Honiton as its base. His dad sometimes lamented that Gordon’s mum had not lived to see it all—but Gordon did not mind so very much. His mum had died when he was a baby; and anyway he adored his dad. His main concern at the moment, in fact, was that, if Digger Enterprises moved to London, his dad would be left behind to run the B&B alone, a thought he could hardly bear. One of the ingenious features of Digger, much remarked upon by adult observers of the game, was that the player sometimes dug up stuff that looked like

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gold, only to find that it stuck to his hands and afflicted him with debilitating pain and anguish. Gordon’s classical education was not extensive, but he knew about the Midas touch, and had also been horrified as a child by the story of Hercules and the shirt of Nessus, so he had simply put the two ideas together. Digger devotees (as well as Gordon’s many interviewers) had often pointed out the maturity of his moral insight, and posed the obvious poor-little-rich-boy question of whether Gordon himself might have dug up more than he could handle. Would the unexpected wealth turn sour? Gordon’s generally cheerful disposition gave the lie to this idea, but it had certainly struck him lately that the possible separation from his dad would be just the thing to make him rue the day of Digger’s success. It was his Auntie Angela who offered him the best advice on the subject of success. ‘Expect to lose all the pals of your ba-zoom, Gordon,’ she warned him flatly on the day Digger came out (Gordon was fourteen and motherless, as aforementioned). ‘Auntie’ Angela (no relation) was American, with a house just up the road. She sharpened a cracked fingernail briskly with an emery board and took a deep drag on a cigarette, with the effect of turning her already dry-throated delivery to pure essence of razor-blade. ‘Listen, Gordon baby,’ she snarled, ‘it is harder for a camel to thread a needle with its goddam eye than for a friend to forgive you success. Okay?’ She was a bit of a dragon sometimes, Auntie Angela, toughened by years of working in light comedy on British television, her skin tanned to a leathery yellow hide by decades of sun and cigarettes. But although she breathed fire and snorted smoke, she was not alarming to Gordon; he basked in the warm ashes like a fledgling phoenix not sure whether to rise up flapping or snuggle down for a bit more cosy snooze. Science, by the way, had not yet revealed the full perils of passive smoking. As Gordon remembered it, this important conversation took place one sunny afternoon in Angela’s shed; the same shed that Osborne and Makepeace were planning (as you will long since have guessed) to visit for Come Into the Garden in a couple of days’ time. Thinking back, Gordon could visualize the smoke and dust hanging in equal density in a shaft of sunlight from the small window; he could see Angela’s stacks of yellowing sheet music mixed in with the pots and trowels, and he could smell the earthy bulb fibre in its bag. He had spent many happy afternoons in that shed, actually, with Angela narrating the plots of Broadway musicals for his delight, and belting out all the songs by way of illustration. He was particularly fond of Showboat—especially ‘Just My Bill’ and ‘I Still Likes Me’. So for now all was rosy in Gordon’s particular world. He played football on Sundays, made visits to Angela, reaped ever-increasing royalties on Digger and kept up with the latest research into the technology of virtual reality. He was a genius, of course; but not a bit overbearing with it. He seemed to have the enviable capacity of enjoying his good fortune; a talent that the profile writers, after con-

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sulting child psychologists, had deduced at length to have a rather banal explanation—viz., that he owed it to a lifetime of ‘proper parenting’. Really. One of these psychologists used an analogy which would almost have endeared Gordon to readers of Come Into the Garden (if he weren’t just about to close down their magazine): she said that Gordon had had the luck of being ‘planted in a soil that nourished him’; a luck, she went on to say, that was as rare as a snowdrop in August. And the luck was still with him, because her comment prompted him to think of a new virtual reality program, which he now hugged to himself, for he knew it would revolutionize the whole leisure-perception-Gameboy business and place the name of Gordon Clarke on the rollcall of history, along with Newton and Buddha, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Because in this new virtual reality program, the player would not vanquish opponents or dig for treasure, but would feel himself grow. Just by strapping a computer-generated visual world on to his bonce, he would experience an unfurling, an expanding, a reaching towards the light— like a snowdrop, a yucca plant or a mighty oak, depending on preference. Gordon’s provisional title for it was Phototropism (though he suspected this might have to change), and his ambitions for it were boundless. Imagine returning to the real, warped, stunted world after an experience such as Phototropism! It would be like reporting back from heaven; it could change people for ever.  Meanwhile Come Into the Garden does well to shelter indoors from the harsh pelting weather sweeping towards it from the west. No point getting the corduroys damp in a misplaced effort to stay the inevitable. Its demise will be significant only to a small number of people—and, being mostly gardening types, the readers are well acquainted with the ruthless survivalist principles of pruning, deadheading and plucking out anything that’s got a bit rusty round the edges. In short, they will be cross, but ultimately they will understand. But still, one can’t help feeling sorry for the poor old mag as it waits unawares for its sudden end. It has no idea it has done anything wrong. It thinks it has permanent roots; it thinks it’s a perennial. And it even expects Osborne and Makepeace to hit the road next Monday and bring back a ‘Me and My Shed’ so brilliant, witty and generally wildly glorious that it will make the whole world of gardening journalism sit up and say, ‘Wow.’ Which just goes to show how out of touch it really is.

Chapter 5




‘I love this van,’ said Makepeace, as he accelerated the old Fiesta away from the kerb with a screech of tyres and punched a few buttons on the crackly radio cassette so that a loud Dire Straits number drilled the air. Osborne, tightly duffled in his coat and fastened securely in his seat belt, clutched his overnight bag hard against his chest and, with his head thrown sharply back by the G-force of the take-off, prayed silently with his eyes closed to the patron saint of hopeless causes. But an immediate squeal, thunk and shout forced him to look up. Makepeace had belatedly noticed a large coach bearing down on them and braked, just in time, to a violent dead stop. It was an ominous beginning. The van rocked furiously on its chassis, and Makepeace’s push-bike shot forward from its position in the rear so that a hurtling handlebar struck Osborne quite forcibly on the back of the head. The sound of tring! is not usually associated with despair, but there is a first time for everything. Makepeace, incensed, grabbed his door handle, evidently with the intention of leaping out to defend his affronted honour, but fortunately the offending coach roared off in a haze of exhaust, because otherwise a rendezvous for pistols at dawn would surely have been appointed. ‘Pillock,’ averred Makepeace, turning the music a little louder. ‘Arsehole.’ At which the van lurched off again, this time (by an undeserved stroke of good fortune) locating a perfectly Fiesta-sized gap in the stream of westward rush hour traffic. Devon had never seemed further off than it did now to Osborne, as he contemplated London’s South Circular Road and imagined the grim prospect of his friend taking up cudgels for his legendary infallibility every six or seven yards between Putney and Stonehenge. ‘I did not pull out without indicating’; ‘But you did’; ‘I did not, you arsehole’; ‘You did, you fucking maniac’; ‘Take off those glasses and say that’; Biff !; ‘Aagh!’; Boff ! Tinkle! Tring! If debate over traffic accidents tends to bring out aggression in people, Makepeace had just the right demeanour of overweening smugness to invite a nasty smack in the eye from virtually any fellow motorist not laid low by infirmity or disqualified from punchups by gender or divine ordinance. Mind you, come to think of it, ‘Take off that wimple and say that’ sounded pretty feasible, too. Osborne suddenly realized he couldn’t remember why he liked this bloke. ‘Do we need to fill up?’ he yelled above the din of music and engine, but his words were ignored. Shortly afterwards, however, Makepeace announced to no one in particular, ‘Hey, I’d better get some petrol,’ and swerved into a garage, narrowly missing a woman on crutches with a baby on her back.

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It is a misplaced perception tragically common among neurotics that dangerous situations are somehow not dangerous per se, but are merely sent to try them. Famous for worrying about nothing, the Osbornes of this world paradoxically respond to genuinely scary situations by affecting not to notice, because somehow it makes them feel better. So, while any normal person might have sprung from Makepeace’s van at this perfect opportunity, pretending all of a sudden to remember a valid train ticket in the back of their wallet, Osborne merely breathed deeply, glanced around to check that the crutch lady was still vertical, and reached into his bag for the solace of the packed lunch. ‘Cup cake?’ he said. Makepeace applied the handbrake and stared at his passenger in surprise, as though Osborne had been deliberately keeping his presence a secret. He repeated the offer. ‘Er, cup cake, Makepeace?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said the master of all their fates. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you see I’m driving?’  An hour later, as the little yellow van screamed and rattled from the M3 on to the old West Country road, and the surrounding Hampshire scenery presented its quaint palette of November greens and browns, Osborne brushed the last of the chocolate crumbs off his lap, feeling obscurely pleased. He was, when all was said and done, a man who took his consolations where he found them, and experience had taught him there were few situations that did not contain them if you looked hard enough. So, Number One, he had survived this miserable journey thus far with only a slight bash to the head; and Number Two, eight cup cakes in a single sitting was a personal best. He noted with additional satisfaction that in six cases out of the eight, he had so carefully peeled the silver paper that no chocolate icing had been caught in the little corrugations. So, not so bad, really. Now he leaned back, tried to blot out the FM babble of the radio (the signal was wandering, but Makepeace didn’t notice), and closed his eyes so that Makepeace’s maverick tendency to thunder up close behind other cars and then scarily overtake on the left was something he merely felt in his gut rather than experienced fully through the organs of vision. Riding as a passenger in Makepeace’s van was in one regard quite different from what he had expected: there was apparently no necessity for talk. In other ways, alas, it was precisely what he might have imagined. Makepeace’s driving was of the God-I’m-dying-for-a-pee school: fast, tense and involved, and with his torso inclined so far forward in his seat that occasionally his nose bumped against the windscreen, leaving a smear of grease. Osborne felt no compulsion to communicate, therefore, especially since Makepeace’s few utterances were exclusively addressed either to road signs (whose information he predictably refused to believe), or to other motorists (who thankfully could not respond).

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‘Since when?’ was an evident favourite in Makepeace’s open-road repertoire (‘Basingstoke “four miles”? Oh yes? Since when?’). Osborne guessed rightly that this was a question that required no answer—or at least none that he was in any position to supply. So instead he turned his mind to the mystery of Angela Farmer, whose part in his downfall he was still agonizingly unable to place, despite the automatic writing he had seen on his notepad on Friday night. ‘Why didn’t you tell me who you were?’ it had said ominously, with a kind of low cello vibrato—reminding Osborne of something from a sensational nineteenth-century novel, along the lines of ‘Gone! And never called me mother,’ or, ‘But there is one thing no one has ever told you, my pretty; you are mad, quite mad.’ For a man who treasured the quietness and regularity of his life, and was convinced he had never paddled in the shallows of melodrama, this mystery was cause only for alarm. What a shame, he grimaced, that all the cup cakes had gone. Chocolate is always so helpful when a man wants to think. It was at this point, unfortunately, that Makepeace decided to get chatty. Thirty miles from Hyde Park Corner, he suddenly relaxed with an audible sigh. He leaned back in his seat, switched off the radio, lowered his speed and altered his entire disposition. ‘So,’ he said, ‘tell me what you reckon to this Angela Farmer.’ For a moment, Osborne was so surprised to find himself addressed that he glanced into the back of the van to find out who Makepeace was talking to, and received the full force of a handlebar just below his eye. ‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘Who, me?’ ‘Mm. What angle are you going to take?’ ‘I don’t know.’ Osborne hated being asked questions about his work; his answers always sounded so unconvincing. ‘I haven’t got one.’ ‘Course you have.’ Makepeace apparently knew all about it. ‘You can’t do an interview without an angle.’ Osborne, a man who had never had an angle in his life, and wasn’t sure he would recognize one if it snuggled in beside him in the Fiesta, shrugged and consulted his notes, faintly hoping that a heading marked ‘Angle’ would appear miraculously at the top. It didn’t. ‘No. Really,’ he said. ‘I just thought I’d ask about the shed.’ His friend laughed scornfully, as though he were pulling his leg. ‘You don’t mean that.’ ‘I do.’ Osborne felt he was being got at. Which of course he was. ‘All right, you do,’ conceded Makepeace. ‘But there must be some sort of idea of what you want her to say before you start, surely. I mean, what do you usually ask? Tell me how it goes.’

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Osborne sighed. He hated this. ‘Well, it varies from person to person,’ he said at last. ‘Sometimes they say do I want to see the shed on my own, and then talk about it indoors over a drink or something, which saves them the bother of coming out; and sometimes we go down together, which I prefer actually, because I find it leads to the best stories.’ ‘Right.’ Makepeace noisily dropped a gear to overtake a dawdling 70 m.p.h. milk-tanker, his arm out of the window with a V-sign on the end, but nevertheless appeared still to be listening. Osborne continued. ‘And then we go and have a look at the shed. And I always double-check they haven’t reorganized it since the photographer came, because otherwise I might say in the piece that it’s a really neat and tidy shed and the picture shows it as a terrible mess, which makes me look stupid.’ ‘Right.’ ‘I mean, it’s bad enough when I describe them wearing gumboots, and the picture shows them in sandals.’ ‘Right.’ ‘I let them know that I’m familiar with their work, because that makes them relax.’ ‘Right.’ ‘And sometimes I take flowers, if it’s a woman.’ ‘Right.’ Makepeace was thoughtful. Osborne had evidently failed to say what he wanted to hear. ‘But what about the excitement? Isn’t it a buzz meeting famous people all the time?’ Osborne thought about it, but the question meant nothing to him at all. He shrugged. ‘Haven’t you done any interviews yourself ?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Is that why you wanted to come?’ ‘Partly.’ ‘But it’s not like really meeting these famous people, you know. I mean, you might bump into them in the street the next day and they wouldn’t know you.’ ‘So what?’ ‘I mean, take this Angela Farmer. I’m positive, positive, I have met her before, but I know for an absolute fact that she won’t remember me.’ ‘You have met her, though; that’s something.’ ‘Well, there’s the difference between us. I really don’t think that it is.’  Osborne was wrong, though, if he thought he had no impact on people in general, because there was one group of his acquaintance on whom he made an im-

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pression disproportionately large: women. Unlikely as it may seem, women regularly took a fancy to Osborne, against all the negative probability that a downat-heel hack with only a few kilos of peanut brittle to his name would make a woman remotely happy in the long term. There was just something about him; something that the little squit Makepeace, for example, would never possess despite all his youth and cleverness, despite even his ginger ponytail. Even Osborne’s virginal vagueness about sex, which he always modestly supposed would disqualify him from the field, paradoxically served only to fuel the attraction. Of course, cynics might say that the phenomenon owed more to the shocking self-esteem of the women concerned than to the innate attractiveness of the man; but this insight, while undoubtedly helpful, could not account for everything. Osborne had many genuine features to commend him: a pleasant manner, decent dental hygiene, and a liberality with cup cakes bordering on saintliness. To cap it all, there was an old-fashioned streak of gallantry he had somehow never shaken off—which meant that he sometimes complimented women on their appearance, opened doors for them, even kissed the backs of their hands. This knocked them dead. Such demonstrations being like showers of spring rain in the veritable Death Valley of most modern women’s emotional lives, Osborne absentmindedly picked up female admirers the way other people pick up fluff. Michelle, of course, had fancied him for twelve years, a fact that anyone but Osborne would have deduced long ago from her wildly divergent behaviour towards him. Why else would someone appear to be so cloyingly sweet one minute, and the next as punchy as a boxing kangaroo? It is a sure sign of thwarted passion in a naturally forceful person such as Michelle. But Osborne, unable to penetrate the mystery, merely assumed that when she was nice, she was attempting to give him the benefit of the doubt; and when she was nasty, it was because, understandably, she found she couldn’t, after all. Those spoof letters she wrote to Osborne from the unfortunate red-herring address in Honiton were only the latest of dozens she had written for her own amusement and then filed carefully in a special place in the office. In each brace of letters, moreover, she had conformed to the same schizoid pattern, making it a rule that for each saucy epistle there would be a reproving one of equal strength. Looking back on the two letters that (thanks to Lillian) had got away, she was proud of the part about the gold flip-flops and the gardening gloves, but relieved, on the whole, not to have made reference on this occasion to a particular sexual fantasy that recurred in the letters as it recurred in her dreams. She didn’t want to scare anyone unnecessarily, even under a false name. But this fantasy, for what it is worth, entailed the tying of Osborne’s wrists with garden twine, the staking of his body to a freshly turned flower-bed, and the stroking of his exposed nipples, ever so lightly, with the sharpened tines of a rusty, jumbo pitchfork. In some ob-

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scure way which Michelle had never dared pause to analyse, the idea gave her enormous pleasure.  Approaching Stonehenge, Makepeace ventured, ‘Perhaps you know Angela Farmer in the biblical sense.’ Osborne took a moment to guess what his friend might be getting at, because his mind immediately leapt to Angela Farmer as the redoubtable Eve in Forgive Us Our Trespasses—in which case, of course, he did know her in the biblical sense, as did millions and millions of other people. ‘Are you talking about sex, Makepeace? Are you suggesting Angela Farmer would have sex with me? The well-known glamorous person? You must be further off your trolley than I thought.’ ‘Why not? You’re a nice-looking bloke. I’ve seen how the women look at you down at the Birthplace of Aphrodite.’ Osborne suddenly felt rather warm and unbuttoned his coat. His window steamed up. ‘Just drop it,’ he said. ‘You’d make a nice couple, you and Angela—and the tulip. And she must have buckets of money.’ ‘Look—’ ‘You should get in there, I’m not joking. Take her some flowers. Tell her she’s got the nicest shed you’ve ever seen. Something like that.’ ‘Leave it, please.’ ‘I’ll bet you two dozen cup cakes she remembers you.’ ‘Shut up. I mean it.’  It was just getting dark when they finally located their boarding house. Fortunately there were unlikely to be two B&Bs with a name like Dunquenchin in a small town like Honiton. ‘What does it mean, for fuck’s sake—that they’ve given up alcohol?’ asked Makepeace, as he noisily wrestled the bike out of the back of the van on Dunquenchin’s gravel drive. ‘Big fucking deal.’ He had been a bit tetchy ever since the conversation about Ms Farmer, Osborne had noticed, and was starting to behave in the manner of a loose cannon. Perhaps Osborne’s notorious helplessness with street-maps had annoyed him (it annoyed most people); perhaps something nasty once happened to him in a town famous for lace and traffic jams. Either way, he had started to say ‘Fuck’ a lot, so it was fair to assume that something was up. ‘Fuck!’ he now exclaimed for no apparent reason, as he fixed the bits of his bike together. ‘Oh, fuck this!’ ‘You all right?’ asked Osborne.

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‘Fuck off.’ ‘We made it, though.’ ‘Dun-fuckin-quenchin,’ Makepeace went on. ‘Jesus Fuck, what the fuck is that?’ Osborne wondered momentarily whether he had somehow stumbled into a Martin Scorsese movie, but he looked around and he was definitely still in Honiton at lighting-up time. ‘I expect there’s an explanation,’ he said in an attempt to mollify. ‘An explanation, he says. Fucking great. Mister Oz reckons there’s an explanation. So what will you be calling your retirement cottage, Mister Oz? Dunbuggerin-about? Or just Dun-doin-fuck-all?’ Osborne tried to ignore this, merely dragging his bag to the front door and peering in the dark for the doorbell. This was scarcely the right time to fall out with Makepeace, because for one thing they had booked a double room. He found the doorbell and pressed it. ‘Better than Dun-bloody-knowing-it-all,’ he muttered, but loudly enough for Makepeace to hear. Which was probably a mistake. Makepeace threw the bike down with a clatter (that ominous tring!) and strode towards him, almost at a run. ‘Dun what?’ he bellowed. Good grief, it was the horror of the pomegranates all over again. Osborne stifled a scream. ‘Dun fucking what?’ At which point, luckily, the door opened to reveal the rather dramatic silhouette of a large man in an old fireman’s jacket, and Makepeace skidded to a halt on the stones. Osborne looked around in amazement. The man, who was observing Makepeace coolly from the step, appeared to be holding a metal hatchet in his hand, possibly with the intention of using it. Everything went terribly quiet. ‘It’s called Dunquenchin,’ he said softly to Osborne, absently polishing the blade with a large white hanky. ‘Does your friend’—here he pointed with the weapon—‘have a problem with that?’ ‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ said Osborne. ‘Mm.’ ‘I’m really sorry about the shouting,’ continued Osborne, ‘but he’s been driving all day, and he’s a bit wound up.’ ‘Wound up?’ said the man. ‘As Jeff Bridges so wittily remarks in The Fabulous Baker Boys, he’s a bloody alarm clock.’ They looked together at Makepeace, who had gone back to the van and was now inexplicably stamping on the ground in fury, as though involved in a strange Cossack dance of his own devising. ‘He’ll be all right if he can have a drink, I expect. “Dunquenchin” doesn’t mean you don’t serve drink, I hope?’ ‘No, only that I don’t put out fires.’

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Osborne looked at the uniform and said, ‘Ah.’ ‘Just been giving a talk to some lacemakers. They loved the hatchet.’ ‘I see.’ ‘You on business?’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘Name?’ ‘We booked under the name of Makepeace. That’s him.’ The fireman considered him for a moment. ‘What does your friend do, apart from impressions of Rumpelstiltskin?’ ‘He’s a writer.’ ‘You don’t say. What does he write?’ ‘Book reviews, mostly.’ ‘It takes all sorts.’  Nobody else was staying at Dunquenchin that night, which was not surprising given the season. In the evening, therefore, Osborne and Makepeace sat alone in the small, chilly dining-room consuming a fairly good home-made soup, cream of cauliflower, and staring in glum silence at their host’s many fire-service mementoes decking the walls. Normal talk was impossible: for a start, Makepeace had overheard the Rumpelstiltskin comparison and was still sulking; but on top of that they both laboured under the usual inhibition of self-conscious visitors to guesthouses, a paranoid conviction that their conversation, however banal, was being not only overheard but possibly also written down. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, since the fireman obeyed the corollary rule of guesthouses, which says that the host pays very little attention to the diners (‘Brr, are you sure you’re warm enough?’ he said, not waiting for an answer, as he whisked away the soup bowls), and that the meal must be prepared with the maximum rumpus and no self-consciousness whatever about kitchen conversation travelling straight to the ears of the guests. So, ‘I gave them the last of the cauliflower soup,’ they heard him say to someone on the other side of the thin swing door. They tried not to listen, but they couldn’t help it. ‘Oh,’ replied another, younger, male voice. ‘Hadn’t it gone a bit whiffy?’ Osborne scratched his nose and looked hard at a shiny helmet, a medal and a large fullcolour photo of a warehouse conflagration in 1975—presumably a fire with happy memories for his host. ‘What are they getting next, then?’ the conversation continued. ‘One of my famous risottos.’ ‘Blimey, Dad, is that all? You’re not exactly pushing the boat out.’ ‘Well, they’re a bit obnoxious, if you must know.’ ‘Oh, I see. How many nights?’ ‘Just the one, I hope.’ ‘Good.’ ‘Shall we go out for a drink after this?’ asked Makepeace in a low whisper.

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‘Good idea.’ ‘I was in a bit of a mood earlier on.’ ‘I noticed.’ ‘I get moods like that sometimes.’ ‘Right.’ If this was Makepeace’s way of saying sorry, ‘Right’ was all he was getting in return. ‘I don’t like it here.’ ‘Nor do I.’ There was a pause. ‘Did you think the soup was whiffy?’ asked Osborne. Makepeace didn’t reply. There was another long pause while they stared at the walls, and the word ‘obnoxious’ bounced around the room. Suddenly Makepeace let out a little shriek. ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ he rasped. ‘Look. You see the name on all this fireman crap? It’s Clarke.’ Osborne looked puzzled. ‘Clarke? What do you mean?’ ‘Look at it,’ hissed Makepeace. ‘Clarke. Of Honiton. You know. The flip-flops. It could be him, our friend with the shiny buttons.’ ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ exclaimed Osborne, forgetting to keep his voice down. Makepeace signalled at him furiously, so he shut up. But Osborne was confused. Was this a joke, or what? ‘Listen.’ Makepeace now sounded urgent. He had picked up a spoon and was studying it carefully, as though thinking his way out of a dangerous situation. ‘Think back,’ he hissed, importantly. ‘Does he know who you are? Did you give your name or anything when you booked?’ Osborne thought about it. ‘No, I gave yours. But—’ ‘Whatever you do, don’t tell him, then. Funny letters are one thing, but he’s got a hatchet. Next thing you know, you’ll be on a one-way journey to the shed in a fireman’s lift.’ ‘Listen, this is stupid.’ Osborne started to get up from the table, but at this point the door burst open and a young man with carroty hair entered with two bowls of steaming dinner, a side salad and a basket of bread, most of it precariously balanced on his forearms. He plonked it down, gave them a pleasant noncommittal sort of smile, said, ‘Hello I’m Gordon, hope you’re warm enough in here, not very warm though is it,’ and promptly disappeared again, to rejoin the conversation off-stage. Gordon. They looked at one another. That made him G. Clarke. ‘It’s him, then!’ said Makepeace. ‘The boy! It’s him!’ But by now Osborne had had enough. ‘All right, shut up,’ he said. ‘This is

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bloody silly. Just because his dad said you looked like Rumpelstiltskin, there’s no need—’ ‘Come and “rummage in my shed”, big boy,’ Makepeace continued. “Phew, hot work, gardening”.’ ‘I’m not listening.’ ‘Keep your voice down,’ commanded Makepeace, and jerked his head towards the door so vehemently that they stopped arguing and started listening again. Which was unfortunate, really, the way things turned out later on. ‘Have you sent those Come Into the Garden letters yet, Gordon?’ shouted the older man over the drumming of water in a washing-up bowl. ‘Not yet,’ his son yelled back. ‘You ought to do it soon. I mean, if it’s urgent.’ ‘I know.’ Osborne gulped. Makepeace, astounded, burst out laughing. ‘Urgent!’ he repeated, and pointed at Osborne’s face. ‘You know I don’t like to interfere,’ Gordon’s dad continued. ‘But I just wonder whether you’ve got mixed feelings. You could ease up, you know.’ ‘Ha!’ exclaimed Makepeace in triumph. ‘Mixed feelings!’ And he slapped his thigh. ‘Listen, Dad,’ said Gordon, ‘I know what I’m doing. I know when I’m out of my depth. Trust me. You remember how you worried about Digger?’ ‘I know.’ ‘I can handle it.’ ‘All right.’ ‘I’ll see to the plates.’ Gordon kicked the swing door and marched into the dining-room, the fixed B&B smile already planted on his face. But what he found was that the dinner on the plates was hardly tasted, let alone finished. ‘That’s funny,’ he shouted back to his dad. ‘They’ve gone.’

Chapter 6




Angela Farmer put down the detective novel she was reading, breathed a large blue plume of smoke and consulted her watch. Eleven fifteen. Jeeze. She would definitely have to get dressed soon. Or at least visit the bathroom. Something. For now, however, she stubbed out her cigarette in one of the ashtrays resting on her upper chest and fractionally shifted her position in the bed—just enough to feel the benefit, but not so much that she disturbed the rabbit sleeping on the eiderdown, or toppled to the floor any of the books, papers or cake boxes that seemed somehow to have piled up in heaps. Idly she thought of all the people who were currently doing healthy outdoor up-and-at-’em things, such as weeding and golf, and gave a loud, barking laugh, something along the lines of ‘Arf, arf ’. Woman’s Hour played at her elbow on a large portable radio. In a moment, Jenni Murray would announce, ‘And now, Angela Farmer reads the second instalment of—’ but the prospect gave her little satisfaction. She picked up the book again and studied the cover. It was Trent Carmichael’s new title, Murder, Shear Murder (the latest in Michelle’s favourite death-by-garden-implement series, which included Let Them Eat Rake and the bestselling Dead for a Bucket), but she put it down again. Trent Carmichael had been a buddy ever since she starred in the TV movie of S is for . . . Secateurs!, and he always sent her a complimentary copy of each new book, with a friendly inscription. But that didn’t mean she had to like his goddam fiction. ‘Ah,’ she sighed, ‘fuck him if he can’t take a joke’. ‘Ya OK down there—bunny?’ she barked. The rabbit made no move. ‘Sure you don’t wanna go—walkies?’ It didn’t. Or not so as you’d notice. Swell. ‘And now,’ announced Jenni Murray pointedly, ‘Angela Farmer reads the second part of—’ ‘Oh no, she do-on’t,’ sang the listener gruffly, and switched herself off. Strange to feel less than contented, really. Here she was, with a new hardback, no work today, as much cake as she could eat and a faithful rabbit at her side. She could stay in bed, have a ball, sing all the songs from Showboat, anything. ‘You could make believe I love you’ (she loved doing duets); ‘I could make believe that you LOVE ME.’ Maybe the problem really was the book. For a third time she tried to concentrate on the deductive puzzle confronting the much-loved Inspector Greenfinger and his earthy sidekick (Pete), but for a third time failed to raise the necessary enthusiasm. ‘The gardener did it,’ she announced. ‘My money’s on the

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goddam gardener.’ And exasperated, she threw Murder, Shear Murder down the bed, where it hit the bunny and woke it up. When she had given an interview about ‘a day in the life’ to a Sunday magazine, by the way, it had strangely mentioned nothing of all this. Up at seven, with a healthy half-grapefruit and a few knee-bends, that’s what she had told them. ‘Here’s my knee,’ she growled, ‘to prove it.’ A couple of hours’ light toil on the long-awaited theatrical memoirs (as yet unstarted, actually), a half-hour answering fan letters with a hunky male secretary (Gordon’s dad had obligingly posed for the pictures), a low-cholesterol lunch, plus a long walk in the fresh air, and all before The Archers at 1.40 p.m.! It was only because her imagination ran out, and she had to invent a rather far-fetched interest in fell walking, that the interviewer ever smelled a rat. ‘Oh,’ he had said politely, ‘fell walking. But there are no fells in Devon.’ ‘Sure there are. They’re just so good they blend naturally into the landscape.’ ‘Actually, um, there aren’t, you know.’ ‘You sure? Jesus, what a gyp.’ She lit a cigarette and tried to think fast. So many daylight activity hours still to account for. The interviewer broke the silence. ‘Perhaps I could say that you do the flowers at the church, or something?’ She thought about it. ‘Does that sound OK to you, not too creepy?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘Well, it’s a deal. Say I do the flowers, but not every day. No one would buy that. Can you say I have a dog, too? I’d like a dog, but I never got around to getting one. And maybe an Aga where I bake cookies.’ ‘Fine by me, Ms Farmer. What do you want me to call it?’ ‘The Aga?’ ‘The dog.’ ‘Oh, yeah. Archie.’ ‘Nice name.’ ‘Thanks. I think so too.’ She could not understand actors who fretted about ‘resting’. There was nothing shameful about putting your feet up; especially when, by and large, the rest of your life was hell on wheels. Yesterday she had driven to a London studio and done voice-overs all day (‘The warmth of a real fire’—it was amazing how many different ways you could say it); by the weekend she had to read several lousy nohope scripts for proposed TV sitcoms; and sometime this week she had a guy visiting from a little chicken-shit magazine to talk to her about her outhouse, for some cockamamy reason. So why not enjoy the peace and quiet when you had the chance? Except that it wasn’t particularly peaceful at this moment, because all of a sud-

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den there was someone running up the stairs, and the rabbit, startled by the noise, had jumped off the bed with a thump, and was charging towards the wardrobe for cover. For Christ’s sakes, what now? ‘It’s only me,’ shouted Gordon from outside her door. ‘Auntie Angela, can I come in?’ ‘Sure. But wait till I call off the bunny. We thought you were a burglar, and he’s all riled up.’ Gordon let himself in. ‘Hi,’ he said, smiling. ‘Hi yourself.’ ‘Been busy?’ He waved at the chaos on the bed, the floor, the bedside table and all the available surfaces around the room. ‘Good job Dad isn’t here, he’d throw a fit.’ ‘He would.’ Gordon cleared a space carefully and sat down. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I just thought I ought to warn you. There’s a couple of blokes staying with us, and I heard one of them mention your name this morning. I think he’s coming to see you.’ ‘Now why would he do that?’ ‘Don’t know. But I think he’s coming at twelve.’ Angela pursed her lips and looked at the ceiling as if to say, ‘How I pity me,’ but said nothing. ‘Shall I check in your diary?’ ‘You’re a doll, but I wish you wouldn’t.’ ‘Come on, where is it?’ Angela waved a hand vaguely. ‘The rabbit had it last.’ Quickly surveying the room, Gordon spotted the diary lurking in exactly the place he expected it: under a Mr Kipling Victoria Sponge. He grabbed it and riffled. ‘Now, hang on . . . right. Tuesday, midday. Come Into the Garden,’ he read cheerfully, and then went terribly quiet. Angela didn’t notice the change in his demeanour. Having heaved herself out of bed, she was now kicking debris out of the way, to clear a path to the wardrobe. ‘Give me strength,’ she yelled. But at the same time as Gordon appreciatively watched her performance, laughed and started tidying things into piles, he felt oddly detached from his surroundings. Come Into the Garden had come to Honiton? This was dreadful. These people to whom he had just served breakfast, were they his own employees, the ones he was going to sack? No wonder they had given him odd looks. No wonder the big one looked nervous all the time, and the little one so aggressive. How they must hate him.

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‘How’s the book?’ he asked as he tidied it into a neat stack of Battenbergs and Madeiras. He needed time to think. Angela called out from inside her walk-in wardrobe. ‘Borrow it if you like. But it’s gruesome, I warn you now. These two misfit guys turn up at a house in the country, behave in such a weird manner that they attract lots of attention, and then a young red-headed nineteen-year-old squire is found dead, stabbed fatally with a pair of shears.’ Gordon looked thoughtful. ‘What’s the motive?’ he asked tentatively. ‘Some grudge.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘It’s kinda hazy.’ ‘But did they do it?’ ‘Good question. I figure the gardener. It’s usually the disgruntled employee, in my experience.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘I think the trouble is he writes too much. Trent Carmichael, I mean. He’s a kind of production line. When he rang me Saturday, he told me he’d already halffinished the next one—I don’t know, Dead-head Among the Roses, or some such miserable thing. Oh, but he told me something interesting. He’d had the same guy around to interview him about his goddam shed. I mean, your pal from Dunquenchin.’ ‘What?’ ‘Said it was strange, though. The guy never asked any of the obvious questions—about the shears and rakes in the stories. Trent figured he was either very deep or very stupid, so he rang up and asked for a copy of the piece. But when they faxed it to him, he said it was amazing: the guy must have been a huge fan, with a real taste for this stuff. He catalogued all the murders, including even the shears in this one, and the book’s only been out a week. He’d done some big heavy-duty homework. Trent was very impressed. Said the guy had a real understanding of the mad, vengeful, homicidal mind.’ Gordon broke a Victoria Sponge in half, stared at the cream and jam, and felt suddenly very lonely and small. He wanted his daddy. He couldn’t stop thinking about how he had just served breakfast to two men who quite conceivably wished to kill him. It was silly, obviously. People didn’t go around killing people, not because a little magazine folded. Get serious. But on the other hand, something was definitely going on with these guys. Why else, at breakfast, had the big one visibly flinched when Gordon touched his hand by mistake as he put down the toast rack? ‘Aagh!’ he had cried. ‘Lay off with that!’ the other one had shouted, jumping to his feet. They were edgy all right. It all made horrible sense.

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Dad must be told at once. Gordon had left him on his own in the house with them. There was just one little problem with Gordon’s theory: how on earth could these men know about Digger Enterprises’ plans for the magazine? Surely nobody knew, besides Dad (who was currently faxing an official letter to the editor of Come Into the Garden, to put everyone in the picture). But the individual letters of dismissal had only just gone in the post. ‘Well, what do you think?’ Gordon looked up to see Auntie Angela stunningly attired in a bright blue pullover, smart leggings and long boots. ‘Terrific.’ She kissed him. ‘Thanks, Gordon, baby. Next to the rabbit, you’re my favourite person.’ He smiled. ‘Now, skedaddle while I put on my face, and I’ll come see you later. How’s that?’ ‘Right you are,’ he said, and made for the door. But he turned back. ‘Will you be all right on your own?’ ‘Why? Do you want to stay?’ Gordon thought about it. Auntie Angela alone in the shed with two dangerous desperadoes, and all those shears and trowels and buckets lying about. ‘Actually, it might be an idea,’ he said. ‘Fine, if you want to. Listen, you can double for me at the interview too, if you like. Put on a frock or something. This nightie would suit you—catch. You know more about that goddam shed than I do, that’s for sure.’  Back at the offices of Come Into the Garden, a fax was coming through. Since Lillian kept the machine beside her desk, between the standard lamp and the magazine rack (in front of the framed reproduction of The Haywain), she was in a position to turn it off most of the time; but today, by some stroke of misfortune, she had forgotten. She hated the disruption to her concentration (she was knitting a cable stitch in fluorescent orange—she always wore bright colours), but since she was frightened to turn it off once it had started operating, she now merely glared at the missive as it slowly and noisily emerged, bottom first, and tried to imagine what life was like before the invention of telecommunication. ‘Honiton, Devon’, it said; then, after a bit of high-pitched whirring, ‘G. Clarke’. This was going to take for ever. ‘Yours sincerely’. Lillian fretted impatiently, but then saw the final line of the letter: ‘I am sorry to bring you and your staff such bad news.’ Death knells don’t only come in bongs, then. This one didn’t go bong, or ding, or clang, even faintly. It just made a nasty insistent electronic noise, in the

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manner of faxes everywhere, and a grave two-minute silence would have been distinctly out of place. Looking around, in fact, it was plain to see that office life was proceeding with quite ghastly normality. Tim—attempting to make a cup of tea—sniffed some milk in an open carton and recoiled so violently that he hit his head on a pillar and his glasses fell off. Next door, Michelle spoke to the typesetters by phone, asking them with a deadly sweetness, far be it from her, etcetera, whether it would be too much trouble for them to ‘set some type’, perhaps in the spirit of experiment, to find out whether they could take to it, given time and the right circumstances. And a motorcycle messenger, despairing of ever gaining Lillian’s attention, slowly surrendered to narcolepsy on a chair, his heavy, shiny, helmeted head coming finally to rest on his leather-clad knees, giving him the appearance of a black coiled-up bean-sprout. All this blithe normality! How incredibly ironic! When just a few yards away fate was unfolding, slowly and backwards, with only Lillian to know. She tore the message off the machine and read it through, several times. She even read it bottom-up a few times, too, just to recapture the original sensation of receiving it. And then she put it in her top drawer and turned the lock. She peered at the motorcycle messenger and decided it would be a shame to wake him. ‘Not from the elusive Mr Makepeace, I suppose?’ Michelle was passing, on her way to the sandwich shop, and had spotted the fax. ‘No,’ snapped Lillian, ‘it wasn’t.’ ‘Lackaday,’ said Michelle, not as a joke. ‘Could I ask you to be preternaturally sweet and keep an eye peeled for his book round-up?’ Lillian gave her a look that said No, actually, Michelle could not ask her to be as sweet as all that. In fact, just try it. And as for the peeled eye, what an unpleasant turn of phrase. ‘You see, between these four walls, Lillian—these four quaint but cosy livingroom walls, I suppose I should say,’ she added, glancing at Lillian’s magazine rack, ‘I suspect Mr Makepeace of making things up. He keeps missing deadlines, but instead of apologizing he says, “Didn’t you get it? I posted it on Friday.” I asked Osborne to tell him we haven’t received the latest piece, and I just know he’s going to pretend he’s done it already.’ ‘Huh,’ said Lillian. ‘Well, it’s annoying!’ exclaimed Michelle, suddenly quite heated. ‘It’s unprofessional. When he says, “I posted it on Friday,” I have to pretend I believe him, because I can’t accuse him of lying. I hate it. And I don’t understand why Osborne has befriended him, either. What can he see in a jerk like Makepeace, who can’t stop telling lies?’

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In fifteen years, Lillian had rarely heard such passion from Michelle. It was rather entertaining. Did she say ‘jerk’? ‘Want me to sort him out?’ said Lillian flatly. ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘I could sort him out. I’m good at sorting out liars.’ Herewith, she tapped her locked drawer significantly, and gave Michelle a level stare. ‘You’ve lost me, I’m afraid,’ said Michelle. She shoved the swing door and marched out, leaving Lillian to her own devices. ‘Oh yes,’ said Lillian to herself, ‘I’m very good with liars.’  ‘I’m going back,’ said Makepeace. They had reached Angela Farmer’s gate; and Osborne was stooping to pick up the nice bunch of flowers he had dropped, nervously, for the second time; and hoping he wouldn’t topple over, through sheer nerves, when he tried to regain the upright position. The long walk to the front door always took him this way; he reckoned it was the adrenalin. Fight or flight, they called it. Which was fair enough, since he would certainly have fought anyone who tried to stop him running away. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Going back? You mean you aren’t coming in?’ ‘No, I’m not.’ Osborne was confused. ‘But I thought you wanted to meet her.’ ‘I never said that.’ ‘You did.’ ‘I fucking didn’t.’ ‘Oh. Mm. Right.’ The older man needed a minute to take this in. ‘Oh well,’ he said, trying to sound regretful, ‘I suppose if you’re going back now, I can always catch a train. Tsk, don’t worry, I can manage. After all, it’s up to you, it’s your car—’ ‘No,’ interrupted his friend. ‘I mean, I’m going back to Dunquenchin.’ Osborne looked at him. He had made his announcement as though ‘going back to Dunquenchin’ was something that a man’s gotta do. ‘But they’ve both gone out. The boy went out first, and then the fireman. Don’t you remember, we saw him from the florist’s? I waved, and he pretended not to see us. In any case, what’s the fascination? If that boy is a bit funny about me, isn’t it better just to get away and forget about it? He didn’t know who I was, so no harm done.’ ‘But I want to find out who Digger was.’ ‘Digger?’ ‘Last night, he said his dad shouldn’t have worried about Digger, because everything had been under control. Perhaps he felt about Digger the way he feels about you.’

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‘Stop it, mate. It’s not worth it. Let’s just do the interview and go home.’ ‘No.’ ‘Have a cup cake?’ ‘Fucking no!’ ‘How will you get in, in any case?’ ‘I unlocked the back door this morning, when I was taking my bike out.’ ‘I don’t like it.’ ‘You don’t have to. You just be nice to Ms Farmer and sit in her shed, and I’ll do the rest.’  It would be fair to say that when Gordon opened the door at Ms Farmer’s, holding a pale blue négligé in his hand, Osborne did not rise above his emotions. ‘Aagh!’ he exclaimed, and dropped the flowers again. ‘Didn’t expect to see me?’ said Gordon carefully. This is the only way to deal with these people, he decided. Don’t let them see you are afraid. ‘Well, not so soon,’ admitted Osborne jumpily. ‘Er, I’ve got some—well, business with Ms Farmer, if that’s all right.’ Don’t say what it is, thought Osborne. For God’s sake, don’t tell him you are the shed man at Come Into the Garden. They looked at one another. There was a long pause. ‘I know,’ said Gordon. They both took a deep breath. ‘I know who you are. And I think I know why you’ve come. You’re from Come Into the Garden, aren’t you? You’re the man who does the sheds.’ Oh God. Osborne gulped. ‘’Assright,’ he said in a tiny voice. ‘I know your work,’ said Gordon very carefully. ‘Oh good. Er, thank you very much.’ ‘Where’s your friend?’ Osborne started guiltily. ‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘I mean, I don’t know. Nothing to do with me, anyway.’ ‘You’d better come in,’ said Gordon. ‘No, it’s all right,’ said Osborne with a brave smile. ‘I’m fine here.’ ‘I think you should.’ ‘No, it’s a lovely day. Tell you what, where’s the shed? I’ll start there.’  Back at Dunquenchin, Makepeace had climbed the stairs to Gordon’s modest little office—a top-storey room with a tiny window, and very little sign of Gordon’s immense success. It was nearer to an average teenager’s playroom than to an executive office, with papers and gadgets and bits of computer scattered about like

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toys. What it did have, however, was a fax machine, something Makepeace spotted at once. Could this be his perfect opportunity to clear himself with Come Into the Garden? If not, why not? Despite the rather stressful circumstances, this was too good a chance to miss. Hastily he scribbled a note to Come Into the Garden, and fed it, without more ado, into the fax. Dear Michelle, Hi! Osborne tells me you didn’t get my round-up last Friday. Are you absolutely sure? Because I came to the office specially and posted it in your letter-box on Thursday night. It was two sides of A4, green typewriter-ribbon. I can’t imagine what could have happened to it. Anyway, I can type it up again by Friday if you like. What a drag! In haste (in Devon!), M. Makepeace

 ‘Why didn’t he come in?’ asked Angela. ‘I don’t get it.’ Gordon considered. ‘I just think he’s a bit peculiar.’ ‘Well, I’ll drink to that. Shall I go out and speak to him, do you think? I mean, if he’s just gonna look at the shed on his own, I needn’t have got up so early. I mean, now I think of it, I needn’t have got up at all.’ They were watching from the kitchen window. ‘Listen, can I phone Dad? It’s just that the other one, his pal, isn’t with him, and I’m a bit worried what he might be up to.’ ‘Gordon, this isn’t like you, sweetheart. What’s on your mind?’ ‘Well, it may just be rubbish, but I think these blokes might be a bit desperate. I don’t know; out for revenge, or something like that.’ ‘I get it. Your dad did one of his risottos, am I right?’ ‘No. I mean, yes. But that’s not it. Can I use the phone?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘Don’t mention it.’  Makepeace was startled when the phone rang, and even more alarmed when he heard it answered downstairs. ‘Fuck,’ he said aloud, and then wished he hadn’t. ‘Dunquenchin,’ said Gordon’s dad, as though it were quite a normal thing to say, but then his tone changed. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Yeah, but I only just got in. Listen, if there’s trouble I’ll sort it out. You stay with Angela, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’

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Just then the fax machine started to rumble, and Makepeace panicked. Gordon’s dad was looking for him! The big man with the beach-ball shoulders and those searing Rumpelstiltskin analogies! Oh God. Should he hide, jump out of the window, what? Why hadn’t he picked up a hatchet from downstairs, or a ladder, or a large colour picture to hide behind? And now this sodding machine was giving him away. ‘Shut up!’ he hissed at it, and rushed over to turn it off. But glancing at the message emerging from the machine, he realized to his considerable discomfort that it was addressed to him, and was a reply from Come Into the Garden. Oh fuck, how incriminating! Even if he hid, Gordon’s dad would find out what he’d been doing. As soon as it was finished he ripped it from the machine and stared at it in horror. Dear Makepeace, Michelle wanted me to tell you not to worry about the round-up piece. She says it was on her desk all the time!

(‘No!’ he whimpered.) Sorry for the false alarm! Thank goodness you haven’t ‘retyped’ it yet, eh? She says it was pretty good, by the way, but she wasn’t sure about the reference to ‘hoist by his own petard’—perhaps a twinge too literary, she said.

(Makepeace struggled for breath.) Anyway, the point is, stop worrying! You writers are all far too conscientious! All best, Lillian

‘Fuck!’ shouted Makepeace. The effect of this letter was quite extraordinary. He had started hyperventilating. In fact, he was bent double and panting when Gordon’s dad put his head round the door and saw him. ‘Gotcha,’ said the fireman softly. And standing outside, he gently but firmly turned the door-key in the lock.

Chapter 7




You might suppose that Osborne Lonsdale of Come Into the Garden had reached the stage in his career when he could no longer be surprised by a shed. He might have thought so himself. But this would be to reckon without the shedus mirabilis which was now revealed to his astounded eyes in Angela Farmer’s garden. How fantastic, you wonder, was Ms Farmer’s shed? Well, put it this way: if Cole Porter had known anything about sheds, this amazing specimen would have featured in the famous lyric ‘You’re the Top’ alongside the Mona Lisa, the Tower of Pisa and something that rhymed with ‘bed’. Osborne was speechless with excitement. Having spotted the shed from the side of the house, he fairly raced towards it, clutching his airline bag and bunch of flowers with one hand and reaching out with the other, rather in the manner of someone who has been wandering aimlessly on an almost forgotten pilgrimage for the better part of his adult life and then beholds the Holy Grail, large as life and twice as graily. All thoughts of Gordon Clarke’s perverse desires were banished from his mind. This shed had a chimney! It had a little garden of its own and a picket fence! It was blue! It had guttering and leaded lights! To a man who had spent a dozen years dressing up boring sheds for the benefit of his readers, Angela Farmer’s exceptional shed was like manna from heaven; his heart filled with praise. Forget the Cole Porter thing and put it this way instead: if the Magnificat had been about sheds, Osborne would have dropped down on his knees and sung it. For one thing, all those years devoted to looking at second-rate sheds were now utterly vindicated: they had prepared him to bear expert witness to this wondrous structure. And for another, how immensely cheering to reflect that this week’s ‘Me and My Shed’ piece would be an absolute doddle to write. Angela watched him from the kitchen window, a cup of coffee in her hand. ‘That man is nuts,’ she said. ‘Mmm,’ agreed Gordon. ‘He’s acting like a goddam lunatic.’ ‘Well, I—’ ‘Is the bunny safely indoors? I don’t want that rabbit spooked by a nutsy newspaperman.’ ‘It’s upstairs, I think.’ ‘Good.’ ‘Actually, it was nibbling some TV script or other, the last time I saw it. I hope that was all right?’ ‘Sure. Why not? A rabbit needs all the roughage it can get.’ She put on a coat.

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‘Well, I suppose I’d better go talk to the crazy—man. Don’t look so worried, baby. Take my word for it, the guy is harmless. On the other hand, he does seem to be worshipping the outhouse. Do you suppose that’s normal?’ ‘We had some really nice times in that shed, Auntie Angela,’ said Gordon wistfully, as if nice times were emphatically a thing of the past. ‘Do you remember? How you used to sing me songs?’ ‘I remember that you sang them too.’ ‘Did I?’ ‘Sure. Duets. “You say neither and I say nie-ther”.’ Smiling, Gordon suddenly sang out, ‘ “But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part—” ’ She joined in. ‘ “But oh,” ’ they sang together, ‘ “if we had to part, then that might break my heart.” ’ Osborne opened the little picket gate and stood enraptured. Neat little descriptive phrases were leaping in his writer’s mind like salmon in the spawning season; he felt refreshed, vigorous, inspired and glad, nay proud to be the author of ‘Me and My Shed’. For some reason, however, he also kept getting intrusive little flashes from a recent memory of the Come Into the Garden office, but he couldn’t think why. He looked at his shoe—at the Tipp-Ex mark, actually—but it wasn’t that. It was something to do with Tim. That’s right. Tim crouching beside his desk, asking questions about Angela Farmer. All those details about sheds, about her husbands and gerbils, and umpteen sitcoms. Osborne couldn’t remember much of it now, which was a nuisance. ‘Barney proposed to me in that shed,’ Angela told Gordon, as if reading Osborne’s mind. ‘You didn’t know that, did you?’ ‘I did, I think. But I’d forgotten.’ ‘Well, why should you remember? He left before you and your dad moved down here; he’s hardly been near me in ten years. He wasn’t a man for keeping in touch.’ ‘Was it terrible, breaking up?’ ‘No, it was predictable. It was never going to work. I said “neither” and he said “nie-ther”.’ She grimaced. ‘But to be honest, that was bearable. No, the trouble was that neither of us said “pot-ah-to”. We had to call the whole thing off.’ They looked out at the big, autumnal garden, and both shivered. Gordon rarely heard a word about Barney. The ex-husband could be buried out there in the cold ground with the invisible bulbs and tubers for all the difference it would make. All Gordon knew was that Angela’s second (and last) marriage had endured for just five years, and that there had been no children, even though it had been Angela’s last chance of motherhood. She gave up quite a few things for that man. Before Barney, she had split her career between London and New York, but

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because Barney worked in British television (cockney character parts, mostly), she settled with him in England, bought the big house in Devon and the flat in town, even agreed with his decision not to have babies. And then he dumped her—just when her biological clock wound down and stopped. She never forgave him for that, and especially not for starting a family straight away with his next wife, his bimbo co-star on For Ever and Ever Amen. That was a real poke in the eye. Barney was a louse, as Angela was fond of saying. He was, she said, ‘of the louse, lousy’. When the Angela Farmer tulip was announced, he sent her a postcard, from completely out of the blue, saying, ‘There you are, love! You got propagated after all! Ain’t nature wonderful?’ which made Angela so mad she set fire to the curtains. Since Barney, there had been very few liaisons of the romantic variety, either in the shed or out of it. Angela spent most of her fifth decade alone, partly because she was happier that way, but also because the available talent for women her age was so sparse it was laughable. The brightest spot of the past ten years had occurred in a darkened cinema, when Angela saw to her amazement, in the movie In Bed with Madonna, that she was not the only famous glamorous woman who had trouble finding a mate. Men were intimidated by her, for God’s sake. If not by her intelligence, then by her fame; if not by her independence, then by her money. Her best girlfriend in the biz, Jerry Moffat, would sometimes talk to her about all this when they met at a London hotel for cocktails, but they didn’t particularly see eye to eye on the subject. ‘Poor babies,’ Jerry would sympathize, while a waiter hovered nearby. ‘No wonder they’re threatened. They’re just so insecure, don’t you see?’ ‘Fuck that,’ said Angela, handing back the bowl for more nuts. ‘Let’s have another drink.’ Jerry was the one friend of Angela’s who did not actively hate her for her success. As Angela had warned Gordon all those years ago in the shed, when Digger looked set to make him famous, it is easier for a camel to thread a needle with its eye than for a friend to forgive you for being recognized in Sainsbury’s on a Saturday afternoon. Even Jerry, to be honest, sometimes went home cursing after their meetings, because Angela was recognized by somebody and she wasn’t. Years ago, they had made a special trip along Shaftesbury Avenue to see Angela’s name being hung in lights outside a theatre. It had been Jerry’s idea to do it. But then, when they got closer and saw it, and Angela said, ‘Wow, can you believe that?’ Jerry mysteriously jumped in a taxi and drove off, holding a large white hanky to her face. Angela knew she didn’t deserve the pariah treatment, but at least she understood the dynamic. The point was that she was funny. She was funny on stage, funny on TV, even faintly amusing in real life. Therefore the public didn’t just

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point at her across supermarkets, they responded to her personally. They came over, smiling, with their hands outstretched. Naturally this warmed her heart, but it was extremely galling for her friends. Going around with Angela was like being the sidekick of the Most Popular Girl in the Fifth. It was enough to drive anyone back to the camels and their frustrated attempts at ocular needlepoint. Angela, to reiterate, understood this. But unfortunately she didn’t see what she could do about it. And if guys were put off by it—if guys couldn’t cope with the public adoring her—then they weren’t worthy of the name ‘guys’, that’s all. ‘Fuck ’em,’ she muttered. ‘Sorry?’ said Gordon. ‘Forget it.’ She drained her cup and smartly zipped up her coat, the very picture of heroic resolve. ‘I’m going out now,’ she said. ‘I may be gone for some time.’ And she struck off down the garden in the manner of Captain Oates in a blizzard, her forearm pressed against her eyes, staggering occasionally to the left. Gordon laughed. For the time being, he had entirely forgotten the existence of the Come Into the Garden hit-squad. There was no one in the world he liked so much as Angela.  ‘I want to show you something.’ Lillian breezed into Tim’s office and shut the door with a slam. Tim pressed himself deep into his chair and held his breath. He really hated it when people shut the door of his room with him inside it. It made him want to scream. His glasses went all bleary with the heat rising off his jumper. ‘Actually, I’ve got rather a lot of work just now. This feature about mulching is the worst I’ve ever read and Makepeace has let us down again and if I don’t completely rewrite this in time for the two o’clock bike, which always comes at one forty-five I might add, it won’t be set up by tomorrow and then we won’t—’ Lillian snatched it from his hand and threw it in the bin. ‘Oh look, your desk calendar is wrong,’ she snarled. ‘What?’ Tim looked frantic. It was Tuesday, wasn’t it? Still Tuesday? Wasn’t it? ‘Just kidding,’ she said. ‘Got you going, though.’ Tim stared at her and felt his heart race. He didn’t understand it. Lillian was the most irritating person he had ever known, but she was usually wheedling and awful, or whinging and awful. Now, suddenly, she was aggressive and awful, too, and he didn’t think he could bear it. ‘Look at these,’ she said, and threw down on his desk a thick file full of pho-

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tocopied letters. ‘Go on,’ she said. She seemed to mean business. In fact, he had the distinct impression that if he didn’t look at these letters straight away, she would get behind him and push his head down on them, like a dog having its nose rubbed in widdle on the carpet. ‘Er, thank you, Lillian.’ ‘Look at them.’ ‘Of course. But possibly later.’ ‘Now.’ ‘Right. Er, what are they, exactly?’ ‘They were written by someone on the staff. She has been writing letters to this magazine under a false name for several years, and I would never have said anything about it, except that this time she has gone too bloody far.’ Lillian’s voice rose to an unearthly shriek. Tim looked at the file. It was an inch thick at least. ‘Could you leave them with me?’ ‘No. You read them now.’ She kicked a waste-bin with such force that it flew across the room and hit a partition wall, leaving a mark. ‘Fine. I’ll do that.’ ‘She’s got a pash on Osborne, you understand.’ ‘A what?’ ‘She’s obsessed with him.’ This was more than Tim could take in. He didn’t know who this person was, but how could anyone be obsessed with Osborne? ‘Are you sure?’ ‘Read the letters.’ She didn’t move. Tim couldn’t think how to shift her. ‘I believe I can hear the phone ringing, Lillian.’ ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said, sitting down on his spare chair and producing her orange knitting from a large bag, ‘Get real.’  When Angela Farmer opened the shed door and barked for humorous effect, ‘You! What do you think you’re doing in there?’ she disconcerted a very happy man. Osborne was gazing at the piles of sheet music, the collection of 78s, the wind-up gramophone, in silent ecstasy. What an amazing place. Only a cup cake could convert the experience into a transcendental one, he thought. Which meant he was in luck, actually, because providently he had bought a couple of boxes at the shops. ‘Oh, Ms Farmer,’ he exclaimed, spraying chocolate cake crumbs at her. ‘Ms Farmer, I am so pleased to meet you. This is the best shed I’ve ever seen. I can’t tell you, it’s so marvellous, I—’

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‘Listen, it’s a shed. Don’t pop your cork.’ Osborne looked at her. God, he wished he could place her. What a stunning woman, what a presence. ‘Right. You’re right. I do apologize.’ Hastily, he stuffed some silver cup-cake papers in his pocket and reached for his votive offering. ‘Um, these flowers are for you.’ ‘Well, thanks.’ She wiped the crumbs from her zipper-jacket and accepted the chrysanths with considerable grace. He smiled and shrugged. He was rather cute, she thought, in a ne’er-do-well, beaten-up, chocolate-cakey kind of way. ‘So what do we do now?’ she asked flatly. ‘What’s your angle?’ ‘Oh, ha ha, I don’t really have one, actually. I’ll just ask you about the shed, if that’s all right.’ Angela gave him a frank, don’t-mess-with-me look. ‘Oh yeah, sure. That’s what you told my friend Trent Carmichael last week. Just ask about the shed, you said. All that boring question-and-answer about the cat locked up overnight, remember? And then you write a brilliant piece with references to crime devices in his novels so way back and obscure that Trent himself had forgotten them. So come on, tell me what you want. I’m not going to give you stuff about how long I’ve owned a hosepipe if in the end you write about how I’m related metaphorically to the goddam Angela Farmer tulip. Which has been done before, I might add.’ ‘But you’ve got it all wrong,’ objected Osborne. ‘How?’ He thought quickly. He could hardly explain that all the clever stuff in his Trent Carmichael piece had been written by Michelle. ‘Well, to be honest, mainly because this really and truly is the best shed I’ve ever seen, and I desperately want to write about it.’ ‘And of course you say that to all the girls.’ ‘No I don’t.’ Osborne was getting worried. His dream piece seemed to be slipping away fast. He would have burst into tears, if he hadn’t suspected it might not be professional. Angela patted his arm and smiled. ‘Don’t take any notice of me. Really. Nobody else does. Let’s just sit down and talk about the goddam shed, if you want to, and then we can go and get a drink indoors. Deal?’ ‘Deal.’ ‘Right. Fire away.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘Just let me say one thing.’ ‘What?’ ‘You’re very sweet when you’re confused.’

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 Indoors, Gordon was feeling better. He could see Auntie Angela sitting quietly in the shed with the interviewer, everything was calm, it was all right. He hummed into his cup of camomile tea, ‘But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.’ He danced his fingers along the work surface, in time with the music. How silly to get hysterical about these men from the magazine. They couldn’t possibly know his plans, so why should they feel any animosity towards him? But even if they had somehow found out the whole story, surely it was pretty unusual for disgruntled employees to turn, in the first resort, to murder. Aside from anything else, it might hamper their case at ACAS. So. The fact that the ‘Me and My Shed’ man was an expert on homicide (of the horticultural type, anyway) was sheer—or possibly shear—coincidence. Oh yes. Gordon kicked himself for being so hysterical, and took a sip of consoling camomile. If these guys were jumpy, obviously they were jumpy about something else. It wasn’t his concern. The phone rang. It was Dad. ‘I’ve got him,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Do what, Dad?’ ‘I’ve got the little writer. You keep the big one occupied, and I’ll come and take care of him, too.’ ‘Er, Dad,’ ventured Gordon, ‘when you say you’ve “got” him, what do you mean?’ ‘I’ve locked him in your office.’ Gordon could hardly believe his ears. ‘What was he doing in there? Did you ask him in? What happened?’ ‘He had broken in, Gordon. You were right, there’s something really fishy going on.’ There was a pause. ‘Gordon? You all right, son?’ ‘What’s he doing now?’ ‘I don’t know, he’s gone quiet. But I think he’s tampering with your computer.’ ‘What a nerve.’ ‘Shall I come over for the other one?’ ‘I suppose you’d better.’ ‘I’ll be there as quickly as I can.’  But back at Dunquenchin, Gordon’s dad did pause momentarily to take a few deep breaths before swinging out of the front door with his hatchet. Blimey, he

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thought, it was really tough being so macho all the time. Why couldn’t somebody else deal with this? Why was it that whenever he looked around in a crisis, he seemed to be the only grown-up in sight? ‘Is it a bird?’ they said. ‘Is it a plane? No, it’s Gordon’s parent (male).’ Standing in the dining-room, considering whether to put down the hatchet and proceed unarmed, he felt a sudden surge of resentment. He looked at the pictures on the walls—all of them, when you came to think about it, mementoes of a career spent dousing other people’s fires, extinguishing other people’s cockups. It was part of family history that when Gordon was little, he had noticed an astrology column in a newspaper and said, ‘You’re Aquarius, aren’t you, Dad?’, to which he had replied that actually he wasn’t. ‘But you must be,’ persisted Gordon, ‘you’re the water-carrier.’ Of course it was useless to argue, at this stage of life, with one’s personal destiny. And if being a cross between a tower of strength and a perpetual bucket of water was his—well, at least it was better than being a poison dwarf like the little chancer locked upstairs. ‘The honorary Aquarian’ was how Angela described him whenever she saw him in the vicinity of water—be it running a bath, watering the garden, washing the car, or just filling the kettle for a cup of tea. She admired him very much, and liked the way the title dignified him. One day, if he was agreeable, she fancied commissioning a classical fountain for the garden modelled on Gordon’s dad, with him dressed up holding a trident and bewhiskered like the source of the Thames. She visualized him surrounded by an interesting, splashy, post-modern medley of water receptacles ancient and new—deep classical urns and pitchers, of course, but mixed up with buckets and standpipes and hydrants. Why he had given up being a fireman nobody knew, but sometimes when Angela came to dinner and they all talked late, he dropped a hint or two about a woman in London he had known; also a fire in Hammersmith, in which a friend had died. He often dreamed of fires, but didn’t discuss it much, the way the heat and flames encroached on him in the night. Once he had spoken of it with his niece Margaret, because she seemed interested, but unfortunately she rather abused the confidence, and so he learned it was best to keep his own counsel. Margaret was currently studying for a master’s degree in psychology at a London college, and whenever she came to stay, she affected a huge interest both in Gordon’s computer stuff and in his dad’s dreams. The trouble, however, was that she was extraordinarily insensitive. So the moment she acquired an insight into someone else’s imagination, she used it as a blunt instrument with which to knock them down. ‘You’re scared of impotence, it’s obvious,’ she had declared to Gordon’s dad, simply, between bites of dinner. ‘It informs everything you do. By the way, is there

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any more of this? It’s not very good but it fills a hole, if you know what I mean.’ Another time she had called Gordon’s dad on the phone quite late at night because something had struck her, and it couldn’t wait until the morning. ‘You should call that house “The Four Elements”,’ she had declared. ‘You cover the whole range! Do you get it? Here’s Gordon with his higher mind and his Digger, all air and earth; do you see? And here’s you, all fire and water. Wow! No wonder you complement each other so well. Did I ever tell you about my last boyfriend? How he dug up some bulbs once when he was a child to see if they were growing? Can you believe that? Isn’t it marvellous?’ At which she snorted loudly, rather like a pig, and hung up.  Tim had always regretted telling Margaret that story. Margaret was the girlfriend who had moved out quite recently, you may remember, leaving just the cat behind. Digging up the bulbs had been silly, but that was all. It was on a par with opening the oven door to check on a soufflé: you learn from it, and then don’t do it again. And that’s it; it’s dead and buried. Yet fate had somehow contrived to make him pay for it over and over, with Margaret shovelling loam like a madwoman, to dig up the story whenever he least wanted to hear it. Living with Margaret, he nowadays reflected, was like being with a fanatical resurrectionist, forever exhuming for the benefit of science all the stuff he had taken special care to bury in an unmarked spot. What a relief she had gone, really. Now he could bury things for good, if he felt like it—and generally he did. These letters from G. Clarke of Honiton, for example: if Lillian hadn’t known all about them already, he would gladly have paid a funeral director out of his own pocket to bury the whole lot six feet under. ‘So what do you think?’ asked Lillian, her eyes flashing. ‘It’s Michelle, you know. Michelle wrote them. She’s mad. She’s got to be stopped.’ Tim pulled himself together and gave her a solemn look. ‘I think you should put them away,’ he said, ‘and forget all about them.’ It was precisely the wrong thing to say in the circumstances, because Lillian went berserk. ‘But she’s crackers, you bloody neurotic!’ she yelled with great and surprising volume. ‘Good bloody God! Sit there in your fancy bloody knitwear and tell me to forget about it—well, I won’t! You’re a weed, that’s what you are! Are you saying Osborne shouldn’t be warned that Michelle wants to poke his nipples with a pitchfork? Are you?’ Tim tried to interject, but somehow failed to raise a squeak. ‘To think I considered knitting you a woolly!’ she yelled. ‘Ha! And you’d rather forget it, would you, that she’s getting Makepeace to send faxes from Devon

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telling us that the magazine is closed! Yes, Makepeace! He’s in on it, too, you know! He sent a fax from the same number within ten minutes of this bloody “G. Clarke” thing arriving. And Osborne is with him down there, for the Angela Farmer piece! And God knows what plans they’ve got for him between them. Forget all about it? Not bloody likely, you spotty-faced wimp!’ She snatched the letters from the desk, and grabbed the door-handle. ‘God, you make me puke!’ On which departing words she wrenched open his office door with such sudden energy that all the staff gathered outside to hear the shouting didn’t have time to run off, and were caught standing there with their mouths open. ‘Get out of my way!’ she yelled, and grabbed her coat (a bright pink one). It was extraordinary. Lillian was transformed by fury. If her husband had been present, he would scarcely have recognized her. This was no poor ickle bunny, that’s for sure. Or if it was, this was one little bunny that, in Angela Farmer’s words, was all riled up.

Chapter 8




When Osborne Lonsdale came to look back on his momentous trip to Honiton, it was the surprising moment when he was carried bodily from Angela Farmer’s shed in a fireman’s lift that probably stayed with him most vividly. One moment he was gazing transfixed into the actress’s eyes, and feeling with a mixture of pleasure and alarm the unambiguous squeeze of her hand on his knee, and the next—well, he wasn’t. The door flew open, a large human silhouette blotted the light, and then his feet left the ground and he was hanging over someone’s shoulder, with all the blood rushing to his head. He was so surprised that he didn’t have time to think. All that flashed through his mind was the rather curious reflection that if someone were to shove a microphone under his nose and say, ‘Which would you prefer, sir: this weird upside-down thing that’s happening to you now, or a chance to clean the Augean stables?’ he would have opted, without hesitation, for the horse-shit. He didn’t struggle. That was the funny thing about Osborne. He was quite resigned. And as he later sat on the cold lino of the small upstairs junk-room in which he had been locked by Gordon’s dad without a word of explanation, a feeble ‘Bugger’ was all he could muster by way of complaint. Osborne suffered, unfortunately, from a rare and debilitating conviction that when nasty things occurred in his life, he must somehow have deserved them. So instead of the more conventional ‘Why me?’ he tended to ask ‘Why not?’ Hopeless, really. Instead of ‘You’ll pay for this!’ it was ‘I expect I’m paying for something!’ Arguably, then, the most distressing aspect for Osborne of being locked in a room miles from London by three crackpot strangers manifestly stronger, faster and quickerwitted than himself (and all with palpable designs on his body) was that it pointed to a past sin so heinous that it was a double disgrace not to be able to recollect it. It was natural to be scared, however, especially if a friend (was it really Michelle?) had once lent you a copy of Stephen King’s thriller Misery, with all the most gruesome torture bits marked so deeply with a sharp pencil that there were actually holes in the paper. Osborne had started reading Misery comfortably one evening in his safe south London billet at about half-past eight, pouring himself a small brandy and listening to records; and finished it wide-eyed, stark sober, hyperventilating and peeing himself at four o’clock the following morning to the scary early-hours amplified hum of electric lights. For reasons obvious to anyone familiar with this book’s memorable plot, aspects of it now jumped up and down in Osborne’s imagination, shrieking. In Misery, a hapless writer is held captive by his ‘Number One Fan’ and made to write pulp fiction, under duress! Meanwhile,

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the fan indicates to him in various unignorable ways that she is dangerously off her rocker! She gets him addicted to drugs! Cuts his foot off! With an axe! Was this what fate had in store for Osborne, our inoffensive shed-man? Would Mad Gordon appear in flip-flops and négligé at any moment with a hatchet, a typewriter and a fistful of amphetamines? Anyone else might have screamed at this point. But Osborne was not everyone. Rearranging himself more comfortably on the floor, and taking a few deep breaths, he attempted, believe it or not, to look on the bright side. You had to hand it to him—really. Say the worst happened, he reasoned. Well, he had been meaning to write a novel for ages; this could be his big chance. Oh yes. As for the drugs thing, well, for heaven’s sake, why not try drugs? Especially in a controlled environment, and especially (he added as a plucky afterthought) if he wasn’t going anywhere, having only the one foot. Something about that foot amputation failed to present itself in any cheery aspect, despite efforts. But otherwise it was a brave try, and for a while it completely took his mind off the other, more pressing, thing that most people would have been doing in the circumstances, i.e. plotting their escape. Bugger. He suddenly leapt to his feet. Should he be tying sheets together, or something? Fashioning a crude weapon from a razor-sharp sliver of window pane and a ripped-off table leg? Starting a small fire and banging on the door? Well, probably, yes. For a few moments, Osborne stood rooted to the spot, but gesturing wildly in different directions as though intending to sprint off somewhere when he’d made up his mind. But the access of energy did not last, and he soon sat down again, defeated before he’d begun. Funny how the survival instinct did not apply to everyone, he reflected. When they were giving it out, he must have been too scared to step forward. Once, he had discussed this matter with Makepeace down at the Birthplace of Aphrodite, mentioning as a case in point the remarkable behaviour of passengers in air disasters. If there is a fire at the back of a plane, he told Makepeace with astonishment, these people just climb over each other, every man for himself; then they jam the doorways and die. ‘I know,’ said Makepeace, ‘so what?’ ‘Well, I just don’t think I’d do that,’ he had replied, baffled. ‘Yes you would,’ said Makepeace flatly, ‘because everyone would.’ Osborne looked at him and shook his head. ‘But can you imagine yourself doing it?’ he persisted. ‘Of course,’ replied Makepeace with a tinge of exasperation. And he meant it. Afterwards Osborne found it hard to shake off the mental image of Makepeace on an aircraft blithely clambering over upturned faces not for any reason of life or death, but just to get first crack at the loos. It was at least half an hour before he noticed the rabbit. When at last he registered its presence, it was chewing a photograph album; and to judge from the

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shreds of assorted paper and cloth on the carpet, this item was only the entrée in a many-coursed banquet now in full swing. Osborne also noticed that an electric flex for a small bar-fire had been gnawed right through. Oh great. An electrical fire was probably the last thing he needed (if you didn’t count the fairly unlikely sudden appearance on his ankle of a dotted line marked ‘Cut Here with Axe’). Osborne remembered with a shudder how one of his house-sitting experiences had been quite ruined by a pet rabbit chewing through the cable to the washing machine and causing a small explosion. A flash and a bang from the utility room had been followed by the sight of a rather dazed bunny with all its fur sticking out hopping lopsidedly into the living-room and then falling over. The rabbit was never the same again. If you held up three fingers and said ‘How many?’ it just looked at you. Watching this rabbit of Angela Farmer’s, however, Osborne felt strangely moved. It reminded him of how lonely he was. And here was this innocent bunny sharing his captivity. Wow. If only he had the right teeth and shoulders, he might be Burt Lancaster in The Birdman of Alcatraz. He grinned widely and stretched his torso, and racked his memory for more examples of stuff about prisoners cheered up by a brush with wildlife; but beyond the little birdy in Byron’s ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, he couldn’t think of much. He sighed and relaxed his face from the rather eerie Burt Lancaster impression. What about Job? he thought. Did not the God of the Hebrews send a bunny-rabbit to comfort Job, or was this yet another case of faulty recall? It was an interesting point to ponder. For example, if this rabbit were indeed engaged in work of a divine nature, would it really just sit there on the floor eating someone else’s photo album? Osborne thought about this question for a bit, and decided he didn’t have the proper theological qualifications for an educated answer. ‘What have you got there?’ he whispered instead. The rabbit took no notice and continued chewing. ‘Let’s see,’ he said gently, and although he was a bit worried about what a rabbit might do to you if you interfered in the early stages of its main course, he tugged the album free and stood up to place it on a top shelf, noticing in passing that it said ‘Our Weeding’ in gold letters on the cover. Funny, thought Osborne fleetingly, as he popped it into the cupboard. He had met many gardening fanatics in his time, but none that kept a pictorial record of their antidandelion campaigns. Fancy that. ‘Our Weeding’. He took it down and looked again. Oh yes, hang on, ‘Wedding’. Osborne laughed and shrugged. Well, ‘Wedding’ made a bit more sense, probably, but it was also somehow disappointing. He opened it, just to be sure, and there it all was. Angela Farmer’s summer wedding, in 1975, to Barney Jonathan, the comedian and TV producer. Cakecutting, kissing, hand-holding, marquee, the works. Lots of famous supporting characters in the background, mostly London stage variety types with shiny

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noses, all in seventies period costume of big collars and flared trousers and platform boots (despite the heat). As Osborne flicked through the pages, Angela and Barney smiled inanely at each other; Barney opened countless champagne bottles; Barney lit a huge cigar, with a knowing wink. Osborne’s trained eye picked out all the appearances of the shed, of course, even when it was not the main subject of the picture. He noticed it had been decked out in ribbons and used as a cold store for drinks. But the main thing that even Osborne could not ignore was the youthfulness of Angela—Angela looking fifteen years younger than she did today, and a lifetime more optimistic. Osborne felt uncomfortable at the sight of Angela’s bridegroom. Barney was possibly the only person Osborne had ever interviewed whose shed had subsequently received a scathing review in Come Into the Garden. In person, Barney had turned out to be precisely what you might expect from his roles on TV: good looking, well preserved, compulsively jokey, and a really mean bastard. It was at Barney Jonathan’s house, actually, that the terrible business with the hyperactive child had taken place, when Osborne was locked in the shed for a laugh. If his resulting piece about Barney was one of his best observed and best written, there were two reasons for it: first, four hours gives you quite enough time to examine the contents of a shed; and second, Barney’s character was so obnoxious that the writer needed to sew him up quite carefully, quoting him with deadly accuracy, so that he hanged himself with every word. Just mentioning his snide remarks about Come Into the Garden, for example, had been pretty useful for enlisting reader support against him; after all, you insult a magazine, you insult the person who’s reading it. Odd to think that Angela Farmer had married him. What an awful mistake. Turning the pages of the album, Osborne felt a tear roll down his face. He absentmindedly stroked the rabbit, drew his legs up close, and for the next couple of hours studied the images, one after another, as the short November Tuesday lost its brightness and slowly began to wane.  Makepeace, by contrast, had not been idle. The sort of person who experiences an incandescent adrenalin rush not only from air disasters but from a harmless chat about the classics or a bit of mild criticism, this excitable dwarf had no difficulty summoning the gotta-get-outta-here energy that so noticeably eluded his chum. After an hour of frantic activity, therefore, in which his pony-tail wore loose and his sweaty hair hung down around his grim, determined face, he sat surrounded by a small armoury of improvised weapons (ingeniously utilizing paper-knives, shards of mirror, scissors, staples) and panted like a dog. He was not a pretty sight. Having inadvertently nicked his hands a few times in the

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course of handling broken glass, and then rubbed his face, he was now smeared with blood and dirt, which added not inconsiderably to the startling picture of miniature savagery he presented, reminiscent of something climactic from Lord of the Flies. He decided to ransack the room. No point doing things by halves, after all. So he started knocking things over, sweeping documents off shelves, attempting to tear directories in half (abandoning this when it proved humiliating), and flinging Gordon’s priceless work-in-progress computer disks around. It was only when he saw a set of files marked ‘Digger’ that he paused. Slavering slightly, he ripped open the first one, emptied the contents on the floor, and stirred the papers with his foot. Most of the documents seemed to be in computer code, all signed at the bottom by Gordon, but there was one that immediately caught his eye, because it was in the form of a letter. He knelt beside it to see. Dear Digger, You will find me in a country garden. I am an unknown quantity. My riddle is deep, and in the blue corner. Dig me up. I long for you. But remember the shirt of Nessus.

Makepeace couldn’t help thinking, even in his excitement, that he was glad not to have Gordon for a pen-pal. To a devotee of Digger, of course, this letter made a sort of cryptic sense, and was merely a harmless stage in a game of clues. But to Makepeace it was further evidence that the boy was mad and dangerous. Gordon had lured Digger to a country garden (‘Dig me up’ was the rather ghastly invitation), but warned him about poisoned shirts that stick to your back and tear your flesh. Makepeace had to get out of here at once. Forget the heroics with the home-made machetes, perhaps he should just wriggle out of the window and climb down the drain-pipe. On the other hand, if he calmed down and thought about it, couldn’t he see whether the key was still in the lock? Instead of fighting his way out, or crawling, there was just the faintest possibility he could unlock the door and walk out normally, down the stairs and out. He peered through the lock and, sure enough, the key was there. Countless films had taught him what to do next. He slid a piece of paper under the door, poked the key with a paper-knife so that it fell on the paper, and then pulled it back under the door. Shame this didn’t occur to me earlier, he thought, as he surveyed the devastation in the room and tried to staunch the bleeding of his hands with a wad of tissues. But on second thoughts, perhaps it was perfect this way. Those bastard perverts deserved it. Should he also scrawl ‘PIGS’ on the wall with his own blood, or would it be too sixties? He decided to have a go, but he ran out of free-flowing blood after ‘PI’. Oh well, if this kid was such a mathematical

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brainbox perhaps he could distract himself by trying to understand PI, as so many had done before him. So, taking the ‘Digger’ letter with him, he left the room, locking it carefully and pocketing the key, and crept away downstairs.  In the shed, things were not harmonious. ‘You’ve got nothing to go on,’ barked Angela. ‘That guy Osborne is a sweetheart. You nuts or something?’ She paced up and down, smoking furiously, while Gordon and his dad exchanged glances. ‘Tell her,’ said Gordon’s dad. ‘You realize he could sue you for this?’ she continued. ‘Holding someone against his will is what is technically known as deep shit, you know that? Jesus, and he was so cute, too. We were really getting along.’ Gordon looked like he was going to burst into tears. Angela glared at him some more, and he felt wretched. ‘So what you going to tell me? It better be good.’ Gordon pulled himself together. ‘It’s just that, well, you know that deal I did a couple of weeks ago? The one for the seaside postcards business? It included the magazine this Osborne chap works for, and I decided to close it down.’ ‘So? You feel guilty about a guy, you lock him up?’ ‘Well, and then he turns up here with his punchy sidekick, and they act very peculiar and shifty as though they’re hiding something—’ ‘Big deal,’ grouched Angela. ‘And then the little one breaks into the B&B when we’re out, and every time this Osborne sees me he leaps a foot in the air. Dad went back to check on the little one, but he’s gone. And Dad had to break the door down to my office, and it’s all mangled and covered with blood, and Dad’s best hatchet has disappeared, and it’s getting dark, and to be honest,’ he gasped, ‘I am really really scared.’ Angela huffed, but she also steadied herself against a wall. What the hell was all this blood and hatchet stuff ? ‘Where’s the bunny?’ she barked. Gordon and his dad swapped dejected glances. ‘We think, um . . .’ they faltered, and cast grim looks towards the top of the house, where Osborne currently languished. They didn’t need to finish. ‘Oh no,’ said Angela, ‘oh swell.’  By the time Lillian arrived unnoticed on the scene at seven o’clock that evening, Angela and the Clarkes had made a decision. They would telephone Trent Carmichael, the celebrated crime writer, and ask him for some expert help. They

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would not contact the police. Through the locked door to Osborne’s room, Angela had conducted a brief secret negotiation concerning the rabbit, with Osborne agreeing to let him out in return for some ham rolls, a few biscuits and a flask of tea. Osborne hastened to make it clear that he had not been holding the rabbit for purposes of ransom. The idea of taking a photo of the rabbit nervously holding a copy of today’s newspaper would simply never have occurred to him. ‘He seems like a nice rabbit,’ he added lamely as he handed him over, catching Angela’s eye and then looking away. She felt terrible. ‘I’m sorry about all this,’ Angela said in an unusually meek voice. Osborne, surprised, found himself reassuring her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry too.’ She relocked the door and tiptoed away. Gordon and his dad would be furious to know she had talked with him. But then she tiptoed back again, and spoke very close to the door. ‘Listen. Osborne. Whatever your name is. Can you hear me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ ‘Somewhere, yes.’ ‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’ ‘Well, the trouble is I can’t remember.’ ‘Swell. You can’t remember. That makes me feel much better.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ There was a pause, during which Osborne assumed she had gone away, so he started eating his tea. But she hadn’t. ‘Osborne, tell me, how about if I came along to see you later, and brought a bottle of wine or something? How would you feel about it? Would you think I was taking advantage?’ Osborne choked on a piece of ham roll. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘Stupid, stupid.’ ‘No!’ yelled Osborne, just catching her as she turned to go. ‘That would be great. But, do you mean, just you and me?’ She looked hard at the closed door as if hoping to read its expression. ‘Well, yes—’ ‘I mean, you wouldn’t tell young Gordon?’ ‘Why, do you want Gordon along too?’ ‘No, no.’ ‘Thank goodness for that. But you shouldn’t hate him, you know. He’s a good kid. And he’s really sorry about you losing your job. I think it’s your little friend that worries him more than you. With good cause, by all accounts. Did you know

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he’s on the loose with a hatchet, after ransacking Gordon’s office and spraying the walls with blood?’ ‘What?’ Osborne slumped to the floor. ‘Oh God.’ ‘Osborne?’ Osborne made a small, high-pitched, inarticulate noise, something that sounded like ‘Ing?’ but probably didn’t signify anything other than despair. Angela tapped on the door. ‘You think he’s dangerous, Osborne?’ ‘Oh God. Ing?’ ‘Speak to me.’ ‘I can’t. Ing? Oh God. Sorry. Ing?’ ‘I’ll come and see you later. I can bring some blankets and stuff. I know you’re a nice man, Osborne. So tell me. All this locking you up is just a crazy misunderstanding, right?’ She waited, but no further words were forthcoming. On the floor of the junk-room, Osborne lay in a curled position with a faraway look in his eyes, saying ‘Ing?’ from time to time. He kept seeing this awful vision of Makepeace on the war-path, felling to the ground with a single blow from his hatchet all his natural foes—ranging from someone innocently pointing out that the lights on his bike weren’t working, to a friendly pedant in a pub discussion mildly suggesting that his knowledge of North African nomadic ritual left a couple of smallish gaps. Osborne felt he should open the window and warn the world that, in Honiton at the present moment, ‘You’re wrong there, you know’ was the most dangerous expression a man could utter.  And now Lillian was here. She had booked herself a room in a pub, phoned a very confused Mister Bunny at home to tell him not to worry, and was now sitting in the dark in Angela Farmer’s shed while deciding what to do next. She smoked and muttered compulsively. Much of her initial impetus, of course, had drained away in the course of the rather difficult train journey, but now that she had actually caught sight of Osborne at an upstairs window pacing about, she knew she had been right to come. Confronting Michelle must wait. If Lillian didn’t get to the bottom of the G. Clarke stuff here and now, Osborne might suffer, and that would be terrible. Why was she there? Well, analysing her own motives required more effort than Lillian was prepared to give. However, it did occur to her that it was not just hatred of Michelle that had driven her to this peculiar behaviour. The cuteness of Osborne surely had something to do with it. How Angela Farmer fitted into the scheme, she neither knew nor cared. Through the kitchen windows, she watched Ms Farmer in a family group with a

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big man and a red-haired youth, talking, making coffee, doing normal things (Lillian watched in agony; she would have killed for a cup-soup). These people seemed quite oblivious to the presence of an alien journalist two floors up. Lillian started to feel angry again. And where was Makepeace? There were quite a few things she wanted to say to him, when the time came. She grimaced, took a final drag, stood up and chucked the cigarette into the back of the shed. Time to retrace her footsteps to the pub and consider a plan of action. Of course, she had no idea, in the dark, that Makepeace was lying in the shed behind her, asleep and unmoving, exhausted by a couple of hours’ frenzied digging in Angela Farmer’s garden. She did not know that he was sleeping the sleep of the vindicated, having located in the cold hard ground something that had been definitely hidden there—buried, as opposed to planted. And as she left the shed, and strode off into the night without a backward glance, she failed entirely to notice how the cigarette kindled into a small flame in the old, dry sheet music on which Makepeace slumbered, and then caught and burned and started to spread.

Chapter 9




With the train service from Waterloo to Honiton scheduled to take a long and dreary three and a quarter hours, Michelle stared glumly out of the train window and contemplated how incredibly miserable the next portion of her life was going to be. The compartment smelled of ancient dust, the window was smeary as though painted with yellow glue, and moreover, with ten minutes till departure time, the worn and crusty seats were filling up with alarming speed. Michelle, unaccustomed to the brusqueness of Intercity etiquette, flinched and clenched her teeth as each new pinstriped bum wordlessly slapped down in a space she had fondly hoped would be empty. She was horrified. Who were all these men? Why were they so rude? And what possible reason could they have for catching a train to Honiton at half-past eight in the morning? When agreeing to make this journey, she had been comforted by a pleasant vision (admittedly founded on nothing more substantial than bluesy British Rail TV advertisements) that included an idea of relaxation and room to breathe. But the sad truth was that Michelle had worked in an office for too long. She did not know the first rule of British Rail travel: that if there is more than one cubic metre of space per passenger, something is deemed to be wrong and the service is cut. The worst thing about the journey in prospect, however, was not the cattletruck discomfort, nor the danger that someone would sit next to her eating an individual fruit pie without first inquiring whether she wanted some. It was that she and Tim now faced three and a quarter hours in which to bemoan their common predicament, which was simply this: they no longer had a magazine to sacrifice their lives to. ‘No magazine’—what a strange combination of words. Perhaps that was glue on the windows, she thought—but her mind was wandering. She glanced around, pulled herself together, looked at her shoes, and faced facts. In the course of twenty-four hours Come Into the Garden had ceased to exist, and now she and Tim had been left, bewildered, sacrificing their lives to nothing. It was a weird feeling. Each of them carried a businesslike letter, received in the morning’s post, informing them of Digger Enterprises’ intention to cease publication of Come Into the Garden forthwith, blah, blah, sincere regret, rhubarb— but they still couldn’t take it in. It seemed like nonsense. As she fought for breath, Michelle could not remember ever experiencing a shock of equal proportions. The day before, when the magazine’s typesetters in Clerkenwell suddenly announced midway through the afternoon that they were laying down their tools, was a memory fresh as paint, and would remain so. When she thought of it, her mouth went all stiff, her shoulders came up around her ears, and she felt a terrible urge to hit someone.

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Just like that, the typesetters had pulled the plug. The keyboard operatives stopped tapping; the compositors laid down their scalpels; and a few seconds’ silence were respectfully (or was it ironically?) observed before attention turned routinely to the late news pages of Pigswill Gazette or Marmalade Monthly, or some such other grisly specialist publication. No matter that Come Into the Garden had run uninterrupted for fifty years. No matter that Michelle had given it the best years of her life. Later in the day, acting on his own initiative, a typesetter’s clerical assistant with a nasty rash on his neck gathered up all the standing artwork from the Come Into the Garden pigeon-hole (the ‘Me and My Shed’ logo, the ‘Dear Donald’ in big loopy handwriting, the list of editorial staff that always appeared on page three underneath the Contents) and tipped them in a bin. Such is the passing of a little magazine. Obviously, with typesetting a moribund trade, the managers of this little company were rightly dismayed to lose a nice regular job like Come Into the Garden. But on the other hand, the matter also had its compensations. The pleasure of finally telling Michelle over the phone precisely where she could stick her forebears and twinges and far-be-its and etceteras was so highly relished and coveted that, after a scuffle broke out at the coffee-machine between volunteers for the job, the men actually drew lots in the toilets. The lucky winner was a young paste-up artist called Jim—a relative newcomer, unfortunately, who had been allowed to take part in the draw only because the older blokes felt awkward about leaving him out. Fair and square he won it, but understandably the others were sore. By rights, the job should have gone to someone who had known Michelle much longer, who wanted it more badly; but such was fate. The hapless losers made the best of it by crowding around the office phone while youthful Jim made the historic call. ‘We’re not setting your stuff any more,’ Jim told Michelle excitedly, in a rush, not savouring it at all. The other blokes shrugged; what a waste. Michelle, caught halfway through one of her arch how-I-hate-to-be-a-nuisance-pestering-you-forcooperation complaints about the late arrival of proofs, paused for breath and considered what she had heard. ‘Could I trouble you unforgivably and ask you to explain that last remark?’ she asked. ‘We’re not setting it, you see,’ said Jim, ‘because you’re going out of business.’ Michelle gasped loudly and knocked over her bottles of nail varnish, so that her sub-editors looked up briefly from their work and bit their lips. ‘But what am I going to do with all this copy?’ she demanded crossly. At which she was surprised to hear the assembled typesetters, in the background, whoop with delight and crack up laughing. Ha ha, what could she do with that copy? Blimey, she walked right into that one. Now she watched as Tim wiffled uncertainly down the platform to buy some coffees from the Waterloo concourse, and saw how thoroughly her life was tied

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up with Come Into the Garden. Just observing Tim’s departing form, she realized she had never before encountered him outside the context of the office. Someone suggested having a drink after work once (at Christmas?), but Michelle had made an excuse and left; probably, Tim had done the same. At work, Tim looked different, somehow older; at work, they both knew what they were doing. She yearned to be back at her desk. A pile of features waited to be subbed, and she saw them in her mind’s eye—all badly written, all straggly and formless, crying in the semantic wilderness for a decent sub to please, please show them the way (hoorah, a split infinitive)—and here she was, sitting on a train at the commencement of a fool’s errand, thinking only of her own future. She felt guilty. Those features needed her. Her mission in life was to straighten them out. Fifteen years working to a weekly production schedule would not be eradicated overnight. Wednesday morning, for Michelle, meant the arrival of next week’s crossword (set since 1960 by an elderly cantankerous gaffer with dandruff, who signed himself ‘Tradescant’); it meant final proofs of ‘Ted’s Tips’; the writing of the cover-lines by the editor (she rewrote them afterwards, he didn’t seem to mind); and around lunchtime, it meant Osborne turning up in a flurry of string bags and oranges to write his terrible piece about celebrity sheds. Every week the same. The incontrovertible order of things. Whenever Michelle had taken holidays, it didn’t matter where in the world she went, or how long she stayed away, she was aware hour by hour, almost minute by minute, of what ought to be happening at the office. Once, in a fabulous sea-front bar in Turkey, she had quite surprised her fellow Classical coach tour holiday makers by suddenly narrowing her eyes and snarling, ‘That eleven-thirty messenger is early again, I just know it.’ So it was jolly hard to adjust to the idea that nothing whatever was happening in the office this morning, apart from a couple of volunteer subs answering the phones and dolefully dividing up the reference books to take home. Lillian had disappeared the previous afternoon, and Tim refused to tell her why. In fact he was particularly jumpy on the subject. But on hearing the terrible news from the typesetters—and then receiving his own ghastly letter of dismissal—he had been insistent that they travel immediately to meet with Digger Enterprises with a personal plea for time, or negotiated redundancy, or both; so here they were. Michelle was not optimistic that they could make any difference to the outcome, but agreed to go—partly, she realized on reflection, because she was too dazed to argue, and partly because, having never been to Honiton, she was curious to see it. Perhaps she would at last discover why ‘Honiton, Devon’ was always her first inspiration when writing spoof letters to either Osborne or the magazine. She picked up the book she had brought for the journey (the new Trent Carmichael in hardback), but put it down quickly. By page forty-two she already

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had a fair idea that the gardener did it. She stared out of the window again and sighed. To think that only a week ago she had subbed Osborne’s ropy Trent Carmichael piece so brilliantly. All those knowing references, all those clever puns; she had been born for this job, how could it possibly cease to exist? Morbid thoughts overwhelmed her. What would become of this highly specialized talent? Where could she take it? What was it worth? On the tube this morning she had come up with a superbly clever headline for a piece combining Orson Welles and patio furniture (should one ever crop up), yet all of a sudden there was no connection whatever between clever horticultural headlines and the price of sprouts. Her chin began to wobble. ‘Nobody wants my Sittings on Cane’ was possibly the saddest thought she had ever experienced. ‘Not enjoying your book?’ She looked up in surprise to see a tanned, intense-looking man in a Barbour jacket and flat cap sitting opposite. Unlike everybody else on board, he must have sat down quietly, for he had completely escaped her notice. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t think why. Outdoors-ish with his orangey-brown face and startling blue eyes, this man nevertheless had hands that were small, pink and soft; and his Barbour looked as if it had just come off the hanger in a Piccadilly outfitter’s. No, she suppressed the idea as ridiculous; she didn’t know him. After all, she reflected bitterly, unless he had worked for Come Into the Garden at some point in the past fifteen years, chances were obviously against it. ‘So, not enjoying it, then?’ he repeated, looking her challengingly in the eye and patting his corduroyed knees in a self-satisfied manner. He evidently thought this was funny. Some of the other passengers were pretending not to listen, and he seemed to be pleased by the attention, as though he deserved it. ‘You ought to keep on with it, you know, the book. It might get better,’ he said in quite a loud voice, and shot her a wink that said ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’ Michelle gave him a non-committal stare and noticed, with a certain revulsion, that his lips were a strange unnatural shade of salmon pink. Was this a chatup line? Michelle sincerely hoped it wasn’t. She peered exaggeratedly out of the window for Tim, but he was nowhere in sight. ‘Oh look, my friend is just coming,’ she said nevertheless, and—just for the sake of the fiction—waved pleasantly at a small bench in the middle distance. Undeterred by her little ploy, however, the stranger reached forward and touched the book in her lap, the intimacy of the action sending a great shockwave right through her body and out of her ears. ‘That’s mine actually,’ he said, with a glamorous and rather insinuating smile. ‘That’s my book.’ Michelle pulled herself together, and stopped bothering to look for Tim—who was quite honestly going to miss the train if he didn’t hurry.

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‘No, it isn’t,’ she said sharply. ‘Look, I am on page forty-two.’ She shuffled herself upright in her seat, and prepared for a fight. ‘Oh no, I’m sorry, you misunderstand,’ he said, still smiling. Looking at him, she couldn’t decide whether he was handsome or vile. It was certainly a misfortune for a chap to have colouring so suggestive of cheap make-up from Woolworth’s. ‘What I meant was, well, Murder, Shear Murder was written by me. I take all the blame, ha ha. Guilty, your honour. I am the humble author.’ He sat back and gave her a look that said ‘Amazing, eh?’ and waited for her reaction. Michelle’s eyes widened. Was this really Trent Carmichael? Author of Dead for a Bucket? What an extraordinary coincidence. She flipped the book over and looked at his picture, and then looked at him again. It was true. Of course, the man on the dustjacket was probably eight or ten years younger, and was pictured in black and white, and had evidently been told to assume a cold, murderous expression while resting on a shovel next to a freshly dug grave (it was rather a disturbing image, actually), but it was the same face, all right. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell you how the story comes out,’ he said teasingly (this sounded like a well-practised line). ‘I won’t disclose “who done it”!’ She laughed politely, wondering whether to mention she had already formed a strong suspicion against the gardener. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘please don’t tell. That wouldn’t do at all.’ Feeling awkward, however, she carried on. ‘Actually I did guess the murderer in S is for . . . Secateurs!’ she said brightly, confused to find herself sounding gushing and inarticulate. ‘Right at the very beginning, I thought that clever teenager, the girl, you know, the one who labels everybody, I guessed—’ But she broke off, realizing rather late that crime writers aren’t particularly interested to hear how easily you sussed their game. She picked up the book and opened it again, but was confused about what to do next. Should she tell him she was a fan? That she had read every book? Should she mention the magazine article she had worked on? Or should she pretend to be so absorbed in Murder, Shear Murder that she couldn’t stop for a chat, but must read on furiously, biting her nails? It was an unusual situation in which to find oneself. Her discomfort wasn’t helped much, either, by Carmichael’s rather eerie fixed smile. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, something that was perhaps due to him as a famous person. But since she didn’t know what it was, he was obliged to give her a hint. ‘Would you like me to sign it for you?’ He was leaning forward again, with that half-gruesome, half-engaging, proud-father smile. His body was so close she could smell his after-shave, which was earthy and rather strong. ‘No, that’s all right.’ ‘Really. It’s no bother.’ He had found a smart silver ballpoint pen in his inside pocket, and had popped it out, ready.

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‘No, really, I don’t want you to.’ But he took the book and opened it at the title page. She noticed, with a flinch of annoyance, that he had carelessly lost her place. ‘Now you’re going to tell me your name.’ It wasn’t a question. Michelle looked around for Tim again, but without much hope. He had evidently got caught up in a bullion robbery or something. At the back of the train, someone was blowing a whistle. ‘Michelle,’ she said at last, without much grace. ‘That’s a lovely name,’ he said. ‘Mmmmm. Michelle, Michelle, Michelle. Ma belle. Mmmmmm. Beautiful. Lovely.’ He kept this up as he wrote in the book. When finished, he handed it back to her, and gave her a highly practised flash of famous-person charisma. ‘Now, Michelle. Are you going to make it come true?’ He pointed to the book, and she opened it at his inscription. To Michelle, whose delightful company and frankly unusual predilections have enriched my humble understanding of female desire. Our train journey was one I will never forget. Thanks so much for the memory. Your Trent Carmichael (CBE)

At which point, with Tim just hurrying through the ticket barrier balancing a couple of coffees and some slices of fruit cake on a wobbly paper tray, the train moved out of the station, leaving him behind.  Tim had not been caught up in a bullion robbery, he was merely phoning his exgirlfriend Margaret for a bit of last-minute sympathy and support. However, compared with being tied up, blindfolded and bundled in the back of a hijacked Securicor van, the option of making voluntary contact with Margaret was probably only marginally less distressing. It was a stupid thing to do, of course, but he was desperate. Remembering that Margaret had a cousin and uncle in Honiton (Gordon something, an inventor, and his dad, an ex-fire-chief ), Tim wildly decided that the journey in prospect was an adequate pretext to get in touch. How he thought he would obtain the yearned-for sympathy and support is less easily explained, since he ought surely to have recollected that Margaret possessed talent and inclination for neither. But he phoned her, the poor sap, he did. He even missed his train in this forlorn hope of a few kind words. Margaret’s readings in psychology were extremely handy for a person disin-

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clined to mollycoddle, which is perhaps why she took up the subject in the first place. It was rather neat: for Margaret, psychology meant never having to say you’re sorry; you could hurt people and then, with a single bound, get away with accusing them of textbook insecurity. Objective reality is an illusion, she reckoned; fulfilled and unfulfilled desires account for everything. Thus, if someone were to phone her up at half-past eight in the morning (say) and tell her he was jolly upset about his magazine closing, she could argue that secretly he must have wanted it to happen. Tim unfortunately had forgotten about all this when he made his last-ditch call from the end of Platform 12. He had forgotten, in particular, that Margaret would reiterate her usual theory that his feelings were all connected with his mother, with ‘pain of separation’ and something anal to which she sometimes referred darkly but never satisfactorily explained. Amazing that he could have forgotten. Less amazing, perhaps, how it all came flooding back. ‘Listen,’ he protested after a couple of minutes, almost in tears at her refusal to accept the straightforward case of the matter. ‘I’ve lost my job. It’s real. It’s happened. My job!’ He was obliged to shout, so that he could hear his own voice above the ambient station noises. ‘ “Job”,’repeated Margaret playfully. She was enjoying this. Just out of the shower, she was towelling her hair while keeping an eye on the weather forecast on Breakfast TV. ‘That’s a very telling choice of word, Tim. It makes me wonder whether you mean your big job or your little job.’ Tim felt wretched. Was there really something psychologically revealing about using the word ‘job’? Was it this anal thing again? ‘All right, then, my position.’ Margaret laughed. ‘Position’ was clearly no improvement. Tim looked at his watch and started worrying whether he really had time for all this. ‘How about post?’ ‘Ha!’ Tim gave up. It suddenly struck him that she might be writing this down. ‘Still keeping Post-it notes in business?’ asked Margaret. Now that she had started, she seemed to be relishing the chat. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘I thought of you last week when the Independent went up by five pence,’ she said. ‘God, how I remember the trauma from last time. I told everybody on the course about it, and they couldn’t believe it, they thought I was making it up. We had a really good laugh. So what did you decide?’ ‘I decided not to let it worry me,’ he said, lying. ‘Gosh, well done.’ If this was a stupid conversation to miss a train for, it was also a stupid one to get upset about, yet quite out of nowhere Tim suddenly realized he was crying.

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Two huge tears welled up behind his specs, and involuntarily he felt all the muscles in his face dissolve. ‘Do you ever miss me?’ he asked. ‘Of course.’ Margaret was now brushing her long dark hair, deliberately creating static electricity in it, so that she could hold the brush to one side and observe the way the hair lifted up, defying gravity, reaching out feebly for support. She put the brush down, and the hair collapsed. ‘I miss you,’ said Tim. ‘Of course you do.’ ‘I mean it, I really miss you.’ ‘And I mean it, too. Of course you do.’ ‘I can’t live without you.’ ‘That’s nonsense.’ Tim choked on a sob, and noticed that his money was running out. ‘Better go,’ he said, ‘I’m worried about missing my train.’ ‘That’s typical of you, Tim,’ said Margaret, to the sound of a disconnected line. ‘That’s absolutely textbook.’ As soon as she put down the phone, she grabbed for a large box on a shelf marked ‘TIM’ and hauled it down. Efficiently she made a few notes on a scrap of paper, circling the words ‘job’, ‘position’ and ‘post’ in green pen, and carefully noting the time and date at the top in blue. She was getting good at this, she reflected; the ‘TIM’ box was almost full. It would soon be time to convert all the research into a ground-breaking casebook study and unleash her ex-boyfriend’s obsessive-compulsive disorder on the waiting public. She could see it now, the scene in the bookshop, with her signing copies of Tim: How I Lived with a Loony, just like her old buddy Trent Carmichael sometimes did. Margaret’s mum once mentioned, tentatively, that perhaps Tim’s identity ought to be disguised when the book was written, but Margaret had set her straight about this, impressing on her the demands of proper scientific practice. ‘It’s got to be authentic!’ she declared, her eyes passionate. ‘Don’t forget I only lived with Tim in the first place because he promised to provide such fantastic material. Do you think I would compromise my own academic integrity by telling anything less than the exact truth?’ Hearing the case put like that, Margaret’s mum—who had been told about her own inadequacies enough times to know when she was out of her depth—decided to rest her case. As Margaret had so rightly pointed out on numerous occasions, she should just count herself lucky that no companion volume called Mum: Every Detail of What’s Wrong with the Stupid Old Bat had, as yet, got past the planning stage. Margaret phoned up British Rail and asked for the train times to Honiton. This was just what the book needed, Tim driven to misery and madness by the

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loss of all his routines at a single blow. She couldn’t afford to miss it, even though the place made her slightly uncomfortable. Gordon and his dad were pussy-cats, it wasn’t them she was worried about. It was whatsername, Barney’s ex-wife, up the road. Ten years ago, when Margaret was fourteen, there had been a bit of an incident in Barney’s garden—ever since when that creepy Trent Carmichael had referred to her as his ‘partner in crime’. But it was all a long time ago—just before Gordon and his dad moved to Dunquenchin, and just before Carmichael wrote his breakthrough bestseller S is for . . . Secateurs! Cleverly, Trent had persuaded Barney’s wife to star in the TV version, just for his own (and Margaret’s) private amusement. One day she planned to write a book entitled Trent: Psychopaths Do It but They Don’t Get Involved, but obviously not just yet.

Chapter 10




On Wednesday morning, the shedus mirabilis lay in ruins. ‘Oh my good giddy bugger uncle,’ said Osborne in alarm, as he drew the thick heavy curtains to Angela’s bedroom at eight o’clock, and saw the devastation. Outside, the day was lovely—bright winter sunshine, Cambridge-blue sky, leafless oaks rocking gently in the breeze. But what really caught one’s attention from the vantage-point of the first-floor master bedroom, what really socked you in the mincies (as it were), was this smouldering half-collapsed wooden structure from which white smoke and twirling ash were belching, rather as though it had just exploded. Osborne turned to look at Angela, still comatose, and wondered how he should break the news. Charred and tattered fragments of her favourite old sheet music were taking impulsive little sideways runs across the garden, settling briefly, and then somersaulting and darting off to impale themselves on rose bushes. The double-glazed bedroom window foiling Osborne’s powerful impulse to open it, he just clawed feebly at the glass like a trapped kitten. He didn’t understand: how could this conflagration have gone unnoticed from indoors? True, as he looked back at Angela, her bedside table strewn with empty champagne bottles, knocked-over glasses, and ravaged packets of prophylactics, perhaps it wasn’t quite such a mystery. In fact, now he came to scratch his addled bonce and give it some sensible thought, he did remember the red light flickering in the night, because, yes, he had drawn attention to it at a key moment. Angela had been sitting astride him at the time (doing an expert high-bouncing impression—quite belying her years, actually—of an oscillating suction pump), and he remembered how, in all the mounting tremendous smelly wump-wump shrieking willy-frenzy, he had gazed in transcendent wonder at a thin sliver of beautiful red-and-yellow light patterns dancing on the ceiling in the dark. ‘Is that the Northern Lights?’ he had shouted deliriously, pointing upwards. ‘Or is it me?’ Angela, concentrating rather hard on something else at this juncture, didn’t answer. Instead, she pushed her hands harder against his chest, dug in her nails, arched her back, squeezed a secret muscle, and stepped up the tempo. ‘Anje-ler,’ he had gasped, ‘is it—me?—Or is it—Oh God—Northern—Aagh— Northern—?’ ‘That’s not the Northern Lights!’ she yelled, as suddenly her whole body whiplashed and convulsed in a huge, melting, electrifying spasm. ‘That’s—Oh God!—that’s Manderley!’

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There had been several other climaxes, but the Daphne du Maurier was honestly the hottest and the best. If Osborne was a bit hazy about the exact order of events before and after this, however, it was not surprising, given the amount of alcohol they had jointly consumed. Angela had unlocked his door at 8 p.m., just after insisting that Gordon and his dad return to Dunquenchin (‘Go home, I’ll be fine, I’ve got—er, lots of catching up to do,’ she said, choosing her words carefully). Having taken Osborne straight to her room, she immediately opened the champagne, knocked some half-chewed scripts off the quilt, talked eagerly with him about sheds and deadlines and house-sitting for half an hour as though honestly she had no idea what was going to happen next, and then suddenly she was undressing him and they were doing wild, intense, all-night impressions of suction pumps, piston engines, and Old Faithful in the Yellowstone National Park. Osborne still couldn’t recall where he had met her before, but it was ceasing to matter. She was wonderful. And the quite amazing thing was, she seemed to like him, too. ‘Hey, did we do that?’ She had appeared beside him in a large T-shirt printed with ‘BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL WOMAN THERE IS A RATHER TACKY DIVORCE’, and was staring at the shed. ‘I guess we did,’ she shrugged, and kissed him on the neck. A great advantage of their happy deluge of bodily fluids was that, paradoxically, it had given them the opportunity to clear a few things up. In between taking fortifying slugs of Moët et Chandon and tracing affectionate patterns in spilled fizz on one another’s unfamiliar skin, they had talked, naturally enough, about how Osborne had so far veered from the road most travelled that he had wound up locked in a sitcom star’s upstairs cupboard with a voracious rabbit, in mortal fear of a teenage psychotic computer prodigy dressed in a see-through frock. Put like that, it took a bit of working out. But Osborne explained about the letters, and Makepeace’s suspicions of Gordon (it all sounded rather pathetic, now); meanwhile, Angela reassured him that Gordon was shifty only because he felt guilty about the closing of the magazine, and because he had temporarily made the natural mistake of thinking Osborne and Makepeace were hit-men. ‘What’s this book like?’ Osborne asked now, picking up Murder, Shear Murder from the floor. ‘Oh, the usual thing. Inspector Greenfinger investigates: “I expect you’re all wondering why I called you together in this potting shed with a strimmer, a Geoff Hamilton video and a stopwatch.” I was in one of his things on TV once—I was the brave, red-herring, alcoholic wife whose husband was bonking a Lolita in the greenhouse. I wasn’t saddled with a tulip in those days, or God knows what that crazy guy would have made of it. Trent was real impressed with the piece you wrote, incidentally—but no, I told you that already.’

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‘I don’t usually read detective novels,’ said Osborne. ‘You don’t?’ Angela looked a bit surprised. ‘Listen, why don’t you read the first few pages of this one while I go to the bathroom, and tell me who you think did it. Five minutes should give you ample time. And then we’ll have an enormous breakfast and phone the Clarkes and tell them there’s nothing—’ She stopped abruptly. Osborne looked up confused from his perusal of the first paragraph. ‘Well, it’s a wild guess at this stage,’ he said, ‘but what about the gardener?’ Angela punched herself rather hard in the abdomen and let out a groan. ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, I just remembered. We called Trent last night. He’s coming.’ ‘What? To tell you who did it? Couldn’t you just read to the end?’ ‘No, he’s coming to investigate you. Well, you and the other guy. What the hell am I going to tell him? And what the hell am I going to tell him about the goddam shed?’  Gordon had not slept much. The idea of Makepeace on the loose and Osborne forcibly holed up with the rabbit was not the thing to aid carefree slumbers; meanwhile, he knew that today’s closure of Come Into the Garden would make him deeply unpopular with a further group of people, whose identities he didn’t even know. In the night he sighed a lot, tossed and turned, punched his pillow into different shapes, noticed a warm glow in the dark morning sky (but thought nothing of it), and finally climbed the stairs to his office, cleared a space in the chaos, and—for the first time in two years—took refuge in Digger, immersing himself in virtual reality from about five o’clock in the morning until he could speak to his dad at eight. By normal Digger standards, three hours was a short session, but it was highly distracting, as it was intended to be. Mentally, Gordon dug and laboured and dug again, and tried to piece together the bits that came up. If there was nothing in the real world Gordon wished to think about at present, least of all did he wish to contemplate the imminent arrival of the legendary Trent Carmichael, whom he considered an absolute gasbag. To him, the idea of inviting that charlatan down from London as if he were Sherlock Holmes was so absurd he wanted to scream. But alas, he had been outvoted. Both Dad and Angela evidently thought highly of Carmichael’s piddling, minuscule abilities; not only were they somehow impervious to his creepy, patronizing tone, but Angela seemed almost to like it. Considering that she could normally spot a phoney at twenty paces, this was completely inexplicable. That Carmichael was a creep, a phoney and all the rest, Gordon had no doubt. Years ago, when the Clarkes had first moved to Dunquenchin, Gordon overheard him whispering to cousin Margaret in the dining-room, and was terribly shocked. First, he disliked the intensely familiar tone (Margaret would have been

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only fifteen at the time); but more importantly, he hated the way they laughed at Angela behind her back. Angela’s marriage had just broken up; it was awful that they should joke about it. Ever since, the very mention of Carmichael made Gordon alternately bristle and sulk. So when Angela had yesterday described the plot of Murder, Shear Murder, with its ginger-haired young victim, it was not surprising he took it so personally. Carmichael, for all his magisterial tone, was at heart a touchy blighter, who knew perfectly well that Gordon distrusted him. It would give him nothing but pleasure to stick his young rival in a crime novel as an early casualty, skewered to the deck with a wooden-handled Spear & Jackson’s. Gordon shuddered, turned off his computer and glanced out of the window. It was light now. With the help of Digger, he had made it through the dawn. As usually happened when he unlocked himself from virtual reality, he saw the everyday world as strange, flat, weirdly coloured and slightly sinister. Which was why, when he first noticed the strange tall woman in a shocking-pink coat staring up at the house, smoking a cigarette and muttering to herself, he wasn’t convinced she was real. She was holding a large file of papers under her armpit. ‘Oi!’ said Gordon, opening the window, ‘what do you want?’ But by the time he looked down again the shocking-pink lady had gone.  ‘So then I wrote S is for . . . Secateurs!,’ chuckled the humble author, shouting to be heard above a set of points, ‘and after that I never looked back!’ Michelle, pointedly consulting her watch as the Carmichael monologue clocked up its fifty-fifth minute, smiled faintly and gave up trying to get a word in. She could certainly appreciate that Trent Carmichael was a never-look-back sort of person. The trouble, unfortunately, was that he was evidently a neverglance-sideways person, too, with possibly the worst case of tunnel vision she had ever in her life encountered. This absence of peripheral eyesight was literal— in that he didn’t seem to notice anything not directly in front of him (the ticket collector was obliged to bend down and speak straight into his face)—but it was also metaphorical. Trent Carmichael ploughed a very straight furrow, narrativewise, and refused to be distracted by any question a polite interlocutor might pose. ‘So when was this?’ Michelle might ask; or ‘So why are you on this train?’ But Carmichael told his story in strict chronology, and without deviation from a fixed agenda. Thank God we have at last reached the mega-success of S is for . . . Secateurs!, thought Michelle. The rest is surely history. ‘But that’s enough about me,’ he said, with a visible effort. ‘Tell me about yourself. Tell me what you think about me!’ Michelle was so surprised, she just shook her head. ‘Don’t you want to tell me all about yourself ? I am disappointed, Michelle. In

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fact, I am hurt. People generally do, you see. Because I’m an author, and they want me to immortalize them in prose.’ ‘Well, if you’re an author, why don’t you just make me up?’ said Michelle heatedly. ‘Why do you need me to tell you anything? Besides, how could you know enough about me from a chat on a train to put me in a novel?’ ‘Ah, but you don’t understand. The Michelle I will write about is not the person whose life you would describe. When I put you in a novel, I have the power to take liberties with you. I can peel back your layers, rip you open like a fig; do you understand? And you will surrender, joyfully. What shall I make of you, Michelle? I think I shall make you a flirtatious, gardening sex-kitten in thick gloves who— oh, what shall I say?—who likes to tie men’s arms with garden twine and stroke their nipples with a pitchfork.’ ‘What?’ Michelle almost screamed. How on earth did he know about the pitchfork? Or Osborne’s nipples? Was this man a mind-reader, a blackmailer, what? Carmichael raised an eyebrow and pretended not to notice the strength of her reaction. This was always his favourite bit, when he met new women, teasing them with kinky scenarios and gauging the reaction, while also trying out new plot ideas. Being a naturally parsimonious person, he liked the idea of killing two birds with one stone; the economy of effort gave him pleasure. Plus his success rate was uncanny, since sometimes (as with Michelle, apparently) he could hit home at once with dead-eye accuracy. ‘Or I could make you the victim, if you prefer,’ he continued, giving her time to collect herself. ‘I don’t know, buried alive, perhaps? Or covered with beer and slobbered to death by marauding snails? People often ask me, you know, why I choose the garden as my homicide arena, they think it might be restricting. But gardens are dangerous. They are also filled with the violent struggle of life, as flowers are forced to bloom wide and shriek with colour in their last gasp. And besides, as I always say to interviewers, it’s just right to die in a garden. You know the old rhyme, I suppose: ‘The kiss of the sun for pardon, The song of the bird for mirth,’

—here he paused for the full sinister effect of his italics— ‘One is nearer to God in a garden Than any place else on earth.’

Michelle did indeed know the old rhyme, but found it hard to associate the kiss of the sun and the song of the bird with Carmichael’s relentless fixation with

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sticking Wilkinson Sword gardening tools into people’s necks. However, since the erotic mental picture of Osborne’s little pink nipples standing out on a milkwhite, goose-fleshy, hairless chest was now making her feel a bit sticky, she was probably not in a position to criticize. ‘I expect you are wondering why I called you all together, I mean, sorry, whoops, why I am on this train,’ Carmichael smirked, pleased with his own joke. ‘I am bound for Honiton, in the county of Devonshire, my dear, just as you are (I stole a look at your ticket), because my deductive talents have been summoned by a Miss Angela Farmer. She has a little mystery that requires a solution.’ At the name Angela Farmer, Michelle frowned a little, but he didn’t notice. ‘Nothing murderous, so far as I understand, so please don’t alarm yourself on my account. I’m sure I shall be perfectly safe. No, the lady is acquainted with my fine sleuthing instincts, so naturally, having a little problem with a, let’s see—’ here he opened a small leather-bound notebook and peered at some notes, ‘—oh yes, a crazed journalist with a hatchet, she thought I might investigate.’ Michelle gulped. Could he mean Osborne? After all, Osborne had visited Angela Farmer this week. But what was this stuff about a hatchet? ‘You wouldn’t know the publication Come Into the Garden, I suppose?’ he said. ‘No,’ she said, her face glowing hot, ‘I mean, oh no. I don’t think so. What is it?’ ‘It’s a rather ghastly little magazine, quite frankly, with a tiny circulation, the sort of thing one’s mother used to read, if you know what I mean. Full of oldfashioned tips that the average gardener knows already, completely behind the times. You sometimes get a free packet of seeds. But they have a regular item about celebrity sheds which isn’t too bad—I know, I know, sheds!—but luckily they do manage to attract some stunning high-class names sometimes, some really top people, if you know what I mean. For example, they asked me—’ ‘I see. And now Angela Farmer—?’ ‘Yes, now Angela Farmer.’ ‘I think I understand,’ said Michelle, rather glad now that Carmichael had so utterly dominated the conversation. As far as he was concerned, she could be anyone; he knew nothing about her. ‘So when they ask you about your shed,’ she asked innocently, ‘does it have to be particularly interesting? Or must you just fabricate stories about the cat being locked in it?’ Carmichael regarded Michelle solemnly, and then reached over and grabbed her hand. He spanked it lightly, and when she drew a sharp breath to complain, he put his fingers on her mouth. They smelled, but she didn’t react. She just tensed up as he whispered to her. ‘You are a remarkable woman. Michelle, and I am sure you remember what I wrote in your book. So perhaps now you would care to accompany me to the buffet car, or possibly the guard’s van, and we’ll find out what you really like?’

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 Lillian was on the phone to Mister Bunny. She didn’t have an idea in her head to tell him, so worked round the problem with her usual panache. ‘Oh, oh, bunny ever so sorry,’ she said, with a big childish shrug which really helped the performance, even over the phone. ‘Bunny just can’t come home to Bunny-land right now. Just can’t, bunny. Not poss. Poor bunny. Shame, shame, shame.’ Then she listened for a bit, while he gently asked the important questions— ‘Where are you?’ and ‘What on earth are you up to?’ and ‘Where do we keep the bin-liners?’—at the end of which she took the conversation straight back to Bunnyville. ‘Miss you, bunnykins, miss you like ever so. I had a rotten night-night, you know, without the ted-babies and the wombats.’ This was clever, since Lillian knew the mere mention of lonely wombats would be more than Mister Bunny could bear. She was right. Before he knew it, he was saying that the poor little ted-babies and wombats had missed her, too; and that ted-baby Dexter needed wrapping up against the cold again, despite being a white bear presumably acclimatized to polar regions. Lillian suggested a red knitted scarf, and together they discussed its merits. And before long, Lillian’s money ran out, which was a kind of blessing, whichever way you look at it. Thus beguiled (as always) by the charms of Bunnyland, Mister Bunny hung up before realizing he still didn’t know where his wife was, or what she was doing, or who she was with. Furthermore, if he wanted a bin-liner, he was buggered. For her own part, much as she loved Mister Bunny, Lillian was glad the conversation was over. Admittedly Mister Bunny was a real good hubby, and their home was full of furry love and squirrel cuddles, and ted-babies snuggled in special knitted scarves; but on the other hand, sometimes in a secret part of herself, Lillian thought the hell with this, I’m forty-two. It never occurred to her that Mister Bunny (or whatever his real name was, she’d temporarily forgotten) might secretly think the same, and that perhaps a teddy amnesty followed by a big teddy bonfire might work wonders for the marriage. Alas, just as it is possible to stand so close to a wood that you can only see trees, so it is possible to be so densely involved in the dark depths of the marital bunny-wunnies that you just worry that Dexter the white bear is feeling the cold on wintry nights, or that he gets depressed during Panorama. Better call the office, she thought, and make up some excuse. As she punched the number (she was using the pay-phone at Honiton station) she had this horrible presentiment that Michelle would answer and make things awkward. But instead of the snappy Michelle, a very quiet and unfamiliar voice answered,

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claiming to be somebody called Clement. Well, naturally Lillian denied all knowledge of anybody called Clement, and things turned a bit nasty until it was finally established to her satisfaction that Clement was in fact a sub who had been working at Come Into the Garden for two or three years, and that she ought to remember him because he once obligingly polished her post-sorting tongs when they lost their sparkle. At which point she decided to be gracious about it. ‘Look,’ she started to say, ‘whoever you are, and you shouldn’t be so bloody nondescript in my opinion, if you want people to take any notice, just tell Tim that I shan’t be in today but I expect to be back by Friday—’ But he interrupted her. Didn’t she get her letter this morning? At home? Telling her the magazine was closing? That Come Into the Garden was no more? ‘We found out yesterday,’ he said, ‘after you’d—er, what was it, gone out or something—and then today we all got letters from Digger Enterprises in Honiton. They’ve decided to close us down.’ Lillian staggered. ‘Michelle and Tim have gone by train to Honiton this morning to see if they can talk Mr Clarke out of it, beg for time, you know. But in the meantime, Ferdie and I thought we’d start sharing things out in the office, and actually it’s good you called because Ferdie wanted to know whether that standard lamp was going begging, or whether it was yours.’ ‘It’s mine,’ she snapped. ‘You leave that standard lamp alone.’ ‘We didn’t think we wanted to take anything, but it’s funny, once you start thinking about it, and looking around, you want to take home all the chairs and standard lamps and—sorry, I’m running on, and you’re not well, this is terrible. Are you all right, Lillian? Honestly, we won’t touch any of your stuff until, um, at least tomorrow. Anyway, we’ll be here if you need us, although obviously we’ll go quite early this afternoon because there’s no work to do, it’s really odd, especially without Michelle . . .’ And so he went on. Lillian didn’t know what surprised her most, this appalling news about the magazine, or the fact that a sub called Clement (for heaven’s sake) could get words out in such quantities. But it was all, all of it, very hard to absorb. The fax she had received at the office was no hoax, then. This G. Clarke really existed. He was not just Michelle’s dangerous alter ego who had wicked designs on Osborne; he had bought Come Into the Garden and closed it down. Suddenly the full force of it hit her, and she felt her face burn with indignation. Fifteen years! After all she’d done! A decade and a half of back-breaking toil had just been tossed aside, flung in her face, taken for the high jump, or another more exact metaphor that would possibly strike her later. Fifteen child-bearing years of thanklessly answering that phone, sorting post, nodding at people with

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stupid names like Clement, trying to keep their spirits up with friendly chat. All down the Swanee, out the window, down the toilet. She had done everything for that magazine. And here was her future. On the bonfire with the rest of the flop-eared bunnies. Bitterly she remembered how she had once put a note on the stationery cupboard saying, ‘Tell me when you remove things from this stationery cupboard, I am not psychic you know’, and had a row with Michelle about it. The things she had put up with from Michelle! Just in the cause of keeping the office running smoothly. To think she had given herself so entirely to an enterprise only to be chucked in the bin, let out with the bathwater, thrown to the wolves, cut loose from the dock. It was no good, the phrase wasn’t coming. It probably required a calmer state of mind. Should she call up Mister Bunny again, and tell him what was going on? No, better not. He had Dexter’s chill to worry about. But if she were going to stay in Honiton and get Osborne released from his upstairs prison (the Michelle and Tim mission to G. Clarke could wait till later, and Honiton was a big place), it was obviously imperative that she make a friend on the inside, and she rather thought the young lad with the ginger hair was the ideal fellow. He had an honest face, he appeared to be a confidant at Angela Farmer’s house and, best of all, he seemed to live at a B&B, so she could move in without it looking suspicious. (Usually it does look suspicious if you move into someone’s house and make friends with them afterwards.) Lillian felt her resolution grow to bursting-point within her. These bastards wouldn’t grind her down. She could go undercover, calling herself—um, Miss Dexter, yes; Miss Dexter from the teddy business. Which had the obvious virtue of being easy to remember. As she made her way to Dunquenchin, grimly she lit a cigarette and thought how hard it was for a woman in her position, with such a fantastic level of commitment, to be jettisoned, ditched, dislodged, discarded, put out with the cat, stubbed out like a fag-end. It was curious, this; but for the first time in her entire life, Lillian felt the lack of a thesaurus.

Chapter 11




Late that night at Dunquenchin, all was silent save for the muffled keyboard thumpings of Margaret’s lap-top word processor as she sat up in bed with her specs on, an old blue cardigan pulled around her shoulders, and worked with fanatical concentration on the day’s events. Pigs in muck don’t usually make notes about the experience, but in most other respects—especially the snorting with pleasure—the resemblance between Margaret at Dunquenchin and a pig in muck was actually quite striking. So much to write, she thought, as her nimble fingers danced and flew over the flat grey keys at midnight; so much to write, trala, tra-la, diddle-dee; so little alternative to damned hard work in this relentless pursuit of excellence. She frowned and licked her lips and, with a huge effort at selflessness, pitied all the poor little people in the world of psychological research who suffered the current misfortune not to be her. Such a burden. Not for the first time, she pondered the enormous responsibility she owed to her talent. How could any single person, even a noted brainbox such as herself, hope to assimilate and organize all the extraordinary tell-tale psycho hang-ups she had witnessed today? Sometimes she wished she could subdivide herself, in the manner of an amoeba, to form two identical Margarets, or four, or sixteen, or 256, all tapping away at their lap-tops in Busby Berkeley formation, all equally dedicated to blasting their insights into the waiting world. Ah, the truth was clear to see: in common with the poet Keats (but with arguably less cause for regret), Margaret had fears that she might cease to be before her pen had glean’d her teeming brain. Fortunately, however, the other 255 lap-top-thumping Margarets were as yet babes unborn; and uniqueness was still one of the nicest attributes you could ascribe to her. ‘There’s only one Margaret Sexton, and I’d know her anywhere,’ Trent Carmichael had commented aloud, with an interestingly ambivalent choice of greeting, when he recognized her voice from the dining-room of Dunquenchin that afternoon. She and Tim had travelled on the same train, not knowing it; but immediately on arrival in Honiton she persuaded him to join her at her uncle’s, so here they were: Margaret springing forward to be greeted by a tanned, handsome Silver Dagger Award winner with big white teeth; Tim hanging back in the hall, looking thin, pale, bothered and demoralized. He had never noticed it before, but suddenly the sleeves and armholes of his jumper were so tight he could hardly breathe. It hadn’t helped his spirits much, either, that Margaret introduced him to her nice cousin Gordon by reminding everybody of that oftrelated, character-pigeonholing incident from his childhood when he dug up those bloody bulbs.

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Tim had good reason for his mood of despair on arrival at Dunquenchin. Not only was he out of a job, uncertain as to the whereabouts of his chief sub and secretly worried almost to distraction about whether he had locked his front door properly, but on the way from the station he had volunteered to carry Margaret’s dead-weight briefcase, and the effort had nearly killed him. Unknown to him, alas, this bag contained Margaret’s entire TIM file, complete with diagrams, photos, computer print-out and even some specimens of his famous Post-it notes. This explained why Margaret, watching him wrestle innocently and pink-faced with the bag, considered the whole thing absolutely hilarious. Oh dear, she thought later in bed (removing her specs briefly to wipe her watering eyes), she was going to miss studying Tim. Tim’s behaviour shows all the classic signs of deterioration [she wrote with lightning speed]—the anal retentive obsessive-compulsive control freak loses his routines at a single blow, and his personality implodes. It is happening already, and it is fascinating. What worries me is whether my own presence on the scene—as his ‘ex-girlfriend’—will in any way interfere with the natural course of his inevitable breakdown; after all, science would not thank me for supplying the cause of his bearing up and surviving! However, I noticed that he burst into tears when we came upstairs to our separate rooms at bedtime, so perhaps I am worrying about nothing. I do hope I am not becoming neurotic! To be fair to myself, I may in fact be helping to nudge him off into the abyss, which is reassuring. I don’t believe in rigging experiments, but there is surely nothing unethical in helping him along his destined path.

Margaret took a sip of cold Oxo from a brown mug, nibbled a piece of cheese and stared briefly at the wall before continuing. It was a surprise to see Trent here, especially with the peculiar new girlfriend. A bit old for him, though, or so I would have thought, from my own experience. Talking of which, I notice he is still using that picture I took of him, the one of the burials in Angela Farmer’s garden, on the dustjacket of his books, so he hasn’t forgotten our little pact. He pretended to be pleased to see me, but he knows I could ruin him tomorrow if I wanted to! Tee hee. On the other hand, since I did unintentionally provide him with his first and best plot—has he ever done anything better, or more creepy, than S is for . . . Secateurs!?—he ought to be jolly grateful. The new book isn’t so good by a long chalk, except that, to be fair, when you get to the end, and find out that the gardener did it (the gardener!), it comes as a complete surprise. But the main thing is Tim’s reaction. There we are, middle of the afternoon,

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and here’s Carmichael in the dining-room snogging this unknown woman over a batch of scones, and Tim just stands there gaping. I say something like, ‘This is my old friend Trent Carmichael,’ but Tim says nothing, he points at the woman—who’s somehow got clotted cream on her neck, and lipstick all over the place, and buttons half undone—and he makes stifled baby-like ‘Mm . . . Mmm . . .’ noises. The others don’t know what to make of this, but I do. He is obviously traumatized by displays of sexuality! Compounded with this he also hates the sight of cream (mother’s milk! mother is a cow?!); or JAM (good grief! red stuff! menstrual blood! oozing thickly!). Either way, he cried for his mummy (‘Mm . . . Mmm . . . !’) in a very gratifying way. ‘This is Michelle,’ says Trent. The woman glances at Tim, and is so struck by the incredulous look he gives her that she actually runs out of the room. ‘I work with that woman,’ Tim confides to me, in a whisper, as we make our way upstairs. ‘Of course you do,’ I say in my best bedside manner, thinking He must relate the event to himself ! ‘But on the other hand, Tim,’ I said calmly, ‘you are probably having just a teeny bit of a breakdown, because of getting the sack. And as for that, well, let’s remember that you don’t actually work with anyone any more!’ It was a kindness to mention it. I do believe I am uncovering a completely new syndrome. I could call it posttraumatic redundancy syndrome, and it could form the whole second half of the book. Later in the afternoon, when we went out to buy a toothbrush for Tim (he worries about his TEETH!), we passed a woman on the street, she was wearing a pink coat and carrying a big white toy bunny-rabbit in broad daylight. I pointed her out myself, just for the sake of a laugh. But ‘Good heavens,’ said Tim, clutching the wall of the bank. ‘I work with that woman.’ ‘No you don’t,’ I said, ‘you ought to get a grip.’ ‘I do,’ he insisted. ‘If you want, I’ll ask her,’ I offered, but the woman took one look at Tim and disappeared. He is scaring people, terrorizing complete strangers. It is possible he will have to be hospitalized. Anyway, she dropped the rabbit and Tim picked it up—which is terrific stuff for the casestudy, as I hardly need mention. In the spirit of scientific discovery, I took a photo. For the rest of the afternoon, I pointed out more people that Tim might claim to have worked with (a couple of dogs and cats, too, just in case), but the delusion seemed to have passed. However, just before bedtime I heard him shout something that sounded like ‘Make peace!’ from his room, and of course I ran in, because if he was starting to yell stuff, I didn’t want to miss it. ‘You want to make peace?’ I said, hardly able to contain my excitement. ‘That’s terribly interesting, you know, Tim.’ ‘I saw him from the window!’ he said. ‘All mangy and bloody and curiously singed.’ ‘Who?’ I said. ‘Makepeace,’ he yelled at me, ‘a bloke I work with.’

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Well. I looked out of the window, and there was nobody there. So I told him to get some sleep, but then he did a very curious thing. (I can hardly write this I am so agitated.) He flung up the window and shouted, as if to the empty night sky, a great metaphysical question. ‘Makepeace,’ he demanded, ‘where is your copy?’ Such an extraordinary, compelling, sad, and almost beautiful thing to say. Where indeed is anybody’s copy?

 Tim’s nocturnal sighting of Makepeace was unremarkable, of course, until you realize that his lifeless corpse had been discovered, earlier that day (Wednesday), in the remains of the shed fire in Angela Farmer’s garden. ‘What’s this?’ said Trent Carmichael suddenly. Up to now, his poking through the ruins had been pretty half-hearted and pettish. Not surprisingly, the great detective was a bit cross, having come hotfoot from London in dismal weather on a consultative mercy dash, only to discover that Angela had unilaterally sent her troublesome journalist away straight after breakfast, apparently with a full apology and a small packet of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches. Investigating a burnedout Devonian shed in the presence of that little snot-nose Gordon Clarke was hardly an adequate compensation for this disappointment, and Carmichael was not a man to demonstrate grace under pressure. ‘What’s what?’ replied Angela distractedly. She felt glum. Holding Gordon’s hand and suddenly squeezing it, she had just noticed the melted remains of her old wind-up gramophone and was feeling the prickling at the back of her nose which normally (though not very often) presaged the onset of tears. Carmichael pointed to something sticking up out of the ashes. ‘Well, to be honest, my dear, it looks like—well, it looks like a human hand.’ It was true. They all stared. Angela was so surprised she forgot to tell him off for calling her ‘my dear’. From amid the mess of blackened timbers, charred pots and smouldering paper, a curled, blackened, human hand reached out, the index finger extended, and the whole thing rocked slightly, rather as though its owner were saying ‘Over here!’ or trying to beckon a waiter. ‘Oh God, that’s terrible,’ said Gordon, in a very small voice. ‘Who is it?’ whispered Carmichael. He took the opportunity to steal a comforting arm around Angela’s shoulders, but impatiently she shook it off. ‘For God’s sake,’ she bawled, ‘are you telling me I have a barbecued stiff in my shed? Is this some kind of a joke?’ Nobody had the stomach to see what else was underneath, but Gordon recognized the remains of his dad’s hatchet lying nearby, and also Makepeace’s bag of bicycle bits (lamps, pump, chain and padlock, all buckled from the heat), so it was pretty obvious whose hand was sticking out here, arrested for all eternity in

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the futile act of trying to order an extra round of poppadoms. Poor Makepeace. The man who was never wrong. A lot of people, when they heard the news of his passing, would sigh and hang their heads, and remember him. And they would think, ‘Thank heaven I’m never going to be bullied by that bloody little know-all again.’ ‘What I don’t understand,’ said Carmichael, turning to Angela, ‘is how you didn’t see or hear anything. Isn’t that your bedroom immediately above here? Wouldn’t you notice that there was a fire burning? Wouldn’t you hear the crackles, see the lights, feel the heat?’ Gordon frowned and looked at Angela. He hated to admit it, but Carmichael had a point. Angela was a light sleeper; plus she had a stranger locked up in the house; plus she was blushing heavily now, in a manner he’d never seen before. For herself, Angela found it hard to answer this question with any degree of honesty, especially as her own internal shed-burning—complete with crackles, lights and licky hot flames—was merely dormant, and honestly might flare up again at any moment if she gave a single thought to the night’s events. ‘I don’t want the cops involved,’ she snapped. ‘OK.’ There was a pause. They all looked around. The hand waved; ‘Excuse me—’ ‘Any reason?’ asked Carmichael casually, as though it didn’t really matter. ‘Yep.’ She pulled her jacket around her shoulders, and gave a brave smile to Gordon. She was wondering whether to tell him she had taken Osborne as a willing sex slave and temporarily concealed him in the garage with a stack of cup cakes and the bunny for company. But possibly, on second thoughts, he was a bit too young to understand. ‘Right,’ said Carmichael. ‘I mean, you don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.’ ‘You’re dead right I don’t.’ Angela sniffed, and lit a cigarette. ‘So what do you want me to do?’ he exploded. ‘What do you want me to detect? After all, we know who’s under there. Also, we assume it was an accident—’ ‘Of course it was.’ ‘So I’m just not quite sure where my expertise comes in.’ They all looked at the hand. It seemed to be beckoning, in a polite sort of gesture, as if to say, ‘Sorry to be a nuisance, but I wonder, could I have a word?’ ‘What would Inspector Greenfinger do?’ asked Gordon, tearing his gaze away. ‘He’d sit down for a minute indoors, if he had any sense,’ said Angela. ‘Just right,’ said Carmichael. ‘He would say, “Well, Pete”—Pete is his sidekick, but you knew that—“Well, Pete, I don’t think that fellow is going anywhere!” and surge indoors for a cup of hot, strong camomile tea.’ ‘Swell,’ said Angela. They turned to go inside. The hand could wait. Carmichael, eager to change

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the subject, started telling them the plot of his next novel, in which the victim was found with a big old-fashioned watering-can forced down over his head. They chuckled appreciatively. ‘He yells for help through the spout, but no one hears him,’ he added proudly. ‘In fact, he is only found eventually when someone inadvertently trips over the handle.’ They all laughed and speeded up, heading gratefully for the back door. What a ghastly way to spend an afternoon. Thank goodness it was over. And meanwhile the blackened hand still signalled from the debris. ‘Er, I don’t suppose you could hold on a minute?’ it said. ‘I just feel sure there is something you haven’t taken into account. If you could just—Hello? Excuse me—’ But they had gone.  The thing about Lillian’s clever choice of disguise—as travelling fluffy-bunny salesperson—was that it rather defeated her intention. In some vague indefinable way (but something to do with a tall, striking, baby-blonde woman trailing soft toys about in broad daylight) it just didn’t help her to blend into the surrounding landscape. People pointed her out; small children scoffed and jeered; and Gordon, first thing in the morning, brought up an ironical extra little breakfast tray with just a lettuce leaf on it. But if she wanted to change her cover story to something else, it was a bit late now. And besides, if she was honest, she rather liked the bunny she’d bought at the shops. He was woolly and earnest-looking, and, like all the best soft toys, he was a very good listener. Certainly he was a comfort in this ghastly unnecessary mess she had got herself into. He was her only ally. For if Michelle and Makepeace had contrived to get rid of Osborne (she was still sure of this), and if Angela Farmer and the Dunquenchin team had lent their support—well, that only left the soft toy she could trust. But she had dropped the bunny when she saw Tim in the High Street; and now, to cap it all, she’d been robbed. Somebody had taken the letters. Those nutsy letters Michelle had written, about wanting to stake out Osborne and do horrid things to his nipples—they had been stolen from her room by somebody during the day, when she was out fruitlessly casing the Farmer house. All in all, it was no wonder she felt pretty insecure. No sign of Osborne any more; no friendly furry helpmeet with long floppy ears; and when she got back to her room in the evening, not only were the letters gone, but there was a little drop of blood on the carpet and the room was permeated by the curious and unpleasant odour of singed hair. On top of which, an insane missive was attached to her pillow. In a mad scrawl it said: ‘Knowledge is Power, and you know nothing.’ 

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The only person to have a fairly good day was Osborne. No sane person would choose to be cooped up in a dark, empty, paraffin-smelling garage while a legendary thriller-writer sleuths for clues twenty yards away; but on the other hand, Osborne was not slow to appreciate the chance of forty winks. Angela’s sudden and virulent arrival in his life had been cata-clysmic, and the result was that a little lie-down was called for. ‘I’ll come get you as soon as I can,’ she promised as she lowered the up-and-over door, sealing out the natural light; but inwardly he begged her not to rush. He felt he had been wrenched, pushed, dragged, drawn and wrung; he felt like a weed that has forced its way through concrete. The sight of the cup cakes made him feel sick. Most of the day he snoozed, intermittently waking up to switch on his torch and read a few more pages from Trent Carmichael’s nasty S is for . . . Secateurs! before snuggling down in a nest of old blankets, peeling a cup cake, and surrendering himself to the far from unpleasant feeling that, at present, there was precisely nothing he could do. This was true, of course. If Come Into the Garden had folded, there was nothing he could do. And if Makepeace had been sizzled to a crisp in the shed fire (as Angela popped in to tell him during the afternoon), well, there wasn’t much he could do about that either. Of course he felt sorry for the little chap, but it was curiously difficult to regret his passing, or even fully to believe in it. During one of his many snoozes, he hallucinated that Makepeace was being buried, yet kept insisting on sitting up in the coffin. ‘You’re dead,’ people told him. ‘I am not,’ he protested. ‘Come on, lie down.’ ‘I won’t.’ Lucky that Osborne appreciated this chance to loll about; lucky that he believed in ‘sleep debt’ the way other people believed in overdrafts. In fact, he thought of his daily ten hours of nod in precisely the same balance-sheet terms: that if you draw out you must pay in; and that when you overdraw consistently, ultimately you receive a nasty letter threatening to revoke your credit facilities until further notice. So he stretched, yawned, snuggled down with his eyes closed, and let his thoughts wander across the border into Bo-Bo Land. The rabbit stirred, and unconsciously he scratched its ears. For Osborne, sleep was the constant state, the default mode to which he always returned when his attention was not demanded elsewhere. Everyday life might extend distractions to pull him out of the sack, but the moment it relaxed its grip, he sank back gladly into catalepsy. Sometimes it seemed to him that even if he slept till the millennium, he would simply never catch up. Osborne’s sleep debt was evidently of prodigious proportions, somewhere along the lines of the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement. Turning over to get more comfortable, he thought vaguely about S is for . . . Secateurs! and wondered what everyone saw in it. The story concerned a precocious pubescent girl, physically unattractive but jailbait none the less, who blackmailed two older men after involving them in the dismemberment and disposal of a

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body. It seemed that, partly crazed by a youthful perusal of the works of Sigmund Freud, this West Country Lolita had killed her father over a misunderstanding at the allotments, when at the fervid height of her teenage sexual alertness she overheard him tempting a schoolfriend with a giant marrow. ‘Do you see how it’s grown?’ he said in all innocence. ‘Tell you what, I’ll treat you to a bit later, if you’re interested.’ It was a tragic choice of words—especially for a man whose psychotic daughter not only harboured a burgeoning Electra complex, but whose favourite job was sharpening the blades of the hedge clipper. Osborne squirmed slightly at the memory. He pictured the large garden in S is for . . . Secateurs!, extraordinarily similar to Angela’s, in which the burials took place. It disappointed him that Carmichael had modelled the topography so closely on a real locale; what a shame it was when novelists didn’t bother to make things up. In the story, the garden had the same dark poplar trees, the same ancient mulberry, the pergola, and (of course) the magnificent shed. It occurred to him suddenly that the sinister author picture he had seen on the back of Murder, Shear Murder actually showed the out-of-focus shape of Angela’s shed in the background. Ho hum. Another instance of lack of imagination. But it occurred to him also, as his mind started its slow, struggling ascent out of the pit of slumber, that a line from one of the G. Clarke letters didn’t really make sense. ‘I haven’t even met Trent Carmichael . . .’ it said. There was something wrong with that. What, though? He switched on his torch, and got the letter out of his pocket: ‘I haven’t even met Trent Carmichael.’ He scratched his head. Well, of course the real G. Clarke did know Carmichael, but that wasn’t the point. It was that—oh yes, good heavens, this letter had been written before the Carmichael piece appeared in the magazine. He sat up so quickly that he bumped his head on a fire extinguisher. ‘Bugger,’ he said, but it was only a reflex. This Carmichael reference was significant. How could somebody respond to a piece that wasn’t yet in print—to a piece, in fact, that had never been published at all, because the magazine had closed down in the week it was due to appear? There was only one person who knew he had written it: Michelle. He gasped as he considered the implications. It was Michelle who wanted him to rummage in her shed. It was Michelle who wanted to dress up in a négligé and gardening gloves and flip-flops. Which was why, when the garage door flipped momentarily open, and a small figure scurried in wearing a loose frock and carrying a pitchfork, he yelled, above the boom of the closing door, ‘Michelle! Oh God, you’ve come to get me!’ ‘You’re wrong there, as usual,’ said a familiar voice. And suddenly the garage reeked of burning hair.

Chapter 12




Up in the office at Dunquenchin, Gordon was having a breakthrough. He might have shouted ‘Eureka!’ if his classical education had been better; as it was, he shouted ‘Dad!’ Twelve months of terribly advanced electronic remote— contact wizardry with teams of Californian graphics experts, combined with neurological analysis of such amazing complexity and sophistication that quite honestly you or I would never understand it—even (ahem) if it could be described in words—had finally culminated in that virtual reality program he had called, provisionally, Phototropism. It was Thursday morning, and breakfast was finished. It seemed the perfect opportunity for a test run. Hearing the footsteps of his dad coming up the stairs, Gordon strapped a custom-built Fly-Mo unit to his bonce (or that’s what it looked like), thrust his hand into a wired-up glove, adjusted quickly to the intense consuming dark, and for the very first time surrendered himself to the entirety of the finished game. Though he was a pioneer, he felt safe and confident. Earlier, his dad had commented kindly, ‘You need taking out of yourself, son’; and Gordon had promptly decided that a ‘proto-photo-trip’ was precisely the thing required. In theory, the program would trigger receptors in his brain to convince him—little by little, and depending on the level of skill—that his entire body was growing and reaching out like a plant in sunlight. It would take him out of himself, exactly. What Gordon seemed to have seriously miscalculated, however, was the rate of acceleration. As it now transpired, being taken out of yourself from nought to infinity in fifteen seconds is pretty terrifying, and slightly more than the normal human constitution can withstand. From the evidence of his earlier partial test runs, Gordon had expected a slow but perceptible unfurling sensation, like an exquisite lily opening gracefully on the surface of a tranquil Japanese pond: starting with warm earlobes and a tingling sensation under the skin, it would then progress to something delicate around the eyelids. Instead, however, as his whole body instantly convulsed and whiplashed in his chair, the main sensations were of being violently drawn, wrung, pushed, dragged and wrenched. It was horrific. He screamed as his fingers spread and stretched, creaking and splitting, as his arms and legs tugged fiercely at their sockets, as even his hair yanked painfully at his head. The large Victorian bedroom he could see around him (a virtual reality blackand-white 3D drawing, based on the Tenniel illustrations from Alice) shrank in on him, foop!, like that; in two seconds flat, Gordon had his foot up the chimney, and his arm out of the window, and was just about to swell up fatally against the ceil-

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ing when—beep!, the machine apparently switched itself off. As the picture dimmed and Gordon felt himself dwindle to normal size, he noticed a little tray of cakes marked EAT ME, which were presumably part of his Californian designer’s homage to Lewis Carroll. Even in the throes of his peculiar ecstasy, and even at only nineteen years old, Gordon’s detumescent brain thought, Hang on, that’s a bit suggestive, I’d better work on that. He removed the lawn-mower helmet in a state of utter shock and disbelief. His head was hot, his eyes saw patterns in the air and his ears throbbed. When he tried to speak (just to exclaim ‘Lumme’), he vomited and started sobbing. No wonder he was upset: if this was its usual physiological effect, Phototropism obviously had a very limited future in the penny arcades. Gordon’s proto-photo-trip had lasted exactly six seconds and had taken about ten years off his life. If his dad had not burst into the room and taken the initiative of unplugging the machine, he might shortly have gone insane. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ his dad said later, when Gordon had stopped shaking and was sipping from a large mug of hot sugared tea. ‘I don’t think I can.’ ‘Sure you can. What did it feel like? Was it anything like growing?’ Gordon yowled, nodded and suppressed a snivel. ‘Why do I get the impression that growing isn’t a pleasant experience?’ Gordon’s dad said warmly, to no one in particular, and then hugged his son again. ‘What else is worrying you, eh? Tell your old dad. What’s been going on in that brilliant loaf of yours? I suppose it’s that hand?’ (His tone suggested the hand was to blame, as if to say, ‘Just wait till I catch that hand, I’ll show it the back of my— er, hand.’) But at the mention of the hand, Gordon, usually such an equable lad, let go of everything he’d been bottling up, with an explosive outburst rather like an accident in a compressed-air factory. ‘But he’s dead, Dad,’ he yelled, ‘that Makepeace is. Died in the fire on Tuesday night. Lying there all charred and it’s my fault, because I got scared of him and you locked him in and I feel so guilty now—’ ‘But hang on,’ his dad interrupted, ‘I’m sure he was in here yesterday again. I—’ ‘No, he’s dead. Definitely. I saw the hand, and now I’m worried because Angela let the other one go, and that creep Trent Carmichael is here, and I know there’s something horrible going on between him and Margaret, always has been, something really nasty, and Margaret’s a cow, Dad, she’s really horrible to that exboyfriend, and he’s looking really worried, and now my program doesn’t work properly—’ ‘Could anyone have tampered with it?’

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‘What? No. I mean, well yes, but who would? Anyway, that’s not all. Now I’ve sacked a lot of innocent people I don’t even know, and what else, right, the tall woman in the pink coat keeps trying to make friends with me on the landing by talking baby talk as though I were three—years—old!’ He paused. He wiped a tear. There was no more. ‘You’re right about Margaret, you know,’ said his dad after a bit. ‘My own brother’s daughter, God rest him, but such a rotten cow that you can hardly credit it. She had a great pile of notes on that boyfriend, you know. Loads of it. Brought it with her. Tapes as well, photos, samples of shopping lists, everything. She’s writing a book.’ ‘No. What, on Tim? What’s he done?’ ‘Just been himself, that’s all. But as far as Margaret’s concerned, he’s a fruitcake. All that guff about those daffodil bulbs. You know.’ ‘Poor bloke, that’s awful. What a cow.’ ‘Yes. Anyway, I found it this morning when I was making her bed, so I took it straight round to his room, poor bloke, and said take a butcher’s at this.’ Gordon gasped. ‘You didn’t.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘No, I mean, it’s brilliant. I think that’s brilliant, Dad. But you realize she’ll go berserk?’ ‘I don’t care.’ ‘No?’ ‘No.’ Gordon dropped his voice, as if to raise something delicate. ‘So she hasn’t, sort of, got anything on you? No secrets, you know, no nasty buried stuff ?’ ‘Of course not.’ Gordon was relieved. ‘It’s just she always gives the impression she knows something to your disadvantage.’ ‘I know. But that’s because she’s a cow.’ ‘Right.’ ‘Which she is.’ ‘Absolutely.’  ‘What a cow!’ exclaimed Tim. Ten minutes ago he had been lying in bed, miserable, listening with distant interest to a rather combative programme on Radio 4 called Face the Facts, and worrying heavily about nothing whatsoever. The things he faced were not facts, but they loomed larger than reality, and that was the trouble. This morning he had been particularly preoccupied by the vivid mental picture of his next-door neigh-

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bour in London, Mrs Lewis, carelessly leaving the front door wide open after feeding Lester. He simply knew it was true; he could see it, for goodness’ sake— open, flapping, people wandering in for a look round, while Mrs Lewis blithely packed her bags and embarked on a fortnight’s holiday without a backward glance. When he tried to suppress this unfounded anxiety, perversely it only grew and stretched in his mind so that by the end it entailed Mrs Lewis (Oh no, was this trustless woman Welsh? It explained a lot) absent-mindedly placing a magnifying mirror next to a net curtain, and the low November sun reflecting off it and starting a huge fire, and then Lester rushing frantically into the street and being almost knocked down by a fire engine, which swerved to avoid him and instead ploughed into a bus shelter packed with schoolchildren, exploding with enormous loss of life. Tim winced miserably and wondered whether to phone his own number, just to check that the line was not ‘unobtainable’, but he had done this lots of times before, from the office, and knew it didn’t prove much. In the old days, when he and Margaret lived together, they would sometimes come out of the tube station and, walking home, address his fears in sequential order, with Margaret’s natural sarcasm reined in as tightly as it would go. ‘Phew, the neighbourhood is still here,’ Tim would say, amazed, as they emerged in the daylight. ‘All right so far, then,’ said Margaret. They turned a corner. ‘Wow, our road is still here,’ said Tim. ‘A very good sign,’ she agreed. They held their breath until the trees cleared to reveal in the distance their own abode still standing, and not a blackened shell surrounded by ambulances. ‘The house is still there. Look, the house.’ ‘Hallelujah.’ They moved closer, not running, but walking more urgently. ‘And thank God, I don’t believe it, I think the flat’s still there!’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Margaret. ‘It’s a miracle.’ But Tim now had an additional worry, and a pleasingly circular one at that. Possibly he was really bonkers—and anxiety about being bonkers was the first sign that you were mad. Certainly Margaret’s purse-lipped, arms-folded, tut-tut attitude to his repeated sightings of work colleagues in Honiton would suggest that she thought he was barking, but was too polite to say. Last night he had actually seen Osborne, by the way, which brought the running total to four. Looking out of the window, he thought he saw the ‘Me and My Shed’ man being ferried, trussed up, through the quiet streets of Honiton on the front of a push-bike pedalled by a small, black, hairy figure in a frock with a trident, like Britannia—possibly a child, or possibly a clever, cycling, costumed chimp escaped from a patriotic circus. Tim had accepted it, at the time. Now it seemed pretty sick. The radio didn’t help, this Face the Facts stuff, especially since the reporter seemed so certain of everything. Not a flicker of doubt was present in his mind. ‘So we confronted Mr Chimneypot at his new premises in Gloucester Road,’ he

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announced. The soundtrack cut from the studio to the outdoor swish of passing traffic, the panting huff-puff of the reporter chasing someone up to their front door and sticking his foot in it. ‘What about your investors, Mr Chimneypot? Is Chimneypot your real name? Are there any little Chimneypots? Can you tell us anything about Kiss Me Quick PLC—’ ‘Why don’t they leave him alone?’ thought Tim, as he switched it off. ‘In any case, where do they get the moral energy?’ But then Margaret’s uncle knocked on his own door and offered him this great pile of stuff about how he was a casebook nutcase; and amazingly (paradoxically, you might call it), ten minutes later he wasn’t mad any more. Except, of course, in the sense of absolutely hopping. ‘What a rotten cow,’ he exclaimed again, leaping out of bed, and pulling on some clothes. He switched the radio back on. ‘That was Face the Facts,’ said the announcer. Yes, thought Tim, it certainly was. ‘I’m going to kill her,’ he said. ‘Look, she’s got my Post-it stickers and everything. She’s set me up.’ He read the latest notes again, scanning for the bits that annoyed him most—‘personality implodes . . . inevitable breakdown . . . nudge him off into the abyss . . . traumatized by displays of sexuality . . . hates the sight of cream’—and let out a very uncharacteristic bellow of rage. ‘WOOOOORH!’ he went, feeling surprisingly good about it. ‘WOOOOORH!’ He had come down here to this godforsaken town to find the bastard who’d taken his job away, and been sidetracked into acting the invalid, just because of that cow Margaret. ‘WOORH!’ he went (slightly shorter this time). He didn’t even know what he was doing in this bloody B&B. ‘WORH!’ he went, kicking some files. He felt quite exhausted. He needed to sit down. And the very last ‘WRH’ he made—just before Gordon tapped on the door and came in, and they somehow got on to the subject of who’d bought Come Into the Garden—was actually quite quiet.  ‘The thing you’ve got to remember about Margaret,’ said Trent Carmichael to Michelle, as they watched her walk past their coffee-shop window, smiling privately to herself about something, ‘is that she is an absolute cow.’ Michelle nodded. She knew the type. ‘I mean it. Whatever you do,’ he warned her, showing his teeth, ‘don’t tell her anything personal.’ ‘I won’t.’ Michelle thought about it. ‘You mean the rubberized gardeningglove fetish sort of thing?’ ‘Exactly. She’d make something of it.’ ‘I understand. She resembles that sinister patricidal girl in S is for . . . Secateurs!, then?’

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‘Yes. In fact you might say she’s the very model.’ They continued to stare out of the window, until Michelle broke the silence. ‘She knows something about you, does she?’ ‘Alas, yes.’ ‘Pillow talk, was it?’ ‘Sadly, you’re right.’ Michelle stiffened. She hated the thought of sharing Trent with another woman, especially a cow like Margaret. ‘Actually, my little dung beetle (if I may),’ Trent continued, ‘it does occur to me that you still haven’t told me anything personal, either, yet, except that you’ve got a mother you have to phone twice a day who loves my books almost to the point of obsession, and who can’t wait to meet me.’ He put a hand on her thigh. It thrilled her. ‘Haven’t I?’ she said, attempting an airy manner, but feeling her face redden. ‘No.’ ‘Mm.’ He moved his hand. He was awfully good at this. ‘I’ve guessed a lot, though. I can’t help looking for clues, you know, being a crime writer. I think I’ve, you know, ratiocinated quite a lot about you.’ ‘Such as?’ ‘Well, you are clever, obviously. But you’re pale, you stay indoors a lot, and you don’t have a boyfriend, and you do your nails, but not very well.’ He smiled apologetically. She smiled back, allowed him to continue. ‘Now, your clothes are a bit old-fashioned, and you obviously don’t know how to communicate with people, and you have a devotional air and know about gardening, and you’ve got this big gap in your life going back, ooh, fifteen years.’ ‘So?’ ‘So I reckon you’re a lapsed nun.’ Michelle said nothing. She felt like laughing, but thought it would be rude. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ said Trent. She took a long, thoughtful drink of coffee. ‘Well, put it this way,’ she said, at last. ‘You’re not exactly wrong.’ She looked out of the window and smiled to herself. Two days ago she’d been in the office, doing usual Tuesday things. A mere forty-eight hours later she was in a Devon teashop with a famous lover with sympathetic kinky ideas, a plate of free cream buns, and a mysterious past involving wimples. What did she usually do at 11 a.m. on a Thursday morning? Good heavens, she’d forgotten. She’d almost forgotten about Osborne, too; but not quite. ‘Trent, you know, I’m a twinge angry with you, my darling Green Thumb (if I may). You still haven’t told me what happened yesterday, at your friend Angela’s. Did you find out what was wrong with this—who was it, um, I forget—this shed

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journalist? Storm in a teacup, was it? I don’t suppose he had a hatchet, did he? Just some silly mistake.’ ‘Well, actually, no.’ Carmichael looked around, and moved his chair closer to hers. ‘If you can keep a secret,’ he virtually whispered. ‘Actually, he’s dead. The shed burned down with him—and the hatchet—inside it. Dreadful business.’ Michelle went white. Dead? Her lovely Osborne? Dead? Dead, in a shed? ‘Where is this place? I want to see it,’ she cried, getting up suddenly and knocking over a trolley of cakes. Carmichael stared at her with surprise and admiration. This woman was a real dark horse. ‘It’s down the lane from the guesthouse,’ he said. ‘Past the Chimneypot Garden Centre. You can’t miss it, it’s got a burned-out shed in the garden.’  Angela had been mortified to find Osborne gone. Not only had he scarpered without saying goodbye, he had also taken the blankets, the cakes, the book and the rabbit. Jesus, men were such lousy scumbags. She slung an empty gin bottle into the rubbish, where it clanked against all the other bottles she’d emptied since yesterday. Vodka, Bailey’s, sangria, Tizer, Worcester sauce—it had been a very long night, and she had invented some deeply unusual cocktails. And now she was giddily propping herself up at the kitchen window, all the weight on her forearms, frowning against a swirling mental fog, and barking down the phone to Gordon (‘Ah, a proto-scumbag,’ she thought, viciously), who had innocently rung her, to ask to come round. ‘Jesus’ sakes, Gordon, sure she’s a cow.’ Staggering, she looked around for a stool to sit on, but there wasn’t one, so she just collapsed on the kitchen vinyl, pulling the phone down on top of her with a crash. ‘You still there? OK. No, I’m fine. But don’t sound so shocked about whatsername, yeah, Margaret. I’ve told you a million times she’s a cow. I wouldn’t trust her further than I can throw my own pancreas.’ Just next to her face on the floor she noticed a small drip of golden liquid (the last of the whisky, perhaps?) and realized that if she moved her body a couple of inches to the left, she could probably lick it. She turned her attention to Gordon. ‘A cow is what she always was, Gordon baby. Barney left me because of her, I know it.’ Actually, she’d never thought of this before, but she was free-associating, and it sounded like sense. ‘Yeah, sure. I always knew it. Something they did together. Sometimes I’ve even wondered whether that S is for . . . Secateurs! was all about her and Barney and Trent. All that spooky burial stuff, you know.’ The proto-scumbag asked to come round. She said, ‘Sure’. He needed advice.

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He said he’d just discovered that the B&B was crawling with disaffected staff from Come Into the Garden, one of whom was the ex-boyfriend of Margaret. ‘Small world,’ said Angela bitterly, not very interested in Come Into the Garden any more. ‘Sure, come.’ She hung up the phone, and added glumly, ‘I’ve got nobody else here.’ She lay on her back. Scumbags, she thought. Manderley, what a joke. She made a decision and licked up the drip of whisky. It had some dirt in it, but it was OK. Then, with her arms folded across her chest and her eyes tightly closed, she surrendered herself to the familiar round-and-round out-of-body sensation she fondly called the helicopters, only this time it made her think of Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, she didn’t know why.  Tim and Gordon walked along together to Angela’s house. ‘She’s a cow,’ muttered Tim. ‘You’re right,’ said Gordon. ‘I’m glad we burned it.’ ‘Me too.’ Tim kicked a stone. ‘I still can’t believe you’re the bastard who’s closed down the mag.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘I mean, it meant such a lot to me.’ ‘I know.’ ‘It was the thing I could count on, you know. A sort of shelter. I feel really exposed without it. I’m not sure I can survive in the outside world. I’m too weedy.’ ‘But you can survive without Margaret?’ ‘That’s true. She’s a cow.’ ‘You’re right.’ ‘I’m quite excited about meeting Angela Farmer. I’m a fan.’ ‘Oh, she’s terrific, you’ll love her.’ It was only when they arrived at the gate that they heard a woman scream, from the vicinity of the burned-out shed. It was Michelle. She was standing in the ashes, holding a blackened hand (somebody else’s) up to her face and shrieking. But as they raced towards her, they realized she was shrieking with hysterical laughter, not fear. ‘It’s not a real one,’ she yelled to them, more loudly than was necessary, as they reached her, panting. She seemed exhilarated by relief. Tim was confused, he had never seen her so animated. ‘I’ve seen hundreds of these. Look, it’s just latex or something. My mother buys them in job lots. She’s obsessed with S is for . . . Secateurs! and the others; always trying to re-create great moments from it.’

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They all looked at the hand. ‘So Makepeace isn’t dead, then?’ gasped Gordon. ‘Makepeace?’ said Tim and Michelle, with a single voice. ‘But what was a trick severed hand doing in Angela’s shed?’ asked Gordon, puzzled. ‘It wasn’t there before.’ Michelle shrugged. Now Trent Carmichael had appeared at the gate, as well as Gordon’s dad and, separately, Lillian. What the hell was Lillian doing here? ‘Hi, Lillian,’ said Tim, whom nothing surprised any more. ‘I thought it was you I saw. Everybody’s here, then. I even saw Osborne last night. Although, come to think of it, he didn’t look too happy in his role as the spoils of Britannia.’ But his voice faded on the air, and everyone looked at Michelle. Somehow it seemed like a moment of truth. The hand wanted to tell them something! As they all stood still in Angela’s garden, they surveyed the scene as though they had never seen it before (to be fair, some of them hadn’t), and tried to comprehend the full meaning of it all. Here, beside the shed, was the small area of recently dug earth where Makepeace had uncovered the hand. All around them, the autumnal garden held its breath, keeping its secrets, the very image of life suspended. Wordlessly they were gathering at the shed, to see the hand. It was a moment of deadly solemnity. Angela, with her gumboots on the wrong feet, staggered across the lawn to join them. ‘I expect you’re wondering why I’ve asked you all here,’ she said, beaming. And then vomited copiously on Trent Carmichael’s shoes.

Chapter 13




Although Osborne still could not imagine why the rabbit had been brought along, he was extremely glad of the company, especially now that Makepeace had gone off and left him shackled in a Lumberland Alpine Resteezy in a windy, deserted garden centre just two hundred yards from Dunquenchin. He stroked the rabbit and, in the absence of anything more suitable, fed it a cake wrapper and some wood shavings, which it appeared to enjoy thoroughly. Being locked in confined spaces was becoming second nature to him, he reflected. Were he ever to get out of Honiton alive, he would hereafter only accept housesitting jobs which offered smallish airing cupboards, or coal bunkers, or larders, where he could sit in the dark with a pile of junk food wondering vaguely whether someone would come along at any minute and kill him. Did Makepeace intend to kill him? Surely not. Just because he had assumed the alter ego of Loony Gordon, complete with négligé and flip-flops, didn’t mean he was bound by destiny to perpetrate violence. Just because he had furtively experimented with Phototropism for dangerously lengthy periods, and it had turned the balance of his mind so that he honestly no longer had any conception of his actual size—all this did not mean he must behave like King Kong, Gog, Magog and Godzilla rolled into one. And just because he was all sooty and singed and his hair was still smouldering didn’t mean he must automatically assume all the other savage attributes of the Wild Man of Borneo. Last week, for heaven’s sake, this small, long-haired intellectual contortionist had written a deliberately incomprehensible thousand-word review for The Times Literary Supplement on the subject of Norwegian poetry—quoting much of it in the original language, moreover, with its o’s crossed out, and everything. From such spectacular brainbox ostentation to a state of primal savagery it was surely impossible to plummet in a seven-day period, however eventful or surprising those seven days might somehow conspire to be. Makepeace was certainly a little unbalanced, however. Even Osborne was obliged to concede it. ‘Seen these before, you tiny minuscule person?’ Makepeace had yelled at Osborne overexcitedly, chucking a fat file of papers at his recumbent friend, on their first reunion in Angela Farmer’s pitch-dark garage. ‘They come from—Dunquenchin!’ In the ghostly illumination shed by Osborne’s feeble torch beam, these papers were revealed to be more—possibly hundreds more—letters from G. Clarke to the author of ‘Me and My Shed’, half of them dwelling quite gratuitously on what a frightful and appalling writer he was, the others filled with drooling fantasy about rubbing green liquid lawn-feed into his skin, or binding his body in a length of half-inch garden hose before imag-

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inatively employing his hardened willy in the greenhouse as a sort of improvised dibber. As before, Osborne saw straight to the essence of these letters, and took the critical ones to heart. ‘Oh look, oh that’s not fair,’ he wailed, time after time, shuffling the papers for the worst bits and frowning at the smarts of unfair accusation. In the blackness of the garage, his little torch beam skidded madly around the walls and ceiling, as he gesticulated his misery and hurt. ‘Oh, but my Val Doonican piece was one of my best. Oh. Oh, this is vicious, really. And I did mention the knitwear. I even mentioned bright elusive butterflies. These are very unfair, Makepeace. I hope you didn’t read them?’ Makepeace made no reply. Osborne read some more. ‘Blah blah . . . garden hose . . . lily-white skin . . . blah blah . . . dibber . . . blah blah . . . hang on, what was that dibber bit? Good lord . . . blah blah . . . Ah! Listen to this, listen. ‘“I sometimes wonder have you even really been to meet the famous celebrities whose sheds you write about, you make them so uninteresting.”’ Osborne turned off his torch and put his head in his hands. ‘God, that’s so depressing.’ He felt wretched—and not just because ‘famous celebrities’ was a tautology, either. How miserable to contemplate Michelle, ostensibly his friend and colleague, composing these poisonous epistles, doubtless at the same time as he was blithely tapping out his inoffensive weekly column in an adjoining room. It was like finding out not only that your mother never loved you, but that in your infancy she also instigated a detrimental whispering campaign (‘Smelly feet, pass it on’) amongst your family, schoolfriends, teachers and soft toys. For the first time since embarking on this disastrous adventure to the West Country, he seriously wanted to cry. Meanwhile Makepeace, whose figure he could only faintly discern in the blackness, shuffled with impatience. ‘What about the others?’ Makepeace urged significantly, in a deep whisper. ‘The other letters.’ ‘How do you mean?’ Blindly, Osborne felt around on the floor for more papers. ‘The threats, you know. The pitchfork, the dibber. Surely you know by now that Gordon means every word he writes.’ Osborne frowned, confused. ‘No, it was our chief sub who wrote these,’ he said, his heart so filled with sadness that it welled in his throat and almost choked him. ‘Sorry I didn’t tell you, but I only just worked it out myself. Can you believe it? She hates me that much.’ There was a menacing laugh from Makepeace, but Osborne was too unhappy

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to notice. ‘You know who I mean? Michelle, in the office. Is she jealous, do you think? Why couldn’t she tell me some other way?’ Instead of offering an opinion, however, Makepeace told him to shut up. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ he hissed, in that now wearily familiar ding-ding warning-bell tone of his. ‘Gordon wrote these!’ ‘No, really—’ ‘Gordon.’ ‘N—’ Belatedly Osborne caught the unmissable gist, and quickly reconsidered his position. ‘Oh yes, you’re right,’ he said, promptly. ‘Thanks.’ There was silence. Osborne reached for his torch, turned it on, and pretended to fiddle with it aimlessly, while trying to get a partial view of Makepeace. He whistled a tune, waved the torch, cuddled the rabbit and concentrated hard on being somewhere else. After all, what he saw of Makepeace in fractions and spectral glimpses—a gash of vermilion lipstick, for a start—did not encourage him to wish he were here. ‘Actually I was worried about you,’ he said conversationally. ‘People seemed to think you had been in the shed when it burned down.’ ‘I was.’ Makepeace had moved closer. His voice was quite loud. ‘Yes, but, well—they also thought, ha ha, you were dead.’ ‘Which I am, of course. In a manner of speaking.’ Recognizing the need to tread delicately at this juncture, Osborne said merely, ‘Oh?’ ‘I just rose from the ashes, that’s all.’ ‘Nice. Mm. I see.’ ‘And now I’m G. Clarke of Honiton.’ ‘Did you say—? Oh. Well, that’s great for you. Great. Congratulations.’ ‘And I have a destiny.’ ‘Smashing.’ ‘Which is why I’m here with you.’ ‘Oh. I mean, goody.’ There seemed little to say. ‘Where did you get the lipstick?’ ‘At Dunquenchin, of course.’ ‘Suits you.’ ‘Thanks. Hey, you can call me Gordon, if you like.’ ‘I’ll try.’ Osborne sighed. He wondered how long he could keep this up. Humouring Makepeace was not his greatest natural talent. And perhaps he shouldn’t try so

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hard, in any case. Because whatever he did, it was obviously simply a matter of time before the little bastard punched him on the nose. ‘I don’t suppose it struck you,’ ventured Makepeace at last, ‘how closely I resembled Gordon in the first place?’ ‘You’re right,’ said Osborne. ‘Yes, I do see what you mean. Absolutely. Although I suppose what did slightly confuse me, why I didn’t think you were identical twins separated at birth,’ he said, choosing his words carefully, ‘was the extraordinary difference in height.’ ‘Meaning?’ Osborne was glad, now, to be in the pitch dark. He let it out. ‘He’s a lot taller than you, that’s all. You know. Tall.’ At which point, from out of the blackness, Makepeace hit him so hard on the jaw that it knocked him unconscious. And that was that. So now, next morning, Osborne was alone with the rabbit again, in this draughty shed in a deserted garden centre (winter opening: weekends only). Goodness knows how Makepeace had acquired the strength to shift him, but he’d done it somehow, possibly with the aid of the bike. Rubbing his sore, bruised face, Osborne thought of Angela and sighed. She was such a wonderful person, he was sorry he had let her down. Manderley, oh yes. Last night he dreamed he went to Manderley again. He hoped she hadn’t noticed his disappearance; he hoped (with just a smidgen of self-pity) that she would hereafter have a nice life without him. He sniffed. He wanted to be with her. But unfortunately he was tied up at the moment, at the mercy of a short-house know-all transvestite with colossal delusions and a surprisingly effective right hook. Makepeace, of course, had crept back upstairs in Dunquenchin for a final blast of Phototropism before fulfilling his grisly destiny. Luckily all the residents were presently at Angela’s (at this precise moment, in fact, all were staring aghast at the noxious pile of sick that had suddenly appeared on Trent Carmichael’s footwear), so the B&B was empty. It was true, as Gordon’s dad had suggested, that someone had been tampering with the program. Makepeace, whose understanding of advanced computer science was naturally almost as comprehensive as his knowledge of the twenty-six different words for ‘under the weather’ in Norwegian, had tweaked the acceleration to its maximum after his very first session. None of that gradual, delicate, eyelid lily-pond nonsense for Makepeace. He was a small man in a hurry. Nothing in Norwegian poetry had prepared him for Phototropism. It was a revelation, an epiphany. It caught him up, wrenched him, forced him to grow and reach. Unfortunately it is quite true that people, unlike plants, do not grow unless they are forced to, or unless someone takes an active interest on their behalf.

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Left to themselves, they stop. So it was arguable that Makepeace deserved the privilege of Phototropism, since he was merely compensating for a lifetime as a loveless retard unchallenged by adversity. But alas, it also helped him identify with Gordon, with whom (as we have seen) he was increasingly infatuated. He plugged in, switched on and screeched outwards like the winds of hell until his body filled the universe.  At Angela’s, Michelle was studying the hand and getting impatient. Unlike Trent Carmichael, she was extremely good at deduction, and in fifteen minutes of urgent questioning had pieced together enough information to know that Osborne had disappeared; that Makepeace, previously feared dead, had probably abducted him; and that a mysterious nameless rabbit was also somehow crucially involved. Moreover, as an expert on S is for . . . Secateurs! (having discussed its plot with her mother on many macabre occasions), she had quickly deduced that this fake hand had been buried in the garden ten years ago by Trent and Barney (precisely in the manner of the two adult male conspirators in the book) in the misguided belief that it belonged to the corpse of Margaret’s father. Since Trent seemed unable to grasp this point for himself, she took him aside and explained it to him. ‘You see, if it had been a real hand, it would have decomposed.’ ‘I know that.’ ‘And it’s not a real hand.’ She paused. ‘So it didn’t.’ ‘All right, OK,’ he conceded miserably. ‘So why do I detect a twinge of reluctance to accept it?’ she said. She was slightly irritated. For someone who had just heard the happy news that he took no part in a terrible long-ago patricidal carve-up—or more precisely, that no terrible long-ago patricidal carve-up had taken place at all—he seemed less than properly relieved. ‘It’s just that all these years—’ He broke off. All these years what? thought Michelle, her heart suddenly jerking and flipping in her chest like a yo-yo doing loop-the-loop. All these years, you have depended on the idea that your soul was smeared with guilt? I do love you, she thought, her yo-yo melting behind her ribs. You are so wonderfully twisted. ‘All these years what?’ she encouraged him gently. Trent Carmichael screwed up his face as though about to spit. ‘It’s just that all these years that cow has been making a fool of me.’ Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Angela’s eyes, ears, nose and throat were reacquainting themselves with the cocktails and packet-snacks of the previous night,

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while Gordon stood manfully beside her with a towel and a bottle of water, humming it’s-all-right-I’m-not-looking tunes from Showboat and being careful not to mention undercooked eggs; and Lillian, who had been forced to realize that her cherished conspiracy theory against Osborne was precisely wrong in every respect, was making a private phone call from the hall. We will listen in on this conversation, but a word of warning is first required: under the strain of recent developments—not least the drama of Angela’s unexpected projectile vomiting—Lillian’s baby-talk had deepened so profoundly that it now scarcely qualified as language at all. ‘Bunny? Oh, hey-wo bunny, issmeegen bunny.’ [Greetings Bunny, it’s me again, also called Bunny.] She waited while Mister Bunny yelled, ‘Where are you, what’s going on?’ and simply took no notice. Being in Honiton on the trail of a missing ‘Me and My Shed’ columnist was an impossible answer to frame within the regressive vocabulary available. ‘How Dexie doin, poor ted-babe?’ [How fares Dexter, the sick little bear?] ‘So sorry, bunny, not home. But soon as poss.’ [Full of regrets not to be home yet, all will be revealed in the fullness of time.] ‘Mishu.’ [More regrets.] ‘Oops, money don. So spensive. [We are about to run out of time; the rate is high.] ‘Bwye!’ [Bye!] ‘Tiss, tiss.’ [Kiss kiss.] Only when she replaced the receiver did she notice Gordon’s dad watching her from the kitchen door, his face contorted in a grimace of pain. ‘Wassamat—I mean, what’s the matter?’ Gordon’s dad came towards her and put a sympathetic hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry if this seems rude,’ he said, ‘but were you really talking to somebody? Or just pretending?’ Lillian blushed, and picked at the fluff on her sleeve. ‘Does it matter?’ she said at last. ‘Not to me, no. But I ought to warn you: do that when my niece Margaret is in earshot, and you’ll end up reviewed by Professor Anthony Clare in the Sunday Times Books section.’ They walked through the kitchen and outside into the garden again. A wind was rocking the trees, blowing ashes and leaves in swirls and loops, making Lillian feel strange and light-headed. Tim had just told her that Gordon was the proprietor who’d sacked her, but she couldn’t feel angry about it; she could never dislike this nice man, Gordon’s dad. Come Into the Garden was another world. Let Clement take her standard lamp if he wanted to: what did she care? If anyone had

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offered her a lumpy cup-soup with crotons at this moment, she would have rejected it utterly, waved it away, as an unwelcome reminder of Angela’s vomit, nothing more. ‘I don’t think I’ve met Margaret,’ she said. ‘Is she the one everyone says is a cow?’ ‘That’s right. She was writing a book about Tim—your colleague, yes?—but we burned the notes. He seems suddenly a great deal happier now.’ ‘Tim never mentioned Margaret at the office, you know.’ ‘Not even when they split up?’ ‘No. But then we didn’t talk about our private lives. I didn’t know Michelle had a boyfriend. I just knew she wrote mad letters to Osborne. And I suppose, now I come to think of it, that personally I never talked about Mister Bunny—sorry, I mean, Jeff. No, hang on, no, not Jeff, what is it?’ ‘Your husband?’ ‘Mm. Jack. Jerry. George.’ They surveyed the ruined shed. Neither of them quite knew why they were doing it, or why they’d suddenly gone quiet. ‘Why did you call yourself Miss Dexter?’ ‘I’ve forgotten.’ ‘I liked the stuffed bunny-rabbit.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘I sent it a lettuce leaf for breakfast.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Are you fond of Osborne?’ ‘I suppose I must be. But not the way Michelle is. She wants to stick sprigs of rosemary up his nose and use his erect member to make holes in potting compost.’ ‘You’d never guess, to look at her.’ Lillian laughed. ‘Could you fancy a walk into town?’ said Gordon’s dad, offering his arm. The gesture reminded her of Osborne. ‘That would be lovely.’ He opened the gate for her, and they set off down the lane. ‘I’m sorry about Come Into the Garden. Were you there a very long time?’ ‘Only fifteen years.’ ‘It must have been good, then?’ There was a pause. ‘No,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Not good. Just safe.’ 

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‘Who in the name of alimentary tracts are—all—these people?’ barked Angela, hurling herself on to a soft sofa, her face white and shiny, her hair sticking flat to her head. ‘Who in particular is that woman shoving her body at Trent Carmichael and why is she waving an amputated mitt?’ ‘She’s another of my sacked employees,’ said Gordon glumly, forgetting that she didn’t know this yet. ‘What? Are you Digger Enterprises?’ gasped Michelle, looking for confirmation to Tim, who nodded. ‘Good God.’ Stunned, she sat down and wrung her hands—her own, then the fake one, and then all three together. ‘So are you from the gardening magazine?’ asked Carmichael. ‘Not a nun, after all?’ Angela exchanged glances with Gordon and leaned forward. ‘I used to play scenes like this when I did Shakespeare,’ she whispered. ‘They’ll be talking about moles on their father’s cheek soon.’ He smiled. She spoke up. ‘Anyone else need to know who anyone else is? Feel free, I mean it. Since we are surely on the verge of clearing up a lot of misunderstandings, we might as well start with present company.’ She looked around. ‘You, sir!’ she pointed at Tim, who jumped. ‘Who the hell are you? And Gordon, are you aware that your dad just went down the road with a lady in a pink coat whom nobody knows from Zsa Zsa Gabor?’ ‘Oh, that was Lillian,’ chorused Tim, Michelle and Gordon. Angela raised her eyes. ‘And what does Lillian do, when she’s at home?’ ‘Well, at an educated guess,’ said Michelle, ‘probably not much more than she does at work.’  ‘What was the best thing about being a secretary?’ asked Gordon’s dad, as they strolled past Dunquenchin and down towards the Chimneypot nursery on the way to the shops. ‘The best thing about being a secretary?’ she repeated. She blinked, and thought quite hard, but somehow nothing would come. ‘I mean, did you take a pride in it?’ The question was definitely in English, but Lillian still seemed puzzled by it. She stopped, lit a cigarette and shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she grimaced helplessly, ‘perhaps we should talk about you instead.’ ‘I’m genuinely interested, really. When we took the decision to close down the magazine, we came and saw the office at the weekend. I probably saw your desk.’ ‘Look, it’s really not interesting.’ ‘It is, to me.’ ‘All right. Mainly my job entailed a mail-sack and a pair of tongs, and the

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phone ringing, and messengers turning up, and the best bit was systematically throwing away all the readers’ letters to Ted’s Tips, Dear Donald and Katie’s Cuttings, because it meant Michelle had to make them all up in the evenings.’ ‘You don’t like Michelle?’ ‘Ha!’ ‘What’s wrong with her?’ ‘She’s supercilious, arch, martyrish, hostile—’ ‘So you threw away the letters to Dear Donald?’ ‘Yeah. Amongst other things.’ Lillian took a long drag on the cigarette and then chucked it into some dry leaves by the side of the road. ‘You can start fires like that, you know.’ ‘Oh, give me a break.’ ‘Sorry.’ They walked on. ‘I want to ask you something personal. When we looked around the office, I saw a corner with a lampstand and a square of carpet—was that yours?’ ‘Yes.’ She giggled. ‘Well, the funny thing is that I assumed the person who worked there must be sixty years old, at least. So I’m a bit puzzled. Here you are, talking to your husband like you’re two and a half, and acting at work like you’re sixty. So what I want to know is: when do you get to be your real age—when you are, if I may say so without sounding creepy and smarmy like that smarmy creep Trent Carmichael, in your prime?’ Lillian looked crestfallen. He hesitated, but on the other hand, having got this far, he thought he’d better continue. ‘I’m not a very clever man, and I don’t have Margaret’s knowledge, let alone her inquisitive inclinations. But on the other hand, I do wonder whether—good lord, did you see that?’ Lillian wiped a tear on her sleeve and sniffed. ‘What?’ ‘There’s someone in the garden centre.’ ‘Why shouldn’t there be?’ ‘Because it’s Thursday.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘Someone’s broken in. And this is going to sound rather odd, but it appeared to be a chimp or a midget in a thin blue frock. You didn’t see it, Lillian? On the bike?’ Lillian smiled weakly. ‘I was thinking about something else.’ ‘You don’t mind me calling you Lillian?’ ‘As long as you promise not to call me Bunny.’

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‘Fair enough.’ ‘So what do you want to do?’ ‘I’m thinking.’ But Lillian thought first. ‘Didn’t Tim say something about seeing Osborne abducted by a midget in a frock? I mean, it may be a different midget, of course, but—’ ‘You’re right. I’d better get the others. You stay here and keep watch and I’ll run back. Can you do that?’ ‘Of course I can.’ ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’ He put his hand towards her, but didn’t touch. ‘Right, I’ll go.’ ‘Just one thing, though. I think Tim also mentioned a pitchfork. And it seems to me, if I rack my memory, that this may be significant, and have something to do with nipples. The figure you saw, did it have a pitchfork too?’ ‘I believe it did.’ ‘Well, in that case you’d better get your skates on.’  ‘Alone at last!’ cackled Makepeace, flinging wide the door of the Resteezy shed, and standing arms akimbo like the jolly Green Giant. ‘Ha ha ha ha ha.’ Osborne looked up wearily. He was a patient man by nature, but he was getting tired of this. ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, think what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘We’ve been alone lots of times. We were alone in the van coming down here, alone in our room at Dunquenchin. We’ve been alone at your flat, and at mine, and in pubs and down the caff. And besides, there’s the rabbit here now—’ ‘Stop quibbling,’ said Makepeace. ‘But—’ ‘Stop it.’ ‘Oh, all right.’ Makepeace struggled to recapture his former confidence. He went ‘Ha ha ha, ha ha ha,’ again, which helped. ‘It seems to me you’re not taking this seriously enough, my lily-skinned friend. Why do you think I brought you here? Why, to fulfil my fantasies with you! The whole lot. Hose, pitchfork, lawn-feed, everything—even the dibber.’ Osborne looked at him. At last he’d fallen in, after all this time. It was so simple. This man was mad. ‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’ ‘You look like a chimp.’

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‘I don’t.’ ‘And there’s a woman behind you, about to hit you on the head with a shovel.’ ‘No, there isn’t.’ ‘There is, you know,’ said Lillian from behind, and with a fabulous ringing dung! noise, Osborne’s forty-eight hours in captivity were finally brought to a close.

Chapter 14




Only one thing cast a faint pall over the celebratory tea held at Dunquenchin that Thursday afternoon. Margaret Sexton had been found dead in Angela’s garden. ‘Grisly, really,’ shuddered Trent, helping himself to another toasted teacake. ‘Horrible,’ agreed Michelle, spooning out some jam. Momentarily, everyone in the room stopped laughing and chattering (‘So it was you, all the time!’ ‘Yes, me!’) and generally drawing the many laborious misunderstandings of the past few days to a satisfactory close. It was Trent who had found the body, and now all eyes turned to him, in hope of gauging his feelings. But although he made a loud burp and said, ‘Excuse me,’ he otherwise betrayed no sign of inner turmoil. It looked like a suspicious death, however. Foul play was certainly indicated. Shears, rake, weed-killer, garden twine, bucket, all the usual things had been employed. Flower-pots, hose, watering-can, secateurs. ‘Someone must have thought she was a real cow,’ averred Osborne, in his innocence, and was surprised when the entire roomful of people stared guiltily into their tea. ‘I suppose, to be fair, we ought to investigate,’ said Gordon. ‘I mean, it must have been, ahem, to coin a phrase, someone in this room that did it. In fact, pretty obviously it was Trent.’ Trent looked up, but said nothing. Gordon, embarrassed, cleared his throat and continued. ‘Surely it’s obvious. For a start, (a) Trent can’t imagine killing anyone without popping into a garden centre first; (b) he knows most about murder; (c) he hated her; (d) she was blackmailing him; (e) she’d deceived him; and (f ) he’s got a new girlfriend who might have put him up to it.’ Gordon looked at the floor, his heart thumping. ‘No hard feelings, of course, Mr Carmichael.’ ‘Of course not,’ agreed Trent, with the weird smile of a man who has already killed off his young pipsqueak antagonist in his latest novel with a pair of shears. ‘Goes without saying.’ Michelle loyally spooned some jam on to the back of his hand. He looked her in the eye and licked it off slowly. ‘Perhaps it’s not as simple as all that, anyway,’ piped Angela. ‘Trent doesn’t know anything about real murder. And if we all start accusing each other—’ ‘Well, I think you did it!’ said Michelle, jumping to her feet. ‘After all, Margaret broke up your marriage!’

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‘She did?’ shrieked Angela, jumping up likewise. ‘Jesus, what a cow.’ Osborne felt slightly detached from all this. He didn’t know Margaret. He knew Trent Carmichael only by means of his boring shed in Highgate and the lousy plots of his books. And self-evidently he could proffer no useful insight into this nasty murder, since there had been scarcely a second in the past two days when he wasn’t either locked up with a long-suffering rabbit, or in bed with Angela Farmer investigating Daphne du Maurier’s Vanishing Cornwall. So while the others debated the murder in question, he just felt sad and preoccupied. It is not every day that a friend goes bonkers and is sectioned under the Mental Health Act. When they led Makepeace to the waiting car with his arm twisted behind his blue-chiffoned back, he had uttered an extraordinary plea which would live in Osborne’s memory in all his future years: ‘You can’t do this to me,’ he said with solemnity, ‘I am a contributor to The Times Literary Supplement.’ ‘I think Osborne should look into it,’ said Lillian. ‘He would have a fresh eye.’ ‘Yes, but he also doesn’t know who anyone is,’ snapped Trent. ‘He could find out.’ ‘So could anybody.’ ‘Well, someone’s got to do something.’ Angela interjected. ‘Well, I think Osborne must be tired, poor baby. Don’t you need a quiet lie-down?’ And she waggled her eyebrows at him in a suggestive manner. Catching the unmissable nuance of this, Michelle stifled a scream of annoyance. ‘I’m phoning Mother,’ she said, running from the room. ‘And I think you’re all mad.’ She slammed the door behind her. Angela looked around carefully. ‘Hey, I think I’ve been in this play,’ she said. ‘And unless I’m mistaken, this is the moment when the policeman appears at the front door in a very tall helmet and we all freeze with our hands to our mouths and the curtain comes down to a cloudburst of applause.’  Things were gathering unstoppable speed. For example, when Mister Bunny stepped gingerly from the train at Honiton station, he was promptly knocked over sideways, with some violence, by a woman in a motorized wheelchair careering wildly along the platform, ostensibly out of control. It was a bad start for a visit. A litter-bin broke his fall, but possibly at the cost of a fractured rib, so the benefit was questionable. ‘Aagh,’ he exclaimed, clutching his dented chestal area. ‘What was that?’ His glimpsed impression was of an old, cracked-looking female in a velour track-suit shouting ‘Out of my way’ and ‘Mind your backs’ as she gouged a path through the new arrivals before hurtling towards the far end of the platform, where it ended in a sheer drop and a small pile of gravel.

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‘Aagh,’ he repeated, staggering towards a bench and sitting down. Not only had she knocked him sideways, she’d run over his foot, leaving a nasty black mark on his Hush Puppy. In some respects, the random childlike brutality of this woman reminded him fondly of Lillian, but he cast such thoughts from his mind. After all, he was a man with a mission. Beside him he placed a small square suitcase, which he patted affectionately, evidently glad that it was safe. ‘No harm done, I expect,’ he said aloud, although no one was present to hear him, least of all the death-on-wheels lady, who had now mysteriously vanished. ‘Oh well.’ He picked up the suitcase and placed it under his arm. ‘Come on,’ he said, again to nobody visible. He was hobbling slightly. ‘Ouch.’ Why was he here? Because, in his desperation to locate his bunnykins beloved, he had telephoned Come Into the Garden and spoken to Clement, the sub-editor; and against an unusually loud and echoing atmospheric clatter—suggestive of masons and electricians working inside the dome of St Paul’s—Clement had explained in a raised voice about redundancy and Digger Enterprises and Honiton, and so on. Which had led Mister Bunny straight to the Honiton train. ‘What’s that din?’ yelled Mister Bunny. ‘Is somebody using an electric saw in there?’ ‘That’s right. Well, the editor said we should take home anything we liked, and my colleague Ferdie has decided he wants to dismantle the built-in bookcases.’ ‘I see.’ ‘Which is only fair because as well as half the furniture I’ve got the carpets and a few of the partition walls, and the light fittings and the boiler, and the sink from the Gents.’ ‘What’s left, then?’ Clement looked around. ‘This phone. And some underlay. And the old red mark on the wall where the franking machine exploded. I was saying to Lillian, it’s funny how you start off not wanting to take anything—just an angle-poise lamp or a dictionary, you know—and then somehow you can’t stop, and before you know it—’ At which point, mercifully, Mister Bunny’s money ran out.  ‘Er, do you think these tyre tracks are significant?’ asked Osborne, worried that he was stating the obvious. At the scene of the crime, despite the trampling of many feet around the body (all had wanted to check that Margaret was really dead), the keen-eyed detective was able to discern a distinct and extensive crisscross pattern of neat parallel ruts, about twenty-four inches apart. What could this mean? Osborne’s brain worked rapidly. These marks were suggestive of either a motorized wheelchair doing repeated three-point-turns, or a frenzied

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Dalek with mud on its eyeball, or possibly a pair of novelty-act synchronized twin cyclists of outstanding technical versatility. ‘Did trick cyclists kill this woman?’ he said, puzzled. Angela, Trent and Michelle gathered around to look at the evidence—the others having sensibly stayed in the warm at Dunquenchin. Osborne explained his theory, waving at the tracks in a vague but hopeful way. ‘A trick cyclist homicide hit-team? That’s a new one,’ said Trent, fumbling in his inside pocket for a notebook and pencil. But Michelle did not respond. She was staring at the tracks. ‘I’ve just had a horrible thought,’ she said. Angela didn’t care very much, and suggested they go inside for coffee. ‘I say it was cyclists; and I say they won’t get far,’ she said. ‘Stand out a mile in any normal setting, pirouetting on their back wheels playing Ravel’s Bolero on the kazoo. I’d like to know their motive, that’s all. What do you think, Trent? Hey, perhaps Margaret was writing a book about their unnatural love for their bikes.’ ‘You mean, velocipedophiles?’ suggested Michelle dismally, from force of subeditorial habit. ‘Yeah. Velocipedophiles, that’s good,’ said Angela. ‘Take it from me, lady, you were wasted as a nun. Velocipedophiles—you can imagine what they get up to, those sleazy bastards, greasing their pumps—’ ‘Riding tiny little innocent trikes,’ added Carmichael, nodding. ‘Selling illicit videos of the Tour de France—’ ‘But it wasn’t cyclists who killed Margaret,’ Michelle interrupted, with a gravity that made them both stop and listen. ‘It was my mother. And I think I know why she did it.’ Angela made a tut-tut noise. ‘Listen, I have been in this play. But for the life of me I just can’t remember whether I get killed early so I can start drinking before the interval.’  Tim put down the phone and, with his eyes closed, feebly traced his way along the walls to the kitchen, where Gordon was washing up. ‘That was Mrs Lewis, my next-door neighbour,’ he said, stunned. ‘She had a bit of bad news.’ He sat down. ‘Not the cat?’ Gordon sympathized. ‘No, the cat’s fine.’ ‘Oh good.’ ‘Yes, since the door was open, he ran out in the street. And luckily the fire engine swerved to avoid him.’

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‘What fire engine?’ ‘The one that put out the fire in my living-room.’ ‘Oh.’ Tim, as though in a trance, removed his spectacles and then banged his head on the kitchen table, quite hard, three times. He put his specs back on again. ‘No, it’s still true,’ he said. ‘Oh God.’ ‘Was it an accident? Some thoughtless oversight?’ ‘No, that’s the funny thing. She did it deliberately.’ ‘Who?’ ‘Mrs Lewis.’ ‘Why?’ ‘She said she was fed up with me ringing her from the office, and from here, and from tube stations, and from the corner shop, to check that the place hadn’t burned down while I was away.’ ‘Still, it’s a bit extreme.’ ‘That’s what I said.’ ‘How’s the damage?’ ‘Apparently the flat is habitable. It just looks awful and it serves me right.’ ‘So you can go back if you want to?’ ‘And she’s taken the cat.’ ‘Oh well.’ Gordon sat down beside him, and kindly put an arm on his shoulder. Tim wanted to cry again. ‘Can you show me that Phototropism thing you told me about? I feel I need taking out of myself.’ ‘All right. If you’re sure. I need to tinker with it first, though, because Makepeace interfered with it somehow.’ ‘I can wait,’ said Tim. His mind’s eye was consumed with the picture of his living-room carpet alive with flame, his Post-it notes combusting spontaneously on the door-frames like the necklace of fairy-lights around Harrods. ‘Do you know what I really regret?’ ‘No, what?’ ‘That Margaret didn’t live to see this moment. You see, she always upheld I was worrying about nothing.’  As Mister Bunny hobbled up the lane towards Dunquenchin, he encountered Michelle and Trent Carmichael stooped double and agitatedly tracing a set of tyre tracks in the opposite direction. ‘There!’ yelled Michelle. ‘And there!’ ‘If only I had a big magnifying glass and a fancy pipe,’ said Trent sarcastically.

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‘This isn’t funny!’ she snapped. ‘We’ve got to find this wheelchair before it’s too late!’ It was at the word wheelchair that Mister Bunny decided to intervene. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Busy,’ said Michelle, waving him away. ‘Did you say you were looking for a woman in a wheelchair?’ ‘Yes, she’s my mother. What’s it to you?’ ‘Would she be wearing a track-suit?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then she ran over my foot at the station just five minutes ago,’ said Mister Bunny, proffering his Hush Puppy for inspection. ‘And I’d like to say that a more reckless—’ ‘The station?’ ‘That’s right. But—’ ‘Trent. Come on. We’ve got her.’ ‘Perhaps you can help me, too,’ Mister Bunny called after them. ‘I’m looking for a tall blonde woman in a pink coat.’ ‘Really?’ Michelle narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, be careful if you find her. I happen to know that this morning she hit a man on the head with a shovel.’  ‘Everything is going too fast,’ said Osborne, while Angela stroked his forehead and made nice, friendly, croony noises into his ear. ‘So slow down.’ ‘Everyone’s dashing about, discovering things. We’re hurtling towards the edge and there’s a sheer drop and a small pile of gravel!’ ‘You’re delirious. Perhaps it was the shock to your system of eating something other than cake.’ ‘I’m not used to it, that’s all. I’ve just spent two days in cupboards.’ ‘So ease up.’ ‘It’s very agitating out here. And I miss the rabbit. Is he OK?’ ‘He’s fine. He’s eating Murder, Shear Murder. He gave me a look that said it tasted like the gardener did it.’ Osborne rolled over. They were lying wrapped in a duvet on the sitting-room floor. Angela had pulled the curtains against the early night, switched on some lamps, and lit the fire. The only thing to ruin the mood was the music, which by an unfortunate but understandable error was not Al Bowly (as Osborne had requested) but Abba’s Greatest Hits, Volume Two. ‘Did you miss me?’ shouted Osborne above the jaunty din of ‘Take a Chance on Me’.

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‘What a question. Does cowpat stick to your shoes?’ ‘I missed you very much.’ ‘Like hell.’ ‘Will we keep in touch?’ ‘You going somewhere?’ Osborne thought about it. He pictured, for some reason, the Birthplace of Aphrodite; in particular, the woman with the grey cloth who slopped the tables while you were eating your toast, and who always put your cooked breakfast down on top of your newspaper, before you could move it out of the way. ‘You don’t have a job any more.’ ‘I know. Thanks.’ ‘But look on the bright side. You know a lot about celebrity sheds.’ ‘Oh yes. I forgot.’ Osborne tried to remember when he had last seen a job advertisement that said ‘Knowledge of celebrity sheds an advantage’. ‘Angela, do you really think the Observer will snap up my column?’ ‘Trust me, I’ve got a plan. Does the name Chimneypot mean anything to you?’ ‘Something to do with Father Christmas?’ She tweaked his nose. ‘Yeah. If you like. Something to do with Father Christmas.’  Lillian stretched out her arms, yawned and snuggled closer to the fire. Virtuous exhaustion was a novel sensation, and one to be relished. This had been a great day for her, all in all—first the searing, cleansing conversation with Gordon’s dad, then the daring rescue of Osborne, followed by the modest disclaimers (‘Anyone would have done the same, Michelle, but funny how it was me’), and now the peace and quiet for reflection in the cosy lounge at Dunquenchin. ‘Mother Teresa of Calcutta must feel like this every day,’ she thought, wiggling her toes. Somehow the mental picture of Mother Teresa panting, wiping her brow and resting on her shovel after heroically clouting a loony on the side of the head was a surprisingly pleasing one. She must mention it to Gordon’s dad. ‘Who was at the door?’ she chirped, hearing Gordon’s dad return from answering the bell. And turning, she found herself face to face with Mister Bunny. ‘Bunny,’ he said, simply. ‘Smee.’ ‘Bunny. Oh.’ She looked at Gordon’s dad, who deliberately looked the other way. ‘Er, hey-wo bunny. How doin?’ They stared at one another. Mister Bunny extended the suitcase. ‘I bwung Dexie,’ he explained. ‘Shall I leave you?’ asked Gordon’s dad. ‘Or shall I try to interpret?’

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‘No, it’s all right,’ said Lillian. ‘Do you think we could have a cup of tea?’ ‘My pleasure.’ Gordon’s dad paused before leaving the room, however. ‘You must be Mister Bunny, then?’ Mister Bunny nodded. ‘And is this Dexter, the teddy bear that’s not very well at the moment?’ He pointed at the tiny suitcase. Mister Bunny nodded again. ‘Well, I just can’t tell you how lucky you’ve been in your timing. My niece Margaret would have grabbed you, chomped you and minced you up into little pieces—bones, fur, little ears, squeaker, button-eyes and all. But you will be relieved to hear she succumbed to an unexpected bombardment of garden implements today at about half-past two p.m. Cup of tea, then, Lillian?’ Mister Bunny signalled at him to wait, and then produced a cup-soup sachet from his coat pocket. ‘Bunny, look, got crutongs,’ he smiled. It was a difficult moment. ‘Just the tea, please, Mr Clarke,’ said Lillian. And she wondered whether Mother Teresa likewise was sometimes cruel to be kind.

‘Right. Hold on,’ said Gordon. ‘It’s nearly there.’ Tim watched amazed as his new friend voyaged into the dark interior of a computer program, stooped in deep concentration over his keyboard, his body shaped like a human question mark as he tapped and thought and tapped some more. ‘No wonder Makepeace went off his rocker,’ Gordon commented wearily to no one in particular. And then went tap, tap, click, tap, tap again. ‘Sorry,’ said Tim, casting an eye around Gordon’s office, ‘but I’ve only just put two and two together. Did you invent Digger?’ ‘That’s right.’ Tap, tap, tip, tap-tap-tap. ‘Hence Digger Enterprises?’ ‘Mm.’ Tap. Tip. ‘But Digger was enormous, Gordon. Why aren’t you offensively rich?’ ‘I am. I just bought Frobisher’s, remember.’ ‘But why aren’t you a big company?’ ‘I didn’t want to be.’ Tap, tap, thump. ‘I wanted to work at home. I wanted to keep my own life simple. But I’ve got lots of people working for me, one way or another, in the town, in London, in the US. And Dad’s been marvellous.’ ‘Lumme. I had no idea. And this one’s called Phototropism? I hate to be critical, Gordon, but it’s not quite as catchy as Digger.’

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‘Oh, I know.’ Tap, tap, tip-tip, tap. ‘It’s just provisional.’ ‘Would you like me to think of a name? I’m pretty good with words, especially horticultural ones. Well, it’s my job. I mean, you know. Was.’ ‘That would be great.’ Tap, tap, click, click, whir, tap, tap. Thump. ‘In fact, you can tell me your ideas when you get back from your journey into the unknown.’ Gordon helped him into the glove and helmet (‘Sorry, specs off ’) and sat back. ‘Just stop whenever you feel like it,’ he said. ‘But tell me first, what can you see?’ Tim took a while to reply. ‘A really intense black,’ he said at last, ‘as though light has never existed.’ ‘Do you feel anything?’ ‘No. Unless, yes, the hairs of my arms are tingling. And I seem to be stretching, relaxed, turning very slowly. Am I floating?’ ‘Not visibly.’ ‘Oh, but I am. Weightless, warm, drawn out. And now there’s music coming from somewhere. Gordon, you’re a genius, this is beautiful.’ ‘What does it feel like?’ ‘Well. I don’t know how to put this without sounding crazy, but I think I’m, um, germinating.’ ‘I’ll shut up, then. Good luck.’ ‘You could call it Come Into the Garden. In memoriam, sort of. You could give away free packets of seeds.’ ‘Now you’re rambling.’ ‘Like a wild English rose?’ ‘Like an idiot.’ ‘Bye, then.’ ‘See you later.’ Gordon set a stop-watch for fifteen minutes and quietly left the room. Outside, he leaned on the door. ‘What’s up?’ said his dad, arriving with some mugs of tea. ‘Gordon, you’re crying.’ The boy wiped the tears from his eyes, and blew his nose in a large hanky. ‘I don’t know why, Dad. I just feel a lot better now, that’s all.’  ‘How long have we known each other now?’ gasped Trent Carmichael, clutching his chest as he raced to keep up with Michelle. She was steaming along the London platform at Honiton station for the third time, yelling ‘Mother!’ ‘Since yesterday morning,’ she called back. ‘Is that all?’

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They both stopped in their tracks. They could hardly believe it. Trent Carmichael leaned against a wall and wheezed. ‘I don’t even know, why we’re doing this,’ he panted. ‘I’ve obviously lost track. You think your mother killed Margaret, using a composite of all the murder methods she’d found in my books?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘Because you had told her on the phone that you’d met the original of the girl in S is for . . . Secateurs! which she was obsessed with?’ ‘That’s my theory.’ ‘Right. Got it. So tell me this. If she’s such a dangerous maniac, why on earth do we want to find her?’ ‘Because that’s what you do to murderers. I’m surprised at you, Trent. You of all people should know that you must track them down and confront them.’ ‘Can we sit down?’ ‘What?’ ‘I want to sit down.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Don’t look so worried, sweetheart,’ he said, ‘I only want to talk to you.’ With a sudden intense weariness which bleached her blood, Michelle realized what Trent Carmichael was going to say. It was brush-off time. That ghastly upbeat inflection is never used for anything else—it goes with ‘It’s been fun, really!’ and ‘I’ll never forget how we found that body in the garden!’ So it was all over, bar the platitudes. Here, on a cold, dark station platform, in a place she’d previously considered entirely notional (‘G. Clarke, Honiton, Devon’), he would ditch her with a clear conscience and bugger off home. She tried to think positively about it, but with no job to return to, and now no mother she dare reside with, dismay promptly overwhelmed her. How predictable life is. Of course she will pretend she agrees with him (‘Marvellous interlude!’), promise to come and see the famous shed (‘One day!’), laugh about the hectic run of events, ask jokingly to see the novel she appears in. And then he’ll get on a train and wave, and she’ll know for a certainty that he’s secretly thinking, ‘Thank God that’s over.’ ‘Well, Trent, it’s been real,’ she said bravely, trying not to cry. ‘That’s true,’ he agreed, puzzled. ‘And yes, one day I’ll come and see that shed!’ ‘Oh. All right. Good.’ ‘And thanks for the autograph! I’ll treasure it!’ You had to hand it to her, she was taking pluck into new dimensions. ‘Michelle, why are you talking like this? Are you going somewhere?’ ‘No. Aren’t you?’ ‘Not unless you are. I just wanted to ask you if you fancied going back to that

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garden centre we passed, where Osborne was tied up. I thought you might, you know, get off on it.’ She said nothing. ‘I think the pitchfork is still there,’ he added. Michelle’s mouth went dry. ‘Are you offended?’ ‘God, no.’ ‘So you don’t mind if we give up chasing your mother?’ ‘Not a bit.’ ‘Even though I think I can hear a faint moaning coming from the end of the platform, where conceivably she tipped over the edge into a small pile of gravel?’ ‘Leave her.’ They got up to go. ‘You know something, Michelle? As a writer of crime fiction, your imagination intrigues me very deeply.’ Wincing, she put her hands to her ears. ‘Just wait till I get my hands on your dangling modifiers,’ she warned, saucily.

Chapter 15




In the subsequent eighteen months, the following celebrity profiles and guest spots nearly (but, for reasons that will be apparent, never quite) appeared in the British press, in periodicals as divergent as The Times, the Independent on Sunday, Radio Times, Old Flames (the ex-firemen’s gazette), Which Shed? Monthly and the Guardian. They are reprinted here in no particular order. How We Met: Gordon Clarke and Timothy Johnson The brains behind SHOOT!, the internationally bestselling ecological virtual reality program, came to partnership only last November. Clarke, 20, was the schoolboy inventor of Digger; Johnson, 24, a penniless journalist working at the sharp end of gardening tips. Famously, the name SHOOT! (a brainwave attributed to Johnson) cleverly misled thousands of adolescent boys into playing the game (or buying the home interactive video version) in expectation of violence and zap guns when in fact it soothed the savage beast and reputedly reduced violent teenage crime in Britain by a tenth in its first week of release and sale. Both men are now based part-time in Victoria, in a large empty post-modern distressed office environment—bare wires, no carpet, no sink in the Gents—and part-time in Honiton, Devon. GORDON CLARKE: It’s funny but I can’t remember now what it was like not to know Tim. He’s already the best friend I ever had. When we met, he had just been having some quite grisly girlfriend trouble—well, ex-girlfriend trouble, to be precise—and this brought us together, especially as I helped him bury the whole thing, as you might say, about six foot under. My first sight of him, I thought, ‘What a weed.’ It’s awful but it’s true. All I knew about him, before we met, was a story that in childhood he dug up some daffodil bulbs to see how they were doing. Big joke, right? But in a way, that’s what I was doing both with Digger and SHOOT!—playing with the idea that dormancy is only a natural phase in the cycle of growth. So I recognized him as a kindred spirit. Tim has an extraordinary mind, but he worries too much. If I want to know what he’s thinking, I say ‘What are you worrying about now?’ and he doesn’t see that there’s anything odd in the question—you know, that his natural mode is worrying rather than just thinking. We suit each other because I can override a lot of this worry. He’s neurotic, really. And he’s obsessive. And compulsive too, I think. But the success of SHOOT! has helped him in lots of ways. He wears looser jumpers now. His specs don’t steam up so often. Now we are working together on a project for a new monthly gardening magazine, which he will edit. Personally, I liked the idea of calling it Maud, since it’s the natural sequel to Come Into the Garden, but Tim assures me that ‘Maud’ is

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not a sexy name for a magazine. He says, imagine going into a newsagent and saying, ‘Maud out yet?’ I trust Tim’s judgement in these matters. He’s the ‘words’ man, after all. Sexually, we suit each other very well indeed. Before we met, we were both pretty hazy about our sexuality. I didn’t really ‘come out’, as such; more sort-of turned round one day and found I was out already. My Auntie Angela says my love of musicals was an early indicator that I was gay, but I must admit I didn’t suspect a thing. Tim is a lovely person. I’m going to buy him a cat for his birthday, but he doesn’t know that yet. TIMOTHY JOHNSON: I’m not sure about this. What did Gordon tell you? Are you trying to trick me into saying something that contradicts what Gordon said? Can I see a copy of what Gordon said? No, I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I think we ought to stop. On My Mantelpiece: Angela Farmer Oh God, look, I meant to tidy it before you came but oh, what the fuck, this is meant not to be serious, right? OK, so starting from the left, a crumpled bag of peanut brittle (not mine), some shed brochures (not mine either), empty Cognac bottle (that is mine), and Trent Carmichael’s new hardback, Never the Twine Shall Meet. (Have you read this? It’s the one where an old innocent put-upon guy gets his revenge on a young psychologist by hiring a bizarre trick cyclist homicidal hit-team, and ends up living with a libidinous ex-nun he meets by chance on a train. I don’t know how he thinks of them.) What? Oh yes, mantelpiece. Then we’ve got a couple of scripts for new TV sitcoms (crap, actually; forget those, I’ll chuck ’em out), the lease to the local garden centre (which I recently bought, when Chimneypot went bankrupt), bits of underwear, condoms. That’s it. What do you mean, why do I keep condoms on the mantelpiece? To keep them away from the rabbit, why do you think? Kitty Corner: Cat Rescue of the Month This week we spotlight in Kitty Corner a very lucky puss rescued by Mrs Abigail Lewis, after a mysterious fire rendered him completely homeless. ‘I don’t know how that fire started,’ says Mrs Abigail Lewis, cradling a limp, relaxed Lester in her arms like a baby, ‘but I simply had to save the cat. Now he lives with me and I am making up for the neglect he suffered previously, living with the sort of person who starts fires out of sheer carelessness. Lester is a very loving cat, very sensitive. He’s very fond of expensive food, unfortunately, which sometimes means I have to go without. But on the other hand, who needs adequate nutrition when they could have a wonderful little cat like Lester? ‘I think he wants to have a sleep now, so perhaps you could leave. I’ve got his

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bed made up with a hot-water bottle and a fleecy blanket, and I’ve drawn the curtains just the way he likes them. So I just have to kiss each of his paws—mwah! mwah! mwah! mwah!—and tickle his ears, and rest his catnip toy on his white linen pillow, and tiptoe out again. Bless him. Oh yes, sometimes I lie on the floor next to him, in case he wakes up and wants something.’ My TV Dinner: Angela Farmer It depends who’s cooking, you see. If it’s me we might just have a big drink, a piece of cheese and a slice of fruitcake, but if my lover-baby is cooking (if that’s the right word—I mean ‘cooking’, not ‘lover-baby’) he’s a lot more inventive, especially with tinned stuff, which he mixes together, cold. No, it’s fine. Really. Don’t worry about me, I can take it. And it’s a real scream to watch, too. A subtle transformation occurs as he stirs it all together in a big bowl with a trowel. Tuna, baked beans, sweetcorn, rice pudding, peach slices. I’ve learned a lot. It’s amazing how many different ways food can resemble puke. A Life in the Day: Trent Carmichael I rise at nine on most days, listen to the radio for its edifying effect on my imagination, and depending on how exhausted I am from yesterday’s efforts (at writing, I mean) return to bed with a cup of delicately fragranced herb tea for another snooze. Writing is very hard work, people should realize, especially when one is forever inventing very complicated murder plots involving Spear & Jackson garden implements in new and breathtaking combinations! People tell me I’ve made a rod for my own back with all these secateurs and buckets, but I don’t see it that way, it’s what I’m famous for, and I’m grateful. I mean, did Will Shakespeare ever complain, ‘They keep demanding the same old blank verse, but I am an artist, I want to express myself in limerick and knock-knock jokes’? Personally, I ain’t convinced. My girlfriend, Michelle, is a great help to me, she’s one in a million, especially when she changes all my prose and rescues me from silly grammatical mistakes. She’s a whizz on my computer, evidently, although actually I’ve never shown her how to use it. In fact, quite the contrary—I keep changing the password. But even when I finish the day by putting my latest writing in a secret file, she still manages to find it! I might pop down to the shops for a new box of paper and when I get back and switch on the machine, my stuff has been rigorously rewritten, and the original discarded. What an amazing woman. Even when I write in longhand, and hide the sheets of paper in the shed in a special hole under the floorboards, I still find—when I retrieve it— that it’s covered in bright blue sub-editing marks, with comments such as

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‘Cliché?’ added in the margins. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I’m thinking of including her in the next book, but I haven’t thought how to ‘do’ her yet, if you catch my drift. In the afternoons I sometimes go for walks, and think about my characters as though they were real people. Actually, this isn’t as clever as it sounds, since most of them are real people. But when I need a new twist in the plot, I like to go off by myself and stand on the horizon at Parliament Hill with my head thrown back in a thoughtful pose. You could take my picture doing that, if you like. The twin cyclists in my new book, for example, I know what you’re thinking, ‘Where on earth would an idea like that come from?’ Well, it was simply divine inspiration. All I can tell you is that I just needed those trick cyclists, and suddenly, with a sweet tring! tring! of bicycle bells, there they were. I quite often do readings in bookshops in the evenings. As you know, my books are extremely popular, so it’s a surprise when so few people turn up. But my publisher assures me that many of my most devoted fans are simply infirm— in wheelchairs, nursing homes, hospitals for the criminally insane—and can’t get down to the bookshops for the readings. Which sounds plausible. We sometimes laugh about it. I mean, as long as it doesn’t prevent them from buying the books, they can be as sick as they like, I don’t care. Dinner is usually at home. Just Michelle and me, or should that be ‘Michelle and I’?—either way, just the two of us. It’s lucky we enjoy one another’s company, because curiously we don’t have any friends. Michelle tried to make some once, in the West Country, but with predictably hilarious results (as they say in the Radio Times!). So we spend our evenings plotting murders and testing out certain new plot devices in the seclusion of our own home, behind drawn curtains, not hurting anybody, and sometimes recording it on video. Michelle is usually as ready as I am for a bit of excitement when evening comes, as she spends a lot of her day in the unrewarding job of returning letters to fans with all their mistakes helpfully crossed out and altered. And so to bed. When I lie awake at night I sometimes think up names for new books, as it helps me get to sleep. My good friend Angela Farmer sometimes jokes that it takes me less time to write my books than to think of the titles, which I think, in common with all jokes, has a tiny element of truth in it! But now I have Michelle to help, and she is very good at it, so I’ve already got a stockpile of fifteen decent titles to be going on with. The next six months are going to be tough! Where Did You Get That?—Angela Farmer Where did I get what? Don’t you people have anything better to do? Oh for the love of Mike. I’ve got to go now, I’ve got my leg caught in a man-trap.

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Dagenham Delights This week local woman Mrs Lillian Bugs tells us how she and her husband changed their name by deed poll to something less silly, under advice from a Harley Street psychotherapist specializing in regression in couples. ‘We’re much better now,’ says ex-Mister Bunny’, in all seriousness, while waggling his ears and doing the goofy thing with his teeth. My Perfect Weekend—Angela Farmer Where would you go? Somewhere where nobody asked me celebrity questions all the time. How would you get there? By a miracle. Where would you stay? In bed. Who would be your perfect companion? My rabbit. I mean, no, my local shed-dealer. It’s a long story. What essential piece of clothing would you take? Bandanna. Which books would you read? ‘101 Uses of a Bandanna’. What three things would you most like to do? Have a quiet time with the rabbit. Have a quiet time with my shed-dealer. Have a quiet time with my bandanna. What would you like to find when you got home? That I was the only kid on my block who knew enough about bandannas to improvise a makeshift bunny-hammock for a tired rabbit. Old Flame of the Month: Henry Clarke Ten years after Henry Clarke left the fire service, he is now embarking on a whole new life, and asks his old cronies to ‘Come on Down!’ to a new garden centre in Honiton, where he is in charge of water gardens, ponds and fountains. ‘Can’t seem to stay away from water!’ he jokes. ‘But there is a lot more besides at the new Angela Farmer Garden Centre (formerly known as Chimneypot). Visit our amazing shed museum, in which sheds of the famous have been painstakingly reconstructed, using genuine tools, bags of manure, cat-litter, Christmas decorations and carrier-bags full of carpet offcuts, to represent—in exact replica!—sheds belonging to Harold Wilson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Jane Seymour and Frank Bough. The idea came from Osborne Lonsdale, who also gives a free guided tour of the exhibit, with anecdotes! No, it’s very interesting. Where are you going? Oh, give us a break.’ What I’m Reading—Angela Farmer I can’t believe you guys, you never give up. Every time I answer the phone! Well, what I like best are self-help books because they’re hilarious. I’m reading one about improving your telephone technique at the moment, you know, concen-

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tration, courtesy, staying awake, not rambling, that sort of thing. Hang on, sorry—You! Rabbit! Stop eating those condoms immediately! Get down, for Pete’s sake! Sorry, what was I saying, I’ve forgotten. Oh yes, self-help books. And there’s another one I’ve got which helps you remember where you’ve seen someone before, and I find that very interesting because there’s someone I can’t place—all day I’m saying, ‘Where, oh where, oh where did I meet him?’ You know?—and it’s bugging me. Hang on, sorry—I told you before! Do that again and, cute as you are, you’ll end up as PIE! Got that? Sorry, just talking to the boyfriend, he’s making disgusting food again, and I just won’t stand for it any longer. Yeah, anyway, this book tells you to look at the mystery person kinda sideways, so I keep doing that, but all it does is make him nervous. How We Met: Angela Farmer and Osborne Lonsdale For God’s sake, I keep explaining, we can’t remember. Osborne thinks it might be something to do with the theatre, because he used to review plays in the sixties and early seventies, but I’m not so sure. osborne lonsdale (quietly): She keeps squinting at me. It’s scary. farmer: The trouble is, it’s not bugging him, it’s only bugging me. He says we’ll probably just remember one day— LONSDALE: One day, yes— farmer: But meanwhile I’ve gone nutsy cuckoo, you see, so that’s why I asked you to see us together, because it might concentrate his mind a bit and get the whole thing sorted out. LONSDALE: Or it might not. farmer: Thanks. So, Mister ‘Independent on Sunday’, perhaps you could ask us some questions, to get the ball rolling? INTERVIEWER (hesitantly): Um, OK. Er, you might not believe this but actually I’m a clairvoyant with exceptional powers, and I can probably tell you how you met, if you really want to know. farmer: What? Really? (To Lonsdale) Can you believe this? LONSDALE: No. farmer (to interviewer): Sir, have you ever heard the theatrical expression deus ex machina? INTERVIEWER: I don’t think so. farmer: Well, that’s a relief, because I don’t know what it means. OK, so tell us, how did we meet, then? Do you need any special records on, and the curtains closed, and that kind of thing? INTERVIEWER: No, but it would be nice to hold the rabbit. farmer: OK. I don’t imagine you’re going to print this, are you? ANGELA FARMER:

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t h e ly n n e t r u s s t r e a s u ry I doubt it.

FARMER: Then I’d just like to say this is the best interview, aside from Osborne’s,

I’ve ever had. INTERVIEWER: Thanks. I’m drifting off, now. Would you like to hold hands? It doesn’t add anything from my point of view, but you do seem very fond of each other. Anyway, I see a garden shed. I hear muffled screams— LONSDALE (gasps): Not Makepeace? INTERVIEWER: I see a figure in a gypsy cloak unlocking the door. There is a name beginning with ‘B’. FARMER (with a shriek): It’s Barney’s. I let you out of Barney’s shed! LONSDALE: Did you? FARMER: That’s it! A kid had locked you in! LONSDALE: Oh, good. Right. Lovely. So that’s solved that, then. You can stop giving me those funny looks. INTERVIEWER (still in trance): It’s a ‘B’, but I can’t quite get the rest. Is it Benny? Bradley? FARMER: I just told you, it’s Barney. INTERVIEWER (unhearing, in a world of his own): Possibly Bailey, but I’m sticking my neck out. FARMER (ignoring him): Well, so: Barney’s shed. Phew, that’s a weight off my mind. LONSDALE: But I don’t understand what you were doing at Barney’s house when the kid locked me in the shed. Wasn’t it ages after the divorce? FARMER: Well, I was upset. And like any spurned first wife, naturally I was hanging around his new home and hoping to scatter bits of glass in the kiddies’ sand-pit under the guise of an old, gnarled gypsy woman selling hub-caps door to door. LONSDALE: Hub-caps? FARMER: Something, yeah. Actually I think it was hub-caps. But he saw through my disguise. INTERVIEWER (to himself ): Brierley, was it? Baloney? LONSDALE: What do we do about the chap in the trance? FARMER: He didn’t say anything about waking him up, did he? LONSDALE: Better leave him, you think? INTERVIEWER: Battersby? Bombay? FARMER: Sure. He looks quite happy, with the rabbit. INTERVIEWER: Bali Hai? Broccoli? Bambi? My Childhood: Trent Carmichael My childhood was absolutely normal in every respect, and nothing horrible ever happened to me to make me become a crime novelist, if that’s what you’re an-

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gling after. I had a mother and father who loved me enough to call me Trent and give me a start in life. I did all the usual childish proto-writer things, such as reading indoors when everyone else was playing rough games, and learning poetry by rote so as to be teacher’s pet. That’s not too revealing, is it? I mean, that’s normal. We had holidays in Sussex, and I enjoyed Knickerbocker Glories, but I don’t think it warped me in any way at all. You can’t read anything into a Knickerbocker Glory. Thank you, I really enjoyed doing that. Smashing. The Questionnaire: Angela Farmer What is your idea of perfect happiness? Someone to love me, and not run out. What is your greatest fear? That he’ll run out. With which historical figure do you most identify? Cinderella, maybe. Snow White. All those pathetic innocents. Sleeping Beauty. Which living person do you most admire? The confident woman who lives inside my answering machine and who tells me the time the messages arrived. She harbours not a single doubt in the whole fibre of her being. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself ? My inability to refuse interviews. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Their need to ask questions. What vehicles do you own? Why? Are you an out-of-work mechanic, or something? Who the hell wants to know what vehicles I own? I have a car. What is your greatest extravagance? Long-distance phone calls to London newspapers, to apologize for being snappy. What objects do you always carry with you? Castrol GTX, bit of rag, spanners, overalls, tyre levers, jump leads, battery recharger, spare wiper blades. What makes you most depressed? Running out of drink before 7 p.m. on a Sunday. What do you most dislike about your appearance? That I’ve got crow’s-feet. But on the other hand, it’s worse for the crow that’s got mine. What is your most unappealing habit? I dig stuff out of my ears and then eat it. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? ‘Ech! Earwax!’ What or who is (was) the greatest love of your life? My last ex-husband, see below. Which living person do you most despise? My last ex-husband, see above. What is your favourite smell? The Tahitian gardenia on the tropical hillside of Hana Iti in French Polynesia. Sorry, that’s not true. Um, gin and tonic. What is your favourite word? Glenmorangie. What is your favourite building? How many buildings do you think I’ve got? What is your favourite journey? Back from the off-licence. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Abstemiousness. On what occasions do you lie? Whenever I find sitting too strenuous. What is your greatest regret? That I am too good at acting to appear in The House of Eliott.

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When and where were you happiest? When Osborne, my new chap, said he would stay in Honiton if there was a reasonably good peanut-brittle supplier, and we found out there was. How do you relax? By pottering in the garden. I also do diggering, prunering and weedering. What single thing would improve the quality of your life? Less work. Which talent would you most like to have? To do less work, and not worry about it. What would your motto be? Something will turn up. What keeps you awake at night? Nothing. Not even sheds burning down. How would you like to die? Is that a threat? How would you like to be remembered? That’s very kind of you. Yes, I’d like that a lot. Quote of the Month (Sheds)—Osborne Lonsdale ‘I don’t know how I got into sheds, but the funny thing is this. Once you’re in them, it’s very hard to get out again.’

Tennyson’s Gift




Celebrities seem to come like misfortunes— it never rains but it pours. LEWIS CARROLL, Diaries, October 1863 There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing ridiculous. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The action takes place at Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, in the last week of July 1864

Part One Hats On Chapter 1




A blazing dusty July afternoon at Freshwater Bay; and up at Dimbola Lodge, with a glorious loud to-do, the household of Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron is mostly out of doors, applying paint to the roses. They run around the garden in the sunshine, holding up skirts and aprons, and jostle on the paths. For reasons they dare not inquire, the red roses must be painted white. If anyone asked them to guess, they would probably say, ‘Because it’s Wednesday?’ ‘You’re splashing me!’ ‘Look out!’ ‘We’ll never get it done in time!’ ‘What if she comes and we’re not finished?’ ‘It will be off with our heads!’ The smell of paint could probably stop an engine on the Great Western; so it is no surprise that it stops the inquisitive Reverend Dodgson, who happens to be sidling by the house at this moment, on his way up the lane from the sparkling afternoon sea. In fact the smell wafts so strongly through the tall briar hedge that it almost knocks his hat off. He pauses, tilts his head, and listens to the commotion with a faraway, satisfied smile. If you knew him better, you would recognize this unattractive expression. It is the smirk of a clever dysfunctional thirty-twoyear-old, middle-aged before his time, whose own singular insights and private jokes are his constant reliable source of intellectual delight. ‘O-O—Off with our heads?’ he muses, and opens a small notebook produced with a parlour magician’s flourish from an inside pocket. ‘Off with our h—heads?’ He makes a neat note with a tiny pencil. ‘H-H-H—Extraordinary.’ It is a very warm day, but Dodgson’s only thoughtful concession to holiday garb is a pale boater added to his clerical black. Perspiration gathers at his collar and in his armpits, but since this is just the sort of discomfort a real mid-Victorian gentleman is obliged to put up with, he refuses to take notice. Dodgson is a sober dresser always, and today he is on a mission of importance. The only thing that worries him is the straw hat—a larky addition which seemed a good idea at the time. He takes off the hat and studies it. He doesn’t know what to do. The trouble with the Poet Laureate—on whom Dodgson plans shortly to call—is judging the etiquette. Will the fashionable summer hat be a help or

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hindrance? Tennyson is well known for his testiness; he is a great sore-headed bear of a man who expects his full due as Top Poet. Yet at the same time he has extreme short sight and filthy clothes covered in dog hair and smelling of stale pipe tobacco. Does it matter, therefore, what a supplicant wears? Dodgson tucks the hat carefully under his arm, touches his neat hair with one hand, and then the other, and replaces the hat. A small curl on his large temple lies exactly as it should. There never was such a fastidious fellow as Dodgson when it comes to attire. It has often been remarked. When he touches his hair like that, he does it with such concentration that he seems to be checking he still has his head fixed on. ‘The Poet Laureate? Oh, very good, Dodo. Why not drop in on Her Majesty, too?’ his Christ Church colleagues sniggered supportively, before he left Oxford for the Isle of Wight. Was this sarcasm? Did they think, perhaps, that he was making it up? But yes, he is proud of it. The object of this smooth-faced stammering nonentity is indeed Alfred Tennyson, the greatest wordsmith in the land, the man who claims—with justice—to know the rhythmic value of every word in English except ‘scissors’. The man who had the extraordinary literary luck to write In Memoriam before Queen Victoria got bereaved and needed it. And if Dodgson is vain of the acquaintance (and inflates it), it is understandable. He forged this relation single-handed, Tennyson offering him no encouragement of any kind. A lesser man would have given up long since, and pushed off back to his Euclid. But when Dodgson sets his heart on befriending a fellow of celebrity or talent, he forgives all bad-tempered rebuffs, however pointed those rebuffs might be. ‘Be off with you! What are you doing in my drawing room?’ Christina Rossetti once demanded in Chelsea. (He soon overlooked this outburst of hot-blooded Latin temperament.) ‘What was your name again?’ asked John Ruskin at Coniston, a clever remark worthy of the foremost critic of the age, at which Dodgson smiled indulgently. ‘I’ll set the dog on you,’ quipped Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yes, between unequals in the social arena, the proverbial ‘nothing ventured’ is quite correct, and Dodgson proves it tire-lessly. ‘Nothing will come of nothing, speak again,’ Dodgson is pleased to repeat to himself sometimes. It shows he knows Shakespeare as well as maths. And now, this undaunted fellow carries under his arm a manuscript of a new book for children, about a girl called Alice. And he is bearing it like a great magical gift up the lane to Farringford, Tennyson’s house, two hundred yards further from the sea. He feels like a knight returning with the Holy Grail; positive that his king will be terrifically impressed.

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‘You’re not going to show Tennyson your silly book?’ they said, those Oxford know-nothings. (Dodgson just can’t stop remembering their jibes somehow.) ‘N—Not exactly,’ he replied. No, the idea was to reacquaint himself breezily with Tennyson (‘Dodgson? Is it you? Well met, my dear young fellow!’). And then, after some pleasant bread and butter on the lawn, a chat about the latest American poetry, and a kind offer of dinner and bed from Tennyson’s saintly wife Emily, Dodgson would humbly ask permission (ahem) to dedicate his little book of nonsense to the laureate’s sons. ‘To my very dear and very close friends Hallam and Lionel T,’ was the modest idea, although of course every reader would guess at once the full name of these famous children, and be tremendously envious of the author’s sky-high literary connections. ‘It’s not much to ask,’ Dodgson told his amazed collegiate cronies. ‘Want to bet?’ ‘It’s no more than asking a person to p—-pose for a ph—ph’ ‘Photograph?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You mean it doesn’t cost them anything, yet it profits you?’ ‘W-W—Well, I w—wouldn’t—.’ ‘Best of luck,’ they had laughed, interrupting. ‘I’ll have you know, I am a gr—great friend of L—Lionel T-T—,’ he began. But nobody was listening. They all knew Dodgson’s Lionel Tennyson story, and thought it a lot less flattering than Dodgson did. Evidently the poet’s glamorous ten-year-old younger son once agreed to correspond with Dodgson, but imposed an interesting condition: that he could first strike Dodgson’s head with a croquet mallet. ‘More paint here!’ ‘Slap it on, jump to it!’ Back in Freshwater, outside Mrs Cameron’s house, Dodgson wonders what on earth is going on. After weeks of drought, the hedgerow is singed brown; it crackles as he presses his body close to hear. Perhaps Mrs Cameron has ordered her grass to be painted green, so that it will look fresh and emerald from an upstairs window. Knowing of his fellow photographer’s boundless and misguided devotion to aesthetics, such lunatic set-dressing is certainly possible. Mrs Cameron is forever making extravagant gestures in the cause of Art and Friendship, both with capital letters. She is a bohemian (at the very word Dodgson shudders), with sisters of exceptional beauty and rich husbands. She hails from Calcutta, and burns incense. While Dodgson takes pictures only of gentlemen (and gentlemen’s children), Mrs Cameron poses shop-boys and servants for her dreamy Pre-Raphaelite conceits. In short, in terms of exotic personality, she is

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quite off Dodgson’s map. He has heard that she will sometimes run out of the house, Indian shawls trailing, stirring a cup of tea on its saucer! Out of doors! If in London, she will do this in the street! And sometimes, she gives away the photographs she takes, the act of a madwoman! ‘You will be visiting Mrs Cameron, sir?’ the carter at Yarmouth asked Dodgson that morning, recognizing photographic gear as he loaded it aboard, straight from the mainland ferry. ‘Oh no,’ replied Dodgson. He glanced around nervously, to check that this terrifying woman was not in sight; was not actually bearing down on him with a cup of tea and a spoon. ‘Not for w-w-w—’ The word refused to come. ‘Watering cans?’ suggested the carter. Dodgson shook his head, and made circular gestures with his hands. ‘Weather-vanes?’ A strangling noise came from Dodgson’s throat. This was always happening. ‘Windmills?’ ‘Worlds,’ Dodgson managed, at last. ‘Very wise, sir,’ said the carter, and said no more.  At Farringford, Emily Tennyson sorted her husband’s post. Thin and beady-eyed in her shiny black dress, she had the look of a blackbird picking through worms. She spotted immediately the handwriting of Tennyson’s most insistent anonymous detractor (known to the poet as ‘Yours in aversion’) and swiftly tucked it into her pocket. Alfred was absurdly sensitive to criticism, and she had discovered that the secret of the quiet life was to let him believe what he wanted to believe—viz, that the world adored him without the faintest reservation or quibble. To this comfortable illusion of her husband’s, in fact, she was steadily sacrificing her life. Take ‘Yours in aversion’. Since this correspondent first wrote to him, he had become one of Tennyson’s favourite self-referential stories (‘The skulking fellow actually signed himself Yours in aversion!’), but Alfred didn’t know the half of it; he had no idea the skulker had continued to write. Emily had a large drawer of unopened ‘Yours in aversion’ letters in her bureau upstairs. She would never let Alfred know of their existence—not while there was breath in her body, anyway. Afterwards, very well, he could find out then. It was only fitting that after her death he would discover the lengths to which she had gone in the wifely defence of his equanimity. In general, however, the illusion that everybody loved Alfred Tennyson and

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found no fault in his poetry was quite easy to sustain day by day. It just meant narrowing one’s circle of friends to a small, scarcely visible dot, cancelling the literary reviews, and living in a neo-Gothic bunker in the farthest corner of the Isle of Wight. If people still insisted on visiting (and they did; it was astonishing), Emily’s terrible hospitality soon put a stop to that. One of her favourite ruses was to make a note of all who fidgeted during the two-and-a-half-hour readings of Alfred’s beloved Maud, and then deliberately tell them the wrong time for breakfast. When that gallant hero of the Risorgimento, Garibaldi, had visited Farringford in the spring, he obligingly planted a tree in the garden while the household sheltered indoors; but was he asked to stay for tea or dinner afterwards? He was not. Ironically in the circumstances, he was not offered so much as a biscuit. Thus was Alfred, the greatest, touchiest and dirtiest living poet, protected from the unnecessary hurt of point-raisers, and family life sealed off from interruption. Luckily, Alfred’s eyesight was so execrable that he missed all sorts of nuances in everyday intercourse, including the yawning and snoozing of his Farringford guests. In fact, he could read Maud to a library full of empty sofas. It made little difference to him, actually. Emily tore up some review magazines helpfully forwarded by Tennyson’s old Cambridge chums, and made a neat pile of the pieces. A maid would dispose of them later. But talking of maids, what had become of Sophia? Emily frowned. Sophia had been sent to Dimbola Lodge three hours ago. Had she never returned? Emily was just reaching to ring the bell when she saw the maid run through the garden, worriedly plucking flowers from her hair and followed by a small boy carrying a dark wooden box, clearly of Indian origin. Emily signalled to her through the window, and the maid—still pinning her hair into place—raced indoors. ‘Oh, Sophia, Sophia, I am disappointed.’ ‘I do apologize, madam.’ ‘Did Mrs Cameron make you pose again? What was it this time? Flora? Ophelia?’ ‘Titania, madam.’ ‘Titania!’ ‘We tried to do the ass head with some dusters and wire, but we gave up in the end, although the butcher’s lad seemed happy enough to wear them.’ ‘The butcher’s lad!’ ‘He came by with some chops, and Mrs Cameron said—’ ‘Don’t tell me.’ Emily sighed. Sophia looked wretched. The boy rubbed his ear. ‘Are you the butcher’s lad?’ Emily asked the question quite kindly.

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‘I am.’ The boy looked hopeful, suspecting a tip. ‘Well, what am I supposed to do with you?’ she snapped. ‘Isn’t life complicated enough?’ Emily needed some good news, but she had a feeling she wasn’t going to get any. She sat down in preparation. ‘Did Mrs Cameron accept my gift of the writing paper?’ ‘No, madam,’ said Sophia. ‘She said it was far too good, and that you must keep it.’ ‘And this box, Sophia? Dare I ask?’ ‘It is for you, madam—’ Emily groaned. ‘—She had it only yesterday, shipped all the way from Mr Cameron’s estates in Ceylon. She said it would look perfection on the new sideboard.’ ‘What new sideboard?’ Sophia bit her lip. ‘The one which will follow shortly,’ she admitted. Emily slumped back in her chair, and dismissed the maid. She was not a well woman, and the bombardment of presents from Mrs Cameron made her weaker than ever. Last week Julia had sent—admittedly on different days—a leg of Welsh mutton, an embroidered jacket, a child’s violet poncho, and six rolls of bright blue wallpaper decorated with a frieze of the Elgin Marbles. This level of generosity was intolerable, more than her frame could stand. Emily reached for the box and sniffed it. Just a day it had spent at Dimbola, and already it smelled so strongly of photographic chemicals that it might have been blown up the road by an explosion. Inside the box was a long and unnecessary missive from Julia, written in her usual breathless style—full of praise for poetry and beauty and exclamation marks—and ending with her regular plea that Alfred should sit for a photograph. Emily sighed at this. Alfred would refuse, of course; it was a point of principle never to give anything of himself away. Every day brought requests of some sort, and Emily shook her head at the stupidity of them all, especially the ones requesting money. Did these people know nothing of the world? And what was this? The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had written from Oxford, in his usual tiresomely pompous prose, mentioning a ‘small favour’ he wished to ask. Emily laughed rather nastily at his letter, and put it in her pocket with ‘Yours in aversion’. She would deal with it later. But a ‘small favour’? Dodgson was not a man to trust with a favour of any dimensions; experience had taught her that. She must keep him away from Alfred, she resolved. Alfred’s new volume Enoch Arden had just been published, and it would make or break his reputation. And

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sadly, it was not one of Alfred’s best. Parodies were bound to ensue. Mr Dodgson was a gifted parodist, albeit an anonymous one, like the rest of the vile cowardly breed. Just two weeks ago, Punch had shockingly included a parody of Alfred’s In Memoriam, and Emily was so surprised by its appearance that she tore out the page at the breakfast table, panicked what to do next, then stuffed it into her mouth, chewed it, and swallowed it. Alfred had seemed perplexed, as well he might. ‘Why did you do that, my dear?’ he asked. ‘Why are you masticating a page from Punch?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she said lamely. She thought quickly. ‘Perhaps my anaemia craves the minerals in the ink!’ So to sum up, Emily was jumpy. The last thing she needed was this treacherous Oxford stammerer hanging about. The only favour the Tennysons had ever asked of Dodgson—that he keep to himself a photograph of Alfred taken in the Lake District—he had ignored. The photograph subsequently appeared as a popular carte de visite, published by a studio in Regent Street. Alfred was outraged. ‘Whose picture was it?’ he barked at everybody. And when they didn’t know what to say, ‘It was mine,’ he answered. ‘Quite obviously, it was mine.’ Today was Wednesday. Alfred would return this afternoon from London, and Emily was glad. She was very proud of Alfred, despite his touchiness, insensitivity and meanness, and despite even his tragic standards of personal hygiene, which were remarked by almost everyone they met. Truly Alfred Tennyson was the dirtiest laureate that ever lived. But there was more to a man than a washed neck or clean fingernails. That her lord was unacquainted with the soap and flannel did not make him a lesser poet or a lesser husband. As he once cleverly blurted to a fellow who had impudently criticized a dirty collar, ‘I dare say yours would not be as clean as mine if you had worn it a fortnight!’ Emily folded her hands and smiled. ‘There’s glory for you,’ she thought. She was pleased to reflect that she was well prepared for Alfred. As a matter of routine, he would ask three questions as he whirled dramatically through the door in his black cloak and sombrero, to which his wife’s dutiful answers must always be the same. ‘Did you check the boys for signs of madness, Emily?’ ‘Yes, dear. I did.’ ‘Is there an apple pie baked for my dinner?’ ‘Yes. Cook has seen to it.’ ‘Is anyone after my head?’ ‘No, dear, nobody. As I have told you before, Alfred, that’s all in your imagination.’ 

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Back at Dimbola, a clattering of pans and a smell of lobster curry issued from the kitchen, and from Mrs Cameron’s glass house an occasional steam-whistle shriek marked the success or failure of the latest coating of a photographic plate. ‘You nudged my elbow!’ ‘No I didn’t!’ Dodgson’s curiosity could resist the commotion no longer. Removing the boater, he pushed his head into the briar to see what on earth was happening. And there he saw a beautiful garden, in which maids and boys were slopping white paint onto red roses as fast as they possibly could. To someone who had only recently completed Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, this scene came as a bit of a shock, obviously. Nobody noticed him, with his head poking through the hedge. Of course they didn’t. They were absorbed in their strange work. Even when the door of Mrs Cameron’s studio opened suddenly and a glass plate came skimming out, breaking against the trunk of a tree, the unflappable rose-painters paid no heed. ‘Oh, dear,’ piped a small voice near to Dodgson—too near to the hedge for him to see the body it came from. What was this? A little girl? At an educated guess, somewhere between eight years old, and eight and two months? With a dear little fluting voice? Dodgson pushed himself closer, despite tell-tale cracking and snapping. ‘Oh dear,’ repeated the little girl, disconsolate, ‘I do believe I’ve quite forgotten.’ Seeing more clearly into the sun-filled garden of Dimbola Lodge, Dodgson discovered a sight so pleasant to his eager spying eye that for a giddy moment he wished he might push his head right through the flowery bank (though of course without his shoulders, his head wouldn’t be much use). A leggy barefoot girl of eight, her thick hair flowing, her skirt pinned up, and heavy angel wings of swan feather attached to her tiny shoulders, stood just two yards before him, staring uncertainly at a rose bush dripping white paint to the earth. And there she pouted, confused—an irresistible image of innocence and poultry cunningly blent. ‘Mary Ann!’ she cried, at last. Her wings flapped a bit, which was so nice to see that Dodgson whimpered in the hedge. No answer. ‘Can you remember? Are we painting red roses white, or white roses red? Mary Ann!’ she shouted. ‘I want Mary Ann!’ ‘Now what’s all this?’ snapped an older girl, an Irish servant of about sixteen in a dull dress and white apron. She looked quite severe, with her dark hair pinned tight against her head, as if it had deserved punishment by restraint. ‘As you well know, Miss Daisy, Mary Ann will be in the mistress’s glass house at this minute—why, isn’t she there all day every day? And like as not she’s pre-

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tending to be Mary Madonna, or a Hangel, or anybody else from the blessed Bible who never got their hands dirty doing her fair share of chores around the house.’ Mary Ann’s modelling duties were clearly rather unpopular with the Irish girl. ‘But I say good luck to her,’ she continued. ‘Oh yes I do. Her with her moony long white face, not that I’d take that face off her if it was offered, even with the neck and the hair and the arms thrown in—’ ‘But what about the roses, Mary Ryan?’ interrupted the little girl. Mary Ryan smiled. ‘Well, you’re a goose, so you are. Is it really so difficult? What colour do you have there in your little pot?’ ‘Oh,’ said the girl in a small voice, suddenly downcast. (Like all children, she hated to be told off.) ‘White.’ The girl pouted again and changed the subject. ‘Does Mrs Cameron ask you to be Mary Madonna sometimes, Mary Ryan?’ Clearly this was not the right thing to ask. Mary Ryan pursed her lips and emptied her paint pot over the honeysuckle. She probably wasn’t supposed to do that, but at least she didn’t dump it over Dodgson. ‘Does she?’ urged the child. ‘She took my picture! Can I see pictures of you, Mary Ryan—’ ‘No you can not!’ spat out Mary Ryan. ‘And you just be careful with those wings, Miss Daisy Bradley, that’s all. The mistress ordered them all the way from Mortlake, and if you’ll not be crushing them feathers all this time, I don’t know what you are doing.’ At which the little girl, sensing that the fun was over, ran indoors. Mary Ryan, left alone, wiped her eyes with her apron and let out a little scream. ‘Mary Ann this! Mary Ann that! How I love thee, Mary Ann!’ And picking up her pinafore, she turned on her heel. Unabashed at his eavesdropping, Dodgson stepped back from the scene, brushed his clothes for dust and twigs, and reassured himself there was nobody about. He was never embarrassed when people betrayed private emotions in front of him; having no emotions himself (or none to speak of ), he was just very, very intrigued. Sometimes he made notes for use later on. He had no idea why one maid should begrudge another maid her chance to star in Mrs Cameron’s photographs—especially when, in his own opinion, the photographs were dreadful, too big, and shockingly out of focus. Glancing up at the windows of Dimbola, he caught the eye of a white-bearded old man smiling from ear to ear—Mr Cameron, presumably. The old man waved in a jolly sort of way, as though deranged. Dodgson studiously ignored him; you never knew where that sort of thing might lead. ‘But I must contrive to meet this Daisy,’ he decided, and produced his small notebook again. He wrote down her name. He also wrote it in letters down the

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page—D-A-I-S-Y-B-R-A-D-L-E-Y—ready for an instant acrostic poem, which he could sometimes complete in five minutes or less. Twelve letters! Excellent! Three stanzas of four! Two stanzas of six! What a charming child, to have such a convenient name, numerologically speaking! With several days planned at Freshwater Bay, there was plenty of time to make friends with the little girls, and get their addresses, and campaign for their photographs, and send them love poems. But he had discovered it was a great advantage to know names in advance, without asking. ‘I love my love with a D because she is D-D—Daring,’ he mused. ‘I hate her because she is Demanding. I took her to the sign of the Dr—Dromedary, and treated her with Dumplings, Dis-sss—temper and D-D—Desire. Her name is Daisy and she lives—’ Indeed, he was just envisaging the scene on the gusty beach—the little girl paddling with a shrimp net; himself nearby pretending not to notice her, but doing fascinating bunny-rabbit tricks with a pocket handkerchief to ensnare her attention (it never failed)—when he heard the approaching trundle of the Yarmouth cart, and looked up to see Tennyson, the great literary lion of the age, dressed as usual in copious cloak and broad hat, holding a book of his own poems directly in front of his face for better reading, but evidently catching a vague myopic passing blur of Dodgson nevertheless. There was no time to hide, no time to frame a polite greeting before—‘Allingham!’ boomed the laureate, as the cart passed Dodgson (pretty closely). Dodgson jumped. Allingham? He glanced behind him, but could see nobody. ‘Allingham, we dine tomorrow at six! Come afterwards—not before, there’s a good fellow—and I shall read my Enoch Arden, and explain it to you, line by line! We shall confound the critics!’ And before Dodgson could voice a word of protest, the poet had passed by. The rush of air pulled Dodgson’s boater from his head and left it dusty in the road. This was not the welcome Dodgson had anticipated. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. How could he make a visit now? He picked up his hat again, and touched his head carefully with each hand in turn. Still there, still there; still Dodgson, not Allingham. He looked up at the old man, who now appeared (no, surely not) to be dancing with glee. On the breeze, Dodgson smelled the ozone from the sea, the scent of roses, fresh lead paint, hot buttered toast and potassium cyanide, all mixed together with the lobster curry. He looked up the lane towards Tennyson’s home, and then back to the blue sizzling bay, where children would soon be packing their shrimp nets. Salty and sandy, and with their hair in pretty rat-tails, they would head home for tea at the nearby hotels.

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Absently, he flicked through his manuscript. Dear oh dear, how late it’s getting . . . Mary Ann, Mary Ann, fetch me a pair of gloves . . . I shall sit here, on and off, for days . . . You? Who are you? As he pondered Mrs Cameron’s interesting corner of the Isle of Wight, another glass plate whizzed across her garden and broke with a shattering sound like someone falling into a cucumber frame. At Freshwater Bay, he reflected, whichever direction you went in, the people were mad. ‘Which way?’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Wh-Wh—Which way?’

Chapter 2




When Lorenzo Fowler woke on Thursday morning to the sound of waves and seagulls, and the scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave, he had trouble initially guessing where he was. He normally woke to the sound of London traffic and coster boys. Freshwater Bay had been an impulsive decision, prompted by little Jessie complaining of the fug of Ludgate Circus (‘Pa, this heat!’) and accomplished with a spirit of ‘What are we waiting for?’ that had ‘yankee’ written all over it. Lorenzo as a caring father needed no other incitement than his little daughter’s cry. She was a pale, freckly child with orange ringlets, and he still felt guilty at transplanting her to England—such a backward land in terms of diet, clean water and fresh air. So at her first complaint, he shoved a few heads in boxes, packed his charts and silk blindfold in violet tissue, selected some hot, progressive Fowlers & Wells pamphlets (subjects included anti-lacing, temperance, tobacco, octagonal architecture and hydropathic cholera cures) and took the earliest train to the New Forest. Even in a mercy dash, it seemed, a phrenologist did not travel light. For phrenology was Lorenzo Fowler’s lifelong pursuit, and after thirty years he was not so much proud of this highly dodgy profession as still busting the buttons of his fancy satin waistcoat. Some people grow tired of fads, but not Lorenzo Fowler. For him, phrenology was the fad that would not die. Talk to him ignorantly of phrenology as the science of ‘bumps’ and he might throw back his magnificent head to laugh (baring his excellent white teeth) before genially setting you straight for half an hour, dazzling you with his specialist vocabulary, and at the end of it selling you a special new demountable model of the brain for the knock-down rate of two and nine. Of course, for practising the craft of head-feeling, all you needed were a pair of hands, a good spatial sense, and a map of the mental organs fixed firmly in your mind. But Lorenzo Niles Fowler was more than a phrenologist. He was also showman and evangelist, whose personal belief was that the market for phrenology had never been so vigorous, not even in its heyday in his native United States. Why, already on this trip to the Isle of Wight he had used a cursory reading to pay the carter from Yarmouth, telling him, ‘Such a large Self Esteem you have! And what Amativeness!’ Gratified by this mysterious, flattering talk from an exotic foreigner, the normally morose carter had gladly waived the fee when he dropped his passengers at the Albion Hotel, right on the edge of the bay. Lorenzo smiled. It worked every time. Tell people they have abnormally large Amativeness (sexuality by a fancier name) and they are well disposed to

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phrenology—and phrenologists—for ever after. It’s just something they happen to enjoy hearing. Jessie was awake and dressed already, playing with heads in the chintzy sitting room. She was eight, and precocious, and though the scene might strike an outsider as altogether gruesome, she was happy enough, having known no other dollies in her life save these big bald plaster ones with nothing below the neck. Poor kid. She had no idea how it looked. Not only were there detached heads all over the floor, but she had on a thick dress of red tartan—a tragically bad choice when you consider the ginger hair. ‘Pa?’ said Jessie. ‘Oh there you are, Pa! Ada and I breakfasted already, but we made them save you some brains!’ ‘My favourite!’ This was the Fowlers’ daily joke. It was funny because they were vegetarians as well as phrenologists—and looking on the bright side, at least it was generally dispensed with quite early in the day. ‘Brains! Ha ha, ho ho!’ laughed Lorenzo, slapping his knees, while the nunlike Ada, their British maid, wordlessly unpacked some pamphlets from a trunk, and tried not to count how many times she’d heard this one before. You have to look at it from Ada’s point of view. A family of American freaks that delighted in brain jokes? No, the gods of domestic employment had not exactly smiled upon Ada. ‘Test me on the heads, please, Pa! Ada can’t do it, she’s too silly. She’s too British!’ ‘Try not to be rude about Ada, dearest,’ said Lorenzo, while he blindfolded his horrid little daughter, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Tight enough? Not too tight? We are guests in this country, Jessie,’ he continued, as he secured the strings with a dainty bow at the back of the little girl’s well formed head. He was a big man with deft fingers. His hands were always warm. ‘We have a duty to behave with the very best of manners. In particular we should lead the way in courtesy to the lower orders.’ ‘But what if our hosts are all sillies and nincompoops like Ada?’ asked Jessie. Ada left the room, and slammed the door. ‘Well, I agree, dearest,’ said Lorenzo. ‘That sometimes makes it hard.’ Lorenzo had brought a selection of plaster heads on holiday, the way another man might bring a selection of neck ties. Spreading them on the rug in a semicircle, he handed them one by one to the blindfolded Jessie, who sat with her legs out straight, bouncing her calves alternately up and down. ‘Take your time,’ he said, as her little hands swarmed over the polished plaster. But his breath was wasted. Time was something Jessie clearly did not need. ‘It’s too easy, Pa,’ pouted the little girl.

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‘No, it is not. Phrenology is a high science.’ ‘Well, this one’s the Idiot of Amsterdam, aged twenty-five, I know that.’ ‘Very well. I take away the Idiot of Amsterdam, aged twenty-five. But first tell me about him. How do you ascertain his idiocy, Oh little clever one?’ ‘But it’s so obvious! The flat, short brow, indicating no reflective or perceptive qualities! A cat could tell you that! I mean, if a cat had the Organ of Language, which of course it doesn’t. A cat has a large Organ of Secretiveness!’ Jessie never stopped showing off. It was one of the reasons why she had so few friends. (The other reason was that she never minced words about other people’s cranial deficiencies.) She picked up another head, felt it quickly, and cast it aloft. ‘You can take away the Manchester Idiot, too, Pa, while you are about it.’ Lorenzo caught the head before it fell to the floor. Jessie was getting overexcited. ‘Now, now, child,’ he said. ‘These things cost money.’ He handed her another. ‘Who’s this?’ Jessie whooped. ‘It’s the Montrose Calculator! Papa, you brought the Montrose Calculator! With the enormous Organ of Number!’ ‘What’s the story we tell about the Montrose Calculator, Jessie?’ ‘That when asked how he could calculate the number of seconds a person had been alive, he’d say’ (and here she assumed a terrible Highlands accent) ‘I dinna ken hoo I do’t. I jest think, and the ainsa comes inta ma heed!’ He patted her shoulder, partly to congratulate her, partly in the hope of slowing her down. ‘That’s enough for now,’ he said, but ‘No! One more! One more!’ she pleaded, and blindly reached out her chubby arms. How could he resist his darling? Especially when she looked so lovely—so right—in that violet blindfold? Lorenzo opened a special, individual box, and handed her a new head. ‘Who’s this, Pa?’ she asked in a lowered tone, her face tilted upwards as she eagerly mothered the head in her lap, like something run mad by grief in a Jacobean tragedy. Lorenzo smiled but said nothing. His ruse had worked; the little girl was intrigued. The original owner of this head was no murderer, or idiot, or cunning boy. ‘Is he an artist, Papa?’ ‘He is, you clever child. What makes you say so?’ ‘He has Constructiveness and Ideality very large. Who is he, Pa?’ She stroked the head, as though smoothing away its cares. ‘He seems to lack Firmness completely, what a shame. I’ve got enormously big Firmness, haven’t I?’ Lorenzo smiled. It was true. There was no denying it. ‘Can we feel my enormously big Firmness later, Pa?’

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Jessie removed her blindfold to look at the name on the base. ‘Benjamin Robert Hay-don,’ she read. She stuck out a lip. ‘Haydon. Who’s he?’ ‘Mr Haydon was an English painter of great historical canvases and murals, Jessie, who killed himself before you were born.’ ‘Killed himself ?’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘Oooooh.’ Lorenzo felt very proud. This kid was such a chip off the old block. ‘Was he famous?’ she asked. ‘Famous, but poor. Artistically, some might have called him rich—but no, I’m lying. To be honest, even artistically Haydon was very, very poor. In other words, a useful case for lecturing purposes! He was also a phrenologist, Jessie—from the earliest days of our great science, when few people believed.’ Jessie was intrigued. Her whole life revolved around the heads of dead people, and mostly odd, sad, idiotic or self-slaughtering ones at that. Any other eightyear-old would have changed the subject to Humpty Dumpty or twinkle-twinklelittle-star, but Jessie wanted the full grisly biography. She knew as well as her father did: this stuff would be dynamite on stage. ‘So why did he kill himself ?’ ‘Indebted. Disappointed. Nobody wanted his paintings, except a back view of Napoleon—’ ‘Did you bring Napoleon? I love doing Napoleon!’ ‘—Except a back view of Napoleon on St Helena,’ continued her father (whose Organ of Firmness was more than equal to Jessie’s), ‘which he was obliged to paint again and again, some twenty-three times.’ Jessie tried hard to imagine the disappointment that drove Benjamin Robert Haydon to kill himself. It didn’t work. After a short pause, she tried again. ‘That’s silly,’ she said, at last. ‘To kill yourself just because you have to keep doing the same thing, again and again.’ ‘I agree,’ said Lorenzo. He had been doing the same thing, again and again, since 1834. He absolutely loved it. He looked out of the window to the deserted morning bay, with its bathing machines drawn up on the sand, its cheerful patriotic flags straining in the stiff breeze. He cracked his knuckles. ‘But luckily for us, my darling, there are a lot of very confused and unhappy people out there.’  As Jessie had said, it was hot in London. Queen Victoria had already quit for Osborne, this being the first and last period of history when the Isle of Wight had a fashionable cachet, and well-appointed people longed—positively longed—for an invitation to East Cowes. The centre of London stank, and even in the relatively rural Kensington setting of Little Holland House, it was hot enough to broil lobsters without putting them in pans. On Thursday evening, the renowned, long-

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bearded painter G. F. Watts and his pretty young wife Ellen were sticky and agitated, and had reached the usual point in their near-to-bedtime arguments when the noted painter pleaded ‘Stop being so dramatic!’—which was a reasonable enough entreaty until you considered that the wife in question was that glory of the London stage, the sixty-guineas-a-week juvenile phenomenon, Miss Ellen Terry. Watts was fed up; Ellen was fed up. He was forty-seven; she was sixteen, so they both had their reasons. But it was a bit rich to call Ellen ‘dramatic’ in the derogative sense, even so. ‘Dramatic’ had been a continual reproach from this weary grey-beard husband ever since that overcast day in February when foolishly they wed. Ellen wished ‘artistic’ carried the same force of accusation, but somehow it didn’t. Yelling ‘Don’t be so artistic!’—though perfectly justified when your dreamy distant husband seriously calls himself ‘England’s Michelangelo’ and affects a skullcap—never sounded quite as cutting. On the other hand, theatricality was certainly in the air. ‘Drrramatic, am I?’ demanded Ellen in a deep thrilling voice (the sort of voice for which the word timbre was invented). She clutched a tiny butter knife close to her pearly throat, with her body leaned backwards from the waist. It looked terribly uncomfortable, and Watts was at a loss, as usual. He stroked his beard. He adjusted his skullcap. Something was clearly ‘up’. ‘I only said Mrs Prinsep is very kind!’ Ellen groaned and whinnied, like a pony. ‘But she is our host, my patron. Really, Ellen, surely you see how lucky we are to live at Little Holland House! I hope I may live peacefully here for the remainder of my life.’ ‘Painting huge public walls when they fall available, I suppose?’ she snapped. ‘For no money?’ ‘Yes, painting walls. What insult can be levelled at the painting of walls? You make it sound trivial, Ellen. Yet when I beat Haydon in the Westminster competition—’ ‘I know, you told me about Haydon and the Westminster competition, you told me so many times!’ ‘Well, then you know that the poor man died at his own hand. Painting walls is of significance to some people, my dear. My designs for the Palace of Westminster were preferred to his, and Haydon was shattered, poor man. Walls let him down! Walls collapsed on him!’ Ellen narrowed her eyes. ‘But on the main point, my dear,’ continued Watts, ‘Why—why—should I want to earn an independent living from my art when we can abide here quite comfortably at someone else’s expense?’

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And then Ellen screamed. Loud and ringing from the diaphragm, exactly as Mrs Kean had trained her. Watts ran to the door and locked it. This wayward Shakespearean juvenile was always transforming the scene into some sort of third act climax, butter knife at the ready. (The effect was only slightly ruined by the knife having butter on it, and crumbs.) Watts collapsed on one of Little Holland House’s many scented sofas. He had married this young theatrical phenomenon in all good faith, assured by his snooty patrons that she would thank him for his protection; he had been in love with her profile, her stature—in short, her beauty with a capital B! But within five months he looked back on that marriage with confusion and even horror. This beauty was a real person; she was not an ideal form. She expected things from him that he could not even name, let alone deliver. This regular money argument, for example: it always went the same way. Here they were, comfortably adored and protected, and Ellen had to show off about it. ‘If you would let me work, George—’ she would say. And then all this sixty guineas nonsense would be rolled out again. Watts did not want sixty sullied guineas a week. He did not want to paint lucrative portraits, either. No, Watts was the sort of chap who loses his invoice book down the back of the piano and doesn’t notice for four and a half years. Watts wanted to live with the Prinseps, conceive great moral paintings of an edifying nature, sip water over dinner, and be told with comforting regularity that he was the genius of the age. The sad thing was that when he married Ellen, he assumed she wanted the same release from her own career. After all, her career was the theatre. But he had learned that while you can take the child out of the theatre, it is a more difficult matter to extract the theatre from the child. She still dressed up quite often. She danced in pink tights. A couple of times she had sat next to him at dinner, dressed as a young man, and he had talked to her for two hours without in any way piercing her disguise, or noticing the absence of his wife. ‘My dear,’ he began, ‘If you continue with this, I shall have a headache.’ But she drew away from him and took a deep breath, so he gave up. If experience was to be trusted, Ellen would probably forge into a famous speech now, and—ah, here it was. ‘Make me a willow cabin.’ Make ME a weell-ow cabin (so Ellen began, in the thrilling voice again, with fabulous diction) at yourrr gate!, (emphatic, with a little stamp of the foot) And call-ll-ll (this bit softly cooed) uppon my SOUL

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(a plaintive yowl of longing) with-in the HOUSE! (no nonsense)

Such a shame it was from Twelfth Night, Watts reflected, as the recital progressed. Watts had been rather touchy about Twelfth Night ever since he painted a huge allegorical picture for the wall of a railway terminus on the theme ‘If music be the food of love’ which had too much delighted his critics. A naked Venus with a bib at her neck sat down to a hearty lunch of tabors, fiddles and bagpipes. He still didn’t see what was so damned roll-on-the-floor funny about it. The bagpipes—the exact size of an Aberdeen Angus—looked particularly delicious. Venus burped behind her hand. The knife and fork were four feet long. Meanwhile, Ellen continued: Writeloyalcantonsofcontemned love (breathless, fast) And sing them . . . LOUD! (long pause) even in the dead of night (airy, throwaway) Halloooooooo your name to the Rreverrberrrate hills (welsh R-rolling) And make the babbling ‘gossip’ of the air (an arch curtsey to Mistress Gossip, that rare minx) Cry out! (sharp) ‘Olivi-aaaaa!’

Watts liked Shakespeare, but only as stuff to read in bed. All this prancing about was too tiring. Acting was the lowest of all arts. Still, he thought Ellen’s performance was going rather well, and he had in fact just got his eyes closed, the better for listening to the poetry with, when the emotional undercurrent turned abruptly again and his wife burst into tears. She flung down the butter knife and left the room. ‘What’s wrong now?’ Watts asked, jerked awake. It was all beyond him. Settling back on his sofa, with skullcap pulled over his eyes, he thought hard about what he had just heard from Ellen’s lips. Yes, he thought hard. But on the other hand it would be fair to say that the expression ‘sub-text’ meant even less to Watts than to any other Victorian luminary you could mention. So what preoccupied him now was not the underlying tenor of Ellen’s theatrical performance, in par-

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ticular its expression of tortured young female longing. Instead it was the following: should the ‘babbling gossip of the air’ wear a hat? Should she sit on a gold-trimmed cloud, to indicate the airiness of her babble? And pondering these important questions Il Signor Michelangelo Watts arranged himself comfortably—though unconsciously—in a well-practised foetal position.  If it was hard to keep up with Ellen’s stormy emotions, it was also impossible to contain them. The temperament of Mrs Watts was alarmingly dissimilar from Watts’s own. For his own part, any vexation might be healed by the gentle removal of whatever thorn was temporarily in his paw (usually a big bill for buckets of gouache, which the Prinseps paid with their usual handsomeness); whereas Ellen turned hell-cat when offered assistance, especially in the form of Watts’s edifying proverbs. Alas, he was a man who dearly loved a verity. ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure,’ was the sort of thing. ‘Fine words butter no parsnips,’ the great allegorical painter now consoled himself, for instance—and was instantly preoccupied conceiving an enormous fresco for Covent Garden Market, of tough root vegetables turning their ungreased backs, perhaps, on a bunch of spouting poets with long hair and big shirts. Ellen had let her nose go red, which was too bad. Such a ruddy child was quite wrong for the Victorians’ popular aesthetic of alabaster flesh. In ‘Choosing’, his latest portrait of her, Watts had allowed her a certain pinky flush, to reflect the surrounding camellias, but he now believed this a profound mistake, and intended to overpaint with a light green at the earliest chance. Overhearing two grand comic novelists at Little Holland House discussing the flesh tones in the picture, he had been quite wounded by their remarks. ‘Know what she’s been doing,’ said one great comic novelist, nudging with his elbow. ‘Very good, I must remember that,’ said the other. Dickens and Trollope, someone said they were. Despite its lovely pinkness, then, ‘Choosing’ had few happy associations for Watts. For one thing, it had been a tremendous bother to get the violets into the picture (in Ellen’s awkwardly raised left hand), and in any case the allegory failed. Not since ‘Striking a Careless Pose’ (in which a tall king cuffed a young servant who had dropped something), had one of G. F.’s notions misfired so badly. Ellen was supposed to be choosing between the big scentless showy camellia and the humble perfumed violet, yet it was quite clear from the composition of the picture that her preference for the camellias was pretty strong already. Meanwhile the humble symbolic violets were so extremely shy and retiring that whatever they represented in the picture (marriage? humility? Watts?) got no look-in whatsoever.

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‘So she’s choosing the big red flowers?’ said Watts’s devoted fans and perpetual support, Mr and Mrs Prinsep, when they first saw the picture. ‘Good for her! Mm, you can smell them, Il Signor, you can, really.’ Watts judiciously stifled his impatience. The relationship between an artist and his patrons is an unequal one, despite the flattery on both sides. The patrons flatter the artist (calling him ‘Il Signor’, for example) because they can afford to be generous; the artist flatters the patrons because he likes eating, and lying down in the forenoon. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the red flowers are mere ostentation. I abominate red flowers. They should all be painted white. No, Ellen, representing Woman in the Abstract, chooses between the superficiality of the scentless camellia and, ahem, the sincerity of the humble perfumed violets.’ ‘Does she?’ they said, eager to understand. ‘Oh. But what violets? Where?’ ‘There.’ He pointed. ‘Oh yes. I mean, no. Sorry, I can’t quite—’ ‘There.’ ‘Oh yes.’ There was a short pause, while the Prinseps conferred sotto voce, and Watts looked out of the window at the fields, pretending he couldn’t hear. ‘Perhaps he should make the violets bigger, what do you think?’ ‘Dare one suggest it?’ They looked at each other, and then at Watts, who was now biting his nails. They decided against. ‘It is a stupendous picture, Il Signor!’ Mrs Prinsep exclaimed, making Watts smile broadly with relief. ‘A great success! You are a genius, and we are privileged to sit at your feet. Come! Let us dine from the best fowl the capital can provide, and you our master shall taste the liver wing!’ But this was all a month ago, and from Sara’s adulation Watts must return bathetically to the present scene, in which the returned Ellen sank to her knees, clutching his trousers like a waif. His artistic reverie had changed nothing, apparently. Here was all the trouble with marriage, in a tiny shell: when you got back from your mental wanderings, the little wife was invariably still there. ‘Are you still acting?’ he whispered, at last. ‘How could I choose Viola?’ she whimpered. ‘Of all the heroines!’ He didn’t know what to say. ‘But the pose was quite lovely, nevertheless. You have a decided talent, my dear. And the moral of that is, waste not want not, for tomorrow I will sketch you in that exact position for my projected masterpiece, “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Hope”.’ Ellen sniffed.

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‘Ah,’ he continued, warming up at once (he loved talking about art). ‘You make no remark? Of course. But think, if you will, of the supreme challenge of depicting the Absence of Hope! For you see, if I merely leave Hope out, it won’t do at all! Critics will argue with justice that my picture equally well represents “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Railway Carriages” or “Fortitude Overcome by Grace in the Absence of Soup”!’ Ellen nodded to show she understood, though secretly she thought the absence of hope was a challenge to everybody, and Watts was the usual cause of it. She rallied a little. ‘I don’t know why, Viola just came out,’ she snivelled. ‘But the point was, I wanted to do Lady Macbeth or Lady Ann or something. I want you to take me seriously! I want it dreadful bad!’ ‘I see. And the moral of that is—?’ ‘That I want you to take me seriously. I’m your wife and I love you.’ ‘And Viola won’t do?’ ‘No. Because she’s too much like me. Viola loves an older man, and he doesn’t see her for what she is.’ ‘I know. The Duke Orsino. And the moral of that is—?’ ‘Whereas, you see, I don’t want to watch and wait like Viola. I am not patience on a monument. George, we have been married five months.’ ‘Ah.’ Watts winced at the use of his name. ‘Could you not call me Il Signor? The Prinseps call me that.’ She seemed calmer now, and Watts took her hand. He was a kind man by inclination, but unfortunately if an allegorical picture of G. F. Watts were to be considered, it would show ‘Inclination Untutored by Practice and Doomed to Disappointment’, for he had spent his first forty-seven years unmarried, depending largely on the generosity of patrons, and letting other people pay for the luxury of his high-mindedness. In short, he had never been made to care. His most vivid emotional engagement had been, in childhood, with a small caged cockney sparrow, which he tragically murdered by trapping its head in a door. Watts never recovered from the guilt or the grief of that accident. His emotion on the subject of that little squashed bird made Alfred Tennyson’s great In Memoriam look like nothing. It had hindered him for years; disqualified him from happiness. This complex of emotions had now stretched a dead hand into his marriage, too. For whenever he thought about touching his wife in a marital way, the ghost of poor wronged Haydon (for whose suicide Watts was really not responsible) rose up and cried, ‘Remember Westminster!’ thereby throwing him completely off his stride. ‘Let’s go to Freshwater,’ said his wife brightly, as if she had just thought of it (she hadn’t). ‘I want to leave London dreadful bad. Let’s go tomorrow. I could pose for you there, and for your friend Mrs Cameron, who is beginning to like me

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a little, I think. You know how well I pose. You know how well I embody an abstract when I set my mind to it. Mrs Cameron needs sitters for her photography. The summer is too hot for London, especially considering your headaches.’ Watts looked unconvinced, so Ellen continued with her list of reasons, realizing she needed to butter him a little. ‘You could paint Mr Tennyson again—it must be months since the last time— and then Mrs Cameron could take your photograph, making you look so very handsome, my dear! You have such excellent temples, George! And then we can all pose for each other and never stop having fun and larks!’ Ellen was accustomed to getting her own way. Her drop-dead prettiness had a miraculous effect on men of all ages, turning princes and politicians into fawning servants at the merest wiggle of her prominent but tip-tilted nose. This quality was to be her great salvation in life: that a childhood spent portraying Shakespearean nobility had led her to expect slavish devotion as her due. She need only turn the full force of her ingénue good looks on Il Signor, and like all other mortal men he felt privileged to kiss the hem of her gown, or carry her picnic hamper that extra mile up Box Hill. Beauty has power but no responsibility. It is terribly unfair, but there you go. ‘Would you?’ was generally Ellen’s way of saying ‘thank you’. ‘Would you really?’ she said, as she strode ahead of her puffing volunteer minion. Once at Little Holland House, the First Lord of the Treasury pointed out that the wheel of Ellen’s carriage was running badly. ‘Oh please don’t feel you have to do anything about it,’ she had assured the astonished prime minister, and although everybody else laughed like rills down a mountainside, Ellen was puzzled. She was quite sure she hadn’t meant it to be funny. How could Watts deny her a trip to the Isle of Wight? What was good enough for the Queen must be good enough for his princess. ‘I don’t know about the larks,’ he said, ‘but I agree it is a good plan. What a shame Mrs Prinsep cannot accompany us, she would love to see Julia. I have never known sisters so fond and close.’ ‘Except mine,’ objected Ellen. ‘What? Oh yes, well, the Terrys,’ said Watts, in a tone that suggested the emotional closeness of Terrys did not count. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘it will be refreshing to see Mrs Cameron, and she is bound to make us welcome. You know how Mrs Cameron loves to give, give, give!’ (‘Which is fortunate,’ thought Ellen, ‘when you prefer to take, take, take.’) ‘Such selfless generosity,’ he continued, as though reading her mind, ‘is not within the means of all of us. Poor men must rely on the currency of talent to buy their friends. And I am a very poor man, Ellen, I never misled you about that. A very poor man. Yet I esteem Generosity above all other human traits, above Faith and Hope and Discretion and Fortitude and Purpose—’

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‘George,’ said Ellen quietly. ‘You’re doing it again.’ ‘I apologize, my dear. Ah, ’tis love, ’tis love that makes the world go round!’ He slapped his knees and stood up, his wife’s emotional outburst now forgotten. ‘Do you know, I feel quite restored already. Where’s that new bucket of gouache? I believe I can feel an allegory coming on!’

Chapter 3




‘I don’t suppose they’ve hung that lovely wallpaper at Farringford yet,’ said Julia aloud. It was Friday midday at Dimbola, and Julia Margaret Cameron was having her ‘quiet time’—a daily hour by the clock when she eschewed all household duties (including photography) and sat at her westward-facing bedroom window scanning the chalk downs for a sight of Alfred. Ah, Alfred, Alfred! She could hardly wait to see his reaction when he found all her roses had been painted white. The servants had assumed it was one of her artistic whims (‘Mr Il Signor Flipping Watts is behind this!’), but it was a valentine to Alfred, of course. A white rose means ‘I am worthy of you’. And if Alfred didn’t know that, then at least he would recognize the reference to the flower garden scene in Maud. The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near;’ And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late;’ The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear;’ And the lily whispers, ‘I wait.’

Julia loved Maud. She had bought copies for everyone. She had posted them indiscriminately to people she hadn’t even met. When she saw Watts’s ‘Choosing’ picture of his wife for the first time, she recognized at once that Ellen’s attire was an exact replica of Maud’s in the poem: Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls, Come hither, the dances are done, In gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls, Queen lily and rose in one; Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls, To the flowers, and be their sun.

It was not surprising that silly little Ellen had not endeared herself to Mrs Cameron, when everyone fell at her feet in this nauseating way, and geniuses painted her in the exact guise of Alfred’s ideal woman. Julia did most things precipitately; and thus she had rushed into a decision about Ellen—that she was a spoiled child, hopelessly unserious, whose background was not only common, but very possibly Irish. As she sat in her bedroom now, all around were testimonials to her impulses.

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The house itself had been bought on a whim—two houses, in fact, joined together with a castellated tower, and all overgrown with ivies and roses. She had bought it, obviously, to be nearby to Tennyson in case he ever needed a leg of mutton in a hurry, or a loan of a violet poncho. The small window in which she sat was not a natural bay, but had been flung out one night when the fancy took her, and had ever since rested on stilts. In her room were intricate Indian pelmets to remind her of life in Calcutta. Yes, the sound of sawing never really left off at Dimbola Lodge, and the god of Carpentry smiled on Julia Margaret Cameron just as broadly as the gods of Art and Friendship. Moreover, on her back this morning she wore half a cherry-red shawl, having given the other half to a shopkeeper at Yarmouth two days ago who happened to admire it. ‘What a lovely X,’ was the wrong thing to say to Julia Margaret Cameron, as her friends had long since recognized. In fact visitors to Dimbola were now careful not to exclaim over any object that was not actually bolted to the walls or holding up the ceiling. At her feet, primly knitting a length of chain-mail with outsize needles, sat Mary Ann Hillier, the local girl (employed on impulse, of course) who posed so well in religious mufti, with her face tilted up to a sublime, framing light. Mary Ann had an unvaryingly stupid countenance, unfortunately, which properly captioned would be ‘What?’ or ‘Huh?’ Yet Mrs Cameron discovered great spiritual depth in Mary Ann’s vacant, open-mouthed expression, and appended all sorts of poetic tags to it. One of her latest shimmering Mary Ann pictures was called ‘The Nonpareil of Beauty’, which had been such a hit with the other servants that below stairs Mary Ann was now known as the nail-paring. Mary Ann ignored their jibes; she knew she was invaluable. Where would Julia’s photography be without Mary Ann? Mrs Cameron could hardly rely on Farringford to provide decent photographic subjects—it was the general talk of Dimbola that Emily drove all the Carlyles and Ruskins away with her terrible meals; if not, Tennyson sent them scarpering for the ferry soon afterwards by guzzling all the port, blowing smoke in their faces, and reciting Maud till they fell off their chairs. A railway had been mooted, to bring more people to Freshwater, and Tennyson opposed it with every inch of his body. A visitor once averred in his hearing that a railway link would be ‘dandy’, but Tennyson dismissed this as the opinion of an ignoramus. ‘That man clearly has no idea how one thing leads to another,’ he declared. It was Charles Darwin. Mrs Cameron had a wistful fleeting vision of a carriage-load of celebrities descending on Freshwater, and then regained control of herself. She grabbed a

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piece of paper and made a note for more photographic subjects featuring those only constant and reliable resources: Mary Ann, a pool of light, a lily and a cheesecloth shift. ‘The Angel at the Sepulchre’ (she wrote), ‘The Angel Just Outside the Sepulchre’, ‘The Angel on Top of the Sepulchre, Looking Down’, ‘The Angel at the Sepulchre Saying Move Along Now Please, There’s Nothing to See.’ She put a line through the last one on grounds of blasphemy, but was generally satisfied. The important thing when there were no lions around was to make do. Up in London, of course, her sister Sara Prinsep had lions galore. Little Holland House abounded in lions. It even had a resident lion (couchant, of course) in the person of the eminent painter G. F. Watts. Sara knew how to tame these largebearded luminaries. You had to flatter them senseless, and then give them big slabs of meat for their dinner. She was a great success, the hostess with the mostest. In fact it was the mark of a very poor day if the amiable Thoby Prinsep inquired over his teatime bread and butter, ‘Who’s for dinner tonight?’ and his wife replied, ‘Oh, just some Rossettis, you know, left over.’ The trouble, as Julia saw it, was that whereas Sara only knew how to feed these lions, Julia could lend them immortality. Life could be terribly unfair. But as Julia was always telling that wretched Irish servant Mary Ryan when she whined about not being photographed as much as the favoured Mary Ann, ‘The beautiful are dearer to God’s heart, that’s all, Mary. We who are not beautiful have an obligation to serve, and to receive the charcoaled end of the joss-stick.’ At which the actually not bad-looking Mary Ryan would turn away with her eyes narrowed like letter boxes, and hum ‘Oh God our help in ages past’. Julia rested her hand on Mary Ann’s head, and the girl looked up beatifically— light from the window striking her features in that thrilling Bellini-ish way that it always did. It was quite a knack the girl had, and it did not go unrewarded with privilege. While the other servants were expected to wear their hair tidy and pinned, Mary Ann wore hers free and flowing. Its tresses, shining gold and silver mixed, spilled over her shoulders like a stream in torrent. And right now, the stupid girl was steadily knitting it into the chain-mail while it was still attached to her head. ‘I fear Alfred does not come today, Mary Ann. He is late! He is late!’ said Julia. Mary Ann said nothing. She was wondering whether to unpick three inches of chain-mail. She tugged at the attached hair, but the stitches merely tightened, holding her more securely in place. Still she held her tongue. She had learned from experience that when she opened her mouth and spoke, her Isle of Wight

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accent rather ruined the Pre-Raphaelite effect. When you owned a profile suggestive of angels and madonnas, it was daft to undermine it with ‘Our keerter went to Cowes wi’ a load o’ straa.’  Meanwhile, on the train to Brockenhurst, a single lion was on its way. G. F. Watts had fallen asleep over his old pocket edition of Tennyson’s poetry and was warmly dreaming, his great domed forehead resting lightly against the window glass and his tired eyelids pressed gently on tired eyes. All around (interestingly) the languid air did swoon. Ellen studied him from the seat opposite, and folded her arms. She found it odd to be married to a man so attached to the horizontal, when her own body sang with energy, vigour and bounce. She had heard many times that Julia and Sara’s father was ‘the biggest liar in India’. How peculiar, she reflected, that these women were now so fond of the biggest lie-er-down in England. On his lap, the Tennyson lay open at The Lotos-Eaters, a poem that endlessly delighted Watts and infuriated Mrs Cameron—concerned as it was with becalmed sailors succumbing to a lifetime of postprandial snooze, ‘propt on beds of amaranth and moly’ (whatever that was). Let us alone. What pleasure can we have To war with evil? Is there any peace In ever climbing up the climbing wave? All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave In silence; ripen, fall and cease: Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.

It was the line about ever climbing up the climbing wave that particularly appealed to Il Signor. He felt he knew the sensation, and that he had learned to ride waves not fight them. Also, ‘There is no joy but calm’ had always been his personal motto until Little Miss Act Five Scene Two Terry had kicked the ottoman from under him. The Lotos-Eaters was a great poem, all right. Besides which, on train journeys it always helped lull him to sleep. In his dream, however, things were less reassuring. He was still in a railway carriage, but Ellen was dressed prettily in a red coat and feathered hat like the child in John Everett Millais’s painting ‘My First Sermon’. This seemed perfectly natural. Outside the window, the landscape (which should have been Hampshire) was all cliffs and wind and wild flowers, alternating with long stretches of blue coastal sea. Another of the passengers was the dead painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who studied Watts through the wrong end of a telescope and

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whispered ‘Remember Westminster’. It was very unsettling. Meanwhile the sound of the carriage wheels was saying, over and over, a passage from Maud: ‘Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South, Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth.’ ‘Rosy is the West, Rosy is the South, Roses are her cheeks, And a rose her mouth.’

Ellen watched him as he twitched in his seat, merely remarking to herself that it was the most animated she had seen him in a considerable time. She returned to her own reading matter, but could not concentrate. Watts had given her a book of proverbs to digest on the journey, bought at Waterloo for the knockdown price of threepence. Watts did not notice that a knockdown present gave his wife very little gratification; he always loved to tell her how little his presents had cost. It was another area in which they would never see entirely eye to eye. She flicked through the book of proverbs idly. ‘It is a silly fish that is caught twice by the same bait.’ ‘Northamptonshire stands on other men’s legs.’ ‘Cheese digests everything but itself.’ So many picture opportunities for her dear husband! How would he manage Northamptonshire’s borrowed legs, she wondered. The section on Gratitude included the interesting commandment, ‘Throw no gift again at the giver’s head’— which was a precept which came just in time for Ellen, since the ungrateful young woman was just about to hurl this ghastly book straight at her nodding spouse. What is the point of a book without pictures or conversation? Ellen tried to read Tennyson’s latest poem Enoch Arden (Watts knew better than to turn up at Freshwater without it). But she had trouble with that as well. Its story was the usual cheerless Tennyson stuff, but with slightly more event than one had learned to expect. It concerned a fisherman who undertakes a voyage, leaving his family, and stays away for umpteen years because shipwrecked on a desert island. Back at home, his wife waits and waits (years pass), and keeps putting off another suitor, but finally concedes that Arden will not return. And then, what do you know? Arden is rescued! He comes home, learns that his wife has remarried, and dies in grief alone. But he makes a friendly landlady promise to tell the whole story after his death, so that everybody can feel really guilty and morbid, including the kiddies. Ellen huffed, and put the book back in her bag. The whole thing seemed bizarre to her. If she were shipwrecked abroad and returned to find George remarried, she would dance the sailor’s hornpipe and set up house with a parrot. Ellen was the least morbid person who ever lived. Those pink tights, for instance. She thought

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Watts had found her verve attractive; she hoped that was why he had asked her to marry him. But then as his first act as a married man he had asked her to pose for ‘Choosing’ and she was forced to realize the extent of his self-deception. Given the choice between the big showy camellia and the humble scented violet, Ellen had a decided floral preference, and the violets were in the bin. ‘Choosing’ was a blatant case of authorial wish-fulfilment. It was so funny it was almost sad. She looked at Watts. In his dream, he was trying to talk to Haydon as though there was nothing between them, but Haydon was pale and accusing, with a long white finger and a jagged crimson slash at his neck. Ellen kicked him lightly on the shin. Her husband only frowned. Haydon was talking about gouache costing a thousand pounds a pint. Ellen decided on the ungrateful course proscribed by proverb, and with some force threw the book again at the giver’s head. Nothing. In his dream, the railway carriage bucked in the air as though jumping a river. And at that point, Watts felt a terrible wrench to his face, as though someone were trying to pull his head off. He jerked, he saw an ungraspable vision of the absence of hope; and woke to discover that for some reason Ellen had fallen against him and grabbed his beard to steady herself.  Half an hour to go, and still no Alfred. Julia’s daily letters had been written (a servant chased the post-boy up the road), so the rest of the time was hers. But it went against the grain, this quiet time. She had promised her dear husband that she would sometimes take things easy, but temperamentally it was quite beyond her. Besides—as she often pointed out to him, as he lay in his bed with his beard spread across the counterpane, a volume of Greek verse under his hand—dear old Cameron took things quite easily enough for both of them. ‘Why do you write so many letters, Julia?’ Alfred had once inquired. ‘I would as soon kill a pig as write a letter. You write to your sisters every day. Do they reciprocate? I can’t believe they do.’ ‘I write to my sisters because they are beautiful; ever since our childhood, I felt I owed it to them.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Alfred. Emily had intervened at this point. ‘All Alfred’s family are mad or morbid, or morbidly mad; isn’t that right, Alfred?’ ‘Barking, the lot of them,’ boomed her lord. ‘That’s why we lost our inheritance, and I’m so beastly poor.’ Nobody said anything. Tennyson’s belief in his own crushing poverty was a sacrosanct delusion. ‘So we feel it better to remove ourselves as much as possible,’ continued Emily sweetly. ‘For the boys’ sake.’

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Alfred had a thought. ‘Did you check the boys for signs of madness this morning Emily?’ ‘I did, my dear.’ ‘Any signs of black blood at all? Gloom, or anything?’ ‘None, dear. Nobody’s mad in our house. As I will never tire of saying.’ ‘Well, you’re not mad, Emily.’ ‘I never said I was.’ There was a pause. ‘Will you pose for me, Alfred?’ asked Julia. ‘No, I won’t,’ he replied. Just then, Mary Ryan knocked and came in. Mary Ann tried to put down her knitting, but unfortunately she was more tangled up in it than ever. When she let go of it, it still hung in the air in front of her face. ‘Mrs Tennyson has sent back the Indian box, madam,’ said Mary Ryan. ‘She says she cannot accept it.’ Julia was astounded. ‘Cannot? But it’s a very beautiful box. I felt sure she would treasure it.’ ‘There is a letter, too.’ Julia jumped to her feet, took the letter, and shooed Mary Ryan out of the room. ‘Do you know what this letter says, Mary Ann?’ she said at last, with passion in her voice. Mary Ann said nothing. ‘It says that the box is too good for them. Well, I shall not give up. Too good, indeed.’ She continued to read. ‘Gracious!’ she exclaimed, and sat down. ‘Mrs Tennyson also informs me that C. L. Dodgson of Christ Church will be visiting Freshwater this week, that he may even have arrived already. Do you know what this means?’ Mary Ann looked blank. Admittedly, it was her forte. Shrugging mutely, she gave up the tussle with the knitting, and with a pair of shears, cut herself free. ‘What do it mean then, ma’am?’ she said at last. ‘It means that he will get Alfred’s photograph again, Mary! And why not? He’s got everybody else! The man has already photographed Faraday, Rossetti, he’s even got the Archbishop of Canterbury! So he’ll get my Alfred. How does he do it? He has no connections, no reputation, no sisters in useful houses, and his pictures are flat, small and boring, and have no Art.’ Julia paced. ‘I can’t bear to think of it. I wait here, day after day, week after week, year after year, hoping that Alfred will give me something, anything! He does not even come to see the roses! I would give anything! And now they are

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sending back my presents! Oh, Mary! If he would only pose for me, Mary—’ She sobbed and sat down. With the letter crumpled in her hand, she looked like a woman in a Victorian melodrama with sobering news from the landlord. ‘Oh Mary, if he would only pose for me!’  ‘And how was your morning on the beach, my dear? Did you make any little child friends?’ asked Lorenzo, trimming his beard at a mirror. Jessie took off her pink bonnet (pink! for a red-head!), plonked it on the Manchester Idiot, and burst out laughing. ‘What would I want with little child friends?’ she asked. ‘They’re all such sillies.’ ‘As you like, dear,’ said Lorenzo. He was an easy-going chap. He had recently located the Organ of Human Nature, and discovered—by happy accident—that on his own head it was massive. ‘Well, except a girl called Daisy, she was all right, quite clever. Quite arresting to look at, and good fun. She said she could borrow some wings for me, if I wanted, but I can’t see the point. Perhaps I’ll ask her to tea. Her father is a clever man, but do you know, she’d never heard of phrenology or vegetarianism or the perfectibility of the human brain through the exercise of memory. So I told her, if he hasn’t taught you any of that, he obviously hasn’t taught you much.’ ‘Not everyone’s as clever as you, Jessie. Actually, I sometimes think I’m not as clever as you. How old are you again?’ ‘I’m eight.’ ‘Good heavens.’ Jessie poured some tea, and handed it to him. ‘Would you like me to help you with your grooming, Pa? That’s your best suit, isn’t it? Where are we going?’ ‘I must visit the hall I have booked for tonight. You remember the carter from Yarmouth?’ ‘Pa! It was only two days ago!’ ‘Well, he has already told everyone arriving from the mainland that I’m here. Interest is growing. News travels fast. I may have to send to Ludgate Hill for more merchandise. You can return to the beach with Ada this afternoon.’ Jessie pouted. While Lorenzo went scouting the venue, the Infant Phrenologist would be left at home again, to re-read Hereditary Descent: its Laws and Facts Applied to Human Improvement, Familiar Lessons on Phrenology for the Use of Children in Schools and Families by Lydia F. Fowler (her mother). Jessie sighed. She hated it when Lorenzo left her alone with Ada. Ada was quiet and broody, and unnaturally sensitive to childish insult. Also, Jessie hadn’t even the consolation of other Vic-

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torian children, that if her father wasn’t at home, at least he would be indulging gross unnatural vices, such as smoking and drinking, or tightening himself in a lady’s corset. ‘Oh Papa, there was something I needed to tell you. Did you know the poet Albert Tennyson lives in Freshwater?’ ‘I did.’ (Lorenzo did not correct her on the ‘Albert’. The tantrum could last for hours.) ‘I asked everybody on the beach what his head was like, but of course nobody knew how to describe it. They said he usually wears a hat! But apparently he’s got big puffs under his eyes, indicating the Organ of Language. Of course, I had to tell them about Language; they only knew about the eye-bags. Oh, and they also said, if you drop in at the house, don’t expect tea. Wasn’t that an odd thing to say? One of the boys, called Lionel—I think he’s the poet’s son—did a comic impression of him, rubbing his hands together. And he kept moaning, ‘I am a very poor man! I am a very poor man!’ Everybody laughed. There’s another boy called Hallam, apparently, but he’s very shy. Also there was a clergyman sitting on the wall, who looked surprised and made a note. I don’t miss much, do I?’ ‘Jessie, it sounds as though the seaside entertainment was endless.’ ‘Don’t patronize me, Pa.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ Lorenzo patted her on the head, which he knew she loathed. ‘And what of this clergyman? What sort of head did he have?’ ‘Massive, Papa, I meant to say! All number and logic at the front; all love of children at the back. I’ve never seen a head like it! It seems he’s here to photograph little girls, like me, just my age. He sat on the wall doing corny tricks with a pocket handkerchief, and I have to tell you, it was quite shocking how quickly Daisy and the others were swarming around him, giving him their personal details, and letting him pin up their skirts.’ Lorenzo stopped preening. He needed to hear that last bit again. ‘He pinned up their skirts? With what?’ ‘With some safety pins he just happened to have with him. I know what you’re thinking, Pa. That’s what I thought, too. Perhaps he is one of those fiendish pedagogues! Is that what I mean?’ ‘Not quite.’ ‘Well, whatever it’s called, perhaps you should lecture on the dangers of it while we are here. These people need us, Papa. They need us badly.’  Meanwhile, at Dimbola Lodge, what an effort it was to sit still! Even with a lovely garden to look at, with stark white roses weeping for love and worthiness beneath, Mrs Cameron wondered how people achieved this stillness, the way she

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frequently commanded them. Reining in all this energy was enough to make your brain ache, yet others seemed to take to it. Mary Ann was virtually a human statue, of course, but then she was also pretty gormless. Charles Hay Cameron, the beauteous old husband in the next bedroom (a student of the sublime in younger days), not only lay perfectly still for hour after hour, but also smiled all the while, even when asleep. Such a smile the old man had! It was quite remarkable. In fact it delighted his wife sometimes to reflect that whereas many people have seen a man without a smile, only the highly privileged have seen a smile without a man. Alfred was something else entirely—a vigorous walker with fine stout calves, who strode on the cliff despite being dangerously shortsighted. On the days when he chose to visit, he would burst through Mrs Cameron’s Gothic garden gate (installed specifically for the purpose), full of new poetry composed on his bracing cliff walk, or fulminating at some anonymous critic or parodist, or banging on about the railway, blinking against the sun and shouting hellos to whoever was about, and getting their names wrong. Mrs Cameron lived for these moments. She would glimpse his hat, and the sun came out. And if he was accompanied by his wife Emily—pushing that devout fragile lady in an invalid perambulator—Mrs Cameron found it easy to mask her disappointment by raining presents and compliments on the poor saint until she grew so exhausted she had to be wheeled home, limp like a broken puppet. From the bottom of her soul Mrs Cameron loved and admired Emily Tennyson, but somehow this did not stop her entertaining treacherous mental visions of clifftop disaster. In fact she rehearsed the happy scene in her mind quite frequently. It went like this: Alfred paused on his blustery walk to hurl himself to the ground and examine a tiny wild orchid, leaving Emily’s perambulator temporarily brakeless and rudderless. The wheels began to turn. No! Yes! The black carriage gently trundled off (‘Alfred!’), gathering bumpy and unstoppable speed (‘Alfred!’), lucklessly veering cliffwards to a perpendicular drop. Yes! Yes! Yes! ‘Hoorah!’ yelled Julia, involuntarily. Alfred wasn’t coming today. Perhaps (some hope) he had gone home to supervise the hanging of the wallpaper. Perhaps Queen Victoria had dropped in, as Alfred often remarked she had promised to do. Having once been summoned to Osborne, Alfred entertained a vain hope that the visit would be returned, since Her Majesty had expressed a wish to hear In Memoriam recited by its author; and Emily even kept a plum-cake ready, in case, and a pile of laundered handkerchiefs for the inevitable royal blub. When Julia invited Alfred to dinner, he often made the excuse, ‘But what if Her Majesty called while I was out?’ It was funny the first time, but by now it was wearing thin. Julia consulted her clock. Ten minutes to go. She dismissed Mary Ann, and

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told her to get into her cheesecloth as soon as possible—she could feel a photograph coming on. ‘Don’t forget the lily,’ she barked after. ‘Think some religious thoughts!’ And then, folding her hands, and closing her eyes, Julia Margaret Cameron completed her hour of inactivity by reciting from Tennyson’s Mariana. ‘She only said, “My life is dreary, He cometh not,” she said; She said, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!” ’

For some reason not unconnected with Victorian morbidity, this recitation always made her feel much better.

Chapter 4




‘Have some more tea,’ said Tennyson airily, by way of distracted greeting, not glancing up from his book. Looking around, Ellen was delighted by the idea of refreshment after such a long and dusty journey, but then kicked herself for falling for this terrible old chestnut. It was the usual thing. How could you take more tea, if you had taken no tea already? Yes, the Tennyson table was set for an outdoor repast, with plates and cups and knives, but drat their black-blooded meanness, it was just for show: there was nothing on the board save tableware. Not a sausage for a tired and thirsty theatrical phenomenon to wrap her excellent tonsils around. Nothing will come of nothing, as any true-bred Shakespearean juvenile will tell you. As she crossed the dappled lawn behind Watts, and surveyed the view of ancient downs beyond, Ellen wanted to jump on the table and render some funny bits from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; it was a marvellous setting for theatricals. But instead she made her formal salutes to the older ladies and Mr Tennyson (who squinted at her rather horribly) and turned her thoughts inward, where at least they were safe. Yes, nothing will come of nothing; nothing will come of nothing. Wasn’t that a mathematical principle as well? Hadn’t a kindly mathematician once explained it to her? Yes, he had. That was in the days when she was adored, of course; when members of her audience threw flowers at the stage, and ‘came behind’ after. When her face glowed in limelight; when people looked right at her, instead of politely askance. This mathematician—it was all coming back—she had met after her very first performance. As the infant Mamilius in A Winter’s Tale, at the age of only eight. It all seemed so long ago now, and what was the point of the reminiscence? Oh yes, the mathematician. By means of some pretty, nonsensical example, this Mr Dodgson (for yes, it was he) had proved to her that whichever way you did the sum, the answer was nothing, nothing, nothing, every time. Ah, Mr Dodgson! Where was he now? If she had chosen to remain on stage, all London would be hers to command, and she would moreover pocket sixty guineas a week to spend independently on food and lodgings and full-priced books without proverbs in them. How mad of her to quit the stage for Old Greybeard here, with his borrowed home and empty flat pockets. And how cruel to her public. Mr Dodgson, for one, would be repining in the aisles. She looked at Watts, and gave him an encouraging smile, but her heart wasn’t in it. For thirty years among patrons and well-wishers this husband of hers had soaked up endless quantities of love, money, praise and time, yet still had none to give in return;

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did the multiply-by-nothingness principle apply to marriage, too? If it did, her continued love for him was like one of his terrible pictures: the triumph of hope over mathematics. It was a curious fact, remarked on by many visitors to Farringford, that whatever time you arrived for dinner, you’d missed it. The same, it now appeared, applied to tea. Emily Tennyson had long ago adopted the ‘every other day’ principle of home economics, and found that it suited well. Pragmatically, the poet’s boys hung around other people’s houses at teatime, eyeing the jam tarts—proof enough, surely, that they were not mad. Dimbola Lodge was a good spot for cadging food, which was why the boys were at Dimbola now, in all probability—sucking up to Mary Ann, and telling her how lovely she looked as ‘The Star in the East’ or ‘Maud is Not Seventeen, But She is Tall and Stately’. Hallam and Lionel (but particularly Lionel) had learned quickly that Mrs Cameron rewarded good looks with sweets, so the Tennyson boys spent much of their time away from home, carelessly showing off their charming profiles in her garden, and flicking their girly locks. Lionel was an absolute stunner. Mrs Cameron was however at Farringford this afternoon, to greet Watts and Ellen in a flurry of shawls and funny smells, and fervent greeting. ‘Il Signor! Il Signor!’ Watts loved this kind of devotion, of course, and acknowledged it with a bow. He felt no obligation to return it. Though the Wattses were guests at Dimbola, Mrs Cameron had conceived this pleasant notion of meeting them at Farringford after their journey. For one thing, in the garden at Farringford the roses were not all half-dead (and dangerously flammable) from the recent application of paint. Also, Watts and Tennyson were mutual admirers, with matching temples and pontiff beards, and Mrs Cameron loved to witness their hirsute solemn greetings for the aesthetic buzz alone. ‘The brains do not lie in the beard’ was an adage with which she had always argued. And beyond all this was a more pragmatic reason for the Farringford rendezvous: it was an excuse to see Alfred in the afternoon, when he had somehow forgotten to come in the morning. Chairs from the banqueting hall had been arranged around a table on the wide green lawn, in the shade of the ilex, and if the furniture was a peculiar assortment, this only reflected the odd people sitting in it—Mrs Tennyson silent and gaunt in black, her beady eye alert for gentlemen of the Edinburgh Review lurking in the shrubbery, Watts already asleep with his head on the table, Mrs Cameron hatching benevolent schemes and waving her arms about, and Tennyson preoccupied, in his big hat, speaking in riddles. Ellen took off her own hat, patted her golden hair and sat down gingerly in a sort of throne at the head of the table. Her real impulse was to kick off her shoes,

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let her hair down and shout, ‘Bring me some tea, then,’ but in the company of this particular set of grown-ups, who often scolded and belittled her, she found herself too often at fault. They even disapproved of pink tights: she was clueless how to please them. So, her throat rasping for want of refreshment, she played a game of onesided polite conversation she had recently taught herself from a traveller’s handbook left by Mr Ruskin at Little Holland House. And nobody took the slightest notice. ‘My portmanteau has gone directly to Dimbola Lodge,’ she announced (with perfect diction, as though speaking a foreign language). ‘My husband and I will travel there later also. It is only a short walk. My parasol is adequate although the sun is strong. Are you familiar with the Dordogne? Our journey from London was comfortable and very quick.’ No one said anything. Not a breath stirred. In the far distance, childish voices on the beach could be heard mingled with the crash of waves, piping like little birds in a storm. Watts emitted a snore, like a hamster. ‘The bay looks delightful this afternoon,’ she continued. ‘I hope there will not be rain. The Isle of Wight has the great advantage of being near yet far, far yet near. Rainbows are not worth writing odes to.’ Nothing. Bees hummed in the shrubbery, and Watts made a noise in his throat, as though preparing to say something. At this stirring from the dormant male, Mrs Cameron signalled at Ellen to hush her prattling. ‘Speak, speak, Il Signor!’ urged Mrs Cameron, grandly. But Watts did not speak, as such. Rather, he intoned. ‘An American gentleman on the boat to Leghorn,’ he said, ‘lent me without being asked eight pounds.’ He resumed his slumber, and Mrs Cameron nodded shrewdly as though a great pronouncement had been made. Tennyson continued to read his own poetry silently, with occasional bird-like tippings of the head, to indicate deep thought. ‘At what time do we arrive at the terminus?’ Ellen persisted, her voice rising a fraction. ‘I have the correct money for the watering can. You dance very well, do you know any quadrilles? No heavy fish is unkind to children. Will you help me with this portmanteau, it is heavy. I require a view with southerly light. Please iron my theatrical costumes. This gammon is still alive. Northamptonshire stands on other men’s legs. Phrenology is a fashionable science. Would you like to feel my bumps?’ It was at this point, when Ellen was just beginning to think she would not survive in this atmosphere for another instant, that she spotted a dapper figure in a dark coat and boater dodge nervously between some trees in the garden. Behind him ran a little girl in a pinafore.

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‘That man is behaving very curiously,’ she said aloud. But since this exclamation might have been just a further instalment of her phrasebook speech, no one glanced to see what she was talking about. Ellen, however, burned with curiosity. Tennyson looked up from his book, but luckily did not notice the intruder. So wary was he of fans and tourists (‘cockneys’) that he had once run away from a flock of sheep in the belief they were intent on acquiring his autograph. In fact, even after the mistake was pointed out, he still maintained that they might have been. ‘George Gilfillan should not have said I was not a great poet,’ he finally announced, in an injured tone. Emily sighed. She didn’t know who George Gilfillan was—indeed nobody knew who George Gilfillan was—but she had heard this complaint a hundred times. Gilfillan’s opinions of Tennyson’s poetry had somehow eluded her vigilance. Meanwhile, a hundred yards away, between the trees, the curious man had frozen to the spot, gazing at a pocket watch. Emily tried to recruit Julia to her cause. ‘Really, Alfred, you must forget Mr Gilfillan, he is of no consequence. And besides, to repeat bad criticism of yourself shows no wisdom. Yet you do it perpetually. What of the many fine words written in your praise? What of the kindness and approbation of the monarch? It is too vexing. The Chinese say that the wise forget insults as the ungrateful a kindness.’ Julia murmured her approval. ‘And apart from all that, you should be a man, Alfred, big fellow like you,’ she said. ‘People will say there’s no smoke without fire, if the cap fits!’ She tried to think of more suitable clichés. Watts beat her to it. He opened one eye. ‘The more you tramp on a turd, the broader it grows,’ he remarked. Julia patted his hand. ‘Thank you for that, Il Signor,’ she said. ‘There never was a man more apt with a vivid precept. We shall have dinner at Dimbola later,’ she added, in a comforting whisper. ‘With food.’ ‘Kill not the goose that lays the golden egg,’ he said, and closed his eye again. To Tennyson in full flow, however, all this talk of broadened turds was mere interruption. ‘He should not have said I am not a great poet,’ he continued. ‘And I shall prove it to you. Listen to this: With blackest moss the flower-plots [note the way “moss” and “plots” suggest the rhyme; a lovely effect, do you think you could do it?] Were thickly crusted, one and all:

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[“crusted” is a fine word here] The rusted nails fell from the knots [“knots” rhymes with “plots”, you see; “crusted” with “rusted”] That held the pear to the garden wall—

‘Peach,’ interjected Mrs Cameron, dreamily. ‘I beg your pardon.’ ‘Did I speak? Yes, I do apologize, Alfred, I did speak without meaning to. It’s just that the line is, That held the peach to the garden wall.’ ‘No, it isn’t.’ ‘I ought to know, Alfred! It’s your Mariana. I recite your Mariana to myself every day of my life! I make a point of it!’ ‘You do?’ asked Emily, quickly. Julia gulped. She suddenly realized what she’d said. ‘Well, perhaps not every day,’ she laughed, hoping to make light of it. ‘And not because it means anything, of course.’ Tennyson huffed. He wanted to press on with the recital. But Emily was not to be put off. ‘But that’s very curious, Julia. Why do you recite Mariana? I can hardly think of anybody less like Alfred’s Mariana than yourself, my dear. She is all passivity and tranquillity. You do not die for love, surely, Julia? For whom do you wait, aweary, aweary, wishing you were dead? It is quite the antithesis of your lively character!’ Julia pulled a shawl tighter, and stirred a cup furiously, which was an odd thing to do, because there was nothing in it. ‘Well—’ she began, but Alfred huffed again. He had no idea what was going on. ‘She recites Mariana, my dear, because it’s a very fine poem, of course! What an absurdly simple question! I am surprised you could not guess it!’ And he flung himself back in his chair, quite satisfied. ‘Now, where was I?’ he said, and resumed his book. ‘At peach,’ insisted Julia, spiritedly. ‘Pear,’ he rejoined. ‘Peach.’ ‘Pear.’ ‘Peach.’ ‘Stop!’ snapped Emily. ‘You must explain yourself, Alfred.’ Tennyson shut the book. ‘You are right, Julia. The word was “peach”. I changed it.’ ‘You did? When?’ ‘I don’t know. Recently. “Pear” sounds better, as I think you will agree.’

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Emily silently practised peach-pear-peach-pear, and then pear-peach-pearpeach. ‘But you wrote Mariana in 1830, Alfred,’ exclaimed Julia. ‘That’s thirty-four years ago. Why don’t you leave it alone? Thousands of people have learned it as “peach”.’ ‘She’s right,’ mumbled Watts, his contribution so unexpected that the others jumped. Tennyson blinked in confusion and looked behind him. He clearly had no idea where the noise had come from. ‘It is still my poem, Julia. I can do what I like. You might say that I like what I do, and I do what I like.’ ‘But you gave Mariana to the world—’ ‘I did no such thing.’ ‘You published it, Alfred.’ ‘That’s quite different.’ Tennyson scowled, and changed the subject. He looked away from the table altogether. ‘And as for Ruskin,’ he continued, tiresomely, ‘that foolish man, when he read my Maud, objected to the lines, “For her feet have touched the meadows / And left the daisies rosy”, representing me most unjustly as a subscriber to the pathetic fallacy. Ha! The pathetic fallacy? Me? Such stupidity is enough to make the heavens weep!’ Nothing agitated or excited Tennyson more than adverse criticism. Enoch Arden was already in the shops. The title poem ends with the lines, ‘So passed the strong heroic soul away / And when they buried him that little port / Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.’ No wonder he was getting punchy. ‘But what lack of understanding,’ he continued (he was still banging on about Ruskin). ‘Daisies do go rosy when trodden on. Ask any botanist. I have every intention of sending Mr Ruskin a real daisy one of these days, without comment, to show him that the under-petals are pink.’ Mrs Cameron, still reeling from the news of the peach, felt she could make no further comment on poetic licence today, but the saintly Emily chipped in—and with surprising vehemence. ‘For the last time, Alfred!’ she shouted, ‘We all agree with you about the daisy!’ ‘I know, but—’ ‘It was years ago! You know more about daisies than Ruskin does! It is understood! You are right and he is wrong! The man has a brain the size of St Paul’s Cathedral, but he does not understand that daisies can be rosy! That’s enough!’ ‘But—’ ‘All right! Send him a daisy, then! Here’s one!’ Emily leaned over the arm of her chair and ripped a daisy from the grass. ‘Here’s two!’ She did it again. ‘Here’s a whole bunch!’

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Tennyson narrowed his eyes. The normally placid Emily seemed to have lost her grip. ‘I will,’ he said, gravely. ‘Go on, then.’ ‘Don’t think I won’t, because I will.’ ‘I dare you.’ Ellen shrugged. These grown-up literary discussions were beyond her; perhaps because of her extreme youth. Looking on the bright side, however, she calculated that nobody would miss her if she slipped away, to investigate the curious man. Instead, she met Lionel Tennyson skulking behind a camellia bush. From the state of his cheeks, smeared with red, he seemed to have scored rather well with the Dimbola jam tarts this afternoon. ‘Lionel? It’s Mrs Watts. Do you remember me? We played at Indians.’ ‘Shh,’ said Lionel. ‘Keep down, won’t you?’ Assuming this was a new game, Ellen joined him in hiding behind the bush. ‘I thought I saw a man in a straw hat,’ she whispered. ‘Is he a friend of yours?’ ‘That’s who we’re hiding from,’ said Lionel. ‘It’s a Mr Dodgson from Oxford. Mother doesn’t like him, so I’m making sure he doesn’t reach the house. Nobody knows he’s here except me. Not even Hallam. Did you see the way he was lurking? Mother says—’ Lionel looked around before finishing the sentence. ‘What does she say?’ asked Ellen, in an excellent stage whisper, which could be heard for a hundred yards in all directions. ‘Shh,’ said Lionel. ‘Mother says he’s not a gentleman.’ ‘Indeed?’ said Ellen. ‘How dreadful.’ ‘He takes people’s photographs without asking.’ ‘But that’s not possible,’ objected Ellen. Lionel’s handsome little face assumed a contemptuous expression. ‘You agree that photographs are taken?’ ‘Well yes, but—’ ‘Have you ever heard of anyone giving a photograph?’ ‘I suppose not.’ ‘So.’ Just then, Dodgson appeared in a glade twenty yards away. He seemed to be having trouble shaking off the little girl. ‘Go away,’ he pleaded. (Dodgson had no stammer or ceremony when he talked with children.) ‘But you said you loved your love with a D,’ said the child, who was holding a sheet of paper with writing on it. ‘Doesn’t that mean you want to run away and get married?’

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Dodgson closed his eyes. ‘Please, please,’ he said. ‘Hop it.’ ‘But I love you too, Mr Dodgson. I love my love with a D because he is Dapper. Come to the beach and tell me a story.’ ‘Daisy. I am here to see a man about a book. I have come to make a magnificent gesture; a priceless gift, the fruit of my genius. You wouldn’t understand.’ ‘If you come to the beach, I’ll let you do the thing with the safety pins.’ Dodgson considered. He looked at his watch again. Daisy rested her hands on her hips. ‘If you don’t come to the beach, I’ll tell Mama about the thing with the safety pins.’ ‘You wouldn’t.’ He gasped. ‘I would though.’ He groaned and capitulated. He took her little hand and turned back. ‘I suppose it is a bit late to call now,’ he said. ‘They seem to have company, too.’ Ellen and Lionel watched him out of sight. For some reason, his retreat filled Ellen with a sense of loss, and she had an urge to wave a handkerchief. As he disappeared from sight, they heard him say, ‘But apart from making my excellent gift, I would dearly love to talk to Mr Tennyson about the railway. It sounds such a splendid proposal . . .’ Ellen looked at Lionel. ‘What a strange man,’ she said. ‘What did she mean about safety pins?’ ‘I have no idea. But I happen to know a secret. Mr Dodgson writes parodies of Father’s poems. I’m not supposed to know, because if Father finds out, Mother says he’ll froth at the mouth.’ ‘Why is your father so sensitive to other people’s opinions? Is he mad? Surely he knows he is a great, great man?’ Lionel did not answer at once. He was seriously considering the ‘mad’ part of Ellen’s question, like the true black-blooded Tennyson that he was. ‘Is he mad? Is he mad? Is he mad?’ He tried it all three ways. The exercise was not particularly helpful. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘He’s not exactly Mister Stable of the Isle of Wight. Let’s just say it’s a bit rich the way he checks us for madness every day.’ Lionel straightened up. ‘He’s gone,’ he said. ‘Shall we go down to the sea?’ ‘Yes, please. Where’s Hallam?’ ‘Oh, Hallam stays indoors a lot. He’s such a girly.’ Ellen smiled. ‘I see.’ ‘Are you coming, then?’ ‘But won’t we see Mr Dodgson there too?’

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‘Oh yes, but we’ll ignore him. I’m terribly good at that. I’ll teach you, if you like.’  Freshwater Bay was very popular this afternoon, and Dodgson was the most popular thing about it. On all his summer seaside holidays, four o’clock was his regular story-time with children on the beach, and by the time Ellen and Lionel located him, he was seated on a rock (conveniently low) telling the story of the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle to a group of six children, all so enthralled by the underwater curriculum that they were currently practising reeling, writhing, drawling, stretching and (best of all) fainting in coils. Daisy made sure that when she fainted in coils, she made contact with Mr Dodgson’s boots, which made him extremely uncomfortable. Ellen’s heart leapt when she saw him more closely; for this (as she had hoped) was her very own dear Mr Dodgson, who had adored her once! But she was afraid to disturb the story, so she waited beside a barnacled breakwater with Lionel, just listening to his words, and catching the sun on her face. Waves lapped and seagulls flew; maids giggled behind bathing machines. Ellen watched the bright faces of Dodgson’s eight-year-old admirers. They were entranced. ‘How many hours a day did you do lessons?’ said Alice. ‘Ten hours the first day, nine the next, and so on,’ said the Mock Turtle. ‘What a curious plan!’ ‘That’s the reason they’re called lessons,’ the Gryphon remarked. ‘Because they lessen from day to day.’

The children groaned, and Lionel laughed before he could stop himself. ‘It’s very funny, this,’ Ellen said, suddenly performing a little pirouette. ‘Don’t you think he might write it down? It would make a splendid entertainment for Dimbola Lodge. I would play little Alice, of course. In fact, that would be rather fitting, because my first name is Alice, did you know that?’ Lionel clearly wasn’t interested. ‘Isn’t it fun eavesdropping?’ she said, ‘Like something out of Shakespeare. Do you know those children?’ ‘I know of them,’ conceded Lionel. ‘I wouldn’t count them as friends.’ Without much grace, he pointed them out. They included Daisy and her cousin Annie (both enraptured); and on the end of the line, sitting up straight, and trying not to look interested in the story except from a scientific point of view, was Jessie Fowler. ‘Oh, I ought to have told you!’ said Lionel, prompted by the sight of Jessie.

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‘Tonight the great Lorenzo Fowler gives a demonstration of phrenology in the parish hall. The carter told me. It was arranged terribly quickly. Father says we children can’t attend, of course; but Mrs Cameron’s Mary Ann will be going, and Mary Ryan too, and our gardener, and the coachman. I’ve asked them to tell me all about it. I wish I could go. Will you be allowed to go, Mrs Watts?’ ‘I don’t suppose so.’ It was alarming to realize that even though he called her Mrs Watts, he lumped her in with the children. ‘Is he famous, this Lorenzo Fowler?’ ‘Jessie says he’s the most famous phrenologist that ever lived. That’s Jessie with the orange hair. She’s a phrenologist, too. She’s very stuck up, and disapproves of everything, including ham-and-egg pies and narrow waists. She’s awful. I hate women who talk too much about what they know. What do you think?’ Ellen perused the child. ‘Well, she shouldn’t wear yellow.’ ‘But on the other hand,’ added Lionel. ‘She seems to like me, so she can’t be all bad. She told me this morning that she helps in her father’s demonstrations, but I don’t believe her. She just wants me to find her fascinating because I’m so fantastically good-looking.’ Jessie, who had been all this time pretending not to be eight, suddenly gave way to a childish impulse. At the sight of the truly gorgeous Lionel behind Dodgson’s back, she smiled and waved, flapping her hand furiously, as if it was something stuck to her, and she wanted to shake it off. ‘Lionel!’ she yelled. At which, of course, Dodgson looked round. And seeing both Lionel and Ellen, stopped his story abruptly, in mid-sentence. ‘L-L—Lionel, my dear friend!’ he exclaimed. (Lionel groaned.) ‘And can this really be Mrs Watts with you? The brightest star of Drury L-L—?’ ‘It is a pleasure to meet you again, Mr Dodgson,’ said Ellen, extending her hand. ‘I have never forgotten your kindness to me when I made my first appearance on the stage. And now you tell stories about little Alice. I was reminding Lionel that Alice is my first name—you remember that, of course, Mr Dodgson.’ Dodgson made no comment. He was rather overcome. ‘You are very brave to return to Freshwater,’ Ellen continued, her self-esteem swelling as she felt herself adored. She could be very grown-up and condescending when it came to talking with fans, and she was a finely made young woman. Like Maud in the poem, she was not seventeen, but she was tall and stately. ‘B—brave?’ queried Dodgson. ‘Yes. Lionel told me as we walked from Farringford that he once offered to strike your head with a croquet mallet.’

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‘Oh! Ha ha,’ said Dodgson uncomfortably, patting Lionel on the shoulder. ‘He didn’t mean it, I’m s—sure.’ ‘I did, though,’ said Lionel, pulling a face. ‘Ha ha! Youth, youth.’ They all looked at the sand for a moment. ‘But Miss Terry,’ he began again. ‘I am so very pleased to see a fr-fr—’ He rolled his eyes, and tried again. ‘Fr-fr—’ ‘Frog?’ suggested Lionel. Dodgson waved away the very idea. He pointed at the children. ‘Fr—’ he continued. ‘Phrenologist?’ Lionel tried again. ‘Fracas?’ said Ellen. ‘Frigate?’ ‘I know! I know!’ said Ellen, getting carried away. ‘Fretful porpentine!’ Dodgson took an exaggeratedly deep breath, mainly to shut them up. ‘Friend,’ he blurted, at last. Ellen looked abashed. He had called her Miss Terry; he had called her a friend. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been so nice to her. Dodgson caught his own mistake. ‘But I apologize. I must call you Mrs W-W—’ Lionel let him wallow. ‘Mrs W-W—’ ‘Miss Terry will suffice, I think,’ interjected Ellen, ‘just between ourselves. I know from my own experience that the other title is sometimes hard to say.’ She looked at the little girls on the beach—particularly Daisy, who was studying Dodgson with big round purposeful eyes—and felt suddenly overcome with sadness. ‘I have been fancying myself little Miss Terry all afternoon, Mr Dodgson—at about the same age as these pretty girls here, in fact. And I can barely express how much pleasure it has given me.’

Chapter 5




While all this childish excitement was taking place at the bay, Ellen’s husband was engaged in a far more serious and elevated pursuit. In a small circle of light in a darkened shed, he sat stiff-backed on an upturned tea-chest, trying very hard not to move. His whole body ached from the effort, and it was a strange way to spend a Friday afternoon. His hair was brushed from his face, to reveal his excellent temples. He had been most emphatic on this point. ‘Can you see my excellent temples, Julia?’ ‘They are displayed to great advantage, Mr Watts!’ Taking photographs by the fashionable wet-collodion process was a tricky, smelly, neck-straining business, and took an unconscionable amount of time, especially the way Julia preferred to do it, with dim light and slow exposures. Watts’s beard was spread dramatically over the bodice of a grubby white muslin shift, belted at the waist. He sat completely still, with an expression fixed and glassy. Underneath his tunic, where realistically he should have sported bare legs and sandals, he wore tweed trews and thick boots. They made him very hot. ‘These trews, Julia—’ he had begun. ‘Forget them!’ she said. ‘They will not be visible in the picture!’ ‘Oh. I see. Oh, very well.’ Not only was it stifling in this makeshift studio, but there was a strong smell from the fresh seaweed coiled round his neck, yet Watts was a fairly happy man. How charming to see someone else slaving for art, for once. How pleasant, too, to slip away from the tiresome child-wife, who had been in a peculiar mood ever since leaving London. The last time he saw her she was skipping off like a little girl through the garden at Farringford, without a thought for the etiquette of tea with one’s elders. The trouble with Ellen, he reflected, was that she could be so many different sizes in the course of a single day. ‘Forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, hm?’ barked Mrs Cameron, nodding to him encouragingly, as she walked briskly up and down in her red velvet dress (such energy she had, she was the sort of woman who seemed to run at breakneck speed just to stand still). Watts could feel the sweat starting from his brow. Also, was he imagining it, or could he really remember mentioning a turd at teatime to Mrs Tennyson? ‘Forty-five, forty-six!’ Watts had been in Freshwater just three hours, and already Mrs Cameron had dressed him up and got him to work, photographically speaking. Mrs Cameron was deeply fond of Watts, and the reason was not hard to find. Here was a man who knew how to accept her presents, to repay hospitality with humble thanks

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and words of praise for her kindness. This was a simple matter to Watts, for early in life he had learned the confoundedly simple social lesson that ‘How can I ever repay you?’ released you from any obligation to cough up ninepence. Amazing, but true. Throw no gift again at the giver’s head was a foolproof precept for a cheap life in good company. And of course he would sit for Julia. Did it cost him anything? No. She sneezed. He reacted, but recovered himself. ‘Ignore me!’ she said. ‘Just the chemicals, you know! Don’t move! Hm? Stay still! Observe your map, George, with conflicting emotions! Big eyes! Big eyes!’ Watts complied with all this barked advice (delivered in a loud voice, as if sitting still had made him deaf ), but he was convinced his crown was slipping, and that the picture would be ruined by the silvery ghost of his locomotive hat. But summoning up the required conflicting emotions of the old Ulysses was not too difficult, he found. On his knee was a crude outline of the Aegean, drawn on a pillow case. ‘Why? How? What? When? Where?’ he therefore asked himself with genuine confusion. He had no idea why Julia chose him for Ulysses. After all, he was hardly the heroic nautical type. One minute he’d been snoozing pleasantly in Tennyson’s garden, the next he was planning one final heroic voyage toward death in a blacked-out chicken shed. But despite his shortcomings in the Greek hero line, he saw nothing inherently ridiculous in the situation. Where lesser aesthetes, for example, might have queried the choice of implement in his right hand—a small, three-pronged toasting fork, representing ten long years of epic maritime adventure—Watts thought it rather ingenious, and made a mental note. ‘A hundred and one, a hundred and two, a hundred and three.’ The painter did not move his head—after all, he had his conflicting emotions to attend to, and he had selected a daring combination, comprising pensive and sublime in the upper cranial regions, with a bit of melancholy in the cheekbone area, and poetic firmness about the mouth. Knowing the action to be permissible, he blinked every thirty seconds. Mrs Cameron allowed her sitters to blink, partly because she grudgingly accepted the necessity, but mainly because she had found the effect of blinks on the final picture artistically desirable. Blinking added a spiritual opaqueness to the eyes, which in turn added to the general air of sublimity. Her latest picture of Mary Ann—‘Can I but relive in sadness?’—had the eyes so filmy and opaque that truly it made people yawn and stretch their arms just to look at it. ‘A hundred and forty-nine, hm? A hundred and fifty.’ Watts had no idea how long this would go on (it could go as high as five hundred if the exposure was seven or eight minutes), but he was already tired. He resolved that for his next sitting he would choose his own hero, and select a dead

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one. The corpse of Hector, perhaps; or the Morte d’Arthur—anything that would entail lying prone on cushions. Or he could embody that superb short sentence, ‘Homer sometimes nods.’ Now his arm ached; the occasional whiff of ether snatched at his tonsils, and at his side, not improving matters in the least, that uppity Irish servant girl recited Tennyson’s Ulysses, presumably to get him in the mood. Such a lot of Tennyson one must endure suddenly! He gave her his attention for a moment. She had just reached the bit that went, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.’ ‘Oh, dear,’ thought Watts. ‘More dreary exhorting stuff. A chap who is capable of The Lotos-Eaters, too. Why does Ulysses not remain at home with his charming wife? It has taken him such a long time to get there, after all.’ ‘A hundred and sixty, a hundred and sixty-one,’ continued Mrs Cameron, nodding at him with her hands steepled together, praying him to be still. ‘A hundred and sixty-two—Don’t move!’ Watts could feel the crown sliding, and his emotions conflicted even more. His thoughts turned to Ellen again—before they left London she had casually mentioned the phrase ‘Patience on a monument’, an absolutely splendid notion for a high-but-extremely-narrow wall he’d heard mentioned in the Clerkenwell area. ‘It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,’ said the girl, unheard by Watts. ‘Oh, this part is so grand,’ she said, breaking off. ‘Do you not think so, madam? Is it not the grandest thing?’ ‘It is by Alfred Tennyson, Mary,’ said Mrs Cameron. ‘I know, madam. We learned it in the schoolroom—your sons and I, when you very kindly educated me above my station for no purpose. I know it word for word. In fact I feel that I know it as well as Mr Tennyson does himself.’ ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ muttered Mrs Cameron (the treachery of Mariana’s peach was still fresh in her mind). And so the girl continued, from memory, closing the book. ‘It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength—’

Mrs Cameron interrupted. ‘That last part again, Mary, please. I think I heard you touch on the ideal title for this very wonderful picture of Mr Watts, whose noble brow has never shone to such advantage. But I must respect Il Signor’s concentration, which is pro-

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found, and is a lesson to us all!’ (It was true. Mentally, Watts was no longer in the room.) ‘Again, Mary! But quietly. Let me hear the lines once more!’ ‘It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: [repeated Mary] It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and—’

Mrs Cameron clapped her hands for joy. ‘That’s it!’ she exclaimed. ‘Tho’ much is taken much abides! That’s it!’ Watts, hearing the cry, was recalled from his reverie. ‘It is?’ he said thankfully, standing up, and removing his crown. ‘Much as I love to labour for the muse, Julia, I am profoundly glad to hear it.’ He looked at her. ‘Is something amiss, my dear?’ And Mrs Cameron, her picture ruined, watched him with her eyes like saucers, all aghast.  Several minutes after the Ulysses disaster, Mrs Cameron had prepared another plate by coating it with collodion (gun cotton dissolved in ether), washing it in water, and then sensitizing it in a bath of silver nitrate and glacial acetic acid. This chemical stuff had been a bugger to learn, as you can imagine. She removed the plate carefully between two blackened fingers, peered closely, remarked, ‘Perfectly satisfactory, just a few hairs and scratches,’ and then sneezed on it violently. She threw it out of the door. The next plate was ruined when it cracked and broke being taken out of the camera; the next when the door to the chicken house flew open unexpectedly during the exposure; the third reached its required seven minutes without mishap, but Mr Watts was found to have moved some inches, due to falling asleep; another plate was dropped on the floor during another tricky process involving pyrogallic acid. The worst hold-up of all, however, was not technical but artistic, when Mary recommenced her reading of Ulysses, and mentioned that the king sat ‘among these barren crags’—an optional point, thought Watts; but Mrs Cameron, who groaned and smacked her forehead when she heard it, felt bound to represent the rocks, and sent the gardener to find a craggy-looking sack of garden rubbish for Mr Watts to stand on. Watts begged to be excused: he could not stand on a bag of rubbish. And so she had him lolling—which suited him more—and finally, a plate was exposed, developed and fixed. At which point, with the picture printing on to coated paper in the late after-

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noon sunshine outside, the accumulated stress overcame Mrs Cameron and she began to cry out, ‘Oh! Oh!’, shaking her hand and running on the spot. ‘What is the matter, Julia?’ asked Watts. ‘Have you pricked your finger?’ ‘I haven’t pricked it yet. But I soon shall, George, it is only a matter of time, and then potassium cyanide will pass into the cut and course through my bloodstream and then I shall die! Oh! Oh! And nobody will miss me—least of all Alfred Tennyson, the biggest ingrate who ever lived! Oh! Oh!’ ‘You mean you may give your life for your art, Julia?’ asked Watts, patting her hand. ‘But wouldn’t that be a splendid thing to do? I think so often these days of poor old Haydon, you know.’ ‘Haydon? Why?’ ‘I’m not completely sure. But he haunts my dreams with a telescope, Julia; he never quite leaves me alone. He seems to blame me for having a patron and a comfortable life, when he struggled alone in the hard, hard world of bills and debt and children. But that’s not my fault, is it? He even begrudges me Ellen—although I’d better not go into that.’ ‘Oh the dear talentless man,’ agreed Mrs Cameron. Kind-hearted soul that she was, she immediately forgot her own troubles, thinking of someone else’s. ‘Of course we bought his sensational journals when they were published after his death. Charles and I read them in the evenings aloud, and cried a great deal, especially the bits about his brain being too big and driving him mad.’ ‘I know,’ agreed Watts morosely. ‘Those journals were a cracking read.’ ‘Yes, but Alfred must never know I read them, George! You know how he disapproves of morbid curiosity—which is odd in him, really,’ she reflected, ‘when he has done so much to make morbid his own middle name.’ And at the thought of dear old Alfred ‘Morbid’ Tennyson, Mrs Cameron sighed and slumped, and stared at his special gate with eyes forlorn. ‘Julia?’ ‘Yes, George.’ ‘You don’t suppose it was my fault, do you? That Haydon took his life? It wasn’t because I was getting all the decent walls?’ Mrs Cameron was amazed by the question. ‘I am sure he never blamed you, George. But I think it shows the greatness of your heart that you think in such terms.’ She paused. A thought had struck her. ‘Are there not plenty of walls to go round?’ ‘Alas, no, Julia. A good public wall is worth a thousand pounds a foot. And before Haydon made a point of demanding some, there were virtually no walls at all.’ ‘No walls at all? I see. Well, no wonder he was such a champion of the Elgin

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Marbles—there’s walls for you. Speaking of which, you didn’t see whether the Tennysons had hung that exquisite wallpaper I gave them? I’ve asked so many times now, I can’t—’ She trailed off. Watts looked nonplussed. He was not a man on whom wallpaper made an impression. ‘As for Haydon, however,’ continued Mrs Cameron, ‘it was the American midget that killed him, George, metaphorically speaking. Everyone knows that. He could not endure it that all the visitors to his terrible last exhibition preferred to go next door and see that yankee short person, what was his name—?’ ‘Colonel Tom Thumb.’ ‘—Yes, that’s him. Losing out to a freak, it was so undignified, for a man of his high artistic aims.’ Watts considered. He supposed this must be true. The indignity must have been frightful. ‘Actually, I heard the freak was good,’ he said at last. ‘He was. We went twice.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘We bought the book.’ ‘And Haydon’s pictures were bad?’ ‘They stank, George. They reeked. His talent was never close to yours, whatever you may think. You are England’s Michelangelo! Haydon was just a dauber on a very large scale. People only kept asking for his “Napoleon on St Helena” because it was a back view, you know, and because they felt sorry for him. And another thing. Despite all his devout talk and perpetual prayer, it must never be forgotten that Haydon used his own face as a model for the countenance of Our Lord. I fear I can never forgive him for that.’ ‘It was a bit presumptuous, I suppose—’ Mrs Cameron snorted. ‘—But perhaps no other head was available, Julia.’ Mrs Cameron considered the argument for a moment and rejected it. ‘There is always a head available, George. We both know that.’  Back at the Albion Hotel, Jessie folded her arms and assumed an expression which in an older person might have been deemed murderous. It had been a horrible day. Those nincompoops Daisy and Annie had mooned around Mr Dodgson, letting him write them poems and draw funny pictures on the sand with a stick. Daisy had even let Mr Dodgson pin up her skirt again, pretending that she had no safety pins of her own. (She had lots, in fact. Jessie had seen them. Jessie had even equipped her with a dozen of her own.)

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Her face was nearly purple with emotion. If Watts had seen her, he would have been prompted to pronounce that old infallible dictum, ‘Short folk are soon angry.’ ‘I love my love with a D!’ said Jessie, spitting out the words. ‘Because he is a Darling Doggie Dumb-Dumb Dodo! Argh! Pah! Pooh!’ Jessie had expected a bit more attention for herself, that was the sum of it. Dodgson had been absorbed elsewhere, and although she disapproved of him, the rejection stung her. She had yet to learn the sad fiscal lesson of the plain female, that if you don’t pay compliments to the male gender, you don’t get any back. Lionel Tennyson had virtually ignored her, preferring to chat with a pretty woman fully double her age (Ellen, who was indeed sixteen). To cap it all, Ada had abandoned her, disappearing behind the bathing machines in a sneaking manner the moment Lionel turned up. Ada ought to be a bit more grateful to Pa and me, Jessie thought. We picked her up when she was virtually destitute, and we can just as easily drop her again. She kicked a table leg. ‘The trouble with everybody,’ said Jessie aloud, ‘is that they’ve got no Organ of Gratitude.’ She pursed her lips, pulled her folded arms more tightly to her chest, and let the words revolve in her mind. Ha! No Organ of Gratitude at all, some people; What some people need sharpening up is their Organ of Gratitude. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she started to feel her own head, to check that her own Organ of Gratitude was of decent size and health. But she stopped again. Hold on a minute, she thought, where is the Organ of Gratitude? She knew where Benevolence was. Also Acquisitiveness, which in her own case was substantial. But Gratitude? Where ought it to fit in? Was it a higher emotion, or a baser one? Animals were supposed to feel gratitude. But wasn’t it a cornerstone of human relations? Weren’t good people benevolent so that others could be grateful? Puzzled, she ran to Lorenzo’s charts and scanned them for an answer. It wasn’t there. Jessie took several deep breaths and searched again. It still wasn’t. ‘Christopher Columbus!’ she whispered. For suddenly it was as plain as day: Nobody had yet discovered the Organ of Gratitude! Phrenology had been going for seventy years, and nobody had located one of the most fundamental organs. And then, one day, a small lisping infant asked the question, ‘Where ith gwatitood Daddy?’ and revolutionized science. It sounded like a great myth; she could already visualize the pamphlet. ‘How

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Jessie Fowler located the Organ of Gratitude, Unaided by a Grown-up—Chapter One: Out of the Mouths of Babes.’ As you may see, the scientific implications of this breakthrough were not lost on Jessie. In phrenological terms, her discovery on this Friday afternoon in Freshwater Bay was a landmark. It was like being the first person ever to say, ‘Yes, this River Nile is all very well, and yes it’s got some very snappy crocodiles in it, but where does it come from, then? Don’t you think somebody ought to head up country in a pith helmet and find out?’  Back at Dimbola, Mr Watts was invited to remove his smock and see the first signs of the finished picture entitled ‘Tho’ Much is Taken, Much Abides’. He was quite glad to get the smock off. Its last inhabitant had been an artisan involved in cleaning mackerel (representing King Lear), and if his nose did not deceive him, it had not been washed in between. Shadows crept across the lawn, and Mrs Cameron moved the printing frame progressively nearer to the house, to keep it in the light. The process of printing was like hatching an egg, she explained to Watts. You had to keep it warm for hours and hours. In fact, the paper had been coated in albumen, which was eggwhite, funnily enough, and— ‘So you think Haydon did not hold me directly responsible?’ said Watts. He was still harping on, apparently. ‘If he did, he was even sillier than everybody thought,’ said Julia. ‘But what’s brought all this on, George? He killed himself eighteen years ago.’ ‘Is it as long as that?’ ‘Yes, it is.’ Watts had no explanation, but Haydon had haunted his dreams (‘Remember Westminster!’) only since the marriage to Ellen. Sometimes he showed Watts a tumbling heap of unpaid dress-making bills, and gestured with an unambiguous neck-sawing motion. ‘Shall we place the apparatus on the garden wall, perhaps?’ Watts suggested. ‘If it would be secure, it would catch the last of the warm sun.’ ‘You are a genius, Il Signor. I have always said as much. We will place it above Alfred’s gate, for he never calls at this time. There is no breath of wind, hm? Another hour and the print is made.’ And so Mary Ryan took the precious delicate plate in its printing press, and placed it above the Tennyson gate to catch the last hot rays from the west. Mrs Cameron squeezed Il Signor’s hand. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She should have said it earlier, but she could say it now. ‘My dear Julia,’ said Watts, with dignity. ‘It was the least I could do.’

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They went inside. ‘I do apologize for my outburst earlier, George, when I said that Alfred wouldn’t care if I died from potassium cyanide poisoning. It was unjust.’ Watts was puzzled by the reference. ‘Consider it forgotten,’ he said, carefully. ‘I have been contemplating a picture of “The Absence of Hope”,’ she said. ‘Perhaps that explains my unusually sombre mood.’ ‘ “The Absence of Hope”?’ said Watts. ‘My own dearest project, Julia! I long to show it to the world. Haydon felt it, I am sure. It is like an undercurrent dragging pebbles down the beach, the sound of a wire snapping, Eurydice dragged back to Hades, or a door slamming at the edge of your hearing.’ ‘But how to show it?’ ‘Indeed.’ ‘Indeed.’ They sat together in glum silence, with Absence of Hope written all over them. ‘Despair is not the same, of course,’ said Watts. ‘Oh no.’ ‘Haydon, you know, sketched his own children in their death-throes, such was his dedication to his art.’ ‘Do you think we could stop talking about Haydon now, George?’ ‘Julia, of course.’ ‘Would a cup of tea be acceptable, George?’ ‘I would worship you for the rest of my life.’ Julia laughed. How pleasant it was to hear real gratitude, for once. ‘You know what Cameron would say if I asked him that? He would say, “If it makes you happy, Julia”.’ Watts considered it. ‘He’s got a point, I suppose.’ Julia spluttered. ‘But George, it is the most infuriating reply! It suggests that I perform kind deeds merely for my own satisfaction. I can’t tell you how dispiriting that is.’ This was too deep for Watts, who had never performed a kind deed. But he smiled sympathetically, being keen to smooth the path to the teapot. ‘Don’t concern yourself about Haydon—’ Julia began. But as they made their way to the drawing room, a faint but unmistakable slam and a crash reached their ears. They looked at each other. The sound came from the far end of the garden. On their joint countenance, the Absence of Hope made a long and fruitful visit. ‘George!’ yelled Ellen, as she capered into the house, showing her petticoats. ‘Hello?’ She appeared at the door with shards of glass in her hands. ‘Was this important?’ she said excitedly, holding out a corner of plate negative.

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‘I just came in through the gate, and the next thing I knew, well—all the king’s horses and all the king’s men!’ She paused, but only for breath. ‘I was lucky it didn’t fall on my head, actually.’ Mrs Cameron, who had remained unusually silent, spoke up. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that, Mrs Watts.’ And with a muffled ‘Excuse me,’ retired upstairs, at an undignified half-run. ‘What have I done now?’ said Ellen. ‘You should take more care,’ snapped Old Greybeard. ‘Why?’ He gave her an accusing look. ‘We shan’t have tea now.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said the girl. ‘Why does everybody expect so much of me, without telling me what it is? But I wish you would listen, George. I have discovered a very charming clergyman on the beach who has written a book all about me. Isn’t that perfect? This is the first time anyone has written a book about me, George! You should be pleased. And best news of all, tonight there will be a demonstration of phrenology at the parish hall. I knew we would have fun here if we made the effort. Phrenology, George! As Mr Kean used to say so beautifully, So much for Buckingham! Off with his head!’ Watts harumphed, and reached his hand towards her face. But it was not a gesture of tenderness; he adjusted her collar, which had come up. She knew what he was going to say. He said it. ‘The phrenologist will manage without us, Ellen, as you well know. Phrenology! At the parish hall! You might as well express the wish to see the Gymnastic Feats of Mr Reynoldson, the Celebrated Cripple!’ ‘Why, is he on too?’ ‘Ellen!’ ‘Well, honestly!’ ‘Ellen, tonight we must stay with our hosts, of course, and try to repair some of the damage you have done.’ Unquelled, indeed not even listening, she examined the shards of glass and peered at the fractured, ghostly image of Watts. It looked like a real hoot. Was that a toasting fork? Surely not. She tried to pull a long face, indicative of regret. ‘What was it called, George—this lovely picture I have ruined?’ ‘ “Tho’ Much is Taken, Much Abides”, if you must know.’ She brightened. ‘Well, not much of it abiding now,’ she said, and ran upstairs to prepare herself for an evening of adventure.

Chapter 6




That evening, at Plumbley’s Hotel, Dodgson made notes in his diary about the children he’d met on the seashore. He was attempting to keep his spirits up. Next to the name ‘Daisy’ he made a large emphatic cross, and then, after a pause, added a thoughtful question mark. There was certainly something very attractive about the child, even though her forwardness terrified him. Perhaps it was the image of her in the garden with the wings. For some deep reason, Victorians always liked to picture small girls as figuring somewhere between a corpse and a chicken. Next to ‘Annie’ he wrote ‘A triumph, pic soon’ and next to ‘Jessie’ he wrote ‘Needs work. Unimpressed by bunny tricks. Poss not child at all, but imposter midget?’ What a life for a grown man with a huge intellect: sucking up to kiddies on their holidays. Yet every day he recorded the names of the new conquests, and calculated whether their parents would let him share them for a couple of hours. Sharing was Dodgson’s life, really. The way he looked at it, other people seemed to have lives not so much full to the brim as wastefully overflowing; they generated left-overs of all sorts; it seemed therefore an offence against the Almighty not to cream off some of the surplus. Great trees are good for nothing but shade, as the saying is. So Dodgson shared other people’s fame when he took their pictures. He shared other people’s poems when he made a parody. He shared other people’s teatimes when he dropped by at six. And the little girls? Well, he would never have one of his own. He stood up and made a decision. He would attend the phrenology lecture. In Oxford or London, he would not have risked the impropriety, but here in the Isle of Wight he could mingle with the artisans and housemaids, and pay his tuppence for the privilege. He always loved a show, as long as there was no harm in it; and to be honest, the social opportunities of Freshwater had been a bit of a disappointment thus far. No response to his letter from Farringford yet; and as for Dimbola Lodge, he was so anxious about being hauled in to pose for Mrs Cameron as Beowulf with a coal scuttle on his head that he had started going past on all fours. Even from the photographic view, he had got nowhere in Freshwater. Both evenings since his arrival he had stayed in his hotel, alone, writing little letters to child-friends, closing his eyes to picture them with not much on, and polishing his equipment vigorously with a rag. And why should he not attend the lecture? From all that the dear, pretty Ellen had told him, none of the resident geniuses of Freshwater would stoop to the level of Lorenzo Fowler (‘Old Watts will never let me go,’ she said), so Dodgson

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felt safe from recognition if he joined the throng. No, the biggest worry was the possibility of audience participation. The great Lorenzo would require heads to practise on; what if Fowler called Dodgson on stage? Phrenologized him in front of a hall full of people? Pulled the secrets out of his head like a magician producing a coloured scarf from a nose? Dodgson reached for a hat and tugged it firmly on his head. He placed another on top of it. And then the boater. Dodgson had been phrenologized once before, and had hated it utterly. Even years later, the thought of it made him feel nauseous. That another person should touch one’s head, even in a private consulting room in Edinburgh—the intimacy was outrageous, horrifying. And then one must endure the diagnosis, too. Dodgson’s outstandingly logical mind had been deduced in Edinburgh; also his abnormally large love of children. But ‘Emulous’ this insolent Scotsman had called him, to Dodgson’s indignance. Emulous? Why, he was no more emulous than any other distinguished man of letters writing in England today, if he might include himself in that company (and he thought, on the whole, he might). Dodgson resolved to stand firm against Mr Fowler if the question of volunteers arose. He wished only to watch the phrenologizing of the lesser orders. If asked to participate, he must simply say no in the firmest possible way. He practised it now. ‘You are very k-k—’ he began. ‘Thank you but n-n—’ ‘I f-f—feel I must decl-cl—’ As usual with the Reverend C. L. Dodgson, the firm words needed work. It was eight o’clock when he left the hotel, and the sun had almost disappeared behind the western downs, but the bay beneath glowed sapphire as though lit from within, the surf danced, and Dodgson felt a surge of happiness. His skin still burned from the day, and he shivered in the sea breeze, but he decided not to return for a scarf, even though he had prudently packed a nice woollen one when leaving Oxford. Life for Dodgson was a succession of resisted urges—as he walked up the lane to Dimbola (it was on the way), he wanted to turn up his collar; he wanted also to break into a frantic run; he fancied snorting like a buffalo, or striking an Anglo-Saxon attitude. But he resisted all of these things, and hardly admitted them even to himself. No wonder he didn’t want a scientist poking at the assorted giveaway offal inside his head. All the rooms at Dimbola Lodge were lit this evening (a typical extravagance of the Cameron woman) and since the curtains were open, he saw as he approached that all sorts of merry larks were taking place inside, including the table and sideboards set for a fashionable dinner à la russe—a wasteful method of dining, in Dodgson’s opinion. Heaps of fruit, there were, too; and Mrs Cameron darted from room to room with a dripping photographic print in her hands, letting

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chemicals fall on the table linen as well as on the bare heads of her guests. Dodgson noted that Mr Watts, the painter, was taking an enthusiastic interest in Mrs Cameron’s efforts, while pocketing some biscuits for later, and that Miss Terry was nowhere to be seen. Dodgson clucked at the mess Mrs Cameron made; it was quite unnecessary. In all his years photographing, Dodgson had never sustained the smallest mark or abrasion from his hobby, yet Mrs Cameron ran around with fingers blackened by the chemicals to the state of rotten bananas. ‘This is not dirt, but art!’ she exclaimed. But the story was told that the great Garibaldi, visiting Tennyson to plant that tree in the garden, had sent her packing, assuming she was a gypsy. He gave her sixpence, apparently, and warned her in Italian that God’s eye was upon us all. This sea breeze was surprisingly nippy. Dodgson sheltered beside Dimbola’s briar to readjust his sleeves and cuffs, and was pleased that he had done so, for straightaway from the house came two maids, evidently heading in the same direction as himself. He let them pass. They didn’t see him. One he recognized to be the Irish Mary Ryan; the other must be the famously photogenic Mary Ann. And as if reading his thoughts, the unknown girl threw back her head to observe the first stars, and a beam of silver light picked out her chiselled profile, illuminating her with a kind of halo. It was quite a spooky gift this girl had, actually—even a religious chap like Dodgson had to acknowledge it. Luckily Mary Ryan noticed what she was doing. ‘Will you stop that!’ she snapped. Mary Ann lowered her face and stuck out her tongue, and the sublime patina fled. Dodgson was just about to move when a door slammed at Dimbola again, and another figure came hurrying past—one of Mrs Cameron’s sons, perhaps?—a slim young man in a peaked cap who muttered to himself as he walked. There was nothing very remarkable in that, of course; a man may mutter. No, it was what he muttered that intrigued Dodgson. ‘My name is, er, um, Herbert Pocket,’ he said, in a squeaky and then a gruff tone. Dodgson wrinkled his nose. What? My name is, er, um, Herbert Pocket? Why would the young chap be telling himself his own name? Also, why wasn’t he completely sure what it was? ‘Yes sir, Herbert’s my name, sir,’ Mr Pocket continued, ‘Down from Lunnon; don’t know nobody in the districk—’ Dodgson followed quietly behind. Herbert’s stride was lengthening, and he was beginning to stick out his elbows like the ears on a pitcher. What on earth

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was going on? Herbert poked some loose hair up into the hat, impatiently. He seemed to have a thin waist and ample chest, too; there was a suggestion of hips, moreover. Dodgson would have said ‘Curiouser and curiouser’, but true to his instincts, resisted it. He knew it might take him all evening to get it out.  Jessie Fowler had known no other life than this. A hundred times she had heard her father announce to a complete stranger, ‘Now, I don’t know you from a side of sole leather, is that correct, sir?’ And a hundred times the subject had grimaced and shrugged that he supposed the case was so. The useful thing about phrenology, from the showmanship point of view, was that it really worked. There was no need of trickery. What made one phrenologist better than another were presentation, entertainment, and the quantity of easily affordable products available for sale at the exit. Lorenzo had made and squandered a personal fortune from phrenology, mostly out of selling pamphlets at a penny a go. Getting the character analysis correct was merely the first, easy stage; Lorenzo honestly thought nothing of it. Back in America, where he hit the sawdust trail thirty years before with his big brother Orson, the Phrenological Fowlers were know to be infallible. Imposters they exposed, murderers they accused, the secrets of human distress they diagnosed with compassion. Almost never had they been run out of town. Those stout fingers could not be fooled. The Fowlers were awesome. ‘No Conscientiousness whatsoever!’ Orson once exclaimed, his hand flying off a volunteer head as though subjected to a shock of electricity. ‘Oh! No Conscientiousness!’ repeated the audience with a lot of hissing, as they glanced at one another, wondering exactly what this meant. Orson bit his lip. Cautiously (as though the head might explode if he pushed it in the wrong place) he continued his search for clues of depravity. The audience held its breath. He lifted a handful of hair and peeked beneath. ‘No Approbativeness!’ he cried (the audience recoiled). ‘No Shame!’ He backed away from the head, and begged the audience to tell him what this man had done. He killed a female slave, they said. Orson shook his own head and drooped his shoulders, as though all the strength had been taken from him by the evil of this man. The Fowlers sold out all their pamphlets that famous night in Virginia, even the dogeared unsaleable ones about the modern miracle of the broad bean and the cause of female suffrage. Jessie’s role on these English tours was to pick out the volunteers, and also to help with the heads and charts at the beginning of the show. Lorenzo always began slowly with a history of the science and a quick run-down of the ‘congeries of organs’ that comprised the brain. ‘Three storeys and a skylight,’ was how he

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genially explained cranial organization—with the base instincts such as sexuality (Amativeness) in the cerebellum, then reflective and perceptive qualities as you moved further upstairs (‘You can see more from the top floor!’); and finally Veneration and Hope and Benevolence with the best view of all. You could always tell an archbishop or theologian from the high cathedral dome of his head, Lorenzo explained. And it’s true, when you think about it. People who have been dropped head-first on a stone floor in infancy almost never make it into the higher echelons of the church. During the lecture, Jessie kept her eye on the audience, and smoothed her special stage frock. It was a misguided shade of coral. She would pay particular attention to the people who surreptitiously removed their hats and ran their hands over their Self Esteem. As she looked out now, she could see several people she recognized from the beach, including Mr Dodgson (that pedagogue), who was currently poking his Amativeness with a small pencil. She would have him, she resolved quickly, if only to pay him back for all the ‘I love my love with a D’ business. She also alighted on the Irish maid from Mrs Cameron’s house, who had a broad space between her eyebrows—a quality Lorenzo always admired in a woman, since it betokened Individuality. Jessie listened to the lecture, though she had heard it all before—the pygmies and Napoleon and the Idiot of Amsterdam (aged twenty-five). Lorenzo gave her the Montrose Calculator and she indicated the enormous Organ of Number beside his eyes while mugging in Scots. She watched Dodgson reach up and touch his own head again. Dodgson had Number and Causality so obvious that Lorenzo would instantly guess he was a logician. In phrenological terms Dodgson was a gift; she could hardly wait to give him to her pa. But tonight Lorenzo was not to be rushed; he was making his public wait and wait. He was displaying Benjamin Robert Haydon now, showing his lack of Firmness but also his Individuality. ‘Persons who have this organ large,’ he said, ‘are apt to personify abstractions.’ Jessie noticed that when he said this, a slim young lad in the audience frowned under his peaked cap as though deeply interested. Jessie was very proud of her father sometimes. These people were ripe for the picking. By the time she finally raided the stalls for volunteers, she would be knocked down in the commotion.  ‘And now,’ said Lorenzo, ‘my daughter Jessie will ask some of you to join me on this little stage. At no extra cost I will conduct a personal analysis. Please do not resist the call; do not insult me by refusing. Our time is short enough.’ Jessie tugged at his sleeve, as though excited.

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‘Yes, my dear,’ he commanded her grandly. ‘Find me a head!’ Dodgson watched with astonishment the downright eagerness of the paying public to be made laughing stocks. Every time Jessie plunged into the audience, he resolved to leave the hall before she did it again—yet something (let’s call it prurience) repeatedly prevented him. Up they went, one after another, to be told that their Ideality was superior to their Adhesiveness, each nodding gravely as if making a mental note, and feeling in their pockets for change (charts and explanations were on sale after). One volunteer had Approbativeness out of all proportion—‘An intense need for approval, ladies and gentlemen!’—and then proved the diagnosis, rather neatly, by asking nervously ‘But I do hope that’s a good thing?’ Dodgson watched enthralled, horrified, especially in that portion of the evening devoted to Mary Ryan, who spoke up well under questioning, was found to have a good mind and strong character, and even agreed to be hypnotized. ‘In this experiment,’ said Lorenzo, ‘I will demonstrate the power of PhrenoMagnetism.’ ‘Oooh,’ said the audience. ‘Phreno-Magnetism is the very latest development, and luckily for you Freshwater folks I am its principal exponent. By hypnosis we may cure the diseases of the brain, direct the mind to purity. For we all strive for perfection, do we not?’ The audience, who had perhaps never looked at itself in quite such a flattering light before, cheerfully agreed that perfection was all it lived for. ‘By hypnotizing this young lady I can not only indicate the organs of her brain, but obtain direct access to them. Prepare to be amazed. Simply by touching the Organ of Self Esteem, for example, I will alter this young woman’s demeanour.’ Mary, in her trance, sat staring forward at the audience, looking slightly disgruntled as she always did. ‘Mary, I will now excite your Organ of Self Esteem,’ said Lorenzo, and with his beautiful hands smoothing and swarming over her head, he exerted pressure with his thumbs on a back section of her skull. Dodgson was astonished at her reaction. Mary Ryan sat up straight, held her nose in the air, and gave a look of such confidence that some of the audience started to titter. ‘Please do not laugh,’ commanded Lorenzo. ‘Self Esteem is a very serious matter. Mary, tell us what you do from day to day.’ The hall fell silent. Mary spoke quietly, but they all heard. ‘I do work that is beneath me.’ Mary Ann leaned forward. ‘Why do you continue with it?’ asked Lorenzo. ‘Because I am indebted to my mistress.’ ‘Indebted? I see. You mean you are grateful to her?’

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‘No, that’s different.’ ‘You are proud, Mary!’ ‘Not proud, but I know my worth. I may not be beautiful but I am educated. I am not seventeen, but I am tall and stately. I will marry well.’ ‘You will?’ ‘I know it.’ Mary Ann Hillier guffawed, and stopped herself. The audience was agog, but Dodgson shifted in his seat. He hated seeing someone so vulnerable and offguard. He also hated to hear the lower orders getting above themselves. ‘So much for Self Esteem,’ said Lorenzo, releasing his grip. ‘I must explain that if I asked anybody those questions they would reply in the same surprising way. Our true estimation of ourselves may be masked by daily convenience, but the self esteem remains intact, waiting its moment. It is a flame that is never snuffed out.’ ‘Tho much is taken, much abides?’ said Mary, still in her trance. ‘Precisely,’ said Lorenzo, pleasantly surprised. ‘I will now excite your Organ of Mirthfulness, Mary.’ And as he pressed her temples with his fingers Mary started to laugh so cheerfully that the audience laughed with her, and Lorenzo brought her gently out of her trance. Finding herself laughing and joyful, she grasped his hand and would not let go until Jessie grabbed at her skirt and pulled it. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said to Lorenzo, wiping her eyes. ‘I don’t know what you did to me, sir, but don’t I feel a whole lot better for it?’ All this was very intriguing for Dodgson, but he never forgot his original resolve to leave while someone else was on stage. The last thing he wanted was to be trapped by his own curiosity. A couple of times he changed seats, to encourage his own false perception that he was invisible. He vowed that during the next demonstration he would definitely slip away—and yet, when the next sitter proved to be the mysterious young er-um-Herbert from Dimbola Lodge, he found himself lingering dangerously. There was something very familiar about the young fellow; he made Dodgson think of Twelfth Night for some reason, in which he had once seen Miss Terry play Viola. Herbert was on stage already, but refusing absolutely to remove his cap. And the audience jeered at him, to take it off. ‘Come now,’ said Lorenzo, ‘You must be reasonable.’ ‘Either read me with my cap on, or not at all,’ said the fellow in his gruff breathless voice. Lorenzo acquiesced, saying he had never done such a thing before, in thirty years as a practical phrenologist. But when he started to feel the youth’s head, he stopped grumbling, because he soon found several things to intrigue him. ‘I find that you have large Amativeness, combined with large Hope and small

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Caution. This will tend to warp your judgement in matters of love, and blind you to obvious failings in the object of your affections.’ The boy looked up at him in amazement. ‘It doesn’t say all that, does it?’ he said. ‘Ah, I see I have hit on a truth,’ said Lorenzo. The boy denied it, but looked glum. Down in the audience, Mary Ann nudged Mary Ryan; she liked the look of this boy. ‘I think I have never felt a Caution as small as this, sir,’ continued Lorenzo. ‘It will lead you to many rash deeds. You must remember never to confuse Courage with Carelessness, Firmness with Foolhardiness. You would make a fine actor, sir, incidentally.’ ‘Oh good,’ squeaked Herbert faintly, and tried to rise from his chair. It was clear he would like to step down, but Lorenzo was enjoying himself too much. In all his years of phrenology, he had never encountered a transvestite before—not even on the island of Manhattan! Yet here was one, amazingly, in this little place at the back end of the Isle of Wight. He ran his fingers across Herbert’s fine white neck, making him shudder. ‘You have a large Organ of Marvellousness, too—which means you love novelty and adventure,’ he announced to the hall, and then he leaned forward and whispered in Herbert’s ear. ‘Luckily I have Marvellousness large as well. Perhaps we should get together.’ He placed his big hands on Herbert’s narrow shoulders. And then he let him go. ‘I must explain something now,’ said Lorenzo. ‘This boy seems sad when I tell him what I read in his head. But I think he should be grateful. He is much too young to have made a bad marriage. There is no sign of a beard on his cheek. The motto of the Fowlers is Self Made or Never Made, and I stand by it, young sir. The findings of phrenology are lessons, not prescriptions. Man can, and must, overcome any failing in his nature. How else will he ever be perfect? Now that you know yourself, sir, you must never allow yourself to marry in the hope of being able to work a reform after marriage. You are lucky to receive this warning. It is a lesson many people wish they had been taught!’ But Dodgson noticed how the boy still looked glum, even while the hall cheered and laughed Lorenzo for his wisdom. Lorenzo turned again to his people, and pressed his hands together. ‘When you leave here tonight, I want you to write your own epitaph in legible characters on a slip of paper. Make these epitaphs as flattering and eulogistic as possible. Then spend the remainder of your lives endeavouring not only to reach the standard you have raised, but to go far beyond it.’ Jessie looked up at him in admiration as the crowd threw hats in the air. She felt a lump in her throat. What a man!

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‘And now!’ said Lorenzo. The audience held its breath, while Jessie stood on tiptoe and whispered in his ear. Lorenzo grinned, and looked directly at Dodgson in the back row. ‘And now!’ he repeated, ‘We have time for the last, but most special, demonstration of the evening.’ He pointed at Dodgson. ‘Would you come forward, please, sir? It has not escaped my daughter Jessie’s attention how closely you have followed proceedings this evening!’ Dodgson felt his body jerk with the shock. Trapped and sick, he wanted to shut up like a telescope. Jessie ran straight to the back row and pointed to him and the audience turned round to look. ‘Go wan then!’ they heckled. ‘Wouldn’t you guess it ud be an overner tho?’ (They were disappointed. The star turn was someone from the mainland.) Should he run? Should he shout ‘Fire’? Miserably Dodgson stumbled to the front and took his seat in a chair beside Lorenzo. Up close, he could see that the man wore a small amount of theatrical make-up. His big pliable hands smelled of sandalwood and other people’s hair oil. Dodgson realized he had at last discovered something other people had that he did not wish to share. ‘If I may ask your forbearance, ladies and gentlemen, I will ask my assistant Jessie to tell you her first impressions of our friend’s head here. For at this point it is my great pleasure to ask Jessie Fowler—the Infant Phrenologist!—to take her very first public reading!’ Dodgson blinked in horror as the crowd cheered. ‘May I ask your name, sir?’ Dodgson clenched his fists, swallowed hard and got it out. ‘Dodgson,’ he said. ‘Mr Dodgson,’ said Jessie, stepping forward with a big threatening smile. (She got a round of applause.) ‘I thought we might start with the base of your cranium, where I perceive, ladies and gentlemen, that the Organ of Philoprogenitiveness is considerably enlarged.’ She said ‘Organ of Philoprogenitiveness’ as if it was ‘Bread and butter’. Which in a way, of course, it was. Dodgson fought for breath. ‘We ought to explain, Jessie,’ added Lorenzo, ‘that Philoprogenitiveness is the love of children.’ ‘It is, father. It is a great addition in a parent, and I have always been glad to know that you have it substantial, Pa.’ The audience laughed at the cute, pre-rehearsed joke, but Dodgson felt weightless in his distress. Jessie had climbed on a stool behind his chair. He could feel her breath on his ear. He could smell her clothes. And then, gently, Jessie laid her small warm fingers on the back of Dodgson’s skull and massaged it. The unprecedented intimacy of this contact with an eight-year-old girl—in front of a hundred people—made Dodgson want to scream like a railway engine.

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‘Mr Dodgson, may I ask if you have any children of your own?’ began Jessie. But he heard it only as in a dream. Jessie, who had been all set to ask what the name ‘Daisy’ meant to him, had already lost her first client, as Dodgson’s conscious psyche simply snapped under the strain. His body twitched and whiplashed beneath her hands. ‘Pa!’ she cried in horror, and Lorenzo leapt forward to assure the audience everything was under control. But the good people of Freshwater stood up and gasped, with their hands to their mouths, as Dodgson reeled and writhed in his chair. No one had ever seen anything like it. Dodgson reeled and writhed, he stretched and drawled; and finally—some might say inevitably—he fainted in coils.

Part Two Hats Off Chapter 7




Freshwater Bay is easily located on a map of the Isle of Wight. Imagine the island as a pair of pursed lips—the kiss-me mouth of Lillian Gish comes to mind—and Freshwater is on the bottom lip, to the far left, a small imperfection in an otherwise smooth line of high chalk cliff. There is an apocryphal story told of a Russian tsar, asked by his engineers to indicate on a map where a major railway track should be plotted. With a loud exclamation of ‘Do I have to do everything?’, he took a ruler and drew a straight line—through hills, forests, churches, whatever. And so the railway was built exactly as he drew it, but where his fingers accidentally overlapped the ruler’s edge, there came two kinks, which the engineers faithfully replicated. Freshwater Bay is like the kink of a tsar’s fingertip. For no observable reason, the chalk dips dramatically for the tiny bay, and then quickly rises up again to lordly heights, as if embarrassed about the lapse. It is named Freshwater because the River Yar rises here, not far from the sea, and flows perversely in the other direction, across flat land, to the northern coast at (of course) Yarmouth. If the sea defences were knocked down at Freshwater Bay, the waters would merge, and the West Wight become a tiny island of its own, as perhaps it once was. But in 1864 a small isthmus keeps the Isle of Wight in one piece, and that highly insular poet Tennyson is obliged to put up with it, here at the quiet limit of the world. From his windows at Farringford, he can survey the Afton Down, which he says dates back four hundred million years. From the top of his cliff, he can look to the Needles, stately in their lucid mist. He appreciates grand views. It has been shrewdly observed by modern critics that in Tennyson’s poetry, there is no middle distance—things are either big and far, or small and near. Had Victorian ophthalmology been more advanced, the history of English poetry might have been quite other.  Three days after the phrenology lecture, at half past three on Monday, Ellen stood on Tennyson’s cliff and watched the laureate point his face at the warm wind and the sea’s horizon, his big heavy eyes closed thoughtfully as though he were listening to what the waves were saying six hundred feet below. She recognized the posture and expression from Watts, of course, who had a knack of falling into such a reverie without warning, usually in the middle of a railway terminus. It was

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whisper-of-the-Muse time—all very worthwhile and pretty on a clifftop with a poem coming on; not so useful if you were racing for an express. Perhaps she should tweak the laureate’s nose, while stamping on his foot and shouting, ‘Wake up’. (It usually worked for Watts.) But no, she could just imagine all the tiresome recriminations afterwards, if he fell off the cliff and she trailed home without him, carrying his hat. ‘Where’s Alfred?’ they would ask. And she would sit down in a huff, ‘Don’t start.’ The grass up here was tough and springy, and it mingled with abundant tiny flowers—blue orchids which took the modest course of choosing survival over display. ‘They must have Caution pretty huge,’ she said to herself, and twiddled with one, attempting to pull it out. She would like an orchid, and Alfred was unlikely to offer her any. If she just took one while he had his eyes closed, he would never be the wiser. Tennyson leaned into the wind. The thing about this man, she realized as she watched his cloak furl and crack behind him like a flag, was that he was rather like a cliff himself. His large white face looked hewn and shaped by centuries of rain and landslip; and all his life (even when it was quite unnecessary) he seemed to defy a gale, staunch on his stocky Lincolnshire legs, with his chest puffed out. Here was a man who would never discover a sheltered place in the world and then relax in it. Tennyson was a walking personification of the verb ‘to buffet’. When Watts was cut up by a review, Ellen had observed that he would mend again by teatime. But Tennyson went all to tatters, and displayed his wounds perpetually, even to people who strenuously desired not to see them. Perhaps his Approbativeness needs looking at, thought Ellen (who was now fully up to speed in phrenological jargon). Tennyson’s Approbativeness must be the size of a baby gnat. Watts had been asked to come, but had declined. You would never get Watts up here, so far from anything upholstered. Though he loved the elements, he preferred to paint them indoors, out of his own head, and since he started visiting Freshwater he had tried the cliff walk only twice. The first time he was sick, and the second time his hat blew off. (How Tennyson kept his big hat on, incidentally, while striding through gales on his daily walk, was a marvel to all who knew him.) But Ellen was glad Watts stayed at home. It gave her time to reflect on the phrenology lecture, and her little adventure as Herbert. Appreciating for the first time the variety in the shapes and sizes of the human head, she suddenly understood why hatters went mad. As for her own head, large Hope and small Caution, that was Ellen’s destiny—and she thought (as obviously she was destined to) that this was excellent news. And hang the consequences. Watts was always posing her as Hope in some grisly picture or other (‘Hope is a Good Breakfast but a Bad

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Supper’; ‘There is Hope from the Mouth of the Sea, but None from the Mouth of the Grave’). What a lark that he had been right all along. But in other ways her adventure in male disguise had backfired horribly. For one thing, Lorenzo had guessed at once the game she was playing (the young Herbert’s hat stuffed with luxuriant hair); and for another, she had felt terribly discouraged by Lorenzo’s other pronouncement, about her tendency to love blind. ‘Do not expect to reform your spouse’s character after marriage,’ Lorenzo had said. Too late, too late for that. Reappearing at Dimbola—having used the commotion of Dodgson’s collapse as a cover for flight—she found she had not been missed, least of all by her husband. A cup of tea had been poured for her, in fact. So she drank it cold, and listened to Mrs Cameron announcing her latest plan for a theatrical evening in the garden, a selection of tableaux vivants, possibly from Twelfth Night. It was curious how Mrs Cameron did not seek Ellen’s professional advice on theatrical matters. A less resilient person might suspect that Mrs Cameron didn’t like her. ‘Oh, there is nothing like Twelfth Night for tableaux vivants,’ sighed Julia, leaning back in her chair. ‘I would have thought A Midsummer Night’s Dream more apt,’ said Ellen. ‘I didn’t say there was nothing more apt,’ snapped Julia, ‘I said there was nothing like it.’ Watts snoozed over a volume of verse, and when he woke to find his wife sitting beside him, he said happily, ‘Ellen. Oh yes. Do you know, I was just telling Julia. When I resided with Lord and Lady Holland in Italy, you know they refused to allow me the merest personal expense? “You are our guest, Il Signor,” they insisted, “Take some more soup, you eat like a little bird,” they said. “And no more talk of such nonsense. Your purse is nothing to the matter here.” Julia agreed with me, such generous sentiments are very fine. Between friends, especially where one is very poor, there should never be talk of money.’ Ellen rolled her eyes. She noticed that Watts was wearing a new velvet skullcap—a present, no doubt, from Julia, who had noticed that George was balding, his Organ of Veneration quite naked to the elements. ‘Sixpence a pint!’ boomed Alfred, unexpectedly. Ellen turned to find him smiling. Amazingly, his clifftop reverie had finished before hers. ‘This air,’ he explained, gesticulating with his cloak. ‘Worth sixpence a pint!’ And playfully he scooped armfuls of it towards her, as though he would knock her flat with the force. Ellen laughed. A game at last! She pretended to gather the sixpenny pints in her skirt, weighing the material in her hands, as though loaded with heavy logs. ‘That’s at least five shillings’ worth! Ten shillings! A guinea!’ she said gaily, staggering.

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But Alfred stopped when she said that. ‘Oh,’ he frowned, suddenly serious. He bit his lip. ‘In that case, my dear, I think I’ll ask for some of it back.’  News of the sensational phrenology lecture had been quick to disseminate, especially since the bewildered and whimpering Dodgson had been wheeled through the village on a grocer’s hand-cart and left at Dimbola for Mrs Cameron to deal with. No sooner had Ellen set down her teacup, in fact, and recovered her breath from the quick change, than the whole household was in uproar, with Dodgson dropped on a sofa in the drawing room, and Lorenzo Fowler presenting callingcards to everybody in the mêlée, and Mrs Cameron flapping the prone logician with an Indian shawl. ‘Tempt him with a dry biscuit!’ she told her girls, who ran off efficiently for bandages and camphor and everything else the crisis suggested. Privately, in a whisper behind the drawing room door, Mary Ann apologized for bringing him. She knew Mrs Cameron’s feelings towards the Reverend Dodgson. ‘No, child, you were quite right,’ Mrs Cameron declared. ‘He is a rival, as you know; and also a very pompous man, and I believe an opponent of my good friend Jowett in Oxford. But a rival and bore in distress is another matter. Poor fellow, what can we do for him?’ She ran back into the room and shook her hands as though drying them. ‘I would give anything. How did it happen, Mr Fowler? Tell us that.’ Lorenzo shook his head. The room waited. ‘Speak, speak,’ urged Julia. He looked very grave. ‘I believe he was overcome by the size of his own organs, ma’am.’ Dodgson’s eyes opened and he saw Mrs Cameron quite normally, surrounded by her friends in the drawing room of Dimbola. But then something rather odd happened. With her face horribly enlarged, she leaned towards him and said directly in his ear, ‘I dare say you’re wondering why I don’t put my arm around your waist?’ He stiffened with alarm, but she continued, ‘I’m doubtful about the temper of your flamingo.’ Dodgson squealed and pressed his body into the sofa. Mrs Cameron gripped Lorenzo’s wrist. ‘What have you done to him? He seems to be out of his wits.’ Indeed he did. Inside his head, Dodgson was currently attending a game of croquet organized by the Queen of Hearts; and an ugly Duchess was stealing her arm around his middle towards the flamingo he was using as a croquet mallet.

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Not surprisingly, Mrs Cameron had not the faintest notion that this was going on. ‘My dear man,’ she said, and patted his hand. ‘He might bite!’ warned Dodgson, and flashed his eye-whites. (He meant the flamingo.) Without a trace of annoyance, Mrs Cameron told the girls to make a bed for Mr Dodgson and send at once for his belongings at Plumbley’s Hotel. This man needed nursing, nourishment, and battering with gifts, so much was clear. ‘Mustard isn’t a bird,’ said Dodgson, rather feebly, as he was lifted from the sofa and helped upstairs. ‘It’s a mineral, I think.’ ‘That’s right,’ said Mrs Cameron, following behind. ‘There’s a large mustard mine near here,’ he continued. ‘And the moral of that is—The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.’ ‘I quite agree with you.’ Watts and Ellen heard him continue until he was out of sight. ‘Never appear to be otherwise,’ he said, ‘than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise—’ Watts and Ellen stood in the Dimbola hallway watching Dodgson’s progress upstairs. Ellen felt very sorry for him; but she couldn’t help noticing how the shock had cured his stammer. ‘Well, it’s an ill wind, George—’ she began, but stopped. She never got Watts started on a wall if she could help it. She took Watts’s hand and turned to him, her eyes still blazing from the thrill of the escapade. Should she tell him about her Organ of Hope? His happy Italian reminiscences seemed to have lifted his spirits so much. For once, he was looking positively animated. Taking his hand to the top of her head, she began, ‘Did you know, George—’, but he pulled it away and interrupted. He put his arm around her shoulder instead. It was the most intimate thing that had happened in weeks. ‘Oh George,’ she said. ‘Are you concerned for Mr Dodgson?’ He put his lips to her ear. She thrilled. This holiday was already doing them both such good. ‘Ellen,’ he confided in an excited whisper. ‘In all the commotion—’ ‘Yes, George?’ ‘—Somebody dropped a florin. Look.’ She looked down and saw the coin in his hand. Nudging her in the ribs, he slipped the coin in his pocket and patted it there.  From the commercial point of view, Lorenzo’s phrenological evening had been a fiasco.

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‘But you were magnificent, Pa,’ Jessie was still saying after the weekend, ‘everybody said it.’ She hated it when he was unhappy. She had already fed him some breakfast (‘No brains for you, Pa! Ha ha!’) and soothed his brow with a damp handkerchief; now she volunteered to polish the heads as well, even though they didn’t need it. ‘Ada did them yesterday,’ he objected. ‘Then I’ll do them again. She doesn’t know how to do them anyhow. Ada said I had red hair, Pa. Red hair! When all the world can see I am strawberry blonde!’ Lorenzo looked beyond his child to Ada, whose air of condescension was beginning to get on his nerves. Behind Jessie’s back, this difficult maid was now working some scissors in thin air—as though practising for cutting something thick—and all the while frowning menacingly at the back of Jessie’s head. Jessie was oblivious. She shook her horrid curls. She was dressed today in orange. ‘Look how shiny I’m getting Mr Haydon. I bet nobody ever did this to him in real life. That’s probably why he killed himself. Oh, cheer up, Pa! Think of your Organ of Firmness.’ But Lorenzo refused to be comforted. He ran his powerful fingers through his own iron-grey locks. ‘I had them in the palm of my hand,’ he kept repeating. ‘The palm of my hand.’ It was no wonder Lorenzo was downhearted, however. Generating mass hysteria takes a lot of effort, and Lorenzo had reached the time in life when he only expended in energy what he bargained to recoup in cash. Freshwater on Friday had been a three-guinea crowd. But with Dodgson’s dramatic collapse, the guineas had all dispersed, skipping over the usual rush for merchandise; and if Lorenzo now had a considerable succès d’estime on his hands, he also had two hundred pamphlets he had expected to sell at the door. He kicked a demountable brain which Jessie had just cleaned and assembled on the carpet. ‘Pa!’ she objected, as the labelled bits of grey plaster cerebrum exploded across the room. Secretiveness skittered under a bureau; Amativeness flew high in the air; only Inhabitiveness stayed put. Ada was commissioned to gather them up. She whistled between her teeth. ‘Look,’ Jessie said, ‘I wasn’t going to tell you this, but has it ever occurred to you that there is an organ missing from this model?’ ‘More organs are discovered every day, Jessie. The year alone saw the location of Graveness, Gayness and Awe.’ She patted him encouragingly. ‘And where would we be without them?’ she agreed. They were on their hands and knees, fitting the pieces together with automatic

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efficiency—it was a job they could do with their eyes closed. Jessie had never seen a conventional child’s puzzle; her earliest memories were of assembling bits of brain. Should she tell Lorenzo about Gratitude? What if he didn’t say thanks? Part of her still wanted to keep her discovery to herself, but she had gone too far to turn back now: she knew she would have to share it. ‘But what about Gratitude, Pa?’ she blurted. ‘Where’s that?’ ‘Gratitude?’ He had replaced the final piece in the demountable brain, and sat back on his heels to look at it. Gratitude? Just as Jessie had done before, he considered where Gratitude ought to come in the scheme of human feelings. Was it a fine emotion or a base one? Didn’t the lion feel grateful to Androclus? On the other hand, didn’t children have to be trained to thank? ‘I think we should look for it, Pa,’ said Jessie, firmly. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. And I believe it says more about a person than anything.’ ‘Nonsense.’ ‘But you remember the Irish one on Friday night? She said she was indebted, not grateful, and you were shocked.’ ‘Mm.’ Lorenzo stroked his beard. She tried another angle. ‘Even if it doesn’t really mean anything—if nobody ever feels it—people would want to know they had a big organ of it, wouldn’t they? And what’s the point of Benevolence without it?’ Lorenzo said nothing. He was not convinced. So the child chose another tactic. ‘I just thought you’d be pleased to beat Uncle Orson to something. But don’t worry, Pa. I’ll write to him in Boston, he’s sure to do it.’ ‘No, don’t do that!’ said her pa. ‘No, Uncle Orson will polish it off in no time—’ ‘Give me a minute, Jessie, please.’ He thought quickly. He pictured the pamphlet. A Million Thank Yous. How Lorenzo Niles Fowler discovered the Organ of Gratitude, Unaided by his Know-all Brother Orson. It sounded good. Also, he had to admit he was rather stuck at the moment. Thanks to Dodgson’s spectacular breakdown, the Phrenological Fowlers would need to stay in Freshwater for a few more days in any case, organizing some other kind of event to pay for the expense of the first one. Why not conduct a little research at the same time? ‘Jessie, would you care for a stroll on the shore?’ She folded her arms. She hated it when he changed the subject. Was this a yes or a no? ‘What would you say if I preferred to stay here?’ she said distrustfully, her eyes like slits. ‘With Ada,’ she added.

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‘Huh,’ said Ada, and left the room. ‘I’d say your Organ of Gratitude is probably very, very small.’ Jessie jumped into his arms and kissed him. ‘Oh, Pa!’  At the bay, Daisy sat alone in the lee of a bathing machine and unfolded a dogeared paper. It was Mr Dodgson’s ‘I love my love with a D’, and it filled her with pleasure. She had known this man—this genius—less than a week, but already he was desperately in love with her. He had asked her to pose for a photograph called ‘The Elopement’, standing on the sill of an upstairs casement, with a packed bag in her hand. It could mean only one thing. The stupid Jessie Fowler had told her to refuse the safety pins, so nah-nah to Jessie Fowler now. Mr Dodgson did not love his love with a J, because she was Jealous. When Daisy ran away with Mr Dodgson and got married, she would send Jessie Know-All Fowler a whole cartload of safety pins along with a copy of Mr Dodgson’s delightful book, illustrated with photographs of herself. ‘Daisy’s Adventures in Wonderland,’ she said to herself. Daisy was a very determined little girl. A man did not meddle with her precocious femininity without reaping the consequences.  Back on the cliff, Ellen had just finished telling the laureate about the new guest at Dimbola, careful not to mention his name. She remembered what Lionel told her, that Tennyson loathed Dodgson; if she spoiled this pleasant walk by making her companion angry, she was bound to get into trouble later on. Tennyson would not inquire for details, anyway. He was notorious for his lack of interest in other people. But on this occasion he enjoyed Ellen’s spirited account of the story so much (she did all the voices, and acted bits out) that he actually wanted more. ‘Does he have a profession, this fellow?’ ‘Oh.’ Ellen thought quickly. Better not to mention the Euclid or the photography. ‘Well, he is a gentleman and a cleric, of course, sir. And he has written a book for children, which he has been telling the little girls on the beach.’ ‘A book of morals?’ ‘No, something quite different. Little Daisy Bradley told Mrs Cameron that his story was very funny and dreamlike—with songs and mad people and animals who take offence. Daisy seems quite taken with Mr Do—’ She stopped herself. ‘Actually, I saw his manuscript when it was brought from his hotel. I read it.’ Tennyson frowned. ‘I hope you did not read it without the author’s permission.’

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Ellen was obliged to confess. ‘Well, to be honest, I did.’ ‘Without the author’s permission or knowledge, Mrs Watts?’ ‘Er, yes.’ She could tell he was shocked. Another telling-off was coming. ‘I cannot begin to condone—’ he began. She made a quick decision. ‘His name is Lewis Carroll,’ she added. ‘His book is very good.’ Tennyson snorted. He hated to hear about other people’s writing. Especially when it was described as very good. ‘What’s good about it? What do you mean about animals taking offence?’ ‘I think you have to read it, sir. It’s hard to explain. Alice is always in the wrong, because the rules of behaviour in Wonderland are mad and topsy-turvy. It’s supposed to be a fantasy; but personally, I find it extraordinarily true to life.’ ‘And is he in his right mind now, this Mr Carroll?’ ‘It’s hard to say. This morning he sat up in bed and said, “Mary Ann, what are you doing here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan!” But when she brought him what he asked for, he seemed to have forgotten all about it. He looked her in the eye and said “You? Who are you?” He seems to be quoting his own book. We are thinking of asking Mr Fowler to treat his brain.’ ‘Mr Fowler was the phrenologizer?’ ‘Yes, and he was spectacular. Not that I was present, of course.’ ‘Of course.’ Tennyson fell silent again. They had reached the lower part of his cliff walk, near to the bay and the military fort. He would be taking her down to his special cove, she hoped. ‘What about madness?’ he said, stopping. ‘Oh, I don’t think he’s mad.’ ‘No, I meant, can a phrenologizer detect signs of madness—say, in the head of a young boy? Oh, we check Lionel and Hallam every day, we make a point of it. What with the, you know—’ ‘Black blood of the Tennysons?’ ‘That’s right. But the trouble is—’ he lowered his voice ‘—we are not exactly sure what we are looking for.’ Ellen didn’t know what to say. ‘I think I will approach the fellow—although Emily must not know. She thinks I worry too much about the boys’ melancholic inheritance. “You’re just being morbid like the rest of your family, Alfred!” she says. Which, as I tell her, is precisely the point I’m making!’ And he strode off into the wind again, while Ellen skipped along to keep up,

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her hand still gripping tight the little blue orchids—a dozen or so—that Alfred Tennyson had not given her.  Below stairs at Dimbola, Mary Ann was having a bad time wringing clothes. Her hair kept getting caught in the mangle. It was a funny life, being the Mother of God yet fated to such humble pastimes. She wondered how the original Mary, mother of Jesus, had managed to bring herself down to earth when it came to cleaning out the stable and such. Education had not been the main focus of Mary Ann Hillier’s upbringing. ‘So what be aall this tork o marryin?’ she asked Mary Ryan, who had just returned from shooing Lionel Tennyson out of the pantry. (The servants had a rota for this job.) ‘Marrying?’ Mary Ann spluttered in disbelief. ‘Be you forgooat?’ she exclaimed. ‘When old me nabs ketch’d you in yon traance, zee what you zed o ticin a townser!’ Mary Ryan looked perplexed, as well she might. ‘What do you say, Mary? Can we start again at “marrying”?’ she suggested, without facetiousness. But Mary Ann had started to enjoy herself, repeating the story of Mary Ryan’s wiggled Self Esteem, in a dialect so impenetrable that alas for the consequences, it left the exact contents to be guessed at only vaguely. Mary Ryan picked up only that she had discussed her marriage prospects with Lorenzo Fowler in front of a room full of people. But why? Had he predicted she would marry well? Why couldn’t she remember? Meanwhile Mary Ann kept jabbering and mangling, with considerable gusto. It was not often she spoke her thoughts aloud, which was just as well. It was like hearing the Rokeby Venus speak in the accents of a Tyneside shipbuilder. ‘Thee wast querken like a wold zow then, bwoy!’ she said. ‘The whole show wudn’t nowhere near what twas puted to be, but “I know my worth” zes shee. If thee gits vound out, there’ll be a pretty piece o work! An I dooan’t gee noohow. Them towner rantipikes be no count at all anyways, swap me bob.’ Mary Ryan recognized the last bit. ‘Swap me bob’ meant ‘So help me God’, but goodness knew what the other stuff entailed. Rantipike? What was a rantipike? But one thing was certain. She must consult Lorenzo Fowler as soon as possible. Mary Ann had changed the subject. ‘Have ye zid the wold cappender about y’ere lately? A was here yes’day smaamen over the back door wi tar but I han’t zid nothen on en zunce.’

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Mrs Cameron put her head round the door. ‘Is all well?’ she asked. ‘Mary Ann has caught her hair in the mangle again, madam,’ said Mary Ryan. ‘Shall I cut it all off to save us the trouble every day of saving it?’ Mrs Cameron looked shocked, and then burst out laughing. Mary Ann, temporarily unable to raise her neck from waist-height, gaped with astonishment. ‘You are a bad girl, Mary Ryan,’ said Mrs Cameron. Mary Ann tried to extricate herself but couldn’t. ‘Swap me bob!’ she said.  Ellen and Tennyson continued their walk on the cliff. ‘Does your husband work on any canvases here in Freshwater?’ ‘I am sure he will ask you to pose again, sir,’ said Ellen. ‘Otherwise, I have high hopes for “Take Care of the Pence and the Pounds Will Take Care of Themselves”, a new painting in which coins of small denomination are tucked up in Crimean hospital beds, while bank notes exercise in the fresh air, with a set of Indian clubs.’ Tennyson tried to picture it. ‘I was joking,’ added Ellen quickly. ‘Oh,’ said Tennyson gravely. ‘A joke. But not a disrespectful one, I hope? It sounded slightly disrespectful. Watts is a very fine painter, my dear, even if sometimes a little misguided by his enthusiasm for simple verities.’ She didn’t argue. But she had to admit that this walk was putting her right off Tennyson. He’d told her to say ‘luncheon’ instead of ‘lunch’, and was fiercely emphatic about it, even though London fashion had now swung quite the other way. Why were people always telling her off ? Surely she made it clear often enough that she didn’t like it. They walked on. ‘Will you take me down to your special cove today?’ she said. ‘I will if you desire it. But it’s a steep climb, my dear. Do you think you can manage?’ ‘Of course, sir, lead the way,’ she said. But then she remembered the modest size of her Caution, and wondered whether she was muddling foolhardiness with firmness again. ‘My only fear, sir,’ she added, ‘is that, were I to slip, I would knock you down ahead of me.’ Alfred frowned, and then had an idea. ‘Then you shall go first!’ he said.

Chapter 8




Unluckily for her friends, Mrs Cameron never stopped to consider why she gave presents all the time; why she flattered, helped, donated and worshipped to such an embarrassing degree. Perhaps she spent her whole life compensating for being the only unattractive sister in a family of beauties. While Tennyson’s family were all mad, and Ellen’s all flighty, and Dodgson’s all boring, Julia’s were all knockdown dazzlers who caused breaches of the peace in London shopping districts. It wasn’t easy being nicknamed ‘Talent’ in these circumstances. To be called ‘Talent’ when your sisters include ‘Beauty’, ‘Dash’ and ‘Eyebrows’ sounds a bit like a codeword for ‘Ugly’. Whatever the cause, however, Julia might reasonably have asked, ‘What’s so wrong with giving presents?’ In fact, she asked it repeatedly, because her benevolence was treated like an impediment or a club foot. Why weren’t people just grateful? But when anyone said ‘You shouldn’t have!’ to Julia Margaret Cameron, they usually meant it. On receiving a prayer book from her, Thomas Carlyle is supposed to have said, ‘Either the devil or Julia Cameron has sent this!’ Such bad grace bewildered and hurt her, but did not put her off. When she met with rebuff, she deduced that the present was at fault, and conceived a better one. Thus was she caught in an ever-tightening spiral, requiring more and more profligate ingenuity. For Julia would not learn. She had Benevolence so enormous that her lace cap wouldn’t fit her head properly and was always falling off. Items were returned with polite demurrals; high-quality wallpaper was not hung; she was rhetorically lumped together with the father of lies; and worst of all, those inferior persons who were objects of her charity simply forgot their debt and took their luck for granted. She just couldn’t understand it. If an allegorical picture of Mrs Cameron were attempted, she often thought it would have to depict ‘More Kicks than Ha’pence’. Look at the ungrateful Mary Ryan, snatched from poverty (and a dirty gypsy mother) on Putney Heath, and reared by Mrs Cameron at her own personal expense. ‘You are too good, Julia,’ friends said. ‘The girl is inexpressibly fortunate.’ Yet the girl herself was blind to the claims of charity. She was sullen, she refused to be beautiful in any useful photographic way, and she whined about her position in the household—was she a maid or a daughter? Why had she been educated if she was meant only for housework? Why was that dullard Mary Ann given all the nice jobs? Mrs Cameron was exasperated by such ungrateful talk. Mary Ryan was now joking about cutting off Mary Ann’s lovely hair! ‘Doesn’t she realize that without my intervention, she might be dead of neg-

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lect?’ Mrs Cameron railed bad-temperedly at Mary Ann, in her quiet time. Mary Ann, instead of speaking, tilted her very best ‘Eve Repentant’ profile, knowing how well a picture of feminine humility broke Mrs Cameron’s heart. She was looking particularly soulful these days, because she was in love. Ever since the lecture, she had dreamed of young Herbert—such an exotic young creature, with such an unusual figure! Julia’s old white-beard husband kept aloof from such upsets, although he pitied her when she stormed into his bedroom, her cheeks wet with tears. ‘Thrown back in my face,’ she would cry, pacing up and down. ‘Thrown back in my face.’ Generally supportive in a wry, ironic, bedridden kind of way, he would nevertheless gently warn her when he thought she expected too much from Mary Ryan, or when her grand, unlikely presents overstepped the mark. The Elgin Marbles wallpaper for Farringford was a case in point. ‘Perhaps you went too far, my dear, although acting as always from the best intentions?’ her husband suggested. ‘And the mutton was a lovely idea, Julia, except that the Farringford estate is over-run with sheep. See the white fluffy things on the downs?’ She sat on his bed, and slumped, helpless. ‘I shall knit you a muffler, Charles,’ she said. ‘If it gives you pleasure, Julia.’ This was non-committal without being rude, and was his usual, wellpractised response. As Julia had complained to Mr Watts, it avoided saying thank you and thereby implying an obligation. ‘See, Charles, I have converted the vegetable plot into a lawn overnight! You said you wished we had more grass!’ Julia would declare. Or, ‘While you were asleep I redecorated your bedroom! You said you preferred a darker shade!’ And rather than discouraging her by saying, ‘You’re mad, Julia,’ he would smile. ‘If it makes you happy, my dear.’ But what was the problem with this Elgin Marbles wallpaper, you ask? Well, obviously, it had the Elgin Marbles on it. As with so many of Julia’s presents, the wallpaper was a gift inadequately thought through. Where would it hang at Farringford? Did it accord with the Tennysons’ usual taste? What did it say about how Julia perceived her friends? ‘She thinks we belong in the British Museum,’ said Emily. Yet Julia had such a powerful vision of Alfred’s pleasure on receiving this imaginative gift (‘Julia, what a kind person you are’) that she had been unable to resist it. She had little idea what discord it would sow between Alfred and Emily, who were now scarcely on speaking terms. Lord Elgin and his wallpaper were now touchy subjects at Farringford. Lionel Tennyson had noticed (with delight)

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that even if you dropped the words ‘Parthenon’ or ‘Great Russell Street’ fairly innocently into a conversation, you would get some very sour looks. ‘Let’s burn the damn stuff,’ Alfred had said. ‘But how would Julia feel? She is such a good friend, Alfred.’ ‘Would you rather we hung it on the walls and let it look at us?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, then.’ Emily was glad that Julia could not ensnare Alfred’s better nature by the gift of a few baubles; but at the same time horrified by the possibility that he simply had no better nature to ensnare. ‘It must be frustrating for Julia,’ she sympathized, but only half-heartedly. It was quite comical, actually, from Emily’s point of view. That Julia openly adored Alfred did not impress him; he regarded it as only natural. That her unreturned attentions made her unhappy was nothing to him. The stream of votive presents were an amusement (‘What’s it today? A teapot!’); now that Emily had started sending things back, he was puzzled, nothing more. Emily ordered that the wallpaper be piled at the base of Alfred’s little spiral staircase—the special escape route built on the corner of his library so that he could avoid meeting invaders and invited guests. Emily felt he had been passing her the problem and forcing her to solve it; this seemed like a good passive way of handing it back. Every time he ran down his stairs, he would have to vault six rolls of wallpaper. This was only fair. Emily protected her husband from so much that was unpleasant, she refused to protect him from well-meant gifts as well. Another letter from ‘Yours in aversion’ had arrived this morning, and she put it in her pocket unopened, as always. She was glad now, anyway, that she never warned Alfred about the imminent arrival of Mr Dodgson. By some unknowable stroke of good fortune, the dreadful fellow had not shown up.  The great delight at Dimbola Lodge was the discovery that they had a new genius in their midst. To add to the greatest living poet and the greatest living painter, Julia could now lay claim to the greatest living nonsense writer (Edward Lear always gave her the cold shoulder anyhow). So while Dodgson took beef tea in sips and continued to mislay his reason, the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was read by everybody, even old Mr Cameron, who particularly approved the Cheshire Cat, and the philosophical discussion between the King, Queen and executioner about whether a head can be beheaded when it is not connected to a neck. ‘I could quite happily think about this logical point for a week or more, Julia, if I were not excited with unexpected presents.’

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All Mrs Cameron’s former dislike of Dodgson—based only on reputation— was now swept away by her enthusiasm for Lewis Carroll. ‘I refuse to believe Mr Dodgson was overcome by the size of his own organs,’ she said. ‘The sheer imaginative effort of writing this book could break the constitution of any man. But I do wish the poor fellow would recover himself,’ she added. ‘I want to know why a raven is like a writing desk.’ Watts grew cross and grumpy, but Julia barely noticed. All weekend, everything was Alice this, and Alice that. Il Signor got almost no attention. Julia’s behaviour was quite insensitive, and her noisy trilling about Alice was causing him a headache. On Sunday he had set up his easel and begun work on the recolouring of Ellen’s portrait (‘Choosing’), but nobody asked him why the rosy cheeks were turning pale. Every time he sat down to instruct Julia on the Italian masters, too, she would think of some other mad coincidence that brought the world of Alice closer to her own existence. ‘How extraordinary, George, that I painted my roses on Wednesday! You see, that is the sort of thing that may have set him off. As we both know, George, genius must always be treated with delicacy.’ Watts winced. ‘In that case, could you call me Il Signor?’ ‘Of course, George. Just say the word. But I feel sure the way to jolt him out of this state is to bring Alice alive for him in some way—perhaps little Daisy. What do you think? We could do tableaux! Ellen says that before his breakdown, he always stammered, people supplied his words for him. Now he speaks fluently, but nonsense. The human mind is fascinating, hm?’ Watts shrugged and stared out of the window toward the bay, where he saw Ellen approaching with Tennyson, just in time for tea. Ellen really was very beautiful. It was such a shame he couldn’t do anything about it. ‘Haydon came to me again in the night,’ Watts confided. Julia said, ‘Did he, dear?’ but she had followed his gaze to Alfred and the pretty girl, and was not really listening. It was truly irritating that Mrs Watts was the living Maud. Julia loved Alfred better than anybody, and he was always rotten to her because she was not young or pretty. ‘Yes. The poor dead fellow was shaking his fist at me and pointing to the place where he cut his throat.’ ‘Don’t take it to heart,’ she said, still preoccupied. ‘It was really not your fault. It was the yankee midget, as I told you before. Live for the present, George.’ ‘But Julia—’ Ellen and Tennyson arrived at the front door, and Julia recovered herself with a great effort. ‘And what a coincidence that we have a Mary Ann in the house when there is one in Alice, too!’

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Watts gave in. Was there any profit in pointing out that half the maids in England were called Mary Ann? Probably not. ‘Fancy,’ he clucked. ‘What’s that, George?’ ‘Mary Ann, fancy that. What an uncanny coincidence. Ellen’s first name is Alice, too, did you know? Another accident which isn’t one really.’ ‘No?’ ‘No, she tells me that Dodgson met her and admired her when she was only eight. She has concluded that the child in the book is her.’ ‘Little Alice is Mrs Watts!’ Julia exclaimed in disbelief, as she watched Ellen arrive at the front door and remove her bonnet. ‘Oh I don’t think so, not Mr Dodgson too,’ she muttered. ‘That silly girl can’t inspire everybody.’  After tea, Ellen was commissioned to sit upstairs with Dodgson for an hour, to see if there was anything she could do. Mary Ann came with her. They found him sitting morose in a high-backed chair beside an open sashed window, dressed in a heavily embroidered Indian shirt and a purple fez, evidently some inappropriate gifts from Julia. His gaze was far out to sea, and he hardly looked around when the others entered. His demeanour reminded Ellen of the mad scenes she had seen in Shakespeare—people are always mad when there is a crashing shore nearby, it seemed. If she dared, she would put her orchids in Dodgson’s hair and tousle it a little. But what really impressed her was that Dodgson, in this big shell of a chair, reminded her of the Mock Turtle on the sand in Alice, which she had read again that morning. So she sat on a low stool, quietly, and listened to the distant breaking waves, wondering who would play the Gryphon to complete the picture. Mary Ann spoke up, with a big effort to sound normal. ‘This here young lady,’ she said, ‘she wants to know your history, she do.’ Dodgson looked at Ellen, and then at the sea again, and then turned back. Demented or not, he certainly looked unhappy—as you would, too, if you were remembering that you were a real turtle once. ‘I’ll tell it to you,’ he said. ‘Sit down both of you, and don’t speak a word until I’ve finished.’ Since they were already both sitting down, they did not move. They glanced at each other, and Ellen put her finger to her lips. She had a plan to remind him of his normal self. ‘Once,’ he said, with a deep sigh, ‘I was a real t—’ ‘Turtle?’ Ellen prompted.

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Dodgson bit his lip, and looked back out of the window. Biding for time, he wiped a tear with the back of his hand. ‘When we were little, we went to school in the sea,’ he continued. ‘The master was an old turtle. We used to call him T—’ ‘Tortoise?’ she interrupted. Dodgson sobbed, as though a bone was in his throat, and tried again. ‘You may not have lived much under the sea, and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster—’ ‘No, but I would love to see a Lobster Quadrille!’ said Ellen. Dodgson put his hands to his head and closed his eyes. This wasn’t supposed to happen. When he opened them again, the little girl was still sitting at his feet, with her chin in her hands, her big childish eyes gazing up at him. ‘Alice?’ he said. ‘Is it you, Alice?’ ‘Yes, I’m Alice,’ she said, quite truthfully. (Well, she was.) ‘Alice, a terrible thing has happened. I hardly know how to tell you, my dear. But somehow or other, you have got inside my head.’  As night fell across the bay, Lorenzo and Jessie finally gave up testing each other for the Organ of Gratitude. After hours of hypnotic tests, expert manipulation, and some fairly brutal heart-searching, they were forced to admit the possibility that neither of them had one. ‘Perhaps one of these characters had it, though, Pa,’ said Jessie, indicating the heads, piled like a Golgotha in the corner of the room. ‘That Haydon was always glad of help, wasn’t he?’ She went and got Haydon, and set him on the table. Lorenzo frowned. ‘He was always asking for help, certainly, but—’ ‘Now it seems to me,’ she said, ‘That the key to Gratitude is Self Esteem.’ Lorenzo leaned back in his chair and whistled. ‘Jessie, how old are you again?’ ‘I’m eight and you know it.’ ‘Where in damnation did you learn to be so worldly?’ ‘Ah, cheese it, Pa,’ she declared, but she blushed nevertheless. She loved it when Lorenzo told her she was a brat prodigy. ‘But come on, Pa, apply yourself. Say Uncle Orson gave you—’ ‘Jessie. I am tired of hypotheticals. It keeps turning out that I’m the most ornery ingrate that ever lived. Shouldn’t you be in bed? Let me call for Ada.’ ‘But this is just getting interesting.’ ‘Well, I honestly think—’ He was just about to tell her what he honestly thought when Ada interrupted. ‘There is a young man to see you, sir.’ She pulled a face. ‘Go on.’

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‘He says he attended the Freshwater lecture, and would like to purchase a pamphlet. Should I send him away, sir? It’s very late. If I were you I’d send him away, but then nobody listens to me of course, because everyone here is so much cleverer than I am.’ Lorenzo ignored the uppity sarcasm. He smiled. It was a visit he had been expecting. ‘Jessie, you must go to bed at once. Ada, bring the young man, and ask for some lamps to be brought. Why, we should have had lamps half an hour ago. What were you thinking?’ It was true. While he and Jessie sat talking, they hardly noticed how the room had darkened, until the only light came reflected from the sea in the moonshine. When the boy came in, the room was still thus dark, even darker, and Lorenzo could hardly see him, but he knew at once who it was. ‘Hello, young man. Is it Herbert, am I right?’ ‘That’s right, sir,’ came Ellen’s disguised gruff voice. ‘Herbert it is.’ She edged into the room, where all she could clearly make out was the shape of Lorenzo standing at the window. She began to wish she had not come. Compared to the weedy aesthetes she had grown accustomed to, Lorenzo seemed such a large and manly man; a sixteen-year-old cross-dressed woman alone with such a man was the sort of situation she knew only too well from the stage. It led to all sorts of embarrassing mix-ups. Lorenzo would be suggesting they wrestle soon, and take their tops off. ‘I am sorry to disturb you in the evening, sir,’ began Herbert. ‘But I wondered if I could have the benefit of your advice.’ Lorenzo did not reply at once. Perhaps he was waiting for her eyes to become accustomed to the dark. She heard him sniff the air. Ellen wished the lamps would be lit, but she thought it was going pretty well until Lorenzo took a step closer and she smelled the sandalwood on his hands. ‘May I take your hat?’ ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Come now.’ ‘No. Really.’ ‘Herbert, would you really want me to kiss you with it on?’ ‘Oh no, sir,’ she squeaked. ‘So we should take it off, then.’ ‘Oh, sir, I never meant—’ ‘You see, I feel attracted to you, Herbert,’ he laughed, as he moved towards her again, and reached out to touch the brim of the hat. ‘You have the biggest Organ of Hope—But ah, the lamps are come,’ he said good-naturedly, as the servants appeared at the door with oil-lamps, apologizing, curtsying, lighting more fixtures

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with spills. Ellen felt she had never been so glad to see anybody, but when the room brightened, and she could see Lorenzo plainly, smiling at her and indicating a seat at the table, the thrill of danger did not pass. In fact, she felt a jolt of desire. ‘So tell me why you’ve come,’ said Lorenzo, not waiting for the room to clear. Ellen coughed and thought. Was it really true she had come here for a pamphlet?  Back at Dimbola, over coffee and muffins, Julia decided it was time to confide in Mr Watts. She had conceived the ultimate present for Alfred, a magnificent present which he would appreciate all his life. ‘What sort of present?’ asked Il Signor, vaguely interested, picking a buttery muffin from a platter. ‘Can you eat it?’ ‘No, you can’t eat it,’ Julia said. She seemed to find the question amusing. ‘You can’t hang it on walls, either.’ Watts had not the energy to guess. ‘What is it?’ ‘George! It’s what he wants more than anything in the world. It’s something that dear Emily could never give him, either. It is the gift of a true friend.’ Her eyes flashed with happy tears. ‘You still can’t guess?’ Watts shrugged. ‘It’s a review, George.’ And she poked him in the ribs. ‘A review? But where? You can’t just write him one, you know.’ ‘I know that, George. It’s in the Westminster Quarterly! Alfred will receive it tomorrow. Sister Sara has used her influence with the greatest critic and editor of the age, and Enoch Arden is to be accounted Alfred’s most accomplished work to date. A proof-sheet arrived yesterday from town. It is a wonderful review. I wrote it myself. Listen to this—!’ She removed a folded sheet of paper from beneath her shawl, and opened it. ‘It says there never was such a perfect depiction of absence of hope, George! Enoch Arden’s story is relentless in its poignant tragedy. The reviewer says the poem made him feel utterly despondent from beginning to end! Imagine how such words will comfort Alfred. The reviewer quotes thus: And Enoch bore his weakness cheerfully. For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck See through the gray skirts of a lifting squall The boat that bears the hope of life approach To save the life despaired of, than he saw Death dawning on him, and the close of all.

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Despite himself, Watts was impressed. It was the most miserable thing he’d ever heard. ‘There’s glory for you,’ he said. ‘But Alfred will be so happy!’ exclaimed Julia. ‘You and I both know the wicked sting of the critic, George; but as for the critic’s fine words, we take them straight to our bosoms as balm!’ Watts masticated his muffin. ‘How will he know it’s from you?’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘George?’ ‘How will Alfred know this is a present?’ ‘Oh but he won’t! He never will! That’s the beauty of it!’ ‘That’s very selfless of you, Julia.’ ‘I know,’ she said, thoughtfully. She still wasn’t sure she could cope with this aspect of the thing. ‘But now where’s your little wife got to?’ she asked brightly, changing the mood. ‘Shall we ask her to entertain us with a little dance?’  At this precise moment Ellen scurried back up the lane to Dimbola Lodge, her heart pounding. She ran fast and removed her bothersome hat, so that her golden hair swung loose on her shoulders. She laughed for pleasure. All in all, she was far too preoccupied to notice Mary Ryan standing hooded in the shadows near the hotel, watching her as she passed. ‘He will love me!’ Ellen said to herself in Mary Ryan’s hearing. ‘He will be unable to resist me.’ Ellen was supremely happy. She flicked her hair in the moonlight as she ran. She had solved the problems of everybody. Lorenzo would visit Mr Dodgson in the morning; he would consider Alfred’s requirements about the mad children, too. And as for her marital problems with George! Well, Lorenzo had promised some practical help in a theatrical extravaganza. No longer would George yell ‘Remember Westminster!’ at the precise moment any intimacy threatened. For the first time since her marriage, she had been able to discuss this peculiar marital plight with another person, and the depth of Lorenzo’s compassion had overwhelmed her. Not once had he suggested that the failure was hers. He said she was brave to come. The relief was as though someone had drilled a hole in her head and let out the accumulated pressure of sixteen years. ‘Perhaps small Caution is a benefit sometimes,’ she had said to him, meaning to make a light joke. ‘Oh, it is useful, of course, if you are a hero in a tight spot. But in matters of love it is the source of more trouble than you can imagine,’ said Lorenzo. ‘I too

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have small Caution. And I have Amativeness so massive and bulging that I must rest it on the back of my chair, look, just to obtain relief.’ Ellen gulped. She pictured the back of her husband’s head. It was flat, like a wall. ‘I am very grateful for your kindness this evening,’ she said. ‘If you will help me with George, help make him love me, help him get over this Westminster thing, I will think well of you for ever.’ Lorenzo shook her hand. ‘But do you think gratitude exists, Mrs Watts? Or is it just a name for obligation? If we are truly grateful to somebody, perhaps we must love them, too? Is that what defines real gratitude, a love of the giver for himself and not the gift?’ ‘I don’t understand,’ said Ellen, worried. She feared his Organ of Amativeness was nudging into the discussion again. ‘But in my experience it is always a good idea to say “That’s kind” or “Would you really?”, because people set such store by it. It doesn’t take long to say. It doesn’t mean anything. But it makes people help you again, or give you more things.’ ‘Well, that’s certainly a practical attitude, Mrs Watts,’ Lorenzo admitted, as he walked her to the door. ‘Perhaps you can show your gratitude to me, by helping me with a little research. If you are truly grateful, Mrs Watts, I fear you are going to have to take your hat off to me, sooner or later.’ Outside in the shadows Mary Ryan considered what to do. Perhaps the hour was too late for a visit to Mr Fowler now, although she still burned to know her marital fate. She looked upstairs to the rooms, for sign of a light. ‘He will love me,’ Mrs Watts had said. She must have meant Mr Fowler. As Mary Ryan watched the building, Lorenzo opened a window and leaned out. At moments like these he wished he smoked cigars. Watching Ellen run back to Dimbola Lodge, he blew a kiss towards her. ‘Ah, Mrs Watts!’ he sighed happily. ‘God bless my Organ of Marvellousness, but I’m enjoying this.’ Mary Ryan looked up the road at Mrs Watts, and back to the hotel window, where Lorenzo still watched, with a look of enchantment. Mr Fowler and Mrs Watts? She shook her head and whistled. For once, only the local exclamation would do. ‘Swap me bob,’ she whispered.

Chapter 9




Lorenzo Fowler had very much enjoyed his evening of verbal foreplay with young Mr Herbert. As he kept repeating to himself next morning as he dressed at the cheval glass, you hardly expect romantic interest on the Isle of Wight. A man who in another life might have been a top opera singer (with a slightly different cranial arrangement, to include musical ability), he puffed out his chest, stretched out his arms at shoulder level and sang the words as though to a Handel aria— ‘A man!’ ‘Hardly!’ ‘Expects rrromantic . . . Interest!’ Pause for orchestral diddle-diddles. ‘On the Isle of Wight!’ A positive thinker at all times, Lorenzo now concluded that life was better than ever. At breakfast he found himself saying grace for the first time in many years. He said it with enormous sincerity, too. ‘Thank you with all the juices of our humble mortal excitable bodies, Lord, for the splendid gift of your lovely, lovely plenty!’ ‘Did he take his hat off, Pa?’ asked Jessie conversationally, spreading some butter rather badly. ‘Not this time. But I’m sure he will. For me.’ ‘How are you supposed to do him properly with his hat on?’ ‘Jessie, that’s exactly what I said.’ ‘I mean, does he think we’ve never seen scurf ?’ Lorenzo smiled and helped her with some jam. He remembered how he had just got his fingers on the tweedy brim of that hat when— ‘Ada offered me bacon again, did I tell you?’ ‘No!’ ‘She said it could be our little secret.’ ‘I hope you reiterated our position on the consumption of flesh?’ ‘Oh yes, but she doesn’t understand. Ada says that if I don’t eat meat I’ll grow up a simpleton and dullard. Yet I keep explaining that my farinaceous family is full of alert, energetic people who never miss a trick. Look at Uncle Orson, I said, the most productive brain in the whole United States, and moreover the world’s greatest expert on martial love!’ ‘Marital, Jessie.’ ‘Yes, marital. Why doesn’t she examine the evidence that’s right before her eyes?’

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‘Perhaps because her intelligence is clouded by animal fat.’ Jessie looked puzzled, and then guffawed. ‘Can I tell her you said that, Pa? I can’t wait to see her face!’ It was quite true that the Fowlers defied the usual dumpy phlegmatic fate of the vegetarian. Somehow their blameless lifestyle—meatless, drinkless, smokeless, and disencumbered by the vile fashion of corsetry—had not only sharpened their wits, but given them an abnormally large appetite for other base, animal activities. Both literally and metaphorically, they were full of beans. Uncle Orson, back in Boston, was the prophet of so many popular health movements that he was on the verge of losing his mind keeping up with them all. He promoted all progressive notions with the same total enthusiasm. When he became consumed by a passion for gardening, for example, he sent packets of seeds (free) to any part of the United States. As for marital love, Uncle Orson was not so much afroth on this subject as a human egg-white beaten to a stiff meringue. Reportedly, he saw sex in everything. Given the opportunity, he might even have seen it in G. F. Watts. Intercourse summons all the organs and parts of the system to its love-fest, wrote the lathered Orson. It compels their attendance, and lashes up their action to the highest possible pitch. The non-participant female . . . is a natural abomination. Orson’s latest pamphlet—an abstract from his projected hundred-thousandword book Creative and Sexual Science—Lorenzo had read quietly to himself a couple of times (no more) and then hidden in the lid of his portmanteau. True, every so often he retrieved it, to refresh his memory. He particularly liked the expression ‘lashes up their action to the highest possible pitch’, which made his cheeks warm under the bushy beard. To be strictly honest, he had taken a quick perusal of the pamphlet again in bed last night, after Ellen’s visit. Orson had wanted to send five thousand copies, to be sold from Ludgate Circus at a penny each. But England was not yet ready for all this lashing up, Lorenzo decided. And let’s be frank here, the Isle of Wight never would be. ‘I have an appointment at Dimbola Lodge this morning, Jessie. Will you come?’ She put down her knife with a clunk. ‘To see Mr Dodo? No fear.’ ‘But Jessie—’ ‘I only touched his head, Pa!’ ‘I know. But sometimes that’s enough, Jessie. Sometimes that’s enough.’  At the breakfast table at Farringford, Emily opened a note from Julia and some embroidery silks fell out.

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‘Alfred,’ she said, flatly. He picked up the silks and poked them in his pocket. He continued reading Enoch Arden, his tragic fisherman poem. Although the book was scarcely off the presses, he was already considering emendations. ‘Under the palm tree’ in line 494 would be yards better as ‘Under a palm tree’, he thought. He practised ‘Under the palm, under a palm, under the palm, under a palm,’ while tapping time with a spoon. Emily smoothed her hair and composed herself for the letter, but when she resumed it, she felt all the hope drain again from her body. ‘You read it, Alfred. I can’t.’ Alfred sighed, put down his book and scanned the letter, holding it three inches in front of his eyes. Receiving the American phrenologist this morning (Tuesday), Julia said; you are both invited to meet him. He read the note first upright, then sideways, then upright again. It was important that he keep this news from Emily. He wanted to consult this phrenologist on the urgent matter of the boys’ inherited madness. He played for time. ‘I wish she wouldn’t cross her letters,’ he said. ‘Her handwriting is bad enough without it.’ ‘What does she say?’ ‘Oh. Nothing.’ ‘Nothing at all?’ ‘Just will I sit for her. The usual thing. And please accept these lovely silks, bought when last in London. The blue is quite a rare shade, she says.’ Emily felt like a heel. ‘Am I wrong to be so agitated, Alfred? I had a dream about the wallpaper last night, in which you were papered all over with it, and wore a big hat made of it, and the boys were eating it. And I was being papered to the wall. When I awoke, I could still smell the paste.’ Alfred patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry, Emily. You’re not mad.’ ‘I didn’t say I was.’ ‘Did you check the children?’ ‘Yes.’ She opened another envelope. Inside, mysteriously, was a copy of the Westminster Quarterly, a publication she had cancelled several years ago. What on earth was going on? Opening it, she found a review of Alfred’s new volume. She snapped it shut again, and thought fast. ‘Mmm?’ said Alfred, noticing a sudden movement. Emily nearly burst into tears. What could she do? A review! a review! Help! Help! She couldn’t eat this one, it was too big. And besides, the minerals in the

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ink of Punch had actually done her frail digestion no good whatsoever. She decided to divert his attention. ‘Oh look,’ she said, pointing a bony finger at the window. ‘Alfred, who’s that? Who’s that—at the Garibaldi tree? Can it be—er, who’s the other one? Not Garibaldi—you know. Count Cavour!’ It was a wild invention—but it worked. While Alfred leapt to the window, squinting for more uninvited Italians of the Risorgimento invading the tranquillity of his house and garden, she tore out the review, and looked round frantically for a hiding place. It wasn’t easy. She didn’t have a cleavage, and her pockets were already full of anonymous letters. In desperation—and just as Alfred looked round—she took the lid off the teapot and stuffed the pages inside.  Breakfast at Dimbola on this Tuesday morning was an altogether more jolly affair. Ellen in particular was in excellent spirits. For some reason she kept patting her husband on the back of the head, and then feeling the back of her own. ‘When that I was and a little tiny boy, With a hey, ho the wind and the rain,’ she trilled, happily contemplating another day of fine blue skies and seagulls over white cliffs. ‘Does it ever rain in Freshwater?’ she asked, not expecting an answer. ‘Jove knows I love, but who?’ she continued, tweaking her husband’s nose in an unseemly manner. ‘Lips, do not move! No man must know! Ha! I really can’t think why I objected to Twelfth Night, you know, George, it is a capital play. Wonderful speeches. What is your parentage?’ Watts was taken aback by the question. He exchanged glances with Mrs Cameron. Both of them knew that George’s sire was a piano tuner. It was not something to be mentioned over breakfast. ‘Don’t you know anything, George? If I say “What is your parentage?” you say “Above my fortunes but my state is well.” It’s very appropriate. You know, in your case.’ ‘Have you spoken with Mr Dodgson today, Mrs Watts?’ asked Julia, trying to slacken the pace. ‘I did see him yesterday but he was still Lewis Carroll. He said persons over a mile high should leave the court, so I made an exit, no applause. But I’m sure Mr Fowler will set us all straight. I have such a firm belief in phrenology. It’s a science, you know, yet it’s about people. Isn’t that a marvellous combination? I learned—um, somewhere—that Mr Fowler was the man who discovered Human Nature. And guess where it is located? Above Comparison! Isn’t that tidy? Human Nature is above Comparison! There’s one for your canvases, George. I’m surprised you never thought of it.’

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Only the arrival of devilled kidneys slowed Ellen down. She attacked them as though her last proper meal had been at Christmas. Julia looked at her and wondered at the unfairness of life. How could Lewis Carroll write a book about this silly girl? How could Watts think of marrying her? And worst of all, how could Alfred prefer her company? What would this girl ever do for Alfred Tennyson? What could she do that would compare with the magnificent gesture of the Westminster review? She hugged herself to think of Alfred reading it at this very minute. ‘I hope your walk with Alfred yesterday was not too tedious, my dear?’ asked Julia. (Naturally, she hoped the opposite.) ‘Oh no.’ ‘I expect he drifted off a great deal? He sometimes forgets his companion, I find. Those of us who love him—and know him very, very, very well—learn to forgive him. Much as I admire the man, I must admit that when there is a masterpiece stirring in his brain, he takes no account of the special claims of female company.’ Ellen struggled to understand the tenor of these questions. Surely Julia didn’t want to know that Alfred had been boorish? She was his friend, wasn’t she? ‘Not at all, he was most attentive,’ she reassured the older woman. ‘Really?’ Ellen took a swig of tea. ‘Oh yes, most attentive. No drifting off at all. He pointed out cormorants and such, named the flowers, explained geology. Oh, and he took particular pains to teach me to say “luncheon” instead of “lunch”.’ ‘That was well done,’ observed Watts. ‘And he gave me these,’ she added, pointing at the tiny blue orchids. Proud of her booty, she had attached them to her collar with a cunning little silver brooch in the shape of a rose. Julia peered at the flowers with her mouth open, and then—rather alarmingly—clutched her chest and flailed her legs in the air. Thank goodness she was sitting down at the time. She seemed to be suffering a kind of seizure. ‘He gave them to you?’ she squeaked, ‘Alfred? Gave them to you as a present?’ Ellen realized she was stretching things a bit here, but it was too late to admit she’d picked them herself. She shrugged. ‘Don’t you think they go with my eyes?’  Dodgson still sat in his upstairs room, staring out of the window. He hated to admit it, but much of his post-traumatic stress had now passed. In a very boring life, this Freshwater episode was, by far, the most interesting thing that ever hap-

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pened to him. To slip into his own book! A lucky man. But now he was recovered, and the occasional glimpse of a rabbit darting down a hole made him a bit dizzy, nothing more. He could now behold the Dimbola cat without thinking it hailed from Cheshire. ‘It has p-p-p—passed,’ he said, as if to prove it. It felt rather a shame. While he’d been mad, everyone had been so nice to him. Mrs Cameron had been quite wonderful, bringing him nice drinks and sheets of paper and small oriental ornaments to cheer him up. These knick-knacks he had now packed carefully in his portmanteau, in case she changed her mind. A lacquer box of considerable value was among them; it would stand as a useful prop at home, when he posed little Oxford girls in mandarin pyjamas with parasols and chinoiserie screens. He sighed. He really ought to get back to his art, even if the unaccustomed hospitality of Dimbola Lodge tempted him to stay. Mrs Watts, too, had been an angel, though he was uncomfortable about her awkward insistence that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland bore some immediate relationship to herself. People will believe anything if it’s flattering enough, he concluded. And he was just about to get dressed and announce himself cured (possibly in time to catch a morning ferry from Yarmouth), when he heard the sound of Tennyson arriving downstairs. Muffled greetings and questionings reached his ears, but he couldn’t make out much. ‘Any news, Alfred?’ asked Julia, happily, only to be bewildered when Alfred rejoined, ‘None at all, praise God!’ and hurried past her to talk to little Mrs Watts outside the front door. Upstairs, the arrival of Tennyson set Dodgson in a quandary. It was the nearest he had come to the laureate all week. ‘Should I consider remaining an extra day?’ he thought. ‘If Mr Tennyson felt sorry for me, perhaps he would not only allow the dedication, but offer it himself ?’ And so Dodgson finished his breakfast tea in his high-backed chair and gazed at the view again, thinking of his next best move as though puzzling a strategy in chess. His window stood open, however, which was how he came to hear Tennyson and Mrs Watts conferring in whispers outside, on the sheltered path below. They were discussing the anticipated arrival of Lorenzo and the madness of Tennyson’s boys, but Dodgson did not know that. To an outsider, their conversation sounded suspiciously like a tryst. ‘My dear! You must pardon me for speaking to you yesterday on such an intimate matter.’ ‘Not at all,’ Ellen assured the great man. ‘Your passion commends you.’ There was a significant pause, while Dodgson wondered whether to take notes, but decided to sit very still instead.

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At last, Tennyson sighed. ‘Should I live in hope?’ he asked. ‘You must!’ said Ellen, rather thrillingly. ‘I know I always do!’ ‘This is such a delicate matter. I would confide in Julia, but she loves Emily so dearly! And Emily must never know about this, Mrs Watts. She already believes I am irrationally obsessed on the subject, simply because—’ He stopped. ‘Why?’ asked Ellen. Alfred lowered his voice even further. Dodgson craned to hear. ‘—Because I ask her every morning.’ Dodgson held his breath. But at this moment Mary Ryan entered to clear away his breakfast tray, and heard the same exclamation—‘Julia might tell Emily!’— and the gape-mouthed ‘Swap me bob’ look from the previous night appeared on her features once more. ‘What can be done?’ Tennyson continued, breathlessly. ‘If an organ is to blame for the disorder, perhaps it can be beaten down and vanquished?’ Dodgson winced, but Ellen merely replied, ‘Well, possibly. But I wouldn’t know. Obviously it’s not an organ I’ve got.’ ‘I should never have had children, Mrs Watts! I have been selfish!’ At which point Mary Ryan made a decision. She was a very proper girl who did not eavesdrop deliberately. So she closed the window, quite noisily, making Alfred and Ellen look up; and Dodgson subsided in his chair. As the Irish maid left the room with his breakfast tray, Dodgson thought he heard her say to herself, ‘Mr Fowler and Mr Tennyson in love with Mrs Watts, well swap me bob twice!’ but it wasn’t very likely. What was certain, however, was that the morning ferry would sail without Dodgson today. He realized, as he relaxed his muscles, that he had been sitting in his chair fully six inches above the actual seat.  While Alfred and Ellen made a pleasant walk in the garden, Julia arrived at Farringford breathless. A mad dash has rarely been madder, but Julia was confused, worried; she had to do something. She had less than half an hour in hand before the phrenologist’s arrival, but after dreaming all night of Alfred’s wonderful review, her perfect gift seemed to have gone wrong. ‘None at all, praise God!’ Alfred had said. Yet Julia had sent the Westminster by hand this morning, her only copy. And then what did he do? He went into a huddle with the Terry girl, the young pretty woman to whom he had given his first ever recorded present. No wonder Julia felt the need to be up and doing. But what, in fact, could be done? In the gloom and chill at Farringford, she discovered Emily sitting alone in the drawing room, writing. A clock ticked on the mantelpiece. Stepping in from the warm, bright morning, it was like entering the British Museum; the birdsong

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stopped, and the house smelled of stone. Perhaps, unconsciously, this was why Julia had bought them the Elgin Marbles wallpaper. In her journal Emily mentioned that it was her birthday today, but that ‘A’ did not concern himself with such anniversaries, so she had not mentioned it to her husband or the boys. She was jolly brave about it, actually. Emily was one of those tough, wiry invalids who outlive their fitter spouses, and give rise to the wise old saying ‘A creaking gate hangs longest’. ‘My dear!’ called Julia. ‘My dear!’ echoed Emily, with slightly less enthusiasm. ‘I’m afraid I come empty-handed,’ confessed Julia. ‘Oh,’ said Emily, and shrugged. Her feelings were mixed. ‘But I sent the silks.’ ‘Of course. Thank you, Julia, I always say that you are kindness itself.’ ‘Did you like the blue?’ ‘I have already begun a sampler with it.’ Julia looked around, vaguely hoping for signs of classical Athenian bas-relief on the walls. There was none. ‘But there must be something else?’ asked Emily. ‘Oh yes. I forget myself. Did Alfred receive any good news today?’ ‘No, I don’t think so.’ ‘I see.’ ‘What sort of good news?’ ‘Oh, you know. About the new poem.’ Emily looked shifty. What did Julia know? She decided to stand her ground. ‘No, none at all, praise God!’ There was nothing Julia could add without giving herself away. The two women looked at one another. Emily closed her journal, as though to say her inspiration had fled; her thoughts would not re-compose themselves now. ‘I’ll be off then.’ ‘Goodbye Julia. It is always a pleasure to see you, for however short a time.’ Julia looked brave, kissed the invalid, and scurried through the house. But as she approached the front door, she saw a pile of torn paper and recognized amid the scraps the cover of the Westminster. So the Tennysons had received it, but not even looked at it! She almost collapsed in her dismay. All that effort for nothing? Those Tennysons were the living end. She felt a sudden terrifying urge to torch the house. But luckily another wild scheme occurred to her at the same time, and before she knew quite what she was doing, she darted up the main staircase. In her pocket she still carried the proof sheet of the Enoch Arden review. She could save the day by placing it on Alfred’s desk, where he couldn’t help but see it! But two minutes later, she stood indecisive at his library window, the sheet

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trembling in her hand. It wasn’t working. She put the review down on some papers; she picked it up again; she tried tossing it carelessly on the floor, and poking it in his pen holder, screwed up like a shuttlecock. Nothing looked right. Even in her heightened emotional state, she retained enough good sense to see that. For this most perfect of gifts to find its mark, Alfred must see the review in the Westminster Quarterly or nowhere. Resignedly, she folded the sheet and put it back in her pocket. She must return to Dimbola at once! She had a quick, hopeful scan of the walls—what had they done with it?—and made for the door. ‘Julia! is that you?’ The call startled her. Help! Emily must be coming up! Julia looked round in panic and made a quick decision. Alfred’s emergency staircase! The spiral one he used for escaping Americans! She flung open the door and plunged down into the darkness. And Emily, having struggled half-way up the main stairs, heard the scurry, screwed up her face and said ‘Ouch!’ in anticipation. Seconds later, a muffled crash and scream confirmed the awful, the inevitable, the fitting end. Julia had located the Elgin Marbles wallpaper.  Meanwhile Lorenzo had arrived early at Dimbola, and his first sight was Ellen apparently canoodling with Tennyson in the garden. With her hair visible for once, and those orchids on her collar like sapphires, Ellen looked more beautiful as a female than he had dared to imagine. He looked at her; she blushed. She put her hands behind her back. He made her feel terribly self-conscious. Alfred peered into the blur and saw only a large figure in a bright dandy waistcoat, bearing down on him with a big right hand outstretched. But he felt self—conscious too. For once, in fact, he was actually nervous. Nothing touched him more deeply than the mental health of his sons. So instead of the usual careless greeting, Alfred took some care with his introduction. ‘Alfred Tennyson,’ he said. ‘Poet Laureate.’ Lorenzo shook his hand. ‘Lorenzo Niles Fowler,’ he announced. He smiled at Alfred and Ellen warmly. ‘No head too big!’  ‘Mr Dodgson?’ Dodgson heard a small voice behind him, and turned round. It was Daisy. He said nothing. ‘Mr Dodgson, I have brought you a present, and I hope you will soon be well enough to travel.’

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Dodgson watched her suspiciously. How had she got in? More importantly, how could he get out? Was there any escape from her, save through the window to a ten-foot drop? ‘I have been thinking about the photograph you want to do. The one where I stand on the windowsill with the packed bag. I think I understand what you mean by it.’ She moved towards him, and reached out her little hand. ‘Don’t touch my head!’ he shrieked. ‘I’ll leave it here,’ she said, placing a slim package on Dodgson’s trunk. ‘I hope you like it.’ Dodgson shuddered as he watched her go. Less than a week ago, he had thought Daisy an ungraspable vision of loveliness. Now she was like the Eumenides in the Oresteia. He unwrapped the paper. Inside was a photograph of Daisy, which Dodgson guessed (by the novice murk and bad focus) to be the work of Mrs Cameron. It was, however, an extraordinary picture, which quite disarmed him. This was not the usual Victorian photograph of a demure prepubescent. Confidence and determination were the main qualities of this little face with its quizzical stare. Daisy held her right hand dramatically to her throat, as if to say, ‘Moi?’ And underneath, she had written, ‘I am ready for The Elopement whenever you are,’ and signed it ‘D’. Dodgson heaved an unusually racking sigh, and dropped to his bed.  Lorenzo, meanwhile, was wilfully neglecting his mission to Dodgson. In fact, when Mary Ryan entered the drawing room with some cups and plates, she heard Lorenzo in full flow, addressing Tennyson and the other luminaries in a kind of makeshift circle. ‘What I tell my paying audiences is this,’ he said, slapping his knees. ‘Go home now, I say, and write on a slip of paper your own obituary. Make it grand, I say; make it flattering. But then live the rest of your lives making it come true.’ He beamed at them all, gauging the appreciation. They were all impressed. They reflected on their own lives. In fact Mrs Cameron—who had already had quite a bad morning running to Farringford and back (and falling down stairs)— gulped and rubbed her shin. ‘Oh Alfred,’ she said wistfully. ‘It is true that we have but one chance to get things right.’ ‘I know I can’t offer you much,’ continued Lorenzo, ‘except free analysis and advice in absolute privacy and confidence, but I have every hope you will allow me the honour.’ Tennyson coughed. ‘Free, did you say?’ Things were turning out better than he

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hoped. To get the children checked over by an expert, who wanted nothing in return! He need only string the fellow along, which was easy enough. ‘I did, sir,’ said Lorenzo. ‘And a Fowler is a man of his word. To examine your heads will be the pinnacle of my professional life. And if I could take a plaster moulding for my own personal use—not for public display, of course, nothing like that—’ He noticed a certain amount of dissent and shuffle here ‘—Well, we will talk of that at another time.’ Tennyson leaned toward Julia and whispered (loudly enough for everyone to hear), ‘Perhaps the boot’s on the wrong foot here, Julia. Perhaps he should be paying us! Eh?’ She smiled nervously, and offered Lorenzo more tea. Sensing his audience slipping a little, Lorenzo regathered it expertly. ‘Imagine my position. I have before me the greatest names of the age,’ he said, ‘and I myself am nothing, nothing. The greatest living poet, sir; the greatest painter, photographer and actress. Such heads. I tell you frankly, my fingers itch to find the secret of that greatness. Science begs on its knees.’ Mrs Cameron interjected. She hated to see a nice man wasting his time. ‘I think I can speak for Mr Tennyson here, Mr Fowler. He refuses consistently to sit for me, and I am one of his oldest friends. The simple fact is, he will not allow such an intrusion, it is anathema to his—’ But Alfred interrupted. ‘Julia, you are too hasty,’ he said. Julia blinked hard. What? ‘But Alfred—’ ‘I think I may be allowed to do what I like with my own head?’ ‘But Alfred, my dear—’ ‘It is quite a different matter from your damned silly photographs, Julia!’ he snapped. Agitated, he jumped to his feet and walked up and down, while Julia stared at him. Mr Fowler and the Wattses, suddenly wishing they were invisible, all studied the pattern on the carpet. ‘You must come to Farringford this afternoon, Fowler, and meet my boys too,’ declared Alfred. And then, deliberately avoiding Julia’s hurt expression, he fidgeted for a handkerchief in his pocket, making one of Emily’s new embroidery silks fall out. Julia, with a little gasp, saw it fall. It was the blue one. She sniffed. Why was this always happening? But worse was to come. As he stooped to pick it up, Alfred peered closely at Mrs Watts for the first time and saw the orchids on her collar. Julia watched his face and Ellen’s, as he recognized the flowers. Ellen coloured.

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‘You look remarkably well this morning, Mrs Watts,’ he said with a big smile. ‘Does she not, gentlemen? Is she not a very beautiful young woman?’ The other men agreed loudly. Ellen, glad of the attention, beamed at them all. All plain women will know how Julia felt at this moment. It is a bit like being hit in the face with a sack of wet sand. ‘Alfred!’ Julia called to him. He was heading for the door. ‘Oh, I meant to mention it, Julia,’ he said. ‘When I came through my gate this morning, I noticed that your garden has an infernal smell of paint.’ Julia stood up, too, although her legs were shaky. Suddenly, she felt very old. ‘I must consult my husband, I do hope you’ll excuse me,’ she said, and vacated the room before the first sob of anguish escaped her. What a terrible morning! She burst through the back door and ran to her glass house, her heart thumping. In the space of a couple of hours, she had been rejected by Alfred in every way conceivable—as a friend, as a benefactor, as a photographer, as a woman, and lastly (most cruel blow of all) as an aesthete. ‘What I wouldn’t give!’ she cried. ‘Alfred, I would give anything, but I don’t know what you want!’ She sat completely still for ten minutes, her face a perfect picture of misery. In fact, had she only prepared a photo-graphic plate in advance, she could have got her ‘Absence of Hope’ picture right there, on the spot. While her guests ate warm biscuits in her drawing room, she trailed back to the house, and was met in the hall by Mary Ryan. ‘A parcel has come from Mrs Prinsep, madam.’ The maid indicated a small box, which had been opened. ‘A dozen copies of the Westminster Quarterly,’ she reported, puzzled. Mrs Cameron dried her eyes with a corner of shawl. She blew her nose on it too. Such a robust spirit this woman had. Her Hope was not as big as Ellen’s, but her Benevolence was prodigious. ‘A dozen copies, my dear Mary? Twelve? Then all is not lost, Mary. All is not lost, after all!’

Chapter 10




No phrenology was done that morning, but Lorenzo felt invigorated nevertheless by his meeting with the Dimbolans: as if he had just done the blindfold test and successfully untangled the history of a really tricky head—a wife murderer turned archbishop, say, with a strong aptitude for woodwork and gaming. What he failed to notice, however, was that while he grew sticky with excitement about getting his hands on the heads of these Freshwater people, most of these Freshwater people were pretty keen to get their hands on him. ‘He is Lancelot!’ exclaimed Mrs Cameron to her husband, later. ‘I shall pose him with Mary Ann as the Lady of Shalott! Such human passion! Can’t you imagine him singing “Tirra Lirra” on the river?’ ‘I believe I have found a model for Physical Energy, my dear,’ confided Watts to his wife. ‘Mr Fowler is a magnificent specimen. How do you think he would look with no clothes on?’ ‘I can’t quite define it,’ said Ellen less elevatedly (and to herself ). ‘But I would just like to get my hands on him, that’s all.’ Only Tennyson saw no practical application for the phrenologist in his own work. But then he never was a head-hunter; he was always the head hunted. Many years ago, his miserable brother Charles had written a derisive poem about phrenology, which began, A curious sect’s in vogue, who deem the soul Of man is legible upon his poll. Give them a squint at yonder doctor’s pate, And they’ll soon tell you why he dines on plate.

After such a strikingly bathetic start to the genre of the Phrenology Poem, most Victorian poets agreed the wisdom of conserving their candle for something else. Once outside in the garden, Lorenzo had run straight into Tennyson. ‘I meant it, come to tea with us, Fowler,’ he boomed. ‘Bring your charming daughter. I suppose she is charming? I mean to say, if she isn’t, don’t bring her. However, I will insist the boys are present, so that you may conduct your examinations in full view of everybody, as though in a spirit of—well, teatime fun!’ Teatime fun was not something Tennyson had ever experienced; in fact the word ‘fun’ was so new to his vocabulary that he paused for a moment to repeat it to himself, fun-fun-fun, weighing its poetic value (which was short).

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Lorenzo bowed. ‘It will be a pleasure. And will we have the delight of meeting your wife?’ Tennyson frowned. ‘Emily? Why ever not?’ He paused. Here was a point, actually. How was he to break the news to Emily? She had been so nervy in the past few days. A few random memories suddenly converged in his mind. Count Cavour in the shrubbery. Her hand guiltily in the teapot. Eating bits of paper torn from Punch. ‘But she’s not mad, you know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t say she was.’ ‘As sane as anyone in this house.’ ‘Good.’ ‘It’s the boys I’m worried about.’ ‘Understood.’ ‘Well, as long as that’s clear to you, Mr Fowler. Emily is not mad, not mad, not mad. I can’t tell you how often I have to reassure her on the subject.’  Julia knew nothing of this fresh arrangement, otherwise she would have insisted on organizing it and providing some food. No, at the termination of Lorenzo’s informal lecture, she had wiped her eyes again and hurried to Farringford for the second time that day, possibly wishing (as she ran along, panting and sweating, with her shawls a-flap) that some clever engineer would soon get around to inventing the safety bicycle. A dozen copies of the perfect-gift periodical lay in a basket across her arm. There was also a hammer and some nails, and some paste made from flour and water. Myopic pompous ingrate though Alfred was, he would certainly find his review before the day was out. He would rejoice in the Westminster’s good opinion, if the effort killed her. Arriving at the house, she first established that Alfred had not returned, and that Emily was lying down upstairs. Then she made twelve quick decisions, distributing the copies in cunning places and completing the task in as many minutes. She paused for breath on the lawn, adjusted her lace cap (which was always getting askew), and departed for Dimbola Lodge again. Today she would photograph Mary Ann in the pose of Friendship, which oddly she now knew to be a small organ of the brain positioned just back from the ear. Perhaps Mr Fowler could stimulate that organ in some of Julia’s acquaintance, she thought. ‘Then we might be getting somewhere.’  Dodgson meanwhile kept to his room at Dimbola, dreaming of the quiet life in Oxford. This morning he had seen Lorenzo Fowler enter the house, but no sign of

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the red-headed daughter, thank goodness. Dodgson was relieved. The last thing he needed was to be separated from his wits again by that demon in infant form. Detached observers might assume that where Dodgson was concerned, the Fowlers owed an apology. After all, their antics had deranged a complete stranger—and while he was on his holidays, too. But the Fowlers saw it quite the other way about. Dodgson had many reasons to apologize to them. For one, he was a pervert. For another, he had ruined their show. Most important of all, however, he had interfered with their takings. Lorenzo was therefore not the ideal person to minister to Dodgson in his current fragile state. ‘Sir!’ shouted Lorenzo, catching the invalid logician weakly buffing his lens with a cloth. Dodgson dropped the lens on his bedroom carpet, and gaped. Such violence of manner in a gentleman’s bedroom went well beyond decent practice. But worse was to come. With a flourish, Lorenzo shut the door behind him, and locked it. ‘Mr F-F—! I must pr—protest.’ Dodgson looked round in panic. The room seemed a lot smaller with Lorenzo in it. ‘Have you come to ap-p—pologize? I’m much b—better now.’ Lorenzo laughed. ‘Apologize? No, I have come to tell you that I know exactly what you’re up to.’ Dodgson thought quickly. What was he up to? Only failing to get Tennyson’s blessing for his book, as far as he could see. At worst, he was pilfering a few bits of bric-à-brac. There was nothing deserving this kind of beastliness. ‘I don’t think it’s any of y—your business,’ he declared. ‘It’s the business of any decent man,’ said Lorenzo. ‘Every American has a God-given duty to defend the weak!’ Dodgson was completely baffled. He sat down and pushed a lock of hair behind his ear. Not for the first time, he wished he had a big bushy Moses beard like every other Victorian man of consequence. He was sure it was his smooth chops that did for him. ‘And what’s this?’ said Lorenzo, lighting on the picture of Daisy. ‘A present,’ explained Dodgson, lamely. Lorenzo read the inscription and his jaw dropped to his chest. It appeared to concern a proposed elopement between Dodgson and little Daisy Bradley. ‘You are a fiend, sir!’ said Lorenzo. ‘I can tell you at once that you will go nowhere with this child!’ And Dodgson blinked in amazement as the phrenologist left the room and locked the door behind him. 

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While all this was going on, Ellen strolled in the garden with Alfred. ‘Why won’t you pose for Mrs Cameron?’ she asked. ‘It would make her so happy.’ ‘Happy? But, my dear, Mrs Cameron’s happiness in this matter is neither here nor there.’ ‘It isn’t?’ ‘Consider what she does when she has a person’s photograph. She exhibits it, she gives copies to anybody who calls. She gives away albums.’ ‘She has a generous nature.’ ‘And I have a desire for seclusion. Why do you think I live on the Isle of Wight?’ Ellen thought this was a proper question, and answered it. ‘Because the Queen likes it? And she once said she might visit you? And then you might get a knighthood?’ Alfred conceded the point. ‘Yes, but aside from that. I simply will not accept that, just because I am a poet, people should know what I look like—’ ‘Well, everyone knows what I look like.’ ‘Take this point, my dear,’ interrupted Alfred. ‘On a walking holiday last year, my companion shouted “Tennyson!” in the hotel, and the price of our simple lodging was doubled at once. Already visitors come to our house, pushing their noses at the windows, frightening Emily, disturbing the boys. People send me their poetry to read. They want to intrude on my private life in a most unseemly manner. I fear for this development, my dear, especially if the railway comes to Freshwater. Even in death I will not be safe. For there is a fashion for writing lives of poets, publishing their diaries and letters.’ ‘Yes, but that’s to show how important they are,’ urged Ellen. ‘Poets are dreadfully important.’ But Tennyson would not be cajoled. ‘But such scoundrels might tell the world that a man was mad, or dirty, or worse! And he has no defence! You may have seen my poem on the subject, entitled “To—, After Reading a Life and Letters”?’ ‘To whom?’ asked Ellen. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite—’ ‘No, it’s called “To—”. A blank, you know. It’s a poetic tradition, protecting people from exactly the presumptuous intrusion to which I respond.’ ‘I see.’ ‘I shall quote to you what I wrote. Stand back, my dear.’ She did so. She folded her hands. Tennyson ahem-ed, closed his eyes, and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He opened his eyes again. ‘I’m starting in the middle,’ he explained. She nodded. He closed his eyes, and from deep within him his poetry-reading voice erupted with such force that around Ellen where she stood, lilies shivered on

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their stalks. Tennyson had a mournful, barking recital manner reminiscent of an expiring moose. ‘For now the Poet cannot die, Nor leave his music as of old, But round him ere he scarce be cold Begins the scandal and the cry: “Proclaim the faults he would not show: Break lock and seal: betray the trust: Keep nothing sacred: ’tis but just The many-headed beast should know.” ’

Ellen put her hands together to clap, but Tennyson pressed on. Maids pegging washing in the kitchen garden beyond had popped their heads over the wall, to see the cause of the commotion. The laureate did seem very passionate about all this. ‘Ah shameless! For he did but sing A song that pleased us from its worth; No public life was his on earth, No blazon’d statesman he, nor king.’

Ellen clapped now, and Tennyson let out a long breath. ‘You won’t hear anything better than that on the subject,’ he said. ‘I am sure I won’t. But don’t you agree that fame has its price, Mr Tennyson?’ ‘It has a price,’ he agreed, ‘but I firmly believe that no one can make you pay it.’  Watts stood back from his canvas, after explaining its emblems and symbols to an impressed phrenologist. Watts hoped soon to broach the subject of Lorenzo modelling for him. For his own part, Lorenzo was definitely warming to the old goat, but he still couldn’t quite see the attraction for Ellen. The man had a head so flat at the back it suggested he’d been struck with a frying pan. ‘It is a very beautiful picture,’ Lorenzo agreed. ‘The brash camellia, the humble violets, a lovely conceit.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘If you could just show me the humble violets again. I can’t quite—’

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‘There.’ ‘Oh yes. No. Is that—?’ ‘There.’ Lorenzo clapped him on the back, slightly too hard so that Watts dropped his palette. ‘Got it!’ he said.  ‘It’s no fun down here without Mr Dodgson,’ pouted Daisy, her shrimp net limp in her hand. Jessie looked at her pityingly. They were paddling in rock pools, as usual, under the eye of their respective maids. ‘Daisy, tell me you’re not serious,’ she said. ‘That man gives me cholera.’ Daisy huffed, and stamped her foot in the water, splashing them both. ‘You don’t understand about Mr Dodgson and me,’ she said. ‘It’s very special. I think he really loves me. We’re planning to run away. I’ve already packed a little bag.’ Jessie sat down on a rock. ‘Jessie?’ The girl did not reply. ‘Jessie? Speak to me.’  At two o’clock Emily Tennyson rose from her nap, and read the note sent by Alfred in the care of Julia’s gardener’s boy. Some Americans were coming to tea, apparently—an odd proposition from Alfred, since Americans were precisely the sort of people she was usually expected to shield him from. In fact, if Americans turned up at the house, the Tennysons had a well-oiled routine for dealing with them. Emily would greet them hurriedly, leave them in the hall, and disappear to the dining room, immediately below Alfred’s library. There she would take a long-handled broom and bang the ceiling with it three times. Re-emerging in the hall with telltale ceiling plaster on her hair and shoulders, she would point the way upstairs to Alfred’s study, and then listen for Alfred’s scuffle as he ran down his secret staircase, threw open the garden door and hared across the lawn to the cliffs. People sometimes objected that they had travelled six thousand miles to see the Poet Laureate, to which Emily would always riposte (though only mentally) that oddly enough, Alfred would not have crossed Lombard Street to meet them. So she made the arrangements for tea (with food, this time), and got surprisingly busy. She was one of those invalids who has to lie down a lot, and sometimes can’t lift a bread knife, but can shift a mahogany wardrobe if the fancy is

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upon her to see it in a different place. To Alfred, she always tried to show her more feeble side, because it reminded him of his mother. To his friends, she emphasized the sacrifices she willingly made for her lord, so that they agreed in secret she was too good for him. To her children, she played the rewarding role of domestic saint. This daily checking for madness, for example, she conducted in the following fashion: ‘What day is it, Hallam?’ ‘Tuesday, Mother?’ he lisped. ‘Lionel?’ ‘Oh Tuesday, too, I’d say.’ ‘Does either of you happen to know the name of the Prime Minister?’ ‘No idea,’ they chorused. ‘Excellent,’ she said, and packed them off to play. Her boys were very beautiful, she thought, and she would keep their hair curly against all objections for as long as she could—possibly until the day they left her house to be married. Other boys were sent off to school, but Emily employed a succession of governesses to teach her boys at home. As she often argued to Alfred, this only sounds like an expensive option, but in fact it was completely free. Each governess would stay about a year before realizing she was never going to be paid. And then she would leave, and another would replace her. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, Emily decided that she felt very well. She might even take a turn in the garden. So vigorous were her spirits, in fact, that when she first discovered a copy of the Westminster Quarterly perched on the umbrella stand next to the peg where Alfred’s best hat was hanging, she simply removed it and tore it up. Only when she found another copy suspended from the door-knocker, and another attached to the collar of Alfred’s favourite wolf hound, did she start to suspect that things were dangerously out of the ordinary. Three copies of the Westminster? How? Why? Was this another bad dream like the wallpaper? She sat down and fanned herself. It suddenly seemed very hot. How could she bear it if things ran this much out of control?  ‘So listen, Jessie, I want you to be on your very best behaviour.’ ‘You got it, Pa.’ Lorenzo looked down at his little girl, determinedly marching beside him in her little purple bonnet and lace-up boots, and he felt a surge of pride. He paused and kissed her hand. ‘If I could bottle this moment,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘I could become a millionaire.’

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‘What shall we talk about at Farringford, Pa?’ ‘Between ourselves, Jessie, I have made an agreement with Mr Tennyson that I will check his sons for signs of madness.’ ‘What?’ Jessie stopped and adjusted a boot. She was a very independent little girl. ‘Yes, the Tennysons are all mad, you see,’ said Lorenzo. ‘Tennyson’s father used to spend an hour and a half each day choosing which peg to hang his hat on. So naturally, the present Mr Tennyson worries now that Hallam and Lionel are chips off the old block.’ Jessie had never heard you could inherit madness. She thought madness was something that just happened to people in Shakespeare when the wind got up. ‘Lionel’s not mad,’ she said flatly. ‘But I can’t speak for Hallam. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him.’ ‘Nor has anybody. They say he’s very shy.’ ‘What about their mother? Does she have to be mad, too, for the boys to have caught it?’ ‘She doesn’t have to be. Mr Tennyson says she has nothing to do with the black blood of the Tennysons. He was suspiciously emphatic on the point.’ ‘So you believed him?’ ‘Not for a second.’ ‘Good for you, Pa.’ Lorenzo rubbed his hands. ‘My, I am really looking forward to this. If that old lady isn’t a tile or two short of the full dome, I promise you, Jessie: I’ll eat the hat shop on Ludgate Hill.’  To her increasing disbelief and concern, Emily found three more copies of the Westminster before the Fowlers arrived. One was peeking from under the hall carpet; another was on the seventh step of Alfred’s special stairs; and the third was in the fireplace. It was the wallpaper dream, only worse. Where could these things be coming from? Who could be doing this to her? She wanted to scream. Help! Help! Yet she must appear normal, at all costs. Waiting therefore in a relaxed family tableau before the fireplace—boys at her skirt—for Alfred to deliver his new friends into her presence, she gripped her sons’ necks so tightly they started to see stars. ‘Mother!’ whimpered Hallam, as his legs gave way beneath him. ‘Quiet!’ she snapped. Lionel broke free, and waved something. ‘Look what I found inside one of Father’s shoes,’ he said, producing copy

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seven of the Westminster. She gasped, snatched it from him, and just as Alfred entered with his Americans, hurled it with considerable force across the room so that it landed behind a sofa. The Fowlers saw it fly. They looked at each other. Alfred, of course, saw nothing but a blur. ‘But it had a review of father’s new book,’ Lionel started to say, but he managed only ‘But it had—’ before Emily, in desperation, stamped smartly on his foot. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said, moving forward with as much grace as she could, while Lionel yelled with pain and fell over backwards holding his leg. ‘I think you’ve met Lionel,’ she indicated the squawking child rolling on the hearth rug. ‘Such a madcap!’ ‘Emily, is there a bird in the room?’ said Alfred. Emily laughed nervously. ‘A bird?’ she repeated. ‘No, no.’ She looked at Jessie Fowler, who stared back. ‘Although very possibly a bat,’ she added. ‘You know how it is.’ Alfred merely grimaced and led the way to the garden, while Lionel regained his composure and hopped along behind. He stuck his tongue out at Jessie, who stuck her tongue out in return. Lorenzo gripped Jessie’s hand tightly, and gave it an excited squeeze. Already secrets and violence! Here was definitely something to tell the folks at home. Things went relatively well for the rosy picture of mental health at Farringford until, seated in the garden, Lorenzo asked about the Wellingtonia. ‘Garibaldi planted it,’ said Tennyson, airily. ‘He just turned up in April, and we didn’t know why, so we put him to work with a shovel.’ Everyone laughed politely, as though it was a joke, although actually this version of events was pretty close to the truth. ‘But I have been meaning to ask about Count Cavour, my dear,’ Tennyson added. ‘You saw him the other day from the window, but he never came in.’ Lorenzo butted in, assuming this was a joke as well. ‘Did he come to mow the grass, Mrs Tennyson? Should we check that the man in the wide-awake tending the roses is not King Victor Emmanuel?’ The laughter continued, but Emily looked uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t say I saw Count Cavour.’ ‘You did.’ ‘I didn’t.’ Alfred gripped her arm. He lowered his voice. ‘You’re not mad, Emily.’ ‘I never said I was.’ ‘But you pointed out of the window, and I got up to look.’ Emily smiled at her guests. ‘It must have been a joke,’ she explained.

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Alfred spluttered. ‘Well, if it was, it’s the first one you ever made!’ ‘Perhaps you would like to see the tree itself, it is very fine,’ said Emily. Alfred agreed that this was a good way to change the subject and led the way. ‘Tell Mrs Tennyson about your fascinating experiences in phrenology, Mr Fowler,’ Alfred urged, but strangely Lorenzo could not be drawn. For once in his life, a Phrenological Fowler preferred not to have an audience. On this occasion it was far more interesting to have a spectacle. Never before had he seen a woman more tightly wound up than Emily Tennyson. Not only was she hallucinating about North Italian politicians, but she was craning her head in all directions, as though anticipating an ambush in her own garden. ‘Hello, what’s this?’ said Alfred. They had reached the Wellingtonia, and Alfred now leaned forward to pluck a small pamphlet from the trunk (where it was nailed). Emily yelped in alarm. The Westminster! They all looked at her. What could she do? ‘Alfred. You’re right!’ she blurted, desperately. ‘I did see Count Cavour! I remember now! He came by gig!’ The others said nothing. Alfred turned back to the pamphlet and reached out his hand. ‘He was dressed in a patriotic flag!’ she added, conclusively. At which Alfred turned away from the tree, to say ‘I knew you saw him really!’—thereby leaving Westminster copy eight safe for the meantime from discovery. Copy number nine was an easier one. While the men went for a little game of croquet and the women drank tea, Emily asked little Jessie about herself, and noticed that the child was flicking through yet another manifestation of the Westminster. ‘It was attached to the seat of my chair,’ Jessie explained, as Emily took it gently from her. ‘Do you like games?’ Emily asked this strangely serious little girl. ‘Not much,’ admitted Jessie. ‘Well, here’s one anyway. See if you can bury this periodical in that flower bed using only a teaspoon.’ Unsurprisingly, the child was not excited by the suggestion. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘Very well, I’ll do it myself !’ snapped Emily. And to Jessie’s astonishment, that’s precisely what she did. It was only four o’clock and already Emily felt she could drop from exhaustion. Her head swam. Her whole body was so tensed for action that she tasted acid in her mouth. Besides which, the atmospheric pressure seemed to be rising, as if there would soon be a storm. Copy number ten was stuck to the tray on which the maid brought the tea; Emily upset the milk with a karate chop to the

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jug, and sent back for more. ‘Bring a different tray, I never liked that one!’ she added, twitching. It was clear by now that Alfred need have taken no pains to hide his phrenological intentions from her. Lorenzo could have put the boys in straitjackets this afternoon, shaved their girly hair, and ordered a black maria for their removal to Carisbrooke, and she would have noticed nothing. As it was, however, Lorenzo was just examining Hallam’s head and proclaiming a massive healthy intellect when Alfred, suddenly aware of a discomfort in his hat, took it off and looked inside it. It was copy number eleven. ‘Look, Emily,’ he said. ‘What’s this?’ And Emily, pulling out all the stops of her ingenuity, snatched the hat, turned her back on the company, and promptly vomited inside it. She gave it back to him. ‘Emily!’ he said. He was very fond of that hat. It was the final straw. ‘I do apologize to your guests, Alfred,’ she said, almost in tears. ‘Please do help yourself to some food, but I think I must lie down indoors. This heat, you know.’ ‘You have all our sympathy,’ said Lorenzo, standing up to bow. She made a last desperate scan of the tea-table—no sign of another copy! she even checked in the teapot!—and took a few feeble steps towards the house. But she had gone only a few yards when the words ‘What’s this?’ assailed her ears for the very last time that day. ‘What’s this?’ said Lorenzo. For he was just cutting a piece of apple pie for Jessie (Alfred’s favourite) when his knife made contact with a papery thing. Copy number twelve of the Westminster Quarterly had been baked inside an apple pie. Lorenzo broke open the crust, and pulled out the magazine, which emerged in a shower of crumbs. ‘It’s the new Westminster Quarterly, my dear,’ called Alfred, delightedly, cleaning it against his waistcoat. ‘Emily, however did it get here? Do you think there may be a notice of Enoch Arden?’ But as he turned to see what his dear wife had to say on the matter, her skinny body fell to the grass, twitched once and lay still. Alfred shrugged, and opened his review. ‘She’s not mad, you know,’ he remarked. Lorenzo put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Nobody said she was.’

Chapter 11




That evening the weather broke. It was still Tuesday—a day of great events; and it was far from over yet. For the first time in several weeks, rain fell softly on the West Wight, and Mrs Cameron danced in her rose garden, under a small ornamental umbrella, intoxicated by the elements. The earth exhaled rich, dank odours in the rain, and as her skirt grew sodden at its hem she sniffed the peculiar stewed-apple scent exuded by her beloved briar rose. Stewed apple? Was this a pathetic fallacy of some sort? No, it was just the authentic smell of damp briar rose. As Alfred might have said, ask any botanist. Anyway, what with Alfred’s surprise apple pie, what could be more apt? Yes, she decided, stewed apple was Alfred’s particular wonderful smell—if you didn’t count the tobacco smoke, the dog hair, and all the other unmentionable ones brought about by not washing. ‘Ah,’ she sighed. ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating! The eating of the proof is in the pudding!’ And she did a little twirl of victory beside the Tennyson gate. Her husband watched her from his bedroom window, Watts at his side. Two great sage beards together—Watts’s wiry and deceptively virile; Cameron’s soft and white, like flax on a distaff. ‘She is a strange woman,’ observed Cameron. ‘But I would not exchange her for all the cracked pots in Staffordshire.’ Watts looked impressed. It was a sentiment that did the old man credit. Watts coughed. ‘Julia is in great spirits,’ he explained, ‘because we have news from Farringford that Mr Tennyson has received a good review. He found it in an apple pie, and it is accounted a miracle. Mrs Tennyson is said to have fainted.’ ‘A good review for Enoch Arden?’ said Cameron. ‘I am surprised the very church bells don’t clamour!’ And then he made an oddly un-sage-like ejaculation, which sounded suspiciously like ‘tee-hee’. Watts enjoyed the company of Julia’s ancient husband Charles. Man to man, they could talk abstractions tirelessly, for hours by the clock. ‘Trust is the mother of deceit’ they might sagely concur, and apply the precept to Jane Austen and the Greek dramatists. The last time they had enjoyed such a seminar, however, their theme had been ‘Marriage is the tomb of love’—but they had been obliged to cease this manly discussion when Watts, unaccountably, burst into tears. As a man sensitive to metaphor, Watts was well aware that if marriage was generally the tomb of love, his own marriage was the Great Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. But what could he do? He had the will to change it, but not the imagination. What made married people happy? He didn’t know. That helpful expression ‘full intimacy’ had not been quite helpful enough. On his wedding

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night he had gathered all his courage, and then confided in Ellen his guilty childhood story of the little cockney sparrow whose head he shut in a door. How he wept as he remembered the tragedy of the little bird. ‘I killed the thing I loved!’ he sobbed. ‘I never told anyone this before!’ and she felt very sorry for him. Once this was off his chest, however, things continued to run weirdly when he went on to explain how badly he felt about old Haydon, who had slashed at his throat with a razor after first failing to put a bullet in his brain. ‘Remember Westminster!’ had made its first, fateful appearance. And then, having whipped up rather unusual wedding-night emotions in his beautiful young bride, he rolled over and went to sleep. That was it. Full intimacy, G. F. Watts-style. Cameron, on the other hand, did not regard marriage as the tomb of love; very much the reverse. Julia’s great spirit inspired him perpetually. It was like watching waves roll in, or an avalanche tumble—thrilling, just so long as you stood to one side and hung on to your hat. On top of this, their children had been a great success—some of them were still quite young and hanging around the house, he believed. He had seen some recent photographs. Oh yes, there was much about life at Dimbola Lodge to amuse Mr Cameron. He even volunteered for occasional photographic modelling duty, although it was true that he ruined most sessions by cracked up laughing. ‘Well, you must admit this is funny,’ he would say, indicating his monkish garb and all the maids clustered round him in smocks with their hair down. But nobody else could see the comical side. So he just wiped his eyes and recomposed himself. He was the man who gave the lie to the old adage about laugh and the world laughs with you. ‘Did Julia tell you about the exciting phrenologist?’ asked Watts. ‘Ah yes. I was very pleased for her. It seems that Julia need no longer bark at her sitters to keep still and hold their expression.’ ‘Really? Why not?’ Watts could remember no talk of this. ‘Mr Fowler can mesmerize people, can he not? He practises animal magnetism. From what I have read about phrenology—which is all nonsense, of course—he can isolate an abstract emotion on the sitter’s head. Thus Hope, Benevolence, Love, Friendship, Caution—each will be written on the sitter’s face if the organ is excited. All Julia needs do is take the picture! All you need do, my dear fellow, is paint it! There’s a moral there, somewhere, Watts, if only we search hard enough!’ Watts, however, looked pole-axed. Cameron couldn’t see why. ‘I thought you would be pleased, Mr Watts. In your own work, surely, Mr Fowler’s intervention will be a help? You could stop using anchors and broken lyres, and other such emblematic fol-de-rol. He comes to dinner this evening. I am sure he will confirm what I say.’

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Watts felt giddy. He saw his whole life unravel before his eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh no, no.’ He felt for a chair, and sat down. ‘My work is art, Mr Cameron, not trickery, not—’ he struggled for the right word—‘psychometry!’ Cameron was happy enough to drop the subject. ‘Then think no more about it,’ he said, and clapped Watts on the back. Cameron climbed into bed, picked up a small volume of Pindar, arranged his white hair across the pillow and fell instantly asleep. Watts observed him in genuine admiration. If he had seen Bellini making with the hog’s bristle, or Michelangelo with his big mallet, he could not have been more impressed. Conscious of his own amateur (but aspiring) status as Great Victorian Snoozer, he lay on a convenient chaise-longue and watched the rain pelt on Mr Cameron’s bedroom window. Outside it was growing dark early. The panes rattled in the wind. He tried to count the gusts, and in a minute or less, he was happily impersonating ‘Homer sometimes nods’.  Dressing for dinner, Ellen was—as usual—in a more animated state than her husband. Lorenzo Fowler had been asked to dine at Dimbola Lodge, and was expected shortly. She tried everything in her wardrobe twice, then a third time, and finally sat down on a heap of clothes with her wedding dress uppermost. ‘What’s fiddle-de-dee in Gaelic?’ she asked Mary Ryan, who had been sent to help. ‘Fiddle-de-dee isn’t English, madam.’ ‘No, you’re right,’ said Ellen. ‘It isn’t.’ She didn’t know what was wrong, but her feelings were all jangled together. She wanted to see Lorenzo; she wanted to share him with her friends. She had asked for his help in an important project, and nothing must interfere with its success. But on the other hand, she had spent so many hours dreaming of that exceptional moment when, in the dark, he reached out to touch the rim of her hat! Blushing again, she fanned herself with a glove, tried it on, and discarded it. She thought of Mr Dodgson’s funny book. More than ever, she felt like little Alice. Once you have glimpsed the glorious garden through the little pokey hole, nothing will prevent you from striving to see it again. ‘May I ask you something, Mrs Watts?’ asked Mary Ryan, to Ellen’s surprise. She was pinning Ellen’s golden hair. ‘Of course, Mary. What is it?’ ‘I wondered if you could tell me what Mr Fowler said about me, at the lecture, about my marriage, and all.’ Ellen’s eyes swivelled shiftily.

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‘At the lecture? At the public lecture?’ ‘Yes, madam.’ Ellen turned around to face her. ‘Did you see me there, Mary?’ ‘Oh madam, sure but I didn’t know it was yourself. Nobody did. But then didn’t I see you again the other night in the trousers and Mr Fowler kissing his hand farewell from the window? And also, don’t I iron your clothes and find boys’ ones in the wardrobe? And isn’t Mary Ann in love with you?’ Ellen listened with a mixture of horror and excitement. This maid knew her secret! Her innocent secret! Her guilty secret! She tried both ways of putting it. Both sounded all right. She went straight to the real issue. ‘Did he kiss his hand?’ ‘Oh he did that.’ Ellen tried to pull herself together. ‘Things are not as they seem, Mary. Mr Fowler has agreed to help me in a device. Subterfuge was a necessity.’ ‘Honest to God, madam, I’d never have mentioned it. But aren’t I busting to know what Mr Fowler said about me grand weddin’ chances! And you were there! Couldn’t you tell me?’ ‘Do you really not remember, Mary?’ ‘Not a blind, blessed thing. One minute he’s looking in me eyes, the next I’m waking up again laughing. Anything could have happened!’ Mary laughed. Ellen studied her in the glass. She was very pretty when she cheered up a bit. She was only sixteen, after all. ‘Then I’ll tell you, Mary. He made you very confident in yourself, and you declared your own intention to marry well. He wasn’t fortune-telling. He asked you about yourself, and you gave him your genuine opinion.’ Mary seemed disappointed. ‘So it was my idea, the marrying? Then I’ll not be married at all?’ ‘That’s up to you, Mary. That’s the point.’ Mary finished the pinning. ‘You look very beautiful, madam,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a shame to hide this hair under a silly boy’s hat.’ Ellen studied her own face in the glass. She turned to a profile, and tipped back her head. ‘My Caution is very small,’ said Ellen, almost to herself. ‘But I have Hope, Mary. I have phenomenal Hope.’ 

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Dodgson waited all day for Mrs Cameron’s household to realize that a madman had locked him in his room. But what with all the uproar from Farringford, and now the excitement of the rain, it somehow never did. A couple of people tried the door, but when they found it locked, they assumed he had turned the key himself, in the cause of peace and quiet. He resigned himself to his captivity with surprisingly good grace. Being trapped unnecessarily in a nice room with writing materials was very similar to his own voluntary everyday existence, actually. If there was ever a man who lived in his head it was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. In the time it might take a more active person to row up the Isis and back, Dodgson would construct a cracking fulllength parody of a Tennyson poem—Maud, say—complete with funny illustrations and knock-em-dead puns. He spent his day productively, therefore, first warming up with a few letters to ‘child friends’ (meaning girls), a practice he maintained throughout his exceptionally boring life. These missives were condescending, yet also ingenious, and some he wrote cunningly back-to-front, while others were painstakingly composed of pictograms. Finding at luncheon that still nobody came (he heard a tray left outside the door), he devised a new system for logging and answering correspondence, and then addressed himself to a word puzzle with which to delight young minds. Lorenzo Fowler was wrong about Dodgson. He was not a pervert. He did not want to do unspeakable things to little girls. But he was—oh yes, he was—a very sad case. His latest invention was a game in which the player must convert one word into another, changing a single letter each time. Thus, HEAD becomes TAIL if it progresses thus: HEAD HEAL TEAL TELL TALL TAIL —which looks quite simple until you try to do it yourself. He was now busy converting COMB into HAIR, ELLEN into ALICE, and WINTER into SUMMER. Currently the last required thirteen variants (or ‘links’) in between. How dull he was today! It is no surprise that Dodgson should be captivated by the arbitrary nature of words, when you consider how often people wrongly anticipated what he was trying to say. Last night he had attempted to ask the maid for some water, and by the

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time they’d run the gamut from walnuts to whelks via wisteria, he had settled, fairly happily, for a walking stick.  ‘Will we ever have such an amusing afternoon again, Pa?’ asked Jessie, drawing lines on the condensation of the rain-lashed window, as the waves boomed into the bay beneath their sitting room at the Albion. ‘I honestly doubt it,’ agreed Lorenzo, crossing his legs. He sat dressed for dinner in a resplendent waistcoat, which he now tugged a little. He was rather fond of fine clothes. ‘You should have seen the old lady digging with the teaspoon, Pa! And when she was sick in that hat, I thought I’d die!’ Lorenzo picked up his daughter and sat her on the arm of his chair. She gave him a brief hug. ‘This thing we are doing tonight, Pa; is it anything to do with the Organ of Gratitude?’ ‘Oh yes, in a roundabout way. We are helping Mrs Watts in a delicate matter concerning her relationship with her husband. It’s a grown-up thing. How’s the costume? Have you practised?’ ‘So what’s that got to do with the Organ of Gratitude?’ ‘We are a gift; a love-gift from a wife to a husband. We will see how much he loves her for it. Mr Watts is our only hope, Jessie. Everyone says he is gratitude personified, while nobody else here shows any signs of gratitude at all. We may have to give up the quest. It is possible that gratitude is an illusion.’ Jessie pulled a face and kicked a chair. She didn’t know Mr Watts. But she had seen Mrs Watts on the beach, with Lionel, and she certainly didn’t like her. Why should they help her with her marriage? One day Jessie would be grown up, and the world wouldn’t know what had hit it. ‘Why don’t you just give Mrs Watts the leaflet Uncle Orson sent? The one you keep in the lid of the portmanteau. That’s all about what to do when you are married, isn’t it?’ Lorenzo’s nostrils flared dangerously, but he resisted an unprecedented impulse to box the ears of his favourite child. ‘Jessie,’ he said firmly, ‘I absolutely forbid you to look at that pamphlet.’ Jessie slid off the chair. ‘I already read it, Pa. It’s silly. What does “lashing up” mean? I noticed you’d underscored it. Does it involve ropes?’ Lorenzo sighed. So much for parental authority. He stood up, and reached for his jacket.

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‘Have you got the head?’ he asked, resignedly. Confining Jessie to the childish realm was as pointless as expecting curtsies from a buffalo. ‘Head ready!’ she saluted, and jerked her own head towards a hat-box. ‘Flag?’ he asked. ‘Got it.’ ‘Bread knife?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Let’s go.’ ‘What about Mr Dodgson, Pa? Will he be there?’ ‘Dodgson?’ Lorenzo stopped in his tracks and then burst out laughing. ‘I’d forgotten all about him!’  Searching the house for her husband, Ellen discovered the canvas of ‘Choosing’ erected on an easel in his bedroom. She was touched. George hadn’t told her he was bringing it. ‘I’d swear those violets are getting bigger,’ she said aloud, peering closely, and then passed on in her search, making calls at all the favourite sofas and window seats where her lord usually chose to make himself comfortable. She finally found him in Cameron’s room, which, to judge from the rhythmical rise and fall of facial hair, seemed to have been converted temporarily into a sort of Dorm of Prophecy. Ellen tiptoed to her husband’s side. She had to admit it: Watts always looked lovely when he was asleep. She knelt beside him and studied his face—his strong nose and excellent temples, his large eyes and fine lids. It melted her heart. Ever since she first met Watts at Little Holland House, she had longed to hold that noble face in her young hands, stroke its features, make it smile for joy. ‘I love you, George,’ she whispered in his ear. He made no move. ‘And after tonight, who knows? You may feel free to love me too. I would do anything.’ She reached out her hand, and laid it tenderly on his beard. Her fingers caressed it, and lightly she laid her cheek on his chest. Her husband did not wake.  Tennyson normally loathed the business of going out to dinner, but tonight was different. For one thing, he had an excellent review to celebrate. For another, Emily was in bed and not much company. And for another, there would be no apple pie at home, for obvious reasons! So Julia’s invitation could not have come at a more suitable moment. As he gave his hair its first brush for a fortnight (and large particles of greasy loam fell on his shoulders), he rehearsed the review in

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his mind. He was particularly pleased with the sections refuting his previous critics. ‘George Gilfillan should not have said Alfred Tennyson was not a great poet,’ was a sentence which, to his mind, displayed an admirable combination of elegance and sagacity. Likewise, ‘Mr Ruskin displayed considerable botanical ignorance when he questioned the rosiness of daisies in Tennyson’s masterpiece Maud.’ He wondered whether to take the review with him, or merely quote it from memory. Better to take it, so that everyone could see. He popped in to see Emily before he left. She lifted her head for an instant, but it sank back again under its own weight. Her Christian forbearance had rarely withstood more demanding tests than today. ‘What do you think of my fine review, my dear?’ He performed a short Irish jig, by way of expressing his own opinion of it. ‘It makes my birthday complete, Alfred,’ she said, wanly. ‘Birthday? Was it your birthday? Oh.’ He couldn’t think what to say. ‘Happy’ and ‘Birthday’ would have been quite adequate, but they weren’t the sort of words he knew. ‘Did you get any presents?’ he managed at last. ‘Well, the silks from Julia at breakfast. But that seems a very long time ago now; at least a year or two, I’d say.’ Alfred came close and gazed into her haggard face. ‘You certainly look like you’ve aged a year or two,’ he said. ‘It’s a good thing you’re not coming out. People would feel tired just to look at you!’ Emily smiled. ‘I pray for strength.’ Alfred showed her his hands, turning them from backs to palms to backs again. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘Go on,’ she said wearily.  ‘Your wife has planned some entertainment for us tonight, I believe,’ said Julia, meeting Watts on the stairs. ‘I have made a little podium in the drawing room, and a curtain. There is nothing like tableaux vivants to aid digestion.’ Watts was pleased to discover his host in such a good mood, but he didn’t like the sound of this entertainment. ‘I hope it will be nothing improper,’ he whispered. ‘Ellen once entertained us at Little Holland House, and I can’t tell you—’ ‘George, please don’t worry. We will also ask Mr Fowler to give a demonstration of phreno-magnetism. We will do that while we eat. I always think it absurd

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to leave all the conversation to the pudding. Astonishingly, my husband has agreed to sit for Mr Fowler. He wants to know whether the Organ of Mirthfulness can be stimulated and held. In which case, he says, I can take pictures of people looking cheerful instead of sad and morbid! Have you ever heard of such a thing?’ Watts tried to make an objection, but Julia loved talking about her husband, and could not be stopped. ‘Charles is always full of mirth, of course, he hardly needs the good man’s fingers making it worse. Do you know his favourite jest, George? It concerns a horse entering a hostelry—a horse!—and the tapster inquiring, “Tell me, why do you have such a long face tonight?” He laughs for hours. But I don’t think that’s so very funny, do you, George? Why the long face? Because a horse has a long face, I say, it can’t help having a long face. But Charles just won’t listen once he’s away with his laughing.’ She paused for breath. ‘I hate to cast a dour note, Julia,’ interjected Watts, ‘but I think we should take care of Mr Fowler. He is hardly the artistic equal of the company tonight. He is a mere showman, after all. He hardly shares our elevated aims. In fact I am surprised you have already included Mr Tennyson in his company twice.’ They stood in the hall now, and Ellen, unseen at the top of the stairs, stopped to listen, when she heard Lorenzo’s name. ‘But Mr Fowler is a fine man, George,’ exclaimed Julia below. ‘This morning you were talking of asking him to pose as Physical Energy. Your little wife is such an enthusiast too!’ ‘But I have learned more of him now,’ hissed Watts. ‘And I fear the man may be a positive scoundrel. He is most certainly a purveyor of low ideas which could contaminate our art. As for Ellen’s enthusiasm, as you call it, I shall forbid it at once. As you well know, my little wife’s ideas are quite low enough already.’ And they passed on through to the drawing room, out of Ellen’s hearing. Dismayed, Ellen sat on the top step. She had been told off before, but she had never heard such a hurtful opinion from her husband’s lips. Low ideas? Little wife? A tear tumbled down her face. She wanted to drag herself along the ground to hide in a chink in the wall. How could Watts be so cruel? Now she knew how that little cockney sparrow must have felt, when its head got squashed. Was this her husband’s true evaluation of her? Her face dissolved in anguish, as she realized how foolish she had been. She had been living under a massive delusion, no doubt engendered by that damn enormous Hope of hers. For she always thought (stupid!) that she had done Watts a favour by marrying him—that this enormous act of unlikely charity (lovely young woman with dull old man) made him somehow beholden to her. But what nonsense this now appeared. Apparently Watts thought the favour had gone quite the other way. In his eyes, she

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was not a princess condescending to love him, but a tiresome child to be fathered. Wretched and weeping, she stood up, gathered her gown and ran to her room, her eyes blind with tears. But almost at once, she heard a crash, and found that her elbow had knocked a vase from a stand, breaking it to fragments. Mary Ryan ran to meet her. ‘Oh madam,’ she said kindly, surprised to find Ellen sunk to the floor, sobbing over the pieces. ‘Don’t take on. Isn’t it only a silly pot that’s broken?’ ‘If only you knew, Mary. It is more than a pot that’s been broken tonight.’ The Irish girl patted her shoulder, and gathered the pieces into her apron. Mrs Watts suddenly seemed like quite a little girl. ‘And what’s this? A little key, is it?’ Ellen picked up the key, and sniffed. She looked at it closely, and felt some comfort. She remembered how Watts had posed her once for a drawing of Hope trapped inside Pandora’s box, when the lid was slammed and all the bad stuff got out. This key! She had been meant to find this key! She must not despair! She realized they were outside Mr Dodgson’s room. Mary Ryan nudged her. ‘Mr Dodgson has not opened his door all day,’ she said. ‘You don’t think—?’ ‘Mr Dodgson?’ Ellen whispered at the door. She put the key in the lock. It fitted!  Downstairs, Julia thought about all that Watts had said. Of course phrenology was not to be bracketed with high art and high poetry, it was probably irreligious, too. But as Watts ought to accept by now (he had mentioned Haydon’s ignominy frequently enough), sometimes it was the midget you paid to see at the Egyptian Hall, not the heroic paintings. ‘George, you are unbearably stuffy tonight, and I won’t listen to another word.’ ‘Stuffy?’ Upstairs they heard a crash, but Julia shrugged. She didn’t care. ‘Mr Fowler is my guest this evening. His little girl will eat with my boys and be introduced to us later. Alfred is in the best of spirits, and if we can persuade Mr Dodgson to unlock his door, we will have an evening of exceptional lions! Personally, I can’t wait. I just can’t wait. And if you’ll only be honest about it, George, neither can you.’ 

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Ellen opened Dodgson’s door to find, not Hope exactly, but something like it: Mr Dodgson absorbed in some origami. In fact, he was concentrating so hard upon its puzzles and folds that he hardly noticed rescue was finally at hand. On his chair were already grouped the letters shaped meticulously from paper— HELPIAMLOCKE—and he was just finishing the DIN, and considering how to hang them in the window with cotton and safety pins. A captive rarely looked less agitated. In fact, he saw at once that Miss Terry was in far greater distress than himself. ‘Mrs Watts!’ ‘Mr Dodgson!’ To his great alarm, she ran to him, embraced him, and sobbed big tears against his chest, which was curiously stiff and ungiving to the cheek, actually; rather like a linen press. Sensing that something was required, Dodgson did not of course embrace the tearful woman, but tapped her on the shoulder a couple of times, as though telling a wrestler to break his hold. ‘Mr Dodgson, Mr Dodgson,’ sobbed Ellen. ‘My true friend.’ She finally let him go, and sank on his chair instead. Dodgson pointed at the chair—‘Don’t!’ he warned—but it was too late. She had crushed the origami. Ellen caught his hand in hers and kissed it, in a Shakespearean gesture which excited him despite himself. Good grief, normally he’d have to pay 1/6d for this. But he was not prepared for the sentiment that followed. ‘I am so honoured that Alice was written for me, Mr Dodgson!’ said Ellen. ‘It is the greatest—indeed the only kindness anyone has ever shown!’ How could he deny it now? Dodgson said nothing. He stared out of the window at the distant sea, sighed deeply, and wondered whether Mrs Watts’s mistake could at least be turned to his advantage. She seemed to be a great friend of Mr Tennyson’s, after all. And Mr Tennyson was coming to dinner. And so they remained for some time—Ellen’s wet swollen face upturned to Dodgson’s; his own face turned away in calculation. If G. F. Watts had witnessed this tableau, he would have recognized it at once. It was, of course, ‘Trust is the Mother of Deceit’.

Chapter 12




Julia’s dinners were always a success, mainly because she took infinite pains to accommodate, and anticipate, the most difficult of tastes. Watts she provided with simple fare and a carafe of water (he never drank alcohol); Mr Fowler received a special vegetarian dish, requiring a lot of argument with a puzzled cook; and for Alfred she ordered a plain apple pie (a replacement, as it were, for the one she spoiled), plus two bottles of port and a good lamp nearby so that he could launch into a hooting moose-call recital of Enoch Arden whenever the whim overtook him. It would almost certainly be an Enoch Arden night tonight, she fancied. She loved it when Alfred read aloud. His presence filled the room, and even though he paused after each line to comment on its beauties and effects, the greatness of the sentiments invariably reduced her still to tears. Of course he recited for adulation, but then Julia prided herself on giving the best adulation in England. This ensured that even at the risk of returning to Emily laden with unwanted decorating materials, Alfred would always remain her loyal friend. Julia had a particular way of telling people they were the greatest poet in the language which could really set up a chap, especially when he had tendencies of a mopish sort. And her paeans were not forced, either. Flattery was Mrs Cameron’s second nature. It had been an essential part of her infant curriculum in Calcutta, along with French, Hindustani and the Appreciation of the Sublime. So this evening Julia joyfully buttered Lorenzo, while not neglecting her duty to Alfred and Charles and Dodgson and Watts, all of whom relied on her to make them feel big, tall and important. The procedure was a bit like spinning plates. With an initial effort, she would get all her guests spinning individually, and then—when they started to wobble or flag—they required just a practised touch at the right moment. Alfred needed the word ‘Review!’ thrown in his direction, for example; ‘Genius’ sufficed for a weakening Watts, ‘Clever’ for Dodgson; ‘Wise’ for Charles. The trickiest moment for this exemplary hostess had been introducing Alfred to Dodgson, because Alfred squinted at him and boomed confidently, ‘Hello, we’ve never met, Mr Carroll! I hope you have recovered your senses. Can’t stand madmen, make me nervous.’ But the awkward moment had passed, and now, save for the presence of the mad and dangerous Lorenzo, Dodgson was in paradise. Whenever Julia caught his eye, or called him clever, he raised a glass. Never before had he socialized with Tennyson, and tonight he was doubly privileged, because the laureate was in a mood that was certainly overbearing, but might otherwise be described as good. With Tennyson, overbearing was not optional. All Dodgson’s hopes for his little dedication were revived, like the flowers in the garden outside, emboldened by

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the sudden rain. ‘Tonight’s the night!’ thought Dodgson happily, and almost drank some wine by mistake. Beside him sat a subdued but brave Mrs Watts, whom Mrs Cameron noticeably omitted from her flatterings. Poor Mrs Watts was a very highly wrought young woman, he decided. His waistcoat was still unpleasantly damp from the lady’s tears. Such emotion perplexed him, and he wished to be no part of it. Yet she was a lovely girl, and so talented, and she looked so very disconsolate. So he regaled her with stories of his visits to Drury Lane, and complimented her on many performances given, in fact, by her sister. Luckily for him, she was much too confused to notice. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, kindly. Ellen was feeling deeply hurt, yet somehow that damned enormous Hope of hers was egging her on. She had worn her wedding dress to dinner, and the pretty pearls; and she blushed continually, aware of Lorenzo Fowler’s eyes upon her; aware of Watts paying her no attention whatsoever. Yet ‘I will make him love me,’ she muttered to herself. In salt on the table, she had written the words LOW IDEAS, and was sadly pushing the grains with a fork. Dodgson saw what she had done, and made a quick calculation in his head. ‘Wild Easo,’ he whispered, pointing to the letters. ‘No, no, We Sold AI’. She smiled wanly. Good grief, the man was doing anagrams. He pushed his fingers together, thought a bit, and then thumped the table with his fork. ‘Solid Awe,’ he said, triumphant. ‘What’s that?’ said Julia, turning with a smile from her conversation with Watts. Solid awe was something she knew all about. ‘Mr Dodgson was just seeing how many words you could make from “low ideas”. Apparently another way of putting it is “Solid Awe”,’ said Ellen, fixing a look of entreaty at her husband. Mrs Cameron noticed Dodgson was looking thoughtful, and immediately agreed aloud with her husband that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was quite the cleverest book they had ever read. Dodgson perked up immediately, shot an anxious look at Tennyson to see whether he heard (he didn’t; he was busy lighting his pipe), and replied with some spirit that Mrs Cameron’s photographs were the marvel of the age. And so it went on, quite merrily, all plates spinning, and Mrs Cameron asked Lorenzo Fowler whether he could enlighten the company on the subject of Phreno-Magnetism. ‘Nothing to it!’ blurted the always tactful Alfred. ‘I mesmerized dear Emily of the headache.’ Lorenzo bowed his head. ‘With the greatest respect,’ he smiled, ‘I once mesmerized a patient during the removal of a tumour. I have cured people of delusions and addictions. The vile weed tobacco, for example.’

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Julia and her husband exchanged glances, but Alfred merely continued to puff energetically on his pipe, until he had encased himself in a sepia shroud. ‘What I was wondering,’ said Cameron, ‘is this. Can you magnetize people to hold a certain expression for five minutes while they have their photograph taken? A person who might otherwise laugh?’ Cameron shot a mischievous glance at Watts, who made an impatient flapping commotion with his napkin. ‘Low ideas,’ he mumbled, but only to himself. ‘I believe it may be possible,’ replied Lorenzo. ‘Mrs Cameron, I think we should make the experiment. Perhaps your lovely assistant—?’ He indicated Mary Ann Hillier, who didn’t notice, being engrossed at that moment at the sideboard, disentangling her hair from a calves-foot jelly. Since she fell in love with young Herbert, her streak of stupidity had noticeably broadened. More laughter, more clinking of crystal, more lamps. Mrs Cameron surveyed her table with pleasure. The odd tweak of selfishness assailed her when she considered how Alfred must never acknowledge her as the source of his happiness, but it was bearable, certainly bearable. The calves-foot jelly was found most acceptable, though not of course by Lorenzo, but he resisted the natural urge to tell the company their brains were clouded by animal fat. Instead, he drank a pint of water, talked to Mrs Cameron about photography, and cast a rather bold look at Mrs Watts, who surprisingly cast a bold look right back again. ‘And Viola, Mrs Watts! What a mag-g—nificent Viola,’ exclaimed Dodgson. ‘Thank you,’ said Ellen, turning back to her neighbour. ‘I seem to have a special affinity with Viola, I don’t know why.’ ‘She is very lovely!’ ‘I have been reading a book of flowers, and it appears that violets are for modesty, you know, while big red camellias are unpretending excellence.’ Dodgson wondered where the camellias had suddenly sprung from, but he knew about the language of flowers. Daisies, for example, were for innocence, which was funny enough in itself. Ellen raised her voice a little so that Watts could hear. The modulation of vocal projection was, of course, rather her forte. ‘Oh, I mention camellias because my husband has been attempting an allegorical painting in which I choose between the two—between violet and camellia, modesty and excellence, you see—which rather suggests, don’t it, that you can’t have both.’ She surveyed this table of notable Victorian big-heads, and pursed her lips. ‘Do you think excellence precludes modesty, Mr Dodgson? Perhaps it does, you know. But you must see my husband’s picture, it is diverting. If you can spot the violets, I will give you half a crown.’ ‘Shall I read from our Alice, later?’ ‘I do hope so, Mr Dodgson. Give us the courtroom scene, in which little Alice

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realizes that the people she has been frightened of—who have terrorized her, and made her feel an inch tall—are nothing but a pack of cards.’ As she said the last phrase, she thumped the table with her knife, drawing an impatient ‘Shh’ from Watts, who was currently informing old Mr Cameron of the interesting verity that friends tie their purse with a cobweb thread. ‘Talking of Alice,’ said Dodgson, with his voice lowered and his eye on Tennyson, ‘A thought has j-j—just come to me!’ He pretended to laugh light-heartedly. ‘What is it, Mr Dodgson?’ ‘Do you think Mr T-T-T—’ ‘Tennyson?’ Dodgson nodded. ‘Would allow us to d-dedi-c—cate the book to his s-s—’ ‘Sister?’ He shook his head, and indicated with a flat hand the height of a young Tennyson. ‘Schooldays?’ He took a slurp of water. Ellen had another inspiration. ‘Serpent’s tooth?’ He took a big breath. ‘Sons,’ he said. Ellen frowned. ‘Do you want me to ask him?’ ‘You seem to have influ-infl—’ ‘Influenza? La grippe?’ ‘Influence.’ Ellen didn’t know what he was talking about. But on the other hand, she had no need to throw caution to the wind. Her Caution was so naturally small it had been lost in a light gust at birth.  Outside, the elements battled, and the rain still fell, and little Daisy Bradley curled up beside the briar hedge. She couldn’t help noticing she was getting rather muddy, but on the other hand things in an adventure were supposed to be out of the ordinary; they were supposed to vex you a little bit. Had she picked the right evening to elope? Should she go home and think about eloping tomorrow? But then she remembered she had slammed the door behind her, and she didn’t have a key. The wind was sharp with rain. In order to stop feeling frightened, she sang quietly to herself the song she had learned from Mr Dodgson, ‘Will you walk a little faster, said the whiting to the snail’, but then faltered and stopped. His words were strangely uncheering for a little girl, actually. The odd thing about Mr Dodg-

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son’s story, she realized, was that the people in it were all so horrible to each other, on account of being mad and selfish; and in particular they kept threatening Alice, and calling her stupid, and trapping her with rules of etiquette that she couldn’t possibly know. For the first time since she met him, she asked herself whether Mr Dodgson was really the sunny personality she had at first imagined. Did she honestly want to spend the rest of her life with him, setting up home in a bathing machine, and living on what she could catch in a shrimp net? She pulled a face, stood up, brushed her frock. She was only eight, she told herself. As Jessie Fowler had pointed out this afternoon, a girl of eight needn’t say yes to the first man who says he loves his love with a D. ‘Panic about spinsterhood when you are ten and a half,’ said the worldly Jessie. ‘But really, not before.’  Meanwhile Jessie sat bored in the kitchen of Dimbola while the Cameron boys talked about lessons and Latin and ball games, and dull, dull things without any interest to a girl of avid brain power or searching imagination. Much more interesting to the little girl were the hissed discussions between the maids as they scurried about collecting platters of obscene roasted flesh. The one with the impenetrable Isle of Wight accent kept neglecting her duties, and mooning about by the window, and the Irish one was getting cross. ‘Is it your blessed hair again?’ demanded Mary Ryan, producing some nail scissors (she had started to carry them around on purpose). Mary Ann sniffed, and looked sad. ‘Will you take the roast tongue, Mary Ann! We’ve not all night.’ But Mary Ann broke down. ‘It’s not Herbert you’re thinking on, is it?’ asked the Irish one. ‘Haven’t I told you he’ll be back in London by now?’ Herbert? Jessie’s grip of her chair arm tightened, but otherwise she hardly moved a muscle. Herbert was the young man from the lecture that Lorenzo liked so much. Had the servant girl fallen in love with him? Here was some interest at last. Here was something to tell Pa. Mary Ann snivelled. ‘I be in a terbul pucker about it,’ she managed at last. ‘Look.’ And reaching into her apron pocket, she produced Herbert’s hat. ‘That’s Mr Herbert’s hat,’ said Mary Ryan. Mary Ann sniffed some more. ‘Did you take it from him?’ asked Mary Ryan, confused. ‘Where did you find it?’ Mary Ann broke down. ‘In Mz Watts’s room!’ She sobbed unpleasantly on to the plate of roast tongue.

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‘Dooan’t jaw me, Mary Ryan! I be all uptipped! But I shan’t goo without I knows!’ And Mary Ann boo-hooed and sniffed in a highly unbeautiful manner. Mary Ryan felt somewhat uptipped too. Poor fool, she thought, to be in love with Herbert, who beneath his jerkin clearly had big breasts and womanly hips. More foolish still to be jealous in this confusing, ludicrous way. ‘Now Mary,’ she hissed, gripping the girl by the arm. Jessie strained to listen through the clash of pans. This was excellent. ‘I want you to pull yourself together, and not to think such thoughts about Mrs Watts. Aren’t I telling you there is nothing between Mrs Watts and Herbert?’ Mary Ann wailed, and Mary Ryan made a decision. ‘Never mention this to a living soul, but—’ ‘What?’ Mary Ryan lowered her voice further still. ‘Mrs Watts is involved already with Mr Fowler,’ she whispered. ‘And is possibly beloved of Mr Tennyson as well.’ Mary Ann fell back in shock and nearly dropped the plate. Mary Ryan shooshed her. ‘And don’t say Swap me bob.’ On that bombshell, they cantered back to the dining room, and the Cameron boys turned round to include Jessie in a joke about donkeys, only to find her staring like the dog in ‘The Tinder Box’—the one with the eyes as big as windmills. ‘Jessie?’ said Henry Cameron. ‘Jessie, what’s wrong?’ But Jessie was lost in shock. She felt weightless and betrayed. Her head reverberated as if she had been boxed on both ears at once. ‘Mrs Watts already involved with Mr Fowler’? Pa? Pa? For a couple of minutes, she scarcely remembered to breathe. But how? They had been in Freshwater less than a week! What did ‘involved’ mean? Did it have anything to do with those mutual ropings in Uncle Orson’s pamphlet? Had Pa known this woman before this holiday? Had he brought his little innocent darling eight-year-old daughter to this dreary back end of nowhere filled with nincompoops just so that he could do lashings with Mrs Bloody Watts? ‘There’s something wrong with Jessie, Mother,’ the boys told Mrs Cameron, who had popped behind the scenes to check on the hold-up with the food. ‘Oh my dear, my dear! What can I give you? I am at my wits’ end! Your father quite refuses tongue!’ Jessie’s face was unreadable. Luckily Americans are often deaf to innuendo. ‘My dear girl, I would give anything.’ ‘Are we still doing the tableaux later on?’ Jessie asked at last, with her mouth set.

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‘Yes, I believe so.’ ‘Well then there is one thing I’d like, Mrs Cameron. I’ve brought a bread knife, but it’s not right for what we are planning to do. Could I have a sharper one please? A really sharp one?’ Mrs Cameron hugged her, and Jessie wriggled. ‘What a curious little girl you are!’ she said.  Julia had been absent from the room three minutes. When she returned, however, she knew her lovely dinner had collapsed before she even opened the door. The hub-bub had dissipated to an awkward silence, and the maids were hurriedly removing themselves, Mary Ann with an ornate silver gravy boat attached and dangling against her chest. Julia stood at the door aghast. Turn your back on spinning plates for the merest instant, and they wobble, clatter and crash. Food lay uneaten, a glass was overturned, and Watts was staring at the ceiling with a martyred expression, indicative of one of his heads. Some fracas seemed to have broken out, but what on earth could it be? ‘Do you see this impudence, Julia?’ Tennyson barked, waving his arms. Julia rushed to his side. ‘What impudence, my dear Alfred? Show me and I will dispel it. This is a great day for you, Alfred, and I will not have it spoiled.’ ‘The young man here—’ he pointed at Dodgson, whom he could only vaguely make out—‘Gets your friend’s little wife to ask me—’ He spluttered. He couldn’t go on. ‘I merely asked him on behalf of Mr Dodgson,’ spoke up Ellen, ‘whether Alice might be dedicated to Hallam and Lionel, who are Mr Dodgson’s special friends.’ Julia now understood why her dinner party was in ruins. How could anyone be so stupid? ‘Did you say your name was Dodgson?’ boomed the laureate, peering. ‘You’re not the damn photographer fellow too?’ Dodgson gripped the back of his chair. ‘I have n—never given cause for s— such treatment,’ he objected, hotly. ‘And I have never given cause for this hounding and baiting and confounded cockney cheek!’ shouted the bard, bashing the table as he stood up. ‘I am surprised you would allow such disgraceful fellows into your intimate circle, Julia. I am surprised, and I am disappointed.’ Julia started to cry. The lovely review! What about the lovely review? ‘Now I am going home,’ he continued. ‘I had hoped this would be a pleasant evening among friends at which I could make an announcement. When I came here tonight I wanted you all to share my well-earned happiness, since none of you will ever earn happiness half as good for yourselves. In fact I was willing to

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read for four hours if necessary. But I find that circumstances have changed all that. So let me just say this. The review I received today confirmed what I and my real friends already knew, that Enoch Arden is the work which will make my fortune. I have therefore decided to thank you all for your kindness—especially Julia—and tell you that I intend to leave Farringford when my lease expires in two months. There is nothing to keep me here. I shall never set foot on this island again. Good night.’ He swept from the room, and all eyes turned to Dodgson, who stood up. ‘I must say,’ he began, but was interrupted by the sound of Julia weeping on her husband’s chest. ‘Mr Dodgson, don’t you have some eloping to do, or something?’ asked Lorenzo, pointedly. Dodgson, affronted now beyond endurance, left the room. Julia glared at Ellen. ‘I don’t see what I’ve done,’ said Ellen. ‘Shall I follow Mr Tennyson? He seems quite fond of me usually.’ ‘No!’ shouted Julia, so vehemently that her guests jumped. ‘No, I will,’ she added in a more normal voice. ‘May I, Charles?’ ‘If it makes you happy,’ said her lord, as always. ‘You do your tableaux without me,’ she said, gathering her skirts. And she ran off to plead with the man she loved best in the world.  Ellen and Lorenzo looked at one another, and were just unfortunately swapping loaded glances when Jessie entered, to find out whether the show was ready. ‘What the blazes happened here?’ she asked, flatly. Even when mourning for her tragic young life, she couldn’t help noticing that half her audience had split before curtain-up. The ones who remained were an unlikely crowd, too. ‘You don’t want to know,’ said Lorenzo. ‘But come and meet everybody.’ Jessie curtsied to them all in turn, and gave each a steady look, especially the shaky Mrs Watts. ‘You look as bad as I feel,’ she said generally, which was impudent but accurate. ‘Shouldn’t we do this another night?’ said Watts. The strain of the evening ought to be over now, surely. He had the distinctive look of a man who, though he has never had a stiff drink, yet suddenly feels the need of a stiff drink and tragically doesn’t know that a stiff drink is the thing he needs. But Ellen was not to be denied her chance. Perhaps she did have low ideas, but surely he would forgive her—if not absolutely adore her—for using them in the cause of love. So she took all the lamps and candles and arranged them at the foot of the curtain, and then made a short speech.

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‘In this first tableau, I represent Inspiration. I think my husband will guess who the other figure is.’ Cameron nudged Watts; Watts shrugged back. He wished his wife would be sensible. He wished they could just go to bed. But then Lorenzo drew back the curtain, and what was behind it? It was—oh horrible!—the head of Haydon. ‘No, no!’ whispered Watts. ‘Isn’t this good, George?’ said Ellen. Haydon’s head was set on a clothed dummy, made of rags, with its right arm cunningly raised to hold a paintbrush. The clothes were the ones usually worn by Herbert. Ellen had dressed the plaster head in a wig, and coloured its features with theatrical make-up. It was Haydon to the life! An apparition! Watts nearly choked. In the distance he heard a knocking and clamouring at the front door, but he was transfixed by the horror of this vision. ‘Haydon!’ he gasped. Cameron (the only other person left at the table) watched Watts’s face. Little Ellen had certainly captured her husband’s attention, he thought. What a clever girl. And then he drifted off into a pleasant doze. Ellen stood just behind the curtain, holding a handkerchief as though waving farewell. The curtain closed, and she stepped forward. ‘That was, of course, Inspiration Deserts Benjamin Robert Haydon,’ she explained. ‘You see, George, it was nothing to do with you at all. He just dried up.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ Watts croaked. Ellen, whose jangling emotions were now heightened by the thrill of the stage, made a solemn answer. ‘Because I love you,’ she said. ‘And now—’ Watts called out to her from the darkness, ‘Ellen, I forbid you—’ But then the curtain opened again on Haydon, and this time his companion was not Inspiration, but the precocious American child wrapped in a union flag, holding a flashing blade to Haydon’s throat, and snarling. The curtain closed again. ‘That was General Tom Thumb, Famous American Midget, Kills Benjamin Robert Haydon.’ ‘Ellen, please! This is most unseemly! The man is dead!’ But the curtain swung open for the last time, and Jessie, smiling grimly, held the detached head in her hands, from which bright red blood appeared to be trickling. Ellen applauded, but she was the only one. Watts had his hand before his eyes. ‘Westminster!’ he whimpered. ‘That’s the end,’ Ellen explained to Watts. She turned to the child. ‘Jessie, you clever girl, how ever did you manage the blood? It’s so lifelike.’

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But Jessie was wobbling a bit. Which was not surprising when she had just cut herself rather deeply on purpose. She pushed Ellen away. ‘Pa,’ yelled Jessie. ‘Get this woman away from me or I’ll cut her too.’ Ellen fell back in alarm. ‘Mr Fowler, come quickly. She’s done something with this knife!’ ‘Jessie!’ he yelled. ‘I hate you, Pa. I love you. How could you do it?’ Jessie’s voice sounded a bit funny. She dropped the knife and it clattered at her feet.  Outside, in the garden, Julia caught up with Alfred Tennyson, as the wind lashed the trees above their heads, and the rain fell on their faces like—well, you know, God’s angry tears or something. For a man who hotly resisted accusations of the pathetic fallacy, these stormy conditions were just too bad. ‘Alfred!’ yelled Julia above the wind. ‘It’s no good, Julia. My mind is made up.’ ‘Alfred!’ They could have gone on like this, but fortunately Julia thought of sheltering in the glass house, where at least they could hear each other speak. And so they entered Julia’s hallowed place, where Alfred had never stepped before, and the conflicting emotions Julia had demanded from Mr Watts as Ulysses were as nothing to the feelings now fighting in her own breast like cross winds tearing at a sail. ‘I can’t believe you would leave me, Alfred,’ she wailed. ‘Just because I have never spoken to you of my feelings, you must surely know what they are.’ ‘Julia, I think we should discuss this tomorrow. Or perhaps, even better, we should never discuss it at all. It pains me to see you like this.’ ‘It pains you!’ ‘It’s a figure of speech, Julia. It means I don’t want to talk about it. And that such passion in a plain dumpy woman is ugly and absurd.’ Julia gaped. Alfred on the defensive was clearly a very dangerous man. He was still very angry. ‘Correct me, Julia, but you seem to believe that I owe you something. I don’t, and nor does Emily. We did not ask you to move here. We did not ask you for the wallpaper or the ponchos. We don’t even know what a poncho is. We do not need your permission to settle our own affairs and enjoy the success that my talent has earned me, away from constant outrageous requests for photographs and dedications!’ Julia looked around. There was something about the setting. She never

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thought she would see Alfred in her glass house. She had wanted it so much that it had nearly broken her heart. ‘Sit for me, Alfred,’ she said quietly. ‘You do not listen, madam!’ ‘But I do, Alfred. I do. And each word you speak pains me a great deal more than it pains you. But tell me, will your friends see the review in the Westminster? Will they be pleased and impressed?’ Alfred tugged his cloak. ‘Yes, they will.’ ‘And will your enemies choke on their breakfast?’ ‘I sincerely hope so.’ ‘I really didn’t want you to know this, Alfred, and I would never have told you for my own sake, but you simply need to know. I wrote that review. Sara used her influence with the editor to print it.’ Tennyson stood up impatiently. Why was he listening to such silly invention? ‘And why would you do that?’ he snapped. ‘Because I love you,’ she said. ‘And because I wanted you to have a present from me that did not demand thanks. That way your usual brutal disregard for my feelings could not hurt me.’ ‘I don’t believe you.’ ‘Oh Alfred. Your blindness is such a curse. Why do you think the review disputes with George Gilfillan and John Ruskin? Who else but your closest friends would know your tiresome preoccupation with their trifling passing comments?’ ‘They were a lot more than passing comments. They were wounds, Julia, wounds.’ ‘All right then. Look at it another way. How do you think the review got into the apple pie?’ He heard what she was saying. He sat thinking for a while, and the more he thought, the angrier he got. ‘So do you expect thanks now? Is that why you do these stupid extravagant things, for the thanks? Well, you won’t get any. Do you know what you have done, you silly woman?’ ‘Yes thank you,’ said Julia. ‘I thought I was doing you a favour, when in fact I have done one for myself.’ ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. She drew a deep breath. ‘I could tell the world the review was mine, Alfred. Your reputation would never recover.’ ‘You wouldn’t.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Julia. Julia, you are a nice person. In all the turmoil this evening, you seem to have forgotten.’

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‘Sit for me, Alfred. I love you.’ They sat in the dark, and the rain lashed the windows. ‘I love you,’ she repeated. ‘Remember the Westminster. Sit for me.’  Dodgson rushed in to the dining room. ‘It’s Daisy Bradley!’ he shouted. ‘They say she’s gone m-m—missing!’ Jessie dropped Haydon’s head, and it smashed on the edge of the podium. Blood trickled from her fingers’ ends. ‘I love you, Pa,’ she said, and Lorenzo screamed as he ran to catch her in his arms. It was quite a scene. In fact Mr Cameron woke up at that moment, took a look round the darkened room and—not surprisingly—applauded vigorously. It was quite the best tableau he’d ever seen—Watts with his hand across his eyes, Ellen aghast, Lorenzo with the bleeding child, and Dodgson frozen in the doorway. ‘Very fine!’ he called. ‘Mark my words. Put that on in Drury Lane and people would pay good money to see it, I assure you!’

Part Three Hats in the Air Chapter 13




Lionel Tennyson sat up in bed and laughed with delight. His beautiful little face was framed by hair curled in papers (at his mother’s insistence), but he didn’t mind. He hardly even noticed the discomfort in his foot, caused by his mother stamping on it so unexpectedly that afternoon. While Hallam slumbered inoffensively in an adjacent bed, Lionel held up a candle and continued to read a parody of his father’s famous poem ‘The Two Voices’. The parody, published anonymously, had been sent to Lionel by Mr Dodgson a couple of years ago. But Lionel, rightly believing Dodgson to be rather infra dig at the time, had never got around to reading it. ‘The Two Voices’ is not much read nowadays, but Lionel knew it very well indeed. Even though it was a grave and grown-up poem about the arguments for and against suicide, Lionel had known his father’s poem since his earliest youth. The last-but-one governess had read it compulsively and had made both boys learn sections of it by heart. The children used to wonder, actually, whether she was quite all right in the head. At local children’s parties, therefore, when games took place, other infants might lisp ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall’, while the Tennyson boys were apt to fold their hands and begin, A still small voice spake unto me, ‘Thou art so full of misery, Were it not better not to be?’

They would conclude their recitals thirty minutes later, among a party of blubbing and demoralized kiddies, and parents in despair. So there had been general relief when that gloomy governess had gone, and another had replaced her. Like Tennyson himself, she would have been outraged by Mr Dodgson’s version, ‘The Three Voices’, which concerned a chap determined, not to kill himself, but rather to be extremely cheerful at the seaside. But then a sea breeze carries his hat athwart the glooming flat (good Tennysonian words, ‘glooming’ and ‘athwart’), where it is speared by the umbrella of a female philosopher whose aim is to make him see misery in everything. For someone who himself lived beside the sea, Lionel appreciated, if nothing else, the way Mr Dodgson set so many of his poems on the beach.

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A while like one in dreams he stood, Then faltered forth his gratitude In words just short of being rude: For it [his hat] had lost its shape and shine, And it had cost him four-and-nine, And he was going out to dine.

Lionel hugged himself. It wasn’t that the parody was so very funny. It was that his father would be so very mad when he read it that he wouldn’t know which leg to hop on. ‘To dine!’ she shrieked in dragon-wrath, ‘To swallow wines all foam and froth! To simper at a table cloth! ‘Say, can thy noble spirit stoop To join the gormandizing troop Who find a solace in the soup? ‘Canst thou desire of pie or puff ? Thy well-bred manners were enough, Without such gross material stuff.’ ‘Yet well-bred men,’ he faintly said, ‘Are not unwilling to be fed: Nor are they well without the bread.’

There was no doubt about it. ‘The Three Voices’ was dynamite. Dodgson had written doggerel stuff about dinner and hats! In fact Lionel was so engrossed in this wonderful fare that when a handful of pebbles rattled at his window, he ignored them. After all, it was a stormy night with sudden gusts. With any luck the Garibaldi tree would fall over, and do them all a favour. (Lionel had already loosened it secretly around the roots, to get it started.) Another pebble hit the casement, however, and Lionel went to look. Outside, below, was Daisy Bradley, waving a small bag. Lionel opened the window. ‘Daisy! It’s ten o’clock!’ ‘Lionel! What happened to your head?’ Lionel squirmed as he remembered the curling papers. ‘I’ll come down,’ he said. ‘Stay there.’

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 Down on the shore, Dodgson’s boater had blown off, but no lady philosopher speared it. It bowled inland, spinning and scooping, and was never seen by a living soul again. ‘Daisy!’ he yelled. Behind him, battling with the breeze from the sea, were Mrs Cameron and Tennyson, and Watts and Ellen, all doing their best, though not really knowing where to start. Before Jessie passed out at Dimbola, she whispered to Lorenzo that Daisy might have headed for the bathing machines (Jessie was privy to Daisy’s somewhat flawed domestic intentions), which was why the household’s luminaries had now crowded to the bay in low tide and pitch dark, calling and peering, while Daisy’s other family and friends searched inland. Alfred was not much use on a search party. Each time he called, ‘Here she is! I have found the child!’ he was discovered to be pointing at a big rock or a piece of old donkey blanket caught on a bush. But he felt that he needed to be there. He needed to come out and do something rugged and masculine after his frightful encounter with Julia in the chicken-house. Above all, he needed to feel good about himself again. Somehow or other, Julia’s frank words (particularly ‘I love you’) had knocked him quite off balance. ‘Daisy!’ ‘Daisy!’ they called. Dodgson felt wretched, and not just about the loss of his hat. Everyone knew Daisy’s disappearance was his fault. Jessie had told everybody about the safety pins before she fainted away; and they had all shaken their heads and said ‘Shame’. What could he do to redeem himself ? Not take a picture, or write a parody, or sing a comic song. All his usual repertoire for ingratiation was useless in this company. So he must find Daisy. At all costs, he must find her before anyone else. Ellen jumped from rock to rock like—oh Puck or Ariel, or something; while Watts poked at the ground with his stick, as though Daisy might be a shell fish burrowed there. Perhaps he was looking for dropped florins. He held up a large handkerchief and wiped a tear. This had been an emotional evening for him; it felt curiously final, as though nothing would ever be the same. Ellen had paraded his Haydon obsession for all to see! If a child was lost tonight—especially a child called Daisy—the metaphorical implications were simply too enormous to ignore. ‘We’ll find her,’ Julia reassured him, loudly, directly in his ear. ‘She is a very level-headed little girl normally.’ ‘But people do mad things when they love, Julia. Look at me. I married Ellen. That was mad, was it not? Tonight Ellen broke my heart with her little entertainment, apparently thinking to win my affection. That too was quite insane.’

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But Julia couldn’t hear him for the waves crashing and the wind pushing the tide up the shingly beach. Besides, this was hardly the time or place for introspection. Much as she loved him, sometimes Watts was enough to try the patience of an oyster. So she left him to his bemoanings and banged on the side of a bathing machine with a big stick. Alfred was suddenly struck by a thought. ‘The scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave,’ he said, mainly to himself. ‘I wrote that, you know. It’s very fine, very fine. I doubt anyone else could have done it.’ He tried substituting different words— The scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the tide; The shriek of a maddened beach pulled down to the deep; The sound of some pebbly rocks sucked back by a tow

—and decided he had probably got it right the first time, and that he was, despite all his other failings as a human being, a genius of a poet. ‘Julia!’ he called. She ran to his side. ‘Yes Alfred.’ She thought he had found the child. But of course he was thinking about himself again. ‘I just wanted to remind you, Julia, that I have a very great gift.’ Julia’s eyes filled with tears. Perhaps it was the wind. ‘Oh you do have a gift, Alfred,’ she shouted directly in his ear. She had to stand so close, she could feel his beard touch her face. ‘A great gift. If only you could learn to appreciate it.’ Alfred was nonplussed. A man cannot bear so many home truths in one night. ‘I will return to Emily,’ he boomed. And before Julia could say anything, he had gathered his cloak and gone. It was Dodgson who first noticed the light on the boat, thirty yards out in the black water. ‘A light,’ he shouted, pointing. ‘C—Can anyone swim?’ Of course they couldn’t. Nor could he. But he was actually ready to strip off and dive in when Mrs Cameron held his arm. ‘It’s not Daisy,’ she shouted. It was true. The boat, with its lantern swinging, which tossed against the choppy water, was not stationary and helpless, but moved quite quickly towards the beach. And if their eyes did not deceive them, it was rowed by a woman. Who could this be? They watched in a line (and amazement) as this woman rower deftly caught the wave to ram her boat ashore, then jumped out quickly and dragged it up the beach. Rather too late, Mrs Cameron ran to help.

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‘Why, hello!’ shouted the woman, in a friendly fashion. They looked at her. She held her lantern closer to her face. She was a complete stranger. ‘Hello again,’ she yelled, with an American accent. ‘My, this wind.’ It was as though she had dropped out of the sky. In fact it would hardly have been more remarkable if she had. Who was this extraordinary woman? She wore a large tweed cape, sodden with rain and sea-water, which she flung back carelessly as though it were the lightest shawl. If she had worn thigh-boots, and slapped them, it would hardly have looked much out of place. ‘I really didn’t expect to see anybody, arriving so late,’ she shouted, shaking hands with each of them, and ignoring their rude gaping. ‘Out for a walk in the storm? A fine idea. Feel the electricity in these elements. Those nincompoops at Lymington refused to sail, so I hired this boat and travelled under some steam of my own.’ ‘You didn’t row around the Needles?’ asked Julia, aghast. ‘The tall chalk stacks? I did, yes. That was the very best part.’ She removed some thick waterproof boots and tucked them under her arm. ‘But now, what’s this? Great luck. It is the Albion Hotel and my journey’s goal.’ ‘Excuse my rudeness,’ said Julia, ‘but what are you doing here?’ ‘I have come to meet my husband and daughter. What a surprise I will give them both. They think I am in Boston. How do you do? My name is Lydia Fowler.’ The others stared. ‘But tell you what,’ she added, ‘seeing as we’re friends already, you can call me Professor.’  ‘So what happened, Daisy?’ Lionel sat with Daisy in a large armchair. Sophia had brought some drinks, and Daisy had changed from her wet clothes. In her little bag was found a very nice floor-length cotton nightie, so she now wore that, and flicked her hair back over her shoulders. ‘I was mad,’ she said. ‘To fancy Mr Dodo? I’ll say.’ ‘It was just that he said he loved me.’ ‘Hmm. But Daisy, he says that to all the girls.’ Daisy shrugged. ‘I expect so.’ ‘Come on, Daisy, I know so. Someone told Hallam that Alice Liddell’s mother stopped letting him write to her.’

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‘Who’s Alice Liddell?’ ‘Don’t you know anything? She’s the girl he wrote Alice’s Adventures for.’ Daisy whimpered. She couldn’t help it. Nobody told her there was a real Alice. Mr Dodgson had kept that very quiet. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Nothing.’ She pretended she didn’t care, but it was a bit of a shock. Alice Liddell, eh? Alice Liddell. She blinked a lot, but did not cry. ‘The Liddells sometimes holiday in Freshwater,’ Lionel explained. ‘You mean he even sees her here?’ ‘And at Oxford, of course.’ She shook her head. Mr Dodgson’s character got worse and worse. ‘Does he love her?’ ‘Daisy, forget it. He’s thirty-two and she’s twelve.’ Daisy twiddled with a bit of her hair. It was all a bit much to take in. ‘Let’s change the subject,’ urged Lionel. She nodded, and tried to think about something else. ‘What does she look like?’ ‘Daisy!’ ‘I know, I know. I’m sorry.’ ‘Won’t anyone be looking for you, Daisy?’ ‘I shouldn’t think so. I left very quietly.’ ‘Oh good.’  Back at Dimbola, Jessie languished in her father’s arms, while the maids looked grim and mopped the blood off the dining room floor. ‘What have I done?’ Lorenzo moaned. His darling child! His prodigy! He caressed her ghastly ringlets with his big hands, and hugged her closely to him, careful not to touch her bandaged arm. For yes, Jessie had really cut herself with the sharp knife from the kitchen, and it was a madder act than anything a blackblooded Tennyson had ever done, despite the imperatives of heredity. ‘What have I done?’ he repeated. ‘Jessie, just tell me, what did I do?’ She opened an eye. ‘You lashed up your senses with Mrs Watts, didn’t you, Pa?’ It was the thought in her head, but she did not speak it aloud. She was enjoying the attention far too much to jeopardize the mood. So she snuggled nearer and let out a faraway moan. ‘I will send for Ada,’ he declared. But as he said it, his heart broke and he began to sob over the actually not-at-all lifeless body of his little girl.

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‘Jessie, you are everything to me. Don’t take yourself away.’ ‘Oh really, Lorry,’ said Lydia, standing at the door. ‘Can’t you see the child is acting?’ Lorenzo looked around. ‘What?’ His wife? Lydia? Leaning on oars in Mrs Cameron’s drawing room? Jessie sprang into life. ‘Mama!’ she yelled, and sat up straight. ‘What?’ said Lorenzo again, releasing his hold. Was Jessie all right? Or was Lydia a phantasm? ‘Oops,’ said Jessie, looking up at him. ‘Sorry, Pa.’ ‘Jessie,’ called Lydia. ‘My own brat prodigy.’ ‘Mama! Or should I say Professor!’  Finding Lydia was certainly a bonus, but as far as Dodgson was concerned, it didn’t quite compensate for losing Daisy. Alone, therefore, he set off into the darkness. For someone with a logical mind, it was tragic the way he had lost all power of consecutive thought this evening. He sat down for a moment on a little post, and tried to pull himself together. Perhaps he could deduce Daisy’s whereabouts by means of his intellectual training. So he had a go at it, out there in the dark, setting his mighty syllogistic brain to work in a practical cause, using all the available data. Through force of habit, however, the propositions came out something like this: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

No one takes The Times unless he is well educated. Daisy Bradley is missing. No birds, except ostriches, are nine feet high. Guinea pigs are hopelessly ignorant of music. Rainbows are not worth writing odes to. A fish that cannot dance a minuet is contemptible.

Even a cursory perusal told him there was not much to be deduced here, so he tried to focus more narrowly on the matter in hand. 1. Daisy Bradley loves me. 2. Daisy Bradley is eight years old. 3. Eight-year-old girls sometimes cut themselves deeply with sharp knives. 4. If you drink from a bottle marked poison, it is bound to disagree with you, sooner or later.

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Dodgson put back his head and screamed. Then he chose the logical course again, and argued thus. 1. Daisy has friends at Dimbola and Farringford. 2. She is not at Dimbola. The word ‘ergo’ had certainly been invented for such moments.  Jessie, jumping into her mother’s arms, found that she could administer a little kick in Mrs Watts’s pretty little face, which cheered her up immensely, and also brought a smile to Mrs Cameron. No bothersome questions of how, why, or what interfered with her infant joy. Mama was home! Lorenzo, however, was overwhelmed—a sensation he recognized, and adored. Lydia had overwhelmed Lorenzo from their earliest days as phrenologists together, and had thereafter never left off. Readers of this story may have assumed Lorenzo was a widower; certainly his new friends in Freshwater had jumped to that mistake. But Lydia was not dead, she was merely in the United States, which is not the same. She had travelled home with a few tidying-up missions: to re-organize the national practice of obstetrics, for example. Lorenzo, who up to now looked pretty energetic in the context of Freshwater Bay, dwindled beside Lydia like a candle set before a furnace. It was Lydia the child took after, not Lorenzo. The song about Lydia, oh Lydia, that encyclo-piddia was not actually written about Lydia Fowler, for she had no tattoos. But in her family, she was nevertheless known as Piddia, for her obvious know-all tendencies. ‘Greet me, Lorry,’ she said. He jumped to his feet, quickly adjusted his beard, and ran to her side. It pained him to do this in front of sweet little Mrs Watts, but it couldn’t be helped. ‘Goddess,’ he breathed. And taking her by the back of the neck, he kissed her, for a not inconsiderable period, full on the lips, while Jessie looked on proudly. The others, still damp from the elements, coughed and shuffled disapprovingly, a bit like Wonderland creatures waiting for a Caucus race. ‘Mrs Fowler rowed across the Solent in a rainstorm,’ said Julia conversationally, as though the kiss had finished (it hadn’t). ‘She has won medals for rowing,’ said Jessie, proudly. ‘She is Marblehead champion.’ ‘Oh, what’s Marblehead?’ asked Julia, hoping to fill time while the kiss continued. ‘It’s a place,’ said Jessie. ‘Near where Uncle Orson lives. We thought he ought to live in Marblehead, really. Because of the name being so apt.’

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The kiss shifted a little; it stopped for air. But it did not conclude. ‘We didn’t actually know there was a Mrs Fowler,’ said Ellen, with an attempted gay laugh. ‘Oh no?’ But the kiss did not stop. Jessie piped up. ‘Did you find Daisy?’ The grown-ups hung their heads. In the excitement of Lydia, they had forgotten. ‘Oh, she’ll be all right,’ Jessie assured them. ‘But if she isn’t, she has only herself to blame. I mean, fancy falling for Mr Dodo. Give me typhoid any day.’ The Fowler clinch had now broken, much to the relief of the host nation, but the couple were still not ready for general chat. Lorenzo went down on one knee. ‘Diana! Juno! Explain!’ ‘I found you had left London, and here I am. I have brought five hundred copies of Orson’s latest pamphlet. We start lecturing tomorrow.’ ‘Oh Ma,’ squealed Jessie, ‘we’ve missed you so much.’ A few minutes later, a message arrived from Farringford, to say that Alfred had returned home to find Daisy safe in her nightie. The worried Bradley family had been calmed. The hunt was off. The only person who did not know this, of course, was Mr Dodgson, who could now not be found himself. ‘Let’s ask Ada to find him,’ said Jessie. ‘She would love to be out on a night like this. It’s exactly her kind of thing. She’s awful gloomy, Ma.’ ‘Ada?’ queried Lydia. She seemed surprised. ‘We engaged Ada Wilson four months ago, just before you left for America, my dear. You surely remember?’ ‘But Lorry, I left instructions for the girl to be dismissed.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I found her writing anonymous letters. I considered her dangerous.’ Lorenzo and Jessie looked at each other, nonplussed. ‘But Ada’s a real silly, Ma. She’s a misery, but also what you call a nincompoop. Pa says her brain has been fogged by pig and cow.’ ‘Let us send for the girl at once,’ said Lydia. ‘But let us also consider the evidence. I left you a letter about the wickedness of the girl, secreting it carefully in your dressing table. You did not receive it. So the girl must be wicked. Did you not read her head, Lorry? She has Destructiveness so big that her ears stick out at an angle, unable to support the arms of spectacles. Her Organ of Gratitude is the size of a wizened pea.’ Lorenzo and Jessie looked at one another. ‘Ada?’ ‘Organ of Gratitude?’ was the astounded look on both their faces. ‘What sort of anonymous letters?’ asked Julia, intrigued.

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‘Very threatening, to judge by the one I read. The girl was mad, I think. Mad with a grudge. She actually mentioned pushing some mean old lady in an invalid carriage off a cliff!’ Julia stopped breathing. ‘To whom did she send these anonymous letters?’ she asked. ‘To Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate,’ said Lydia, almost laughing. ‘So preposterous.’  Dodgson trudged up the lane toward Farringford, unaware that deep within that lifeless house, Alfred was reading ‘The Three Voices’, and hopping on both legs at once. Which was ironic really, because Dodgson was currently reciting to himself the Tennyson original, and recognizing for the first time the full force of the argument for self-slaughter. Alfred, on the other hand, could hardly believe his eyes. All the deep philosophy of the poem was mocked here, transformed into nonsensical bantering. He had never been so insulted—not by George Gilfillan, not by anybody. The hero in the Dodgson poem doesn’t even know what the Voice is talking about! Fixing her eyes upon the beach, As though unconscious of his speech, She said ‘Each gives to more than each.’ He could not answer yea or nay: He faltered ‘Gifts may pass away.’ Yet knew not what he meant to say.

Gifts may pass away? Well, this gift certainly would. Alfred thundered so loud when he read this sacrilege that Emily was forced to come downstairs to investigate. She found two giggling children (one of them not her own), and her lord in apoplexy, holding a brown magazine which looked, at first glance, similar to the Westminster. ‘Is the review less good than you first imagined, Alfred? I knew you would find cause to hate it before long.’ Alfred folded the magazine and pushed it inside his coat pocket. He would not allow anyone else to see this monstrous thing; Lionel should certainly not keep it; the child would delight too much in learning the poem by rote. ‘Dodgson is in Freshwater, my love,’ he blurted. ‘Damn the man.’ ‘The Oxford photographist?’ ‘The very same.’

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‘Oh.’ Emily had never told Alfred of the letter from Dodgson. She had thereby saved a week of relative peace. ‘He’s been here for several days,’ said Lionel, helpfully. ‘In fact, he’s been here long enough for Daisy to fall in love with him, plan an elopement, and then think better of it.’ ‘Lionel!’ said everybody together—including Daisy, who kicked him. ‘He ruined the dinner at Julia’s this evening,’ said Alfred. ‘I didn’t get my apple pie—twice!’ ‘Poor Alfred.’ ‘Scoundrel,’ spat Alfred. ‘Scoundrel,’ agreed his dear, weary wife. ‘Photographist.’ ‘Scoundrel.’ ‘If he comes near me, I shan’t be responsible for my actions, Emily. Do you know, he even wrote a parody of “The Two Voices”?’ ‘No!’  Back at Dimbola, they sent to the Albion for Ada Wilson, but received the reply that she had packed and gone, immediately after Lydia’s luggage had been delivered to the rooms. Vanished, they said. Jessie and Lorenzo did not wish to believe it, but the evidence was mounting. The child now recollected how Ada had always hidden behind the bathing machines when Lionel Tennyson was on the beach; she had also pumped Jessie for every detail of their afternoon at Farringford. Mrs Cameron thought about her own sweet-tempered maids, and thanked the almighty for her good fortune. Mary Ryan might be disaffected, but she was not (as yet, anyway) murderously insane. ‘But what can she have against the Tennysons?’ was what they all pondered. Yes, sometimes Tennyson’s poetry was a bit depressing, but you didn’t have to read it. Jessie shrugged. She was just glad the girl had left them. ‘Mama, did you mention Ada’s Organ of Gratitude just now?’ ‘Wizened,’ said her mother. ‘Pitiful.’ Jessie knew she must pluck up the courage to ask. ‘Where is it?’ ‘It’s in the lobes of the ear, Jessie.’ All around the room, people fingered their ear-lobes thoughtfully. ‘Who found it?’ said Lorenzo, trying to sound casual. ‘I did. Are you pleased? Brother Orson said it was the discovery of the age, especially since almost nobody has got one.’

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Around the room, people stopped bothering. ‘But what are we doing about Ada? Do you think she is positively dangerous?’  Dodgson was just about to find out, when he noticed on the road ahead of him a woman in a dark cloak hurrying in the same direction. ‘Madam,’ he cried, and scampered to catch up. The woman stopped and turned, and he soon arrived at her side. He recognized her from the beach, but he didn’t know her name. ‘I am going as far as F-F—Farringford,’ he volunteered. ‘May I—?’ She looked at him as if he were mad. ‘I can find my own way to Farringford, thank you.’ There was something very odd about her, he thought. She sounded much too well educated to be a maid, but he was sure that’s what she was. ‘Do you have business at Farringford, so late at night?’ he asked. ‘I do.’ ‘So they are expecting you?’ The woman shrieked with laughter. ‘No!’ ‘Are you familiar with the temper of Mr Tennyson?’ ‘I know his wife much better.’ ‘To tell you the truth,’ said Dodgson, ‘I am a little fr-fr—’ ‘Friendless?’ Dodgson shrugged thoughtfully; ‘friendless’ wasn’t far off the mark, but it wasn’t what he was trying to say. He waved his hands. ‘Frisky?’ He shook his head, but not vehemently. He put his fingers in his mouth. ‘Frost-bitten?’ ‘Frightened.’ Which really he was right to be, because once they were announced at the door—Mr Dodgson and Miss Wilson—they discovered a less than welcoming group of Tennysons sitting in the semi-dark. ‘Miss Wilson?’ repeated a puzzled Emily, as the couple approached. ‘She’s the governess who made Hallam and me learn “The Two Voices”, mother,’ hissed Lionel. ‘She left when you didn’t pay her.’ And then, spotting Dodgson, his eyes lit up. ‘Stay there,’ he told Daisy. ‘What?’ ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said, and scampered to the hall. ‘Miss Wilson, what an unexpected pleasure.’ But Emily had only just stepped forward to greet her ex-employee when she

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was almost knocked down by Dodgson. To his enormous relief, he had spied the little girl in her night dress. He ran towards her and fell at her feet. ‘Daisy!’ he exclaimed. ‘Eek,’ said Daisy. ‘Get off!’ ‘You scoundrel,’ said Tennyson, rising. ‘Shall I do it, father?’ Dodgson looked around. What was happening? Lionel had leapt on to a convenient chair and had raised a croquet mallet. Dodgson looked up at Tennyson. ‘Yes, do it,’ said Tennyson. So Lionel Tennyson struck Dodgson on the head with a croquet mallet, as he had so long hoped to do. As Dodgson keeled over on the hearth rug, Tennyson and Emily broke into spontaneous applause. ‘I never require you to check the boys for signs of madness again, my dear,’ said Alfred, with his broadest smile, patting his breathless son on the shoulder. ‘If that was not the act of a sane mind, I really don’t know what is.’

Chapter 14




That night, Watts informed Ellen they were going home. He sent her a little note, by means of Mary Ryan, advising her to pack her bags at once. Now, with the Irish maid offering her bits of things to decide on—and surreptitiously returning the purloined Herbert hat to its rightful place—Ellen sat amid the debris of her ransacked wardrobe, and felt pretty glum. Perhaps it was time to accept that the marriage was over. The Haydon extravaganza had gone down quite badly. Her satin wedding dress had been ruined in the rain. Damn this small Caution; damn this big Hope. She felt terribly confused. She wanted Watts to love her; but if she was honest, she wanted Lorenzo Fowler to love her too. If only Watts had set up house with her, the marriage might have been different. If they had taken up an independent life, they would have stood a chance. But Watts was a poor man. Haydon had lived an independent life, and look what happened to him. All that remained of him now was a moral tale, a set of gloomy diaries, and a plaster head in fragments. ‘The Absence of Hope’? It was all Watts really desired, of course; to depict moments of desolation and spiritual defeat. How stupid she had been to think she could turn him into Mister Cheeryble just by effort and example. It was as pointless as re-writing ‘The Two Voices’ as ‘The Three Voices’, or trying to pose for a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph (‘Wait! I come to thee! I die!’) with a grin from ear to ear. It was just no good. It did not accord. Despite all his wife’s best efforts, Old Greybeard’s doomy life force had prevailed. ‘And the moral of that is?’ Watts seemed to whisper in her ear. All too easily, she thought of the apt motto. Let the cobbler stick to his last. Of course, the considerable shock of Lydia Fowler’s arrival was still negotiating its way through Ellen’s nervous system, and many, many hours would pass before it settled. The great magnetic Fowler kiss was unlike anything previously seen in polite society, and as a spectacle of raw marital desire, it uptipped this little virgin quite. Lorenzo and Lydia had seemed clamped together, locked in place, their bodies humming the same tremendous note in a major key. ‘Goddess,’ Lorenzo said, and Ellen nearly swooned with longing. She fingered her Herbert costume, and considered putting it on again, but her Herbertian adventure seemed so paltry now. Compared with rowing around the Needles in a night storm to join the man who worshipped you, dressing up as a boy for a bit of strained flirtation with someone else’s husband was very small potatoes. It hadn’t helped, either, that Lydia had handed everyone a copy of Uncle Orson’s explicit pamphlet before bidding goodnight and gathering child and husband back to her omnicompetent skirts. Ellen had read it at once, and a lot of

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matters of an unmentionable physical nature had finally fallen into place. ‘Full intimacy’, for example, covered all sorts of things between a man and wife, but it had nothing to do with dead pets. Somewhat feverish at the recollection, Ellen now found herself alone at bedtime letting down her hair, and unbuttoning the top bit of her nightie. Up to now, Ellen’s sexual frustration had been to her a puzzling sensation, something like a faraway itch, or a door opening to the garden but nobody coming in. But after Lorenzo said ‘Goddess’, the world changed; she saw it differently, and she felt the full, bitter force of missing out on the action. At the Albion Hotel, at this very minute, Mr and Mrs Fowler would doubtless be engaging in vigorous marital relations precisely as prescribed by O. S. Fowler. Ellen had the mental picture of a battering ram, flames, cheers, and boiling oil—which was odd, really, because there was nothing alluding to medieval siegecraft in the book. Watts, by contrast, would be lolling in the next bedroom by himself, feebly wiping his dribbling brushes on a linseed rag. Ellen made up her mind. Five months was long enough to wait for marital love, whatever the quality. What would she lose now by forcing the issue? Nothing. She undid another button and stepped into the corridor. It was time to take the bull by the horns. It was time to forget Westminster. ‘George?’ She rapped lightly on his door. ‘George?’ ‘Mm?’ There was a scrabbling noise in the room, but before her husband could say, ‘Wait!’ Ellen entered on exaggerated tiptoe, getting ready to pull her nightie over her head. But it was a mistake. Oh dear, this was a mistake. As the door swung open, Watts leapt to his feet in embarrassment— ‘George! But—’ ‘No!’ ‘How could you?’ ‘Leave this room at once!’ —and Ellen had returned to the corridor pole-axed with astonishment within thirty seconds. It was the last body-blow of her visit to Freshwater, and it was conclusive. Her marriage was now definitely over. George Frederic Watts had deceived and betrayed his wife in the worst possible way. For no, she had not surprised him molesting a chambermaid, or a child, or her best friend, or even the St Bernard, as other disappointed wives have done throughout history. When she entered her husband’s room on that black night in Freshwater Bay, she had surprised him counting an enormous pile of money.

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 Cameron sat up in bed and persuaded his wife that a further mercy dash to Farringford was out of the question. The hour was too late. ‘But they must be told of Ada Wilson,’ she exclaimed. ‘Alfred has often mentioned an anonymous letter, but think how brave he has been, if the wicked missives have continued. Perhaps he did not wish to alarm Emily. Think of that, Charles. There is some good in the man, you must not deny it. I would give anything for this not to have happened to my dear, dear friends.’ ‘I know you would. You would give anything to anybody. It is to the infinite glory of God that each time I wake up I find my bed still under my body. But you can inform them of this silly Ada business in the morning, Julia. Tell me, how many times have you visited Farringford today already?’ Julia nodded that he was right, as always. She had been there twice, and both times without benefit of wheeled propulsion. She was nearly fifty, and her legs were feeling the strain. She recollected this morning’s first visit, when she tripped over the Elgin Marbles wallpaper in Tennyson’s staircase. How much could happen in a single day. ‘I found the wallpaper, incidentally,’ she told Cameron, absent-mindedly rubbing her shin at the memory of its discovery. ‘I brought a roll back with me, in fact.’ ‘Did you?’ He was amused. ‘Was that quite proper, do you think?’ ‘Well, they don’t want it. They have made that clear enough. Besides, I’m afraid I was hurt and angry, Charles; I believe I vowed to burn the stuff in the fireplace. But now that I look at it, it is so very fine I think I might give it to Mrs Fowler as a present. I would so like to have that lady’s good opinion.’ ‘My dear, as you know, I admire you in all things save your impulsively charitable first impressions.’ Julia said nothing. ‘But Julia, you surprise me. How can you take back a gift you have given? It is no longer yours. Aside from the propriety of the thing, if you don’t return it, they will suspect the servants or the children.’ Julia bit her lip. ‘I was in a passion, Charles.’ ‘I know.’ ‘This has been a terrible day.’ ‘No, no. There I must disagree. From the entertainment point of view, it was more than satisfactory.’ ‘But you are right, Charles. I will return the wallpaper tomorrow. You are always right. That’s why I love you.’

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Cameron smiled and settled his head. He did not regard this as something requiring an answer, let alone a reciprocation. Julia differed from him in this opinion, however. ‘I said I love you, Charles,’ she repeated, with meaningful emphasis. ‘Good for you,’ he said, comfortably.  Staggering hatless from Farringford in the direction of the sea, Dodgson decided it was time to make his excuses to Freshwater society and leave before lunch tomorrow. However much people begged him to reconsider, he would just have to disappoint them. His week’s sojourn at this delightful holiday place had been at best a grim race against brain damage, and he considered it wise to quit while he—and his head—were still ahead. There were just a few details to tidy up in the morning. For example, he would require Daisy Bradley to return his safety pins; and he intended to lend some photographs to Mrs Cameron (to demonstrate how photography should be done). As for Mr Tennyson, his own offences against the great man were still well beyond his power to comprehend, but the evidence of his own ringing ear told him that Tennyson was definitely offended. In retrospect he thanked goodness that at least Lionel had reached for the croquet mallet and not the mock-baronial axe above the mantel. His other major task before leaving Freshwater was to detach Alice from little Miss Terry, who still unaccountably believed the work to be somehow their joint creation. Having finally accepted that Tennyson’s answer was a No, he would instead dedicate the book with a poem to Alice Liddell, which was only fair— despite that ungrateful little girl’s insistence on growing up and spoiling everything. Hopefully, other little girls would heed the warnings in Alice about getting so big suddenly that you fill the room, and your arm goes out of the window and your foot goes up the chimney. But in Dodgson’s experience, there was no reasoning with the little angels once their grosser hormones kicked in and they stopped wearing the wings. Meanwhile, as the rain finally stopped, he was thinking of a clever poem for Ellen which he might slip into the book somewhere as a way of pretending to say thank you. So he was just pacing along with his head down, practising rhymes, when he bumped into the rather arresting figure of Mary Ann Hillier, swathed in black, lighting up the dark with her moonglow profile and expression of infinite sadness. Such beauty was truly astonishing, he had to admit it. The Pre-Raphaelites would stripe themselves pink with envy. ‘Mary Ann?’ ‘Meester Dadgson?’ she said. Dodgson winced as the vision fled.

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‘If you wants to go hooam I shall be gwine outlong in a minute or two,’ she said. Which was nice of her, if not particularly nicely done. Nobody around here, he noticed, seemed to have much grace when they offered you a kindness. They walked along in silence for a short while, but Mary Ann clearly had something she wanted to discuss. ‘Be you a-minding o that lecture t’other day?’ she asked, as they walked along in the dark. ‘How could I forget it?’ said Dodgson. ‘Waall, I caast eyes on a buoy, swap me bob, that tore my heart all to libbets!’ ‘You d—did?’ Dodgson wanted to ask what a libbet was, but he dared not disrupt the flow. Mary Ann seemed to be telling him she was in love, but he didn’t see what he could do about it, and he was hardly in the mood for maids’ confessions. Even at the best of times, in fact, such intimacies made him want to scratch vigorously at the rough skin on his elbows. ‘And the boy?’ he asked. ‘Do you mean young Herbert?’ Her eyes lit up. ‘I do.’ ‘Well, if you look down the road there, you’ll see he’s j—just emerging from D-D—’ ‘Dimbooala Lodge!’ exclaimed the girl. ‘I knowed it! That Mary Ryan’ll git sich a whistersniff in the chops one day!’ And she scurried off after Herbert, while Dodgson—glad to take his mind off his current problems—couldn’t help speculating how long he would have to stammer ‘W-w-w—’ before anyone guessed he was trying to say whistersniff.  ‘Ada has taken some of the pamphlets, Lorry,’ declared Lydia, surveying a sorry mess in the Fowler quarters, which had got quite a lot worse during a rather wild hello-it’s-me-back-from-Boston conjugal intimacy. ‘Mm,’ said Lorenzo, still lazing in his stewy sheets. ‘But we can easily hire another maid, Lydia. Please don’t exercise yourself about it, my Aphrodite. You have, after all, just rowed a very dangerous shipping channel before performing as a fully participant female in a quite exhausting marital act. You must surely deserve a breath or two, or even’—he looked at her steadily—‘a drink.’ ‘Lorenzo Niles Fowler!’ she exclaimed. Any other teetotal couple might have laughed at this suggestion. The Fowlers were not light-hearted, however; it was the secret of their marriage. Now each gripped the other’s hand fiercely, as though rescuing somebody from the sea. They looked searchingly into each other’s eyes, and held the pose for two min-

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utes. And when this odd, non-dancing tango was released, they got back to normal again. ‘Besides, the girl seems to have done no other harm,’ said Lorenzo. ‘But when I think what she might have done to Jessie!’ ‘All she did to Jessie was offer her ham at breakfast. Oh, but there is something to tell you about our Infant Phrenologist. I meant to mention it earlier.’ ‘Apart from the cut to her arm?’ ‘Yes, apart from that.’ Lorenzo had still not fully convinced Lydia that the cut was part of a party game that went wrong. ‘No. The fact is, Jessie read Orson’s pamphlet one day when I wasn’t looking.’ Lydia thought about it. He studied her face. Was she shocked? She wasn’t. ‘Jessie is remarkable, isn’t she, Lorry?’ ‘She is.’ ‘How old is she again?’ ‘Eight.’ ‘Good heavens.’ Lydia tidied part of a demountable brain into a box. It was the Fowlers’ special delight to employ, in their passions, not only their own Organs of Amativeness, but someone else’s too. ‘Shall we leave tomorrow?’ Lorenzo remembered he had an appointment with Mrs Cameron, to test the applications of phrenology on photographic models. The lady was counting on him, dammit, and he owed her a good turn. Briefly, he wrestled with his conscience. ‘I’m with you, divine one,’ he decided. ‘Let’s go!’ Lydia rose from her bed to draw back a curtain. She had firm views about fresh air at night; she had once written a hundred-page monograph about its benefits that had sold particularly well in the western frontier states, and had led to many readers being attacked in their beds by coyotes. ‘That’s odd,’ she said, as she climbed back into bed. ‘There is a youth outside sitting on the sea wall with a cap on. And beside him is a girl with very long hair. It’s late for romantic trysts, don’t you think? I hope they won’t steal my boat.’ Lorenzo sat up. ‘Shall I go and see?’ She kissed him. ‘God,’ she breathed. She was not swearing. A Fowler never swore. She was simply doing the ‘goddess’ thing in reverse. She drank a pint of water in a manner that set her hus-

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band’s loins aflame. Which was why another half hour elapsed before Lorenzo could investigate the callow couple outside.  Dodgson had been right, you see, that the figure was Herbert. The lad made his last outing that night before being burned, with a horrible smell, in a kitchen stove at Dimbola Lodge the following day. ‘What is that? Is it wool?’ asked Cook, as Mary Ryan wiggled the tweed with a poker. ‘Ah, isn’t it such stuff as dreams are made on?’ said Mary Ryan, significantly. As we mentioned earlier, Mary Ryan had been no slouch in the literature department. Ellen adopted Herbert once more because she needed time to think, and no longer could she bear to stay indoors. The rain had subsided, and though a wind still blew, it was warm. She walked to the bay, where she watched the waves, and tried to sort out her life, starting with the most important thing, to wit, the astounding news that Watts had money. She kept saying it to herself. Watts has money. Watts has money. Watts—who has made his proud wife behave as little more than a mendicant—actually possesses heaps of the stuff that rents houses and buys food, and secures respectable independence away from interfering, condescending patrons. Watts had accumulated the money, of course, by taking care of the pence and looking blank and helpless whenever the cost of a ticket to the seaside was mentioned. He was paid for his portraits. He won £300 in the Westminster competition. She could never forgive him. In particular, she could never forgive him for instructing her to live on ninepence a week, and giving her nothing by way of presents except a cut-price proverb book at Waterloo Station. It is normally the case that when poverty comes in at the door, love flies out of the window. But Ellen stopped loving Watts only when she finally found out about his dosh. It was as she sat there, staring at the sea, that Mary Ann Hillier first watched her from the shadows, tragically retaining her firm hold of the wrong end of the stick. It would be a shame to transcribe the exact words of this lovely girl on this occasion, especially if whistersniff or rantipike were among them. Besides, when Ellen ever after looked back on this tragical-comical scene, she remembered it rather differently: O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful In the contempt and anger of his lip!

said Mary Ann (aside), her face all blind admiration. (‘Poor lady!’ thought Ellen; ‘She were better love a dream.’)

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A murd’rous guilt shows not itself more soon (said Mary Ann) Than love that would seem hid: love’s night is noon. O Herbert, by the roses of the spring, By maidihood, honour, truth and every thing, I love thee so that, maugre all thy pride, Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.

Mary Ann gasped at the realization of what she was saying. Do not extort thy reasons from this clause, For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause; But rather reason thus with reason fetter: Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.

Mary Ann Hillier did not say any of this, obviously. Her heart was tore in libbets. Was it true, in any case, that love sought was good but given unsought was better? That’s how it felt to the martyred giver, certainly; but to the receiver, love unsought was a pain in the neck. It did not flatter; it was beaten off with a bad grace, or shunned altogether. It was like unwanted wallpaper. Here was the lesson that Julia Margaret Cameron failed to learn every day of her life: simply, that one-way passion scares people off; it doesn’t work. Ellen saw Mary Ann’s hopeless attachment, and felt sorry for it. She suddenly realized how impossible it was to love in return just because someone loves you very much first. The delicacy of the situation required Shakespeare to help her out. Forever after, when Ellen played Viola to crowds of adoring play-goers, her heart broke for her own dear Olivia, the sweet and beautiful (but very dim) Mary Ann, whom gently she rejected that momentous night in Freshwater. By innocence I swear, and by my youth, I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth, And that no woman has; nor never none Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.

 If Julia thought the day had been a long one, for Emily Tennyson it was the worst birthday since Alfred had asked her in the first year of marriage what was in her pocket. Thinking it was a game, she gaily produced a thimble, and was astounded when he solemnly gave it back to her as a present. ‘I beg you to receive this elegant thimble,’ he said. Since then she had largely hidden the fact of her birthday, and enjoyed it more. Alfred had performed one kindness today, however, by removing

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a roll of that awful wallpaper and disposing of it. No one could find it anywhere. She meant to thank him as soon as she could. It was a thoughtful deed worthy of a great man, and all the better for being utterly uncharacteristic. In all other respects, however, Emily’s birthday had laid her low completely. The battle with the dozen Westminsters had been so enervating that after the arrival of the late-night guests she could not even struggle up to bed unaided, and required Lionel and Alfred to carry her. In the pocket of her night gown she found this morning’s ‘Yours in aversion’ letter which she was about to slip into her bureau with the others when she realized—with a certain frisson—that it had been delivered by hand. Was ‘Yours in aversion’ a local, then? If only her husband were like other men, if only he could stand a bit of mild criticism, none of this tiring subterfuge would be necessary. It was true to say that the more you take on, the more you will be taken advantage of. All lay load on the willing horse. Strangely, it had been quite comforting to see Wilson, the old governess. Emily had no idea Wilson might bear a grudge about not being paid. Was Emily herself paid for her duties in this household? Of course not. What price could be placed on feminine duties? No, she and Wilson had shared almost two happy years, and yes, there had been occasional quarrels over money, but Emily had always forgiven the outbursts. Wilson’s unjust sense of furious grievance would expend itself (she did have quite a temper), and then the two women would get along famously again. ‘Wilson! It is a pleasure to see you, even at this unlikely time of night.’ Emily had thus taken the young woman aside while Alfred and Lionel picked up Dodgson from the carpet and carried him to the door. The whacking of Dodgson did not alarm the old governess. Being accustomed to the Tennysons, she wondered as little as anybody at the croquet mallet forming part of the house’s hospitality. ‘No chance of tea, I suppose?’ Wilson said. Emily laughed and rocked. ‘You and your strange wit, just like old times!’ In the bedroom now, Alfred entered and found her smiling. He decided to take advantage of the good mood. ‘Emily, do you think I should pose for Julia?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘What if I must?’ ‘Must?’ ‘Must.’ She pursed her lips tight. ‘Must?’ she demanded again. ‘We will discuss it tomorrow, Alfred. Wilson was saying I looked peaky, and I

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believe she is right. You must take us both with you on your walk tomorrow.’ ‘Must?’ Alfred began. ‘Yes, must,’ she barked, and then sank to her pillow, all energies disbursed.  Ellen sat alone again. Mary Ann—or Shakespeare’s Olivia, it was all melting together in her mind—had left her. It was no fun reducing a beautiful woman to tears, Ellen thought; why did Watts admire his own handiwork so much? She wiped her eyes and stood up. ‘Mrs Watts?’ She looked around. ‘Mrs Watts?’ It was Lorenzo. Oh heavens, how thrilling. Whenever she saw this man, she felt acutely self-aware, as though her body were swelled by electricity, and moreover outlined by sparks of blue fire. ‘I thought I saw you from upstairs,’ he explained. ‘We are leaving tomorrow.’ Ellen felt a mortal pang, although she knew she was not entitled to it. ‘As are we,’ she admitted. ‘Were the tableaux a success? Was Mr Watts cured of his problem?’ ‘Not entirely. He has forgotten Westminster, but unfortunately remembered something else.’ She smiled at him. She wanted very much to touch his arm, but she held back. She was half afraid the contact might kill him. She lowered her eyes instead. ‘I think my husband and I will soon conclude—oh, that all good things must come to an end.’ ‘Ah. I hope there were other reasons to enjoy your stay?’ Ellen’s body sang so loudly she was amazed he couldn’t hear it. Or perhaps he could. ‘Mr Fowler, I would not have missed it. It’s the sea, you know. The sea throws up all manner of things.’ She raised her eyes. ‘Mrs Fowler, for example.’ Lorenzo did not comment. There was no call for an apology. His wife was a fact. He sniffed his fingers in the dark. ‘You seem unhappy,’ he said at last, tenderly. ‘Not unhappy at all, thank you. I just need courage.’ They looked at the black waves together. ‘You have great courage, Mrs Watts.’ ‘Do I?’ Oh dear, they were getting personal again. Why did every conversation with Lorenzo Fowler have to scream with the sub-text, Please, please, for pity’s sake, touch my head?

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He looked at her. She looked at him. ‘Will you take your hat off this time, Mrs Watts?’ ‘I think I will, Mr Fowler.’ And as the moon broke through cloud above the ink-black bay, Ellen shook the hair out of her hat, pouring it like gold into his hands.

Chapter 15




Next morning, Alfred was just reading mad Uncle Orson’s startling description of sexual frenzy when Emily was wheeled in by Wilson. In her black, pram-like invalid carriage, she looked like a squeezed doll, an image of weakness quite belying either her authority in the household or her influence over the big strapping man who stood myopically before her, his back to the fireplace in authentic baronial manner, while a grey shaggy deer-hound lay at his feet. It was quite true, she reflected, what they said about people and their dogs. ‘Reading your excellent review again, my dear?’ Tennyson took a quick look at the brown cover of the Orson pamphlet. Actually, in appearance it was not unlike the Westminster, a coincidence which might later come in handy—if he wanted, say, to read it again in bed. ‘I am indeed, Emily. Fine words, fine words, and correct in every particular.’ ‘May I see it now, Alfred?’ ‘Mm?’ ‘Will you hand it to me? I think I have strength enough.’ Tennyson hesitated. He doubted his wife would ever have strength enough for the contents of the matter he was reading—which was a shame, but there you go. Thinking quickly, he reached into his coat pocket and withdrew the true Westminster. ‘Another copy,’ he announced ingeniously, and continued to read feverishly about the abomination of women who don’t want to take part. How had Orson Fowler’s curious document found its way into his home? Alfred had no idea that Wilson had brought it. All he knew was that, ambling vaguely down the main stairs this morning, he had discovered it hanging by a thread, exactly placed so that it bumped into his forehead as he made his way to breakfast. What with the apple pie yesterday, and today the contraption with string, people were finally finding ways of drawing things to his attention. ‘This appears to be a periodical called The Train,’ pronounced Emily at last, ‘And it contains Mr Dodgson’s scandalous version of “The Two Voices”.’ Tennyson snatched it back, searched his pocket again, and found the Westminster. These papers all looked too similar. He wondered how librarians managed things at all. Impatiently he took all three pamphlets into one bundle, and cast them on the piano. ‘Do you think we should all go out at once, Emily?’ He wanted to walk alone this morning. He had lots of things on his mind. ‘Why ever should we not?’

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Alfred thought for a reason. He grasped at straws. ‘What if the Queen came, for example?’ ‘Alfred!’ ‘Well, must Wilson accompany us, then?’ he demanded. ‘She is not pleasant company, you must confess. I firmly believe she did not deserve the wages you did not pay her.’ There was an awkward silence, broken by Wilson humming ‘Rock of Ages’, just behind his ear. Emily cleared her throat. ‘She is standing in the room, Alfred.’ ‘Is she?’ he whispered. ‘Three yards to your left, before the window.’ ‘Oh good.’ He thought quickly again. ‘I thought you were a sideboard, my dear!’ He waved an arm of explanation. ‘You admit yourself that you are thick set? Broad of beam? Hm? Shall we be off ?’  And so it was that half an hour later three small black figures could be seen on the down—approaching the high point of the seven-hundred foot cliffs—when Julia set out uphill from Dimbola Lodge with her wretched roll of wallpaper. Cameron had refused to let her spoil the Tennysons’ breakfast with the news of Ada, but she broke out of the house as early as she could. There was an air of finality about the day, for Mr Watts had announced his imminent departure, as had Mr Dodgson, who pored over a piece of paper at breakfast while mysteriously holding a yellow cushion to the side of his head. She had also received a note from Mr Fowler saying that his family must return to London, so bang went the science-meets-art Absence of Hope enterprise as well. Julia hated endings, yet also loved them. She doted on the high-minded melancholy they produced. ‘He is gone, he is gone!’ was the sort of picture she loved above all to produce—a long face in profile, bereft of love. Luckily, Mary Ann had been looking positively hangdog recently. A period of excellent droopy-servant Art was therefore on the cards.  Dodgson spent his morning trading in safety pins and pictures, and bits of ornament, and writing a tortured letter to Ellen. It was conceived in kindness, as a present, but luckily Mrs Watts had become accustomed to presents of a cheap, disappointing nature. For here was yet another.

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My dear Mrs Watts [he wrote] I hope you will indulge an author’s wish, and allow me to include this little poem in my Alice, so that you may then justly claim to have inspired my book in some small, private way (if not in any big one). You will recognize at once its close allusions to the proceedings of this strange week at Freshwater, but at the same time appreciate my efforts to cloak them in terms that will make the poem a private matter between us. The system for decoding the below is a simple one, and I shall never disclose it to a living soul.

(Here followed a highly complicated system of ‘him’ for ‘her’ in lines of even number, and so on. It was obvious to anybody that this was not a system at all, but an excuse for an insulting and empty gift.) The matter of the safety pins in stanza three [he concluded] can be readily comprehended when I tell you that Mr Bradley will send them to you this morning. He has sent me a most polite note telling me I need not call for them myself.

Ellen had no idea what Mr Dodgson’s instructions meant. She also had no idea why he would write her a poem about safety pins. He seemed to be telling her, in certain terms, that Alice was not written for her, but at least this poem was. So she tossed the instructions aside and read the attached. They told me you had been to her And mentioned me to him: She gave me a good character, But said I could not swim.

(‘Well, that last bit is true at least,’ thought Ellen. ‘Come, this is not too difficult.’) He sent them word I had not gone (We know it to be true): If she should push the matter on, What would become of you?

(‘What indeed?’ she commented.) I gave her one, they gave him two, You gave us three or more; They all returned from him to you Though they were mine before.

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(Ellen’s heart began to sink. She re-read the stanza twice, and pushed on.) If I or she should chance to be Involved in this affair, He trusts to you to set them free Exactly as they were.

Ellen stopped reading. She had reached the bottom of the sheet. She turned over. There was more. My notion was that you had been (Before she had this fit) An obstacle that came between Him, and ourselves, and it. Don’t let him know she liked them best, For this must ever be A secret kept from all the rest Between yourself and me.

Ellen put it down. She felt her age had doubled since last night, and with the new-found authority of sadness (which suited her), she tore Mr Dodgson’s poem in pieces. ‘A secret kept from all the rest between yourself and me,’ she recited. ‘It will certainly be that, Mr Dodgson. It will certainly be that.’ Watts opened the door. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked, coolly. ‘I am,’ said his little wife, in a grown-up voice. As she looked at him now, she could never imagine being in awe of him again. He walked away, but she recalled him. ‘Come back!’ she cried, using a professional diaphragm technique which would soon come in handy again. ‘Come back, I have something important to say.’ This sounded promising; Watts turned. ‘What is it?’ She smiled and raised her eyebrows. It was lucky she knew Mr Dodgson’s book by heart. ‘Keep your temper,’ she said.  It was a fine day; the effect of last night’s storm had been to break the hot weather, and today small clouds scudded inland over the Needles and across the

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chalk. At the bay, seaweed in ugly heaps had appeared on the sand, stirred up by last night’s waves, and was now stinking like sulphur, making little girls run squealing, holding their noses. Julia loved the seaweed smell, for it was similar to her photographic chemicals, which betokened freedom and happiness, and a chance to do something beautiful in an otherwise humdrum life. In the confusions of the last few days she had taken few photographs; when her guests had all departed she would again have the leisure but not the subjects. It was annoying how things always worked out that way. But she must hurry to Alfred. There were so many things to say. He would be walking on the down this fine morning, and she must tell him she was sorry for the review, and that of course he must sit for her only if he wished it in his heart. Second, that Ada Wilson was a threat to Emily (though she still did not believe it). Also, she would take the opportunity of returning the wallpaper—and let him toss it from the cliff if he wanted. So with the wallpaper in her arms, she toiled up the steep path to Tennyson’s favourite walk, and was only half-way when she spied the tiny black figures and counted them. They were three. The upright one with the hat—a bit like a chimney-stack—was certainly Alfred; her heart leapt at that. The little box-shaped one was Emily (her heart subsided again). But who— dear God—was the third?  Back at Farringford, Lionel roamed the garden. He examined the Garibaldi tree, which alas, had not budged overnight; and though he pushed it hard with his good foot, it stood firm. Still pinned to it was a copy of the Westminster Quarterly, but it was drenched and ruined. Not for the first time, Lionel wished he could be sent away to school like other boys. At Freshwater, it was not much fun being a child, when all the interesting imaginative games were played exclusively by the grown-ups. ‘Lionel!’ He turned to see Jessie and a strange woman approaching the house. Lionel gave them a cool wave, and sauntered towards them. He was well aware that Jessie thought him handsome. He expected to work his charm on the woman too. ‘Remember, Jessie,’ Lydia whispered. ‘We must not alarm Lionel by asking too directly about Ada. He is only a child.’ Jessie nodded in a grown-up fashion. How awful it must be, she thought, to have people regard you as only a child. ‘This is my Mama,’ said Jessie proudly. ‘Are your folks about?’ ‘I’m afraid my Father and Mother are on the cliff,’ he explained, showing a good profile as he turned to point. ‘Oh,’ said Lydia. This was all a bit delicate. How do you ask a ten-year-old boy whether a maniac has called, without alarming him?

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‘Are your parents well?’ she asked, at last. Lionel thought about it. ‘Not exactly,’ he answered candidly. ‘But then they never are.’ He giggled, and Jessie joined in. ‘We wondered whether anyone strange has been here,’ Lydia continued. But again Lionel was obtuse. ‘Define strange,’ he said, wistfully. At this point Jessie interceded. She couldn’t see the point of all this pussyfoot. ‘We are looking for Ada Wilson; she’s dangerous,’ she snapped. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ said Lionel. ‘She’s gone with my parents on their walk.’ Lydia handed her umbrella and hat to Jessie, and hitched up her skirts. ‘Which way did they go?’ ‘Through the green gate, I expect. Father always goes that way.’ ‘May Jessie stay here with you?’ Lionel pursed his lips, and shrugged his assent. ‘Come on, then,’ he said, without much enthusiasm, and led his little guest indoors. Tennyson’s second son may or may not have inherited the black blood of the family, but he was certainly a splinter off the old door-post in other ways. Lydia Fowler picked up her heels and sprinted towards the cliff. ‘I’ll show you a parody Mr Dodgson wrote of father’s poetry,’ said Lionel, as they walked indoors. ‘A poem by Mr Dodgson?’ remarked the little girl, sardonically. ‘That will be fun. Perhaps we could give each other smallpox as well.’  And where was Lorenzo? Lydia’s husband was at Dimbola, to take his apologetic leave of Mrs Cameron (who was not there) and offer Ada’s old job to Mary Ryan (who was). The house was otherwise deserted: the Wattses had left, and Mr Dodgson was on board a coach to Shanklin (unbelievably) for another seaside holiday, and another batch of little girls. But what a bombshell for Mary Ryan. She was astonished at Mr Fowler’s offer, and blushed a vivid pink. She shut the drawing room door behind her, and begged him to lower his voice. It would be terrible if Mary Ann heard anything of this—so it was unfortunate that when she shut the door, Mary Ann was lurking outside, and got her hair caught in the jamb. They stood in the drawing room looking at each other, Mary Ryan and Mr Fowler. Mary Ryan didn’t know what to say. Lorenzo, on the other hand, could think of plenty. ‘You have such well developed Individuality, Mary,’ explained Lorenzo. ‘How

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can you stay here, away from the world? You have such spirit, it should not be squandered. And you have a desire for a good marriage, too. But whom will you meet if you stay here? We, the Phrenological Fowlers, can offer you travel and glamour, even trips to the United States of America. Really, Mary, you must leave Mrs Cameron and come with us. We could take you this very day!’ Mary hesitated. It was true she loved the sound of travel and glamour. And it was true that she felt frustrated at Dimbola Lodge. There comes a point when ministering to gloomy high-brows gets a bit samey. Also, her photographic modelling career was rubbish. ‘I don’t know.’ Her face crumpled with indecision. But it was then that Lorenzo Fowler—for all his experience in flattery, and for all his enormous Human Nature—made a bad move. ‘We could take you away with us today,’ he repeated. ‘Mrs Cameron is a delightful employer, no doubt, but how can I forget what you said at my lecture— that you stay here only for indebtedness, not gratitude.’ Mary looked at him. ‘Did I say that?’ ‘You did.’ ‘I would never say such a thing.’ ‘In your trance you said it, Mary. And anything said when mesmerized comes from the heart of hearts.’ Mary coloured up. She felt ashamed. Was she really not grateful to Mrs Cameron? Was she really such a bad, unchristian girl? Lorenzo felt her slipping away, but didn’t know what to do. ‘Please don’t condemn yourself for your lack of gratitude, Mary. It is the most natural thing in the world. We phrenologists have discovered scientific evidence that gratitude scarcely exists. See these earlobes of mine, for example?’ And he thrust his face towards her. Mary struggled, she bit her lip, she looked quizzically at his earlobes. Finally, she spoke. Her mind was made up. ‘Thank you for your offer, Mr Fowler. I will always remember it. And I am sure I will never have another to match it. But perhaps my Individuality is too strongly developed for my own good. For, if only to prove to you that gratitude is not an accident of the earlobe, but a proper Christian virtue, I will remain with Mrs Cameron, who has been so kind to me. Without her kindness, I would probably be dead. Matrimonially, I shall take my chances here. Travel and glamour I hereby renounce.’ She sank in a chair. Such a big articulate speech was rarely required of the maids at Dimbola Lodge, but she always had it in her, and it came out very well indeed. Lorenzo, who should really have applauded, was disgruntled, and left the

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room. Opening the door, he released Mary Ann, who sprang back, and then rushed in. Her mouth was agape like a big ‘O’. ‘Mary Ryan! Harken to you! Lor a massey!’ she laughed in amazement, with her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t,’ said Mary Ryan. ‘Please don’t.’ ‘Just wait till Mrs Caameron hear this, buoy!’ exclaimed the stupid girl. ‘Mary Ryan, if you doan’t need your head examined!’  Up on the windy cliff, with no idea of the interest they were causing, the Tennysons proceeded in their usual manner. ‘Emily, listen,’ said Alfred He marked a place in his book. ‘With blackest moss the flower-plots Were thickly crusted, one and all: The rusted nails fell from the knots That held the pear to the gable wall.’

‘What of it?’ asked Emily, leaning over to pick an orchid. ‘It’s Mariana again. You changed peach to pear, I know that.’ ‘I am considering further emendations, my dear. “Garden wall” to “gable wall”. It is a great improvement?’ Emily shrugged. ‘What do you think, Wilson?’ They both turned to the strange woman in black, who had hardly spoken. ‘I think I’d like to take you for a little walk by ourselves,’ she said. ‘Poetry and fresh air never did mix.’ ‘Good idea!’ boomed Tennyson, and turned to survey the blue of sea and sky, while Wilson, with a mad laugh, kicked off the brake of Emily’s carriage, and pushed it fast in the direction of the cliff edge. The carriage had been built for this clifftop terrain, but it was murder nevertheless. Its big wheels bucked and slithered at the best of times, and now Wilson was pushing it much too fast. ‘Hold on, Wilson,’ commanded Emily. The bumping was making her teeth dance, and her brain bounce in her head. ‘No, you hold on,’ sneered Wilson. ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘Oh, it’s not respectable to beg. I’m sure you told me that, Mrs Tennyson. I’m sure you mentioned it many times.’

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The invalid carriage came to a halt in a little hollow, and Emily caught her breath. Something was wrong here. Wilson was much weirder than she remembered. ‘Alfred!’ she called. But either the wind was too loud, or her voice was too soft, because he could not hear. And as for seeing her, there never was a man to whom ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ more aptly applied. Currently, he was whispering ‘garden-gable-garden-gable’ to himself, oblivious. ‘Wilson?’ ‘Yes, Mrs Tennyson.’ ‘Is there something you wish to say to me?’ Wilson laughed again. Emily turned to look at her. ‘I wish you’d stop laughing in that sinister way, and start explaining yourself. Look, Mrs Cameron is coming towards us. We will discuss any grievance you have when we return to the house, but at present, I wish to speak with my friend, even though—oh no, how can I bear it?—she is bringing me another roll of that infernal wallpaper.’ ‘Are you telling me you did not receive my letters?’ said Wilson, nastily. ‘Letters?’ ‘I wrote them twice a week for a year, Mrs Tennyson. A hard thing not to notice.’ Letters? Instinctively, Emily felt in her pocket, and produced the latest ‘Yours in aversion’. ‘Is this you?’ ‘Yes.’ Emily could scarcely believe it. She had always pictured ‘Yours in aversion’ as a failed, impoverished poet expiring from the strength of his own body odour somewhere near Hungerford Stairs, with dandruff and no coals. Emily looked at the letter and shook her head in disbelief. ‘I have read none of these letters since the first,’ she told Wilson, in firm tones. ‘Anonymous letters are vile and cowardly, Wilson. I have—I have thrown them all away.’ ‘What?’ Though Wilson stood behind her, Emily could tell she had struck home. ‘And now,’ said Emily, ‘I will dispose of this one also.’ Wilson reached forward to grab it from her hand, but Emily cast it in the air. Caught by the wind, it soared away uphill like a child’s kite. Wilson yelped. ‘You beast!’ she screamed, and scampered after her handiwork. Emily laughed and slapped her knees. How stupid Wilson was. Alfred was right: the girl had not deserved the wages she had not been paid. At which point, with Mrs Cameron toiling towards her just fifty yards off, Emily’s invalid carriage started trundling downhill, brakeless and without a rudder. ‘Alfred!’ called Emily, as she felt the wheels begin to turn. ‘Alfred!’ But the carriage was travelling quite fast now, downward and seaward,

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straight towards Julia, across the grass and chalk (‘Alfred!’), gathering speed and bumping from wheel to wheel. Julia, who heard the cry downwind, looked up and saw a sight which filled her with a mixture of panic and euphoria, guilt and elation. She stopped and put her hand to her mouth. For this was exactly the picture she had conjured jealously for herself a hundred times, Emily freewheeling towards a certain doom—except that sprinting over the hill behind came Lydia Fowler, waving and yelling. ‘I’m coming,’ shouted Lydia, pushing past Tennyson, who still gazed out to sea, impervious. ‘Stop that carriage! Let me through, I’m a professor!’ ‘And I’m coming too!’ yelled Julia. Emily’s carriage was bouncing and veering now like india rubber as it gathered speed, and it was hard to guess exactly the path it would take, but as it closed on Julia it swerved to the right, directly towards the cliff edge. Julia froze. Her heart drummed in her chest. What could she do? Well, she could get rid of this wallpaper for a start. And so it was that with fantastic presence of mind, Julia heaved the wallpaper into the air. It flew, it arced, and time stopped. And then it landed in front of the lady’s wheels, just ten feet from the edge. The runaway carriage stopped with a jerk, its black-clad passenger shot out with a scream, and the rest was a blank, because Julia—understandably in the circumstances— collapsed in a dead faint. When Alfred was finally roused to the situation, it was mostly under control. Lydia, with typical efficiency, had restored Emily to her carriage, revived Julia’s unconscious form with a practised slap, and restrained the would-be murderess by wrapping her in wallpaper, which was the only material to hand. ‘Very good quality stuff,’ she remarked, as she worked. ‘Well, I’m glad somebody thinks so,’ said Julia. Alfred was nonplussed by the presence of so many people on his cliff at once, but considering that two of them had helped save the life of his dearest Emily, decided to be big about it. He produced some embroidery silks from his pocket which helped tie the wallpaper more securely around the prisoner. And then, having decided definitely in favour of ‘gable’, he suggested they all walk home. ‘She wanted to kill me, Alfred.’ Tennyson didn’t know what to say. He looked around at the clouds and sky. ‘Well, Emily. She couldn’t have chosen a finer day.’  As they walked back across the down from their adventure, they little knew how they were spotted from afar by a lady in a fine carriage, bowling away from Farringford. It is always a nuisance to call on the off-chance and find the whole family from home, but it is even more of a nuisance if you are Queen Victoria and

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have popped in for an edifying recital of In Memoriam, to remind you of your poor dear dead Albert. It is worth remembering here that the Tennysons had lived in hopes of such a visit for ten years. As has been mentioned before, they even kept a plum-cake on the off-chance (or they thought they did—Lionel and Hallam had eaten it). ‘The Queen came, father,’ said Lionel, as the solemn bedraggled party made their way indoors. Lydia laughed. ‘No, it’s true, Ma,’ said Jessie. ‘She was here ten minutes ago, you just missed her. Why is Ada done up like the Elgin Marbles? Is it a game?’ ‘The Queen?’ said Tennyson, blankly. ‘The Queen? No, no.’ He sank into a chair, and allowed a small sob to escape him. ‘I hope you were courteous, Lionel,’ said Emily. ‘I gave her a copy of Enoch Arden, father, and she seemed very pleased to have it. And I also suggested that you would be glad to read it to her.’ ‘Well done, boy.’ Alfred was torn between a desire to hug the boy, and to hack his own head off with a ceremonial axe. ‘But there was a strange thing,’ Lionel added, in that handsome nonchalant way of his. ‘When I left the room to get the book for her, there were three copies of that brown review thing over there on the piano. And when I came back, there were only two.’ ‘She has taken your excellent review, my dear!’ Alfred and Julia exchanged glances. On the walk back from the cliff, she had explained about not expecting thanks for the review. She had explained that she was sorry. But now that Queen Victoria would read Julia’s handiwork, and be terribly impressed, she felt prouder than ever of her perfect gift. ‘Oh, may I see it, too?’ said Lydia. She went to have a look. ‘Ah yes, a copy of the Westminster Quarterly,’ she said, picking it up. ‘And The Train. I don’t know this, is it good? You are fortunate, Mr Tennyson, that the Queen did not pick up the wrong thing here! They are so alike!’ Alfred was still so mentally enfeebled by his terrible luck at missing the monarch that he didn’t at first appreciate the full force of Mrs Fowler’s news. ‘You seem pale, Alfred,’ said Emily. ‘Yet I am safe and sound! I think this is a special occasion. Come, we shall have some tea.’ Jessie and Lionel cheered. ‘And we shall cut the plum-cake!’ Jessie, unaccountably, found herself cheering alone. But meanwhile Tennyson remained silent. He knew there was horror lurking in Mrs Fowler’s innocent words. He just had to pin it down. Slowly he made a cal-

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culation. After the Queen left the room, the Westminster was still there; and The Train. Which meant—which meant— As he finally fell in, the sound that escaped him was a suitable combination of gasping and drowning. The Queen, at this minute, rattling towards East Cowes, held the sexual ravings of Orson S. Fowler in her commodious black silk lap. Had Alfred been asked that morning the worst potential mishap that could befall Orson’s time bomb, he might have pictured Lionel reading it, or Emily. Now, however, Queen Victoria would hop into her four-poster tonight at Osborne House, and scream the place down. He was ruined. It was all up. All he could do was pray. No one would notice. He closed his eyes. ‘Almighty God,’ he began. ‘Save me from this and I will—’ He paused. What bargain could he strike with the almighty? After all, he was already such a Christian man. He opened his eyes for a clue, and spied his dear friend Julia being brave about the Elgin Marbles wallpaper, while adjusting her bothersome lace cap. He closed his eyes again. In his heart of hearts, he knew what he had to do.  Two days later, Julia Margaret Cameron sat at her window in her quiet time, while Mary Ryan read to her from Maud. She had heard about Mary Ryan’s stout and loyal speech to Lorenzo Fowler, and was so heartened by it that she promised the girl more starring parts in the photographs from now on, and also less watercarrying, which was a relief. Mary Ann, who had thought herself rather clever to pass on the story to her mistress, now cleaned silver in the exile of the kitchen, and couldn’t quite work out what had happened. Mary Ryan always read beautifully. She had a poetic soul. Julia listened to her now while watching Tennyson’s gate, with tears rolling from her eyes. ‘Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown. For a breeze of morning moves, And the planet of Love is on high, Beginning to faint in the light that she loves On a bed of daffodil sky, To faint in the light of the sun she loves, To faint in his light, and to die.’

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The air had taken a chill this morning. Julia shivered. Ah, yes. To faint in the light of the sun she loves; to faint in his light and to die. She wiped her cheeks with her shawl. ‘Oh Mary. Mr Tennyson is a very great man.’ Kindly, Mary took her hand and squeezed it. ‘He is so.’ ‘He has a great gift.’ ‘Is that the same?’ ‘He makes the sun come out.’ ‘I know.’ Julia was so taken with this thought that she didn’t straight away notice the Tennyson gate swing open, and her darling Alfred appear, waving his hat at her window. Just like the vision of Emily on the cliff, it would be like a dream coming true. ‘Come into the garden, Julia!’ he called. She looked down. ‘Come into the garden,’ he called again. And then she properly saw him, stark and black amongst her white roses, and her heart filled with joy. She flung open the sash. ‘Alfred!’ ‘I have a note from the Queen, my dear. All is well! All is very well indeed!’ He produced the letter from his pocket, and held it close to his eyes. ‘She says she was never more happily diverted than by the reading matter she obtained from my house—that it made her think more than ever of her poor dear Albert!’ ‘Alfred, I am so glad she loved Enoch Arden. It is a great poem, full of loss.’ Alfred frowned. Enoch Arden? Who mentioned Enoch Arden? He scanned the note again, puzzled. ‘Oh yes, here it is! Yes, she says thank you for the book of poems too.’ Julia had never seen him so playful or so handsome. She scurried from her bedroom and ran downstairs, reaching the garden just as he plucked a white rose—at last, a white rose!—and held it to his face. Her heart broke. ‘I’m so glad you came to tell me,’ she said. ‘And I hope you have forgiven me, Alfred. It’s just that, well, I would give anything, and when—’ ‘I have decided to sit for you, Julia.’ Julia caught her breath and adjusted a shawl. She looked around at her lovely roses. The day was so very beautiful. The soul of the rose went into her blood. ‘Sit for me? Oh, but Alfred! Only if your heart desires it.’ ‘I will sit for you—’ and here he made a special, enormous effort, so difficult that you could almost hear his soul creak—‘with pleasure.’

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‘You will?’ ‘I will.’ He removed his hat and bowed his amazing, famous, enormous head before her. She reached out, as if to touch it. ‘It’s all for you,’ he said.

Appendix




neither mrs cameron nor g. f. watts produced an ‘Absence of Hope’. But Watts’s curiously pessimistic painting ‘Hope’—in which a blindfold figure on a buoy listens to the last string on a broken lyre, and doesn’t look especially cheered up by it—became his best-known work. At one time, it was as famous as Holman Hunt’s ‘Light of the World’, and it brought solace in unlikely places. After their defeat in the 1967 war, Egyptian troops were distributed with reproductions of ‘Hope’. What they made of this peculiar choice of consolation prize is not recorded. Mrs Cameron, meanwhile, decided that the phrenological route to perfect abstract expressions was not the only one, and to generate the right demeanour for her picture ‘Despair’ she simply locked the sitter in a cupboard. jessie fowler became a famous phrenologist in her own right. She continued to help her parents in their lifetimes, and then pressed on alone, back in New York, writing widely on such arcane matters as ‘The Psychology of Arkansas’. She became an expert on child psychology. She never married. Meanwhile, Lorenzo—that ‘prince of mental scientists’—lived to his eighties. Despite a stroke three years earlier, he accepted a model skull at the Phrenological Centenary in Queen’s Hall, during a programme which included music from the Aeolian Ladies Orchestra, and a blindfold examination by Jessie. Back in Boston, Orson Fowler continued to hoe a lonely row, and was publicly reviled for such publications as Private Lectures on Perfect Men, Women and Children, in Happy Families, which included chapters on ‘Just How Love-Making Should be Conducted’ and ‘Male and Female Electricity’. His Sexual Science at the Boston Public Library today has the obscure shelf-mark ‘Inferno’, and cannot be traced. Presumably, it was burned. the marriage of Ellen Terry and G. F. Watts did not survive many months. Ellen returned to her family home, where she received many visits from C. L. Dodgson. In the divorce proceedings, some years later, a difference of temperament was mentioned. In her chirpy memoirs, however, Ellen suggests that ‘a difference of occupation’ would have been nearer the mark. Bumping into Watts one day in a street in Brighton, she records, ‘He told me I had grown!’ Outside a jeweller’s shop in Bond Street, she once saw Tennyson in his carriage. ‘How very nice you look in daytime!’ he remarked. ‘Not like an actress.’ alfred tennyson sat for umpteen portraits by Julia Margaret Cameron. She took over 1,200 images in all, and is rightly regarded as a great pioneer photog-

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rapher. In terms of exposure and aesthetic composition, her solemn big-head pictures are unparalleled. Dimbola Lodge still stands, with its view of the sea intact, and is currently under renovation as a museum. Of her portraits of Tennyson, the poet’s favourite showed a profile, in which the full glory of his unwashed neck is visible for the world to gaze on in perpetuity. He named it ‘The Dirty Monk’, and once wrote beneath it a characteristic imprimatur, ‘This I like best of all my portraits, except one by Mayall.’ farringford also still stands, as a hotel, with a pitch-and-putt on the lawn and croquet mallets in the hall. On Saturday nights is held a dinner-dance, to be avoided at all costs. Through some meteorological mishap, the Garibaldi tree is a gaunt bare trunk, but it is still sturdy and very tall, and pierces the horizon like a needle. Until recently, Alfred’s study was reached by way of an entertaining sign in Gothic script, ‘Tennyson’s Library and Colour Television’. The base of his spiral staircase was blocked by a fruit machine. mary ryan, though not a natural actress, appeared in photographs after this time, and made an amazingly good marriage as a result. Henry Cotton spotted her in Mrs Cameron’s ‘Prospero and Miranda’ at the Colnaghi Gallery, and fell in love. They were married in 1867. Henry Cotton was later knighted. Mrs Cameron celebrated their love by posing them, rather thoughtlessly, as King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. enoch arden sold extremely well, as did Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. One of these works has survived rather better than the other in the national memory, but no simple moral is to be deduced from this. A late flurry of bad feeling between Dodgson and Tennyson took place in 1870, when Dodgson applied to the poet— with extreme niceness—for his permission to read a bootlegged copy of a poem called ‘The Window’. There is a certain unpublished poem of yours, called ‘The Window’, which it seems was printed for private circulation only. However it has been transcribed, and is in my hands in the form of MS. A friend, who has had a MS copy given to him, has in his turn presented me with one. I have not even read it yet & shall do so with much greater pleasure when I know that you do not object to my possessing it. What I plead for is, first, that you will make me comfortable in possessing this copy by giving your consent to my preserving it— secondly, the further permission to show it to my friends. I can hardly go so far as ask leave to give away copies of it to friends, tho’ I should esteem such permission as a great favour.

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This is an extract from the whole letter. A shorter reply came from Emily Tennyson. DEAR SIR,

It is useless troubling Mr Tennyson with a request which will only revive the annoyance he has already had on the subject & will add to it. No doubt ‘The Window’ is circulated by means of the same unscrupulous person whose breach of confidence placed ‘The Lover’s Tale’ in your hands. It would be well that whatever may be done by such people, a gentleman should understand that when an author does not give his works to the public he has his own reasons for it. Yours truly, EMILY TENNYSON

Dodgson insisted on an apology, but did not receive one. The friendship was at an end. daisy (Margaret Louisa) grew up to be a prolific novelist. She became Mrs Woods, and was seen by Dodgson in 1833, acting Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. Her father, the Dean of Westminster, officiated at Tennyson’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1892. watts was commissioned to sculpt a statue of Tennyson after his death, and it stands in the Close at Lincoln Cathedral. It shows a stooped figure with a big dog, looking down at his open hand with a puzzled expression. It is known to locals as ‘The Disappointed Cabbie’. After his separation from Ellen Terry, Watts continued to paint excellent portraits and bad walls, still perversely preferring the latter. In the 1870s he bought a house of his own at Freshwater, which presumably surprised everyone. His second marriage was to another energetic woman, who built him a stunning Arts and Crafts chapel at Compton in Surrey. Mrs Cameron took a photograph of the second Mrs Watts with her sisters, all in their shifts. As if to make up for the Maud reference hidden in ‘Choosing’, the subject for the photograph was ‘The Rosebud Garden of Girls’. Despite his general good luck, Watts’s most famous statement remains ‘Often I sit among the ruins of my aspirations, watching the tide of time’, and photographs show a man who appears to have had his backbone removed. He is due a revival, however, especially since he missed out so badly by not joining the PreRaphaelites (who didn’t want him). On hearing that Watts was about to tackle the

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walls of a country house, William Morris is supposed to have commented, ‘A coat of whitewash would soon set that right.’ In 1875, the camerons departed from Freshwater Bay. Mr Cameron announced a desire to see his estates in Ceylon, possibly to check that Julia had not given them away. Mrs Cameron died in Ceylon in 1879, looking at a sunset from her deathbed. Her last word was ‘beautiful’. Mr Cameron, twenty years her senior, miraculously survived her. Surrounded by his sons as he lay dying, he declared himself happier than Priam. A minister, waiting outside, sent in a message, offering to read the Bible to him. Mr Cameron considered the proposal. His last words therefore were, ‘If you think it would be any comfort to him, let him come in.’

Going Loco A C o m e d y o f Te r r o r s




Part One Chapter 1




Since being the heroine of her own life was never quite to be Belinda’s fate, we may as well begin with Neville. Belinda was a real person, while Neville was an imaginary rat with acrobatic skills; but since he inhabited the pit of her stomach, their destinies were inextricable. Since Christmas, at least, they had started each day together, and if either performed an action independently—well, neither knew nor cared. Belinda would wake, and at the first choke of anxiety concerning the day to come, Neville commenced preliminary tumbling. Belinda clutched her throat; Neville donned a body stocking and tested his trampoline. It was pretty alarming sometimes, a bit too vivid, especially for someone who had never been particularly drawn to the romance of the Big Top. But she had no control over it. By the time Belinda was dressed and committed to the beat-the-clock panic that seemed to have become her waking life, Neville was juggling flaming brands on a unicycle and calling authentic acrobat noises such as ‘Hup!’ and ‘Hip!’ and ‘Hi-yup!’ Belinda did once mention Neville to Stefan, but since her husband’s own alimentary canal had never been domicile to a rat in spangles, he didn’t know how to react. Being a clever Swedish person, he was eager to learn new idioms, new English phrases, which was why Belinda sometimes gambled that he might understand something emotionally foreign to him as well. But when Belinda complained, ‘And now I’ve got a rat in my stomach,’ he had merely looked up from his book, sighed a bit, and turned down the volume on Abba: Gold. ‘A rat?’ he queried. ‘This is a turned-up book.’ ‘Mm,’ she agreed. They listened to Abba for a bit. Stefan mouthed the words. Perhaps under the influence of the song, Belinda found herself staring at the ceiling, wishing she were somewhere else instead. His scientific mind slid into gear. ‘What sort of rat? Rattus norwegicus?’ ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. No, the name Neville had no ring of Scandinavia. ‘He’s more of an acrobatic rat. In tights. With a high wire and parasol.’ Stefan gave her one of his steady, serious smiles; she broke the gaze, as always, by pulling a silly face, because its intensity scared her. ‘You’re working too hard,’ he said, quietly. ‘Jack is a dull boy, I think.’ ‘I know, I know. Of course I am. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’ ‘So why do you invent a rat? Why not say, “Stefan, my old Dutch, help. I’m working my trousers to the bone, but I just can’t beat the clock”?’

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Belinda pouted. ‘I don’t think I did invent him. I can feel him doing backflips.’ Abba started singing ‘The Name of the Game’. Stefan turned up the volume again. At which point Neville walked on his front paws through her intestinal tract, gripping a beach-ball between his back feet. ‘Ta-da!’ he cried.  A couple of things need to be made clear about Belinda Johansson. First, she was not Swedish (obviously). Second, she was under the rather hilarious illusion that she had a hard life, when in fact she had an enviable existence as a freelance literary critic and creative writer in some demand, living in one of the better bits of South London. And third, if she saw an abandoned sock on the bathroom floor, she would glare at it defensively rather than pick it up and sling it into a laundry bag. This last tendency may not sound too bad, but as any slattern can attest, neglected balled-up socks have a talent for embodying reproach. ‘I’m still here,’ the sock will tell you, in an irritating sing-song tone, on your next five visits to the bathroom. ‘I’m going crusty now. And I believe I missed the wash on Sunday morning.’ Belinda’s healthy intelligence would not allow her to be browbeaten by mouldy hosiery, which was why she wouldn’t stoop to silencing its reproaches by simply tidying it up. But add this insinuating sock to the pile of attention-seeking newspapers in the kitchen (‘We’re still here too, lady!’), the ancient wine corks accumulating fluff and grease (‘Remember us?’), and the deadline for her latest potboiler (‘Tuesday, or else’), plus the pressure on her long-term book on literary doubles (‘You bitch! I can’t do it on my own!’) and you begin to understand why Belinda was giving house room to the rat. The deadlines alone she might have managed. It was the cacophony of reproach from all fucking directions in this fucking, fucking house that she couldn’t tolerate much longer. It’s sad but true that, had Belinda’s DNA not tragically lacked the genetic code for basic household organization, none of the following story need have taken place. You couldn’t feel sorry for her, and nobody did. Many women had more responsibilities than Belinda, with considerably fewer advantages. At the nice age of thirty-six, she lived in a nice, large Victorian villa in Armadale Road, Battersea, with a nice, rather entertaining Swedish husband she’d met well into her thirties. Her work was nice, too—compiling a serious literary book alongside more lucrative horsy stuff for girls. On this Monday morning in February she was about to deliver A Rosette for Verity and collect three thousand pounds. The Swede was a

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senior scientist, so the Johanssons had money. Only Stefan’s habit of perusing Over-reach Your English for Foreigners on the toilet each morning could be seen as a cause of strain. Unfortunately, however, the justice of Belinda’s complaints was not the point. The point was, her body was a twenty-four-hour adrenaline pumping station. And at the time this story starts, Belinda’s behaviour was deteriorating badly. She had caught herself waving two fingers at the postman from behind the curtains, just because he innocently delivered more post. ‘Take it away,’ she yelled. ‘Don’t bring it, take it away!’ A magazine editor had rung up with the offer of a laughably easy horse-tackle column (she’d coveted it for years), and instead of saying, ‘That’s great!’, she’d barked, ‘Do you think I just sit here with my thumb up my bum waiting for you to ring? Get a life, for God’s sake.’ At the supermarket, she had rammed her trolley into that of a dithering pensioner, saying, ‘Look, have you got a job?’ In short, the flight-or-fight mechanism Nature gave Belinda for emergencies had gone horribly haywire, as if someone had removed the knob, and lost it. Stefan would tell her to take off the weight, or hang loose. Stefan was one of those people who has a regular job—or even, in recidivist lapses, a ‘yob’—who attends college in office hours, and comes home in the evening to relax. In about fifteen years, he would retire. True, a certain amount of research was required of him, but it was no skin off his nose, as he was proud of remarking. Why Belinda made such a meal of things, he didn’t know. So things came to a head in that pleasant suicide month of February, on a Monday morning. Belinda was racing out of her agreeable house at nine thirtyfive for a ten a.m. train from Clapham Junction, and there was (for once) the faintest chance she would make it. She felt terrible, afflicted by a painful and humiliating dream in which she had punched Madonna on the nose for hijacking her car, only to discover that the passengers were all disabled children. This was not the sort of dream to be dislodged easily. The children had waved accusing crutches at her through the car windows, and though she’d grovelled to Madonna, she’d woken unforgiven and felt like a murderer. Meanwhile, the manuscript of A Rosette for Verity had done its usual job of transmogrifying into a bowling ball in her shoulder-bag. She was brushing her hair with one hand and fumbling for bus-fare with the other, and Neville was helpfully practising trapeze. ‘Steady on, Neville,’ she muttered absently. And then the telephone rang in the hall. ‘Oh bugger,’ she said, as the phone trilled. Oh no. She flailed about, as if caught in quicksand. Here she was, late already, hair not dry, feeling sick with guilt about the poor crippled kiddies, and wearing a strange fashionable black

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slidy nylon coat she’d allowed her mother to buy her, which made her feel like an impostor. ‘Ring-ring,’ it said, as she passed. ‘Nope,’ she told it. ‘Ring-ring,’ it persisted. ‘Remember me?’ So she snatched up the receiver and answered the phone. Why? Because life’s like that. It’s a rule. The later you are, the less time you can give to it, the more vulnerable you are to far-fetched misgivings. What if it’s the publisher phoning to cancel? Or Stefan with his head caught in some railings? All her life, Belinda’s idea of an emergency was someone with their head caught in some railings. ‘Hello?’ A high-pitched male voice with an Ulster accent. A friendly voice, but nobody she knew. ‘May I speak with Mrs Johnson, please?’ ‘Johansson,’ she corrected him automatically, shooting a despairing glance at the hall clock. Why did cold-callers always waste time assuming you aren’t the person they’ve phoned? She gritted her teeth. Before catching the train she needed to buy some stamps, renew her road tax, phone a radio producer and touch up chapter three, because she’d just remembered the bay gelding of Verity’s chief rival Camilla had emerged from a three-day event as a chestnut mare. Perhaps he had got something caught in some railings. Dramatically (and distractingly) Neville swung back and forth in a spotlight, with no safety-net, accompanied by a drum-roll. Meanwhile her bag slid off her shoulder with a great whump, as if to say, ‘Well, if we’re not going out, I’ll stop here.’ ‘Hello Mrs Johnson, my name is Graham, and I work for British Telecom. We recently sent you some details of new services. I wonder, is this a good time to talk?’ ‘Hah!’ Belinda gave a hollow laugh and started to fill this annoying wasted time by hoisting her bag from under the hall table—the area Stefan cheerfully called the Land That Time Forgot About. Heaps of stuff made a big tangly nest under here, even though Belinda had frequently begged Mrs Holdsworth just to chuck it all out. She looked at it now, and it said, ‘Ooh, hello, remember us?’ rather excitedly, because it didn’t get the chance as often as the socks in the bathroom or the newspapers in the kitchen. Weekly free news-sheets and fluff in lumps mingled with Stefan’s favourite moose-hat, and some spare coat buttons. Three empty Jiffy-bags bled grey lunar dust over a novelty egg-timer, a bottle of Finnish vodka, a CD of the 1970s Malmö pop sensation the Hoola Bandoola Band, and an icehockey puck. And there among it was a single white envelope bearing the symbol of registered post. ‘Sod it,’ she said, as she stretched to reach it.

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‘This is Graham from BT,’ the man reminded her. ‘Is this a good time to talk?’ She looked at the clock again: ten forty-three. This envelope clearly contained the cash-card she’d argued about with the bank. ‘You never sent it!’ she’d said. ‘But you signed for it!’ they replied. And here it was, saying, ‘Remember me?’ In her stomach, Neville started calling other rats for an acrobatic display—‘Yip!’ ‘Hoopla!’ ‘Hi-yip!’ From the way their weight was shifting around, they had started to form the rodent equivalent of the human pyramid. She felt compelled to admire their ingenuity. It felt as though they’d acquired a springboard. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. This isn’t convenient.’ Graham made a sympathetic noise, but did not say goodbye. Instead, he asked, ‘Perhaps you could suggest a more convenient time in the next few days?’ It was a routine phone-sales question, but it unleashed something. Because suddenly Belinda lost control. It was because he had asked her to think ahead, perhaps. That’s what did it. Normally she went through life as if driving in the country in the dark, just peering to the end of the headlights and keeping her nerve. But daylight revealed the total landscape. ‘A more convenient time in the next few days’? Her lip quivered. She considered the next few days, a vision of the M25 choked with cones and honking, with nee-naws—of appointments and deadlines and VAT return and, and—and started to sniff uncontrollably. Damn this bloody rushing about. Sniff. Damn this fucking life. Sniff, sniff. She’d had a big argument about this letter, and why had it been unnoticed on the floor? Why? Because there was no time to Hoover this fluff or to clear these papers. Because there was no time to sack Mrs Holdsworth for her incompetence. No time to sew buttons on, or build a nice display cabinet for moose-hats, listen with full attention to Hoola Bandoola with a Swedish dictionary, or get to the bottom of the ice-hockey puck once and for all. There was never any time, and it wasn’t fair. She glanced into the kitchen, where the table was heaped with unpaid bills, diaries. On each of the stairs behind her was a little pile of misplaced items tumbled together (foreign money with holes in, nail scissors, receipts). If items had human rights, the UNHCR would be down on Belinda like a ton of bricks. On the wall above the phone was a handsome blue-tinted postcard of the Sussex Downs with a serene quotation from Virginia Woolf: ‘I have three entire days alone—three pure and rounded pearls.’ Stefan had given it to her ‘as a yoke’. She saw it now, and in an access of Bloomsbury envy familiar to every other working female writer of the twentieth century, Belinda simply broke down and sobbed. ‘Mrs Johnson?’ Belinda made a wah-wah sound so loud it shocked her. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and then, at a loss, wiped the back of her hand on

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mother’s glossy coat—which was of a material, alas, designed specifically not to absorb mucal waste. No one would understand what a bad moment this was. Belinda was not the sort of person who bursts into tears. In times of stress, she simply increased adrenaline production while Neville ran a three-ring circus. She didn’t cry. Stefan hated cry-babies. His imitation of his first wife’s cry-baby mode (‘Wah, wah! I’m so unhappy, Stefan!’) was quite enough to put anybody off. ‘Perhaps you would like some time?’ Graham persisted. ‘I can tell you don’t have time right now.’ ‘No, I don’t have any time,’ whimpered Belinda. ‘Shall I give you a couple of days?’ Silence. A sniffle. ‘Mrs Johnson, would you like a couple of days?’ At which point, Belinda sank to the floor again, to sit flat on her bum and sob. ‘Would I like [sniff ] a couple of—”?’ A loud, helpless wah-wah was coming down the phone. ‘Have you got a tissue, Mrs Johnson?’ Graham asked, gently. ‘Jo-hansson!’ she sobbed. ‘I’ll give you a couple of days.’ Belinda struggled to her feet, dragging her bowling ball towards her. ‘Give me three pure and rounded pearls, Graham. What I want’—she sniffed noisily—‘is three pure and rounded pearls.’  You shouldn’t dislike Belinda. She had a great many redeeming features. She knew lots of jokes about animals going into bars, for example. But clearly she had a big problem negotiating the routine pitfalls of everyday existence. ‘It’s a control thing,’ her friend Maggie said (Maggie, an actress, had done therapy for thirteen years). ‘You want total control. You somehow think an empty life is the ideal life, and a full life means it’s been stolen by other people. You think deep down that everything in the universe—including your friends, actually—exists with the sole malevolent purpose of stealing your time.’ ‘Oh, I see,’ said Belinda. ‘And is this the five-minute insult or the full halfhour?’ But secretly she was aghast. The description was spot-on. Mags was right: even this short conversation now required to be added to the day’s total of sadly unavoided interruptions.  The first thing she’d noticed about Stefan was that he smiled a lot, especially for a Scandinavian. He was solemn, and said rather peculiar things, like ‘A nod is as

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good as a wink’ and ‘That’s all my eye and Betty Martin’, when first introduced, but he smiled even at jokes about animals in bars, which was encouraging. They had met three years ago in Putney at her friend Viv’s, at a Sunday lunch, where they had been seated adjacently by their hostess, with an obvious match-making intent. Belinda resented this at first, and almost changed places. Viv had an intolerable weakness for match-making. In a world ruled by Vivs, happy single people would be rounded up and shot. But she took to Stefan. He was recently divorced, and recently arrived in London to teach genetics at Imperial College. He was solvent, which counted for a lot more than it ought to. Tall, blond, slender and a bit vain, he wore surprisingly fashionable spectacles for a man of his age (forty-eight at the time). Of course, he wasn’t perfect. For a start, middle-of-the-road music was a passion of his life, and he would not hear a word spoken against Abba. He idolized Monty Python, played golf as if it were a respectable thing to talk about, and was proud of driving a fast car. A couple of times he told stories about his mentally ill first wife, which struck Belinda as cruel. Also, he was condescending when he explained his work on pseudogenes. Like most specialists, she decided, he muddled reasonable ignorance with stupidity. But basically, Belinda fancied him straight away, and had an unprecedented urge to get him outside and push him against a wall. In the one truly Lawrentian moment of her life, she felt her bowel leap, her thighs sing and her bra-straps strain to snapping. Having been single for seven years at this point, she knew all too well that she must act quickly—a specimen of unattached manhood as exotic and presentable as Stefan Johansson would have an availability period in 1990s SW15 of just under two and a half weeks. Her biological clock, long reduced to a muffled tick, started making urgent ‘Parp! Parp!’ noises, so loud and insistent that she had to resist the impulse to evacuate the building. The lunch was half bliss, half agony, with Stefan dividing his attention between Maggie and Belinda, and finding out whose biological clock could ‘Parp’ the loudest. Perhaps his understanding of natural selection contributed to this ploy. Either way, Belinda—who had never competed for a man—was so overwhelmed by the physical attraction that she contrived to get drunk, make eyes at him, and (the clincher) ruthlessly outdo Maggie at remembering every single word of ‘Thank You for the Music’ and the Pet Shop Sketch. ‘Lift home, Miss Patch?’ he’d asked her breezily, when this long repast finally ended at four thirty. She’d known him only four hours, and already he’d given her a nickname—something no one had done before. True, he called her ‘Patch’ for the unromantic reason of her nicotine plasters; and true, it made her sound like a collie. But she loved it. ‘Miss Patch’ made her feel young and adorable, like Audrey Hepburn; it made her feel (even more unaccountably) like she’d never heard

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of sexual politics. ‘Lift home, Miss Patch?’ was, to Belinda, the most exciting question in the language. Soon after it, she’d had her tongue down his throat, and his hands up her jumper, with her nipples strenuously erect precisely in the manner of chapel hat-pegs—as Stefan had whispered in her ear so astonishingly at the time. And now here they were, married, and Belinda was having this silly problem with the El Ratto indoor circus; and Maggie could decipher plainly all the selfish secrets of her soul, and she’d burst into tears like a madwoman talking to a complete stranger on the phone because he offered her big fat pearls but didn’t mean it. However, Stefan was still smiling because (as she had soon discovered) he always smiled, whatever his mood. He had told her that he was known in academic circles as the Genial Geneticist from Gothenburg. ‘So what did your masters think of Verity’s Rosette?’ he asked. It was Monday evening, and they were loading the dishwasher to the accompaniment of ‘Voulez Vous’. ‘A Rosette for Verity? They’ll let me know. We discussed the idea that she might break her neck in the next book and be all brave about it, but I said, “No, let’s do that to Camilla.” Six Months in Traction for Camilla—what do you think?’ He smiled uncertainly. ‘You are yoking?’ ‘A bit, yes.’ ‘You remember we visit Viv and Yago tomorrow?’ ‘We do?’ she said. ‘Damn. I mean, great.’ ‘Maggie will be there, too. Maggie is a good egg, for sure. I want to tell her she was de luxe in the play by Harold Pinter. Mind you, no one could ever accuse Pinter of gilding the lily, I think.’ ‘Shall we watch telly tonight? The Invasion of the Body Snatchers is on.’ Although she was really desperate to get on with some work, she felt guilty about Stefan, and regularly made pretences of this sort. Hey, let’s just curl up on the sofa and watch TV like normal people! She fooled nobody, but felt better for the attempt. The trouble was, whenever she felt under pressure, she had the awful sensation that Stefan was turning into a species of accusatory sock. Besides which, it was nice watching television with him, and cuddling. She always enjoyed those interludes with Stefan when they didn’t feel the need to speak. ‘Don’t you want to work?’ ‘Well, I—’ He smiled. ‘You have been Patsy Sullivan today, all day?’ (Patsy Sullivan was her horsy pseudonym.) ‘Then you must work yourself tonight.’ ‘Are you sure? It’s just, you know, it’s February, and the book is due in October. And I feel this terrible pressure of time, Stefan. And I’ve got fifty-three Verity

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fan letters in big handwriting to answer. I have to pretend to the poor saps that I live on a farm with dogs and stuff. And I’ve got to go and see saddles tomorrow in Barnet. Do you know the line of Keats—“When I have fears that I may cease to be, before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain”?’ Stefan thought about it. ‘No, I don’t know that. But it sounds like you.’ He turned to go, then stopped. ‘So I shall look forward to tomorrow night. Now just tell me about Yago and Viv. Why is it that whenever I perorate in their company, they react as though I have dropped a fart?’ This was difficult to answer, but she managed it. ‘They’re scared of you, Stefan. It’s scary, genetics. There you sit, knowing all about the Great Code of Life, and all Viv and Jago know about is Street of Shame gossip and the Superwoman Cook Book. It’s a powerful thing, knowing science in such company.’ ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king?’ ‘Exactly.’ ‘I have got bigger fish to fry?’ ‘That’s it.’ Belinda was glad she’d reassured him. She decided not to mention the fart. ‘Even I’m scared of you, a bit,’ she said, squeezing his arm and looking into his lovely eyes. They were like chips of ice, she thought. ‘Oh, Belinda—’ he objected. ‘No, it’s true. I sometimes think you could unravel my DNA just by looking at me. And then, of course, you could knit me up again, as someone else with different sleeves and a V neck.’  Belinda envied the way Stefan’s work fitted so neatly into the time he spent at college. She imagined him now with enormous knitting needles, muttering, ‘Knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one,’ in a loud, clacky room full of brainy blokes in lab coats all doing the same, trying to finish a complicated bit (turning a heel, perhaps) before the bell rang at five thirty. People were always telling Belinda that genetics was a sexy science, but Stefan said it was harmless drudgery—and she was happy to believe him. Clueless about the nitty-gritty, she just knew that his research involved things called dominant and recessive genes. ‘So some genes are pushy and others are pushovers, and the combination always causes trouble?’ she’d once summed it up. And he’d coughed and said gnomically, ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’ At that momentous Sunday lunch, she had not told him much about her own work. As she discovered later, Swedes don’t ask personal questions; they consider it ill-mannered. But she had told him about Patsy Sullivan, and made him

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laugh describing the horsy adventures. However, the time she regarded as daily stolen from her had nothing to do with her desire to write about red rosettes for handy-pony. It wasn’t time she wanted for ‘herself ’, either. Magazines sometimes referred to women making time for ‘themselves’, but driven by her Keatsian gleaning imperative, Belinda had absolutely no idea what it meant. ‘Make time for yourself.’ Weird. Chintzy wallpaper probably had something to do with it. Long hot baths. Or chocolates in a heart-shaped box. Thus, if well-intentioned people chose to flatter Belinda in a feminine way, it just confused her. ‘Buy yourself a lipstick,’ Viv’s mother had said during her university finals, giving her a five-pound note. But the commission had made her miserable. She’d hated hanging around cosmetics counters with this albatross of a fiver when she could have been revising the Gothic novel in the library. Belinda’s revision timetable had been incredibly impressive, and very, very tight. Only when Viv absolved her with ‘Buy some pens, for God’s sake,’ did she race off happily and spend it. Yes, for someone who lived so much in her head, it was an alien world, that feminine malarkey. Luckily the other-worldly Stefan didn’t mind too much, but Belinda’s well-coiffed mother despaired of her, and left copies of books with titles like Femininity for Dummies lying around in her daughter’s house. Yet even as a teenager Belinda had flipped through all women’s magazines in lofty, anthropological astonishment, amazed at the ways contrived by modern women to occupy their time non-productively. Facials, for heaven’s sake. Leg-waxing. Fashionable hats. Stencils. From this you might deduce that Belinda’s secret personal work was of global importance. But she was just writing a book called The Dualists, a grand overview of literary doubles through the ages. Being Patsy half the time had given her the idea. ‘Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ she explained, when people looked blank. ‘Or like me and Patsy Sullivan.’ But if she implied that she took the subject lightly, she certainly didn’t. In fact, like most areas of study, the closer you got to the literary double, the more importantly it loomed; the more it demonstrated links with life, the universe, everything, even genetics and photocopying. Abba impersonators, Siamese twins, Face/Off—the world was full of replicas. And why was the genre so popular? Because everyone believes they’ve got an alternative, parallel life—in Belinda’s case, perhaps, the ideal existence of that unregenerate toff Virginia Woolf, with her pure and rounded pearls. This parallel life was just waiting for you to join it, to stop fannying about. Every time you made a choice in life, another parallel existence was created to demonstrate how your own life could have been. Surely everybody felt that? Surely everybody looked in the mirror and thought, That’s not the real me. It used to be, but it’s not now. Surely everyone

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measured themselves against their friends? Especially these days, when everyone was so busy? Either way, for the past three years, between all the demands of Patsy and socks (and Stefan), Belinda had left unturned not a single existential book in which a malevolent lookalike turned up to say, ‘I’m the real you. And hey, you’re not going to like what I’ve been doing!’ Her office, formerly the dining room, was heaped with books and notes. She had become an expert on the dark world of Gogol and Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Stevenson and Hogg. Name any writer who shrieked on passing a reflective shop window, and Belinda was guaranteed to have a convincing theory about the personal crisis that conjured up his story, and summoned his double to life. Oh yes, the nearer you stood to the literary double, the more (spookily) it told you universal truths of existence. Unfortunately for Belinda, she could never quite appreciate that the further you stood back from the literary double (as all her friends effortlessly did), the more it resembled leg-waxing by other means.  The phone rang at ten o’clock and Stefan answered it. ‘It was a man from British Telecom, seemed a bit rum,’ he reported to Belinda, who was curled up with a book in her study, Neville snoozing contentedly save for the occasional twitch of his little pink tail. ‘His name was Graham.’ Belinda bit her lip. ‘Oh yes?’ ‘He was ringing from home, to check you were recovered. I told him, “This is ten o’clock at night, were you born in a barn?”’ Belinda looked amazed. Neville stirred. ‘You are all right, aren’t you, Miss Patch? He said he only mentioned his money-off Friends and Family scheme and you wept, like cats and dogs.’ She nodded. She felt cornered. When women had breakdowns, their husbands left them. It was a well-known fact. When Stefan’s former wife Ingrid had a breakdown, he left her good and proper, in an institution in Malmö. ‘You try to do too much,’ he said. ‘I know.’ ‘It’s not my fault, is it?’ Belinda gasped. His fault? He searched her face, which crumpled under the strain of his kindness. ‘Of course it’s not,’ she snuffled. ‘Come to bed,’ he said, reaching to touch her. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You must not forget, Belinda. No man is an island.’ ‘No.’

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She put down her book, and got up. He smiled. ‘The thing about you, Belinda, is you need two lives.’ ‘Well, three or four would be nice,’ she agreed, switching off the light. ‘Why don’t you make some clones for me? You know perfectly well you could knock up a couple at work.’

Chapter 2




It was eleven thirty on Tuesday night in Putney, the candles were guttering, and Jago was telling a joke over coffee. It was one of the smart showbiz ones he’d picked up on a trip home to New York several years ago. ‘So the neighbour in Santa Monica says, “I tell ya, it was terrible. Your agent was here and he raped your wife and slaughtered your children and then he just upped and burned your damn house down.” And the writer says, “Hold on a minute! . . .” ’ Here Jago paused for a well-practised effect. His guests looked up. ‘ “Did you say my agent came to my house?” ’ Belinda laughed with all the others, although she’d heard Jago tell this joke before. Oh, understanding jokes about agents, didn’t it make you feel grown-up and important? She remembered the first time she’d managed to mention her agent as a mere matter of fact, without prefacing it with ‘Oh listen to me!’ It had been one of those Rubicon moments. No going back now, Mother. No going back now. To be honest, Belinda’s grand-sounding agent—A. P. Jorkin of Jorkin Spenlow—was a dusty man she’d met only once. But he was adequate to her meagre purposes, being well connected as well as reassuringly bookish, though alas, a sexist. ‘Let’s keep this relationship professional, shall we?’ she’d said to him brightly in the taxi, when he put his hand on her leg and squeezed it. ‘All right,’ he agreed, with a chalky wheeze, pressing harder. ‘How much do you charge?’ Ah yes, she’d certainly made a disastrous choice with Jorkin, but changing your agent sounded like one of those endlessly difficult, escalatory things, like treating a house for dry rot. For a woman who can’t be arsed to pick up a sock, it was a project she would, self-evidently, never undertake. ‘Perhaps he’ll die soon,’ she thought, hopefully. Random facial hair sprouted from Jorkin’s cheek and nose, she remembered dimly. She really hated that. Jago’s agent, of course, was quite another matter. Not that Jago ever wrote books, but having a big-time agent was an essential fashion accoutrement once you reached a certain level in Fleet Street: the modern-day equivalent of a foodtaster or a leopard on a chain. Dermot, who often appeared on television, was famously associated with those other busy scribblers, the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Complete with his too-tight-fitting ski tan, he was tonight’s guest of honour, amiably telling Stefan about rugby union in South Africa, fiddling with a silver bracelet, and recounting jaw-dropping stories about being backstage at Clive Anderson. No random facial hair on this one. No hair at all, actually. When she’d told him in confidence about her book on literary doubles, he’d laughed out loud at the sheer, profitless folly of it. ‘Here,’ he’d said, taking off his belt with a flourish. ‘Hang yourself with that, it’s quicker.’

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Tonight he was feeling more generous, so he gave her a tip. ‘Belinda, why don’t you write a bittersweet novel about being single in the city with a cat?’ ‘Perhaps because I hate cats and I’m not single, and I don’t write grown-up fiction.’ ‘OK, but single people sell.’ ‘Which is why I’m writing about double people, no doubt.’ ‘Well,’ he sighed, leaning towards her and picking imaginary fluff from her shoulder, ‘you said it.’ Belinda wondered now whether she should have taken his advice. Was her literary work above fashion? Or just so far beyond it that it had dropped off the edge? She poured herself some more wine and took a small handful of chocolates. Relaxation on this scale was a rare and marvellous thing. Neville had given the other rats the night off, evidently, and was spending the evening quietly oiling his whip. Stefan was now teasing Dermot about the real-life chances of an attack of killer tomatoes (for some reason, Dermot was rather exercised on this point); Jago was arguing good-naturedly with Dermot’s assistant about modern operatic stage design. Maggie (bless her) seemed to be adequately hitting it off with the spare man Viv always thoughtfully provided—this time a long-haired, big-boned sports reporter plucked without sufficient research from Jago’s office. And, with all the dinner finished, it now befell Belinda to adopt her perennial role at dinner parties—i.e. pointlessly sucking up to Viv. ‘That was such a good meal,’ she began. ‘I don’t know how you do it. I feel like I’ve eaten the British Library. I can’t even buy ready-cook stuff from Marks and Spencer’s any more, did I tell you? Every time I go in, I see all the prepared veg and I get upset and have to come out again. Even though I haven’t got time to prepare veg myself, I’m so depressed by bags of sprouts with the outer leaves peeled off that I have to crouch on the floor while my head swims. Has that ever happened to you?’ Viv shrugged. She refused to be drawn into Belinda’s domestic inadequacies. After all, they’d been having the same conversation for eighteen years. Also, praise always made her hostile—a fact Belinda could never quite accept, and therefore never quite allowed for. ‘I like your top,’ Belinda said. ‘Harvey Nicks. I went back to get another one, actually, but they only had brown. Nobody looks good in brown. I don’t know why they make it.’ Belinda wondered vaguely whether her own top-to-toe chocolate was exempt from this generalization. She didn’t like to ask. ‘What do you think about Leon for Maggie?’ Viv demanded. ‘The petrolhead?’ ‘Yes.’

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‘Well, I can’t say he’s perfect. So far his only conversation is pit-stop records. He just told Maggie that Rembrandt wasn’t a household name.’ ‘Yes, but Maggie is so lonely and desperate, she might not mind a diversity of interests.’ They paused to hear what was happening between Maggie and Leon. ‘Villeneuve’s a person?’ Maggie was saying. ‘Good heavens! So what’s the name of that bridge in Paris?’ Belinda raised an eyebrow, while Viv pretended not to hear. What a terrible life Maggie had. She looked pityingly at Maggie and saw how her own life might have turned out, if only she hadn’t responded so well to the nickname Patch. In her spare time, Maggie did therapy. When she got work, it was underpaid. It was common knowledge that she slept with totally unsuitable people. And when she went out to her friends’ house for a pleasant evening, looking more glamorous than the rest of them put together, they thoughtlessly paired her with a talking ape. Sitting here, Belinda was caught in a common dilemma of women who compare themselves with others. With whom should she compare herself tonight? Beside Maggie, she looked rather accomplished. Whereas beside Viv, she looked like a road accident. Viv did dinner parties for eight without breaking stride. She had three sons with long limbs and clean hair who said, ‘Hello, Auntie Belinda, do you want to see my prize for geography?’ and ‘Guess what, I’ve got another part in a radio play.’ Viv dressed beautifully in navy. She attended a gym and went swimming. She canvassed for the Labour Party. And, just to give her life a bit of interest, she was the youngest ever female consultant anaesthetist of a major London private hospital. Belinda took another reckless swig of wine. She used to say she had only two modes when it came to drinking: abstinence and abandonment. Looking at her fifth glass, she realized this system had recently simplified. ‘Jago got made executive features editor at the Effort.’ Belinda put down her glass with a clunk. ‘I didn’t know that.’ ‘Last week. Bunter Paxton was kicked upstairs.’ ‘Fuck.’ ‘Dermot says it’s all part of his plan. I’m warming to Dermot. Are you?’ Belinda struggled to find the right thing to say. She was impressed, upset, mortified. Comparisons might be odious, but Viv and Jago were her own age. Identically her own age. She and Viv had started adult life with almost identical opportunities, from exactly the same spot, in fact: queuing for DramSoc at University College London, where they were subsequently cast as Helena and Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream alongside Jago as Bottom. Viv was in medicine; she and Jago were in English. She had rather fancied Jago in those days. Hard to imagine now. Stefan was so good, so dear, the way he just fitted in. What a shame

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his first wife, the loony one in Malmö, had got custody of all their Swedish friends. Viv nudged her to look at Maggie and Leon again. They had their heads together. ‘Anal?’ Leon was querying, his body language expressive of severe discomfort. He ran his hand through his long, greasy hair. ‘Are you sure?’ Belinda wrestled briefly with self-pity, and lost. Just look at what Viv had made of her life. I could have had that. She was beginning to remember why she didn’t enjoy going out.  ‘And yet you go to all this trouble,’ she marvelled, waving a hand. Viv sighed. Not this again. Not that Superwoman crap. ‘I’m not getting into this again, Belinda, I warn you. As I’ve told you a million times, my cleaning lady does everything in this house, and I don’t lift a finger. In fact, I’m sorry to say this,’ Viv’s voice rose, ‘but I wish you’d just shut up about it.’ Even in her drunken state, Belinda was startled by Viv’s high-handed, imperious tone. Just because you abjectly deferred to someone year after year, paying them superlative compliments, that surely didn’t give them the right to assume some sort of superiority, did it? ‘All right, keep your hair on,’ slurred Belinda, ‘I only said—’ ‘Listen, I’m just going to say this to you, Belinda. Just this. Sack Jorkin. Lose Patsy. Boot Mrs Holdsworth.’ ‘Is that all?’ ‘That about covers it, yes.’ ‘Should I move to Botswana as well?’ ‘I’m just telling you how it looks from where I’m standing. And where lots of other people are standing too.’ ‘Mrs H washes her hair with Daz, Viv. She lives on water boiled up from old sprout peelings. She hasn’t had a new scarf for ten years.’ Other chatter stopped abruptly as Belinda’s voice rose. Only Leon could be heard, saying, ‘Penile? In what way?’ Stefan intervened. ‘I agree with Viv you should award Mrs Holdsworth the Order of the Boot,’ he offered, with a smile. ‘Viv is right, as always. Mrs Holdsworth takes the piss and cooks her own goose long enough. Tell her to up stumps. A good wine needs no bush.’ Belinda was confused, and a bit resentful. She didn’t understand how sacking the cleaning lady would in any way improve her ability to give dinner parties. And she disliked it, naturally enough, when pleasant evenings with chums and husband turned Stalinist all of a sudden. She couldn’t remember the last time she saw it on a menu. Dessert followed by show trials; then coffee and mints.

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‘You need people with a bit of initiative around you,’ said Viv. ‘There’s nothing supernatural about what I do. I just hive off bits of my life I don’t want. You could do that. I give mine to Linda. The cleaning lady. She does everything. She’s doing the washing-up right now. She did all the shopping and most of the cooking.’ Belinda nodded. ‘Linda,’ she repeated, dumbly. So deeply did Belinda believe in Viv’s domestic powers, she had always suspected Linda was an invention. ‘I’ve got no sympathy for you, Belinda. None whatever.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘You know what I mean.’ Belinda sniffed loudly, and started to fish under her chair for her handbag. ‘Stefan, shall we go home soon?’ ‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t take offence,’ snapped Viv. ‘I’m only thinking of you, as usual.’ Belinda noticed that the others had stopped talking, in order to listen better. She was not unaware that tiffs with Viv were becoming a regular feature of fun nights out. She tried a last-ditch compliment, to deflect attention. It didn’t work. ‘You’ve redecorated this room,’ said Belinda. ‘It’s lovely. All this white is very attractive.’ ‘Well, we got sick to death of sea green. No one has that any more.’ Belinda experienced a familiar sensation, remembering her own sea-green bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, hall and array of fitted carpets. ‘All right,’ she said, seeing that flattery was getting her nowhere. ‘Assuming I can get someone brilliant like your Linda, how do I choose which bits of my life to give her? I wouldn’t know where to stop, I mean start.’ Belinda thought about it, and felt a bit sick. ‘No, I was right the first time. I wouldn’t know where to stop.’ Viv arranged some wine bottles in a line. She was resisting the urge to hit Belinda. ‘Belinda, just imagine you had the choice. Would you rather sit in your study reading about—what is it you want to read about all the time?’ ‘Doubles. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr—’ ‘OK. Would you rather sit in your study reading that ridiculous old nonsense, or—I don’t know—keep the loo seat free from nasty curly pubes?’ Belinda masticated a truffle. It tasted wonderful, like violets. It took her mind off the hurtful implication that her curly pubes were nasty. ‘All right,’ she said warily, ‘I’ll replace Mrs Holdsworth. But I’m keeping Jorkin and Patsy.’ ‘It’s your funeral,’ said Viv, and getting up, she started to clear dessert plates. Stefan leaned across. ‘How about we ask this Linda if she can work for us too? She doesn’t work for you every God’s hour, I think?’ It was the most innocent of questions. But had they heard a suicidal gunshot from the downstairs cloakroom the effect could not have been more Ibsenesque. Viv stood up and knocked over her chair; Jago shot her a meaningful glance; Viv’s eyes widened in anger as she turned to face Belinda.

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‘If you do that,’ she said, ‘I warn you, I’ll never speak to you again.’ Belinda laughed. They all did. Maggie even clapped. But Viv was serious. ‘Take my cleaning lady, you ungrateful bitch—’ ‘Viv, we’re only talking about a cleaning lady! This is ridiculous.’ Jago chipped in. ‘I know it sounds crazy. Linda’s more than a cleaning lady, that’s all. She has a way of making herself indispensable. And let’s just say—’ ‘That’s enough, Jago.’ Belinda fell back in her chair, exhausted. ‘I don’t get it,’ she confessed. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t get it.’ ‘Coffee?’ said Viv. ‘I’ll help,’ offered Dermot. Belinda and Stefan pulled faces at one another. At the other side of the table, Leon presented Maggie with a perfect, tiny origami racing car, folded out of a napkin. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell me what’s anal about that.’  Belinda woke up suddenly. How long she’d been nodding at the table she didn’t know. Noticing Viv was missing from her side, however, she stood up to find her but lurched unexpectedly and almost sat down again. She must be drunk. Jago was now telling Leon a familiar joke about a Jewish widow addressing her husband’s ashes in her hand. ‘ “Remember the blow-job you always wanted, Solly?”’ Trying for a second time, she got up successfully and propelled herself towards the door—at which point, she heard Viv on a darkened landing, whispering angrily to Dermot. ‘I wouldn’t mind but she owes everything to me,’ Viv was saying. ‘Belinda’s a real nobody,’ Dermot agreed. ‘A nothing of a nobody.’ Belinda leaned against a wall and listened. ‘I introduced her to Stefan. It was all me. But she’s never content.’ ‘Some people suck the blood out of you. They’re vampires. I see it every day, people taking the credit when everything they do is my idea. You have to tell them how great they are all the time. Belinda just takes and takes.’ ‘You’re right. People only ever want to talk about themselves. We’re just mirrors they see themselves in. Mirrors in which they flatter themselves.’ Dermot’s voice became tender. ‘You shouldn’t be bothering with vampires, Viv. You should think only of your lovely, lovely self. I know I shouldn’t say it, but Viv, I mean this, you’re such a good person.’ Belinda held her breath and grimaced. Dermot clearly didn’t understand that flattering Viv made her vicious—sometimes to the point of violence. But some-

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thing else happened. Because Viv evidently caught a sight of herself in Dermot’s flattering mirror. ‘Am I?’ said Viv. ‘You’re so good, so fine. In fact, I admire you very much.’ ‘You do?’ ‘I’ve got no reason to say this, incidentally.’ ‘I know.’ There was a pause while the loathsome Dermot thought of some more sugary things to say. Belinda was astonished. ‘You’re fantastic,’ he continued. ‘Thank you.’ ‘And, you know, I love just talking about you freely like this, without you feeling you have to say anything reciprocal about me.’ ‘Wow.’ Belinda backed away to the kitchen, fearful of overhearing the inevitable culminating squelch of a kiss in the dark. Her emotions were mixed, and her demeanour unsteady, but her intention was perfectly clear. As she made her way to the kitchen, she had one single thought. She would hire Linda. Ungrateful vampire bitch that she was, she was determined to take, take, take. Petulance was an emotion that held no fears for Belinda. If Viv thought so badly of her already, then stealing her cleaning lady was obviously the very least she owed her reputation.  None of Viv’s friends had come face to face with Linda, so it was quite a surprise that she looked like Kylie Minogue. Belinda had imagined a composite of stereotypes. Lumpen librarian in a thick skirt and frilly blouse. Rubber gloves in primrose yellow. Intimidating. Carrying a bucket. A Cordon Bleu, perhaps, pinned to her sensible apron. But the woman reading the magazine in the kitchen was in her early thirties and pretty. She wore fitted jeans and a spotless white T-shirt, with strappy shoes. Her auburn hair was thick and long, and when Belinda noticed her hands—small and clean, with nails beautifully polished, like mother-of-pearl—she felt an unaccustomed jolt of envy. Hearing Belinda in the doorway, this youthful vision of unlikely cleaning lady assumed it was Viv. ‘I wish you’d let me do the rest of it, Viv,’ she said, indicating rather a lot of washing-up on the kitchen surfaces, ‘but I have to say I’m enjoying this Lancet. Oh, hello.’ Something about this greeting puzzled Belinda but, on the other hand, she was so fuddled by drink she could barely remember her mission.

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‘Psst. Are you Linda?’ she hissed. Linda was evidently amused. ‘Yes,’ she hissed back, exaggeratedly. ‘Shh,’ said Belinda. ‘I’m Mrs Johansson, but you can call me Belinda.’ ‘All right, Mrs Johansson.’ ‘Listen, Linda. I’ve got something to ask you.’ Belinda staggered slightly. ‘I want to ask you to work for me.’ ‘That’s nice,’ said Linda. ‘I wondered when you would. That’s a lovely top.’ Belinda looked down at it, but couldn’t focus. ‘Are you sure? It’s not black, you know. It’s brown.’ Linda smiled. ‘Shall I come tomorrow?’ ‘Wow, yes. If you’re sure. Blimey, that was easy.’ Belinda turned, and steadied herself in the doorway. ‘Dr Ripley may not be happy about this,’ she added, over her shoulder. She felt she ought to mention it. ‘That’s OK,’ said Linda. ‘Really?’ ‘Leave it to me. Are you all right?’ ‘I’m OK,’ said Belinda. ‘Thanks.’  Stefan tried never to argue with his second wife. Things had gone badly enough with the first one. But that night, as he drove home late through South London, he was impatient. Because for some mad reason Belinda had gone behind Viv’s back and attempted to steal her cleaning lady. Moreover, she’d informed him as if he would be pleased. ‘This underhandedness is a rum go, Belinda,’ he said. ‘Honest to goodness, I feel I may blow my top.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Stefan drove too fast when he was angry. She’d only said Viv was a cow who regularly pierced her heart with a hundred poison quills, and now they were going to get killed jumping traffic-lights. ‘Listen. Viv is a lovely person. Your behaviour beggars description.’ ‘No, Stefan. You’re wrong. There’s a subtext. Underneath all Viv’s loveliness towards me she actually hates me and she wants me dead. It’s a sibling-y kind of thing.’ ‘You hate her, more likely. Because you make a meal of everything and to her it’s a doodle.’ ‘Doddle.’ They stopped too late at some traffic-lights, and the car slewed with the braking force, jolting both of them forward. Belinda judged that this was not the right moment to mention how much she disliked Stefan’s driving.

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‘Tell me you won’t hire this Linda.’ ‘I can’t. Besides, Stefan, it was your idea. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’ He put the car in gear, revved high, and let out the clutch so that they shot forward at forty miles an hour. ‘Belinda, I tell you straight. It is not just the Linda thing. I am fed up to the back teeth, you are coming a cropper and I will not fiddle while Rome burns. Maggie says to me tonight, “Belinda is wedded to her work, not to you, Stefan.” You cry on the telephone to the man. I don’t want you going loco, Belinda. It happened to me before.’ Belinda frowned. What did he mean, it happened to him? They cornered with a squeal of rubber. ‘Let’s leave Maggie out of it. She’s got her own agenda.’ Stefan slowed for some lights, and Belinda took a deep breath. ‘Look, I’m not going loco, as you put it. It’s just that nobody understands me except Neville.’ Stefan swung the car into Armadale Road, spotted a parking space and braked abruptly. It was an excellent spot, twenty yards from the house. He reversed the car into the space, turned off the engine, extinguished the lights. And putting his hand on Belinda’s arm, he pulled a solemn face. ‘Belinda, this isn’t like you. You are breaking up.’ ‘For heaven’s sake, she’s only a cleaning lady.’ She kissed him hard, running a hand round his collar, smelling his hair. She’d never been addicted to a person before Stefan. ‘You’ll like her,’ she said. ‘Once you’ve met her, I promise you. You won’t be able to help it. And Viv will get over it. The cow.’  Back at Jago’s, at three a.m., Viv crept downstairs to check the burglar alarm and found Linda sitting in the dining room in the dark, a book of Viv’s old photos in front of her on the table. ‘Linda?’ But Linda did not look up. Viv switched on a table lamp and coughed. ‘Viv!’ Linda said pleasantly. ‘What a nice evening. Your friends are so interesting.’ ‘Well, Leon was dreadful. Honestly, Jago is such a desperate judge of character. Do you know, after all that boring Brands Hatch nonsense, it turned out he doesn’t drive? Maggie had to give him a lift to Wandsworth Town. I don’t know why I try so hard for people, they never co-operate.’ Viv tidied a few things while Linda watched. The light-bulbs hummed. She smoothed a curtain. She had something important to ask. Talking to the clean-

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ing lady, she had none of the commanding manner she adopted with Belinda. She seemed almost deferential. ‘Linda?’ ‘Mm?’ ‘You know how I depend on you?’ Viv laughed nervously. ‘I had a scare this evening. Did Belinda speak to you? You wouldn’t leave us, not after everything?’ But, as Linda turned a page and studied the pictures, Viv’s heart sank. She had hoped Linda would do the cleaning-lady equivalent of running into her arms. Instead, it was like asking, ‘You do love me, don’t you?’ and knowing after a few, short, vertiginous seconds that an affair was all over. The longer you have to wait for an answer to that sort of question, the more certain you can be that the answer is not the one you want. ‘How old is Stefan?’ asked Linda. ‘What? Oh, fifty-one.’ ‘And you introduced him to Belinda.’ ‘Yes. My sister met him at Imperial.’ Viv joined Linda to look at the album. It included fuzzy colour pictures from the old DramSoc days. Viv perused the page. Their faces were almost unrecognizable, but nothing had changed, really. At college, Maggie was disastrously involved with a succession of goaty lecturers. Belinda complained all the time about the timetable. And Viv organized an excellent summer outing, to which Jago brought along some useless dickhead they never saw again. ‘Are you going to Belinda?’ ‘I thought I would, yes. Oh, Viv, don’t look like that. I’m so sorry. But at the end of the day, I’m only your cleaning lady!’ ‘How can you say that?’ Viv gasped. Linda took Viv’s hand and squeezed it. It would have been clear to any onlooker that the usual relationship between employer and cleaning lady (‘How are the feet?’ ‘We need more Jif ’) had been long since outgrown. ‘It’s gone a bit mad here,’ said Linda. Viv laughed. ‘You can say that again.’ She thought about it, took a deep breath, and resolved to be brave. ‘So. How are we off for J-cloths?’ she asked. Linda smiled at her gratefully. ‘How the hell should I know?’ she retorted. At which the two of them laughed and laughed in the small hours until they had to hold each other up.  At three a.m., Belinda woke Stefan by turning the light on. She’d had a dream she needed to write down. And since he was now awake, she was quite keen to tell him

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about it, too. And also to treat him to an instant analysis, as she always did. In this dream, she said, she’d been bundled up in the bedclothes and placed in the washing-machine by an unseen hand. ‘It was an unseen hand,’ she said, significantly. ‘But I think we know whose it was. She was singing “I Should Be So Lucky”.’ Stefan shrugged. ‘Kylie Minogue,’ she explained. Belinda popped to the loo, and came back, over-confident that she had captured her husband’s attention. She shook him awake to continue. Belinda often had premature burial dreams, but this one was different. No shovel, no grit. No bone-white fingers poking through the black earth. No, this was the opposite of the Gothic nightmare. Instead of feeling frightened and stifled in this one, she’d had rather a wonderful time. The water was warm and sudsy, something like amniotic fluid but with bright blue enzymes for a whiter white. And the rhythm was very comforting. ‘Slosh-to-the-right, two, three, slosh-to-the-left, two, three. Over, over, over, over, slosh, slosh, slosh.’ It reminded her of perhaps the greatest joy of her infancy—the bathtime game her father had played with her, safely cradling her in strong arms, then gently drawing her the length of the bath while singing the old music-hall song, ‘Floating down the river, on a Sunday afternoon’. Stefan closed his eyes. As a scientist, he was more interested in the physiology of dreams than their nostalgic evocations. ‘No chance of you drowning, my dear? I say it helpfully, you understand.’ ‘No, no. I didn’t even struggle. It was so cosy. Sloshing about. I just tapped on the milky glass from time to time—“Hello? Excuse me! Hello?”—because life was going on outside, and you were out there, Stefan, eating a bagel. You didn’t even seem to notice I’d gone.’ ‘Which cycle were you on?’ ‘Special treatments.’ ‘Oh, good. I have always wondered what that was for.’ Belinda happily snapped shut her dreams notebook and turned the light off. ‘You know what this means?’ ‘Something about the womb?’ ‘No, it means Accept the Cleaning Lady. That’s good, isn’t it? Even my subconscious says it’s a good idea.’  ‘Well, I’m going up,’ said Viv. ‘Thanks again for everything tonight. It will be odd not to make a list for you.’ ‘It was all a sham, Viv. It’s time for you to admit it. You are Superwoman. We talked about this. We knew it couldn’t go on.’

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Viv’s chin wobbled. ‘I’m not Superwoman,’ she said. Linda put her hands on Viv’s shoulders. ‘Yes you are.’ And Viv jumped, as if she had been stung.  ‘And what was the spin like?’ said Stefan. ‘Oh, that’s a point.’ Belinda turned on the light again as Stefan groaned. ‘What is it now?’ ‘I woke up before the spin.’ She made a note. ‘Perhaps I’ll have to have the spin another time.’ When the lamps were finally out, they lay quietly in the dark for a minute. Stefan’s pre-sleep breathing had a little rhythmic squeak in it, a whistle in his nose. Belinda listened to it comfortably, happy. The room was otherwise perfectly still, perfectly quiet. Hiring a new cleaning lady had been such a small decision, yet it had changed everything. On her way to the bathroom she had spotted a heap of laundry at the top of the stairs but it had not said, ‘Remember me?’ Instead it had asked rather excitedly, ‘When does she start? When does she start?’ Something else had changed, too, although at first she couldn’t put her finger on it. ‘Neville?’ she whispered, at last. In her abdomen, a spotlight swivelled around a deserted Big Top, finding only sand and sawdust, and bits of torn paper streamer. ‘Neville, are you there?’

Chapter 3




Belinda was right to say that Maggie had her own agenda. In fact, Maggie’s agenda was about as well disguised as a Centurion tank in a hairnet. Thus, when she told her oldest friend Belinda, ‘You work too hard’, what she really meant was ‘You don’t spend enough time listening to my problems’. When she said to Stefan, ‘Belinda cares only about her work,’ what was clearly imported by this treachery was ‘I’ll always love you, Stefan, I want to have your babies, and it’s not too late’. Telling Leon she thought Villeneuve was a bridge in Paris translated as ‘You’re a dreadful motor-racing bore and I can’t believe I’m listening to this.’ Indeed, the paradox of Maggie’s life was that the more rudely she semaphored her real message, the more her friends felt it polite to take her words at face value. When she woke on Wednesday in her Clapham flat, the morning after the dinner party, it surprised her to find that Leon was still there. She assumed it was Leon, anyway. An enormous naked male body was sleeping face down diagonally in her four-foot bed, which was as unprecedented as it was uncomfortable. Blokes who went to bed with Maggie were, of course, not literally ‘all the same’, as she would sometimes complain, but they certainly shared many tendencies, and one of these was the quite strenuous avoidance of sleep. As if obeying house rules pinned to the door, they would resolutely roll out of Maggie’s bed and breast the cold night air without so much as a cup of tea or a post-coital cuddle. It was a strange, inexplicable nocturnal-urgency syndrome she had often remarked on. ‘Gotta go,’ they’d say, hopping about zipping their trousers and cleaning their teeth at the same time, like characters in a bedroom farce. ‘Unfortunately, I’ve got a very, very early appointment in the morning. Is this soap scented? It’s not bluebell or something?’ ‘All my conquests are either undead or office cleaners,’ she would tell her mates, by way of brave humour. But in fact her conquests were fathers of small children, of course; fulfilling some sort of universal genetic imperative to cheat on the wife during the first year of parenthood. Maggie made a point of meeting the wives of her Undead Office Cleaners as soon as possible—not to cause trouble but simply to prevent her from becoming ‘the other woman’. Meeting the wife had this curious way of dispelling any self-deluding fantasies about adultery. Before you met the wife in the living flesh, you could imagine you were the real person and the wife was the anonymous incorporeal phantom. Whereas after you met her, the mirror swivelled to offer a truer perspective, in which the wife was the real person and you were the lump of garbage. Anyway, ask any of her friends, and they could tell you Maggie’s exact emo-

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tional pattern on these wham-bam occasions, because she’d described them often. As the taxi roared off at two a.m., she would wave gaily from the doorway in her dressing-gown, feeling all jelly-legged and warm. Then she’d go back to her tousled bed with Ariel and Miranda (the cats), Hello! magazine and a hot cup of something brown and chocolatey called Options (nice touch), and as she brushed the condom wrapper from the sheet, she’d tell herself that no scene could better sum up the freedom of modern womanhood. Oh yes, Simone de Beauvoir would be so proud. Look, all that money, yet Barbra Streisand still had a hideous home! On the verge of sleep, she might decide it was high time a sexy woman of her calibre had her navel pierced. And then, seemingly a minute later, she woke alone in broad daylight. The room looked dusty; her pillow was caked in dribble and cat hair; she felt ravaged and cheap. The man in question was by now several miles away playing with baby in the bath, and would doubtless ignore her the next time they met, making her feel she’d been punched in the stomach. ‘What have I done?’ she would wail, then burst into tears and phone Belinda. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting home?’ (translation: ‘Get out of my house’) she asked Leon. She kicked his bum, which wobbled. Although she couldn’t now remember all the details, it had not been a terribly successful night, and it was annoying to find him still here. Evidently in Formula One they can refuel a car in under seven seconds—a statistic that was now proving hard to dislodge from her memory. Good grief, she still had her bra on. Quite rightly it offended Maggie that while she was fit, pretty, clever, a bit famous and had screen-tested for Titanic, she’d still allowed herself to go to bed with Leon. It was so obvious she was too good for her sexual partners, yet strangely, there was no system of justice governing such matters, no god of eugenics who intervened on her behalf. ‘Stop!’ a voice should have said, as Leon gently placed his big paw on her neck in the car. ‘This coupling goes against nature, and must not proceed. This woman is reserved for clever, attractive males who write poetry and stuff. Kenneth Branagh, at least.’ But Maggie knew that the voice saying, ‘Stop!’ would never be hers. While she waited for Stefan to stop loving Belinda, she made the best of things; responded to advances from all directions; made quite a few advances of her own. Not that she was blind to male imperfections; far from it. But in sexual matters, you are often obliged to take your partner at his own estimation, and it’s a sad fact of life that many ugly, bald men look in the mirror and see Kevin Costner. Consequently, Maggie’s romantic career had encompassed sexual partners who, in former, more brutal, God-fearing eras, would have been stoned to death by mobs. Leon snored and flapped a big white arm, but otherwise showed no sign of life, so she got up. She could have snuggled down, growled an erotic Murray

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Walker impersonation to rouse his ardour (she was good at accents). But on second thoughts, a bacon sandwich was more appealing. It was nearly lunch-time. So instead she made unrestrained noise having a shower, getting dressed, playing an oldies programme on Radio Two, and singing. She switched off half-way through Abba’s ‘Take A Chance On Me’—it reminded her too painfully of her first-in-line feelings for Stefan. She checked Leon wasn’t dead, of course. Remembering her duty as a hostess, she held a mirror to his lips until she saw vapour. But he wasn’t dead, and he wouldn’t wake up. So, humming ‘Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (A Man After Midnight)’, she left him a note with directions to the Gemini corner café, and went out.  At college, Stefan was having coffee with Jago in the library canteen. They had arranged it the night before, when Jago overheard Stefan on the subject of killer tomatoes. ‘We’ll do a genetics supplement and you can be consultant editor,’ he’d told Stefan. ‘I’ll see you at eleven.’ The trouble with journalists (as Stefan had often said to Belinda) was that they couldn’t help regarding you not as a person but as a source. ‘I need some Swedes quick,’ Jago might ring up to ask, mid-thought in his scurrilous weekly column in the Effort. No preamble, of course. Busy man, Jago. Part of his charm. ‘For sure. Ingmar Bergman, August Strindberg, Björn Borg.’ Jago could be heard tapping his keyboard in the background. ‘B-U-R-G?’ ‘Well, B-E—which one?’ ‘All of them. You tell me.’ ‘Ingmar is B-E-R-G, August is B-E-R-G, and Björn is B-O-R-G. The reason for such a high incidence of the name Berg and its variants, of course—’ ‘Great. You sure?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘One more Swede who isn’t a Berg, in case the subs don’t take my word for it?’ ‘Abba?’ Four more emphatic taps. ‘Good man, gotta go.’ ‘That was Yago,’ Stefan would tell Belinda, still holding the dead receiver in his hand. ‘How did I guess?’ The phrase ‘need-to-know basis’ had been invented for Jago. He was only interested in anything when he needed to know. Tell him a fact at an inappropriate moment (when he wasn’t writing an article, or commissioning one) and he liter-

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ally screwed up his face to prevent it getting in. He was a tabula rasa with a straining Filofax, and other people were the fools who stored primary material until he came along to nick it. Not that your help would earn you any loyalty from him, let alone thanks. You could help him a hundred times, and he’d stitch you up on the hundred and first. The curious thing was, when Jago looked in a mirror he saw George Washington. ‘So how big is this supplement in the Effort?’ Stefan sighed, playing with his specs in a professorial manner. ‘Twelve pages. Minus ads. That leaves room for about three articles and a dozen pics.’ ‘Why do you think I’ll contribute to it?’ ‘Um, because if you don’t, I’ll go straight to Laurie Spink?’ Stefan smiled but didn’t reply. Laurie Spink made television programmes about genetics. He had a column in The Times. ‘OK, forget that Spink blackmail thing, that was tacky. If you do this for me, Stefan, I promise never to tell Belinda how I know you’re not a natural blond. What more can I say? Copy is by next Friday. A thousand words on anything. Is there a gene for monstrous boobs? Could you look for it between now and next Friday? I’m only thinking of the picture desk.’ ‘Do people actually read these supplements, Yago? I’m afraid I am a doubting Thomas.’ ‘Well, I’m glad you asked that. Research shows that, yes,’ he screwed up his face, as if trying to remember the exact figure, ‘one million, two hundred and twelve people read these supplements.’ ‘But really they’re thrown in the bin?’ ‘In a New York second.’ Stefan checked his watch and stood up. Jago took the hint. Besides, he’d arranged to call Laurie Spink in five minutes’ time. ‘I’ll be off,’ he offered. ‘So you’ll do it?’ Stefan shrugged. ‘No. It’s not really me, I think.’ ‘Of course it’s you!’ ‘I’m not a writer, Yago.’ ‘No problem, big guy. We’ll write it for you in the office. I’ll ghost you. Happens all the time.’ ‘Monstrous boobs may be for some the cat’s pyjamas, but—no.’ ‘Stefan, why are you doing this to me?’ ‘Because it’s a free country.’ Stefan shrugged. ‘East is east and west is west. Genetics is not all beer and skittles.’ Jago was confused, but more than that, he was hurt. Journalists always pout if you puncture their plan, even if they’ve only had the plan for the last ninety seconds.

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‘Why do you call it copy?’ Stefan asked. Jago looked puzzled. ‘Call what copy?’ ‘Copy. I mean, the writing is supposed to be one-off, I think?’ ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far. This is journalism we’re talking about.’ ‘I mean, would you ever say, “Gosh, hey, this is very original one-off copy”?’ Jago had had enough. ‘If I ever said, “Gosh, hey,” at all, I’d lose my job, Stefan. As should you, I might add.’ He strode out of the canteen, and extracted his mobile phone from an inside pocket. Stefan had just completely wasted his time. What a two-face! ‘Gosh, hey, this is very original one-off copy!’ he said, with Stefan’s careful accent. He couldn’t wait to get back to the office to try that one on the guys.  Belinda spent the morning writing an imaginary riding-in-Ireland piece for Jago’s paper, and wondering what had happened to Neville. He was not his usual bouncy self. Even when the phone rang and it was her mother (eek!) there was only a twitch or scuttle from Los Rodentos. Someone phoned up to ask Belinda to appear on radio (she declined, but felt agitated); she remembered Stefan’s birthday was next week; the usual pressures most certainly applied. But no trampolining by small furry bodies. The rats were on a go-slow. Ever since she’d decided to hire Linda, she’d felt like the proverbial sinking ship. ‘Psst, Neville,’ she whispered. ‘Are you all right?’ Not a scuttle; not a squeak. Life was odd without his wheeling and bouncing. She pictured him with little round spectacles, like John Lennon. But no matter how much she hummed ‘Imagine’ to encourage him, he simply wasn’t interested. Belinda always had a marvellous time alone with her imagination. Having invented quite a good travel piece, if she said so herself (‘Wind and soft rain whipped the ponies’ fetlocks; my hat was too tight, like an iron band’) she was now plotting the next Verity novel, Atta Girl, Verity!, in which Verity’s impoverished mum would break the terrible news that she couldn’t afford to stable Goldenboy at the Manor House any more—or not unless Verity took a backbreaking after-school job pulling weeds in Camilla’s mummy’s seven-acre garden. How she enjoyed visiting pain and anguish on Verity, these days. She beamed as she considered Verity’s fate. Ho hum. By the rules of such fiction, Verity must, of course, come back from a perfect hack on Goldenboy, and be rubbing him down with fresh-smelling straw when in the distance, eek! splash!, Camilla falls into the ornamental fishpond! Run to the rescue, Verity! Don’t care if your plaits get wet! Recover Camilla unconscious, apply life-saving techniques, and after a feverish period awaiting Camilla’s recovery, receive as reward (wait for it) free

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stabling for the rest of your life! And not forgetting double oats for good old Goldenboy! The children’s book world was mainly supplied these days with grim stuff about discarded hypodermics, but Belinda knew her own smug little readers would lap up the free stabling plot all right, mainly because they had already proved themselves stupid with no imagination. How easy they were to manipulate, these little princesses. Psychoanalysis might never have been invented. ‘Camilla cuts off Verity’s plaits,’ she wrote now, mischievously. ‘Verity caught cheating in the handy-pony. Shame increases when V investigated by RSPCA; maltreatment of G Boy exposed on national TV by Rolf H. V’s mother seeks consolation in lethal cocktail of booze and horse pills, and is shot by vet. Camilla wins Hickstead.’ Just then a key turned in the front door. Mrs Holdsworth? Belinda felt stricken. She’d been so busy torturing Verity! What was the etiquette for sacking a cleaning lady? Did you let her do the cleaning first, or what? ‘Only me,’ called Mrs H, coughing as she slammed the front door, and struggled out of wellingtons. Belinda stayed paralysed at her desk, panicking. ‘Hello!’ she called, and waited. ‘ “Come into the garden, Maud,” ’ sang Mrs H, coughing between words. ‘ “For the black bat night has—” ’ Here a great explosion of phlegm-shifting, culminating in ‘God almighty, Jesus wept.’ She popped her grey head round the study door, fag in mouth. Here goes, thought Belinda, then noticed that Mrs H’s left arm was suspended in a rather grubby sling. ‘Don’t fucking ask,’ said Mrs Holdsworth gloomily. ‘Doctor says six months. I tell you what for nothing. My fucking brass-polishing days are over.’ ‘That’s awful,’ sympathized Belinda. ‘And when they’d hardly begun. What a shame. I’m sorry.’ ‘So am I. No grip, you see.’ ‘I’ve been thinking—’ Belinda began. ‘Fucking stairs are the worst, of course.’ Mrs H scratched her knee through her overall, using her one good arm. Recollecting that there were three floors to her house (plus attic), Belinda didn’t see how an injured wrist stopped you from going upstairs, but she said nothing. Asking Mrs Holdsworth to elaborate on an intriguing statement was a mistake she’d regretted on too many occasions, and she now had a policy of restricting herself to a noncommittal ‘Mm’ wherever possible. ‘Mm,’ she said now, with as much of a funny-old-world tone as she could manage.

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Mrs H continued to stand in the doorway. It always grieved her to spend less than half of her allotted three hours telling people how long it was since she bought a scarf. She tried again. ‘Bleeding great ’urricane on the way, apparently.’ ‘Mm.’ ‘That Salman Rushdie was in the butcher’s again. I said to him, “Very good, mate. Disguising yourself as a pork chop, are you? That’s fucking original.” ’ ‘Mm.’ Belinda pretended to be deeply engrossed in her notes. ‘My boy says he’s written a new book called Buddha Was a Cunt. Is that true?’  In the café, Maggie read last week’s Stage from cover to cover, filling time before her therapy appointment at two p.m. Maggie had run the gamut of therapy over the years. She’d done Freudian twice and Jungian three times, but had so far avoided Kleinian because Belinda had once said, ‘What, like Patsy Cline?’ which had somehow ruined it. Belinda had an awful way of belittling things that were important to you, by saying the first thing that came into her head. Kleinian therapy would now only involve singing maudlin I-fall-to-pieces country songs, which was what Maggie did at home anyway without paying. Nowadays Maggie was working with a new therapist, Julia, who was the best she’d ever had. The idea was to work on isolated problems, and correct the thinking that led to inappropriate behaviour or beliefs. For example, Maggie had a problem about other people being late. ‘So does everyone,’ pooh-poohed Belinda. ‘Not like me,’ said Maggie. And it was true. Maggie not only got angry and worried as the minutes ticked by, but after a while she started to imagine that the other person was not late at all. He had actually arrived on time, and was standing at the bar or something—but that she had completely forgotten what he looked like. ‘But he’d recognize you?’ Belinda objected. ‘So you’d still meet up.’ No, said Maggie. Because it was worse than that. He’d forgotten what she looked like, too. ‘That’s mad,’ Belinda had said, helpfully. ‘You should never have become an actress if you can’t handle the odd identity shift, Mags.’ Luckily, the therapist took a more constructive approach. ‘Now, since this non-recognition event has never occurred in reality,’ said Julia, ‘we must uncover the roots of your irrational anxiety, which I’m afraid to say, Margaret, is your sense of total unlovability. It’s not your fault. Not at all. Your needs were never met by your parents, you see.’ ‘You’re right.’ ‘You were made to feel invisible by those terrible selfish people, who should never have had children.’ Maggie sniffed. ‘I was.’

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‘They looked right through you.’ Tears pricked Maggie’s eyes. ‘They did.’ ‘Did they tell you to stop dancing in front of the television, perhaps?’ It was a lucky guess. ‘Yes!’ And so Maggie had wept and signed up for six months, figuring that she had very little else to do, and Julia was local (in Tooting). Besides which, she couldn’t keep sitting stock-still with panic in theatre foyers with a sign pinned on her chest: ‘It’s really me! Is that really you?’ Professionally, things were a bit bleak for Maggie, and this didn’t help matters. Her total unlovability was being confirmed in all quarters. The Pinter had been good experience, though incredibly badly paid. She’d had a job on Casualty, classified in the script as ‘Bus crash scene—a woman moans’. But all the while her ambition to rejoin the Royal Shakespeare Company was coming to nothing. For the time being she must comfort herself with memories of two years ago, when she’d peaked in Stratford as the Lady Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, getting a review that singled her out as ‘quite extraordinary’ and ‘probably quite good-looking’. She had really loved that production, which was very loyal of her because it was generally reviled. Playing to paltry houses who sometimes booed, it did not transfer to London. But Maggie loved her Olivia. Never one to argue with a director’s concept, she even loved her Olivia’s Mongolian peasant costume and comical clog dancing. (‘Nobility is relative,’ their director Jeff told them.) Jeff, whom the Financial Times described as ‘an idiot’, had bucketfuls of bold ideas, including the unprecedented notion of casting as Viola and Sebastian (identical twins) two actors who looked absolutely nothing like each other. ‘Most wonderful!’ Olivia would say each night in the last scene, doing a hilarious double-take through bottle-glass specs. Even the critics liked that bit. She wished now she hadn’t slept with Jeff, especially as he was married to the famous TV actress who had played Viola. But he’d done her a great service with that casting of asymmetricals. No one usually finds Olivia’s final-act confusion the least bit funny. Leon pushed open the steamy door, and wiped his shoes. Oh God. He looked slightly less enormous than she’d remembered, and had washed his hair. Maggie fiddled with her teaspoon in the sugar, glancing up occasionally. But though he looked round carefully, he evidently failed to spot her, so she carried on reading the Stage—or pretended to, having read it all already. She heard Leon order a cup of herbal tea and braced herself. He brushed past her (‘Sorry’), and sat at a nearby table with Time Out, studying the ballet listings. She stared at him until finally he looked up. ‘Well, hello,’ she said pointedly. He frowned.

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‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Penelope Pitstop. You must be Muttley.’ He took a sip of tea, and looked behind him. ‘Sorry, were you sitting here?’ he suggested, at last. ‘What?’ ‘Were you sitting here?’ His voice sounded funny. But it was definitely him. ‘No.’ He tried to look away again, but couldn’t. She was staring at him, and clearly getting angry with him, too. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Do I know you? I’m afraid I’m terrible at forgetting people. I meet such a lot of people in my work, you see.’ At which point, the door opened again, and a blonde woman came in, smiling directly at Leon. It was Julia, Maggie’s therapist. ‘Ah, there you are, Julia,’ said Leon, with relief. ‘Perhaps . . .’ and he gestured awkwardly towards Maggie, evidently hoping his wife could identify her. ‘Margaret?’ she began, but in a second Maggie had pushed past her, left the café and was outside.  Verity, high on crack cocaine, was just being bundled into a police van (they were manhandling her plaits) when Belinda wondered whether it might be time to ease up a bit. ‘Phew,’ she said, shaking her head proudly as she perused the last two pages of notes, and wishing she smoked cheroots. ‘What a scorcher.’ The phone rang. It was Viv. ‘Am I interrupting something?’ ‘Only a drug bust. So I see you’re still talking to me? She’s only a cleaning lady, Viv.’ ‘It’s about you and me,’ Viv said. ‘I was wrong, you were right.’ Belinda paused to take this in. ‘And who is this impersonating Viv, please?’ ‘Belinda, listen. I was wrong to interfere in your life. If you want to be bad at things and disorganized and never tidy up, you can do that. You’re nearly forty, after all.’ ‘I’m thirty-six, the same as you.’ ‘You see, Linda isn’t what you think. I know I’ve always said she was Mary Poppins and all that, but the truth is I’ve been covering up for her.’ ‘Viv!’ ‘No, it’s true. She’s got a terrible self-esteem problem. You have to bolster her all the time. And you end up—’ ‘Viv, I can’t believe you’d stoop so low.’ ‘You haven’t sacked Mrs Holdsworth?’

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‘That’s a point. Hang on.’ Alerted to the telltale sound of vacuum cleaning in the hall, Belinda popped her head round the door and found Mrs H pushing the Hoover back and forth on the same spot, apparently lost in thought. ‘Fucking disgusting!’ she yelled to Belinda, over the din of the Hoover. Belinda gave her a thumbs-up and went back to the phone. ‘Not yet. I thought if I gave her a month’s money—’ ‘Leave things as they are, Bea.’ Belinda harumphed grandly. Nobody harumphed as grandly as Belinda. The doorbell rang. ‘I’ve got to go.’ ‘If it’s Linda—’ ‘I’ll ring you later. God, you’re so interfering. Why do you always think you’re responsible for other people’s lives?’ ‘Perhaps because I’m a bloody anaesthetist, in case you’ve forgotten!’ Belinda pursed her lips. The doorbell rang again. ‘If it’s Linda—’ Viv began. ‘I’ve got to go.’ Belinda felt rather good about standing up to Viv. Letting Verity’s behaviour go haywire had obviously given her a boost. ‘Atta girl, Belinda,’ she said to herself on the way to the door, stepping over Mrs H’s wellingtons—and opening it found, in a pool of afternoon light, carrying a very thoughtful bunch of chrysanthemums, the woman who was going to change her life.  Mid-afternoon, Jago rang Laurie Spink again. Spink was now body and soul the property of the Effort, because it was easier to give him an extremely well-paid regular column than think of someone else to write for the supplement. And now that Jago had his number, he could expect the usual Jago call. ‘I need some geneticists.’ ‘I’ve got a tutorial.’ ‘I need them this minute.’ So Spink had reeled off a few names, some of them with phone numbers. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ he added. ‘Copy by Friday, yes?’ ‘Just one more thing. What do you know about Stefan Johansson’s work? He hasn’t done anything on monstrous boobs that he’s keeping quiet about?’ ‘Oh, a lot of his notes were lost, unfortunately.’ Jago had been doodling. He stopped. ‘Lost when?’

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‘When he died.’ ‘Stefan Johansson died? Since this morning?’ ‘No, no. Three or four years ago. Tragic. A fire. Best cloning brain outside the US. I suppose most people don’t know about it. He used his own genetic material for research—ghastly end. Led to all sorts of enquiries and bans, but it was mostly hushed up. Wife went mad, terrible stories.’ ‘But he’s teaching at Imperial.’ ‘Can’t be.’ Jago blinked hard. In a second he had cut off Spink and phoned Imperial. They had no Johansson. He phoned the cuttings library; they promised to e-mail an obituary from an obscure science journal. He cast his mind back (a manoeuvre that did not come easily to him). How much had Viv known about Stefan when they introduced him to Belinda? Nothing. Viv’s sister met him in the canteen, that’s all. He was an impostor! A cheating, clever impostor! Like, like— ‘Get me the names of some impostors quick!’ he ordered his secretary. Jago was nearly hyperventilating. What a great story! What a madly dangerous scheme to take the identity of a famous dead scientist and, moreover, pretend to be Swedish. Jago’s mind raced, as he scanned the obituary that had just arrived on his screen. Key words leapt out at him. ‘Cloning . . . brilliant . . . Swede . . . pseudogenes . . . Sweden . . . reckless . . . only in the mind of Robert Louis Stevenson . . . Human Genome Project . . . very, very mysterious . . . Malmö.’ Jago couldn’t read it properly, because he never did read anything properly. But he got the idea. The man they knew as Stefan—who was he? ‘Unless, unless—’ he muttered. He scrolled to the end, scrolled to the top again. More key words leapt out. ‘Gene sharing . . . Malmö . . . foolhardy experiment . . . replica . . . Frankenstein . . . condemned by scientific fraternity . . . Church . . . offence against God . . . mutation . . . Abba . . . Malmö.’ But then he looked at the picture, and everything changed. It was Stefan. Stefan was dead, yet alive. A great shiver of excitement went up his spine. He heard again Stefan saying, ‘Gosh, hey, this is very original one-off copy!’ The conclusion was staring him in the face. ‘Oh my God. The man we know as Stefan Johansson . . . is a clone.’  Running from the Gemini café, Maggie choked on tears of humiliation. Good grief, if this was what happened when you just popped out for a bacon sandwich she’d become a vegetarian immediately. For someone with Maggie’s particular invisibility complexes, here was a triple calamity: (a) the man she’d condescended to sleep with had entirely failed to recognize her the next lunch-time; (b) he was a bastard and was the partner of her therapist, to whom she now couldn’t

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talk about it; and (c) after all that Michael Schumacher nonsense, it turns out he’s really interested in classical dance! ‘They’re all the same,’ she sobbed openly, as she ran home. ‘All the bloody same.’ ‘Margaret?’ Leon was now calling after her and, from the sound of it, running. His feet were slapping the pavement, and he was gaining on her. Why was he calling her Margaret? ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard,’ she muttered as she ran. ‘Margaret, could you stop, please?’ She turned into her own street. Nearly home. Her heart was pounding as she picked up speed to escape him, and saw—emerging sheepishly from her flat, with hair slightly dirtier than it had been last night—Leon. He stopped and lit a cigarette, then started ambling in the opposite direction. ‘Aieee!’ she cried. ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ Looking back, she saw Leon running towards her; looking forward, she saw him walking away. What an irony, she thought, as she staggered against the wall, clutching her chest. To spend all your professional life practising double-takes. And then, when a double-take would really come in handy, just fainting away on the spot.

Chapter 4




‘Well,’ said Linda, ‘I had no idea doubles could be so interesting!’ As Linda boiled the kettle and opened some biscuits she’d thoughtfully brought, Belinda found herself feeling spectacularly happy. What an intelligent and intuitive woman Linda was. Everyone else scanned the ceiling for flies when she talked about The Dualists, or fiddled with a dinner napkin. It had the same turn-off effect as Stefan telling people he came from Malmö or, indeed, from Scandinavia. In both situations, her mother would say, ‘That’s nice,’ then steer the conversation to the new range from Dolce and Gabbana. Linda, however, was of finer empathetic stuff. She had seen instantly not only that Belinda’s book urgently needed writing but that it needed writing well. ‘So do people meet their doubles in real life?’ Linda asked. ‘No. Not that I know of.’ ‘Shame. Because, as you say, most of us are leading double lives, aren’t we?’ ‘At least double, yes. Or we wish we had two lives, just to deal with everything.’ It felt odd to talk about it. Could Linda truly be interested? ‘So is it that one person is really two people? Or two people are really only one person?’ ‘Both. The main thing in most doubles stories is that the hero has his life taken over by a dark, malevolent force that shares his identity and implicates him in misdeed. Or sometimes the double just gobbles him up. I’ve got lots of theories about it. That’s why I’m writing the book.’ Linda made the tea, as if it were perfectly normal to potter in Belinda’s kitchen. With airy confidence, she gave Belinda Stefan’s favourite mug, and opened a new packet of tea-bags because she didn’t know the system with the old brown jar. ‘Well, I think you’re right,’ Linda decided, putting the milk away in the fridge in the wrong place. ‘You mustn’t feel guilty about making time to write your special book. Our special work is what we’re put on earth to do. I firmly believe that.’ Belinda nodded. Should she ask what Linda’s special work was? ‘And, as you said before,’ Linda continued, ‘men have always shut themselves away to write books, without anyone accusing them of neglecting the household chores. I mean, Tolstoy didn’t write Crime and Punishment in between trips to Asda.’ ‘You say the best things, Linda.’ ‘Thank goodness you don’t have any children.’ ‘Mm.’ Linda reopened the fridge and ran a professional eye over its contents. She

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took a deep breath. ‘I feel very good about this,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘I am absolutely sure that, between us, we’re going to write that book.’ Belinda looked at the new cleaning lady and marvelled. What a formidable ally to have. She had a silly schoolgirl urge to tell Linda she was lovely. She had such a fruity firmness about her, plus the easy elegance that is often found in people who, at a crucial moment in their teenage development, chose hockey club over Georgette Heyer. Paths divide at every moment of the day, of course. But Belinda believed in the universal hockey–Heyer divide most strongly. In her experience, those who at puberty chose solitary reading over group exertion may (oh, yes) have grown up to be brainboxes earning more money, but they could never quite catch up again in self-confidence with those hearty, practical girls, despite all their well-meant gym subscriptions in later years. Outside in the hall, Mrs Holdsworth ran her Hoover into a coat-stand, and said, ‘Shit,’ as it crashed to the floor. ‘I can’t sack Mrs Holdsworth,’ Belinda said. Linda shrugged. ‘I can leave her a patch of hall carpet. Where are the phones, by the way?’ ‘What?’ ‘The phones.’ ‘One in my study, one in the hall.’ ‘When I’m here, I’ll field your calls. Completely uninterrupted time is what you want, isn’t it? Shall I throw those newspapers away?’ Belinda nodded. It was like a dream. ‘Okey-dokey.’ Linda smiled. ‘Well, the best thing I can do this afternoon is get some shopping and prepare the dinner. I’ll give you a bill at the end of each week. You’re in tonight? What time does Mrs Holdsworth finish?’ ‘Four.’ ‘I’ll return at four ten. And I’ll finish at six thirty. What are you working on this afternoon?’ ‘Oh, hack work. It has to be done. I write for money as Patsy Sullivan. Horsy stories. Patsy subsidizes us all. She’ll be paying you too.’ ‘So you’ve got a double life yourself, Mrs Johansson!’ ‘I ought to ditch Patsy, really. Now I’m on the same footing as Tolstoy it doesn’t seem right.’ ‘Well, one thing at a time. Perhaps you’re fond of her.’ ‘Oh, I am. Tell me about yourself, though, Linda.’ But just at that moment the phone rang, and Linda lifted down her coat (a neat ivory mac) from the kitchen door, where she had hung it on a little collapsible hanger. She folded the hanger and put it in her bag. ‘I’ll answer that on the way out,’ she said.

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Belinda was startled. ‘What? I mean, you can’t—’ Mrs H yelled, ‘It’s your fucking phone, Belinda!’ above the din of the machine. Linda gave her a funny look. ‘Trust me,’ she said.  Belinda’s mother regarded herself in her pocket mirror as the taxi bounced along the north side of Clapham Common. With effort and concentration, she twitched the corners of her mouth to form a ghostly smile. She would never actually regret the face-lift, but she had to admit that the general reaction was not what she had hoped for. Instead of her best friends saying, ‘Virginia, you look so good today, so young, but somehow I can’t put my finger on it,’ they walked right past her, even in Harrods Food Hall. To make matters worse, meanwhile, complete strangers were jabbing her in the chest, saying, ‘Do you mind me asking? How much it cost?’ It had cost thousands, of course. Cheekbone enhancement, lips like sofa cushions, realigned eyebrows, and a revolutionary polymer skin treatment guaranteed to keep the whole lot immovable for at least five years, as long as she took certain precautions. She could go swimming, she could be kissed on both cheeks, and she could sunbathe as long as she wore an enormous hat. ‘But if you feel at all tempted to peek inside a blast furnace,’ her surgeon told her darkly, ‘don’t.’ Lucky, then, that there were so few steel mills still under commission in Knightsbridge. Nevertheless she had taken this alarming advice very much to heart. At home, in her Primrose Hill flat, she’d stopped using the oven, and turned all the radiators down. The iron was permanently set to one-dot, and was used at arm’s length. Selling chestnuts on street corners was now totally ruled out as a profession. On the plus side, however, she had given up smoking. After decades of fruitless begging from Belinda, Mother had now kicked the habit overnight, and had even started decrying it in others. In fact, along with rabid jealousy of her facial upholstering, this was the main reason her old friends were dropping her. It gets on your nerves if every time you light up a Benson and Hedges, your companion shrieks, ‘No!’ and shades her face like Nosferatu. Auntie Vanessa, her identical twin sister (though not as identical as she used to be), was a champion smoker and now flatly refused to see her. ‘Hello?’ ‘Belinda, darling! What a terrible line!’ ‘This is the Johansson residence. Who is this speaking, please?’ Mother regarded her mobile phone with a puzzled expression, and knocked it against the car door a couple of times. ‘Belinda?’ ‘I’m afraid Mrs Johansson is working at the moment. May I pass on a message?’

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‘It’s her mother, for heaven’s sake. And I’m just on my way to see her.’ The taxi purred at traffic-lights. ‘Right here, then Armadale Road,’ she yelled, pointing. Linda effortlessly took an executive decision. In fact she took two, because she bobbed down and unplugged Mrs H’s Hoover at the same time, leaving the old woman open-mouthed. ‘Oh, I’ve heard so much about you!’ she lied. ‘Mrs Johansson was just saying how much she’d like to see you. But she is so terribly busy today. I’ll ask her either to call you later or to give me a message for you. Did you have a nice day shopping?’ ‘What?’ ‘I very much look forward to meeting you. I’m Linda.’ She plugged the Hoover back in, and replaced the receiver. ‘You must be Mrs Holdsworth,’ she smiled, extending her manicured hand. ‘What a lovely scarf. Is it new?’  Jago spent his afternoon making secret calls to Dermot on his mobile from the gents’. He had no idea that the vile Dermot had been smooching with his wife the night before—or, indeed, that as he spoke to Dermot, mobile-to-mobile, he was in bed with her, showing her the extremely out-of-the-way places where his tan stopped. Dermot, it has to be said, was more excited by the human clone in their midst than he’d been about making love to Viv—and, to Viv’s chagrin, did not try hard to disguise it. In fact he waved her away rather nastily, and she retreated to the en suite while he offered Jago his professional opinion—viz., that if Stefan were really a clone in our midst, Jago could get half a million for a book, plus serialization fees. However, if it turned out that Stefan was merely in our midst (and not a clone), he’d be lucky to get a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. ‘You’re not an investigative reporter, Jago. Did you ever do anything like this before? What’s the nearest you’ve been to cutting-edge stuff ?’ ‘I interviewed Tom Stoppard when his marriage was breaking up.’ ‘What did he say about it?’ ‘About what?’ ‘His love life.’ Jago’s voice rose. ‘You saying I should have asked him? Jesus, can you imagine how awkward that would be?’ Dermot didn’t have time for this. He sat up in bed and tucked a pillow behind him. ‘See what you can get, Jago. But you know how it is. You’ll need patience and perseverance and tact to get this story.’

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Jago winced three times. He hated all those words. ‘My suggestion is, hire someone to watch him. Find out what happened in Sweden. And don’t get obsessed with the clone thing. Do you think Belinda knows she might be married to a clone?’ ‘No.’ Dermot looked up at Viv, who was suddenly standing next to him. If she had overheard, there was nothing he could do about it. ‘Don’t tell her.’ ‘You’re right. I mean, for one thing I don’t want to alarm my oldest friend unnecessarily. And on top of that—’ Dermot was there already. ‘She might get in first with a book deal?’ ‘Exactly.’  Mrs Holdsworth finished Hoovering her little patch of hall and tottered to the kitchen for her coat. She pocketed the money Belinda had left her with an aggressive swipe, as if she would just as happily trample it underfoot. It had been an unsettling afternoon. Three times she had tried Belinda with conversational gambits of such outstanding ingenuity that she’d had to have a sit-down afterwards. But even ‘Do you think Richard Branson is really the Antichrist?’ and ‘Whatever made anyone invent the scone?’ failed to find their mark. And then, to top it all, this woman in the light mac had unplugged her Hoover. In cleaninglady terms, this was a direct challenge that cannot be overstated. It is the equivalent of the glove smacked across your face from right to left, and then from left to right. From her ground-floor office, Belinda listened as Mrs Holdsworth left. She felt half guilty and half excited by the idea of hurting her feelings. She loved the sense of danger. What if Mrs Holdsworth told her off ? ‘I’ll be off, then, Belinda,’ the old woman called. ‘We’re out of Jif.’ ‘Right. Many thanks.’ ‘Back next week.’ ‘Mm.’ ‘Did you know the other woman took a key?’ ‘That’s OK.’ She heard the front door opened; felt the draught; heard traffic noise. Mrs H was evidently taking her time, deciding whether to pursue it. Then, with a muttered ‘Fuck it,’ the door was slammed, and Mrs H could faintly be heard coughing (‘God Almighty, Jesus wept’) at the garden gate. 

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Stefan was not expecting to meet his mother-in-law Virginia lurking behind a denuded London plane tree as he walked from the bus along Armadale Road. It was six thirty and dark, which didn’t help. And since she no longer looked remotely like the woman he knew as Mother, he walked straight past her, consulting a little book and talking to himself. ‘Make it snappy or make tracks,’ she heard him saying. ‘You have made a hole in my pocket but I won’t make a song and dance. How do you make that out exactly? Ha! That makes you sit up, for sure.’ ‘Stefan!’ she called. She had always liked Stefan, because he was big and handsome; and he had always liked her, too. The reason they saw Mother so infrequently was only that Belinda was discouraged by criticism, and Mother, unfortunately, had no other mode of communication. He turned. ‘Let’s make a night of it, baby,’ he said. ‘Oh, hello, Virginia. Didn’t recognize you. Something up?’ Mother’s permanently fixed expression of wide-eyed alarm often gave rise to this question. But on this occasion at least the context made it the right thing to say. ‘I had to see you,’ she said. ‘Who’s Linda? What’s going on?’ Stefan’s eyes swivelled. ‘I don’t understand. Why are you out here in the street? Has there been dirty work at the crossroads?’ Mother pursed her lips. Or, more accurately, she attempted to purse her lips but gave up. ‘Yes, I rather think there has,’ she said at last. ‘I wanted to invite Belinda to the opera tonight. This Linda refused to let me.’ ‘Really? She sent you away from the door, like a dog in the night?’ ‘I phoned. They wouldn’t let me in, Stefan.’ She pouted. ‘I’ve been out here in the cold. It was someone called Linda and she was very rude. Typical of Belinda to hire somebody who’d be rude to her mother.’ At which point, as they approached the front door, Linda opened it and smiled at them both. She was evidently just leaving, but when she saw them she ushered them inside, gesturing at them to keep the noise down. ‘Mrs Johansson is working until seven,’ she whispered. ‘The dinner will be ready at seven thirty. I’ve rigged up a temporary answering-machine, made a list of the more urgent bills, filed the letters, cleaned the kitchen windows, sprayed the cat for fleas and changed all the beds.’ ‘Linda is our new Mrs Mop,’ Stefan explained, somewhat redundantly. ‘The newspapers I took to the dump,’ Linda continued, ‘but I’ve rung the recycling people and they’ll start coming next Tuesday. Um, what else? Your dressing-gown is warming in the airing cupboard, Mr Johansson. I didn’t know what to do with this ice-hockey puck, but I can ask Mrs Johansson at our three o’clock meeting tomorrow. Normally our meeting will be at one o’clock, when

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I’ll provide soup and a hot dish, but tomorrow I’ll be a little late, as I’ll be having lunch with Mrs Johansson’s agent on her behalf.’ A number of objections raised themselves in the minds of Stefan and Mother, but under this barrage all they could do was laugh nervously. ‘Does Belinda know all this?’ Linda was surprised. ‘Of course not. That’s the idea.’ Stefan ran through the list again in his mind. He frowned. ‘I think the cat was not ours, Linda. We do not own a cat. I fear you have de-fleaed the cat of another.’ Mother made a strangled noise. ‘The cat of another?’ she exploded. ‘Who cares about the cat of another? I’ve never heard anything like it. This is so typical of Belinda. Having lunch with Jorkin? How dare you?’ Linda looked puzzled. ‘I am thinking only of what’s best for Mrs Johansson, and for everybody. Truly, I’m very good at this sort of thing. One of my previous employers said I was like Nature. I abhor a vacuum. Meanwhile, as I’m sure you’re aware, Mrs Johansson has fears that she will cease to be before her pen has gleaned her teeming brain.’ Mother tried to look aghast, but (of course) continued only to look mildly surprised. In any case, it was hard to have a proper scene huddled by the front door, talking in hushed tones for fear of interrupting the sacred work of Belinda. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she hissed. ‘This house! This is so typical! You waltz in here. You just waltz—’ Mother, breathless with exasperation, seemed to be getting stuck on the insufferable image of Linda waltzing. ‘I mean, here’s an idea, Linda, whoever you are,’ she spat. ‘If you’re doing everything for my daughter, why don’t you just come to see Così Fan Tutte with me tonight, then sleep with Stefan afterwards?’ ‘Virginia!’ exclaimed Stefan. English sarcasm always outraged him. But Linda had her head on one side, as if making her mind up. ‘Would you stay there, please?’ she said, and disappeared in the direction of Belinda’s study. They waited awkwardly by the front door, like neighbourhood children waiting for a friend to come out to play. Linda returned. ‘I’d love to,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’d love to come to the opera in Belinda’s place. She’s happy to carry on working, and she said it would be a good opportunity for me to get to know you. She also said you know perfectly well she hates poncy opera. So thank you, thank you very much. Is that a Prada coat? I thought so. Look at the tailoring.’ She attempted to give Mother a kiss on the cheek, but was almost shoved away. ‘Poncy?’ Mother queried, obviously hurt. ‘Belinda!’ she called. Stefan intervened. ‘If the ticket is spare, Virginia, why not take Linda? She takes us by surprise, yet it is a swell idea. Here is a vacuum for her to fill, I think.

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Surely we should give her the glad hand for the kitchen windows and such. Only the cat of another has the right to bad feeling.’ ‘May I call you Virginia?’ asked Linda, with a smile. ‘Of course not.’ Mother was beginning to feel dizzy. ‘You must come to dinner tomorrow night, mustn’t she, Mr Johansson? I happen to know Belinda’s aiming to finish her chapter on Dostoevsky this week, and she’ll be so relieved to know she needn’t do anything.’ ‘Poncy?’ Mother repeated. ‘Così isn’t poncy.’ Linda waved it away. ‘May I call you Mother?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, this is very exciting. Do I need to change first, do you think? Or shall I come as I am?’  Back in her flat, Maggie stroked Ariel and Miranda in the dark, and tried to imagine how she would tell Belinda what had happened. Belinda ought to be informed about a real-life case of doubles, surely? But, on the other hand, the vocabulary was so difficult. ‘I met a double’ would sound like she’d met her own double; ‘I met two doubles’ sounded like she’d met four people, possibly dressed in tennis whites, which was in no way a reflection of what had happened. If only she had a contact number for Leon! If only she had listened more carefully when he told her the details of his next indie-car yawnfest assignment in Oshbosh, Oklahoma. ‘Off to Oshbosh,’ said his note. ‘You were lovely. I want to see you again. Yours anally, L.’ She couldn’t possibly ask Jago about him: it was imperative that her friends never find out the calibre of person she allowed herself to sleep with. But, there again, Leon’s presence was desperately required, simply to prove to her bloody therapist that she hadn’t made him up. Olivia in Twelfth Night, she reflected, had had such an easy time of it by comparison. ‘Honestly, you look exactly like him,’ she had lamely told Noel, Julia’s husband, in the café, when he’d revived her. But he only nodded solemnly and exchanged professional tut-tut glances with Julia. He was a therapist too, naturally. Neither of them believed her. It was a nightmare. They wanted to know why she’d identified herself as Penelope Pitstop, but since neither of them had a sense of humour or had watched children’s television, it had been necessary to abandon the explanation. ‘Margaret won’t mind me telling you,’ Julia was informing Noel now. ‘We’ve been working for several months on a specific complex, relating to her feelings of invisibility. Her greatest fear—I think this is true, Margaret?—is of being publicly ignored and rejected by people who’ve been intimate with her. I think we

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agreed that of all humiliations this one utterly annihilates you, doesn’t it, Margaret?’ Maggie nodded reluctantly, horrified that Julia should discuss this with somebody else. Julia lowered her voice. ‘We think it’s probably to do with her father.’ Noel looked impressed by this discovery. ‘The father is so often the cause,’ he agreed. ‘And today that fear was projected on to me? Tch, I’m so sorry I hurt you that way, Margaret.’ ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ insisted Maggie. ‘And it wasn’t anything to do with projecting. It’s just that you look exactly like the man I slept with last night. It was a case of mistaken identity, that’s all.’ ‘I know,’ said Noel. ‘I know,’ echoed Julia, and automatically offered Maggie a packet of tissues from her bag. Likewise automatically, Maggie took one. She shoved it up the sleeve of her jumper. ‘You do,’ she insisted, and waggled her hands. ‘Yes, yes,’ said Noel, thoughtfully. ‘I’ll tell you what, Margaret. Can I call you Margaret?’ ‘You already have.’ ‘Well, Margaret.’ Noel rested his chin in his hands. ‘I’m struck by an idea here. It’s pretty revolutionary, I warn you. But why don’t we all work together on this? I happen to be an expert on therapeutic role-playing. For therapeutic purposes, and under the strictest ethical controls, I could take the role of this man, this— Leon?’ ‘Yes, Leon.’ ‘And—well, I’m just feeling my way here, of course—but I could be Leon and, um, well, recognize you. Why not take advantage of the fact that you see a resemblance? I could recognize you and respond to you, and make you feel better. Sometimes I wouldn’t recognize you, and you could hit me. Although only under the strictest ethical doo-dahs and whatsits, et cetera. What do you think?’ ‘I don’t know. To be honest, I was thinking of leaving therapy altogether.’ Noel and Julia both gasped. ‘The thing is,’ she continued, ‘I spend so much time talking about my life, I feel I’m not actually living it.’ The therapists swapped glances. ‘All the more reason to continue with therapy, but step it up, add another dimension,’ Julia advised, quickly. ‘Really?’ ‘Oh, yes.’ They watched her as she wavered. Noel coughed. ‘I’ll come clean with you, Margaret. I think you have a very serious problem.’

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‘Really?’ ‘Yes. Ignoring this problem is simply not a choice you have. No, you can either solve this problem through years of analysing it, or you can confront it and blow it out of the water. Tease it out slowly, or blitz it. Well, I think I know you well enough to know which course you’d prefer.’ ‘You don’t know me at all,’ Maggie pointed out, reasonably. ‘Margaret, your hostility and defensiveness are all part of your problem.’ ‘That’s true,’ said Julia. ‘You resist intimacy, even with me.’ Maggie wanted to hit her. She wanted to hit him, too. The café would be closing at half past two, and she still hadn’t had her bacon sandwich. ‘Look. I’m sorry. But the point is, you’re the lady I pay to help me sort out a problem, and you’re a man who just happens to look exactly like the man I slept with last night. I didn’t like him, and to be honest, I’m not warming much to you, either.’ Julia shook her head and sighed. ‘No, it’s OK,’ Noel told her. ‘I can work with that. Let’s say I’m the man you slept with last night, Margaret. See? I’m Leon. Nyow-nyow, and here comes Michael Schumacher in the Renault. First things first. Was I any good in bed?’ ‘You were terrible.’ ‘OK,’ he said again, with slightly less enthusiasm. ‘I can work with that, too.’ ‘No,’ she relented. ‘You were nice. I’m a bitch. I mean, he was nice. What am I saying?’ A man came to collect their cups. ‘Michael Schumacher drives a Ferrari,’ he observed. ‘As a point of fact.’ ‘I didn’t say this was going to be easy,’ snapped Noel. ‘I just said it was the best way to stop this lovely young woman spiralling into madness.’ At which the man pronounced the Gemini closed. Sitting here in the dark now, Maggie realized Miranda and Ariel were practising that special cat alarmed expression, which says, ‘Who the hell are you? Am I in the wrong house? My God, I’m getting out of here.’ It didn’t help. She got up and brushed them off her lap. This is all bloody Leon’s fault, she thought. Bloody, bloody Leon.  When Jago returned from the office at nine that evening, he said nothing about Stefan being a clone. He just brought home with him five books by Laurie Spink, four by Steve Jones and two by Richard Dawkins. It was clear that his efforts to absorb and enjoy these books had defeated him. He looked tired and miserable, as though he’d been wrestling feebly with a muscular opponent who’d not only held him by the wrists but had laughed at him. The minute he was indoors he

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made a tall pile of the books in the hall and kicked them against a door. Viv heard the noise and rushed in. ‘Special supplement on genetics,’ he explained, waving a hand at the scattered, broken-backed volumes. He wore a wounded expression. ‘Do you think Melvyn Bragg really understands any of this?’ he cried. ‘Because I’m fucked if I do.’ Viv watched sympathetically as he retrieved the books and showed them to her, one by one. He was almost in tears. ‘Look at this. “Winner of the Easy-peasy Book Prize”,’ he pretended to read from the cover of one. ‘ “Best popular science book of 1995, a million copies sold to babes in arms”,’ he snarled. ‘Pah! Look. “I couldn’t put it down—Sooty”.’ Viv wondered whether he was going to confide his theory about Stefan, but it looked as if he wasn’t. Since she could hardly explain how she happened to know already, she would just have to wait until he told her, and then act surprised. ‘Why don’t you phone Stefan if you want to know about genetics?’ she said, therefore. ‘He knows all about it.’ ‘Oh yeah, very funny,’ snapped Jago. ‘Why?’ Caught out, Jago bit his lip and thought fast. ‘Someone from the letters desk said Richard Branson is the Antichrist today. Can you believe that? The things people will say.’ ‘Mm,’ said Viv. As they made their way to the kitchen, she hoped she was better at lying than her husband was. Jago was not only sweaty and jumpy but an obituary of Stefan was sticking out of his pocket, and he’d brought home a copy of a sensational American weekly paper, opened at the page ‘Ten Ways to Tell if Your Grandparent is a Clone’. ‘I think Linda’s defected,’ said Viv. ‘Shame,’ said Jago, who didn’t care. He had poured himself a drink. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘ “Ten ways to tell if your grandparent is a clone. One. Sleeps fewer hours than you do. Two. Sometimes gets confused about things that happened relatively recently, yet claims to have personal memories of the Second World War. Three—” Do you think this is on the level?’ ‘I was talking about Linda,’ insisted Viv. ‘She said she’d still come on Thursday, but I feel she’s gone. So you need to know the consequences.’ Jago nodded. He wasn’t listening. ‘Ten ways to tell that your wife is inconsolably upset,’ Viv persisted. ‘One. She doesn’t speak to her oldest friend Belinda ever again. Two. She resigns her job at the hospital.’ ‘Three?’ he said automatically, then looked up. ‘What?’ he said. ‘You resigned your job?’ ‘I rang them today. I’ve resigned. I’m not going back.’

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‘Don’t you think that’s a little extreme? We could replace Linda, for heaven’s sake.’ Viv laughed. ‘I doubt it.’ Jago put down his weekly paper and coughed. ‘Viv, I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said. ‘I came home one day when Linda was supposed to be here, and I saw you putting the washing out when you should have been at work.’ ‘So?’ ‘So, I never thought Linda really did much, and I’m glad she’s gone. I think she had some kind of a hold over you.’ Viv was stricken. It was true. Life had been much simpler before Linda came along and streamlined it. But she felt no duty to tell Jago the full story, because Jago had cheerfully never absorbed a full story in his life. Even at undergraduate level, he was only really interested in headlines. ‘Blind Puritan Pens Mega Poem’ was his level, mostly. ‘Queen Is Faerie Shock.’ When she’d first needed to tell him she was pregnant, she’d left him a note with ‘Wife Up Duff Blunder’ on it. And when Stefan announced his engagement to Belinda, she’d wrestled for hours with variants of ‘Norwegian Wooed’ before admitting to herself it would never quite come right. ‘ “Char In Mystery Job Whammy”,’ she said, for his benefit, now. ‘ “ ‘I Never Knew,’ Says Husband.” ’  At ten thirty, as Belinda and Stefan snuggled on the sofa, the phone rang. It was Virginia. Stefan answered it and came back. ‘Your mother wanted to let us know she’d had a rattling good time at the opera with Linda,’ he reported, pouring his wife the last of the wine. ‘She said Linda was very appreciative and attentive and didn’t keep telling her what to think of it, like some people she could mention.’ ‘Oh,’ said Belinda. ‘Well, that’s good.’ ‘She also said it was nice to go out with someone who didn’t keep squirming in their seat.’ ‘That’s my mother.’ Stefan looked at her. ‘You don’t mind?’ Belinda laughed. ‘Mind what?’ ‘Being compared like that? Are you sure? As sure as eggs is eggs?’ ‘Why would I want to spend an evening with Mother when I could be here with you? Thank you very much, Linda. That’s what I say. What a star.’ They snuggled together again. ‘Some people would be jealous, that’s all. Ingrid was a jealous person. And you are jealous of Viv sometimes, I think.’

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‘I’ll tell you the only time I feel really jealous,’ said Belinda, putting her hand under Stefan’s shirt and stroking his skin. ‘It’s when I think of Ingrid. Or when you look at Maggie, or Maggie looks at you. I saw her whisper to you last night and I got hot and raw and murderous, and I felt sick. That’s when I feel jealous.’ Like most people, Stefan was both pleased and apprehensive at the idea that his loving partner would kill to keep him true. ‘That was a dandy meal Linda made. Sea bass. It’s a crying shame you couldn’t have it. You will have to tell her you think fish is strictly for the birds.’ ‘Yes. But anyone who does what she does—well, you’ve got to make a few allowances. Did you hear about next door’s cat?’ ‘I did.’ ‘She’s going to be amazing. She’s having lunch with Jorkin for me tomorrow.’ ‘You know about that?’ ‘I overheard.’ ‘You don’t mind about that either?’ ‘Oh, Stefan, why should I mind? I loathe Jorkin, he never has any decent ideas, and the extra time not having lunch with him means I can get on with the masterwork. I think it’s marvellous.’ ‘I would lay down the law, if it were me. And stop the rot.’ ‘Mm.’ Belinda shrugged. ‘I mean, who is this Linda? Was she born under a gooseberry bush? You entrust her to run our lives, and bake my dressing-gown in the airing cupboard, and question me about my moose-hat, and make sea bass without asking—and all I know is that she tell me she’s like Nature, she abhors a vacuum.’ ‘Is that what she said?’ said Belinda, evidently pleased by the idea. ‘Honestly, Stefan, don’t take it so seriously. It’s all in a good cause. The way I see it, if she really does abhor a vacuum, that’s marvellous news.’ ‘And she can always use a dustpan and brush,’ said Stefan, solemnly, before breaking into a proud grin. ‘Which is a good yoke, I think.’ Belinda kissed him. ‘What is it you used to call me?’ she asked, teasingly. ‘I used to call you, um, “Come to bed, Miss Patch”.’ ‘I can’t believe I let you get away with that.’ ‘No. Sometimes neither can I.’

Chapter 5




Life without Neville turned out to be exhilarating for Belinda. For yes, as she soon recognized with a pang, the rats had taken one look at Linda, packed their trapeze equipment and gone. Only a whiff of sawdust remained, and the echo of a drum-rolled ‘Hup!’ Belinda wondered whether she should break the good news to Stefan; but since he’d never subscribed to the Flying Vermin Brothers in the first place, decided to let this important Linda achievement pass unmarked. Besides, banishing imaginary rats from her employer’s alimentary canal was only one of Linda’s more rudimentary accomplishments. For, returning next day from lunch with Jorkin, she bit her lip for a minute and then admitted that she’d sacked him. ‘I’m so sorry, but the thing is, he had no ideas and no belief,’ she told an astonished Belinda, as she tied an apron over a rather smart, pale pink skirt she’d worn for the meeting. She climbed a little set of steps and started methodically sorting a kitchen cupboard and, without the least fuss or bother, slipping most of its appalling contents into an open bin-liner. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ she asked, disposing of an ancient lolly-making set. ‘Sacking your agent?’ ‘Not at all,’ said Belinda, almost choking with bewildered excitement. Linda had worked here for less than twenty-four hours and had already jettisoned Jorkin! ‘I just felt that the book should come first. I mean, that’s right, isn’t it? So all I said to him was that we needed an income from the Patsy Sullivan stories that wasn’t dependent on so many new titles. In other words, a push on merchandising, serialization and foreign sales. I thought that’s what you’d have said if you’d been there. I mean, it’s obvious to anybody.’ Belinda, who had never had such a smart idea in her life, agreed readily. ‘Merchandising. Obvious. Anybody.’ ‘Well, that’s what I thought you’d think.’ Linda tossed a bag of old paper napkins, a cracked wooden tray and some baby-blue birthday candles into the sack. A lot of this stuff had come with the house, and Belinda had never even looked at it. ‘So you don’t mind?’ ‘Far from it. I just—’ ‘He didn’t see it at all. He was very obstructive. But it seems obvious to me. Verity dolls, Verity bedspreads, tiny mucking-out sets, little bales of straw at ten pounds each, curry-combs the size of your fingernail. I read a couple of the Ver-

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ity books last night, just to get the feel of them, and I have to say, I think they’re very good.’ ‘Do you?’ Belinda, who loved praise, wanted to ask which ones her new friend had read, but stopped herself. Despite her high-flown literary pretensions, she was exceptionally proud of the second book, A Big Day for Verity. ‘It just makes me mad that your agent can’t see we’re sitting on a gold mine.’ ‘He’s quite literary,’ Belinda apologized. ‘More of a Faber poets kind of chap. There’s not much call for Christopher Isherwood mucking-out sets. I don’t suppose Jorkin has ever met anyone like you before. Who did you tell him you were, by the way?’ ‘Oh, well, I hope you don’t mind,’ Linda said, ‘I sort of implied I was you.’ The shock made Belinda blink and swallow for a couple of seconds, but she managed to keep smiling. A silver cake-stand she’d received as a wedding present was tipped into the bag. ‘Didn’t Jorkin remember what I looked like?’ she ventured, at last. ‘I suppose he can’t have done.’ Linda was now mopping and dusting in the empty cupboard, turning her back. ‘Although he did say he was expecting someone in blue stockings, and was pleasantly surprised. You don’t wear blue stockings, surely, Mrs Johansson?’ ‘I expect he was being unpleasantly metaphorical.’ ‘Oh, I see. Anyway, what do you think?’ Belinda looked up to see the effect of Linda’s work. She felt gooey with admiration. ‘Actually, there’s something else,’ Linda continued. ‘On the subject of real stockings, he tried to put his hand on my knee, so I’m afraid to say I struck him.’ Belinda yelped. ‘You struck him?’ ‘Just on the head. Only enough to knock him down. He was able to get up again and finish his spotted dick.’ ‘Where were you?’ ‘The club he belongs to. Begins with a G.’ ‘The Garrick?’ ‘That’s it.’ ‘Jesus,’ said Belinda, with feeling. ‘Any people around?’ ‘Yes. The place was quite full.’ ‘And you said you were me?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh my God.’ Neatly, Linda stepped off her little ladder, which Belinda now realized she’d never seen before. More of a surprise, however, was that the cleaning lady appeared to have tears in her eyes. What was happening?

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‘I only did what I thought you’d do, Mrs Johansson,’ she protested. ‘It was all for you. But if I was wrong—’ She dabbed her eyes with a tissue, and gave Belinda a soulful look reminiscent of a chastened puppy on a biscuit-tin lid. She slumped as if her backbone had been removed. Belinda felt stricken. Had she really sounded so disapproving? She’d only said, ‘Oh my God,’ and suddenly Linda had turned from a white tornado into a tepid drizzle. ‘You’ve already been so nice to me,’ Linda faltered. ‘So have your husband and your mother. If you want me to leave—’ As Linda sank to a chair, Belinda suddenly remembered in a wave of panic what Viv had told her: that Linda needed reassurance. Was this what she meant? ‘Don’t upset yourself, please,’ interrupted Belinda. ‘I think you’re wonderful. I’ve been thinking about how to put this without sounding drippy, but I can’t. Basically, if you were a girl at school and I were a girl at school, I’d worship you.’ ‘You’re not just saying that?’ Linda’s eyes, sparkling with tears, were of the purest indigo. ‘No. Absolutely not. The fact is, I wish more than anything that I’d struck Jorkin in the Garrick. Absolutely the next best thing is you doing it for me without asking.’ ‘I know I get carried away a bit,’ Linda sniffed. ‘But what sometimes people don’t realize is that I’m—’ She struggled now against her feelings, fielding the tears that suddenly rolled down her cheeks. ‘I’m completely on their side.’ She wiped her eyes and adjusted her apron. ‘So you will tell me if I do anything you’re not happy about, won’t you? Because I’ll just go. I won’t make a fuss.’ Belinda smiled reassuringly and patted Linda’s hand. She wanted to mention the expensive cake-stand; she wanted to mention that she really, really didn’t like fish. But now she knew how feeble Linda’s confidence was, now she knew how easy it was to hurt her feelings, she simply couldn’t bear to do it.  Over the next few days Jago’s genetics research led him nowhere, especially after Laurie Spink assured him personally that despite the journalistic dash and verve of the article ‘Ten Ways to Tell if Your Grandparent is a Clone’, scientifically it was less than watertight. Thus, even if Stefan exhibited all ten of the detailed tendencies, such as incontinence, deafness and a greedy appetite for cakes and puddings, the signs could not be wholly relied on. But if the muddied waters of clone technology might take a while to clear, Jago was sure at least that Stefan was not teaching at Imperial. That lie at least was uncovered. For, over a period of three days, Stefan was observed to board a bus each morning, cross the river in approximately the right spot, but then hide away in

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Habitat in the King’s Road, drinking coffee and reading English-language reference books, whose pages he would mark with sticky tabs. Sometimes he had a cookie; sometimes a Danish pastry. Then he would stroll to the college in the afternoon to do part-time work as a lab assistant. And that was it, save for the bus home, and more reading. The dossier presented after a week by young Tanner, a rather supercilious graduate trainee in Features, was depressingly slim. Doublespaced, and on one side of the paper only, it still amounted to just one page. Jago waved it irritably. ‘So what happens after six thirty?’ he demanded. They were alone in his office, and he had shut the door. ‘At home, of course,’ Tanner scoffed, and ran a hand over his fashionably shaven pate. He couldn’t think of much else to say. His ambition was to make his name one day in investigative reporting, and he couldn’t see how tracking harmless Swedes for maniac executives fitted in. Tanner’s father, chairman of the board of the Effort’s parent company, expected more for him than this. ‘All right, tell me. Did you notice anything odd about him?’ ‘Mm, one thing.’ ‘What?’ Jago was breathless. ‘Kept turning round. Seemed to think he was being followed.’ Jago rolled his eyes. You couldn’t bawl out Tanner, he knew that. He was too well connected. This useless boy could get him sacked. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’ve done all you can here, Tanner. Now I want you to go to Sweden.’ ‘Whatever for?’ ‘I want you to dig some dirt in Malmö.’ The boy sighed. ‘Do I have to? Oh, what a bore.’ ‘You don’t seem hungry for this job, Tanner. I have to say that. This could be an enormous story. Impostors, cloning, Sweden, what more could you ask?’ Tanner shrugged. ‘Been offered a stint on Fashion, actually. The editor rang Daddy. It’s just that my sister is the youngest designer ever at Christian Dior, and he wants a piece on it.’ ‘How old is she?’ ‘Five.’ ‘Damn. That’s a fucking good story! Damn.’ Tanner smirked. ‘I’ll come back to the clone, though.’ ‘You will?’ It was hard for Jago to be patient with this irritating upstart, but at the same time utterly necessary. ‘Why not?’ said Tanner. ‘Where is Malmö, anyway? Sounds ghastly.’ ‘No idea. Get an atlas.’ ‘An atlas,’ repeated the boy. ‘Any atlas?’ He surveyed Jago’s office with the curled lip of someone who would certainly redecorate before he moved in.

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‘Any atlas with Sweden in it.’ Tanner didn’t move. ‘Try the library.’ ‘Right.’ He started to leave, but Jago pulled him back. ‘You haven’t breathed a word of this to anyone?’ ‘Of course not.’ Tanner sighed deeply, but only when fully out of earshot. ‘What a stupid, stupid man,’ he said to himself. ‘I wonder if Daddy could do something about him?’  When Maggie finally phoned Belinda, ten days after the encounter with Noel, she interrupted a pleasant Sunday morning scene. Mother, Stefan and Linda were finishing a large, lazy breakfast while Belinda had slipped away to her study to make notes. Linda and Mother were admiring the style supplements together; Stefan basked in a dressing-gown that had been thoughtfully warmed in the airing cupboard. Occasionally, however, he popped to the window to check for lurkers with notepads. ‘What’s wrong, Stefan?’ asked Mother. ‘That’s the third time you’ve looked outside.’ ‘Oh, nothing,’ he said airily. ‘There’s not a soul out there, no one to hear my prayer. Ha ha.’ Should he mention the youth who had followed him home three nights this week? Once, in the Habitat café, the strange, bald-headed boy had actually approached him and asked whether he’d just eaten a cookie or a pastry. ‘A cookie,’ he’d told him, watching the boy write it down in large fledgling shorthand. ‘With nuts.’ Since Friday, thank goodness, the boy had desisted. But when the phone rang, Stefan was still glad to see Linda answer it. It was astonishing how quickly they had all come to rely on her. ‘I’m afraid she’s working at the moment,’ she said to Maggie. ‘But I’ll be glad to help if I can. No, I’m afraid Mr Johansson is busy too.’ She replaced the receiver. ‘It was Belinda’s friend Maggie,’ she explained. ‘She rang off.’ ‘Hooray,’ said the others, callously. Any observer of this scene would have noticed that it took place in a spacious new dining room, painted a fashionable ochre, but formerly the dark, dusty book-dump that had served as Belinda’s office. For Linda had not been idle in the intervening week. Spotting that one of Belinda’s spare bedrooms was well suited for a study, she had promptly disposed of its furniture, removed its threadbare carpet, brought in a carpenter and a couple of strong lads, and gently trans-

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planted Belinda to the first floor, where she had the benefit of better light and excellent shelves, and was permanently removed from the annoyance of the telephone. Thoughtfully, Linda installed for her a coffee-machine and a couch, and a cunning two-way baby-listening device so that Belinda could call for attention downstairs without all the bother of rising from her desk. ‘What are you working on?’ Linda asked her, every day. And Belinda would excitedly read her a bit from her analysis of Nabokov’s Despair, and Linda would marvel at Belinda’s brilliance and then bring a plate of thickly buttered muffins. No bill had been presented as yet, except for the amounts expended on equipment. Linda had decided to move in, however—an arrangement that suited everybody, especially with Mother suddenly moving in as well. ‘Look what your mother bought me!’ Linda said on the second Saturday, holding up a navy suit from Betty Jackson. ‘I’ve never had anything so beautiful! You don’t mind, Belinda? I mean, she’d have bought one for you if you’d been there. She got me this Estée Lauder foundation as well.’ ‘Of course I don’t mind,’ Belinda replied. In fact, she considered it miraculous that Linda shared Mother’s interest in expensive tortured cloth and coloured, perfumed grease. It removed from herself the unbearable pressure to look smart and fashionable; it liberated a very needy (and misunderstood) aspect of her nature that hankered for elasticated waists and roomy cardigans. Here was a consequence of hiring a new cleaning lady she had certainly never anticipated when she formerly argued the cause of Mrs Holdsworth. She looked at Linda’s tight little suit and shuddered. Tight little suits induced claustrophobia in her. She wanted to rip constricting garments with gardening shears while screaming, ‘Let me out of here.’ It was now too late to tell Linda about the fish, unfortunately. But aside from the nice little trays of cod, prawns, bouillabaisse and goujons Belinda was silently tipping down the loo in between indulging in the ample and enjoyable snacks, she felt no praise was high enough for Linda. It was quite true. Wherever she had a vacuum, Linda went right ahead and abhorred it. Just like a force of nature. Linda really was, as she had said at the outset, completely on her side. Thrown entirely into her work, moreover, Belinda was serenely happy. She had yearned all her life for such a release from daily cares, for hours on end to read and write, uninterrupted by the requirement to do anything manual, social, culinary or selfless. Ahead of her stretched an endless string of Virginia Woolf’s pure and rounded pearls. Viv phoned; she was told nothing about it. Maggie phoned; ditto. Belinda honestly didn’t care. Linda took care of breakfast, dinner, tea and sympathy. And what a bonus that she seemed to enjoy it! Belinda had always felt guilty at making Mrs Holdsworth do the housework; with Linda, she felt she was doing her a favour; she was helping Linda to be fulfilled simply by accepting everything she did.

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Meanwhile, Linda also continued to show astonishing initiative. For example, after a week, a woman from the Today programme on Radio 4 phoned, asking Belinda to take part in a short discussion about making scenes in public places (the Garrick story had spread). But, blissfully secluded upstairs, Belinda knew nothing whatever about it. ‘What shall I do?’ Linda whispered to Mother, with the receiver pressed against her chest. ‘Exposure is useful to a writer, isn’t it?’ Mother made a noise. A sort of ‘tch’. ‘Belinda always says no to that sort of thing. She won’t even do book signings. If you ask me, she has a horror of the mob.’ ‘No,’ agreed Linda, ‘I don’t suppose she’d do it.’ She pulled a face at Mother, who suddenly had an idea. ‘You do it, Linda.’ ‘Me?’ ‘In my opinion, you’ll do it better than she would. Besides, it was you who hit Jorkin.’ So Linda agreed. And the next morning, without mentioning it to Belinda, went by BBC car to Broadcasting House and by general consent acquitted herself magnificently.  Not expecting visitors, since none had come in fifteen years, Mrs Holdsworth was surprised when Viv Ripley came to see her on the second Friday. Viv had heard Linda on the Today programme and been outraged. She had tried to phone Belinda six times. ‘They said she was Belinda on the radio!’ she explained to Jago. ‘She’s impersonating Belinda on the public airwaves! She’s only been working there a week and look what she’s done!’ ‘You’re obsessed,’ said Jago. ‘No, I’m not. I care about my friend.’ ‘You’re not just sore Linda left?’ ‘No, I’m not.’ ‘Yes, you are. You’re jealous as hell. Giving up your job was insane.’ So she had sought out Mrs Holdsworth, and was now taking tea with that lady in her council flat in Battersea, where the smell of boiled sprouts filled the room to a height of five feet. Viv discovered that if you stood up and tipped your head back you could, in fact, inhale air smelling of something else. But unfortunately you couldn’t spend a whole visit pretending to admire the Artex swirls on the ceiling. ‘So, if you still have access to the house, Mrs Holdsworth,’ she said, ‘you could see what Linda is getting up to. I would pay you handsomely.’ ‘How handsomely’s that, then?’ Mrs H, sitting down, lit a Dunhill menthol

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from a flat green box, an accessory curiously out of keeping with her general eschewal of all things debonair. ‘Fifty pounds now, and fifty more when you’ve reported back. Just think. You could buy a new scarf straight away.’ Mrs Holdsworth looked offended. ‘What’s wrong with my fucking scarf ?’ ‘Nothing at all. I just meant you might like another one.’ Viv felt she wasn’t getting anywhere. She tried a new tack. ‘I’ll come clean with you, Mrs Holdsworth. I am not only Belinda’s concerned friend, I am also Linda’s probation officer.’ The old woman took a deep drag on the cigarette, and narrowed her eyes. Viv was indeed a much better liar than Jago. The woman was wavering. ‘Bleeding probation officers don’t give you fifty quid.’ ‘Linda is a dangerous woman, Mrs Holdsworth. Surely you noticed?’ ‘I’ll tell you what, she unplugged my Hoover.’ ‘Exactly.’  And so it was Sunday morning now. The Johanssons were happy in their wellorganized new home; Jago and Viv were scarcely speaking; Mrs Holdsworth was boiling sprouts; and in Malmö, Ingrid Johansson watched the horizon through a barred window, and hummed tunelessly. Meanwhile Maggie was sitting grimly in her flat with the curtains closed while Noel rang her doorbell and rapped at the letterbox. The fateful role-playing moment had clearly arrived. Rap, rap. Ring, ring. Rap. Ring. ‘It’s me,’ he called. Rap, rap. ‘It’s Leon!’ Maggie curled her feet under her, and tried to concentrate on Bridget Jones’s Diary. She grimaced and put it down. It was a book she never could get on with somehow. She’d had it open at the same page for three solid years. ‘Open up,’ continued Noel, cheerfully. ‘I know you’re in there. Nyow, nyow!’ ‘Piss off!’ she shouted. She had decided to have nothing to do with this experiment of Noel’s. Let her problem take twenty years to sort out; Noel’s short-sharp-shock technique was all too clearly a smokescreen for base motives. ‘Full transference’ was what he wanted from Margaret, he said. It was an ominous phrase. Call her a weary old cynic who’d been sleeping around too long, but she felt sure the energetic exchange of body fluids would be bound to come into the full-transference process somewhere. ‘Go away, I’m reading Bridget Jones’s Diary,’ she called. ‘I happen to have located a very funny bit, actually.’ But he knocked and rang until her patience ran out and she opened the door—

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only to be flattened by the full whirlwind force of Noel’s impersonation. Despite herself, Maggie was impressed. The only time she’d seen anything like it was at a Stanislavsky summer school, when the group had been advised to imagine themselves as experiencing nuclear fission while at the same time taking barbiturates. ‘Did you miss me?’ he said, bursting through the door in a cataract of luggage. Kicking a suitcase across the room, he plonked down a flight bag, a duty-free carrier, a lap-top briefcase and a large fluffy toy in the shape of a red racing car. ‘Present from Oshbosh. Do you like it?’ He sat down, ran a hand through his hair, and gave her a wide grin. She had to hand it to Noel. As an act, it was terrifyingly good. The toy had a price in dollars on it, and there were old, dog-eared Grand Prix stickers on the suitcase. Stanislavsky would have wept with joy. She suddenly remembered how huge Leon was—the man now perched awkwardly on her sofa was, like Leon himself, constructed on far too big a physical scale for her flat. His legs were twin telegraph poles. His shoulders under his leather jacket were like beach balls. She expected her furniture to crumple under his weight, like a child’s chair under a gorilla. She eyed a bowl of fruit on the coffee table, and prayed he wouldn’t peel himself a miniature banana. ‘Look, I know I wasn’t great,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve come to make it up to you. The truth is, I’ve been thinking about you all week long at Oshbosh, I couldn’t get you out of my mind.’ Maggie pursed her lips. Yes, it was a good act. He looked like Leon and sounded like Leon, and even dressed like Leon. There was just one problem: this speech of devotion wasn’t remotely reminiscent of Leon’s personality. ‘Why don’t you say something?’ he asked. He grabbed the duty-free bag and produced a bottle of Cognac. ‘For you,’ he said. Maggie frowned as she took the bottle. When did she tell Noel about the Cognac? Leon had finished it off without asking, and said, ‘I’ll buy you another one.’ But she hadn’t remembered it until now. ‘Tell you what,’ she said at last, hardly able to look at him, ‘how about you go away and leave me alone?’ He looked wounded. ‘Oh, come on, Maggie. I said I was sorry.’ He crossed his enormous legs and hugged his arms across his enormous chest. Was he wearing padding? ‘Hey, I can’t have been that bad.’ ‘I mean you,’ she said firmly. ‘What?’ ‘Just go,’ she said. Her histrionic gesture towards the door was somewhat undermined by the big red fluffy racing car she clutched to her chest, but she still meant it. ‘I’m flattered you should go to all this bother. But honestly, just go.’

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He gathered his things sullenly, hunching his shoulders protectively, like a bear who’d been smacked on the nose. He had to stay true to character, she supposed. She felt quite sorry for him. ‘Look, I’m off for a month of stuff,’ he said, as he gathered his things. ‘Boxing in Las Vegas, tennis in Germany, basketball in Sweden. Can I call you sometime? Or when I’m back? I’d really like to.’ ‘I can’t stop you,’ said Maggie. Noel was a very cruel person, she was realizing. When you know how needy for affection a person is, you shouldn’t tease them this way. ‘Look, I really like you,’ he blurted. ‘I think I love you.’ He touched her arm. ‘Don’t.’ He cupped his hand and moved it to her shoulder. Then he stroked her face. ‘You’re lovely,’ he said. ‘I never met anyone like you.’ ‘Don’t,’ she whimpered. ‘Why?’ ‘Because you don’t mean it.’ ‘You’re very hard, Maggie. Come to Malmö in March.’ ‘Oh please, stop it. How can they play basketball in Malmö in March? They’d slip over on the ice.’ ‘Basketball is indoors, Maggie.’ ‘Is it?’ ‘Yes.’ He left at last, and she watched him hail a taxi. ‘Wandsworth, the Arndale Centre,’ he told the driver, even though she knew Noel and Julia lived in the opposite direction, in Kennington. She admired his thoroughness, but was so pleased to see the back of him that when she returned indoors she fell straight asleep.  ‘You’re putting on weight,’ observed Mother, that Sunday afternoon. ‘That’s no way to keep a husband, if you don’t mind me saying so. Don’t you want to watch The Clothes Show with us?’ ‘No thanks,’ said Belinda. She’d been lying on her new couch reading a biography of Hans Christian Andersen and eating a Mars bar. A bag of mini Twixes was at her side. From outside, she could feel the reassuring tremble of the commuter trains as they thundered through the cutting at the end of the road. Her blanket was warm, and she was horizontal in the middle of the afternoon. She had never been happier in her life. ‘Doesn’t Linda do a lovely shark with peppercorns?’ Mother asked. She looked mildly alarmed at the memory of it, but then she always did.

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‘Mm.’ ‘What was it you cooked for me the last time I was here? Baked beans on something?’ ‘Baked beans on cream crackers. You know very well.’ ‘That’s right. You’d run out of bread!’ Belinda tried to keep reading, but Mother hadn’t finished with her yet. ‘Linda’s cleaned the bathroom floor. Did you know it was green under all that?’ ‘No. Look, is there something in particular?’ ‘No, no. Just to say brill with kumquats tomorrow.’ ‘Great.’ ‘Brill,’ Mother repeated. ‘Whoever would have thought it in your house?’ She went away, and Belinda rearranged herself under the blanket. Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Shadow’ had been the original inspiration for her book—a story so troubling that she had never been able to forget it. It concerned a scholar from a grey north European country who took a holiday in Italy and discovered for the first time that his shadow had a personality. At midday it crouched near his feet; in the evening it stretched and lengthened and enjoyed itself. Then, one night, the scholar stood on his balcony and saw the shadow projected against the shutters of the house opposite. What if my shadow could go inside? he thought. Go on, shadow! Of course, the shadow detaches itself, and the scholar goes home without it. But years later the shadow returns—now accomplished and worldly, standing upright, with its own clothes and jewellery, but unable to put on much weight. The scholar is helpless as the shadow takes over his life, forcibly swaps identities with him, and finally orders his execution. Belinda’s theory was that the story fell into a parental pattern—it was about the essential shock of parenthood. You give children your blessing to go off and leave you, to learn more than you ever did, and the next thing you know, they’re telling you what to do. Power abruptly transfers to the child. Or doesn’t, of course, if you’ve got a mother like Virginia, who remembers an innocent baked-bean supper catastrophe for the rest of her natural life. Linda brought her a sticky toffee pudding, and some homemade biscuits for later. She also topped up Belinda’s coffee machine. ‘Thank you, Linda,’ she said, without moving. ‘You’re a marvel. Mother says the bathroom floor is green. They should give you an archaeology award. You should also get a medal for being the first person of my acquaintance that my mother approves of.’ Linda smiled weakly, but merely gathered some crockery and turned to go. At which point, with a shock like a punch to the stomach, Belinda noticed there were tears in her eyes again.

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‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’ She could scarcely breathe. The effect of these tiny drops of moisture was devastating. ‘Is there something wrong, Linda?’ ‘I’m afraid I’ve discovered something so upsetting about you that I’ll have to leave.’ ‘No,’ Belinda gasped. ‘About me?’ All the guilty secrets she’d ever had whirled into her mind. The sin of stopping an ice-cream van once in childhood, when not wanting an ice-cream, had given her sleepless nights until she was thirty years old, but she’d always known that, crime-wise, this incident was rather small potatoes to anybody with an ounce of mature perspective. ‘When I think of all the things I was preparing to do for you,’ Linda said, ‘it makes me feel like a fool. Did you know I’d agreed to do the Late Review for you on Thursday? No, I thought not. I’ve been reading an Updike novel and I’ve seen a play with lots of swearing in it at the Royal Court, and—and—and now this.’ ‘Now what?’ Linda’s chin was wobbling again. Belinda put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Please, tell me. What have I done?’ ‘Mr Johansson just told me—’ She sniffed. ‘He told me—’ ‘What?’ ‘That you don’t like fish.’ Belinda yelped with laughter. ‘It’s not funny,’ Linda snapped. ‘Yes it is. Oh Linda—’ She reached to touch her, but Linda stiffened. Her jaw jutted out. ‘The point is, you lied to me, Belinda. I’ve given you lots of fish because it’s good for the brain, and you didn’t tell me that you didn’t like it, and you swore you’d tell me if I did anything you didn’t like. You swore. But now I find this out, and I know you must have been laughing at me, and now you’re laughing at me again. I’m just so disappointed in you, I feel as if you’ve stuck a dagger in a baby’s heart.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Well, so am I.’ ‘Don’t go.’ ‘How can I trust you now? You might say you’re pleased I’ve set up a deal with a toy company, but really you disapprove. I couldn’t bear that.’ ‘Have you set up a deal with a toy company?’ ‘Not yet. I’ve got a meeting on Wednesday. But what’s the use in me carrying on if you can let us both down like this?’ Belinda made a decision. Being browbeaten by your cleaning lady on such a trivial matter was ridiculous. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I do like fish.’

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‘What?’ ‘Stefan was mistaken. I told him about a nightmare I had once, which did put me off for a while because I was wading through a pond with fish nibbling my legs. But in fact I adore fish and could eat it every day.’ Linda melted. Such a simple lie, but completely effective. ‘You’re not just saying that?’ ‘As if.’ ‘I couldn’t bear it if you were just saying it to appease me.’ ‘No, no. Brill and kumquats, yum-yum. That’s what I say.’ ‘Do you swear that you like fish? There must be something you don’t like? You can tell me.’ Belinda knew this was her last chance to mention shellfish, the mere sight of which set her stomach in a spasm, but she didn’t believe Linda’s assurances any more. She could not tell Linda that she abhorred langoustine, or that crab claws made her vomit. The woman might threaten to walk out again, calling her a Judas. ‘No, I love it all,’ she pronounced. ‘Octopus?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Eels?’ ‘Fab.’ Linda visibly relaxed. She had forced Belinda to lie extravagantly about a love of seafood. And, for some reason that Belinda could not fathom, this evidently counted as a triumph.  Fifteen minutes after Noel left Maggie’s, the doorbell rang. ‘Oh God, he’s come back,’ said Maggie, as she went to answer it. ‘It’s me again, Leon,’ said the man outside, holding a very small bunch of daffodils. ‘I wondered if you’d like to come out for a drink.’ ‘Oh my God,’ she said. It was indeed Leon again. But the trouble was, it wasn’t the Leon who had called earlier. He was smaller and brainy-looking. ‘Where did you get that dreadful phallus?’ he asked her. Looking down, she realized she’d been absently hugging the Oshbosh car. ‘Didn’t you just give it to me?’ she queried. But she knew he hadn’t. This was quite obviously Noel, and his impersonation was terrible. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he said. ‘Really, Margaret, if you don’t go along with this, how’s it ever going to work?’

Chapter 6




Stefan Johansson was not a clone, but he had a secret. And his secret was considerably larger than the petty ice-cream-van offence that had, on and off since childhood, murdered the sleep of his innocent wife. The truth was, he wasn’t Swedish. Nor was he a geneticist. He was in fact an apple-farmer from Kent. And his real first name was George. Linda had guessed something of this right away, even before she found albums of photographs showing his family on long-ago outings to Canterbury and Rye. She thought it suspicious that you could never help him out with a word. Normally, with any foreigner, you can supply ‘wasp’ or ‘jamboree’, and feel incredibly clever. But with Stefan you couldn’t. And now, to confirm her misgivings, here was little Stefan in a big sun-hat, dappled at a typically English model village, and little Stefan on a donkey on the beach at Camber Sands, with Union Jacks fluttering in the background. Lots of childish wasps, probably. And a sense of childish jamboree. Both these pictures, moreover, were clearly marked. ‘Me, George,’ said one. ‘George—Me,’ said the other. To give Linda her due, once she had the evidence she produced it. One stormy evening, after a splendid supper of halibut steamed in seaweed with lugworm hollandaise, she placed the albums gently on the table, then sat down beside Stefan on the sofa in front of the fire. Belinda was working; Mother had gone to bed; Stefan was thinking likewise of climbing up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. When he saw the albums, however, he stiffened. Then he smiled at Linda a little uncertainly. ‘They were under the bathroom floor,’ said Linda, simply. ‘I can imagine why you thought they were safe.’ ‘Oh my God,’ said Stefan. ‘I won’t tell anybody.’ ‘You won’t?’ ‘No.’ ‘My real name is George, you see.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’m not Swedish.’ ‘No.’ Stefan went to the kitchen to recover himself. He came back with a bottle of red wine and two glasses. He poured it unsteadily and took a long drink. ‘It all began in Malmö,’ he said. ‘Yes?’ ‘I went to Sweden for a holiday in 1971, and I found myself there.’

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‘Is it a particularly lovely place, this Malmö?’ ‘Lovely?’ he repeated, surprised. ‘No. Although it was quite prosperous, in those days, with the shipyard.’ He went to the door and shut it, poured some more wine, and sat down beside Linda again. And then, as the fire burned brightly in the grate and the wind blew interestingly outside in the naked branches, he told the story of what happened to him in Malmö. ‘It was the early seventies, as I think I said,’ he began. ‘I was young, I had just left agricultural college. I was good-looking, I had a bit of money, and Sweden being well known for its permissiveness at that time, I was optimistic of having a very happy summer of love. Knowing nobody didn’t matter. There was to be a folk festival in the Slottsparken, featuring the radical Hoola Bandoola Band—a group sinfully overlooked by the other countries of Europe, in my opinion, but that’s another story. ‘Malmö is just a short ferry-ride from Copenhagen, you know. For centuries the whole of the south of Sweden was Danish, and a certain identity crisis persists in the region to this day. Anyway, the ferry from Copenhagen dropped me on the dock on a pretty pink summer evening, and I followed the little crowd towards the lights at the station, where I bought my first drink at the Bar Central. I felt gloriously free. People looked at me, wondering if I was Terence Stamp—a lot of people thought that in those days. The sabre-flashing scene from Far from the Madding Crowd was one I was often called upon to reproduce. I have to admit it was a peerless seduction technique. Although, for reasons that will become apparent, the idea of all but slicing bits off your girlfriend has rather lost its appeal to me, as the years have gone by. ‘Anyway, Swedish pop music was playing in the Bar Central, and it was heady and foreign, backward and progressive, all at the same time. I was dizzy from the drink and the sun, and the promise of all life held ahead of me. ‘I don’t remember how I got involved in the game of blackjack, or how I managed to win fifty kronor. I knew the game only as “pontoon”, which I’d played for pennies at my prep school in Tenterden. But I seemed to be good at it. Stakes were low, but it was fun. Someone bought me a drink, and then another. I played some more, and won even more money, which was a surprise. I noticed one man, about my own age, who couldn’t take his eyes off me. And when the time came to leave, I staggered outside into the strange summer dusk, and came face to face with Stefan Johansson.’ He paused for a reaction, so Linda nodded. Her attention had certainly been caught by the story, but there was something else. ‘I’ve just noticed,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind. You’re talking normal English.’ ‘Yes, of course. I think I’ve explained by now. I’m not Swedish.’

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‘It’s a relief,’ she said. He laughed, mirthlessly. ‘You’re telling me.’ ‘So who was Stefan Johansson?’ ‘Oh, yes. Who was he? What can I tell you of Stefan Johansson? At this time, he was a stringy young human-chemistry student at the nearby university at Lund, rather charming, blond, in a ragged beige suit, who had just completed eighteen months cleaning toilets as a penance for refusing to undertake military service, and had no money to play blackjack. That’s what he told me. He pulled his pockets out to prove it. “But I’ve got a system,” he said, in good English. “And because I’m a mathematical genius, I can memorize the cards. How much money do you have?” I told him the truth: I had five thousand kronor, or about five hundred pounds. I had cashed all my savings at home, and sold the car I’d had at seventeen. “Then I’ll show you what I can do in this dump,” he said, indicating the bar. “And then I’ll take you to a club I know. We’ll split everything fifty-fifty. Agreed?” And heaven help me, I agreed. ‘So I led him back to the card table, where Carl, the dealer, greeted us. And I gave Stefan fifty kronor, and over the next two hours I won steadily with small amounts while he bet boldly and quadrupled his stake. For a student, he was an excellent gambler. I had always thought the art of the card table was concealing how little confidence you have in your hand, disguising your dismay. But with Stefan the art was to conceal his certain knowledge of every card on the table. He bet just the right amount not to draw attention to himself, and quit with perfect timing. He gave me half the winnings, and then we went outside. ‘ “Where are we going?” I asked. He was leading me through grand squares southwards, across canals, away from the sea. The buildings were closing in, and it was late. ‘ “The Möllevångstorget,” he said. ‘ “Easy for you to say,” I quipped, little thinking how the name would in time be impressed on my memory. ‘But when we got there, on this occasion—to the Möllevångstorget, or the Möllevången Square—I remember only a blur of impressions. An unsavoury neighbourhood, scary, the smell of incense and pot, and the ugliest statue I ever saw, of a group of straining, naked people holding an enormous boulder above their heads. It was a monument to the workers, apparently, but I always thought it was rather odd for a town whose most famous landmark was a gigantic crane. Anyway, Stefan knocked on a door. An illegal betting club, where they knew him well. ‘ “Who’s your lucky charm this time, Stefan?” they said. I didn’t understand. All I do know is that he turned my five thousand kronor into twenty thousand. How we got out of there without being attacked I don’t recall. But as we stood be-

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side a canal at dawn, what I do remember is that he took only a handful of the winnings. ‘ “We were going to split everything fifty-fifty,” I reminded him. ‘ “What’s the point?” he said. “Are you staying in Malmö?” ‘ “No.” ‘ “So. It’s no good to me on my own. I don’t have your luck.” ‘He disappeared from my life as abruptly as he’d entered it, and for twenty years I enjoyed and increased my fortune. Then, five years ago exactly, Stefan Johansson reeled me in. ‘I didn’t even recognize the name at first, when he phoned me in Stockholm. I had stayed in Sweden, you see. I had made my fortune there, in the export of household design items, and just sent money back to Kent, where my family still has the orchards. He said on the phone, “I’m the man who made you”—which should have alerted me to his state of mind, I suppose. It was a remarkable choice of phrase, as I considered myself self-made. But, on the other hand, success has a thousand fathers, and many people have taken the credit for my achievements over the years. I had come to accept it as an aspect of human nature. ‘He told me he had given up gambling years before, and was now a respectable scientist, working in genetic research. I attempted a few pleasantries, which failed. Small talk did not engage him. Urgently, he wanted to see me again, in Malmö. He had problems with his work and his wife was ill. Had I married? he asked. I said no, which seemed to annoy him. Any children by other means? Not that I knew of. Come anyway, he said. I was intrigued, I admit it. That long-ago night in Malmö was like a dream. So I invented some spurious business in the south-west, hired a plane, and flew down. ‘We met again at the Bar Central, just for old times’ sake. Neither of us recognized the other at first. He had aged badly since that summer night in 1971—his back was curved, and his long hair was tied back in a grey pony-tail. My prosperity, meanwhile, had lifted me into a different world, where it is customary to look younger than your years. People now said I looked like Sting, which was pleasant. Stefan asked me to outline my career, which I did, although it was unnerving when he kept saying, “I knew it!” and thumping the table. What about his own life, his own work? It was hard to get him to talk about it. He said his wife Ingrid disapproved of his research methods, from which I assumed he worked with live animals. “Many women have soft hearts about laboratory experiments,” I said. He agreed. “They like to think dumb suffering is unnecessary,” he scoffed. “They take the view that no scientific progress in the world is worth an ounce of pain.” ‘Gradually, inevitably, our conversation turned to that interesting night when Stefan won the money and gave it to me. I assumed he wanted money, people

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generally did. So I said that if he had financial difficulties, I would gladly give him the money I owed him. If only it had been that simple. ‘ “Your money? You think I want your money? I could have had your whole life, don’t you see that?” he said. He seemed very angry. “You’re so stupid you don’t see it. We were the same age, we looked alike, we had the same prospects. In those days, if we had looked in the mirror, we’d have seen each other! Now look at us. But I lacked something you had. Tell me what I have, George. What am I good at?” ‘I said that, from what I knew, he was good at gambling, and had a superb analytical brain, also a photographic memory. ‘ “And what else does a gambler need? What else does everyone need in life? What divides the haves and the have-nots more than any other factor in the world?” ‘ “Money,” I said. ‘ “No.” ‘ “Charm. Good breeding. A secure childhood in the Garden of England. A resemblance to an international film star.” ‘He took me by the shoulders. “Luck.” ‘I shrugged. I couldn’t believe he meant it. “Luck happens,” I said. ‘ “Yes,” he said. “But only to those who are genetically predisposed to it.” He punched the wall, rather alarmingly, grazing his knuckles. And then he added: “Like you.” ’ Stefan (or George) took a long swig of wine while Linda put another log on the fire. A high wind raged outside. Unspoken between them was the knowledge that Belinda, upstairs, had been avidly reading this sort of Gothic story for the past three years and making it her speciality. Were she ever to know the truth of Stefan’s background, or that he had shared his narrative with the cleaning lady, she was likely to gnaw off her own leg with rage. ‘So why was Stefan telling you all this?’ asked Linda. She had curled herself small on the sofa, and was holding a cushion across her chest as a kind of shield. If something nasty was going to happen in this story, she wanted to hide behind the maximum amount of upholstery. ‘Well, he was mad, you see,’ said Belinda’s husband, matter-of-factly. ‘Quite insane. He started to outline his research, how for years he had been working to prove luck was genetically transmitted. In opposition to Darwinian orthodoxy, he argued that luck alone was the basis of evolutionary selection. So we talked on, and the bar grew hotter, and every so often he would pull at my hand or my arm, literally pinching bits of flesh. Once he picked a hair off my jacket and laughingly said, “Can I keep this? It might help me get safely across the road.”

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‘I couldn’t make him see things differently. Rational counter-argument simply incensed him. He said, quite simply, that I had the luck gene, and that it would be his life’s achievement to locate it. Which was when I lost my temper, finally. I stood up and threw down some money for the bill. Luck gene? I said I’d had enough of this. “You’re raving mad,” I told him. And I marched outside into the cool night air, with Stefan scampering behind me. ‘Walking into the main square, I calmed down. Children played in a fountain, women laughed. It was all so normal that I thought fondly of Stockholm, and how I would be home again next morning. This sad, grey man at my side would be soon forgotten. If not, his crazy ideas would provide amusing chat for a dinner party, nothing more. It occurred to me to feel sorry for him. Being the object of envy has its consolations. Though he might want my DNA, he simply couldn’t have it, could he? I certainly couldn’t give it to him. His envy was therefore a merely futile, self-sabotaging emotion. The more he hated me, the more he hurt himself. ‘ “Will you come to my house?” he said. “Ingrid would like to meet you. I told her you looked like a movie star.” ‘ “Did you?” ‘ “Yes. She’s looking forward to it.” ‘And so a susceptibility to flattery was my real undoing. I already had a soft spot for Ingrid, since she disapproved of her husband’s work, and so did I. But I went to see her, if I’m honest, because I believed she would find me goodlooking, and after the abysmal evening I’d had with Stefan, I needed a boost. Also, having lived in Sweden for twenty years, I recognized what a rare honour it was to be invited home. ‘ “Where do you live?” I asked, as we headed south again. Despite the influx of immigrants changing the shops, despite the substantial rebuilding of the city, familiar landmarks were passing. In the darkness ahead, I spotted those awful naked bums and the boulder, and I can’t say the sight reassured me. We were in the Möllevången Square, once more. ‘He produced a key, opened a door, and there was Ingrid, finally. We found her in the sitting room of their anonymous ground-floor apartment—a dull little woman, dark-haired, sour, and I knew at once the mistake I’d made. She was not a Terence Stamp fan. She just looked up at me without much interest, and said to her husband, “You were right. This one’s better-looking.” And when I turned to Stefan to ask him what she meant, he struck me on the head with a Carl Larsson reproduction he had snatched from the wall. I staggered, and he struck me again. I saw blood on my shoes before I passed out. I have never liked the saccharine work of Carl Larsson, incidentally. This scene, as you can imagine, did very little to boost him in my estimation.

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‘Concussed, I was bundled into a makeshift laboratory in the cellar, where— well, where I was subsequently kept imprisoned, the subject of innumerable experiments, for the next eighteen months. Yes, eighteen months in a room that stank of rat poison and surgical spirit! My life snapped shut on that night in Malmö. I guessed Stefan would kill me, sooner or later, because his experiments would fail. How I survived those terrible times is a miracle to me, even now.’ Belinda’s husband had been staring at the fire as he spoke. Now he turned to Linda, who shut her mouth when she realized it was hanging open. ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said. ‘You think I’m making it up.’ ‘Stefan,’ she said gently, her face contorted with pity. Tears were in her eyes. ‘Oh, how terrible. Condemned to death by your own luck!’ She reflected on it and patted his hand. ‘What an irony!’ ‘Mm,’ he replied. He had stopped being struck by the irony of it quite some time ago. ‘I never understood the science of his work, but suffice to say the luck gene stayed lucky. It evaded all Stefan’s attempts to find it. I soon realized that Ingrid had been the cause of his obsession with genetic defect—hardly blessed by her own genetic inheritance, she had nevertheless refused to reproduce with a man who had no lucky aspect anywhere in his double helix. I think, to her, DNA was something like astrology. Since I was mostly shackled, I was obliged to converse with her for hours by the clock, and I can honestly say I never met anybody so unpleasant in my life. She was selfish and moody, and got her own way by crying. “Oh, Stefan,” she would weep to her husband, “I’m so unhappy!” God, I hated her. She started to fall in love with me, of course. Wanting my babies was what this was all about from the start. “How lucky is this?” I wanted to point out to Stefan. “Your dwarfish wife now lusts for my helpless body! How bloody lucky is this?” ‘I don’t know what they did with the bits they cut off. To be fair, they were clever and discreet in removing only tiny little bits that wouldn’t show—from the back of the ear, or the inner thigh, or the underside of a toe. All I know is that Stefan would go out to test his luck after injecting himself with something derived from me—and come back every time poorer, or beaten up. Once he was so sure he had isolated my luck gene that he played chicken with the traffic and got run over. My luck was simply not transferable, it seemed. Meanwhile Stefan still went to great lengths to convince me of his theory, making me read his thesis on the biology of chance and testing me on it. Oddly, he seemed to place no value on his work if I didn’t subscribe to it. Ingrid alternately provoked and pouted—taunting him in front of me, and then weeping when he hit her. And when we were alone together, she would paw my face and caress my body, saying she never stopped thinking about me, she loved me, she wanted me. ‘I suppose I had been there a year by then. Kept mentally alive by Monty Python

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reruns that they let me watch on the telly. Entertained by watching the rats die, and by observing that Stefan’s cuts and bruises were generally far worse than mine. They gave me reindeer sandwiches every day, which I can never forgive. Can you imagine what it’s like, day after day for a whole year, trying to think of a joke that starts “I’ll have a reindeer sandwich and make it—what?” You wouldn’t think so, but it was this chronic inability to make a joke out of a reindeer sandwich that, throughout my captivity, brought me closest to despair. ‘My own identity, meanwhile, had been easily disposed of by Stefan. I was dead, found in the canal two weeks after my visit. Somebody else’s body, of course, I don’t know whose. Anyway, when this corpse turned up, Stefan, being the police’s favourite consultant pathologist, made extremely short work of the genetic fingerprinting. There was a small piece about my funeral in the papers, which Ingrid thoughtfully pasted beside my bed. My estate was claimed by Stefan—he made me sign a phoney will—my ageing parents grieved, which caused me terrible anguish. Meanwhile Stefan brought home to Malmö a Ferrari from the auction of my effects, and taunted me with the keys. He really was a sad case, Stefan. He deserved to have terrible luck, I mean it. Despite his undeniable genius, he deserved to be outwitted, as he subsequently was, by a man totally at his mercy. ‘Because one day I put it to him, the answer to this conundrum of life. The time was right. Ingrid was getting unbearably frisky, and Stefan had just sawn off a quite visible piece of my elbow, and I suppose I thought enough’s enough. ‘ “Look, Stefan,” I said. “This grand guignol thing has been going on long enough. I’ve had a much better idea.” ‘Stefan laid the piece of elbow in a sterilized dish, and folded his arms. “What?” he asked. ‘ “It’s obvious,” I said. “The time has come for me to kill you and take your identity.” ‘ “Why?” he said. ‘ “Because this outcome alone will confirm your theories of survival and be the crowning achievement of your work. Moreover, by transferring all my lucky genetic material into the identity of Stefan Johansson—instead of tiny, ludicrous slivers of it—we can ensure that the Johansson work will become famous and win prizes. Johansson will be a struggling, luckless nobody no more! He will be handsome and charming and his wife will adore him, and the world of science will fall at his feet.” ‘I held my breath, waiting for Stefan to burst into maniacal laughter and saw my leg off. But he didn’t. He was genuinely struck by this idea. He could see the logic in it. His mind raced, as he considered the implications. I would have to work abroad, of course, where nobody knew Stefan’s face. I must learn enough about Stefan’s work to persuade people. I must learn to love Ingrid.

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‘Of course, I agreed to everything. ‘ “But let’s not tell Ingrid yet,” I urged him. He agreed. He said it would be a wonderful surprise for her, to find herself married to me. And, as he started fiddling with my sore elbow, I smiled and said I had a feeling he was right. ‘ “What are you doing?” I asked. ‘ “Shouldn’t I sew this back on now?” He held up a sliver of flesh, the size and shape of an anchovy. ‘ “Keep it,” I said. “I’ve got loads more where that came from.” ‘Stefan looked at me admiringly. “I wish I could be like you,” he said. ‘ “You’re soon going to be exactly like me,” I said. And we hugged, man to man, in the one-way fashion available to people who are not equally free to move their arms. ‘You can imagine my surprise that my ruse had been so successful. I even started believing in my luck gene. For a week or two, I was convinced he would wake one morning and realize he’d been tricked. But he didn’t. Because he hadn’t been tricked, not really. Genetically, my suggestion made excellent sense to Stefan. I was bound by my genes to do this thing. And if there was one thing Stefan never argued with, it was biological destiny. ‘Actually, our conversations over the next six months about how I’d kill him and replace him were our very best times together. How we laughed! Stefan would banish Ingrid to the sitting room, and bring some beers, put Abba on his portable stereo. The words to “Waterloo” were particularly apt in the context, funnily enough; it’s about fate, you know. He’d free one of my hands, which was nice. And then together we’d discuss the merits of various homicidal methods. I favoured shooting, for example, because it was quick and noisy, and because I might not have the stamina for strangling after such a long time horizontal. He fancied something more drawn out and Scandinavian. ‘It was rather a bizarre situation, I suppose. I knew he was in earnest, though. He started to buy clothes for me. He bought a forged passport. He even registered my DNA as Stefan Johansson’s, opened an account at IKEA and registered my signature on a new bank account with all our joint money in it. He was more animated than I had ever seen him. In planning all the details of how I would supplant him, he was illuminated by a kind of mad joy. ‘And then one day Ingrid ruined it all. Just a week before the day marked on the laboratory calendar with a hangman’s noose, the bitch came in and released me. It was a Saturday afternoon, Stefan had popped across to Copenhagen to buy me a last, parting gift—a rather nice briefcase I’d picked out from a catalogue—and she saw her opportunity. “Go away,” I begged, when I realized what was happening. But by now she was mad for me, you see. Gagging. And what could I do? It was all frightfully embarrassing. She brought candles and arranged them

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around the room. She called me “big boy” if you can believe it. Drunk as a skunk, of course. She comes in, turns the light out, and climbs on top of me, and then starts moaning, “Hold me, hold me.” ‘ “Ingrid,” I say, fighting for breath and squirming, “I can’t hold you. I’m tied up. Control yourself. You’re sitting on my diaphragm.” ‘ “I love you,” she says. “And I’m so unhappy.” At which point she starts unbuttoning my pyjamas and caressing my privates in what I can only describe as an electrifying manner. ‘ “You’re always unhappy,” I point out, through gritted teeth, as my neck flushes and my ears catch fire. “You can’t blame me for that. You’re Swedish.” ‘ “Hold me, hold me. Don’t you love your Ingrid?” ‘ “Get off me,” I squeal. “Think of Stefan.” ‘ “Stefan!” ‘And then the unthinkable happens. With an ugly pout, which I assume she intends as coquettish, she unties my hands and puts them on her chest. I can’t believe it. My hands free, after all this time. I waggle and flex them against her puddingy, jiggly breasts, as I try to absorb this enormous change in my circumstances. Suddenly, after all this time, there is only a drunk, lascivious small woman interposing her body between me and freedom. Moreover, all I have to do is push. I press tentatively, and she moans. I press harder, and she makes a bloodcurdling noise, like the miaow of a cat. I press again and she licks my face. ‘ “More,” she whispers. ‘So I gather all my feeble strength and push as hard as I can. ‘ “Take that, bitch!” I cry, as she slides drunkenly off my bed and on to the floor. She says, “What?” but that’s all the resistance she offers. Once on the floor, she passes out. ‘Blood thumps in my ears. I don’t know what to do. I can hardly shackle myself to the bed again before Stefan gets back. Shall I run for it? I surely won’t have the energy. Besides, when I stand up my pyjama bottoms fall down, revealing that I have been fully aroused by these exhilarating proceedings. At which point, as I dither half naked and priapic above his supine wife while candles twinkle romantically around the room, Stefan enters, waving the new briefcase, only to be frozen to the spot as he surveys the scene. ‘ “Ingrid, what has he done to you?” he cries, sinking to his knees. She lies before him, evidently lifeless. Oh, the times I have recollected this train of events! So many tragic turns! ‘ “Ah, Stefan, glad it’s you,” I bluff cheerfully, as I try to pull my trousers up. “Look, the first thing you need to know is that this needn’t ruin our plans. This isn’t at all the way it looks. I can still kill you exactly as we arranged with the rat poison. In fact, why don’t I do it now?’

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‘ “No!” he shouts. “Ingrid, are you all right?” ‘ “Of course she’s all right,” I snap. ‘ “I’m so unhappy, so unhappy,” she whimpers from the floor. ‘ “There you are,” I protest. “Perfectly normal.” ‘But he’s not listening. He’s distraught. And although he’s unaware of it, his pony-tail has just caught light from one of the candles. As he turns away from me, I see that the flame is travelling up his old brittle pigtail like a fuse on a stick of dynamite. ‘ “Stefan!” I yell, and hurl a glass of water at him. ‘He turns to look at me, nonplussed by such a strange and puny act of violence. I will never forget that quizzical look on his face, not as long as I live. Especially when we both realized the water was in fact pure alcohol, used for disinfecting my wounds. ‘ “Bugger it, your hair’s on fire, Stefan,” I say, apologetically. And with a final cry of “Ingrid! You see? You see how unlucky I am?” Stefan Johansson goes up in flames.’  Belinda’s husband paused for a breather. He had been talking solidly for an hour, and when he turned to look at Linda, he discovered she had all her fingers crammed in her mouth. ‘I suppose you guessed all this?’ he asked. She shook her head. She’d had an inkling he wasn’t Swedish. It wasn’t the same. ‘What happened?’ she squeaked. ‘Did he die?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said Stefan. ‘But it wasn’t at all what we’d planned. Dying like that made it terribly difficult for me. Police came, and fire engines. I barely had time to flee the place before they arrived. Luckily Stefan had put all the relevant stuff in the briefcase already. Passport, bank account. The clothes were in a suitcase, and the keys to my Ferrari were in the hall. I staggered to the car and drove it a couple of miles before I dared to breathe. Then I got changed and drove like hell. I took a ferry to Denmark, drove to France. And here I am. Those albums were in the boot of the car. They’re all I’ve got to remind me of Lucky George. It’s awkward that I share an identity with a dead man whose demise was so spectacular, but since the alternative was to be scraped to the bone by mad people with no sense of humour, I can’t say I mind too much. ‘My only regret is mentioning Ingrid to Belinda. I can tell it hurts her. But somehow I could never contain my joy that Ingrid was locked up in Malmö. They found bits of me all over the house, apparently. Bits of other people, as well. I wasn’t the first, I knew that. Genetics in Sweden has never really recovered from the exposure. Ingrid was found to be wearing a locket containing a piece of my left buttock the size of a pound coin. Well, you can imagine the consternation.

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‘So that’s my story,’ he said finally, with a smile. ‘I hope I haven’t been boring you?’ Linda whimpered. ‘No,’ she said, in a very small voice. ‘Promise you won’t tell Belinda? She loves Stefan, you see. How can I tell her I’m somebody else? I love her so much.’ ‘You can’t tell her.’ Stefan massaged his elbow through his sleeve, but mercifully did not offer to show Linda the place where the anchovy was cut off. ‘And you don’t mind pretending to be Swedish all the time?’ ‘No, it’s easy. Tell people you’re Swedish, and the amazing thing is, they never ask a follow-up question. Belinda has never asked me to tell her the Swedish word for anything, or wondered why I have no Swedish friends. No, it’s fine, fine. The only trouble is, Linda,’—his voice lowered—‘there’s been somebody watching me this week, and following me to work.’ ‘Who?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know. He’s young and smartly dressed. A boy with no hair. He’s been following me quite openly. He hasn’t learned very much, I know that. In fact, I think he knows only about my taste in Habitat comestibles. But if he comes near to uncovering anything about me—well, I don’t know how to say this without sounding absurdly melodramatic!’ He laughed, and Linda waited. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Well, Linda, I can’t help it. I’ll have to protect Belinda. If he uncovers the slightest thing about what happened to me in Malmö, I think I’ll have to kill him.’

Part Two One Month Later Chapter 7




Since they worked for the same newspaper, it was natural for Tanner and Leon not to recognize each other on the flight to the Malmö airport of Sturup. The newspaper world is like that. Leon had written about sport for the Daily Effort for fifteen years, and he had known altogether only eighteen colleagues by sight. Five had been sacked, and two had collapsed heroically at their desks during the World Cup in 1998 endeavouring to meet the first edition, so now he knew eleven. Leon loved the buzz and even the heartlessness of journalism. When his own time came to die, he cheerfully expected to be checked into heaven with Fleet Street’s highest hallelujah, ‘Copy fits, no queries.’ However, since he and Tanner sat beside each other on three separate occasions that Monday morning in March—first in the City Airport’s café eating damp croissants, then in the departure lounge (both scanning the Effort with a professional eye and making ‘Tsk’ noises), and finally on the plane—it was odd that it took quite so long for them to speak. Leon, for his part, was lost in thought. Four weeks had passed since Maggie sent him away, but he had dwelt on it ever since. He had become a changed man— as his eleven close colleagues would tell you. His reports from all round the globe were now peppered with strange words (removed by the subs) like anal and penile. He washed his hair more often. He began one 600-word report from a UEFA Cup match with the words ‘We forget sometimes that many quite intelligent people aren’t remotely interested in football’, and had found next day to his astonishment that his philosophical musings were reduced to a functional photo caption. Oh, Maggie. He would lie awake at night in Budapest or Monaco, remembering the way she sighed and huffed whenever he spoke. She was so exotic, and spoke with such fabulous vowels. He was quite sure he’d once seen her in something, even though she’d told him it was impossible if he never went to the theatre. When he felt like cheering himself up, he would just remember that surprising moment when she kissed him rather violently in the car and whispered, ‘Come and stay the night.’ (Maggie had characteristically forgotten her own leading role in the seduction.) Meanwhile Tanner’s reasons for not speaking to Leon were even more prosaic. He was asleep. To return to the Stefan Johansson story was a bore, especially by comparison with the intervening month, which had been spent deputizing on

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Fashion. He’d had a wonderful time. When the fashion editor finally returned refreshed (and a bit green) from a French seaweed-therapy health farm, she discovered that in her absence the Effort had seriously commended men to wear pinstripe sarongs to the office, and that the editor had sent a memo to everybody in Features saying, ‘More stuff like this, please.’ Jago had been impressed, not to say wildly jealous, and took the first opportunity to dispatch Tanner to Sweden, even though his passion for the clone theory had burned out long ago. No, sending Tanner to Malmö was now more a means of removing the young turk temporarily from the office. It is not unknown for people in Jago’s position to arrive at work one day and find a Tanner in their chair. To find a Tanner in his chair in a sarong, however, would be more than Jago Ripley could stand. So, whereas last week he’d been in Paris hobnobbing with tomorrow’s designers (also known as today’s bedwetters), now Tanner was heading for Malmö to meet a madwoman. No wonder, then, that bored by his demeaning mission and peeved that he’d been refused an upgrade by the airline, he no sooner settled into his seat than he produced a YSL-monogrammed satin blindfold, donned it, and started snoring. Maggie, why? thought Leon, as the plane taxied to the runway. He tossed aside his Swedish basketball magazine, and squirmed between the punitive arm-rests, which dug into his hips. A man of his size was bound to dislike air travel. His enormous body was now squeezed awkwardly into the restricting window-seat, while the long, spindly Tanner alongside could loll with space to spare. What did I do wrong? he continued. For the umpteenth time he rehearsed all the events of his wooing routine: it was driving him crazy. The fluffy racing car, the generous show of affection, the bottle of Cognac. Over in Oshbosh, he’d confided his interest in Maggie to a tabloid colleague called Jeff, who had advised him brilliantly, telling him to appear all the things he wasn’t: i.e. thoughtful, sexually self-confident and enormously entertaining. ‘You’re not exactly a selfstarter, are you?’ Jeff had guessed, rather woundingly. ‘More of a human waterbed. Well, women don’t like that. Especially actresses. They like you to show fire and initiative and a decent profile.’ Since Jeff had been married three times, once to a lady wrestler, Leon assumed he knew what he was talking about. The trouble with Leon was that, being (indeed) no self-starter, he always took advice if he considered it well meant, regardless of whether it was any cop. So he had burst into Maggie’s flat as Mister Personality—and look what happened. Maggie had virtually thrown him out. But perhaps she hadn’t liked him in the first place, either. Recollecting that night at Jago’s, he was forced to remember he’d ignored the golden rule of social chitchat—that to be interested in

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motor-racing you must first own a pair of testicles. Also, he had told Maggie with some confidence that Rembrandt was not a household name, which now made him squirm to remember. It’s always the same when you’re categorical. Since making this silly statement, he had, of course, seen Rembrandt toothpaste in every corner of the globe. ‘She’s in love with that Swede, that’s the real trouble,’ he told himself. And no sooner had he formed this ridiculous, petulant theory than memories rushed to corroborate it. My God, here was the answer—at long last! In the car home after Jago’s, what had Maggie talked about? Stefan. At dinner, with whom had she swapped private jokes? Stefan. And in her bedroom—how blind can a broadsheet sports correspondent be?—whose picture did she have in an elaborate frame surrounded by fairy-lights? Well, it wasn’t Damon Hill. Maggie was in love with the Swede who talked funny. Who’d solemnly informed Maggie in front of everybody that she had been ‘the absolute dog’s bollocks’ in a play he’d seen. Leon shivered at the thought of him, this man who had captivated Maggie with his silvery tongue. Who was, moreover, a slim, blond, exotic academic; the very antithesis of a bulky, swarthy hack who was also a human novelty mattress. Tanner snored in his seat, annoyingly. Leon had taken care to reserve a position by the aisle, but had arrived to find Tanner already asleep in it, with all his paperwork piled beside him. Clambering over the gangly boy to the window, he’d had to move all the papers on to the floor. Now that the cabin staff were serving food and drink, should he attempt to wake this annoying man? Sleeping on such a short flight was preposterous. He’d taken off his shoes and everything. ‘Rolls, mate,’ he said companionably, in Tanner’s ear. By dint of weary experience he was an expert on airline food. ‘One roll with egg mayonnaise, and one roll with a slice of unidentifiable grey meat. And, seeing as it’s northern Europe, a small square of chocolate.’ Tanner slept on. ‘Coffee, mate. Lukewarm coffee in a cup with a silly handle you can’t hold without sticking your elbow out so that it jabs into people.’ Nothing. The plane tilted violently to the left, as it always will when liquid refreshment is served. ‘Coffee and rolls, mate. Whoopsadaisy. Nearly got some on your skirt.’ But Tanner slept on, so Leon ate two lots of rolls and drank two lots of coffee, and was just fiddling under the seat for his laptop when a file of Tanner’s caught his eye. He blinked with astonishment. It had the name ‘Stefan Johansson’ on it—surely the name of Maggie’s preferred lover! He gasped. Could it be the same Stefan Johansson? No, no. There would be millions of them in Sweden. Millions. There were three, at least, in the national basketball team, a fact that had caused famous confusion on several occasions.

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Yet he couldn’t help it. He picked up the file, to examine it closer. And what he saw was:

Stefan Johansson, the Full Story of a Cunning Clone or The Wild Goose Chase of the Century by Michael St John Tanner chief investigative reporter of the Daily Effort

Leon frowned and gulped so hard that some of his egg mayonnaise came back. A cunning clone? What did that mean? A clone was a sheep, wasn’t it? Blimey, if Stefan was a sheep, he was very cunning indeed. Surreptitiously, still awkwardly bending to reach the floor, he opened the file and found that it was virtually empty. No dossier as such; certainly no manuscript. In fact, it had just three dog-eared items in it, which Leon—unable to control himself—memorized. The first was the address of a secure unit in Malmö’s university hospital, with the note ‘Ingrid J, Tues, 2.30’. The second was Laurie Spink’s home phone number scribbled on the back of Jago’s business card, with the note ‘Ring any time, we’re paying plenty.’ And the third was a sheet torn from a notebook, with ‘cookie’ and ‘nuts’ written on it in appalling shorthand. Leon perused all three items and grimaced. That he had never heard of Laurie Spink goes without saying. Leon was unashamedly ignorant of everything except sport. Once, at the time of a Northern Ireland summit, he had spotted the headline ‘Adams in talks’, and had been genuinely disappointed when the Adams in question turned out not to be Tony, the Arsenal and England defender, renegotiating his contract. So until genetic modification became an issue in Chinese swimming (a development not too far off, actually), he wouldn’t know the first thing about the subject that had been filling features pages for the last five years. As the plane banked and the seatbelt sign was illuminated, all Leon knew for certain was that he didn’t trust the Swede. Was he a cookie? Was he nuts? It would explain a lot. Beside him, Tanner removed his eyemask, folded it neatly, and placed it in his inside pocket. ‘Ah,’ he said airily, when he realized Leon was looking at him. ‘See you’re admiring my sarong.’ He looked very young, Leon thought. Son of a successful father, no doubt. The sort of arrogant Oxbridge tyro who overtakes you professionally the same way Michael Schumacher overtakes people on the race-track—by ramming into them, sailing past, and getting away with it.

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‘Excruciatingly uncomfortable,’ Tanner said, stretching his arms. ‘Mm,’ agreed Leon. ‘Idiots wouldn’t give me an upgrade.’ ‘Right. You going into town?’ said Leon. ‘We could share a cab and get two receipts.’ Tanner put his head on one side and thought about this proposal for about fifteen seconds—proof positive that he had been in journalism no more than a couple of months. ‘All right.’ He extended his hand, so that Leon could notice his bespoke cufflinks. ‘Tanner of the Effort, pleased to meet you.’ Leon shook his hand enthusiastically. ‘Are you Tanner? That’s marvellous!’ he cried. ‘Why?’ ‘I’m with the Effort as well. Jago asked me to look out for you in Malmö. And here you are all along!’  The Armadale Road job was proving extremely easy for Linda. In short, she loved it here. Belinda’s life had so many vacuums, all of which Linda was very, very glad to abhor. No wonder Belinda continued not to recognize her as a malevolent double like the ones in books, even when Linda posed for author photographs, liaised with a new agent, and signed a deal with a toy manufacturer. Except for those rather alarming wah-wah occasions when she threatened to walk out, Linda was a diligent, selfless, trouble-free sweetheart with a talent for homemaking. Also she didn’t charge much, which was astonishing when you consider the extra-mural commitments. Had Mrs Holdsworth ever been asked to effect an impersonation of Belinda on the Late Review, double-time would have been mentioned almost at once. Only six weeks had passed since Linda’s arrival. It seemed hardly possible, when so much had happened. Linda continued to rustle up smoked haddock in filo pastry, also to shop and to clean. But she had been stupendous on television, which no one could have predicted. Smart as a whip, with an infectious giggle, and no swank—she was spotted at once as a natural. The producer was impressed: he mentioned the possibility of a documentary about literary doubles, to help promote the book. To top it all, he even invited the Johanssons to dinner; and what a night that was for everybody. Stefan looked breathtakingly gorgeous in a blue suit Linda bought in Bond Street. Linda had her hair cut by Nicky Clarke. And while her dear, wonderful ambassadors were engaged in their selfless mission on her behalf, Belinda worked contentedly all evening, amazed by her own good fortune. To be honest, Belinda did a rather wicked thing that night. When she heard

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her envoys return home by taxi at two a.m., laughing and drunk, she used her twoway listening device to eavesdrop. It was underhand, and reprehensible. But she was desperate to hear what (albeit vicariously) Belinda Johansson had been up to. ‘When Alan Yentob turned up, I thought I’d die!’ exploded Linda, filling a kettle. ‘But you were brilliant,’ said Stefan. ‘He thought you were great. And the Marquess of Bath wanting you for a wifelet! Wait till Belinda hears.’ As Belinda now sat happily, day after day, at her lovely new desk, the only fly in her ointment was a niggling sensation of guilt connected with the quality of work she was producing. Because perhaps it was not enough, finally, to get your hands on Virginia Woolf ’s pure and rounded pearls. Perhaps you needed a smidgen of Virginia Woolf ’s talent as well. You had to be able to dash off The Waves, or Mrs Dalloway, or something. Sometimes she wished she could knock off another Verity book, to boost her confidence. She had ideas for Verity continually. But she took Linda’s point that she must stop churning them out. Linda was organizing a new uniform edition of her backlist, and had everything in hand. But this doubles book, how good was it really? What if it were second-rate tosh? What if duality were too complex a subject for her to reduce to seven types? Asking other people to sacrifice themselves in the cause of a bad book was an awful imposition. How would Linda feel when she found out she’d dedicated herself to such a hollow cause? How would Stefan feel, after suffering all those celebrity dinners with television controllers and the master of Longleat? It didn’t bear thinking about. Oh well. For now, it was terrific. Except for lavatory breaks, Belinda had scarcely left her first-floor office for the last six weeks. She had not left the house at all, or been downstairs, and had mostly kept the thick curtains drawn all day to exclude draughts. Mother was right that she was putting on weight: since Linda had started thoughtfully supplying crisps and Twixes, she had thickened at the middle, but it was a development that did not much alarm her. Bodily things were such an irrelevance. Besides, everyone says that when you write a book, you put on a stone or two, in the way women formerly lost a tooth for each baby they bore. Her burgeoning waistline was a badge of her intellectual fecundity, therefore. It meant she was ‘with book’, which was lovely.  Talking ad nauseam about the ex-cleaning lady was not what Dermot had envisaged when he first seduced Viv; and to be honest, it was a bit like being married to her, which wasn’t the idea. But he certainly sat up and took notice on the afternoon when—as the adulterous pair sat in flowery dressing-gowns at the kitchen table one day in March—she finally explained to him why losing Linda had been such a phenomenal blow.

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‘The thing is, she was doing my job at the hospital,’ Viv confessed, sobbing. ‘What?’ In his alarm, Dermot poured coffee down his front, leapt up and stubbed his toe. ‘What?’ ‘I don’t know how it happened. It’s just that I didn’t really need a cleaning lady. I liked doing all the things in the house myself. I’m good at cooking and shopping and tidying. I gave her the credit and everyone believed me. I stencilled the bathroom and said it was her. I even made all the Roman blinds!’ The thought of such abject domesticity reduced Viv to a further outburst of tears. ‘Jago doesn’t know,’ she added. ‘He must never know.’ Dermot reeled with shock. He gripped the edge of the table. His toe throbbed horribly. ‘This is outrageous, Viv. For God’s sake, is Linda medically qualified?’ Viv shook her head and blew her nose. She couldn’t speak. ‘Viv, she might have killed people.’ ‘I know.’ ‘Just so that you could sit at home joining bits of chintz!’ ‘There’s a lot more to Roman blinds than that, Dermot!’ ‘Viv, listen to yourself!’ He jumped up and started striding about. ‘I know, I’m sorry. I know.’ ‘What you did was criminal.’ ‘I know. I’m sorry. I know.’ Viv made him another cup of coffee. She was glad her secret was finally out, but at the same time rather shocked to discover she’d forgotten quite the magnitude of it. Human beings can become habituated to the most horrible and unnatural things. Custom, as the Czech people so rightly aver, takes the taste from the most savoury dishes. So, by the same de-seasoning process, it had become normal in Viv’s life to watch her cleaning lady take the car to the Royal Southwark four times a week, wave to her as she joined the traffic on the South Circular, and not think much about it beyond ‘Time to get the sewing-machine out, hurrah.’ After all, Linda evidently did a marvellous job in Viv’s place. She had been twice promoted. Surgeons regularly commended her, and told her she had far outstripped their expectations. The only difficult part of the arrangement was that when Viv gave dinner parties, Linda had to hang around until midnight pretending to work, and take credit for the puddings, when she had early appointments next day at the hospital. However, if Viv was used to the idea, Dermot (as yet) was not. In fact, he was clearly horrified. ‘But how could she do it? How did she know what to do?’ ‘Well, she took an interest, you see. She’s like that—she listens and learns. And she admired my medical ability. It didn’t just happen overnight. She asked me lots of questions, and really got very expert on the subject before—’ Viv stopped.

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‘Before what?’ ‘Before sticking a needle in someone.’ Dermot clutched his head in anguish. ‘Don’t you have colleagues, Viv? Isn’t medicine quite a small world? How could she pass herself off as you?’ ‘Well, it all worked out very neatly. The day I got the interview for the Royal Southwark, one of the boys needed a costume for school, and I didn’t want Linda to make it, even though she was very happy to. It was a Viking, with a horned helmet, and I just wanted to do it myself, and not have Sam tell his friends that his mum was too busy. So Linda attended the interview instead, just as a lark. But then, when she got the job, we thought, why not go for it?’ ‘Why not go for it?’ Dermot repeated, slowly. For an intelligent man, he was taking a long time to accept quite a simple proposition. ‘We expected to be found out sooner or later, of course. I was ready for that. I knew I’d be struck off, possibly imprisoned. And Linda—well, the thing about Linda is that she is completely without ego. She genuinely lives to serve. So everyone was happy, you see. Linda and I could discuss cases. I could maintain an interest in the professional sphere without having to go to work every day and face all those decisions. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds, honestly.’ This wasn’t how Viv had anticipated this discussion. She thought Dermot might feel sorry for her, or agree to help her persuade Linda to come back. Instead of which, he remained obstinately horrified. ‘Don’t look at me like that, Dermot. Women are in a very strange transitional state at the moment. We’re feeling our way. “Having it all” sounds excellent in theory, but it turns out to be utterly ghastly. The choices are getting impossible to make. And some of us career women just can’t stand to watch other people having all the fun with the rufflette and the spice rack.’ Dermot closed his eyes. ‘I’ve got to be somewhere else,’ he said, and left the room, Viv following him upstairs. ‘Don’t hate me,’ begged Viv. ‘Nobody got hurt. I’m only telling you so that you’ll see it’s happening again. She’s taking over Belinda now. Mrs Holdsworth says Belinda is never seen any more. Linda is taking things further than ever. Dermot, she went for Belinda’s smear test!’ Dermot, sitting on the bed and buttoning his shirt, said nothing. He was staring at the wall, thinking. ‘How long did you say Linda was at the Royal Southwark?’ ‘Two years.’ ‘I knew it.’ ‘Knew what?’ Dermot had turned white. ‘You know my appendectomy?’

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‘I do.’ ‘That bloody impostor gave me my pre-med. I knew I’d seen her before.’  How Stefan fitted into Belinda’s life of monastic seclusion (or didn’t) was awkward because she loved him more than she loved her book. That blue suit made him so handsome that when he popped in to say, ‘How’s this for a glamourpuss?’ she nearly swooned with longing. Loving Stefan was so easy. Belinda loved even all the little pits and scars he’d picked up (so he said) at his dangerously progressive kindergarten in Sweden. When first they were naked together, she had swarmed over his body finding the little dents, until she knew them so well she could draw a map. There was a place in Stefan’s left buttock where you could insert your finger or your tongue—it was the most intimate thing she’d ever known. ‘Did Ingrid do this?’ she asked once, out of the blue. She meant, of course, ‘Did Ingrid stroke you this way?’ but it was a tricky moment before Stefan latched on. ‘Forget Ingrid,’ he said. But how could she do that, when he made mention of her so often in his sleep? ‘Ingrid, no!’ was the usual nocturnal shout. ‘No, Ingrid!’ Since Belinda’s idea of Ingrid was of a doe-eyed neurotic who cried a lot and finally sank into depression, she was stung by these cries. It was no use telling herself that being retrospectively jealous of such a poor, broken person was an unworthy emotion. ‘Stefan is bound to love his first wife still, it’s only natural,’ Maggie advised, memorably. ‘You’re very selfish, Belinda. You want everything.’ But she was still upset, she couldn’t help it. The first wife had been Swedish, for a start. Whatever happened in the rest of their lives, they would always have Hoola Bandoola. So she assumed that in those bloodcurdling cries of ‘Ingrid, no!’ Stefan called to his poor lost wife as she slipped into madness, the way Orpheus called to Eurydice as Hades reclaimed her. She could have no idea that in fact the cry was accompanied by nightmare images of a dumpy psychopath advancing with a scalpel. ‘You still love Ingrid, don’t you?’ she asked him, the morning after his confession to Linda. He’d made love to her in an unusually urgent way, and when she caressed his dimpled buttock with a fingernail, he screamed. ‘Why on earth do you say that?’ ‘You ought to go and see her.’ ‘You really are going loco, Belinda. Ingrid is history. I have put up the shutters and, when the chips are down, drawn a line in the sand.’

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‘Malmö’s not far.’ Stefan snorted. ‘You have no idea where Malmö is, Belinda. It’s one of the things I love about you.’ ‘She must miss you so much, Stefan.’ Stefan shrugged. ‘I’m sure she does,’ he said darkly. ‘But look at it from her point of view. She’ll always have a little piece of me.’ With which enigmatic comment he left for college. So now Belinda was alone with the second-rate book of tosh, uneasy about her work and uneasy about Stefan’s cruel streak, when for all the world it was obvious that her cleaning lady was taking her life. Dostoevsky would have noticed it at once. But Belinda—well, Belinda was a woman with a shaky ego and took a different view. Having a double to do telly appearances on your behalf entailed no existential terror, it was absolutely marvellous. She looked at her Virginia Woolf postcard with quite different eyes since Linda came. She had pearls, pearls and more pearls, thanks to Linda. And take the way Linda dealt with Mother. It was miraculous. Initially suspicious of Linda, Mother was now in love with her! She called her, rather pointedly, ‘the daughter I never had’. Linda was pretty and well groomed. In Selfridges, she didn’t sigh and drag her feet while Mother browsed: she grabbed the sleeves of smart suits and said things like ‘What lovely buttons.’ Linda modelled clothes beautifully, accepted gifts graciously, and best of all, never asked, ‘Something up?’ Linda came to remove the filo haddock plate, which had been scraped clean, as usual, in the lavatory. ‘No anchovy sauce these days?’ said Belinda, brightly. ‘No,’ agreed Linda, unconsciously rubbing her elbow. ‘No, I’ve gone off anchovies.’ ‘You never talk about yourself, Linda.’ ‘Have you ever asked?’ ‘I suppose not.’ Belinda wondered whether this was an invitation. But if it was, it was soon revoked. ‘Do you need any Mars bars?’ ‘Well, I can’t pretend another dozen wouldn’t be nice.’ ‘I’ll pop out later. Did I tell you I’m seeing Maggie? She rang up again. I said I’d meet her for coffee at the Adelphi. It’s a friends thing,’ she added, noticing Belinda’s puzzled expression. ‘You don’t have to do that, Linda. After all, she’s my friend.’ ‘Nonsense. I’d be glad to. You’ve got all those justified sinners to worry about. And I’m collecting the photos of your birthday tea.’ ‘Great. Oh, look, sorry I missed that tea, Linda. I got so absorbed—’

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‘No, it was fine. We had a lovely time. I shall be like Paddington Bear, having two birthdays.’ ‘Maggie doesn’t mind about today, I suppose?’ There was something odd about Linda supplanting her with her oldest friend, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Such issues were very confusing, these days. ‘Would you prefer to go instead?’ Linda offered. ‘Right this minute?’ Belinda was only half dressed, despite the late hour. She hadn’t worn make-up in a month. There was chocolate on her jumper. ‘No. Look. Give her my love, or something. It’s just that you shouldn’t do everything!’ she urged, at last. As a protest, it was transparently feeble. ‘But I want to,’ said Linda. ‘And you don’t. That’s why we’re made for each other, isn’t it?’  At the hospital in Malmö, Ingrid whimpered in her straitjacket. She had been trying to gather genetic material from the other patients again, though luckily only with the aid of plastic cutlery. ‘I’m so unhappy,’ she told the young nurse in Swedish. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ replied the nurse, bored. ‘Stefan loved me,’ she said. ‘He was always unlucky!’ ‘You can say that again.’ Ingrid squirmed in the jacket and yelled, ‘Stefan! Stefan! They tell me you are dead! What wickedness this is!’ ‘He is dead, Ingrid. You saw him die.’ ‘No, no! I’m so unhappy.’ ‘Yeah, yeah.’ ‘He’s not dead.’ ‘Yes he is.’  It was dreary in Malmö when Leon and Tanner got their taxi into town. And the wind was piercing, like being lanced by icicles. As a seasoned sportswriter, Leon had judiciously worn a warm coat and thick boots; meanwhile the fine leather soles on Tanner’s hand-made shoes sent him skidding into a bank of trolleys the moment they stepped on to the ice outside the arrivals hall. ‘I’m getting my own column, you know,’ said Tanner, in the gloom of the cab. Leon could believe it. Grey functional Malmö buildings flashed past. The radio played Euro music, and the driver tapped the wheel in rhythm. ‘Sweden,’ said Tanner, ‘Nothing ever happens here, does it?’

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‘Well, it did in Stockholm in 1992, of course,’ said Leon. ‘European Football Championships. England lost two-one. “Swedes two, Turnips one”—you must have heard that? It was Gary Lineker’s last international appearance and Graham Taylor took him off. The fans trashed the place afterwards.’ Tanner looked at him with contempt. ‘Do you really retain trivia, or do you look it up?’ ‘I was here. I remember it.’ ‘Good heavens.’ ‘So you’re here to visit mad Mrs Johansson, is that right?’ Leon asked, airily. ‘Need me to come along? What’s the story?’ He held his breath in the dark, wondering whether Tanner would trust his friendly tone. He did. ‘Look, Ripley thinks Johansson is a clone.’ ‘A what?’ ‘A double. You know. The original Johansson died in a fire in Sweden yet here he is in London, pretending to have an academic post. So Ripley puts two and two together—or one and one together, if you see what I mean. This Johansson was an expert on cloning, you see, and a madman. Bits of pulsating human genetic material found all over his lab and house when he died. Signs of unethical practice. Bodies under the floor, I don’t know. The wife went mad, and that’s all there is to it, except—you’ll like this bit—that the so-called clone is married to . . . Well, guess. He’s married to one of Ripley’s best friends.’ From the way he spat out the last couple of words, Tanner evidently disapproved of nepotism in Fleet Street. Which was a little hypocritical of him, in the circumstances. ‘Can you believe it?’ said Tanner, nonchalantly tapping his passport on his leg. ‘Nonsense. Utter bosh. This man is not a clone, there’s just a mix-up. Do you know how many Stefan Johanssons there are in Sweden?’ ‘How many?’ ‘Well,’ stalled Tanner, who hadn’t checked, ‘just say it’s better to ask how many Swedes aren’t called Stefan Johansson. Ripley’s not too bright, that’s all. It’s my opinion that this Johansson declined the offer to write in his idiotic genetics supp, and the only explanation Jago finds plausible for such behaviour is that the man isn’t human.’ Much as he instinctively disliked and distrusted the stuck-up boy, Leon was still impressed by such a fine grasp of Jago’s personality. ‘Do you like basketball?’ he asked. It was a shot in the dark. ‘Yes, actually,’ said Tanner. ‘Adore it. You don’t play, surely?’ Leon ignored the way Tanner was looking him up and down. ‘No, I don’t play. But I’m here to cover it. Malmö Meerkats and Cincinnati Sidewinders. A slightly uneven contest. But Sweden’s mad for basketball. It will be a good event.’

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‘The Cincinnati Sidewinders?’ Tanner’s eyes opened wide, and for the first time he dropped his world-weary act. In the cab, the music changed to Abba’s ‘Waterloo’. At the thought of the famous Sidewinders, Tanner suddenly looked twelve years old. Leon hid his smile by looking out of the window. Sports journalism was such an odd job. Half the people in the world thought sport was an utter irrelevance, and the other half wanted to climb into your suitcase. Either they looked at you blankly and backed off a pace or two, or were so jealous they burst into tears. With Tanner, it could have gone either way. ‘The Winders?’ Tanner repeated. ‘The Winders are in Malmö? With Jericho Jones?’ ‘I can get you to the press conference, if you like.’ ‘No!’ Leon pretended to check in his file for the time of the press conference, but he already knew it. ‘It’s tomorrow at two thirty. Are you free?’ ‘Yes!’ Then Tanner’s face crumpled. ‘No! No, I’m not! Damn, damn, damn.’ ‘What’s up?’ ‘That’s precisely when I meet Stefan Johansson’s mad old lady.’ ‘What a shame. Your one chance to meet Jericho Jones.’ Tanner agonized. Leon watched him with considerable enjoyment. It was going to be simple to reach Mrs Mad Johansson before Tanner. When the time came, it would be a simple matter of swapping roles. As the cab drew up at their cheap hotel and the driver charged them the three hundred kronor Leon had agreed at the airport, Leon felt optimistic for the first time in weeks. Maggie was pining not only for a married man but some sort of undead person! He could rescue her from this terrible delusion. And then the rest would be easy. How could he put it, in a poetic metaphor she would understand? He could slam-dunk her heart, he thought. He could slam-dunk her heart, while sky-walking.

Chapter 8




When Jago saw Laurie Spink’s fourth column, he was furious. This had gone on long enough. Not one reference to monstrous boobs had yet appeared in Spink’s submissions; not even a mention of monstrous dicks, which he’d assured Spink would be a satisfactory second-choice subject, if sensitively handled. Although he worked for a mid-market newspaper, Jago had been promoted especially on his talents as a tabloid thinker, as a man with a direct psychic link to the least-educated person on the Clapham omnibus. He had kept the Viagra story going for twenty-eight months. The picture desk adored him. ‘Damn it, Spink,’ he bellowed now down the phone. ‘If I’d wanted a piece about free will and predestination in the scientific age, I’d have asked the Archbishop of Canterbury. In fact, hang on a minute.’ He tapped his keyboard and studied his screen. ‘I did ask the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ He tapped some more. ‘Jesus,’ he exclaimed. ‘Have you any idea the money that man gets? I could get God for less. Listen, Spink. I want this again in thirty-five minutes or I rewrite it myself.’ ‘I’ve got a tutorial,’ Spink objected. ‘You’ve always got a tutorial.’ Jago slammed down the phone, and dialled Dermot, the Archbishop’s literary representative. He loved playing tough-talking newspaperman like this. Sometimes he opened his desk drawer to gaze for a few seconds at a little picture of Edward G. Robinson, to fire him up sufficiently. ‘Dermot, it’s Jago. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ A lengthy pause at the other end, while Dermot fought panic. It had to happen one day that Jago would discover the affair. Sweat formed on his brow. ‘Dermot?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I’m talking to you. This so-called Primate of All England of yours. Who exactly does this guy think he is?’  Stefan ate his third nut cookie of the morning and put down his Teach Yourself English Slang. He had felt better about himself since his late-night confession to Linda. He wished sometimes he could drop the Swedish act, but he was right about Belinda’s attraction to him as a Swede. Belinda could never love a man called George; she’d admitted as much. When they saw a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in the early days of their relationship, he tested her afterwards.

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‘You don’t mean to say that you couldn’t love me if my name wasn’t Stefan?’ ‘But your name is Stefan.’ ‘Personally, darling, to speak quite candidly’—he did his Wildean dialogue pretty well—‘I don’t much care about the name of Stefan. I think there are lots of other much nicer names. George is a charming name.’ But true to Oscar Wilde, Belinda said that George had no music and didn’t thrill, and that she pitied anybody married to a person called George, and that she could never love a George, and so on. They were laughing, of course. It wasn’t serious. But Stefan already loved Belinda so much that he couldn’t take the risk. What always amazed him was that she didn’t penetrate his phoney Swede act anyway. True, he’d lived in Stockholm for twenty years, but when his wife asked him (for example) who was the Swedish Alfred Hitchcock, or the Swedish Jack the Ripper, or the Swedish Kenneth Williams, it was surely obvious he was making up the answers. ‘Bo Söderberg,’ he told her recently, with great authority, when she asked who the Swedish Enid Blyton was. ‘Didn’t you say Bo Söderberg was the Swedish John Travolta? I’m sure you did.’ ‘No, that was his brother Nils,’ Stefan had replied, thinking quickly. ‘Nils Söderberg. Brother of Bo. Marvellous clan, the Söderbergs. All blond and extremely clever. Kerstin Söderberg is the Swedish Barbara Woodhouse, while Jonas Söderberg won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1958.’ Luckily, his wife trusted him. She did not ask for an invitation to Stockholm, to meet the Magnificent Söderbergs. And luckily he also loved researching idiom. Throwing back his head now in the Habitat café, all the better to concentrate and memorize, he resolved to work into casual conversation today codswallop, cold feet and colour of your money. A load of cock, he discovered, was ‘less polite than cobblers’. How interesting to consider either of these terms by their degree of politeness. And which of these two excellent turns of phrase would Stefan authentically choose? Or would he (as it were) cock a snook at both? ‘No bald-headed boy, these days,’ he remarked to the girl selling coffee. It was true. A month had passed since Tanner had appeared. Stefan felt free to breathe again. She smiled, uncertainly. ‘The one who kept watching you and making notes?’ ‘That’s the one.’ ‘Gone to Sweden,’ she said. Stefan blenched. ‘What?’ ‘He rang just now from a place called Marmite, and asked me to let him know if you’d done anything remotely interesting in the last four weeks. Those were his exact words. I wrote it down, look. I said no, by the way. What a nerve.’

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‘Marmite?’ ‘Sorry.’ She consulted her notes. ‘Malmö. He mentioned two dots.’ She looked at him. ‘Are you all right?’ ‘No.’ Stefan had swung his scarf around his neck. ‘Did he tell you his name?’ ‘Tanner.’ ‘Right. Tanner.’ ‘Of the Effort.’ Stefan stopped in his tracks. ‘The newspaper?’ ‘I suppose so.’ The boy was from Jago’s paper! ‘Oh God in heaven,’ he said.  Dermot put down the phone from Jago and took a deep, steadying breath. Life was certainly teaching him a lesson—not to have sex with your clients’ wives. Not because it was morally scummy, or anything, but when the husband rang you in a flying rage about something else entirely you needed to lie on the floor to recover. Dermot felt very uneasy about Jago. He could handle feelings of disloyalty, of course; and he was actually deeply fond of lying. What he hated most about the present situation was having to keep from his best newspaper contact Viv’s phenomenal secret. A potentially lethal criminal fraud had been perpetrated by Jago’s wife, and he couldn’t tell anybody. Viv had exonerated her conspiracy with Linda, if memory served, by invoking the beauty of the resulting soft furnishings. He wondered whether even the Calvinists in their heyday had ever considered such a belief system. Justification by Tie-back, they would have had to call it. Expiation by Kapok. Right now, he was supposed to be calling the Archbishop with the Effort’s demands, so he got up off the floor, put his feet up and started to count to 500 instead. This was his usual practice. He would just wait a few minutes and then phone Jago back, saying the Archbishop was a tough nut with titanic financial commitments who refused to bend over for the Effort, not now, not ever. He knew Jago would capitulate when met by superior rhetorical force: Jago liked to impersonate Edward G. Robinson, but it was all an act. Come back at him as Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he rolled over like a puppy. ‘Archbish says no dice,’ he snarled realistically, after making and drinking a nice cup of peppermint tea. ‘You made one primate very, very angry, my friend. He said he’d personally excommunicate you.’ ‘Shit,’ said Jago. ‘Really?’ ‘Just back off. OK?’

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‘OK.’ Dermot took a deep breath. He had to say something about what he’d learnt of Linda. ‘Listen, I hear your friend Belinda’s on Late Review, these days. She’s a big hit.’ ‘So?’ ‘So I hear she’s looking like Kylie Minogue. You should snap her up for the Effort.’ ‘Kylie Minogue? Belinda?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘Belinda looks like George Orwell.’ This was unkind, but not entirely untrue. ‘Well, I’m just tipping you a wink.’ ‘You’re doing what?’ ‘Tipping a wink.’ ‘Oh.’ Jago wrinkled his nose. He had no idea what to make of this. He couldn’t relate to anything cryptic. That Linda was impersonating Belinda he already knew, because at home Viv spoke of nothing else. ‘OK. See you. Oh, name some flowers, I’m in a spot.’ ‘Aster, rose, daisy, clematis, camellia.’ Jago made tapping noises at the other end, and put the phone down. Dermot looked at the dead receiver and shrugged. By his own meagre ethical standards, he had certainly done his best.  Four bad weeks had passed for Maggie since she threw Leon out of her house. Her therapy had intensified to such a degree that now it had more of a life than she did herself. She was therapy’s tool, nothing more. As she sat at home with the cats in the evenings, she was a mere husk, stroking the fluffy racing car, watching mindless television and snivelling. The trouble was, the well-intentioned Julia had a no-nonsense hard-hat approach to therapy. Demolish the person, inspect the foundations, and then rebuild to a new and better spec, using a selection of the original materials. No matter that a shower unit and a bit of cosmetic crack-papering might actually suffice. Instead, methodical and painstaking, she dismantled Maggie’s personality brick by brick, examining the mortar, preserving bits of cornice, and making careful notes of the archaeological layers in the wallpaper. The only problem was that, while the process was ongoing, Maggie felt exactly like an abandoned human building site, with wind rustling her tarpaulins. No roof; no walls; no floors; fireplace and toilet exposed for all to see. It was no wonder, really, in these conditions, that a squatter quickly got in.

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Because although Noel had been banned from Julia’s programme of therapy—lookalike role-playing was absolutely ruled out after the first experiment— Maggie slept with him anyway. She didn’t mean to. It just happened. He kept phoning to tell her he cared about her, and that she was lovely and talented, and that she didn’t deserve to be exploited by married men who stayed only an hour. And then, one day, he brought a thoughtful cat-toy for Miranda, which broke down Maggie’s weakened defences. Noel now came to see her twice a week, each time for fifty-five minutes. And it was awful. Not knowing how much it upset her, he brought her extremely cheap presents, such as a copy of the Big Issue, or a paper bag with two oranges in it. Presumably he hoped to repeat the effect of the cat-toy, but instead she felt demeaned. ‘He thinks I’ll do it for a bag of Bombay mix,’ she said miserably to herself, as she put her hand down his trousers. ‘And if I’m doing this, I suppose he’s right.’ These days, when Maggie looked in a mirror she was reminded of a line in a Restoration comedy she did at college: ‘I’m like an old peeled wall.’ As she prepared to meet Linda for coffee at the Adelphi, she wondered how much of this to tell her. None of it was very flattering, after all. ‘Obviously, if I’m sleeping with you, I must leave Julia,’ she said to Noel, after his second visit. He was putting his coat on and consulting his watch. Having washed his hands twice, he was still sniffing his fingers with a quizzical expression, as if he couldn’t identify the smell. ‘You can’t do that,’ he exclaimed, with panic behind his eyes. He took her by the shoulders, his hands heavy against her neck. ‘I mean, she’ll want to know why, and you can’t tell her. I hope you’re not that selfish, Maggie? To hurt Julia? After all she’s done for you?’ ‘No, no. But—’ ‘Besides, you must never curtail therapy unnaturally. It’s incredibly dangerous, psychologically.’ ‘I know.’ The problems of leaving therapists had plagued Maggie for the past ten years; she was an expert on its double-binds. ‘This isn’t working,’ you say. To which they reply, ‘We must discuss this urgently. Is Tuesday afternoon still good?’ ‘You’re not very bright,’ you object. And they look at you pityingly and say, ‘But it’s exactly this kind of judgementalism that is blighting your life, don’t you see that?’ ‘Sometimes I think Julia will never let me go.’ Noel laughed. ‘Join the club.’ ‘But I’m not married to her!’ He assumed his solemn expression again, and she knew she was in for a lecture. As a member of the therapists’ union, Noel had sworn on a stack of Freuds

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never to let such heresy pass unchecked. ‘What you could have with Julia is better than marriage, Margaret. If you would only accept it, only open yourself up! You refuse to experience transference! But if you did, you’d see that Julia is completely on your side.’ ‘Is she?’ Maggie sniffed. ‘Of course. Shame you’re shagging her husband, really.’ As she remembered this scene, Maggie felt tears of shame roll down her face. And what had she said to him next? ‘What I need, Noel, is to have a man completely on my side.’ ‘Pay me thirty quid an hour and you might get one.’ ‘I wish we could talk.’ Noel kissed her forehead lightly. ‘Talk to Julia,’ he said. ‘Gotta go.’  There was a time when Belinda had never really heard of Malmö. A Söderberg might be a crispbread. But now her beloved Stefan was going back on a sudden visit, and she had to bite her lip and be brave while he packed for his journey. ‘Is it Ingrid?’ she whispered. ‘Is she—worse?’ Stefan took her hands and held them warmly in his own. ‘Not possible,’ he said, gravely. ‘Oh, Stefan. I can’t help feeling guilty about her. We’re so happy and she’s so—’ ‘I know. Don’t say it.’ He threw some warm clothes in a suitcase, and checked his watch. He was catching a flight to Copenhagen in two hours from Heathrow. ‘Oh, Miss Patch, I love you. You do know that? I must come clean. You give me collywobbles.’ She grinned bravely. Of course she knew that. She really appreciated it, too, when he remembered to call her Miss Patch. Even if Audrey Hepburn never weighed thirteen stone, smelt a bit, and got dizzy standing up. ‘I wish I could come,’ she lied. ‘No, no. Listen, Belinda. You have fears that you will cease to be before your pen has gleaned your teeming brain. This is what you tell me. I respect this. It is not codswallop, I think?’ ‘I hope not.’ ‘So don’t get cold feet. I know what you think, Belinda. But your book will not be common or garden. Or cobblers.’ ‘OK.’ He stood in the doorway, gazing at her. He really didn’t want to leave. Not only did he have genuine affection for his strangely ballooning wife, but he had found no way of incorporating ‘a load of cock’ into the conversation.

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 Jago couldn’t believe it. He was having a very bad phone day. Tanner had been in Malmö just two hours, and already Stefan had discovered what was going on. ‘Who is Tanner of the Effort, please, Yago?’ Stefan demanded, without preamble. In the background to the phone call were giveaway airport noises. ‘And why is he in Malmö?’ ‘Oooh,’ stalled Jago, whose mediocre skill at lying was rightly famous. ‘Tanner? Tanner. No, I can’t think. How’s that lovely wife of yours, incidentally? I hear she’s quite foxy these days.’ ‘He has a bald head, like a footballer.’ ‘Bald head, bald head, bald head. Oh, I know! Fashion! That’s right. Couldn’t think who you meant. Yes, Tanner’s our great young style guru. Must be in Malmö for—er, Scandinavian Fashion Week. Snoods are back, apparently. Is there a problem?’ ‘Well, yes, Yago. This bald-headed Tanner fellow has been following me. And I don’t think it’s because he studies my outfits.’ ‘He follows you? What for?’ ‘He spooks me, Yago. In fact, between you, me and the doorpost, I think this Scandinavian Fashion Week story may be a load of old cock.’ ‘No!’ ‘Can you call him off, please?’ ‘I’ll try. But why?’ ‘I must go, Yago. But please, help me! I helped you many times. Please. I don’t know if I am coming or going!’ ‘Which way are you going, by the way?’ Jago tried to make it sound like a pleasantry. ‘What?’ ‘Are you coming or going, Stefan? Are you in Malmö?’ The line went dead, and Jago buzzed his secretary. ‘Get me a flight to Malmö, quick! And name me some flowers while you’re about it!’  ‘You’ve got to get out of this Noel–Julia situation, Maggie,’ said Linda, firmly. She poured milk into her coffee, and took another cake from the plate. What a shame Belinda never came out these days. She’d have liked the Adelphi. Linda sometimes felt she knew Belinda’s preferences better than Belinda knew them herself. ‘It’s the first rule of survival,’ she added, brushing icing sugar from her fingers. ‘Never have anything to do with people who drain the life out of you.’ ‘But they each have my best interests at heart.’

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‘Is that what they told you?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘So you feel really great, do you?’ ‘No, I feel terrible.’ Maggie felt rather awkward talking to a stranger in this way. But it was odd. This woman was far more supportive than Belinda was. She had the knack of applying herself to somebody else’s situation. She seemed to think loyalty the principal virtue of mankind. She said Maggie had enormous potential as an actress. Already, in fact, Maggie was ready to call her the best friend she’d ever had. ‘Can I ask your advice, too, perhaps?’ asked Linda. ‘I would love to know what you think about something.’ ‘Who, me?’ Maggie brightened for the first time that day. Her advice was never sought by Belinda. Even when freely offered, Maggie’s bitter, sour-grapes opinions were consistently ignored by all her friends. ‘It’s just that you’ve known Belinda for years. Do you think she secretly wants children?’ Maggie barked with laughter at the thought of it. ‘No.’ ‘Why’s that?’ ‘Because she’s incredibly selfish.’ ‘But Stefan would make such a lovely father. Strange that a geneticist would waste such genes.’ ‘Oh Lord, you’re right there. When I was Olivia in Twelfth Night, do you know the part I couldn’t cope with? It was when Viola said to me, “Oh, lady, you are the cruellest she alive, if you will lead these graces to the grave, and leave the world no copy.” ’ Maggie swallowed. ‘It used to make me cry.’ ‘That must have been very effective on stage.’ ‘Oh, yes. Except that it’s more of a comical moment, really.’ ‘Oh.’ Maggie pulled herself together. ‘But that’s what you mean about Stefan? He’s bound by sheer good taste to reproduce?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I think you’re absolutely right.’  Jago phoned Tanner on his mobile, and heard strange sports-hall echoes in the background, like a ball bouncing and the squeak of rubber-soled shoes, an organ playing, and lots of cheers. ‘Tanner? Whatever time your appointment is with the madwoman,’ he barked, ‘you’ve got to bring it forward!’

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‘Sorry?’ yelled Leon. The noise of the basketball warm-up event behind him made chatting difficult. Tanner had gone to buy a coffee and left his mobile on the desk. Leon had helpfully answered it. ‘This isn’t Tanner—’ he began. ‘What’s that noise? Tanner, where are you?’ ‘What?’ ‘This is Jago Ripley, for fuck’s sake! You’ve got to go and see the loony as soon as possible!’ ‘What?’ Leon had heard this clearly enough, however. ‘What?’ he yelled. He was quite enjoying this. He had never liked Jago much. Jericho Jones performed a graceful sky-walk slam-dunk, and the place went wild. ‘Stefan’s on his way!’ screamed Jago, amid the approving roar of the Swedes. ‘Sorry, you’re breaking up,’ Leon said, then switched off the mobile and dropped it back on Tanner’s desk. ‘Who was that?’ asked Tanner, returning with hot drinks on a paper tray. ‘No idea,’ shrugged Leon, and looked at his watch. Things were going rather well with his Maggie mission. He just had to get to the hospital before Stefan Johansson. Meanwhile, back in London, Jago chewed the edge of his desk with excitement. It would be accurate to say that his interest in this story had been revived. Stefan had a secret, all right! He was acting like a guilty clone! And, with any luck, the whole story would unfold within the extremely short range of Jago Ripley’s twenty-four-hour attention span.  When Mother popped in to see Belinda, she found her methodically cleaning her keyboard with finger and spittle. ‘Damn. I mean, hello,’ said Belinda, guiltily. Lucky her mother had not entered earlier and found her counting her Mars bar wrappers. Writing had not been very good today. In fact, according to her word-count software, she’d added fourteen words in total to her manuscript, and two of those were ‘Chapter Three’. But on the bright side, she had enough Mars bar wrappers for a free scratch card, and the function keys and space bar had never looked so shiny. ‘Busy, dear?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said Belinda defensively. ‘Very busy. Quite a lot of my time is spent just thinking, you know. It’s not all tap-tap-tap. That’s typing, not writing.’ ‘Yes, of course. That’s why all your work takes so long, I expect.’ ‘Mm.’ Mother cleared a number of books from Belinda’s couch and sat down. She

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chose this spot because it was the furthest from the radiator. Gently, she stroked her own cheeks upwards towards her ears, like a cat washing itself. ‘Something up?’ asked Belinda, automatically. Mother ignored her. ‘Belinda, it isn’t easy to say this, but I feel I must.’ ‘What?’ ‘I feel you have let yourself go. There. I’ve said it.’ ‘Let myself go?’ Belinda laughed. ‘Yes.’ ‘Nobody says that any more, Mother. It comes from the days when people wore corsets and plucked their eyebrows, and lived in L-shaped rooms.’ Mother harumphed. ‘You’re not even offended! Oh, Belinda, you’re beyond hope.’ ‘What do you expect? I haven’t “let myself go”. Actually, it’s an interesting phrase, when you think about it. It can be a very good thing to let yourself go. Go on, Mother. Let yourself go!’ ‘But it’s what you’ve done,’ she protested. ‘You’ve let yourself go. You used to be quite slim and sexy, and now Stefan can hardly bear to look at you. And I don’t blame him. It pains me to say it when you’re my own daughter, but in that cardigan you look absolutely disgusting. I can’t think where you get it from. Have you ever seen me wear a cardigan? Even Auntie Vanessa never wears cardigans and she’s got the worst dress sense of anyone in this family.’ Belinda swallowed hard. The metallic taste of the keyboard dirt made the action all the more unpleasant. ‘Look at your nails! When was the last time you went to the hairdresser? I can’t stand by and watch it any more. This room smells. When I think of how beautifully Linda dresses.’ ‘What’s Linda got to do with it?’ ‘My own daughter, a human barrage balloon. In a V-neck cardie with pockets. I bought you that beautiful nylon Prada coat last autumn and I found it under the stairs today. It had spiders in it. It was streaked with what I can only describe as snot. I’m having it cleaned, and then I’m giving it to Linda.’ ‘Stefan says I’m lovely.’ ‘Can’t you see he’s just saying that?’ ‘No, he isn’t.’ ‘Well. You don’t see the way he looks at Linda when you’re not there. But I can tell you, he can’t take his eyes off her.’ Belinda gasped. This was too much. ‘Well, now I know you’re just being spiteful,’ she cried, and—hardly knowing why she did it—she secretly switched on the two-way baby-listener, so that Linda would hear downstairs in the kitchen, where she was known to be rustling up a delightful dish of squid stewed in tomatoes

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and lemon before popping off to Broadcasting House to review a new film of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for Radio 4. ‘Repeat what you just said to me!’ she told her mother, in a loud voice. ‘What are you implying about Stefan and Linda?’ ‘I’m merely saying that if you continue to bloat in the dark in extra large Tshirts with Wallace and Gromit on the front, your husband won’t be able to help himself. Linda is a very attractive young woman, who also happens to be a lot nicer than you are, as well as more talented, and with excellent connections in the worlds of both the media and fishmongery. And, being only human, she fancies Stefan as much as we all do.’ Mother stood up and left the room, leaving Belinda to stare down at her extralarge T-shirt in a state of confusion. Her mother had all the wrong values, surely? Stefan had told her just an hour ago how much he loved her. He was extremely supportive about the book, too. Besides, who would be interested sexually in a deputy when he could have the real thing? No, Mother was a silly, interfering woman with artificially arched eyebrows who would find any excuse to disparage her own daughter because she was jealous of her intellect. In fact, Belinda was just about to whisper into the intercom, ‘Linda, did you hear all that? What a ridiculous person my mother is!’ when she overheard Mother entering the kitchen. ‘Linda! Darling!’ she said, as if she’d just come home from a terrible day. ‘Can I help with anything?’ Belinda knew she ought to switch off the device, but somehow she couldn’t. Instead, she placed the speaker on her desk, to hear it better. It was crackly, a bit muffled. But good enough to picture the scene. A scrape of a chair told her that her mother was sitting down. A kettle was filled and switched on. Chopping commenced on a wooden board. ‘You’re looking lovely, Linda,’ Mother said. ‘I was just telling Belinda how lucky she is to have you doing everything for her.’ ‘That’s nice,’ said Linda, clattering some pans. She sounded strangely brisk. What was up? Surely she’d been flattered by everything Mother had said. It was true that not many people bridge so gracefully those two distinct worlds of the television studio and the fish shop. Belinda notably had contacts in neither. ‘May I say something?’ Linda said, at last. Sizzling and stirring could be heard. ‘Of course.’ ‘I think you’re a wicked person,’ said Linda, in a level tone. ‘I couldn’t see it before, I thought we were all on the same side. But I heard what you said to Belinda just now, and I have to tell you I think you’re a cow.’ Belinda was glad she couldn’t see Mother’s inadequate expression of mild surprise, but was torn nevertheless. Should she rush downstairs to make the peace?

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Or make sure she didn’t miss anything by staying put? She found she had very mixed feelings at hearing Linda call Mother a cow. She wanted to boo and cheer at the same time. ‘I think you should leave the house and go back to your flat,’ Linda continued. ‘You’ve been very good to me, which makes this hard to say. But I see now you are hurting Belinda, and if you hurt Belinda, you hurt her work. We all know it’s very important for Belinda’s work that she’s not upset.’ ‘But Belinda’s work isn’t worth twopence!’ exclaimed Mother, brightly. ‘Face it Linda, you’re twice the person she is. You’re the person everybody likes. Stefan thinks you’re gorgeous.’ ‘Take that back,’ warned Linda. She sounded angry. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Mother. ‘Take that back.’ ‘No.’ Belinda couldn’t believe it. Were they both mad? ‘Put down that frozen salmon, Linda!’ said Mother, her voice rising. ‘Make me,’ said Linda. At which point, unbelievably, there were sounds of a scuffle. ‘Oh God,’ whispered Belinda. ‘They’re fighting!’ She stood stock-still, staring at the speaker on her desk. She heard a chair knocked over. Bits of crockery fell off the table and smashed. And throughout there were gasps and squeals. There was violence in the kitchen! ‘Linda!’ she yelled into the intercom. ‘Mother! Stop it!’ But the scuffle continued, with the sound effects of oven doors and broken plates until a loud ‘Aieee!’ from Mother announced that something very serious had happened. ‘My face!’ Mother yelled. ‘Linda, you bitch! My face!’ Belinda realized it was time to leave the sidelines. Sometimes it’s all right for an author to abandon her desk—for example, when her loyal cleaning lady is downstairs mutilating her mother. So she loped to the landing, puffed and clung to the banister when she saw stars, then struggled downstairs, reaching the kitchen just in time to see Linda wield a side of frozen salmon round her head, like a claymore. ‘Linda?’ Belinda said. ‘Put down the fish.’ Linda’s arms went limp. It had gone very quiet suddenly. Between them on the kitchen floor Mother already lay unmoving, her face upturned and strangely beautiful. She was dead. Why did she look so strangely beautiful? As Belinda later learnt, a sudden exposure to the heat of the boiled kettle during the scuffle had made Mother’s features drop perfectly into place for the first time since the lift-job. In death,

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therefore, she looked natural and not a bit surprised, and the irony was profound. Nobody would ever say, ‘Something up?’ to Mother again. In the turmoil she had slipped on a piece of raw squid, banged her head on the corner of the kitchen table and died instantly. By the time Belinda arrived at the kitchen door, the celestial Fenwick’s had already claimed her mother, its cash tills ringing in praise. Linda’s eyes were round holes in her face. Belinda thought afterwards it was the first and last time she ever saw Linda frightened. ‘Put the fish down, Linda.’ Linda looked at the salmon as if she had no idea where it came from. ‘I didn’t—’ ‘I know.’ ‘It was her that was angry. It wasn’t me. I told her to go, that’s all.’ ‘I heard.’ ‘She wasn’t good enough to be your mother, Belinda. She said I was twice the woman you are! What sort of mother says that?’ Linda’s dismay choked her. Tears rolled down her face. ‘Look,’ she still managed to say, ‘I did this for you, Belinda, and if you’re not happy about it, I’ll go.’ Belinda felt her head swim. She had to be happy about this? It was a bit of a stretch from being happy about a daily diet of eels and haddock to being happy about seeing your mother lifeless on the kitchen floor. Linda really didn’t know where to draw the line, did she? The problem with this situation was that neither of them had the faintest idea where to draw the line. ‘Belinda? Don’t say you’re not happy about this. Please. I don’t want to go. How could I live with myself ?’ ‘Oh God,’ said Belinda. ‘Come here.’ And as she hugged her insanely loyal cleaning lady, who sobbed in her arms, she noticed with a kind of glum horror that Linda was still cradling a slab of frozen fish.

Chapter 9




Leon’s fifteen years as a sports writer sometimes meant that people made the wrong assumption about him. They considered him a career sports writer, whose life was a perpetual memorizing of results and whose death would be a final whistle of three long blasts. This wasn’t how he saw his own life, however— not at all. True, he liked his job and was good at it. True, he could remember without effort the salient events of Malmö in 1992 or Headingley in 1981. But as far as Leon was concerned, such things did not define him. They weren’t him. The last thing he wanted was to end up like his journalist father (quite a famous chap in certain circles), who became so preoccupied by his own status within the world of sport that by the end of his sad, peculiar life he was arguably deranged. ‘Who was that on the phone? Was it Bobby Moore?’ Dad would call from the shed, while Mother burst into tears, and the boys pretended not to hear. ‘Did I tell you Seve Ballesteros gave me this sombrero? I taught Jack Charlton how to fish.’ The effect on his sons had been interesting, however. While his softer, younger son Leon had decided to try sports writing himself, if only to prove that madness need not be the profession’s inevitable conclusion, the older son Noel became a psychotherapist, to prove that delusional madness is everywhere, not just in people who swan about at the World Cup without paying. Dad had died without being impressed by the achievements of either child, of course. His last words, dutifully relayed by the mystified night cleaner in the terminal ward, left no message to his family. They were instead ‘Tell Pele I’ll get back to him’, from which the family were obliged to derive comfort of a kind. At least they could tell themselves that Dad had been Dad, right to the end. As a result of their divergent paths in life, Leon rarely saw his brother these days—they had so little in common. But each brother was perfectly aware of the other’s existence. When Maggie first told Noel he looked exactly like a man called Leon, he could (and should) have cleared up the mystery at once. But he didn’t. He chose instead to be mystified and sceptical, because he enjoyed exploiting Maggie’s confusion, and delighted in insisting that Leon did not exist. This was why the sight of her stroking that bloody fluffy racing car made him irrationally angry. It would be true to say that he didn’t like Maggie at all, in fact. She just represented something about his annoying younger brother, whom he had discovered (as all older siblings discover sooner or later) he could not literally murder without the risk of incurring awkward questions. So trashing Leon’s girlfriend was a more subtle means of exercising his jealousy, and had the benefit of not being criminal. One should try to feel sorry for Noel, really. It can’t be easy when your younger brother is always in Nevada

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watching sell-out fights with apocalyptic overtones (‘Judgement Night III’ ‘Resurrection Night IX’ ‘Seven Bowls of Wrath Night’) while you spend most afternoons passing tissues to snivelling inadequates in a basement off Tooting Broadway. ‘I’ve got to go out somewhere,’ yelled Leon above the basketball din, putting his coat on. ‘You can’t,’ yelled Tanner. ‘You’ve got to cover the match.’ Half-way through the evening was indeed a bad time for Leon to desert his post, but there was no alternative. ‘File it for me,’ he told Tanner. Tanner pulled a bad-smell expression. ‘Sorry, don’t write about sport,’ he said. ‘It’s easy,’ Leon assured him, ignoring the put-down. ‘They only want four hundred words, and I’ve done most of it already. Call it LEON when you file and they’ll never guess. Mention lots of statistics and get the names right. How many words can you do in an hour?’ Tanner made a wild guess. ‘Two or three thousand?’ ‘Really?’ Leon raised an eyebrow. He was impressed. ‘I mean, two or three hundred.’ ‘Oh. Right.’ ‘I mean, twenty or thirty.’ ‘Well, whatever,’ said Leon. ‘Have you used one of these?’ He indicated his laptop. ‘Of course,’ scoffed Tanner. ‘My dad’s company pioneered the software.’ ‘Then have fun. I’ll see you back at the hotel.’ Outside the sports hall, Leon consulted his Malmö map, straining to hold it against the icy wind. By his reckoning, the University Hospital was an easy walk from the Baltiska Hallen. He gathered his coat against the biting gale and stomped north, wishing he knew more about genetics or, indeed, more about insanity. Blagging his way into unlikely places he was good at. You just carried a coffee in a foam cup, consulted your watch in an exaggerated manner, and shouldered through swing doors as if you knew exactly what to expect on the other side. But what do you do when confronting an insane Swedish woman who holds the key to a genetics mystery? Unless she had the particular delusion that she was the first person Gordon Banks phoned up after the 1966 World Cup final, Leon’s first-hand experience would be sorely inadequate. ‘Bugger,’ he said, leaning into the wind and adjusting his earflaps. Was this really such a good idea? His toes were numb already. Was it possible for eyeballs to freeze this far south of the Arctic Circle? Inside the hall it was cosy and warm and bright. Out here it was like being X-rayed by weather. But he thought of Maggie and a surge of romantic sappiness warmed his toes and carried him onward. How helpless the poor girl was! In love with a man who had taken cynical advantage of a terrible tragedy in this poor Ingrid’s life. Stefan

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must be exposed; there was no doubt about it. As he plunged into the neighbouring area known (unpronounceably) as the Möllevången, he tried finally to gather his thoughts. ‘Nice statue,’ he commented absently, as the appalling boulder-and-bums confection in the Möllevångstorget came into view. And with that excellent critical judgement behind him, Leon forged on against the wind.  ‘I must see Ingrid Johansson,’ demanded Stefan, in rather good Swedish, at the hospital reception desk on the ground floor. ‘I have come all the way from England, and I won’t take no for an answer.’ The dumpy duty nurse looked at him as if he were speaking Urdu. The order of some of the consonants made sense, but the vowels had been picked at random by a chimpanzee. It was a bit like reading someone else’s shorthand. ‘I mist sew Oongrud Johinssin,’ was what it sounded like. ‘Oy hyve cim oll the whoa fram Inglound.’ ‘Do you speak English?’ asked the nurse, at last. ‘Of course,’ said Stefan. ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘What is your name, please?’ ‘Stefan Johansson.’ ‘Stefan Johansson?’ She wrote the name down and underlined it. Stefan had second thoughts. ‘I mean George Colwan. C-O-L-W-A-N.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘George Colwan?’ ‘Yes.’ Her pen was poised for crossing out. ‘Not Stefan Johansson?’ ‘That’s right. That’s somebody else. He’s dead.’ ‘He’s dead?’ This nurse’s English was irritatingly good, Stefan decided. She could do all sorts of intonations just by repeating everything he said. ‘Will you wait, please?’ she said, and dialled an internal number. ‘Hej!’ she said into the phone, in the brisk salute he remembered from his twenty years in Sweden, and then began to speak too quickly for him to understand. He had never quite got used to ‘Hej!’, he recalled. When he did business in Sweden, he preferred to say, ‘Hello, how are you, sit down.’ But the Swedes said, ‘Hej!’ and that was it. It was funny how it all came back. Arriving by boat from Copenhagen this evening, he’d gone straight to a shop to buy a map and had found himself in an automatic ‘Hej! Hej!’ exchange with the youthful shopkeeper. It was only when the man carried on in Swedish, commenting lengthily on his choice of map, that Stefan admitted his Swedish wasn’t so good any more. ‘No problem,’ confessed the youth in English. ‘It was yust bullshit.’

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‘Do you know Ingrid? Is she—all right?’ Stefan asked the nurse, when she had finished with the phone. It was weird that, here in Sweden, he didn’t need to pretend to be Swedish any more. ‘Yes, Ingrid is well. She is not my patient, of course, because she is my friend. I have known Ingrid thirty years. She worked here, you know, during the years of her marriage.’ ‘I didn’t know that.’ ‘When she was suspended on suspicion of stealing cotton swabs and Petri dishes and scalpels and bandages, I spoke up for her. We were like sisters. Ingrid and Birgit! I knew her husband Stefan very, very well.’ Stefan tried not to look too closely, but there was something rather odd about this Birgit. For one thing, she was cubic in shape, and seemed to shrink in height the more he looked at her. For another, her top lip kept twitching. ‘Really?’ ‘Ingrid is as sane as you or I. Yust upset by Stefan’s murder, as who would not?’ ‘I see. Murder? I see.’ ‘All those stories about Stefan’s experiments were made up.’ ‘Good. Yes.’ ‘So,’ she said, with an emphatic exhalation. ‘Will you wait in here, please?’ Stefan was puzzled, but followed the nurse along a corridor. She opened the door to a small room, ushered him inside, then locked it. ‘Do you know how unhappy Ingrid is?’ she said, through a glass panel in the door. ‘She is so unhappy. And you know who she blames? You! Lucky George! You set fire to her husband! You threw her on floor! You get blood on her Carl Larsson reproduction! Your luck yust ran out, Lucky George!’ ‘Hey!’ he yelled, through the glass panel in the door. But the only person who heard him just said, ‘Hej!’ back again. At which point, Stefan saw the inexplicable sight of Leon—from Jago’s dinner party—barge past Birgit and through a swing-door, carrying a cup of coffee.  Back at the sports hall, Tanner was having a few difficulties writing his 400 words. Because, just when he’d settled on a rather good line about Sidewinders being sidelined, just when his account of the match had reached the important 350word mark, with ten minutes to deadline, Jericho Jones stopped the match and announced his retirement from world sport. His son had been expelled from school in Cincinnati on suspicion of dope dealing, and it was time to stop bouncing a ball. He apologized to the miffed Meerkats. He apologized to his millions of fans. He recalled the words of his first coach, ‘Strut’ Schwarz, to the effect that ‘No man is in Ireland.’ And then he led his astounded team back to the dressing room. As all around him reporters grabbed phones and started shouting, Tanner

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wondered what his precise responsibility was here. ‘They won’t need me to write about this, will they?’ he asked a chap from the Guardian, who had been helpful up till now. ‘Get me the news desk,’ snapped the chap. Tanner looked at the 350 words he had already accumulated, and felt a bit sick. Rewriting the whole thing in ten minutes was out of the question. Whereas if he continued at the current rate, and changed nothing, he could just make it. Much as he enjoyed sport, much as he admired Jericho Jones for his splendid eloquence, he was horrified by the reaction of his colleagues. Was this really so important? Surely only time would tell? ‘News will pick it up,’ he told himself. ‘If it’s important, News will do it.’ He was right, of course; but also wrong. Unfortunately, if there was one thing that defined Tanner, it was his refusal to be part of any mass brute reflex. So, disdainful of his colleagues who yelled urgent things like ‘What’s the son’s name?’ to each other, and ‘Who fought the battle of Jericho? Was it Cain or Abel?’ while tapping their keyboards at indecent speed, Tanner took it easy. Insouciance above all; that was the aim. A sense of perspective. Thus it was that his last fifty words mentioned that Jericho Jones had sadly marred this excellent game with a sensational and inappropriate retirement speech which, on mature reflection, did not deserve the oxygen of publicity. Tanner signed the story in Leon’s name and filed it. He shut Leon’s computer, packed his bag and left the building, fighting his way between newsmen waving bits of paper, and dodging the lighting cameramen who waited outside shouting, ‘He’s got to come out this way!’ and ‘Someone said he had a car at the back!’ and ‘This is the biggest thing that’s ever happened in Malmö!’ Tanner shook his head at such depressing evidence of pack mentality, hitched his skirt a bit, and set off to walk northwards, through the Möllevångstorget, back to the hotel.  Jago’s taxi driver was in heaven. Already the fare was two thousand kronor. Apart from disliking the peremptory way the driver had greeted him with ‘Hej!’, Jago was pretty comfortable, too. Because this was the way to do journalism, in his opinion. Get the taxi driver from the airport to tell you everything you need to know, including facts and figures. This driver was either the best bluffer in the world, or really knew the exact number of bars in Sweden (cf. Finland and Denmark), the exact distance to Copenhagen, and the dates of the city’s buildings and statues. By contrast, back in England, Jago recalled that his airport driver had told him with similar confidence that English was spoken by everyone in the world until the eighteenth century, when the French came along.

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‘So this is the place, huh?’ said Jago, peering from the cab at a dilapidated front door with ‘8B’ above it. The windows were dirty. Old snow adhered to the doorstep. ‘The real Stefan guy died here?’ ‘No one lives since,’ said the driver. ‘Even the rats left, they say. It was terrible story, yuh? Mad scientist chopping people to bits? Mister Yekkle, yuh? Dr Hyde.’ ‘Any idea he might have produced clones? That was his work, wasn’t it? You know the word clone?’ ‘Clones, yuh. Dolly Sheep. We Swedes read more newspapers than any peoples in Europe.’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘Oh yeah. We top list also with coffee consuming, eating frozen food. We are yust third in reading books and owning telephones.’ ‘And killing yourselves.’ ‘No, this is not true,’ said the driver, solemnly. ‘We are eleventh only in world at killing ourselves. We are statistically very happy peoples.’ ‘How much do I owe you now?’ ‘Three thousand.’ ‘I understand why you’re happy.’ The driver didn’t laugh, but put the car in gear. ‘You’re wrong, though,’ said Jago. ‘No, no. I check all this. Eleventh only.’ ‘No, I mean you’re wrong that there’s nobody living here.’ Jago gestured to 8B. ‘There’s a light on.’ The driver pursed his lips. ‘No, no. Not possible. We go now?’ ‘Yes, there is. Look. Sort of a glow.’ The driver looked. Jago stepped out of the cab and peered in at the window. Not only was there a faint light inside, but there was movement, too. The front door flapped open. ‘So,’ called the driver, whose manner had changed. ‘That’s enough fun, yuh? Now I think we get out of here.’ ‘Not yet,’ said Jago. ‘Get in, please. In.’ ‘Look, pal—’ he began. At which point the driver slammed the Volvo in gear and drove off, leaving Jago outside 8B without his luggage, listening to the howling of the wind.  Leon had done extremely well in infiltrating the hospital. In fact, he had done too well. The cup of coffee trick had worked wonderfully, and he had ignored all calls of ‘Hej!’ Eight sets of swing doors had succumbed to his mighty shoulders, in-

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cluding the last one, which was clearly marked in Swedish, ‘emergency exit to car park’. He barged through this final set into the cold night air, hearing the doors swing back into place with a nasty click before he realized what had happened. Damn. He had gone through that hospital like a dose of salts, and right out the other side. His phone rang. It was the office. ‘Hi!’ he said, quite pleased. He stomped his feet and sipped the coffee. ‘Good job I brought this,’ he said aloud. ‘Leon?’ ‘Hey!’ said Leon, glad to hear the familiar voice of his boss in London. He didn’t usually get calls about minor events in Europe that were only worth 400 words. But, on the other hand, he was good on basketball. His favourite sportsman was Jericho Jones, and he’d written some decent stuff about him today— about how he was still at the top of his form, and would be splendid presidential material. ‘So how’s the piece? Should I have rung yet for queries?’ ‘Queries?’ yelled his boss. ‘Queries about this shit?’ ‘What?’ Leon was confused. He had left Tanner with about 300 words already written. How could the boy have messed up so badly? ‘What are you playing at, Leon?’ ‘Oh, no, don’t tell me I said anal again.’ ‘Very funny. You’re fired.’ ‘What?’ ‘I haven’t got time for this, Leon. I’ve covered up for you long enough. You’ve been losing your grip for weeks.’ ‘What?’ ‘Stop saying “What”.’ ‘What?’ And then the phone went dead. Leon sat down on an old box and sipped his coffee. Meeting Maggie had not been too good for him, he had to admit. A lot of things seemed to have backfired since then. Take today, for instance. One minute he was a well-liked Effort man on a mission. The next he was jobless in a foreign delivery bay where he might conceivably freeze to death. Funny how life takes turns of that sort. Getting back into the hospital and locating Ingrid Johansson seemed a pretty remote possibility right now. ‘They never called my stuff shit before,’ he reflected aloud. But he had little time to dwell further on the mystery before alarm bells and sirens began to ring and wah-wah within the building, and lights to flash on the wall. A shower of dust and grit landed on his hat. Looking up, he dimly saw a dark figure with a rope, abseiling down the sheer wall towards him at considerable speed. It was Ingrid Johansson. She had escaped.

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 ‘Tanner!’ It was the editor of the Effort, phoning from London. ‘Uncle Jack!’ said Tanner. ‘How are you?’ Back in London, the editor shut his office door. ‘Where are you, Tanner? Someone said you were in Malmö. Is that possible, in our hour of need?’ ‘I am. Although I can’t think why. It’s freezing, and I’ve just been looking at the most hideous statue I think I’ve ever seen.’ ‘Look, this is a long shot. Just say no, if you like. Do you know anything about basketball? The thing is, there’s a huge story about Jericho somebody. Our man completely let us down—Sport are fuming, they’ve sacked him. I said I’d help. What can you do?’ Tanner bit his lip. It was terrible when ambition wrestled with honesty like this. ‘You mean I can save the day, Uncle?’ ‘Exactly.’ ‘Gosh.’ As the man who had imperilled the day in the first place, Tanner was playing things exceptionally cool. ‘How long can I have?’ ‘Three hours maximum. Good boy. Is Jago Ripley there?’ Confused, Tanner looked around. What a strange question. ‘No. As I said, I’m in Malmö.’ ‘When you see him, tell him I’d like a word. Between you and me, Tanner, he’s upset the Church of England.’ Replacing his phone in his skirt pocket, Tanner felt so good suddenly that he felt like dancing. It was a shame about Leon, but on the other hand, for someone who clearly had no connections at board level, Leon had done pretty well for himself over the years. It amazed Tanner that ill-connected people bothered to try in most professions when it was so obvious they wouldn’t succeed. ‘Tanner!’ he heard, through the noise of the wind. He stopped and looked around. Sounded like Ripley. But where? ‘Over here!’ Tanner scanned the empty street of three-storey red-brick tenements, and saw nobody. And then he jumped in the air. Because Jago was inside an apartment, peering out of the dirty window, a faint glimmer in the room behind, as if from a candle. In the light from the street lamp, his face looked pale, almost green. Perhaps he had found a seaweed-therapy place. ‘Why aren’t you at the hospital?’ Jago yelled, his words muffled by the glass. ‘Going tomorrow.’

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‘I told you to go today.’ ‘You didn’t!’ Not surprisingly, Jago was finding it hard to impress his authority on Tanner. ‘This is the house where it all happened!’ he yelled. ‘You’d better come in. We may find something. Jesus, I’m freezing my balls off. I’ve got to get something on Stefan.’ Outside, Tanner was clearly dithering. ‘I said, come in! It’s not housebreaking. The door was open.’ Tanner thought about his big chance, writing a lead story for the editor, and weighed it briefly against helping Jago with his stupid clone theory. ‘Actually, rather not, if it’s all the same.’ And then, from Jago’s perspective, something very unpleasant happened to Tanner’s face. His look of boyish superiority dissolved, to be replaced by a look of terror. ‘Aaaagh!’ he yelled, pointing directly at the executive features editor of the Effort. ‘What?’ said Jago. ‘Aaaagh!’ screamed Tanner, somewhat louder. And before Jago could turn round to see what Tanner was screaming at, he’d been lightly bludgeoned from behind by an old, charred Carl Larsson reproduction.  An alarm at the hospital. People in white coats running around. Through his window, Stefan couldn’t hear much but he could see Birgit, in tears, confessing something to a man in uniform. She raised an arm and pointed towards him, and a porter ran to unlock the door. ‘Ingrid Johansson has escaped,’ he said. ‘Oh, fuck,’ said Stefan, with feeling. ‘That’s the man,’ said Birgit. ‘He killed Ingrid’s husband. I told her he was here, and she went—she went—’ ‘Loco?’ suggested Stefan. ‘No,’ said Birgit, with dignity. ‘She went out of the window.’ ‘Men did this to her!’ she wailed. ‘Men are to blame!’ Everyone looked at her. No one could dispute the passion of her opinion, but the logic was lost on those who knew Ingrid. ‘Where’s she gone, Birgit? Where do you think?’ ‘To the apartment. In the Möllevången. I am sure.’ Stefan staggered. ‘The apartment is still there?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Oh God,’ he said, and put his head in his hands. 

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‘Aaargh,’ said Leon, as Ingrid landed on top of him. Her rope had been a bit short, and she had fallen with some force, knocking him flat. However, with typical selflessness, he quickly righted himself and staggered to her aid. She was curled up, moaning. The alarm bells were still ringing, and the lights flashing, and both had instinctively scuttled into the shadows. ‘Are you all right?’ he shouted. ‘My ankle, my ankle.’ It was odd being dropped on in this way, and Leon didn’t really know the etiquette. ‘I’m sorry,’ he yelled. Like most English people, he was only comfortable when things were his fault, somehow. He had broken her fall and saved her life. Naturally, he should feel responsible. He helped her to her feet. ‘Can you walk on it?’ ‘No!’ She squealed with pain. ‘Oh, I am so cold! So cold! And so unhappy! This noise!’ Leon looked at her for a second or two—a shivering small Swedish woman with frizzy hair and pyjamas—and found he was taking his coat off for her. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Your yacket?’ she said, her eyes wide. ‘You said you were cold,’ he shrugged. ‘I’ll be OK.’ He patted her hair a bit and tried to think straight. Who was she? Even to someone as trusting as Leon, it was clear from her flimsy ward clothes and novel method of evacuating the building that she was not Director of Operations. ‘Are you a mad person?’ he yelled, as she buttoned his enormous coat. ‘Are you Ingrid?’ ‘Yes.’ They heard footsteps inside the building, heading towards Leon’s swing door. In a minute, if they did nothing, they would be caught. Leon bit his lip. ‘I could carry you,’ he offered.  That the real Stefan Johansson was not dead was something nobody had considered except Ingrid. And Ingrid, of course, was dangerously insane. But now Jago was downstairs in a basement-cum-dungeon, face to face with the real, breathing (wheezing) remains of Stefan Johansson, and for the first time in his illustrious career, the words ‘Listen, did you sell your story?’ somehow refused to form on his lips. Jago was out of his depth. Like everyone, he’d seen Silence of the Lambs, but much as he now racked his brain, he couldn’t remember any practical lessons from it. He recollected something about blood dripping in an elevator, but that was it. ‘Who are you?’ asked Stefan, from the shadows. ‘Why are you here in my

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house?’ His voice was a low croak. His disfigured, blackened face looming behind Jago was what had frightened Tanner and made him run off—to come back soon, presumably, with the police. Stalling Stefan until help arrived wasn’t going to be easy, however. ‘Hey,’ Jago replied to Stefan’s questions. He held up the palms of his hands, and tried to remember how he’d been taught in New York to defuse scary situations. ‘You’re OK. I’m OK. I’m Jago, you’re Stefan, OK. OK?’ ‘Neither of us is OK, I think,’ said Stefan, solemnly. ‘I should be dead in my grave, and you, Yago, should definitely be elsewhere. You trespass, you snoop, you tell the boy outside you will “get something on Stefan”. Not OK.’ He swayed from side to side. ‘Not OK.’ Jago’s right knee was shaking uncontrollably. In the dark, he saw a flash of a scalpel in Stefan’s hand. ‘I was always so unlucky,’ said Stefan. ‘I wanted to die, and look at me. I wanted my wife to be happy. Hah. Are you lucky?’ ‘Me?’ Jago thought quickly. ‘No. Never.’ ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘No, I’m like you, Stefan. Abject son-of-a-bitch. Nothing goes right.’ Stefan set down the scalpel and picked up a large knife, something like a saw. From his faraway expression, as he ran his thumb lightly along its blade, he seemed to be remembering happier times. ‘I yust wanted some of his luck!’ ‘Tch!’ agreed Jago, his eyes swivelling. ‘Not much to ask.’ ‘And this is what happens! Ingri-i-i-id! Ingri-i-i-id!’ His call was like a reindeer, or possibly a meerkat, howling across icy wastes. ‘Look, can I ask you something, Stefan?’ ‘What?’ He seemed suspicious. ‘I’m on your side, Stefan,’ Jago assured him. ‘God, yes. Believe me. I just think you should know there’s someone impersonating you in England. Calls himself Stefan Johansson, married my friend Belinda, talks like a Swede—you know, kind of better than everybody else. Sort of guy that has all the luck. Tall, blond. You know?’ ‘Really?’ Stefan’s eyes lit up. ‘I made it!’ he whispered. ‘So. All I want to know is, he’s a clone, right?’ Stefan’s eyes widened. ‘A clone?’ ‘See, I have to tell you this, I’d like to write your story, Stefan, I really would. Let me tell you, your fame is going to be phenomenal! What do you say?’ ‘A clone of who?’ Stefan asked. ‘Of you.’ ‘Does he look like me?’

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‘Well, no. But, without being offensive, I mean, nobody looks like you, do they? Except maybe the toast-guy in The English Patient.’ Stefan started to chuckle. ‘A clone?’ Jago was getting fed up with this. ‘It’s not funny,’ he said. ‘But you are funny, Yago,’ Stefan said. ‘A clone of me!’ And he burst out laughing again. ‘You think I am yeenius, yes? I make little Stefans in test tube! All to be unlucky like me! Very, very funny, Yago!’ Jago pursed his lips. Being ridiculed for his ignorance was never his favourite pastime. He wasn’t too keen on being called Yago so much, either. He had enough of that at home. ‘So he’s not a clone? He’s an impostor?’ Stefan’s laughter only increased. He was beside himself, and Jago couldn’t stop him. ‘Look, OK, I made a mistake. I’m only human.’ ‘Only juman! Ha ha ha.’ Tears rolled down Stefan’s cracked cheeks. ‘Ha ha ha,’ he continued, mercilessly, while Jago pouted, waiting for his recovery. Only a noise from upstairs made Stefan stop. A creaking on the floorboards. ‘Stefan?’ whispered Belinda’s husband. As Jago and Stefan listened, the voice was familiar to both of them. ‘Stefan, it’s me.’ There was a pause, and Jago closed his eyes. ‘I mean, it’s you,’ he said, as his legs came into view on the stairs. And finally, as Belinda’s husband reached the basement, ‘I mean, Stefan, it’s us.’

Chapter 10




Surprisingly enough, Belinda’s husband had quite positive feelings at finding Stefan Johansson alive in the Möllevången. In fact, since he had come hotfoot from the hospital expecting only to confront the escaped Ingrid, he was quite delirious with relief and joy to discover his old friend. This profound attachment between a victim and a tormentor has few parallels in common experience, so may perhaps seem odd. But somehow, when you not only adopt someone’s identity but also feel responsible for hurling flammable liquid on them when their hair was on fire, it turns out that the feeling you have for them is—love. Especially if you used to listen to Abba with them as well. True, Stefan had sawn pieces off his body and held him captive for eighteen months of his life, probing his DNA and feeding him those damn joke-resistant reindeer sandwiches, yet this couldn’t stop Belinda’s husband from believing that, together, the Stefans were a team. The Stefans. The Incredible Stefans. The Incredible Genetically Modified Stefans. Thus it was that, aware Stefan was holding a serrated knife, Belinda’s husband still hugged him. Aware that Stefan’s facial skin was dangerously unstable, he still kissed him. And sadly unaware there was anyone else in the room, he rolled up his sleeve and said, ‘Look at my buggered elbow, you old bastard, did you think it would grow back?’ and burst out laughing. It was strange but true. Only in the company of Stefan Johansson of Malmö, Sweden, did he really feel free to be himself. ‘You are Stefan, too, now? It worked?’ said Stefan, in the darkened basement, the light just perceptible in his eyes. ‘You are Stefan Johansson, in London? Rich, lucky, handsome, famous, Swedish?’ ‘Hej!’ said Belinda’s husband, raising his hand. ‘Hej!’ said Stefan, striking it. ‘Oh my God,’ said Jago, unseen, under his breath. He backed into the deepest shadows. ‘So. Big-shot Stefan. You make how many Stefan babies?’ ‘Ah. None yet.’ Stefan was disappointed. ‘You must. It was our agreement. Your luck gene!’ ‘I know. I will. But my wife is not entirely herself at the moment. It’s complicated.’ ‘Oh. Not entirely herself. Like Ingrid. Ja.’ Stefan seemed to understand. ‘Well, not exactly like Ingrid.’ Belinda’s husband smiled and tried to broach the subject of Ingrid’s escape. He couldn’t. ‘I’m so relieved and happy to see you, Stefan. This is the first time I’ve relaxed in years.’

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‘I am pleased to see you also. I can hardly believe it. This knife in my hand. You there. Me here. Yust like old times. Remember how we talk for two months about the rat poison? And then we do not do it! I’m so unlucky, I tell you. Always.’ Belinda’s husband looked around. ‘Any of me still here anywhere?’ From the faint light reaching the room down the stairwell, he could make out a surface, the sink, his old bed, the shackles in the wall. ‘They took it all,’ said Stefan. ‘Blackened my name. Burned my notes. I was denounced as a mad scientist, George! Me, mad! It was a bad time. Typical bad luck that I should live through it regardless. But you know what kept me going? Knowing I was you. Knowing Stefan Johansson was free. How you get free that day, by the way?’ ‘Ingrid untied me.’ ‘Ah.’ ‘She fancied me, Stefan. I’m sorry.’ ‘Ah. I knew it.’ Stefan was being brave. ‘Did you like the briefcase?’ ‘I’m still using it.’ ‘Good, good.’ Belinda’s husband coughed and fidgeted. Upstairs, the last candle flickered and died, leaving them completely in the dark. Somehow the blackness gave him courage. ‘Look. You do understood why I had to leave in a hurry that night when your head caught fire?’ ‘Sure,’ shrugged Stefan. ‘No skin off my nose, ja?’ And both the Stefans laughed like drains, while Jago, incredulous in the blackness, moaned, ‘Oh God,’ and vowed never to leave the office for a story again.  ‘Can I ask you something, Ingrid?’ Leon puffed. He was now carrying her piggyback fashion, which was awkward because she kept rocking back and forth and moaning, while clasping her gloved hands in front of his eyes. ‘You are big man,’ she remarked. ‘Thanks,’ he puffed. ‘Where are we? I mean, where do we go next?’ She looked around vaguely, and told him to head right. Were they travelling in circles? Big though he was, Leon was no human carthorse, and carrying Ingrid was hard work. He was sure they had passed this statue several times already. Added to which, his phone kept ringing and cutting off before he could put Ingrid down and answer it. ‘You have a question, big boy?’ she reminded him. ‘Oh yes. You see, there’s a man called Stefan Johansson who’s living in London. I know there must be thousands of Swedish men with that name—’ He stopped, panted, and set off again at a slow walk. It was odd talking to somebody

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who was on top of you like this: you couldn’t see if they were listening. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing the back of your own head. ‘Anyway,’ he continued. ‘Anyway, the point is, it’s not your Stefan, obviously, because your Stefan is dead. That’s right, isn’t it?’ There was no response from above. Leon decided to carry on. ‘So this Stefan is married to a woman called Belinda. And he’s very, very happy and has a nice car and a good job and lots of money. But the thing is, he’s got other women in love with him as well.’ Leon stopped again, for a breather. ‘I’m sorry. Is this boring?’ ‘Not at all.’ ‘Anyway, that’s why I’m here, you see. I came to see you. I don’t think he should do that. It’s not fair. There’s a woman called Maggie who loves Stefan, too. Are you listening?’ Above his head, Ingrid was looking very strange. Her English wasn’t quite up to this level. However, she had just heard the shattering news that her husband was not only alive but involved with foreign women—moreover, English women, who were notoriously loose. Just as she had always suspected, Stefan had survived that terrible night, after all. And then he had made a new life abroad, leaving her to rot in Malmö. ‘Ingrid?’ He wriggled his shoulders, to make contact. She clamped her knees to his ears. It hurt. ‘What car does he have?’ she asked. ‘Can’t hear!’ he yelped. She loosened her knees. ‘You said a car. What car?’ ‘Are you interested in cars?’ Leon was pleased. ‘No.’ ‘Oh. Well, it’s a Ferrari. An old one. He loves it.’ She let out an involuntary cry, and tried to turn it into a cough. ‘Ja,’ she said. ‘So what is question?’ ‘Well. Did Stefan do any work with cloning? You know, making clones? Because all we know is, he dies in the middle of a lot of genetic experiments, and then turns up in London. The man in London could be a clone.’ ‘Clones? What is clones?’ ‘Like Dolly the sheep,’ Leon explained. ‘Stefan made sheep? No.’ ‘No, not sheep. I mean, did he make any little Stefans? Baby Stefans?’ ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. But he could feel something different about her. She was like a dead weight now, as if slumped. He hoped it wasn’t his fault. He always hated to make women unhappy, because he didn’t want to be like his dad.

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But Leon had made Ingrid very unhappy, despite his best intentions. In fact, Ingrid was so wounded by the news that she could hardly breathe. Stefan! Having never known of the novel agreement between Stefan and Lucky George to transfer all George’s genetic material by the simplest of methods, it would never cross her mind that the Englishman had taken Stefan’s identity. All she could think of were the little Stefans that had been made without her, and the little Stefans she never made. Like Banquo in the Scottish play, she saw them stretched out in a line—a dozen little unborn Stefans, all with curved backs and long grey ponytails with penknives in their hands, all so sweet. Rearranging herself on Leon’s shoulders, she managed to kick him in the face. He recoiled. ‘Sorry.’ ‘OK,’ she replied, in a dream. They trotted along in silence for a bit, while Leon tried to think of something cheerful to say. ‘The hospital people never caught us anyway,’ he said. ‘You could have jumped out of that window any time, Ingrid.’ ‘I wish I yump out the window the day I arrive,’ she said. ‘Over there!’ And she pointed to the door across the deserted street with ‘8B’ written above it.  Stefan had not come unaccompanied to the Möllevången, of course. He had entered the apartment alone, that’s all. Security men, Birgit, and a variety of people in white coats had charged into a nearby sauna to await his signal. ‘Wait for my signal!’ he told them—though unfortunately without mentioning what the signal might be. And so they huddled inside, sweating, while Birgit stood at the door. A sauna was hardly the ideal place to wait on a night so cold: clad in sensible coats, they were now succumbing to the heat. In fact, while Birgit stood sentry and attracted a fair amount of passing trade with her nurse’s uniform, she twice heard behind her the wheeze and thud of hospital security men sliding down the walls and fainting. ‘Here is Ingrid now,’ she reported in a whisper (in Swedish). ‘She is riding a man like a gorilla.’ ‘I saw that man in the hospital,’ replied one of the doctors (also in Swedish). ‘I assumed he had legitimate business, but I realize now I was fooled by the confident manner with which he carried his hot beverage.’ ‘Mm,’ agreed Birgit. Outside, down the street, Ingrid was dismounting from Leon. He helped her to the door. ‘That’s far enough,’ she told him. ‘I want to go in alone. I have things to say to Lucky George. I have things to say to Stefan, too. I will come to London.’ As she passed his coat to him, she took a note from the pocket and studied it. Then she put it in her pyjama pocket.

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‘Stefan’s dead,’ said Leon, gently. ‘You know that. The man in London isn’t your Stefan.’ ‘Thank you for ride,’ she said, and stamped on his foot. ‘Ow!’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ She hobbled to the door, and turned. ‘You can go now,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait.’  ‘Ingrid! My chicken! Can it be you?’ As Ingrid hobbled and groped her way in the dark down the stairs to the old lab, she let out an involuntary sob of unhappiness, which her husband recognized straight away. ‘Ingrid!’ ‘Stefan!’ A clonk, clonk on the stairs. ‘Ingrid! I thought I’d never see you again!’ ‘Stefan! They told me’—clonk, clonk—‘you were dead!’ As Stefan signalled to him to hide, Belinda’s husband automatically backed into the shadows and crouched beside his old bed. He was happy to oblige. Having come between these people once before, he didn’t fancy doing it again. He felt guilty at spying on their reunion, but on the other hand, he could scarcely make an excuse and leave. The only trouble was, as he leant back into a more comfortable position, breathing softly in the consuming blackness, he realised, with a plummeting heart, that he was leaning against something that was not only warm and soft, but alive—which enveloped and clutched him. The surprise produced an interesting sensation. All the hair on his body stood up and subsided again, like a follicular version of a Mexican wave. ‘Hi!’ whispered the body, in a kind of squeak. It had covered itself in a camouflaging blanket. ‘We’ll all laugh about this one day, right?’ ‘Jago?’ ‘Hi, Stefan,’ said Jago, muffled. ‘I can explain.’ ‘Jago, you shouldn’t be here! It’s very dangerous.’ ‘Jesus, you’re telling me.’ Belinda’s husband peered across the room, and saw Ingrid groping her way to the bottom of the stairs. Evidently, she was unable to see anything yet. She stumbled, and her husband caught her, but then instantly let her go again. Stefan was in agony. He loved his wife, and had missed her painfully. But he couldn’t bear for her to see his disfigured face, or touch his scaly body. ‘Ingrid! I thought I’d never see you again,’ Stefan repeated.

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‘Stefan, let me hold you! I thought Lucky George would be here, not you! Birgit saw Lucky George! I will kill him if I see him, for what he did to you!’ Stefan gulped audibly. ‘Are you all right?’ said Ingrid. ‘Can’t we put a light on?’ She reached for the switch, while across the room, Jago and Belinda’s husband both spasmed with alarm, clutching each other. ‘No current,’ Stefan said. ‘Not for years.’ The pair in the corner slumped with relief. ‘We must get out of here. We will be found,’ said Ingrid. ‘I’m tired, Ingrid. I have been living like a dead person. Since they took you, my life has been so terrible, so empty!’ ‘Really? No little Stefans, then? No Belinda?’ ‘What?’ Ingrid’s tone had changed. They all noticed it. ‘It’s just that I heard some things. I heard you made little Stefans without me.’ ‘What are you talking about?’ Belinda’s husband watched with horror as Ingrid started to survey the room. Her eyes must be getting accustomed to the dark. She wasn’t picking out details, but she was seeing shapes. On all fours, she had edged her way to a table with old, rusty instruments on it. ‘I’m not mad,’ she told Stefan. She was nearer now. ‘Of course you’re not.’ ‘I mean, I’m not stupid.’ She picked up a scalpel and twiddled it, so that the blade found the only glimmer of light in the room. ‘How was London? How was Belinda?’ ‘I haven’t been in London. I’ve been here. In Malmö. Going out after dark, stealing food and candles. An odd dabble in vivisection my only entertainment. Waiting, waiting for you. Dead and alive. And I have to tell you, Ingrid. Now we’re back together again, I’d like to move to somewhere a bit more interesting to be dead in. Like Belgium.’ ‘Ha.’ Hauling herself vertical, Ingrid sat on the mouldy bed and started to cry. ‘I trusted you, Stefan. I believed you loved me. You remember how happy I always was?’ There was an awkward pause. ‘Well, I seem to remember—’ ‘I was happy, Stefan!’ ‘Of course, my dear. I remember.’ ‘And now you are happy with somebody else, and you make little Stefans.’ ‘No!’

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‘Yes! I know all about Stefan Johansson’s high life in London with the Ferrari!’ ‘I deny it. I can explain!’ The tension in the room was as thick as the darkness. Belinda’s husband had started to tremble, and Jago was hyperventilating. So it was a spectacularly bad moment for Jago’s phone to ring. Especially as he had programmed it to play The Ride of the Valkyries. ‘What’s that?’ screamed Ingrid, as the electronic Wagner trilled with unseemly volume. ‘Oh God,’ said Stefan. Jago stood up in the dark and, with a mumbled ‘Sorry, sorry—God, isn’t this always happening?’ wrestled frantically with the inside pockets of his coat, while the Swedes both watched him open-mouthed. ‘Ripley, you’re OK!’ shouted the voice from the earpiece. ‘I knew you would be.’ It was Tanner. Two hours after he’d seen Jago struck by a picture-frame in the Möllevången, he had allowed conscience to prick him at last—as his star blazed in the Fleet Street firmament at home, and Jericho Jones boarded a private jet at Sturup. For in the interim, Tanner had saved the day for the Effort, and was extremely pleased with himself. Sitting on the steps of the ghastly statue’s plain granite plinth, he was attempting to get his bearings. ‘Tanner, I’m going to kill you,’ said Jago, and hung up. ‘Ripley!’ said Tanner, but the phone had gone dead. He tapped it against his leg. Jago realized both the Swedes were still peering in his direction. He swallowed, and resolved to tough it out. ‘I’ll call him back,’ he confided in a whisper, dropping his blanket neatly over Belinda’s husband. He started to walk nonchalantly towards the stairs, on legs that wobbled. ‘Mobile phones,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘Big industry here in Sweden, yes? Taxi guy told me. Nice to meet you, Ingrid.’ Ingrid pounced, but her ankle betrayed her. Jago had never moved so quickly in his life. He reached the stairs and was gone. ‘Stefan, who was that, please?’ ‘Just some guy,’ Stefan explained, lamely. ‘Guy with a phone. I found him here. He’s gone now.’ ‘Anyone else back there?’ asked Ingrid. ‘The Malmö Meerkats? Lucky George?’ ‘No, no.’ But Ingrid did not believe him. She started to grope around. She fingered the blanket that covered Belinda’s husband, so close that he could smell her. ‘Why are there no candles down here, Stefan?’ she asked. ‘Is it because—all those years ago, me and Lucky George?’

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‘Yes.’ ‘It was all his idea, you know. To make babies. I never wanted anyone but you.’ ‘Mm.’ There was a long pause, while Belinda’s husband sat rigidly still and prayed to the god of luck genes. He tried to imagine himself one of those human statues in shopping centres, painted all over in blue or gold. He imagined the Woolworth’s and the children in football shirts trying to annoy him, and the smell of frying onions wafting from a van. It can’t have worked, however. ‘Stefan,’ said Ingrid at last, twitching the blanket, ‘I can hear breathing. I know there is somebody here.’  Turning up outside the apartment and meeting Leon and Jago, Tanner was disappointed by his reception. ‘You stupid little transvestite bastard!’ yelled Jago, who had just emerged from the building. ‘I could have been killed down there! I could have been fucking killed! Where the fuck have you been?’ Tanner sighed. The excitability of journalists was beginning to annoy him. ‘Actually, you’ll be very impressed when you know. I was persuading Jericho Jones to return to sport. Got an exclusive for the Effort. Took longer than I expected, that’s all. The editor said you should call, by the way,’ Tanner added, smoothing his jacket, which Jago had grabbed by the lapels. ‘Something about Lambeth Palace going bananas.’ ‘What? I don’t believe this. There’s a mad bitch with a knife down there, and you’re talking about the Archbishop of Canterbury?’ Leon intervened. ‘Ingrid? Is Ingrid all right?’ ‘You know Ingrid?’ Jago swung round to look at him. He hadn’t registered Leon’s presence before. He was confused. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ ‘Well, I carried her here from the hospital. She was hurt.’ Jago gave him a long, incredulous look. ‘Listen. Leon. That your name?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, Leon, fuck off. One minute you’re the most boring dinner guest I ever met, and the next you’re helping a psycho on the worst night of my life. You’re fired!’ ‘I’m fired already.’ ‘Well, you’re fired again! But you’re going to help me first, OK? And as for that smug son-of-a-bitch—Where did he go?’ Leon looked around. They both did. Tanner had disappeared. At the doorway of the sauna opposite, there appeared to be a commotion—people in uniforms

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spilling out into the night air, as if gasping for breath. For a few seconds, Leon and Jago ran in all directions, looking for Tanner, until it occurred to them that, for some unaccountable reason, he had chosen to go inside. ‘Help!’ Jago yelled. ‘For fuck’s sake, somebody help!’ And the people from the sauna came running.  What Belinda’s husband always said afterwards was that he heard the merest scuffle and that was it. Before Leon, Jago, Birgit and a herd of rather light-headed security men could hammer down those stairs with their torches and loudhailers, Ingrid had lunged fatally for Stefan with her knife. That’s what he told everybody, anyway. But there was more to it than that. Much more. ‘I can hear breathing, Stefan,’ Ingrid had repeated, tugging at the blanket. Belinda’s husband closed his eyes. It was all over. He would never see Belinda again, or work ‘under the cosh’ into a conversation. It struck him as terribly sad, suddenly, that Belinda would never know he wasn’t Swedish. She would never sing ‘Angeleyes’ to him again, or be disabused about the Söderbergs. But as Ingrid pulled the blanket (‘I think I just see if Lucky George—’) a curious thing happened. ‘It’s all true!’ yelled Stefan. ‘What?’ said Ingrid. She dropped the blanket. ‘It’s all true! I’m so sorry, Ingrid. I went to London. Yes, I did. I always hated Malmö, it’s so cold and boring! And I always hated you!’ ‘Stefan, how could you?’ Belinda’s husband felt his bowels turn to water. What was Stefan doing? What was he saying? He had been devoted to Ingrid all his life. He loved Malmö. This was suicide! ‘And I’ve been married for three years to a beautiful woman called Belinda,’ Stefan continued. ‘And we’ve got two little Stefans, and lots of money and—’ Stefan’s ingenuity was beginning to flag ‘—and we didn’t even go to the Carl Larsson retrospective when it came through, and the car is still running very well indeed and—aargh!’ ‘Stop!’ Belinda’s husband yelled. He threw his blanket over Ingrid’s head and circled her with his arms. But he was too late. As he held the hooded, wriggling Ingrid, he was obliged to watch once again as his namesake Stefan Johansson expired in this bloody nasty basement in Malmö. ‘No!’ he cried. With a pang of grief and shame, Belinda’s husband noticed that Stefan had laid down his kitchen knife in the dark. As Ingrid ran to attack him, he had made no effort to defend himself. Tanner was watching in disbelief from the stairs.

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‘You!’ said Belinda’s husband. ‘Go away. This is all your fault.’ But Tanner didn’t move, because he couldn’t. Upstairs cacophonous people were approaching, swapping instructions in Swedish, and trying to switch the lights on. Ingrid wriggled, but he held her tight under the blanket. Stefan hadn’t wanted her to see the state he was in, and now she never would. In his final moments, Stefan reached out a scaly hand towards Belinda’s husband. As he remembered it afterwards, it was like a blessing, an apostolic succession of Stefanhood. ‘You are Stefan now,’ he whispered. ‘Make more Stefans, for my sake!’ And then, just as Birgit and the others came running with their lights and noise, he gagged, and his eyes rolled, and he died.  They arrested Leon for aiding Ingrid’s escape, but then let him go. Tanner’s story made the last edition, while Jago made his peace with the Archbishop of Canterbury by offering him a weekly ontological spot on the puzzles page. Leon asked Tanner politely about his encounter with Jericho Jones, but found it hard to bear. All his life, Leon’s father had fantasized about sharing a flat with Roger Bannister or telling Gary Player he should try wearing black. Leon had always hoped to make that dream come true. And now Tanner had simply bumped into Jericho Jones on a windy night in Malmö, and was deciding when to take up the offer of the trip to meet the folks in Cincinnati. ‘I was running off to call the police, of course,’ said Tanner. ‘But there he was, looking up at that awful statue. What could I do? The editor had asked me to save the day. Jerry made them stop the car when he saw it.’ ‘Jerry?’ ‘Mm. He said the figures straining to hold up the boulder reminded him of life at the top in basketball. He cried, actually. I mentioned it in the piece.’ ‘I should think so.’ ‘Yes. Cried on my shoulder. But I simply told him he should pull himself together, and in the end he saw my point. He’s a great fan of the sarong, incidentally. Offered to model one for the Effort. It could have been anyone who gave him the courage to carry on, obviously. But funny how it was me.’ Meanwhile, in the basement, Belinda’s husband sat for hours on his old bed, feeling bereft, lonely and shaky. He had been an inch from death when Stefan had intervened and drawn Ingrid’s wrath away from him. What should he make of Stefan’s bizarre sacrifice? Should he admire it or deplore it? Did it set him free, or obligate him for the rest of his life? And how could he ever share it with the woman he loved? Jago put his arm around him, but found that even in this extreme situation, his

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unreconstructed maleness prevented him from going for the full hug. So he converted the gesture at the last minute into a matey shove at the back of the neck. ‘Stefan? You OK?’ Belinda’s husband smiled grimly at the appellation, but didn’t contradict it. ‘I’ve got to tell you,’ said Jago. ‘I got this all wrong. I had no idea. I thought you were a clone.’ ‘What? That’s a bit far-fetched, Jago.’ ‘I know. I’m sorry. I got carried away. I had no idea it would be something straightforward like you taking the identity of a Swedish guy who cut chunks off you.’ ‘He loved me, you know.’ ‘Yeah? It really looked like it. I hope no one ever loves me that much.’ ‘We were very close.’ ‘There’s such a thing as too close.’ Jago helped him to stand up. ‘Promise me you’ll never tell anybody about this.’ Jago pulled a face. This was too tough a promise to make. ‘I’m only human, Stefan! Jesus!’ ‘Please, Jago. I left all this behind. Belinda thinks this kind of thing only happens in books. She thinks doubles are some sort of literary convention! And it was your fault it all happened. That boy you sent to spy on me? Why did you do that? When I think of the things I’ve done for you. The times I supplied you with names of Swedes!’ Jago felt like a heel. ‘OK,’ he agreed, softly. ‘What?’ ‘I said OK. I won’t tell anybody. I’ll go nuts, but I won’t tell anybody.’ They sat together on the bed, Stefan still hugging the blanket. He sniffed it. It smelt of surgical spirit, reindeer sandwich, rat poison and ancient mould. In short, in a funny old way, it smelt of home.

Part Three Three months later Chapter 11




From her sparkling attic window, one morning in the last week of June, Belinda observed the arrival of the cleaning lady. Mrs Holdsworth came three times a week, these days. She entered without noise or bother, and was no longer permitted to smoke except in the garden. Swearing had been prohibited. In the intervening months, Linda had trained her to Hoover and dust, tidy and polish, and do simple shopping for haddock and eels. According to reports, the rest of the house was like a palace. Linda had also instituted a Time Wasting Box, into which Mrs H must insert 50p if she tried to start a conversation up the loft ladder. Belinda felt a twinge of sadness at this. A nice old philosophical chat with Mrs Holdsworth about why God made lungs so complicated would have been pretty welcome, the way she was feeling right now. Far away downstairs, a phone rang. Belinda strained to hear it. When Stefan and Linda were both out, sometimes she would drag herself to the top of the loftladder to hear more clearly, but usually she just stopped tapping the keys for a minute. Today, as she paused midway through ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, the muffled voice leaving a message was her new agent praising her ‘Up the Duff ’ column in the Effort. Belinda liked the sound of this new agent: he had parties for clients and, on occasion, even came to the house with good news and a bunch of roses. The phone rang again almost immediately, with a different voice but the same congratulation. This time it was Julian Barnes. Wow, thought Belinda. She had no idea she knew Julian Barnes. Three months on, Belinda still could not believe her luck. Linda had continued to remove from her every worry and obstacle of life—including some she hadn’t even admitted to herself. Look at the way Linda disposed of Mother, for example, then forbade Belinda to feel bad about it. ‘If you grieve, then I’ll feel guilty,’ Linda explained. ‘And if I feel guilty, I’ll have to leave. Which I assume you wouldn’t want. Besides which, grief always saps creativity, and we can’t have that. So buck up, Belinda. Look, as far as the world’s concerned, you’re dealing with the bereavement brilliantly. Honestly, I’m congratulated on my surprisingly high spirits everywhere I go!’ That Mother had died through the dreadful accident of slipping on a piece of squid had been accepted by the police and was, in any case, the truth. But the incident had linked Linda to Belinda in a complicity that made both of them un-

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comfortable. Belinda’s move to the attic took place within a day, and was mainly Linda’s idea, but it made sense to them both to separate Belinda totally from the life downstairs. Especially if she kept crying, and getting on everyone’s nerves. ‘I did it for you!’ Linda would remind her. ‘Her love wasn’t unconditional. Conditional, judgemental love—well, it isn’t worth having.’ And although Belinda secretly disagreed (she rather liked the idea that love should be deserved), she had to admit that a great weight had been lifted from her psyche with the death of Mother. Yes, she blamed herself for not intervening more quickly when she heard the fight downstairs on that fateful night. She wished she had been a better daughter. But she did feel better in some ways. No longer was there somebody in the world who automatically thought badly of her. As an incidental symptom of this reaction, her attitude softened towards squid. She still couldn’t eat it, of course, but nowadays it was certainly welcome in the house. Meanwhile, look at this block about babies, too. Again Linda had blazed the trail. Why had Belinda been waiting to have children, putting things off ? Because she felt inadequate? Because she felt unqualified, not good enough for motherhood? Fortunate, then, that Linda entertained no such weaselly doubts on the subject. ‘But you will make a marvellous mother, Belinda,’ she’d said, on that momentous day conception was confirmed. ‘And Stefan will be over the moon about it. You know what he was like when he got back from Sweden.’ ‘Am I the first to know? Oh, Linda!’ ‘Of course. Do you want to see the test-kit thing? I can get it from the bathroom.’ ‘Oh yes, please.’ ‘How do you feel?’ Linda gave her a conspiratorial wink. ‘Fine. No different. I can’t really believe it.’ ‘Belinda, I’m so happy for you. I have to say it. I think you’re doing absolutely the right thing. Especially when there’s been a death. New life! Congratulations.’ ‘Thanks.’ ‘And I’ll do everything, as usual. Eat coal, whatever. I’m fit and strong.’ ‘You’re marvellous. When you first came, I would never have thought one day you’d have a baby for me. Tell Stefan I’m blooming.’ And now Linda was making Belinda famous with this column about the pregnancy, and earning more in a month than Belinda expected to receive when the doubles book was finished! It was amazing how life turned out, really. The only fly in the ointment—it was now more like a gluey knot of drowned bluebottles—remained the book. Because after spending several months devoting herself entirely to it, Belinda found to her astonishment she didn’t give a damn. No one could have predicted this development, but the more she studied

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the literature of doubles, the less she saw anything remarkable in it. It was Dr Jekyll and Mister Bleeding Obvious, as far as she was now concerned. Even her formerly favourite story, the Hans Christian Andersen one about the shadow, seemed curiously pointless. Given the choice, she read ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Princess and the Pea’ instead. Her notes had started taking a sardonic turn, and she had written ‘so what?’ in big letters across the front of her Dostoevsky. ‘Existential angst, my arse,’ she surprised Linda by saying once, when she popped up to borrow some Sartre. Sensing the problem, Linda had offered to help out, and had started reading The Confessions of a Justified Sinner in her weekly BBC car before the Late Review. But, secretly, Belinda was thinking of dropping it altogether. They didn’t need the money, after all. And she had to admit that in the context of the high profile Linda had acquired for Belinda Johansson in the media, the doubles book was going to look rather dull and earnest when it appeared under her name—rather like the bathetic little tomes on Euclid that Lewis Carroll turned out, when everyone was expecting more Alice. Lumbered with The Dualists, Linda would have to do such a lot of explaining next time she was invited to Number 10. If the book simply evaporated, it might be better for everybody. So, up in her converted loft (thankfully with en suite facilities) she just typed a lot about quick brown foxes jumping over lazy dogs, and tried not to ask herself three hundred times a day whether the quick brown fox was the alter ego of the lazy dog, or a totally separate entity with its own agenda. Bloody doubles. Why was everyone so obsessed with them? Even Jago Ripley, the man who admitted to the attention span of a zucchini, had got interested recently, apparently. ‘Hello?’ Belinda jumped with fright. An intruder on the landing! ‘It’s me. Viv.’ ‘Oh fuck,’ cursed Belinda. She looked in panic around her attic room. Apart from jumping out of the window, there was no way out. ‘Belinda, can I come up?’ ‘No, you can’t.’ Belinda regarded the trap-door with horror. From the telltale clanking sound, Viv was already ascending the ladder. ‘I’ve got to see you,’ came Viv’s voice. ‘I need to talk.’ ‘Bugger off. Who let you in?’ Belinda’s heart was racing. ‘Please, Belinda. I’m coming up. This ladder’s terrifying. There’ll be an accident on this one day.’ Belinda realized there was nothing for it. As Viv’s head appeared through the trap door, Belinda picked up a carton of Mars bars and emptied it over her, simultaneously yelling, ‘Help!’

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‘Belinda, you bitch, ouch!’ cried Viv, retreating. She crawled to the window, flung it open and yelled ‘Help!’ again. Thank goodness, Linda was emerging from a taxi in the road below, with a half-dozen Harvey Nichols carrier-bags. She looked up and saw Belinda at the window. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘Help!’ she yelled. ‘Linda, help! Come quickly! Viv got in!’ Linda shoved money at the driver and raced indoors, but was too late. Viv had taken fright at the bombardment of confectionery, run downstairs and escaped through the back door—presumably with the help of Mrs Holdsworth. ‘Are you all right?’ Linda called, as she tackled the loft-ladder. It clanged and swayed as she mounted it at top speed. ‘Belinda, I’m so sorry this happened. Viv must have gone mad.’ Belinda caught her breath. ‘I’m OK,’ she said. ‘I’m OK now you’re here.’ Linda took her podgy hand and patted it. ‘Of course you’re OK. You’re lovely. Everyone loves you.’ Belinda reached for a tissue in her velour tracksuit bottoms. ‘It was a shock, that’s all.’ ‘Of course. How did you get on today with the book?’ ‘All right, I suppose. It’s taken an interesting animal turn. Foxes and dogs.’ ‘That’s interesting.’ ‘Mm. Julian Barnes phoned, I think. To say he liked the column.’ ‘Well, there you are. He likes you.’ Belinda rolled over on her stomach. It was her most comfortable position, these days. ‘I’d love to read my “Up the Duff ” column sometime,’ she said, gently. She knew it was an awkward subject. ‘I’d be so embarrassed, though. You’re the real writer, Belinda. I’m only pretending.’ ‘Mm.’ Belinda picked at a lump of congealed tomato sauce on her T-shirt. ‘It was really scary just then, Linda. I suddenly saw what this looks like to Viv. Me upstairs on my own, you downstairs with Stefan, me getting so fat and slobby, and you having the baby. You telling me all the time that I’m lovely. If she didn’t understand this was all for my sake, she could so easily get the wrong idea. She’d think you were stealing my life, or something far-fetched like that!’ Linda smiled. ‘You’re not getting fat.’ ‘I am, a bit. I had to have my wedding ring sawn off, didn’t I?’ ‘You’re lovely. You were too thin before, that’s the truth of it.’ Belinda glanced around for a mirror but then remembered Linda had kept them all downstairs, for fear of accidents. ‘Mother never thought I was lovely. She said I’d let myself go.’ ‘That’s a silly expression.’

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‘She wasn’t right, was she?’ Belinda sniffed. ‘Never. Maggie sends her regards, by the way.’ ‘Does she ask after me?’ Linda hesitated. ‘Well, not always. But I tell her anyway. She’s on the mend, I think.’ ‘Oh, good.’ ‘I think she’s going to be happy, at last.’ ‘That’s nice.’  After Mother died, something happened to Linda. She stopped being an enigma. On that ghastly March night, after the police had been and gone, keeping them up for hours with questions, she let down her guard. At precisely the same time as Stefan told Jago all about his dual identity in Malmö, Linda finally sat down and talked about herself, prompted by Belinda. ‘All those things you told the police,’ Belinda said. ‘I didn’t know any of it. I felt so stupid that I knew so little about you. You never said your real name was Janice. Or that you grew up in Crawley. That sort of thing changes everything.’ ‘Does it? I don’t see that. I’m Janice from Crawley, not the last of the Romanovs.’ ‘No, but tell me. Please. When did you change your name?’ ‘When I came back from France, when I was thirteen.’ Linda got up and opened the oven. She was baking the salmon, compelled by sheer force of habit. ‘Go on,’ said Belinda. ‘I never talk about this.’ ‘Just this once.’ ‘You promise not to laugh?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘You see—look, it’s not a big deal. Don’t expect much.’ ‘OK.’ ‘Well, when I was thirteen, I went on an exchange visit for a month to Grenoble.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘I know, lots of people do it. This was a direct swap, though, which we later discovered is quite unusual. I had a great time in Grenoble, although I was homesick. A month is a long time to a thirteen-year-old. The trouble was that, when I got back, something quite upsetting happened. I turned up at the house in Crawley and—well, my parents barred the front door and told me they preferred to keep the French girl.’

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‘What?’ ‘I know. I was devastated. I just stood there with my suitcase. I’d brought them souvenirs! Mont Blanc in a snowstorm, that kind of thing. Individual chocolates with alpine flowers on. I was looking forward to showing off my French. But they said they’d thought about it quite hard and decided the French girl was more interesting than me, and that she fitted in better. They had all had a lovely time without me. ‘I didn’t realize they were joking, you see. Especially since they’d piled my stuff in the front garden. Guitar, recorder, teddy bears, jewellery box. Mum said afterwards that my face was a real picture! All the neighbours had come out to watch. The French girl said, “Au revoir, Janice,” and they shut the door.’ ‘Linda, that’s dreadful. How could they be so cruel?’ ‘The French girl had talked them into it—apparently she’d persuaded other families before, and told them it was always hilarious when the kid got home. But it wasn’t hilarious this time, because I burst into tears and ran off. I took it so seriously. Well, after she’d gone, and my stuff was back in the house, my parents told me they were really disappointed in me for not seeing the funny side, for not trusting them. “We are shocked and hurt, Janice,” Daddy said. He had gone all white around the mouth. He was furious. “You let us down very, very badly.” ‘So that’s the story. Obviously, in the end, I felt so guilty about hurting them that I ran away.’ Belinda was appalled. Her own mother had undermined her gently, over decades, like a lone termite gnawing her foundations. Linda’s parents, by contrast, had gaily picked her up by the heels and dropped her down a lift shaft. ‘But you didn’t hurt them,’ she said. ‘Think about it, Linda. They hurt you. They should have apologized to you, not blamed you.’ ‘You don’t have to take my side, Belinda. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I take theirs. I know what I did was wicked. I doubted their love. I thought love could be switched off, you see.’ ‘Can’t it?’ ‘No.’ Linda sounded quite fierce. ‘Anyway, you asked me why I changed my name and left Crawley, and that’s it. That’s all. Now you know.’  The evening of Viv’s unexpected visit, Stefan came home as usual at six thirty. Three months had passed since Malmö, and a lot of things had changed. As he came through the door this evening, for example, he did not carry a book of English idioms, determined to incorporate ‘How green was my valley’ or ‘Go and chew bricks’ into the conversation. He carried the poems of Tomas Tranströmer, Sweden’s ‘buzzard poet’, a book with a discouraging monochrome snowscape

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on the front. For reasons connected with the demise of the real Stefan, he had gone terribly Swedish all of a sudden. At weekends, for example, he haunted IKEA in Croydon, correcting people’s pronunciation, explaining the effect of the little bubble on top of the vowel. Twice security men had asked him to leave the building, because they thought he was warning people not to buy the kitchen cupboards. He watched Bergman films on video with masking-tape covering the subtitles, and read biographies of Strindberg, for fun. He hummed Abba’s ‘Chiquitita’ as he walked down the road to the bus and wore his moose-hat at unlikely hours of the day and night. ‘But you’re not Swedish,’ Linda hissed to him tonight, as he selected for the umpteenth time the CD of Swedish football songs, Mama, Take Me Home to Malmö. ‘I need to do this,’ he said. ‘You understand. You do love me, Linda?’ ‘I do love you, George. Yes.’ It was inevitable that Linda and Stefan should make a bond, when Linda knew his secret. True, Jago now knew some of his story, but only to Linda could he confess his feelings. Jago’s idea of sympathy was to push the back of your neck so hard that you almost dislocated your head. Belinda’s now total absence upstairs threw him increasingly into the company of Linda, too—especially at the literary festivals and the New Labour media parties. And it didn’t help his relationship with his wife that, shortly after Stefan’s return from Malmö, Belinda had overheard them talking about Ingrid, and jumped to the unflattering conclusion that the subject of their discussion was her. ‘It’s her selfishness that was always so hideous,’ he said. (‘Hideous!’ gasped Belinda.) ‘Yes,’ agreed Linda. ‘It’s hard for anyone to be happy around selfish people.’ ‘She always refused to make little Stefans—that’s the point.’ (‘He wanted little Stefans,’ she yelped.) Belinda had wept bitterly when she heard this, but nowadays comforted herself by eating a Mars bar in a suggestive manner. Looking around at the life Linda had given her, the life she’d desired so badly, she felt a familiar pang of loss and confusion. Because although she might have said she wanted lots of peace and quiet, and may even (oh God) have wanted her mother to disappear, when exactly had she told anybody that she didn’t want sex any more? She stroked her own enlarged breasts, absently, and tweaked her nipples. More than ever she desired Stefan; her body ached for sex, grieved for it. But by becoming physically gross and affecting tracksuits, and by moving upstairs after the death of Mother, and moreover by being hideously selfish and refusing to have little Stefans, she’d somehow removed herself from the carnal world. It would be obscene to caress Stefan now; to lick him all over, as she formerly did. Such a gorgeous man would need to be tranquillized first. However much it hurt

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her, it made sense for Stefan to partner Linda. He wanted babies, suddenly. In fact, he was broody. Linda was young, fit, sexually desirable, talented, and keen. Belinda had to face it: she herself was none of these things. Meanwhile Stefan felt wounded and rejected by Belinda, who had moved upstairs just when he needed her most urgently. Returning from Sweden on the plane after the basement ordeal, all he could think of was how furiously he would fuck Belinda, the first chance he got. He pictured himself, naked in the moosehat, driving himself into her on the hall floor, again and again, sucking her breasts and clutching her wrists until both of them exploded. But instead he’d got home and found a big empty bed, and a wife in the attic who said, ‘No, don’t, I’m too yicky,’ whenever he tried to touch her. ‘You are not yicky, Belinda,’ he assured her. ‘I don’t marry yicky women.’ ‘I am. I’m so selfish and yicky.’ ‘All right. Let’s say you are. But I don’t mind if you are yicky.’ ‘You should.’ ‘I love you.’ ‘I love you, too.’ ‘Then why can’t I have you?’ ‘Because I love you too much to let you have sex with someone who’s so yicky.’ ‘You feel guilty and confused because your mother died,’ Stefan said. ‘Yes,’ said Belinda. ‘Yes, I mean no. I mean yes.’ For a few weeks, the frustration experienced by both of them was intense. Belinda felt horny all day, every day, but tried to ignore it. This must be what it’s like to be Michael Douglas, she thought. She wrote erotic poetry to Stefan; she crept downstairs when he was at college, and sniffed his clothes in the laundry bag. But in the end there was nothing for it but to speak to Linda, and beg her to help. ‘But I can’t make Stefan love me,’ said Linda, embarrassed. ‘It doesn’t work like that. It’s not like taking your place on the Today programme. He knows I’m not you.’ ‘He likes you, though, doesn’t he? Tell me what you talk about downstairs all the time. You’re always laughing.’ ‘Oh,’ Linda blushed. ‘He tells me about Sweden. This and that.’ ‘Haven’t you ever wanted to touch him?’ ‘Belinda!’ ‘He’s so lovely. And he’s a flirt. He must have flirted with you.’ Linda closed her eyes and thought about the times they had danced together. ‘A bit.’ ‘You see? If you didn’t fancy him, I wouldn’t ask you. But you do. He’s so lovely. Tell me what you really feel about Stefan, Linda.’ ‘Honestly?’

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‘Honestly.’ ‘I love him.’ ‘Oh.’ Belinda bit a lip and said, ‘I knew it. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.’ The two women looked at each other like Thelma and Louise before going over the rim of the Grand Canyon. Belinda knew what she was doing. She was letting herself go, totally. Linda would love Stefan, and make him happy. It was better to see him with Linda than lose him. The thought of Stefan making love to anyone else was torture. But the absence of Stefan would kill her. ‘Stefan is a wonderful lover,’ she told Linda, now. ‘And you know he fancies you.’ ‘He doesn’t.’ ‘Did he give you a nickname?’ ‘I can’t believe we’re talking like this. I don’t like it. He’s your husband. I would never hurt you. Nor would he. We’re on your side.’ ‘Did he give you a nickname, though?’ ‘Yes.’ Linda grimaced. ‘I can’t tell you what it is.’ ‘I know.’ That evening, Belinda heard such unmistakable moans and cries from the kitchen that she gave up trying to read Nabokov’s Despair, and just listened. The woman who abhorred a vacuum had finally identified the last gap in Belinda’s life and filled it. Whether it was remotely similar to doing the Today programme, Belinda never inquired. As for Stefan, as he swarmed over Linda, he felt an intense mixture of guilt and relief, revulsion and desire—in fact, he felt more authentically Scandinavian than ever before. It was both agony and ecstasy to make love to the desirable, sympathetic cleaning lady. When she told him she loved him, he wept like beans. Afterwards, as they ate their steamed sea bass with ginger mayonnaise and kept kissing and touching each other without speaking, it occurred to Stefan that Linda was better than Belinda at everything; absolutely everything. He only hoped, for pity’s sake, Belinda never knew how much.  Naturally, Stefan couldn’t face Belinda after sleeping with the cleaning lady. He was grateful for her removal to the attic. Linda had moved into the bedroom; they made love discreetly, but all the time, and he thought about her constantly. The relief of being with someone who knew him as himself—and loved him for himself—was overwhelming. He suddenly wished he had friends and family for Linda to meet. He wished he could take her to Sweden. He phoned her six times a day, on her mobile, and made her laugh. He ambushed her in the shower, and

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wore her underpants on his head. Everywhere they went, people noticed their physical addiction to each other; jointly, Linda and Stefan gave off so much heat that the background wobbled. It was a thrill to touch her hand. Stefan was happier than he had ever been. No wonder that he tried to banish Belinda from his mind. The only way to cope was to tell himself she had died. At Mother’s funeral (which Belinda and Linda attended under obscuring veils, like something from a Victorian novel) Stefan buried a number of people, including his wife. He buried Stefan and Ingrid as well as Mother, and he shovelled like mad to put six feet of earth over Belinda. ‘What was it Belinda used to say?’ he asked Linda one night, as they cuddled on the sofa in front of Fanny and Alexander, while Belinda made faint tap-taptapping noises upstairs. ‘The line from Keats. “When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” I think that’s exactly what’s happened. It’s an exact, gruesome description of what’s happened to her. Her brain is still teeming, but she has completely ceased to be.’  So the last time Belinda saw Stefan was at the funeral. It was the last time she had seen anybody except Linda, now she came to think of it. Maggie had been there, with the lumbering sports writer from Viv’s dinner party. Viv had attended, too, and even said a few words in the chapel, which was fitting, since Viv and Mother had always hit it off. She said Mother was a fighter, a trooper, who defied the tides of time. It made her sound like Horatius holding the bridge, not an ungenerous old woman who refused to have crow’s feet. Everyone was terrifically impressed. As a parting gift to her vain parent, Belinda chose to have an open casket for Mother, to show off the features that had cost so much, and that had finally settled so nicely into a beautiful face. All Mother’s old friends were invited, so they could admire the handiwork for one last time and gnaw the pews with envy. The biggest shock had been seeing Auntie Vanessa, whose naturally ageing features had operated as a kind of Dorian Gray picture for Mother—showing precisely her alternative fate. One need hardly point out, of course, that with all her lines and saggy bits, Auntie Vanessa looked fine. Meanwhile ‘Age Shall Not Wither Her’ was the chosen epitaph for the headstone, which had the benefit on this occasion of being literally true, and a kind of coded warning to future grave-diggers. Her undertakers agreed. Like the tanner discussed in Hamlet, Mother’s facial construction would last in the ground nine years. Over tea, Belinda had kept her veils on and watched how Jago made such a strange fuss of Stefan. Linda explained to her that the ‘boys’ had met by chance

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in Malmö and become firm friends. Aside from that, the funeral was socially a disappointment. Maggie and Viv both kept their distance; Stefan did not comfort her. She rather wished she hadn’t come. But then Stefan chose his moment beautifully and read aloud a haunting poem by his favourite chap Tranströmer. As always at funerals when people read poems, there was a lot of shrugging and coughing. But Belinda loved it. Her squeeze of congratulation when he resumed his seat was the last time she’d touched him. She’d have squeezed him longer, if she’d known.  And now it was June, Linda was pregnant, and Belinda weighed fourteen stone. She hated all the academic books around her, and longed to write a Verity story, for a bit of excitement. But Linda had started writing them, to general acclaim, so what was the point? The publisher loved all the new developments in Linda’s first draft. As Belinda quickly acknowledged, Linda had combined the original simple tone with a more sophisticated psychological insight—for example, explaining with bold strokes the pain of childhood rejection that drove Verity’s rival Camilla to be so selfish. Linda had also (another bold stroke) killed off Goldenboy, Verity’s number-one pony. ‘You can’t!’ gasped Belinda, as she read it, weeping for the loyal pony, who rolled his eyes just one last time as he lay on his straw and offered a hoof of farewell. The fictional death of Goldenboy was as devastating to Belinda as the real death of her own mother. Tears rained down her cheeks. As always, however, she had to admit that Linda was right. Sentiment and complacency were all that had detained Goldenboy from this, his best ever fictional moment. Why had she never seen it? This horse was born to die! The postbag would be enormous. Belinda wished she had some magazines to read. All these hours to kill, day after day, while Linda and Stefan assumed she was writing the magnum opus. Perhaps she could take up nail-painting. She wondered what they would think if they knew her favourite pastime was seeing how many pencils she could retain comfortably in the folds of her body and still move from one side of the attic to the other. Her personal best was twenty-two. Unconditional love was what she had, though. She derived much comfort from that. This might look like a crummy life to anyone who didn’t understand. But it came from, and amounted to, unconditional love. A dozen times a day she reread the poem Stefan had read at the funeral, pondering it. The whole of life and death was in it, in a gloomy Swedish kind of way. And she didn’t mind thinking about death, particularly. Because here was another obstacle (the ultimate one) that Linda had thoughtfully cleared from her path. In the corner was a little box of medical, anaesthetizing stuff—bottles, needles, masks. It was left over

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from Linda’s days at the hospital, when she was Viv. Belinda gazed at it for hours at a time, thinking about the oblivion it offered. ‘If you ever want to go,’ Linda said solemnly, one night, ‘I’ll help you. There’s no greater love than that, Belinda. No greater love.’ Sometimes she dreamt of Stefan rescuing her from her attic, as if it were a fairy tale. He would climb up the outside wall, and burst in. He would kiss her and wake her from a sleep of years; shake her till the piece of poisoned apple dislodged; shatter the mirror from side to side. But it wasn’t like that. She wasn’t a princess held in a tower by some magic spell. She was a fat woman in Battersea with no friends who was perfectly at liberty to come downstairs.

Chapter 12




Maggie rolled her eyes to heaven and said, in her deepest voice, ‘Moscow!’ It felt good. She said it again. ‘Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!’ Leon applauded. ‘That’s very good,’ he said. Maggie sat down, still studying her text. ‘You don’t think the middle one should be like a question?’ she asked, nibbling her pencil. ‘As if she’s saying “Yes! Moscow!” then has a doubt, “But do I really know what Moscow means? What if I don’t like Moscow when I get there?” and then, “No, Moscow’s fine, I’ll settle for Moscow”?’ ‘I think the three howls were better. You can be too complicated, you know.’ ‘OK.’ Maggie made a note in the margin of her Three Sisters. The first day of rehearsals was tomorrow. In her experience, it was quite important to decide at this stage whether Irina really, really wanted to go to Moscow, or had already got bored with the idea, and was just saying it. ‘Talking of Moscow, did I tell you I covered the world skateboarding championships in Red Square last summer?’ ‘You might have done. I don’t remember.’ Leon shrugged. It was clear that Maggie had not yet learnt to be fascinated by the astonishing global impact of American sports. ‘Well,’ she said, rather unkindly, ‘you won’t be doing that any more.’ ‘No.’ ‘This is such a sad play,’ she declared, at last. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Leon. ‘They never make it to Moscow.’ ‘That’s right.’ Maggie was impressed. ‘Is it far?’ ‘Oh. I don’t know.’ ‘Is there a train?’ ‘I think so.’ ‘Why don’t they go, then?’ ‘Oh, you know how it is. I remember hearing an interview on Radio 4 with some people in a ticket queue in Leicester Square, once. A man and his wife, hoping to see Cats. The interviewer asked him if he often came to London, and he said proudly, “Twice a year, yes. We take in a show, and have a meal. Quite a ritual.” “Where do you live?” asked the interviewer. And you know what he said? “Wimbledon.” ’ You had to hand it to Maggie. Once Leon had turned up on her doorstep from Malmö and uttered those epiphanous (if baffled) words, ‘Hang on, what’s my

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brother doing here?’, it had taken Maggie just a few minutes to cast Noel from her life. What a heel that man was. He was Leon’s brother? All along he’d known she wasn’t deluded? Maggie opened the front door to find the two men colliding on the step: Leon in a rather fetching fur hat with ear-flaps, holding a presentation pack of gravad lax and an enormous Toblerone; Noel looking shifty in his old leather jacket, with a small ball of string. Sadly, her Shakespearean doubletake training let her down once more, but at least she didn’t faint. Instead of crying, ‘Most wonderful!’ at the sight of the Confusingly Similar Brothers, she just summoned up all her non-Shakespearean instincts and spat in Noel’s eye. ‘That’s very good string,’ he told her, as she snatched it and shut the door on him. ‘I can explain all this,’ he continued, through the letterbox. ‘It’s only because you are so fatally insecure that you can’t cope with this without resorting to aggression, Margaret!’ The string found a use quite quickly, as it happened. With Leon’s help, Maggie parcelled up all the insulting presents Noel had given her, and dispatched them to Julia without explanation. She reasoned that a trained psychoanalyst was surely capable of working out the connection between a pound of spuds, a dartboard with no numbers on it (evidently found in a skip), and three sample-size bottles of perfume (evidently Julia’s own free gift with lipsticks, purloined from the bathroom cabinet.) She hadn’t wanted to hurt Julia. But on the other hand, short of hiring an assassin, this was the best way of breaking out of therapy that the human mind had yet devised. As a clinger, Julia could give lessons to barnacles. But now, with a single bound, Maggie was free. Free to stop maundering on; free to spend her therapy money on jackets and magazines and catfood; and, most importantly, free to survey the ravaged building site of her psyche and rebuild at her own speed. And she made very short work of it, in fact. Didn’t even bother with scaffolding. By the time she decided to become an item with the faithful Leon, just three days later, her psyche was virtually ready for carpeting. Fully roofed, it smelt of fresh magnolia emulsion, and was only waiting for the pointing in the chimneystack to dry. True, Maggie’s psyche was slightly wobbly, and some of the windows didn’t open, but at least it was habitable once more. ‘How can you do this to Julia?’ Noel objected, on the phone. ‘Bugger off,’ said Maggie. ‘Think of yourself, Maggie. You’re not a viable personality! You need us! You need me!’ ‘Give your Bombay mix to some other poor sap,’ she pronounced, with dignity, and slammed down the phone. Jettisoning Noel, she felt not only jubilant but intensely theatrical. Were she ever to get the role of Nora in A Doll’s House, she

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would draw on the emotion she felt right now. How marvellous. Were Ibsen alive today, she felt ‘Give your Bombay mix to some other poor sap’ was exactly the sort of line he would be writing. ‘Linda and Stefan have invited us to dinner tomorrow,’ she told Leon now. It was a rainy Monday, and they had been together nearly three months, living at her flat. Leon stroked Ariel, while trying to read a sports section. ‘OK.’ He winced, involuntarily, and fingered his hair. ‘Can I watch Wimbledon, if the rain stops?’ ‘You don’t like them much, do you? Linda and Stefan?’ ‘Well, you can’t help noticing a pattern. Stefan’s first wife is locked up in an institution. His second wife is locked up in the attic. And nobody cares about either of them.’ ‘She’s not locked up in the attic. She wants to be up there. Did you know Viv tried to see her the other day, and Belinda told her to fuck off ? You surely don’t think any of this was Linda’s idea?’ Leon harumphed. It all seemed pretty obvious to him. As they said in one of his favourite movies, ‘Follow the money.’ Belinda had a wretched, lonely, anonymous existence; Linda posed on magazine covers with her arm round Antonia Fraser. But then he was a very straightforward kind of chap. Malmö had been a perplexing time for him, what with getting the sack for something he hadn’t written. He never understood what had happened there. All he knew was that it was his own fault for deserting his post, that Tanner came out of it with a promotion, and that he still felt sorry for Ingrid. ‘Well, I’ve been thinking about it,’ said Maggie, ‘and it seems clear to me that Belinda is the Superego in that house.’ ‘The Superego? Maggie, don’t.’ Leon hugged the fluffy racing car and picked at it. ‘You promised. It makes you sound like Noel.’ ‘I know. I’m sorry.’ ‘Dad really did know Bobby Moore, you know. He wasn’t making it up. I met someone once who saw them together in the car park at Anfield.’ ‘But I’m not a bit like Noel. He accuses everybody of being mad. I don’t do that.’ ‘No.’ ‘I observe things, that’s all. And I can’t help seeing that Linda is the Ego, and Ingrid is the Id.’ ‘Please don’t!’ Leon put his hands over his ears. ‘Sorry.’ She came and kissed his head, then settled down to read her text again. ‘Do you think it’s supposed to be funny that Irina can’t remember the Italian for “window”?’ ‘What does she say exactly?’

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Maggie found the place. ‘ “And now I can’t even remember the Italian for ‘window’!” The direction says “With tears in her eyes”.’ ‘That’s definitely funny.’ ‘Good.’  Whether or not Belinda was happy did not much worry Viv any more. She had known for ages what was going on in Armadale Road, and had long since ceased to care. Mrs Holdsworth brought her regular juicy news—about the burgeoning affair between Linda and Stefan, about a holiday in New Zealand the happy couple were planning, about the baby (of course) and the celebrity phone calls. Viv hated to admit it, but she rather approved of the Johanssons’ arrangement. People should do the things they are good at. And, in her opinion, Belinda was good at being selfish and lazy, and letting other people take the strain of the practical stuff. No, what had sent Viv scurrying up Belinda’s loft-ladder was not sympathy or friendship, but alarm. Because she had just heard from Dermot. Her ghastly lover said he could no longer endure to be silent about the hospital scam. Every morning he woke from dreams of Linda in a surgical mask, advancing with a foot-long syringe, something like an antique enema pipe—and he just couldn’t take it any more. He wanted justice, he said. He would shortly be ‘doing something about it’. What could Dermot do? He could tell the police, inform the hospital. Either way, Belinda ought to know that Linda was about to be exposed, and very probably arrested. But, of course, Viv’s visit was thwarted by a torrent of Mars bars, and the message did not get through. In fact, the only consequence of her action was that her spy was sacked—Linda guessing, rightly, that Mrs Holdsworth had admitted Viv to the house. ‘I’m going to have to let you go,’ Linda told an affronted Mrs H, on the phone. ‘I can’t possibly put up with disloyalty. Please come to the house tomorrow, and drop off your keys while I’m out.’ Which was how it came about that, on the same rainy Monday, Mrs Holdsworth did a fine and glorious thing. As a parting gesture, she collected up all Linda’s ‘Up the Duff ’ columns and delivered them to the attic. Belinda was lying on her stomach, with her arms at her side, practising her noiseless weeping technique, when Mrs Holdsworth’s head poked through the trap-door. Work-wise, all Belinda had achieved that day was ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’, repeated twenty-eight times. So she had got down on the floor, as usual—to think, and to feel sorry for herself, and to weep secretly for her deceased mum, and to gaze at the box in the corner with

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all the syringes and things. Objectively speaking, it was indeed the right time for all good men to come to the aid of this party. All Belinda got, however, was Mrs Holdsworth. ‘Mrs Holdsworth?’ said Belinda, rolling over to sit up, and wiping her eyes. ‘Are you OK on that ladder? You don’t fancy a chat, do you? Come on up!’ Mrs Holdsworth pursed her lips and looked around at the piles of dusty books, her employer impersonating a baby seal on an ice floe. ‘Are you fucking having a laugh?’ Belinda thought quickly. ‘It’s just that I’ve been lying here wondering—er, why men have nipples. Any ideas?’ But Mrs Holdsworth merely set down the columns, dismounted the ladder, and left the house for ever. Belinda heard her cough and slam the front door, and the sound of departure made her sad. There was a time when the departure of Mrs Holdsworth would have been like having a nail removed from her head. How strangely life turned out. Recently, Belinda had been remembering the nice man from British Telecom—was his name Graham? Fancy ringing afterwards to check that she was all right. What a nice man. She was wondering if he would fancy a chat about Friends and Family. Ah, yes, friends and family. He might even be able to advise her on how to get some. ‘Give me some days!’ she had said to him. It was hard to believe she had ever felt like that, now that she had day after day after day. At her funeral, to which she had recently devoted much thought, she’d decided to have the congregation sing along to the old Kinks record, where Ray Davies says ‘Thank you for the days’. Linda would understand. Linda was so wise. Humming and snivelling some more, Belinda gave a cursory glance to the columns, with her own name blazoned across the top and a smiling picture of Linda. Should she read them? Did she have the intellectual energy? Lying there on her chest, she hadn’t really been dwelling on the enigma of the male nipple. Really she had been exploring a dream, a dream she’d first had on meeting Linda; a dream in which she’d been gently placed inside a washing-machine, there to float happily in the soapy, sloppy water, occasionally tapping on the glass as the drum rolled her right and left, left and right. ‘Hello?’ she’d called to Stefan, but he’d been absorbed in his breakfast. ‘Hello?’ She remembered what her husband had said to her at the time. What would happen when the spin cycle started?  ‘They’ve invited us to dinner,’ Viv told Jago. ‘Linda and Stefan?’ ‘Tomorrow night.’

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‘OK.’ Viv returned to her treadle machine and her cloth of gold. She had volunteered to make all the costumes for an end-of-term Shakespeare. To add a bit of interest to the project, moreover, she had urged the drama teacher to set it not in some fustian bardic wasteland (sacking robes, and so on) but at the court of Louis XVI, with the hall of mirrors. ‘You always have to overdo it, don’t you?’ said Jago. The living room was a sea of scarlet satin and costume pearls. The Ripleys were not speaking much, these days, except to snipe at each other. ‘Leave me alone,’ said Viv, completing a seam. Agitated, Jago drank his coffee and poured some more. He hated his days off, especially if they were not at weekends. Viv was so madly domestic at present, as if to prove she could outdo the old cleaning lady. And as for him, he couldn’t settle at home. He was frantic to know what Tanner was up to at the office. Every time he closed his eyes, he pictured Tanner trying his chair for size. ‘So are you all right about Linda and Stefan?’ ‘What? Of course.’ ‘I take it you’ve stopped thinking Stefan’s a clone?’ Jago put down his mug with a clunk. ‘I never thought Stefan was a clone.’ ‘Oh, really? I thought you did.’  Belinda put down the cuttings and stared at the wall. Then she stared at the ceiling. Then she stared out of the window. She couldn’t believe it. She felt sick. This reflects on me, she kept thinking, idiotically. I wouldn’t mind, but this reflects on me. To find oneself described in public print as the Bat in the Belfry was a shock, of course. No doubt Mrs Holdsworth thought it was this libel she needed to know about. But matters were far worse than that. Because, truth to tell, ‘Up the Duff ’ was rubbish. Linda was writing liquefying compost, and under Belinda’s name! The realization had so many implications! Belinda considered several of them rapidly. ‘Good God,’ she breathed. ‘How will I ever explain it to Julian Barnes?’ There was nothing wrong with the genre of ‘Up the Duff ’, as such. Even from the seclusion of her ivory tower, Belinda was aware that people wrote these domestic dramas in newspapers all the time, and sometimes executed them with effortless brilliance. Linda’s tone, however, was as clunky as a piano dropped down a staircase. The eponymous Up-the-Duff (Linda herself ) had comical misunderstandings with Nordic Dreamboat (Stefan), while Conversationalist with the Feather Duster (Mrs H) took meals to Bat in the Belfry (Belinda). Meanwhile Un-

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born Sprog caused mayhem of a predictable nature. There was no getting away from it. ‘Up the Duff ’ was dire. ‘Sprog?’ Belinda shuddered. ‘Sprog?’  Dermot sat at his desk, twiddling a pencil and thinking hard. He, too, had noticed that ‘Up the Duff ’ was dreadful, but this was not his only reason for wishing to spike Linda’s activities once and for all. True, he had recently contracted an ambitious young woman writer who would be glad to fill many of Linda’s commissions, were Linda abruptly to relinquish them. But by and large, he just didn’t approve of Linda posing as an anaesthetist without qualifications. Yet it was by no means obvious what he should do. The police must not be involved; Viv must not be dragged down. As he now understood, the poor confused woman had only responded to a biological urge to make cushion covers, after all. So, weighing up all considerations, he just needed a story about Belinda Johansson to scupper Linda’s career. ‘A story about Belinda Johansson,’ he muttered to himself. ‘A story about Belinda Johansson to scupper Linda’s career.’ But what rumour could he circulate, to make all Linda’s editors and friends drop her? That she was an impostor? No, that would merely intrigue them: they would ask her to write about it. That she was a criminal? Ditto. An adulteress? A transsexual? A matricide? Ditto, with knobs on. That she was terminally ill? Dermot laughed nastily. Any hint of terminal illness (even curable illness) would have them gagging for Linda, and upping her fees. It was frustrating for a man like Dermot to find he could do nothing. Possibly the best-connected chap in London, he need only break the story and it would be everywhere. Wild fire looked sluggish in his vicinity. Yet he felt powerless. He frowned and fiddled with his silver bracelet, ran a hand across his smooth pate. Whatever a famous person admits to nowadays, it merely makes him more famous, more hot. Unless . . . ? Dermot felt the answer was coming to him. He pressed his knuckles against his eyes. Unless . . . ? Gingerly, he picked up the phone and dialled the Effort. The editor was, naturally, one of his clients. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Terrible news, I’m afraid. About Belinda J.’ ‘What’s happened to her? Don’t tell me those bastards at the Telegraph—?’ ‘No, it’s not as bad as going to the Telegraph, Jack.’ ‘Good. What is it, then?’ Dermot took a deep breath. ‘The thing is, Jack, Belinda’s dead.’

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 Linda got the news on her mobile. Dermot felt it was only sporting to let her know at the same time as her editor. She was at the fishmonger’s, and in her dismay involuntarily sat down on a display of dressed crabs. ‘You’ve said Belinda’s what?’ ‘I’ve said she’s dead, Linda. This couldn’t go on. Fight it, and I’ll tell everyone about your syringe secrets. You could be in prison for years. Tell Belinda I had no choice. People will be expecting a funeral, but that’s your problem.’ And he hung up. Linda felt her throat constrict. Everything she’d built up for Belinda was to be destroyed! A life so rich and fruitful! A life so happy! Running home, she phoned Stefan, in tears, and he promised to meet her there as soon as he could. ‘Belinda!’ she yelled, as she let herself in to the house. ‘Belinda! Belinda!’ Belinda peered through the loft trap-door. ‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you,’ she said, waving the columns. ‘You’ve heard?’ squealed Linda. ‘I’ve read it myself, thank you very much. How could you do this, Linda? I trusted you.’ ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so terribly sorry.’ As Belinda watched her cleaning lady climb the damn ladder for the umpteenth time, she was deeply puzzled. Confronting Linda about ‘Up the Duff ’ was turning out to be a lot easier than she thought. She had feared one of Linda’s weeping tantrums. Instead of which, she seemed the soul of contrition. ‘This wasn’t how I intended things to end,’ Linda said. ‘You’ve got to believe me.’ ‘End?’ said Belinda. ‘There’s no need for them to end.’ But Linda wasn’t listening. She was agitated. She kept picking up tissues and tearing them into shreds. ‘Things are worse than ever!’ ‘Linda, are you all right?’ ‘How can you be so calm, Belinda?’ ‘Look, it’s only a column.’ At which point Linda realized, with a sinking heart, that they’d been talking at cross-purposes. ‘You said you knew,’ she said, flatly. ‘Knew what? About this damn “Up the Duff ”? Yes, I do.’ ‘Everyone thinks you’re dead, Belinda.’ Belinda laughed. ‘But I’m not.’ Linda shrugged. ‘Well, there’s the rub. If I am, you are.’

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‘But you’re not dead, Linda. You told me you’ve got a box at the Proms. Have you gone raving mad?’ ‘Trust me, Belinda. It’s over. We’re dead. No Proms, no nothing.’ ‘Why?’ ‘It’s over. There’s absolutely nothing I can do.’  In the Gemini café near Maggie’s flat, Noel perused the ballet listings in Time Out. Visiting the ballet was not in fact his favourite pastime, but since Julia was a fan of dance, and since his marriage needed considerable attention since his wife found out about Maggie (if only he had not wooed Julia likewise with a pound of spuds!), he was quietly reading the listings, and circling events with a pen, when a strange woman caught his eye and smiled, as if he ought to know her. She was sitting at a neighbouring table, nervously playing with a knife and flicking through a Swedish–English phrase book, but when she recognized Noel, she moved with awesome speed. Before he knew what was happening, she crossed over to him, grabbed his head and pressed it hard against her chest. ‘Hur lange har du varit här?’ she cried, impenetrably, and kissed the top of his head. His face smothered by this strange woman’s bosom, he tried saying, ‘Do I know you?’ but not much came out. The sense of fear and confusion was matched in intensity only by the taste of rough wool and the déjà vu. Another of his brother’s conquests? Well, if it was, Leon’s taste in women was coming seriously into question. ‘Hello,’ he said, uncertainly, as she released him from her excessive greeting. She pulled his ears intimately, and danced a jig on the spot. Whoever this unattractive little Swedish woman was, she was evidently very pleased to see Leon. ‘Birgit!’ she called to another small woman, solid, who was bringing coffee. ‘What?’ said Birgit (in Swedish), sitting down. ‘It worked! This is the man who carried me through Malmö, on the night of Stefan’s death! The man who gave me his coat with the note in the pocket!’ she said (also in Swedish). Birgit slapped him on the back and saluted him in true Swedish fashion. ‘Hej!’ she ejaculated. ‘Er, hi,’ Noel replied, and turned to Ingrid. ‘Er, good to see you again. Last time I saw you, you were—um?’ ‘I had my knees around your head, ja?’ Noel laughed, and tried fervently not to picture the scene. ‘That was some night,’ he ventured. ‘But I escape,’ Ingrid explained, suddenly solemn. ‘I escape to London. All Sweden looking for me! Mad woman on loose! Birgit help me.’

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‘Oh good.’ Noel’s brain was whirring. ‘I found this note in your pocket, describing this Gemini café!’ She produced the note Maggie had scribbled to Leon all those months ago—the day she’d run into Noel in the Gemini. That poor sap Leon had evidently treasured it. ‘So I come here to see you, beg you to help. I am so unhappy,’ she added, unexpectedly. ‘That’s a shame,’ said Noel. ‘But only natural.’ He assumed his sympathetic expression and, through force of training, handed Ingrid a paper serviette. She took it, wiped her eyes, and lowered her voice to explain. ‘Stefan is dead. I come for Belinda. Birgit help me. You understand? Then my work is done.’ Noel patted her hand, which still held the knife. He knew Maggie had been in love once with someone called Stefan. Belinda was her oldest friend. A plan was hatching, vaguely but very quickly. The fact that it plainly involved a dangerously mad woman gave him no particular cause for alarm. As Maggie so rightly pointed out, Noel assumed that everyone was mad. For the first time in her life, Ingrid’s overtly dangerous insanity provided her with protective colouring. ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked. ‘Nowhere,’ Ingrid sobbed. ‘We yust arrive.’ ‘There’s someone I want you to meet,’ Noel said, gently taking the knife away from her. ‘I’ll find you a place to stay.’  ‘How can you be dead?’ Stefan paced the living room. ‘How can you be dead?’ he repeated. ‘You just cooked salmon and samphire pancakes. We’ve booked for the Cleveland Orchestra. Dead people don’t do that.’ Linda hung her head. ‘Look at the flowers, George.’ The room was full of sympathetic bouquets; the answering-machine flashed with thirty messages. ‘Belinda doesn’t seem to mind, that’s the funny thing.’ ‘She doesn’t mind that she’s dead?’ ‘She’s coming down later, for a chat.’ ‘A chat?’ ‘Don’t keep repeating things, George. I’m worn out. I’ve had a pretty bad day, when you think about it.’ She certainly had. News of Belinda’s demise had spread quickly. Her new agent—a friend of Dermot—informed all her employers within the hour. In fact, when the first of the flowers arrived at the house, she was still in the attic delivering the thunderbolt to Belinda. ‘You’ll have to go down,’ she told Belinda. The bell was ringing insistently downstairs. ‘Quick!’ ‘I can’t. I haven’t been down for three months. I won’t know how to find the front door.’

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‘Go on!’ ‘But who shall I say I am?’ ‘Who cares? Just act sad and shocked. Go on!’ ‘We ought to nip this in the bud. Tell everyone you’re OK.’ ‘Please, Belinda. Nobody knows you.’ So Belinda hauled herself down the ladder, and crossed the landing, and made her way through the house. And the funny thing was: it was exactly as if someone had really died, or at least, abruptly disappeared. As she made her way to the front door, she tried to move noiselessly, yet was spooked by the silence. Unfamiliar pictures hung on familiar walls; she saw new objects on old shelves; she spotted the shopping left in bags on the kitchen table. A shiver rushed up her spine. ‘This was how she left it,’ was the emotional message of everything in the house. ‘In the midst of life we are in death. Ingredients for salmon and samphire pancakes were found in the shopping. A macintosh still wet from rain dripped beside the front door.’ The doorbell rang, and as she reached for the door-knob, Belinda felt dizzy. ‘I’ve got some flowers for Mr Johnson,’ snapped the young man on the doorstep. He was in a hurry, and his pocky skin was wet. His double-parked van was blocking the road; a taxi braked behind it in the rain, and tooted. To Belinda, the combination of sensations was so intense that she staggered. It was like going from the reading room at the British Museum into the trenches of the First World War. The colour, the noise, the people! ‘For Mr Johnson,’ the man repeated. ‘Mr Johansson,’ she corrected him, automatically. ‘Well, can you take them, love? My van’s in the way. Are you all right? You look terrible.’ ‘There’s been a death,’ she explained, lamely. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It happens.’ And handed her the flowers. She wrestled with the card, to see who they were from. It was Dermot, of course. ‘Are you related to the deceased, yourself ?’ Belinda thought about it. ‘Not really.’ ‘Well, I’m sorry anyway. ’Bye.’  And now, while Stefan consoled Linda downstairs, Belinda considered how all this affected her. It wasn’t too bad, actually. In fact, strange as it may seem, she felt rather chirpy. For one thing, dying made her feel a lot better about Mother. The phenomenon known as ‘survivor guilt’ no longer applied. Plus, being dead had stopped her from killing herself. Which had to be a good thing, really. As she cast a quizzical glance at Linda’s medical box, she could only think how

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strange it was to have fancied ceasing on the midnight with no pain, courtesy of Linda’s needles. ‘ “I have been half in love with easeful Death,” ’ she told herself, in astonishment. ‘ “Now more than ever seemed it rich to die”, tsk, tsk.’ Add these morbid sentiments to all the frantic pre-death gleaning she’d been up to, and Keats had rather a lot to answer for, she reckoned. Dying was definitely the best thing that could have happened. Dying made her tidy her attic, and sort her clothes. Books were neatly piled; manuscripts efficiently stuffed into black plastic bags. Belinda embraced nonentity with an energy that was quite inspiring. On her way back to the attic after the Interflora man had gone, she had gathered a few items together, including a mirror from the downstairs loo, and now she looked at herself in it. She fingered its surface, pawed at her reflection, like an orang-utan in a perception experiment. ‘Belinda, you’re dead,’ she said to herself in the mirror. ‘You’re dead, you are.’ She rubbed her teeth, and put some lipstick on. ‘This is fucking fabulous,’ she said. Selecting an old cassette of Kinks records, she slipped it into an old machine, and wound it at top speed until she reached ‘Days’. ‘Bloody hell,’ remarked Belinda, and played the track again. She’d often noticed in life how old pop songs came to mind just when their lyrics finally meant something to you. But wasn’t ‘Days’ supposed to be about an affair? How could it at the same time describe so accurately an experiment in full transference with a cleaning lady that had ended in this unique paradox in a Battersea attic? The true potency of cheap music must have been sorely underestimated. As she listened to the lyrics for a second time, she felt an old familiar twinge in her abdomen. It was Neville. Oh God, the lovely rat was back. Ta-da! This was almost more solitary happiness than she could bear. At midnight, Linda called to her. ‘Belinda, are you mad?’ ‘Not at all,’ Belinda called back. ‘This is supposed to be a house of grief,’ Linda barked. ‘Some of us are quite upset, even if you aren’t. Stefan just had a call from a very tearful Terry O’Neill in Mauritius. I was phenomenally well liked, you know. People are being so nice. Come down. Have some supper with us. We’re worried about you.’ But Belinda couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to go down to the funeral parlour of the living room. Instead she played the song again, and turned the volume even louder. ‘Thank you for the days,’ she yelled. And, stooping slightly under the eaves, she danced and twirled and laughed.

Chapter 13




Whether to persist with the dinner party was the Johansson household’s chief concern. Arguably, the Johanssons had broken their fair share of new ground, etiquette-wise, yet here was a further ticklish point to ponder. If your best friends know you’re not really dead, is it OK to ask them to dinner? Finally, they decided it was. So while Stefan spent hours on the phone, accepting sympathy in a courteous Swedish manner from a surprisingly large proportion of the Groucho Club membership, his late wife flicked listlessly through her recipe books, with unseeing eyes. ‘I can’t enjoy cooking now we’re not alive any more,’ she objected to Belinda. ‘When I was doing it for you, it had a point. It was for you. But I’ve failed us, Belinda. I’ve let us down by kicking the bucket like this.’ ‘Buck up, Linda. I can’t believe this attitude. It’s not your fault. You were always a marvellous cleaning lady. Dermot’s got it in for you, that’s all.’ ‘I feel terrible.’ ‘Hardly surprising, in the circumstances. What did we die of, by the way? Was it an accident? It was very sudden.’ ‘How can you be so matter-of-fact about this, Belinda?’ ‘I don’t know. You’re right, though. I’ve never felt so matter-of-fact about anything. I’ll pop to the shops later, if you like, seeing as you can’t go out any more. Anything you want me to do on your behalf, just say. I owe you heaps. Fancy a Mars bar?’ Energized by the events of the last twenty-four hours, Belinda was pushing into new frontiers of tactlessness, but couldn’t help herself. ‘This often happens to people in grief trauma,’ she puffed, having just run up and downstairs six times, for the exercise. (Linda was sitting with her head in her hands.) ‘I heard about it on Radio 4. The bereaved generate masses of energy. Divorce does it sometimes too. Divorcees—particularly the victims—become human dynamos.’ Stefan watched her in amazement. ‘You are in the pink, for sure, Belinda, even when we are taken to the cleaners,’ he remarked. (Although it pained Stefan to readopt his Swedish guise for Belinda’s sake, he did so with aplomb.) ‘We will have to get you the enormous hamster wheel, or I’m a Dutchman.’ ‘I’ve thought of something you can cremate, anyway,’ Belinda continued, redfaced, standing on her neck on the hearth rug and cycling her legs in the air. ‘For the funeral. You can cremate my book. If you pile in the research notes and the Dostoevskys, it ought to weigh quite enough to fool everybody.’ ‘Your book?’ wailed Linda. ‘Well, let’s face it. Thanks to your careless demise, I shan’t be needing it. I always think it’s spooky when books are published posthumously, don’t you?’ And

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with that she commenced a programme of rigorous Canadian Air Force exercises, with weights strapped fast to her wrists and ankles. It was while Belinda was Hoovering the hall with a feather duster between her teeth in the early afternoon that the doorbell rang. Stefan was in the attic, reorganizing it for Linda. The Johansson ménage had come to the consensus that the attic would be an ideal place for Linda to hide from her admirers during the funeral and after. Meanwhile, in advance of the dinner, she was clattering pans in the kitchen, and poking bits of dead fish in a desultory fashion. ‘Hello?’ Belinda opened the door to see Noel and two women who looked foreign and odd, like missionaries. ‘Are you collecting?’ ‘Mrs Johansson?’ said the smaller of the two women, with an accent. ‘Johnson,’ Belinda corrected. Then she thought about it, and laughed. ‘No, you’re right. Johansson. Sorry, I’ve not been myself lately. We’ve—er, we’ve had a death in the family.’ At this, the women exchanged glances. ‘Do you remember me, Belinda?’ asked Noel, warmly extending a hand to shake. ‘Is it Leon?’ ‘You do remember!’ he said, avoiding the outright lie. ‘But you’re coming tonight with Maggie, aren’t you?’ Noel smiled. ‘Mmm,’ he agreed. ‘Well, thank goodness you didn’t bring flowers,’ she said, ushering them into the living room. ‘The place is stiff with them. If you’ll pardon the expression.’ She looked at the two women expectantly, as they sat down on the sofa. She smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring fashion. What on earth were they all doing here? Birgit nudged Ingrid and indicated the moose-hat. Ingrid picked up the CD about going home to Malmö, and nodded meaningfully. They whispered briefly in Swedish. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce your friends?’ ‘Ah, yes. Of course.’ Noel took a deep breath. The outright lie could no longer be avoided. ‘Agnetha,’ he said, indicating Ingrid. ‘And Anni-Frid.’ The two women both looked up and said, ‘Hej!’ ‘Like the women in Abba?’ Belinda asked, amused. ‘That’s right.’ ‘How amazing. “Does your mother know?” Ha ha. Cup of tea?’ It was so long since Belinda had seen strangers that she was almost giddy with the novelty of it. Had strange dumpy Swedish women visited the house like this in the old days in the company of boring sports writers? She couldn’t remember. It all seemed so long ago.

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‘You’ll have to forgive me, but I feel a bit funny about Abba.’ She smiled. ‘My husband Mr Johansson used to be such a fan, you see. It means that Abba have rather painful associations for me now. I never stopped singing “Angeleyes” at one time. Is your friend all right?’ Ingrid was noticeably squirming in her seat. Evidently her identification with Agnetha in Abba did not extend far. She hadn’t even bothered to wear electric blue satin or a crocheted hat. In fact, it was clear her potent Ingridness could not be suppressed for long. ‘I’m so unhappy,’ she blurted, as Noel shot her a warning glance. She was holding Stefan’s moose-hat and caressing it. ‘Me too,’ said Belinda, brightly. ‘Cup of tea, then?’ ‘My Stefan was here! My Stefan! With this fat Belinda! I’m so unhappy! I want to kill her!’ ‘Ingrid!’ hissed Birgit. Belinda froze, with the smile still fixed to her face. Alarm bells were finally tinkling; Neville had finally grasped his trapeze and started to swing. ‘Could you wait a minute? I’ll just put the kettle on.’ But as she raced upstairs to find Stefan, she was aware of rapid, scuttling movement behind her; and by the time she reached the loft-ladder, the front door had opened and closed. Thus, before Stefan could be alerted to the presence of all three of his wives in the house at the same time, the maddest one had thankfully departed.  It was a big day for Stefan, the day of the wake. Up in the attic, alone with Belinda for the first time in months, terrified by the knowledge that Ingrid had come to his home, he broke down and told his one true wife all about his three ghastly visits to Malmö. Without breaks or sustenance, this enterprise took him well over an hour and a half. ‘Stefan, I’m so sorry!’ she cried, when it was over. ‘I mean, George, I’m so sorry!’ ‘Don’t call me that,’ he said, turning from her. ‘You said you could never love anyone called George.’ ‘Did I?’ ‘After The Importance of Being Earnest. You must remember. You said the name George had no music. And then you went upstairs.’ ‘I never stopped loving you, Stefan. I can’t bear to think what you’ve been through. On the other hand, I can’t bear to think what I’ve been through either. And, Jesus, look what Mother’s been through! Linda sorted her out rather too well, didn’t she?’ ‘Linda is not to blame. She’s a good, good person.’

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‘I know.’ ‘She just loves unconditionally. She never draws a line. She has no judgementalism.’ ‘I know. It stems from adolescent trauma. Do you want to hear something amazing? She offered to help me kill myself. I nearly took her up on it.’ ‘What a woman.’ They clung to each other, both their minds racing. Linda had caused so much appalling havoc in their lives, by being such a jolly nice person who never drew the line. ‘And now Ingrid is here,’ Belinda reminded him. Stefan groaned. ‘Was Ingrid’s companion stocky and miserable, a bit like a Smurf ?’ Belinda nodded. ‘Birgit,’ he concluded. ‘She persists in thinking Ingrid is normal.’ Suddenly, a lucid memory of the Möllevången basement overwhelmed him. In his mind’s eye, Ingrid twitched his blanket once more, while Stefan drew her attention fatally away, yelling, ‘It’s all true! I made little Stefans in London!’ This was what finally drove Ingrid to kill her husband, he remembered. It was the notion of the ‘little Stefans’ that Stefan taunted her with, that drove her to murderous frenzy. ‘We must tell Linda none of this,’ he said. ‘We’ll deal with Ingrid together, you and me.’ Belinda was so struck by the phrase ‘you and me’ that she grasped her husband’s hand and led him to the mirror. ‘Oh Belinda, don’t,’ he said, and tried to pull away. He couldn’t bear to look at himself. He’d been so selfish, so cruel. ‘No, please,’ she said. ‘Please look.’ And so they stood before it, their eyes glancing right and left compulsively, as if in the dreaming state of sleep—looking first at each other, then at the couple they made, sometimes at themselves. It was something they hadn’t done since they were first in love, gazing at each other with such seriousness in a mirror’s reflection without catching the other’s eye, without smiling. ‘You and me,’ pronounced Belinda at last, with a sigh. ‘You and me,’ Stefan repeated. ‘What a bloody shame,’ said Belinda, ‘that I’m not writing a book about all this any more.’  Tanner knew he ought to be excited by the new job Uncle Jack had given him, but as he sat at his new desk, he still wondered whether he should be wasting his

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time in this ridiculous profession. From the absurd fuss Jago Ripley had made on his dismissal, anyone would think making newspapers was a remotely important occupation. ‘You? In my job? You’re the worst journalist in the world!’ Jago had yelled, while Tanner examined his nails in silence, waiting for Jago to collect his things and vacate the room. ‘Jericho Jones has promised us a lifestyle column,’ he’d told Jago. ‘You’ve got to admit it’s an improvement. We’re replacing your terrible dead pregnant woman with an exotic superstar facing a new lease of life in sport. “Still Dunking”, I call it. The editor loves the idea. Are you going to the Telegraph?’ Jago snarled, picked up his boxes and left the office. ‘We’ll always have Sweden, Mr Ripley,’ Tanner called after him. ‘I owe you for that, don’t forget!’ At which he settled himself in his new chair and prepared for his first editorial conference as one of the most important people on the Effort. In the three months since Malmö, Tanner had mostly put the hazy events of that ghastly night behind him. So when Stefan Johansson called on his direct line, after Jago’s departure, he was quite annoyed. ‘Jago? Is that you?’ hissed Stefan. ‘Ingrid’s turned up in London! I have to speak to Leon! He’s harbouring her!’ ‘Mr Johansson? Tanner here.’ Stefan gasped and said nothing. ‘Met in Malmö,’ Tanner continued. ‘Saw you throw a blanket over that murderess. You may remember my sarong.’ Stefan remained silent. ‘Hello?’ said Tanner. ‘Mr Johansson?’ But just the muffled word ‘Shit’ could be heard, before Stefan hung up. Tanner peered at the receiver, and reluctantly made some notes. Tiresome though this whole Malmö story was, he could see it had potential. ‘Ingrid here,’ he wrote, and circled it. ‘Leon harbouring,’ he wrote alongside. He underlined ‘Shit’ three times, then set off for conference.  ‘This is going to be like a wake,’ said Jago, as he rang the Johansson doorbell at eight twenty-five that evening. Viv rolled her eyes. ‘I think technically it is a wake.’ ‘Are we fashionably late enough?’ ‘Weren’t we due at seven?’ ‘Yes.’ Viv consulted her watch. ‘An hour and twenty-five minutes ago. Then we’re just right.’

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It was a fine evening in South London, warm and mellow. Had the occasion not been so solemn, a barbecue in the Johansson back garden might have been considered. But given that the hostess had recently popped her clogs, and that the invitations said, ‘Armband optional’, a more formal style of dinner had seemed appropriate. ‘I’m dreading this,’ said Viv under her breath, as Stefan opened the door. ‘Belinda was bad enough when she was alive. Oh hi, Stefan!’ ‘Hello,’ said Stefan. ‘Come in. Jago, hej!’ ‘Hej!’ said Jago. ‘Did you hear I’d lost my job?’ As these first guests went inside, the door shutting behind them, a large bush in the front garden quivered in telltale fashion, betraying the fact that two Swedish women and a psychotherapist were hiding inadequately behind it. Midsummer was a terrible time for hiding outdoors, the threesome were discovering. Their only consolation was that at least this wasn’t Sweden, where in the month of June it never gets dark at all. ‘Lucky George! That was Lucky George! I want to kill him, too!’ exclaimed the bush now, in excited tones. ‘Shh, Ingrid,’ it also reminded itself, in a male voice. ‘Look, your friend isn’t mad, is she?’ it whispered, a bit worried. ‘Certainly not,’ it replied. ‘Did you see anything odd out there?’ asked Stefan quietly, as he accepted Jago’s bottle of wine. ‘No. Why?’ Viv had gone to find Linda. ‘Ingrid’s been here,’ Stefan whispered. He crouched to peer through the letter-box, then straightened up. ‘Linda doesn’t know.’ ‘Jesus!’ said Jago. ‘She escaped?’ ‘I’ve got a terrible feeling about tonight, Jago.’ ‘I’m not surprised. Let’s go out. In fact, let’s run away to Tashkent.’ ‘Did you see that bush move?’ asked Maggie. Half-way up the garden path, she had stopped and shuddered. Leon looked around the garden. ‘No.’ ‘I’m sure it did.’ Leon had another look, and obligingly, the bush shivered, bounced and rocked. Since Noel was physically wrestling with a highly agitated Ingrid at the time, however, the movement in the bush was relatively modest. ‘You’re right,’ said Leon. ‘Sorry.’ He approached the bush, which shook violently and commenced shouting words like ‘Bitch!’ and ‘Why, you—!’, then abruptly became still. He returned to Maggie. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked. ‘The good news.’

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‘The good news is, there’s a perfectly rational explanation. The bad news is that my brother has just punched Ingrid Johansson on the jaw, and knocked her cold. It was a right upper cut, if you’re interested.’  Looking back on it later, Stefan always regretted carrying the unconscious (and armed) Ingrid into the house and leaving her in the Johansson master bedroom with just Birgit and the assiduous Leon for company. It was such an obvious mistake if you didn’t want blood everywhere. However, persuaded by Leon, that’s exactly what he did. Leon had a soft spot for Ingrid, and wanted to protect her. Meanwhile Stefan wasn’t thinking straight, exactly. Because at the time he made that fateful decision, his primary concern was for Linda’s worrying state of mind. ‘She’s in the attic with a syringe,’ reported Viv, breathlessly. ‘She’s got a syringe, and she’s threatening to use it.’ So Stefan climbed to the attic, and sat down with Linda. Obviously he was neglecting other, noisier matters. But while downstairs Maggie shrieked, ‘You!’ at Noel in the dining room, and Jago physically slugged the despicable Tanner (‘You!’) on his arrival at the house, and Belinda and Viv hugged each other in forgiveness (‘You!’ ‘You!’) in the kitchen, and Ingrid stirred with an animal groan on the comfy double bed (‘Du?’), Stefan begged Linda not to hurt herself; not to abandon him; not to abandon Belinda. ‘You’re too close to this,’ she said, determinedly swabbing her arm. ‘You don’t understand. I’ve got to go. You’ve got to let me go. To other people it will always look as though I’ve exploited you and entrapped you, stolen your lives from you. Look how ecstatic Belinda is now I’ve stopped making her successful and popular and well paid. It’s as though I’ve released her from a hundred years’ sleep. I gave her exactly what I thought she wanted, did everything for her, and she turned out like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ ‘There’s got to be a way forward for all of us. Belinda appreciates everything you did. We both do. You’re such a good person.’ ‘But now it’s over, isn’t it?’ ‘It can’t be. What about the baby?’ ‘I know.’ Linda sighed. Tears came to her eyes as she put down the syringe. ‘This isn’t what should have happened,’ she said. ‘This isn’t how it should have turned out. I’ll get my things from our room and go.’ And those were her last words before she ran to the loft-ladder, and disappeared from view. Stefan was stunned with sadness as he heard her make her way downstairs. ‘Linda, please. I love you,’ he said to himself. ‘I love Belinda too.’ And then he remembered something rather important, concerning the master bedroom. ‘Linda! Oh, my God. Don’t go down there! Ingrid—’ he yelled.

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At which point, as Stefan always remembered it, a bloodcurdling cry interrupted him from the floor below. ‘AAAAAAghhhh!’ came the female shriek. ‘AAAAArrgh!’ it shrieked again, and then came a loud thump as a person (or persons) hit the floor. ‘My God,’ said Stefan, sinking to his knees. ‘My God. Ingrid’s got her!’ As Stefan descended the ladder at speed, the other men raced upstairs, so that all converged on the landing. It was easy to spot the cinéastes among them, incidentally: those who remembered details from Psycho took care not to place themselves at the top of the stairs. ‘Ingrid?’ said Stefan, to the closed bedroom door. ‘What have you done?’ He tried to push open the door with his foot. Either Belinda or Linda could be hurt or dead in there! Possibly both! His wives! His darling wives! But Leon stepped out, and solemnly closed the door behind him. He looked shaken. ‘Don’t go in there,’ he said, running a hand through his hair. ‘I must!’ ‘Don’t go in, Stefan. Your wife—’ Everyone drew a sharp breath and looked at Leon expectantly, rather keen for more details. Come on, Leon. Come on. Nearly all the women in the house were Stefan’s wife, in one way or another. Leon did not understand, however. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Stefan,’ he said, with a gulp. ‘I tried to stop her. But the truth is, I think your wife’s dead.’ Jago lost patience. ‘For God’s sake,’ he yelled, leaping up to seize Leon by the throat. ‘Which one?’ ‘What?’ Leon fought him off, confused. ‘Which. Fucking. Wife?’ ‘Oh. Sorry,’ said Leon. ‘Ingrid.’ At which Birgit opened the door to reveal the lifeless Ingrid on the carpet. She was wearing Stefan’s moose-hat and—strange to relate—she was smiling. Ingrid. Ingrid was dead. Stefan sank to the floor and, for the first time in his five-year ordeal, started to cry. How strange to see her there. No longer unhappy! And in fact, if there is any justice in the spiritual cosmos, already reunited in the vivisectionist quarter of paradise with her own dear Stefan, to experiment on unwilling living tissue for the rest of all eternity. ‘How did it happen?’ asked Stefan. ‘She didn’t kill herself ?’ Belinda and Linda had now arrived at the scene, and between them held him tightly. Birgit pulled a face of horror. ‘I did it. I had to do it. She tried to kill this nice man who helped her in Malmö!’ she said. ‘Yust because his nasty brother hit her on face!’ She put down the knife that she’d wrested from her friend. To her credit, she seemed pretty glum about committing murder. ‘You told me she was mad,

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but I did not believe. Everyone tells me. But she was mad, ja. I had to do it. She was mad, this Ingrid, after all.’  In the ensuing month, many of the Johanssons’ problems sorted themselves out pretty neatly. For a start, Ingrid was cremated at Belinda’s funeral, to everyone’s immense relief. Both Linda and Belinda watched from the attic as the cars drew up at the house, took the coffin and left. It was quite thrilling, in a macabre sort of way. It was also rather a privilege. Between the two of them, Belinda and Linda calculated they added up to nobody, yet all sorts of famous people came to bid them a joint farewell. It was true that Belinda no longer wanted to work on literary doubles. She’d had more than enough of all that. But while the funeral was in progress, Belinda read aloud Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Shadow’, and both Belindas enjoyed it while agreeing it was a bit simplistic. At the end of ‘The Shadow’, the poor scholar doesn’t hear the sound of the shadow’s wedding, because by then the shadow has ‘taken his life’—a nicely ambiguous phrase. Belinda said the story might have turned out better if the shadow and the scholar had become friends and enjoyed their own faux funeral together, laughing and making cups of tea. Linda said it might lack dramatic force that way. Belinda just said, ‘Mm.’ Linda, of course, could not appear at the funeral tea. So she prepared it beautifully and then retired upstairs so that Belinda could serve it, in the guise of the new cleaning lady. She took the name ‘Mrs Golyadkin’ for the occasion, and pretended to be Russian, on the grounds that if you can’t have a laugh at your own funeral, when can you have a laugh? Eavesdropping at your own funeral offers certain emotional risks, of course, but as she mingled with plates of finger food, Belinda mostly had a marvellous time, hearing herself described in glowing posthumous terms. She gave extra bits of cake to people who said nice things, and was particularly overwhelmed to meet a couple from EastEnders, who appeared to have gatecrashed. Meanwhile Stefan carried off the whole event extremely well, and looked fabulous in black. He told the Archbishop of Canterbury (another fan of ‘Up the Duff ’) that he would never grieve in a morbid way for Belinda, because in a very real sense she was still with him; he assured his guests in general that, much as they might have admired Belinda, she was in fact twice the person they knew. And then, when everyone had gone home, they sat together, all three, on the sofa and watched The Return of Martin Guerre, laughing hysterically. Stefan never mentioned Malmö again. He made a little bonfire of his moosehat and his books of English idiom, then took Belinda and Linda on a tour of Kent in the Ferrari, revisiting the scenes of his childhood. Birgit offered to nurse

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the baby when it was born, but the Johanssons declined. Somehow it did not seem entirely fitting to have her back in the house, despite the good deed she had done them. Anyone who could misjudge Ingrid so badly, or call herself Anni-Frid for the purpose of disguise when she looked like a Smurf, might be more trouble than she was worth. Besides, it was time for the Johanssons to cope alone with their domestic affairs, without outside help. Surely three jobless, officially dead people ought to be able to manage with one little baby? Especially three jobless, officially dead people whose lives could now never be extricated from one another’s, as long as they all still lived. Their friends were relatively content, too. Viv ditched the ghastly Dermot, but not before getting him to find Jago a better job. Maggie decided Stefan was a bit too weird for her tastes, removed his picture from her fairy-light frame, and settled at last for the wholehearted devotions of Leon. Her experience with Noel had taught her many things, but mainly it taught her to marvel at what a nice chap Leon was. Sometimes their divergence of interests caused a problem, as when they argued whether Zola was better known as a footballer or a novelist, and Leon got confused thinking that he did both. Or as when Maggie bought him a modern classic American novel called The Sportswriter and Leon chucked it away in disgust because it was so unclear how the protagonist filed his copy. ‘Does he have a laptop or what?’ he asked, quite reasonably. Six months into their relationship, however, Leon discovered independently that Rembrandt was a rather good painter as well as a toothpaste, which brought him closer to his beloved, in a small but important way. Professionally, things were pretty straightforward. Tanner did not prosper long at the Effort but was picked up, of course, by the Telegraph. Jago, in his new job as deputy editor of the Effort, re-employed Leon to ‘ghost’ Jericho Jones’s weekly column, which led to a commission to ghost his autobiography too. Maggie’s success in Three Sisters was marred only by the subsequent approach from the Royal Shakespeare Company—the offer of a role in The Comedy of Errors, which she was obliged to refuse on emotional grounds, because of all the twins. Meanwhile Viv started making curtains as a business, and Mrs Holdsworth (what a dark horse) wrote books. She sent a copy of the first one—I Am a Vacuum Cleaner—to her ex-employers, who were very impressed. Mrs Holdsworth turned out to have a robust style of writing and a gritty carpet’s-eye view of the world, which elicited comparisons universally with Irvine Welsh. Linda found it hard to put her feet up, so the others allowed her to do the majority of stuff around the house. As Stefan explained from his rudimentary genetic knowledge, Linda was predisposed to housework while he and Belinda were predisposed to admiring it and enjoying its benefits. Belinda finally admitted that she loathed fish, which caused less consternation than she had feared. In

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fact, the Burial of the Fish Kettle was a stupendous moment, which they decided to mark annually with songs and a maypole. It turned out that Stefan didn’t like fish much either. In Sweden, fish had been the bane of his life for twenty years. Against this background of domestic harmony, Belinda and Linda sometimes discussed doubles literature and professed themselves amazed by the amounts of contention and murder to be found there—so much mutual turfing of rivals out of the nest. So much winner-takes-it-all; so much uncomplicated ‘him or me’. ‘Written by men,’ Linda surmised, controversially. ‘They are so insecure, aren’t they? I mean, the life-or-death tussle on the loft-ladder—who needs it?’ As for Belinda, she continued to dream about the washing-machine for a while, but it was like the last few revolves of the drum after the spin has finished. Finally there was the faintest of clicks and the cycle was over, the door lock was released. Every day, she woke up in a house with Stefan and Linda—and she loved it. Her days as a Super Trouper were over. She had finally discovered the answer to the problem of work and life, which was to give up the former and share the latter with as many people as possible. Neville was back, of course, but this was a good thing. Because turning her attention fully to her furry friend, she discovered that she had in fact been pregnant since Christmas. Los Rodentos had been a cunning biological disguise for foetal gestation! Within three months of the death of Ingrid, the household welcomed identical twin boys, whom they named Benny and Björn without a moment’s hesitation. No one was more surprised than Belinda. She was astonished. All that time she’d been imagining spotlights and spangles and adoring crowds, and it was not acrobatic rats at all. It was Abba.

Making the Cat Laugh O n e Wo m a n ’ s J o u r n a l o f Single Life on the Margins




Contents




Single Bananas

493

News Stories That Captured My Imagination

515

The Single Woman Considers going Out but Doesn’t Fancy the Hassle 520 The Trials of Celibacy Explored with Surprising Frankness 546 The Single Woman Stays at Home and Goes Quietly Mad 552 The Only Event of Any Importance That Ever Happened to Me 579 Reflections on Culture Crackers Already

582

619

The Arnolds Feign Death Until the Wagners, Sensing Awkwardness, are Compelled to Leave . . .

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No Valentines from the cats again. Sometimes I wonder whether they are working as hard at this relationship as I am. Few other pets, I imagine, were lucky enough to find their Valentine’s day breakfasts laid out on heart-shaped trays, with the words ‘From Guess Who’ artfully arranged in Kitbits around the edge. But what do I get in return? Not even a single rose. Not even a ‘Charming thought, dear. Must rush.’ Just the usual unceremonious leap through the catflap; the usual glimpse of the flourished furry backside, with its ‘Eat my shorts’ connotation. Wearily I sweep up the Kitbits with a dustpan and brush, and try to remember whether King Lear was talking about pets when he coined the phrase about the serpent’s tooth. Of course, the world would be a distinctly different place if cats suddenly comprehended the concept of give and take—if every time you struggled home with a hundredweight of cat food and said accusingly, ‘This is all for you, you know,’ the kitties accordingly hung their heads and felt embarrassed. Imagine the scene on the garden wall: ‘Honestly, guys, I’d love to come out. But the old lady gave me Sheba this morning, and I kind of feel obligated to stay home.’ ‘She gave you Sheba?’ ‘Yeah. But don’t go on about it. I feel bad enough that I can never remember to wipe my feet when I come in from the garden. When I think of how much she does for me . . .’ (breaks down in sobs). Instead, one takes one’s thanks in other ways. For example, take the Valentine’s present I bought them: a new cat-nip toy, shaped like a stick of dynamite. This has gone down gratifyingly well, even though the joke misfired slightly. You see, I had fancied the idea of a cat streaking through doorways with a stick of dynamite between its jaws, looking as though it had heroically dived into a threatened mine-shaft and recovered the explosive just in time to save countless lives. In this Lassie Come Home fantasy, however, I was disappointed. Instead, cat number one reacted to the dynamite by drooling an alarming quantity of gooey stuff all over it (as though producing ectoplasm), and then hugging it to his chest and trying to kick it to death with his back paws. Yet all is not lost. If the cat chooses to reject the heroic image, I can still make the best of it. With a few subtle adjustments to my original plan, I can now play a highly amusing game with the other cat which involves shouting, ‘Quick! Take cover! Buster’s got a stick of dynamite, and we’ll all be blown sky-high!’ And I dive behind the sofa. I suppose all this gratitude stuff has been brought to mind because I recently purchased a very expensive cat-accessory, which has somehow failed to elicit huzzahs of appreciation. In fact, it has been completely cold-shouldered. Called a ‘cat’s cradle’, it is a special fleecy-covered cat-hammock which hooks on to a radiator. The cat is suspended in a cocoon of warmth. A brilliant invention, you might think. Any rational cat would jump straight into it. Too stupid to appreci-

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ate the full glory of my gift, however, my own cats sleep underneath it (as though it shelters them from rain), and I begin to lose patience. ‘Come on, kitties,’ I trilled (at first). ‘Mmmm,’ I rubbed my cheek on the fleecy stuff. ‘Isn’t this lovely? Wouldn’t this make you feel like a—well, er, like an Eastern potentate, or a genie on a magic carpet, or a very fortunate cat having a nice lie-down suspended from a radiator?’ However, I stopped this approach after a week of failure. Now I pull on my thick gardening gloves, grab a wriggling cat by the waist, and hold it firmly on its new bed for about forty-five seconds until it breaks away. I am reminded of a rather inadequate thing that men sometimes say to women, in an attempt to reassure them. The woman says, ‘I never know if you love me, Jonathan,’ and the man replies smoothly, ‘Well, I’m here, aren’t I?’ The sub-text to this corny evasion (which fools nobody) is a very interesting cheat—it suggests that, should the slightest thing be wrong with this man’s affections, he would of course push off immediately into the wintry night, rather than spend another minute compromising his integrity at the nice fireside with cups of tea. Having a cat, I find, makes you susceptible to this line of reasoning—perhaps because it is your only direct line of consolation. ‘I wonder if he loves me,’ you think occasionally (perhaps as you search the doormat in vain for Valentines with paw-prints on them). And then you gently lift the can-opener from its velvet cushion in the soundproofed kitchen, and with a loud ker-chunk-chunk a cat comes cannoning through the cat-flap, and skids backwards across the lino on its bum. And you think cheerfully, ‘Well, of course he does. I mean, he’s here, isn’t he?’  Having now worked at home for just over three weeks, I realize I have broken the longest-ever-period-in-my-life-away-from-the-office barrier, thus confirming that I am definitely not on holiday. So I felt this would be a good time to give any would-be freelancers the benefits of my experience. 1. Advantages: a) The main advantage of working at home is that you get to find out what cats really do all day. This means they can never again expect you to fall for their ‘heavens-what-a-hard-day-I’ve-had’ routine. b) Also important, you rapidly disabuse yourself of the notion that a novel waits to be written about the fascinating diurnal rhythms of a South London postal district. c) There is a lot of excitement generated by the arrival of the postman, who delivers lots of press releases and books. Sometimes he chooses not to put a package through the specially enlarged letter-box, but thoughtfully leaves a note telling

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you to trek three miles to the sorting office to pick it up. Glad of the fresh air, you give thanks for the opportunity to spend a whole morning on a fool’s errand. Luckily, the postman never delivers cheques, otherwise you would have to waste a lot of time making boring trips to the bank as well. d) Where you used to miss good bits on Start the Week because you had crashed the car into a BMW on Hyde Park Corner, now you can listen to the whole programme from underneath the duvet. Then you can hear Money Box, Morning Story and the Daily Service. A good programme to get out of bed to is The World at One. Within a week, the metaphorical lark gives up waiting for you, and rises unaccompanied. e) Where you used to do the shopping once a month, and buy 10lb bags of frozen rissoles, now you learn that you can visit the same corner-shop five times in a single day before the proprietor gets suspicious and starts following you around. 2. Disadvantages: a) Cats don’t talk very much, and if you ask one to ‘copy-taste’ a piece you have written, he will probably sit on it with his back to you. b) Whenever serious work is contemplated, the words ‘Time for a little something’ spring immediately to mind; ditto the words ‘There’s no point carrying on when you’re tired, is there?’, and ‘They can probably wait another day for this, actually.’ c) When you read your pieces in print, the key sentence has always been cut, and the best joke ruined by a misprint. But when you run along to the newsagent’s to amend all remaining copies, the shopkeeper—recognizing you from 1(e)—is unsympathetic. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a proper job?’ he says. ‘The trouble with you is you’ve too much time on your hands.’

Single Bananas




An old friend of mine, who five years ago migrated to the country with her husband to propagate children and rear a garden, recently sent me a card which I didn’t know quite how to take. ‘Wishing you all good luck’, she wrote, ‘on your chosen path.’ I sat looking at it with my fingers in my mouth. What did she mean, exactly, by this notion of the ‘chosen path’? I assumed she meant it kindly, but it made me feel suddenly exposed and distant. Hey, where did everybody go? Supposing that she imagined herself on a path radically divergent from mine, I instantly pictured myself labouring alone up a narrow, steep, dusty, brambly trail with a determined look on my face, as though illustrating a modern-day parable about the grim sacrifices of feminism. So vivid was this picture, in fact, that I could feel the stinging nettles brushing against my legs. It was awful. I felt thirsty; my head swam; the sun scorched my shoulders. Looking down, I observed my friend ambling happily in the sunshine on a broad level path with a pram and husband, while small apple-cheeked children ran off to right and left, frolicking with lambs. I would have watched for longer, but a bloke called Bunyan came along and told me to hop it. But I was definitely confused by the notion of the chosen path, and dwelt on it for days. Did I choose this, then? And if so, why couldn’t I remember doing it? Hadn’t I always thought, rather naïvely, that there was still time to make these decisions about wife-and-motherhood in the future—that the crossroads were just over the horizon? But it turns out that the last exit was miles back, and I am a person whose chosen path speaks for itself. The hardest part was realizing I can never be a teenage tennis phenomenon. How on earth did I let things drift so badly? For some reason I thought of the careers mistress at school—perhaps because she represents the single point in my life when I recognized a T-junction and made a definite choice. She wanted us all to be nurses, you see; and I refused. Brainy sixth-formers would queue at the careers office with fancy ideas about Oxford and Cambridge and archaeology, and come out again 15 seconds later, waving nursing application forms and looking baffled. ‘You have to have A-levels to be a nurse now, you know, Miss Hoity-Toity!’ she would bark after them, twitching. At my age, women are supposed to hear the loud ticking of a biological clock, but I think I must have bought the wrong battery for mine. The only time I experienced the classic symptoms was when I desperately wanted a car. It was weird. If I spotted another woman driving a Peugeot 205, I would burst into tears. In the end, friends tactfully stopped mentioning their cars in my presence (‘My Volvo did such a funny thing the other day—oh Lynne, how awful. I didn’t see you’). And

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there was that one shameful occasion when I lurked outside a supermarket halfconsidering snatching a Metro. ‘What a lovely bonnet you’ve got,’ I whispered, fingering it lightly. But then a woman shouted ‘Oi!’, so I picked up my string bag and scarpered. Now I realize that what I want is a book. So much do I want to give birth to a book that I experience ‘false alarms’—when I think I am ‘with book’, but am not really. Once a month I phone up my agent and say, ‘It’s happening!’ And she says, ‘How marvellous!’ And then I have to ring again a week later and say, ‘Bad news,’ and she says, ‘Never mind, conception is a mysterious thing.’ I suddenly realize that a book would be a comfort in my old age, and I try to ignore the argument that there are already too many books in the world competing for the available shelf-space. Mine, of course, will be a poor fatherless mite, but I shall love it all the more for that. Perhaps the image of the paths and crossroads is just the wrong one. Perhaps I did always know where I wanted to go, but just walked backwards with my eyes closed, pretending there was no act of will involved. Because I do recall from early youth that while other children pleaded with their mums for miniature bridal outfits and little dolls that went wee-wees, I was campaigning for a brickbuilt Wendy House in the garden where I could lock the door and sit at an enormous typewriter. My only imaginary friends were phantom insurance collectors, a person from Porlock and the printer’s boy. My idea of a Wendy House was a rather grandiose one, I suppose. It involved guttering and utilities and a mantelpiece where I could put the rent money, not to mention trouble with the drains. I remember when a little friend told me she had acquired a Wendy House, and I was wild with envy. But when I went to see it, it was just a canvas job with painted-on windows. Fancy telling a gullible kid that this was a Wendy House. Sometimes I wonder what happened when she eventually uncovered the deception. Probably she married somebody with a big house and had lots of kids in double-quick time, to establish a sense of security. In which case, I wish her all good luck on her chosen path.  The prevailing notion of the lone woman traveller seems to have been fixed about a century ago, and entails such heart-stopping intrepidity and pluck that there is not much in our banal modern lives to touch it. I mean, compared with the achievement of striding across the Andes armed only with a pocket bible and a big stick, the modern-day purchase of an air ticket to Los Angeles is going to look rather paltry, isn’t it? And compared with Amelia Earhart flying solo across the Atlantic in a rattling crate with nothing but a soup Thermos and a star-map, the modern woman’s stout-hearted endurance of an eleven-hour

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scheduled flight (complete with movies and drinks) is emphatically nothing to write home about. Intrepidity is relative, however. To me, the acme of being brave is catching a bus in central London after 9pm, or enduring a whole instalment of Just a Minute on Radio 4. So it was only natural that when I booked my single ticket to la before Christmas I was so transported by my own pluckiness that for a moment I thought I smelled quinine and hartshorn in the air. Sod Amelia Earhart’s soup, I thought; this feels great. How brave and adventurous I am, to travel alone! I nearly phoned up Maria Aitken to suggest she make a documentary. This was the first thing I learnt about solitary travel, by the way: that the habit of tiresome (and bogus) self-congratulation starts at the ticket desk and never wears off. ‘Hey, I made it!’ you say proudly, as you step off the plane, having done nothing more heroic during the flight than stumble to the loo a couple of times. ‘Wow, I collected my luggage from the carousel! I found my hotel! I had some M&Ms from the mini-bar! I turned on the TV and it worked!’ This exclamatory tone is a bit relentless, I’m afraid. ‘I hired a car! I looked someone up in the telephone directory! I ate a bagel in Santa Barbara!’ And so on. Travelling à deux does not encompass this splendid sense of perpetual infantile achievement; I don’t know why. Travelling à deux, in fact, is generally a much more sober and grown-up affair, with precision map-reading not only its greatest measure of success but also (alas) its highest goal. ‘Nicely map-read, dear,’ says the driver, calmly applying the handbrake. ‘Well, thanks very much. It got a bit tricky around Nuneaton, but I think I kept my head.’ ‘We didn’t get lost at all, did we?’ ‘No, we didn’t.’ The advantages to travelling alone are many, as I discovered. For one thing, you can listen to old Beach Boys hits on the car radio without your passenger huffily twiddling with FM to find something else. Secondly, you can take art galleries at your own pace (at a brisk roller-skating speed, if preferred) without feeling guilty. Thirdly, you can browse in shops without first devising an hour’s alternative entertainment for your companion (who will otherwise stand next to the door looking helpless, like a tethered puppy). And fourthly, you can choose a route for your journey without your companion suddenly spotting a scenic wiggly detour just a few miles short of your destination. The main disadvantage—as I also discovered—is that when travelling on fast roads at night it is impossible to drive and navigate at the same time. Something to do with the number of hands, I think. Consequently, on a simple trip across town to Pasadena, you can get so deeply lost on the freeway system that you think the night will swallow you up (just like poor old Amelia Earhart) and that your

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cats at home will die of broken hearts waiting for your return. Such terrors are feeble, no doubt, compared with those of the stout Victorian lady wandering lost in the deserts of Arabia, describing huge ragged circles in the shifting sands. But I can assure you that the cry ‘I don’t want to go to Glendale!’ represents the nearest I have ever got to a nervous breakdown. Perhaps map-reading really is what holidays are about—strenuously mastering streetplans, so that one can always find the route back to the bus station. I admit that maps obsess me; as a founder member of Cartomaniacs Anonymous, I resent and refute the theory that women are genetically incapable of reading maps (although I rather like the notion of dangling a copy of the London A–Z over a pregnant woman, to determine the gender of the unborn child. If the foetus shrugs and turns its back, murmuring ‘Ach, I’m sure you’ll find it,’ it is probably a boy.) So no wonder my night of terror in Los Angeles made such an impression on me: every time I braked abruptly at the sight of yet another freeway approach, all my maps slid off the passenger seat on to the floor. Moreover, when I reached inside the glove compartment for hartshorn, there was never any there. Alone and Disoriented Without a Smelling Bottle in Glendale. Perhaps I should make the call to Maria Aitken, after all.  An old chum, newly spliced, recently invited me to dinner in his new marital home. Ordinarily I would have said yes automatically, but this time I heard myself imposing conditions. ‘Is it a nice house?’ I asked. ‘Yes, very nice.’ ‘And you and your new wife are really happy there?’ ‘Yes, we are.’ ‘With a nice well-organized kitchen, and a big fireplace, and a patio for barbecues, and a little room suitable for Baby?’ ‘Yeah, sort of.’ ‘Well, in that case the answer’s no.’ There was an awkward pause. ‘Did you say no?’ ‘That’s right,’ I said briskly. ‘Not in a million years. Let’s meet at Leicester Square for a pizza or something instead. Then we can eat and talk just the same, but afterwards I can come home feeling quite all right and not mysteriously depressed because your home life is so lovely. All right?’ If he was surprised by this outburst, so was I. I had no idea I felt so strongly. All I knew was that sometimes, after a delightful evening spent with perfect hosts

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in a full, groaning family house, a single person spends the next few days dumb with misery, hating everybody, and bursting into unexpected tears during heartwarming re-runs of Flipper. I confessed my ‘Not in a million years’ speech to a friend, who said she understood, and who mentioned that at least I had been assertive without being aggressive. Which made me bloody annoyed. ‘What’s the point of that?’ I yelled. Damn. Next time, I shall shout ‘Sod your fancy house with its bloody patio and its baby room, you make me sick, you people.’ Because there are times when a sub-text simply won’t do. The alternative strategies to an outright No Thanks—though possibly better etiquette in the strict sense—are too wearisome to contemplate. For example, you can accept the invitation, and then half an hour before arrival phone up with a fabricated story about a last-minute mercy-dash (‘I’m so sorry, but if I don’t deliver this jar of rollmop herrings to the Foreign Office in the next hour, we could find ourselves at war with Finland!’). But is this less rude than explaining your true feelings? I think not. Worst of all, surely, is to agree to come, turn up punctually, make perfect-guest ‘Ooh lovely’ noises at the wallpaper, and then sever your wrist quietly in their nice big kitchen while pretending to help with the puddings. Don’t get me wrong. Things get better for single people every day. Oh yes. How cheerful to reflect, for example, that Sainsburys now sells ‘Single Bananas’ in a special bag. But we are not the norm, despite our bananas. We are seen as something akin to the rogue animals in wildlife films, the ones that are tolerated by the herd but don’t fit in, and are photographed sulking hundreds of yards off, snuffling in long white grass. When lone dolphins turn up in British harbours (clearly enjoying a walloping good time eating fresh salmon and frolicking with the boats), the British public invariably feels sorry for them, and worries about finding them a suitable mate. It is the same benevolent but mistaken instinct that makes married people invite you to their new house. What nobody appreciates, of course, is that the poor old dolphin fields invitations all day, through his ultrasonic mindwaves. ‘Come to dinner, we haven’t seen you in ages,’ he hears from a happy nuclear dolphin family five miles out to sea. ‘Bugger,’ thinks the dolphin, wishing he had remembered to switch on his answering machine. How can he say he moved five miles (and risked having to swim with New Age poets in wet-suits) just to escape all this? Treading water for a minute, he programs his super-brain to run through the available strategies, and instantly feels doubly depressed. Pizzas in Leicester Square is not a viable option for a dolphin; and the rollmop herrings routine cuts no ice whatever in a marine context. He is caught all ways actually, because he can’t be assertive or aggressive, since neither is in his nature. And he always finds Flipper depressing. What a bind. So in

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the end, he agrees to visit, swims miles, has a marvellous time, adores the kids, applauds the bold choice of murky green throughout, gets home late, and flops out exhausted with a smile on his face. And then, for about a week later, he mopes miserably in the water, and everyone says it must be because he misses the company of other dolphins. Perhaps it is a phase you go through, this ugly envy stuff. I hope so, certainly. I know one woman who is perfectly all right most of the time, but who bursts into tears every time she gets a wedding invitation, so that we have to rush out and have a pizza at Leicester Square, where we talk bravely about single bananas. Edna Ferber said that single life, like drowning, is a delightful sensation once you cease to struggle—but is this comforting, or isn’t it? The analogy isn’t bad, certainly: your whole life unfolds before your eyes, and you entertain strange dreamy consoling thoughts such as ‘I shall never have to wash my hair again, anyway.’ Meanwhile, however, you can’t help wishing that those nice married people on the bank would stop chucking you lifebelts, so that you can just get on with it.  I went to see Batman Returns last week. A man-friend had dropped the offhand remark that the Michelle Pfeiffer character had reminded him of me, so naturally I couldn’t wait to find out what he meant. After all, Michelle Pfeiffer and I are seldom mentioned in the same breath; and on the evidence of the publicity shots of Catwoman—the sexy patent leather cat-suit, the high heels, whip, and hood with little black ears—I have to admit I was chuffed and flattered. As I stood in the ticket queue at Leicester Square I preened myself by licking the back of my hand and rubbing my forehead with it. I flexed my painted claws. Meeeeow, I thought. How perceptive of this male acquaintance to realize that while I portray myself in this column as a frowzy, spinsterish stay-at-home, in reality I am a lithe, crazy, dangerous feline-type animal who prowls the moonlit rooftops after dark, purring to the sounds of the night-time city. But alas, no sooner was I embarked on my second vat of popcorn than I noticed that the Michelle Pfeiffer character in Batman Returns is a frowzy, spinsterish stay-at-home, instantly recognizable as Single Life material at its most abject and pitiable. Damn. Her name is Selina. Each evening she bursts into her apartment with a ritualistic shout of ‘Honey, I’m home!’ followed by ‘Oh I forgot, I’m not married.’ She kicks off her shoes, listens to the answering machine, pours milk for the cat, talks aimlessly to herself. Evidently it was Selina, not Catwoman, that my friend had been talking about. I put my head in my popcorn tub for a moment, and screamed with the minimum disruption. No wonder Selina escapes this paltry existence by assuming the identity of Catwoman (‘I am Catwoman, hear me roar’). It is a sensible decision. The only

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problem is that, before it can happen, she must suffer a brutal death from defenestration—which gives pause to all the would-be Catwomen in the audience who are fed up with shouting ‘Honey, I’m home’ to an empty flat. I mean, is it worth chucking yourself off the Shell building on the remote chance it might turn you into Catwoman? Well, it’s tricky. I am still weighing it up. But if it boils down to clothes, I am sunk. You see, in order to become Catwoman it is important that you can rummage in your wardrobe for an old patent leather coat; you then rip its seams and magically re-fashion it into the appropriate figure-hugging costume. Imagine your disappointment, then, if having flung yourself from a high roof (and become a glassy-eyed un-dead) you opened your closet, snapping your expectant pinking shears, to find only a brown calf-length fun-fur, with no patent leather in sight. You would have to become Teddywoman instead, and it would not be the same. ‘I am Teddywoman, hear me not make any aggressive noise,’ you would say lamely, as you sat with your arms out in front of you, unable to bend your elbows. It would be dreadful. While chaos overtook your city, you would just sit there looking stiff and fluffy and hoping that your eyeballs didn’t fall out. There would be no opportunity for Batman to fall in love with you during exciting bouts of single combat, either. At best, he might pick you up by the ear and trail you on the ground behind him. And admit it, this would make you feel quite stupid. I don’t suppose Batman’s creators needed to think very hard about the animal identity of his female counterpart. Dogwoman would not draw much male interest. Spiderwoman has been done before. Elephantwoman would look like a ripoff. And Ferretwoman is too suggestive. So Catwoman was the obvious answer. However, lots of potential kitty-joke plot-devices were disappointingly left untapped by Batman Returns. For example, just as Batman is summoned across Gotham City by a special Bat-design searchlight shone on to solid cloud, couldn’t Catwoman have been summoned from miles distant by the shaking of a little box of Miaow-mix? I liked Batman Returns. The one thing that really worried me, though, was the role of the Gotham City populace, who are required repeatedly to turn up in grey hats and coats for Yuletide speeches outside the City Hall. Each time they do this, a dastardly attack is launched against them, entailing multiple explosions, car chases, punch-ups and deaths. At one point, this passive crowd is sprayed with machine-gun fire from a trick umbrella. So why on earth do they keep turning out, these people? Imagine, if you lived in Gotham City, and somebody said ‘Are you coming to hear the new mayor address us this evening?’, wouldn’t you pause momentarily before limping off to another apocalyptic pasting? A twinge of pain from your latest shrapnel wounds would surely nudge your decision one way or the other.

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I suppose one should not be surprised. Only a city of fools relies on a man in a bat-costume to protect it from evil. But perhaps the Gothamites deliberately expose themselves to extreme danger in the hope that they will be transformed, like Michelle Pfeiffer, into a new superhuman chimera. In which case, you have to admire their pluck. The only trouble is, you can’t imagine a movie called Lemmingman, can you?  The bit that always stops me dead is where it says ‘Photo appreciated’. Up to then I am fine, almost excited. I can even entertain the pathetic notion that I am being singled out personally. ‘Intellectual Andre Agassi lookalike with steady job’ (it says) ‘seeks lonely catfixated Teddywoman for evenings of mutual squeaks. Extensive knowledge of EastEnders an advantage. My dream lady has clean TV licence, an interest in the fashion potential of household fluff, and a Jeff Bridges video collection. Please write to Box 213. Oh, and I nearly forgot. Photo appreciated.’ ‘Damn,’ I yell, and head-butt the bath-taps. Bleeding from the brow, I stab wildly at the Lonely Hearts column, speechless with frustration. There he is! Mister Dreamboat himself! But he wants a photo! And now we can never meet because I don’t have any pictures. What a personal disaster. ‘Perhaps you could send your Single Life picture?’ ventures a passing cat, sort-of telepathically. ‘Hah!’ I shout. ‘How can I send a newspaper clipping, you fur-faced poltroon! Besides, this picture gives most people the impression I am 93!’ I clamber from the bath, press a towel to my head, and go through the usual frantic motions of searching the flat for a suitable picture. But while I rifle my home with all the gusto of the professional burglar, I know there is no chance whatever of success. In the end, in desperation, I grab my passport and some pinking shears and tussle with the temptation to cut out the picture forthwith. But luckily I remember in the nick of time that a) it was taken seven years ago; and b) some of the proffered squeaking might take place abroad. Sinking on the debris, I sob quietly. If I say I always look lousy in photographs, there is one large, obvious inference which I would naturally rather not contemplate. But there is another reason, honestly, for my despondence. It is that I find it really hard to pose. In front of a camera I just smile in a ‘this is it, there’s no more’ kind of way, and trust that ‘being myself ’ will do the job. This is utterly wrongheaded, of course, because for a successful photo you must seize the moment, choose your statement, and go for it. Whereas I invariably look as though the statement I have chosen is ‘I am simple-minded. Please don’t mind me. Children are safe.’ For this reason, book jackets depress me. I am amazed by the intensely seri-

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ous faces adopted by authors on the backs of books. It is as though they have been subjected to some weird voodoo practice, where all the personality and humour has been pulled out in strings through their nostrils. Look at the pictures of the Booker shortlist people (the men, anyway) and you will see they seem to have memorized a list of permitted authorial qualities—a list that is unfortunately rather short. It goes: Brainy, Moody, Mad, Sincere, Sensitive, Anxious, Supercilious, Dangerous, Grumpy. On this list, you will observe, Harmless is notable by its absence. Evidently authors may choose three (not more) of these qualities and put them together in subtle combinations. Thus, taking a random selection from the bookshelves, one finds that the Ian McEwan of Black Dogs, say, has opted for brainy, anxious and mad; that Martin Amis, formerly brainy, supercilious and dangerous (London Fields), has now daringly regrouped as brainy, sincere and anxious (Time’s Arrow). And Nigel Williams (They Came from SW19) has achieved an amazing triple—of brainily sensitive, sincerely sensitive and sensitively grumpy. For women the range is smaller and doesn’t include Brainy. That’s just the way it is. Traditionally women could choose from Clever, Nice, Shiny, Well Made-up and Pet-owning, but usually said to hell with it and took the lot. To this list a few new elements have been added recently. For example, Jeanette Winterson (famously self-effacing author of Written on the Body) has added Challenging, Bloody-Minded and Eyes that Follow You Around the Room. Pictures of women authors sometimes have a verge-of-tears quality, reminiscent of Julia Margaret Cameron’s famous picture Despair, which was achieved by locking the juvenile sitter in a cupboard for a couple of hours beforehand. Jeanette Winterson does not look like someone recently emerged from a cupboard. She does, however, resemble a person who has just locked someone else in a cupboard, and put the key down the lav. Meanwhile, what do I do about the Andre Agassi man? If I don’t send a picture, he will smell a rat. Perhaps I should get a heap of coins and take residence in a Photo-Me booth for the afternoon, trying out statements. Think moody. Think mad. Think grumpy. But what I don’t understand is this. Given that the mad, brainy, sincere look is only a pretence, why not go for something a bit more dramatic? Such as Livid, Amnesiac, Paranoid, or Escaping from Wolves? Unfortunately I shall have to settle for Concussed by Bathroom Appliance. Which probably means that my photo won’t be appreciated very much, after all.  A man friend who lives in California recently phoned me at great expense from a Santa Barbara call-box and asked me what clothes I had on. Not having read any fashionable American novels about sex-by-phone, I found this rather unsettling.

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It came out of the blue. I mean, we observed the usual preliminary greetings, such as ‘What time is it where you are?’ and ‘Have you seen The Player yet, isn’t it great?’ But we had barely touched on the elections and the earthquake forecasts before he posed this extraordinary question about my attire, leaving me all perplexed and wrong-footed. Was this a dirty phone-call, I thought, or was he simply concerned to conjure up an innocent mental picture of his faraway pal? Should I give him the benefit of the doubt? Playing for time (and angling for clues) I asked what he was wearing, but his answer didn’t help. Evidently his outfit consisted of a T-shirt and trousers, some trainers and a beany hat. ‘Sounds very nice,’ I said non-committally, wondering whether the beany hat was a code for something. Either way, I was still completely in the dark about whether to confess to the old grey army socks and the jumbo dungarees. Fran Lebowitz once said that the telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink. Personally, I see it as a good way of talking to people without having to dress up in a high-cut Kim Basinger costume, or apologize for your paltry wardrobe of seductive gear. In the end, I decided to ignore the overtones, and acted dumb. I said that actually my clothes were so thickly matted with cat-hair and household fluff that I could no longer identify them with any confidence. A smart evasion, which seemed to do the trick, because the subject turned to the Richter scale forthwith. I was more disturbed by this conversation than it really merited, perhaps. But I hold the telephone in reverence as an instrument of pure verbal communication, and I don’t like to see it messed about. Surely this is the only form of talk in which you can convince yourself that the other person is really engaged in a flow of words entirely undistracted by the extraneous. Which is precisely why it always comes as a shock to discover that for the past ten minutes the other person has been keeping an eye on Northern Exposure, or marking exams, fitting a new fleacollar on a resistant pet, or reading a funny bit from Tristram Shandy. Saying ‘Have I caught you at a bad time?’ does not eliminate this problem, I find. YOU: Have I caught you at a bad time? THEM: No, not at all. How are things? (Tap, tap, tap.) YOU: Are you sure you’re not busy? THEM: (Tap, tap, tap.) What? YOU: Listen, I’ll phone another time. THEM: No, really. This is lovely. (Tap, tap, tap.) YOU: Look, are you typing, or something? THEM: Just the radio play. (Tap, tap, tap.) The one about existential despair. (Tap, tap, tap.) I’m doing this big speech about the black void of silence and the sensa-

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tion (tap, tap, tap) that nobody is listening, anywhere in the universe (tap, tap, tap) to anyone else. I don’t mind if you want to talk, though. (Tap, tap, tap.) It doesn’t bother me. YOU: I’m surprised you can write and talk at the same time. THEM: Perhaps you’re right. I’ll stop for a while. (Clank, clatter, tinkle.) YOU: What’s that? THEM: Nothing much. I thought I’d start dinner. The worst thing is when they don’t mention they have guests. You chatter away for twenty minutes or so, and then hear them whisper, ‘Go ahead without me. I think she just needed someone to talk to. Sorry.’ That’s the other illusion of the telephone, of course: that the other person is on their own, just as you are. There is a woman I know who answers the phone in your presence and signals at you to wait; and then she talks animatedly for thirty minutes without giving a single indication to the person on the other end that there is any reason not to. Meanwhile she pulls faces at you, mimes ‘nearly finished’ repeatedly, and makes exaggerated comic pleading gestures when you make embarrassed efforts to leave. Imagine how awkward one feels phoning her up, after witnessing all that. Perhaps I worried too much about my American friend’s innocent question. He only asked what I was wearing, after all. He didn’t ask if I was entertaining a coach party from the Midlands, or examining A-levels, or making a casserole; whereas in fact I was doing all three, as well as finishing my script for the epic Night of the Living Teddywomen and practising bird-calls. Funny he didn’t remark on the array of sound effects, really—Shsh, tick, chop, tap, cuckoo—(something like a jaunty clock repair shop in a Disney cartoon). But then perhaps he was simply transported by the unbearably erotic notion of a woman, six thousand miles away, dressed up to resemble the inside of a Hoover bag.  When you are a single person, the world is full of happy couples. That’s the idea, anyway; the tragic little myth we have all picked up from somewhere. In this version of events, life is a couples-only ceilidh in which the single person is the perpetual wallflower; she leans over the bridge in St James’s Park in her lonely anorak, crooning the plaintive country song from Starlight Express (‘I’ve been U-nc-o-u-p-l-e-d’), while happy newlyweds chuck beach-balls about, and giggle together at the ducks. This is all rubbish, of course. It rubs no salt in my wound to see people happily paired off; they could waltz around the concourse at Waterloo in their dozens, and I wouldn’t care. No, what single life means to me (strangely enough) is that I can’t stand to hear couples bickering about where to park the car; or stalking off in a huff at the supermarket. It seems terrible. The other day I saw a

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man in the street trying repeatedly to take his wife’s hand, and she kept snatching it away again. It made my blood run cold, like watching somebody kick a dog. I wonder whether people parade their marital misery because they are proud of it. At traffic lights, you can always see couples in cars staring out in different directions with their mouths set rectangular like letter-boxes, and with a small thundercloud visible above their heads. You will have noticed also how those cheerful ‘Bob and Sandy’ windscreen stickers have largely disappeared, which is something I take personal credit for. I kept knocking on the glass and saying, ‘Hey, cheer up, Bob, you’ve got Sandy,’ and ‘Cheer up, Sandy, you’ve got Bob,’ until they took the stupid things down and cut them in half. So if I tend to avoid dinner parties, it is not because I am afraid the couples will canoodle in front of me, but because the couplesome strangers Derek and Jo need only exchange a private hostile glance over the sage derby and I start to panic on their behalf. It is not happy, this Derek-and-Jo; it will split up; its Derekand-Jo kiddies will suffer. I turn into a kind of Cassandra, prophesying the sooner-or-later catastrophe of Derek-and-Jo with a forlorn certainty, usually even before they have reached the front gate and started arguing. It is a heavy burden: to see the inevitable with such clarity. ‘See the cracks!’ I moan inwardly (after some ritual ‘who’s driving?’ fracas after pudding). ‘Oh, woe! Hear the marital fabric split and rend, stitch by stitch verily from top to bottom! Weep, ye marrieds! Weep!’ It is an odd way to behave in a Crouch End dining room, but of course nobody listens anyway. Or if they do, they probably put it down to personal disappointment. This fatalism seems to be the worst aspect of being single; it gives you a cranky view of the world. You have heard of ex-hippies who advocate trepanning as the answer to everything (drill a hole in your skull to let off steam)? Well, I am quite similar, only I think everyone must tear up the marriage lines or sell the double bed, or for heaven’s sake quit moaning. As you can imagine, this makes me pretty useless as an adviser when relationships hit stormy seas, since my suggestions are always equally radical and precisely the same. ‘I think he’s seeing another woman, but I can’t believe it’s true,’ sobs a friend, desperate for support. ‘Split up,’ I advise, promptly, ‘and make sure you get the tumble drier.’ ‘I am in such turmoil,’ says another. ‘My wife wants to have a baby and the idea makes me dream about being eaten alive by a big hairy mouth with teeth in it.’ ‘Mmm,’ I say thoughtfully. ‘Have you considered going your separate ways?’ On Radio 4’s comedy news programme On the Hour the other day, I heard: ‘A palace spokesman has today confirmed that Prince Harry is to split up,’ and I automatically thought ‘Good idea; best thing’ before seeing the joke. The thing is, coupledom is a bit like childbirth; a week after it’s finished, you can’t imagine what it was like, or how you got into it. This is the gulf between sin-

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gle people and couples, and between the different bits of one’s own life. One minute you are Derek-and-Jo; the next you are Derek or Jo. And in each state you can’t imagine the other. I have spent about 80 per cent of my adult life in proper committed long-term relationships, yet at the moment all I can clearly remember is that I once startled my boyfriend by asking, out of the blue: ‘Why aren’t you a pony?’ This ‘Why don’t they split up?’ syndrome is not sour grapes, I promise. It is not even cynicism. It is just an unanswerable point of view, similar to a religious conviction. The only trouble with this particular panacea (like trepanning) is that once you have done it, you can’t do it again. Consequently its evangelists cannot follow their own advice. What do trepanners do when they are depressed? If they kept drilling holes in their heads, they would risk being mistaken for patio strawberry-planters. Similarly, once you have split up you can’t keep doing it, unless of course you are a simple organism like an amoeba. So it is quite ironic, really. Here I am, advocating the new revolutionary pluck-it-out, cut-and-run approach to personal happiness, while at home I am gradually learning how to patch things up.  One of the more difficult things to accept about being newly single is that there is no one to strike chore-bargains with. You know the sort of thing: ‘If you do the breakfast, I’ll take the bin out’; ‘I’ll get the milk, you get the papers.’ Make such fair’s-fair suggestions to a cat, I find, and it will just look preoccupied, and suddenly remember an urgent appointment outside. The beauty of efficient teamwork is that it cuts through the grease and grime of household activity with a brisk one-two, reminiscent of the old telly adverts for Flash. Wisshh, woossshh, all done. ‘You make a cup of tea, while I lie full-out on this sofa, preventing it from bucking up and killing somebody.’ Jobs that can’t be tackled simultaneously stretch out instead in long miserable single file, like prisoners on a chain-gang, and are dealt with on the weary principle of one-damn-thing-after-another. The plodding linear quality is depressing. Sometimes you forget, of course, and glance optimistically at the bin, fleetingly wondering whether someone else has taken out the rubbish. But they usually have not. The cheerful midnight pixie with bucket and mop is a sweet and potent myth, but it is cruelly misleading. Looking on the bright side, however, there is great consolation in the knowledge that the Mr Nobody who takes out the bin is also the Mr Nobody who moves things around so that you can’t find them. Take the TV remote control, for example. In my old cohabiting days, how many times did I search frantically among sofa cushions for it, knowing in my heavy heart that it was probably travelling

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anti-clockwise on the M25 by now, snug in a coat pocket on the back seat of the boyfriend’s car? Living alone, then, it is no wonder you rejoice that things remain precisely where you left them. You feel a great warmth inside on the day you realize that if you haven’t finished the marmalade, there is still some marmalade left. The only interference I have experienced since living alone was when I emerged from the bath one day to discover the word ‘trhjwqxz’ on my otherwise blank wordprocessor screen. I gulped, and stood stock still for a minute, feeling the pulse race in my neck. And then I realized that a cat had made a dash across the keyboard. I mention all this because last week I left a friend alone in my flat for a couple of hours, and when I came back I realized I could retrace virtually every moment of his stay, just by observing all the things he had moved from their usual places. The loo seat was up. A plate with toast crumbs awaited me on the drainingboard, along with a knife tinged with Marmite. A couple of inches of wine had gone from an opened bottle, and a glass with dregs in it was rolling on the livingroom floor. A book had been replaced in the wrong position on a shelf, a window opened (and not closed again), the backdoor key hidden so successfully it took me two hours to find it. I moved stealthily around the flat, feeling a bit like Sherlock Holmes on the trail of exotic cigar-ash. ‘He’s been here, too!’ I whispered excitedly. ‘See, he has moved these cassettes!’ Thank goodness I didn’t have a magnifying-glass, or I would have been down on the carpet, observing the pile for footprints. I felt proud and irritated in equal measure: proud that I can now (like Holmes himself ) detect the tiniest variation in the depth of dust on a pile of Radio Times; irritated for obvious reasons (mainly to do with washing up). But there was something rather macabre about this Do Your Own Forensics activity, and eventually I stopped thinking about it. The idea of living alone is somehow quite closely associated with the idea of dying alone, too; and I didn’t want to think about the giveaway clues packed into my own day-to-day life. ‘We found a half-eaten jar of pickled onions next to the bath. She had fed the cats but not washed the spoon. A little Post-It note was attached to the bin, with the mysterious words “I suppose it’s my turn again?” written on it in big wobbly capital letters, underlined.’ If this sounds self-pitying and morbid, it is nevertheless something that single people very often joke about; the collective single mind contains a whole subsection labelled: ‘What if I died?’ ‘Thanks for the present,’ they say, ‘but what if I died, and somebody found the room stacked to shoulder height with twenty-five years’ worth of Pet Fish Monthly?’ I remember a woman once proudly describing to me how she had rescued herself from acute self-consciousness by assembling a library of pop psychology books, with titles such as 101 Ways Not To Care What Other People Think. The effect of these books had been miraculous she said; she

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had been transformed into someone who did not give a damn. I was impressed, and asked her to check the publishing details. ‘Oh, but I threw them all out, in the end,’ she said in a lowered voice. ‘I mean, what if I died and people came in and found a load of books with titles like those?’  The day that I became single again—some time last August—I felt it was important to perform some symbolic acts. After all, I reasoned, you never know when a social anthropologist might be watching. I tried to picture what a newly single woman would be expected to do, to mark the reclaiming of the living environment after years of cohabitation. Washing the walls and beating the carpets sounded the right kind of thing—but on the other hand it also sounded a bit strenuous, and I didn’t want to alarm the cats. So perhaps, instead, the newly single woman might do a little light tidying? Form the old newspapers into distinct new piles? Pick up the dusty used tissue that she always stared at, mindlessly, through hour-long telephone conversations? This all seemed manageable, given the emotional circumstances. Oh yes, and she might ceremoniously replace the lavatory seat to its ‘down’ position, with an exaggerated flourish and a round of applause. This was ample Coming of Age in Samoa stuff for a single afternoon. But I remember that the first evening I was also moved to root through a heap of books until I found Anthony Storr’s Solitude. This was a book I had wanted to read for a very long time; and I felt I should seize the moment. I read it avidly until 9.30pm, after which I left it unopened on the coffee table for the next three months, hoping that some of its inspiring message would miraculously buoy my spirit. I don’t know why I stopped reading. People must have thought I was a real stoic, savouring a book called Solitude over such a long period. Either that, of course, or that I couldn’t read without moving my lips. Storr thinks that solitude has much to recommend it. He says it promotes creativity—making people write novels, and so forth. Look at Anita Brookner, Edward Gibbon and, er, many, many others. Interestingly, a large proportion of our philosophers turn out to have been lonely miserable gits who walked about wearing buckets on their heads. There was something wrong with the appeal of this argument, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Months later, however, I do still hold out hope that the novelwriting and world-class philosophy stage will bounce along nicely when the time is right. I have bought a few note-pads, just in case. And a cardigan. The only trouble is that at the moment I can’t seem to pass a rather more mundane stage in the experience of solitude. I can’t seem to overcome my excitement at being able (at long last) to listen to The Archers without having to do it in the shed.

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I never accepted the idea that ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’. In my own case, love invariably means never being allowed to listen to The Archers— and in fact saying ‘Oops, sorry, I’ll turn it off then, shall I?’ when discovered in the guilty act. I kept faith with The Archers during three solid years of strict prohibition, just waiting for the day when I could again turn the theme tune up to maximum volume, as a statement: ‘Yes, I love The Archers, and I’m proud.’ My fanaticism may have been forced underground, but it remained resilient, like the French Resistance. I take this as living proof that inside every cohabiting person there is a single person humming ‘Dum de dum de dum de dum’ waiting to get out. The more I think about it, the more I impress myself—the clever ways I found to mask my addiction. I remember those Sunday mornings when I would grab the car-keys at around 10.13am, saying, ‘Just popping down to Croydon for the Sunday papers, dear. I shouldn’t be more than, oooh, let’s say an hour.’ And I would dash off and sit in the car with dark glasses on, agog to the omnibus edition on the car radio. I don’t suppose the boyfriend ever suspected anything—although he did say: ‘Why are you taking a flask of cocoa?’ and ‘What’s wrong with buying them from the man on the corner?’ I expect the Archers euphoria stage was something Wittgenstein went through, too—and Edward Gibbon, I shouldn’t wonder. The other novelties certainly wore off, in time. The tidying of newspapers, for example, started to look like a mug’s game, so I ditched it. I expect I can call in a specialist with a fork-lift truck when I can’t kick a path to the window any more. For a while, too, I made a point of playing records with significant words— ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair’; also ‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John—and lectured friends on the potency of cheap music. But now the flat is sometimes eerily quiet, and I rattle around in it, like a lone Malteser in a shoebox. It is an odd thing, this single life. And Gloria Steinem’s famous feminist axiom—that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle—has been of strangely little comfort. I agree with the sentiment, but I wish she had chosen a different image. Unfortunately I find it very easy to imagine a sardine on a mountain-bike joyfully bowling along country lanes; or a tuna in a yellow jersey winning the Tour de France on the happiest day of its life.  One of the consolations of getting older is that one day you look in your address book and find you have acquired a list of specialists (hairdresser, mechanic, hypnotherapist, carpet-layer) whom you can mention in conversation and pass on to your friends. ‘Try my Ear, Nose and Throat man,’ you say, offhandedly. Or, ‘My acupuncturist knows an aromatherapist who recommends a plumber who could

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really help you with that!’ Gosh, it makes you feel sophisticated. And at the same time, of course, it helps you fill the rather big address book (with pussy-cats on) that somebody gave you for Christmas. I now have a builder, a carpenter, a gas man, and a painter and decorator. Most exciting of all, however, is the handsome ‘24-hour emergency gardener’, whose services I unfortunately rarely need. I sometimes think of him in the small hours, though, and picture him trouble-shooting in a dark garden somewhere, lashing daffs to splints in a high wind, looking Lawrentian. Should I call up with a bogus middle-of-the-night problem? ‘Thank God you’re there!’ I might say, feigning a verge-of-tears voice. ‘It’s—er, a 24-hour emergency! And here I am, clothed only in these—er, diaphanous jim-jams, unequal to the struggle with the elements!’ The only glaring hole in my list of blokes is under ‘window cleaner’, because the local chap simply refuses to clean my windows, on the grounds (I think) that I didn’t register with him in 1948. ‘Excuse me,’ I say periodically, pretending that the idea is quite a new one, and that we have never had the conversation before. ‘You wouldn’t do my windows, would you?’ He looks down at me from his position on the ladder, and just says ‘No’, but he packs the word with an impressive degree of hostility and affront. My question seems to offend him; I don’t know why. I mean, he is a window cleaner. I mention all this because it is a great advantage of the single life to be able to say ‘There is something wrong with the heating; I think I’ll get a man in,’ without having to negotiate with the boyfriend first. Boyfriends, I find, tend to reply ‘No, let me take a look, I’m sure it’s straightforward,’ and end up emptying the S-bend on to their shoes at three in the morning. However competent the boyfriend, the sight of him with his head in the gas cupboard and the sound of bang!-clink!-Oops! is enough to make my blood run cold. ‘What do you mean, Oops?’ I say, dancing about in panic. ‘Nothing.’ ‘You said Oops!’ ‘No I didn’t.’ ‘You did.’ The trouble is that you start to identify with the boyfriend’s tussle with his ego, which is getting out of hand. And strangely, no amount of hand-wringing or helpful why-don’t-you-call-it-a-day noises make his tussle any easier. ‘It’s just this last hole,’ he says grimly, after a day of constant drilling, and you peek aghast into a room filled with brick dust and a wall that has been drilled so many times it resembles pegboard. The helpful suggestion, ‘Hey, let’s forget those silly old shelves, and give the books to the Russians!’ fails to lift the gloom. Which is why I prefer the professional option. This is a simple business arrangement. If the bloke has problems with the job, his ego is his own affair. Recently, a rather lugubrious gas engineer came to remove the old pump from my central heating, and when he said ‘Oh dear, oh dear, it won’t budge an inch,’ and ‘Do you know, when you can get one side to come loose, the other side always

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sticks,’ I just said ‘Really?’ and carried on watching daytime TV. Afterwards, when he discovered his car had been towed away from outside my house, I did not identify with his wounded pride. I drove him to the car pound and told him the fine was usually about eighty quid. Left to my own resources, I admit I do sometimes ‘get a man in’ when it is not strictly necessary. I once called a heating engineer when the only problem was that I had turned the thermostat the wrong way; similarly I recently called out a bemused Zanussi man merely to clean the filter on my washing machine. A livein partner might have stopped me, perhaps; but on the other hand, I might equally have come home to find bits of washing machine all over the floor, and a scribbled note ‘Don’t use water. Have gone to Zanussi spare parts centre in Cornwall,’ while the culprit filter sat unnoticed, cocooned in soggy fluff. On acquiring a boyfriend, then, it is important to know that a chap who says enthusiastically ‘Why don’t we knock the two rooms into one?’ is not necessarily an expert with a sledgehammer. He has just always fancied the idea of knocking down a wall. A friend of mine was married to a chap possessed of this spirit of enquiry, who carried a Swiss Army penknife at all times, and would offer to make new holes in watch-straps (sometimes when you didn’t want one). At dinner parties he was noted for telling stories of fast-thinking chaps with Swiss Army penknives who had saved lives by performing emergency tracheotomies. Understandably, everybody kept quite quiet after this, and chewed very carefully. The slightest choke, and you knew he was likely to leap from his seat and cut your throat. To him, it was the ultimate Do It Yourself.  ‘You want to meet Vic,’ said Jonathan a few months ago, when I was having a therapeutic snivel one evening after a movie. ‘Why?’ I sobbed. ‘Because he’s a great bloke,’ he said, heartily. ‘Don’t be so suspicious all the time, Lynne. Loosen up. Vic is a real free spirit, with marvellous ideas, and funnily enough his last girlfriend just threw him out so he’s available. Some sort of bust-up over money, I think. Anyway, I’ll introduce you.’ ‘What does he do?’ I sniffed. ‘He’s very young at heart. Ha ha good old Vic.’ ‘What does he do, though?’ ‘Well, he’s very artistic, and he’s promised himself that if he doesn’t get into something by the time he’s forty-eight, he’ll get a proper job.’ I thought about it. The distinct odour of rat whiffled past my nostrils, unignorably. ‘Does he like cats?’ I asked at last.

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‘No, he’s allergic, I think.’ ‘Thank goodness for that, then,’ I sighed with relief. ‘I had an awful feeling for a moment that he was exactly my type.’ I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Vic is a phenomenon of our times. I used to think I was unlucky, but then I found out I was just single and averagely tolerant of failure, which made me a pushover for layabouts. It is possible that married readers are unfamiliar with the world of Vic, but each single woman discovers him for herself in a very short while. The telltale clue is when you find yourself paying for both dinners, but pretending not to notice. ‘Did I? Never mind, it’s only money. Tell me again about this project for knitting old cassette tape into lightweight blankets for the homeless, and charging them ten quid each. It sounds fascinating.’ Feminists, of course, are not supposed to admit that there is a man shortage. We have this horrible feeling that it will give ammunition to the backlash, who will jump up and down saying ‘Tee hee! Told you! Only yourselves to blame!’ But if there were a man shortage, hypothetically speaking, and it stretched out arid and flat to the far horizon, then you see that little shimmering dot in the distance? The one coming steadily towards you, like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia, getting slowly bigger and bigger and more sinister, as the only sign of available life? It’s Vic. ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, Vic,’ goes the prune-counting of the wised-up single woman each morning. ‘Rich man, poor man, Vic, beggar man, thief, Vic.’ Vic ought to be more substantially represented in this litany, really; but you get the gist. The really interesting thing, however, is not that single women are eating too many prunes. It is that Vic, like the devil, is everywhere, yet always comes as a surprise. When he’s somebody else’s Vic, you can identify him at once. Whereas when he is your own, and he is blatantly using your mains electricity to recharge his car battery again, you can’t. ‘Ooh, so when will I get to meet him?’ you say to a friend who recently went out with Vic on a first date. ‘Soon, I expect. He’s moved in.’ There is a short pause, while you tell yourself it’s none of your business. ‘Really?’ you say, non-committally. ‘It’s working out quite well, actually. I mean, being home all day he can take in the milk.’ ‘Great.’ ‘And he cooks meals and things, and above all he trusts me with his problems.’ ‘What does he do, then, exactly?’ ‘He’s such a free spirit. Ha ha good old Vic.’

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‘No, but what does he do?’ ‘He used to be a disc jockey. And he’s got so many schemes he doesn’t know where to start. He reckons he needs a mobile phone and some headed notepaper before he can really get going. But unfortunately he hasn’t got either at the moment.’ ‘He sounds—er, laid back.’ ‘Yes! Sometimes we laugh about it. I say he’s so laid back he’ll fall off and hurt himself.’ ‘Ho ho,’ you say, politely. They are not all called Vic, incidentally. It would make things too easy if they were. But I do feel it is worthwhile to list a few of the obvious warning signs, so that more women can be spared the misery of asking Vic, on some fateful day, ‘Did you only love me for my free battery-charging facilities?’ and then waiting for five agonizing minutes while he seriously weighs up the pros and cons. The term ‘free spirit’ ought to set alarm bells clanging; also Vic’s habit of abruptly crossing the road to avoid walking past his bank. Watch out, too, for his suggestion (curious for a free spirit, after all) that you take out wills in one another’s favour after only a brief acquaintance. The really clever thing about Vic is that he feels most comfortable with women who are independent, for reasons beyond the obvious. To an independent woman, you see, the notion of sponging is so unthinkable that she can’t bring herself to accuse anybody else of doing it. But the sad fact is, there are people in the world who consider themselves perfectly eligible for relationships yet whose personal motto is the same as New Hampshire’s: ‘Live Free or Die’. And unfortunately they don’t all wear it on a T-shirt.  They will sack me when they read this. But how can I keep pretending to be single when I have recently entered a rather serious relationship? Ho hum, another nice job down the drain. Of course, I didn’t mean to get into anything so heavy. In fact, I struggled quite hard against it. ‘Don’t you understand?’ I moaned, sinking dramatically to my knees, and hammering my fist on the Axminster. ‘I just can’t afford to get into this. I mean, literally. I can’t afford to get into this.’ It all started in June, when I took a few days’ holiday at a hotel on the north Norfolk coast, all by myself. I had envisioned a carefree time, joining boat-trip excursions to blustery sand-spit nesting grounds, pedalling my nice bike down poppy-lined B roads, and enjoying solitary meals in the hotel dining room with just a book for company. For of course (ha ha) I thought of it as ‘just a book’, then. ‘I’m taking Possession, by A.S. Byatt,’ I breezily informed the cats while I packed

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(hoping they would be impressed). ‘You know Possession, kitties: big one, really literary, Booker Prize-winner, everybody’s read it already, bit of a mouthful so they say.’ And I slung it in with the socks. None of us guessed what the future would hold—that after six warm days and nights of intimate contact with Possession, we would be locked in a tight stranglehold of book-and-woman relationship that would probably last for the rest of my literate life. It is peculiar. I feel as though I have been married for forty years to the same book. Possession and I are not on the same wavelength, yet somehow I can’t break free, and there is no literary equivalent to Relate. Last week, when somebody asked me to a dinner party, I said automatically: ‘Do you mind if I bring my book?’ And they said, er, no, of course not. But they didn’t anticipate the change in me. We turned up at 7.30 (Possession and I) and sat quietly in a corner; and then we left together at about 10. ‘Are you sure everything is all right?’ whispered my host in the hall, as he showed us out. And I shrugged and raised my eyes to the ceiling, as if to say: ‘What I have to put up with.’ I got in the car and put Possession on the passenger seat, and thought back to our early days at the hotel, where my fellow diners often drew attention to my book at meal times. I had thought it was funny, then, the way their friendly comments would have sounded frankly presumptuous had I been seated with a bloke instead. How would a chap react, I wondered, if strangers kept leaning over him to say to me, ‘Gosh, that’s a big one,’ and ‘But I can’t say I fancy it myself ’? Oh, what a Jezebel I used to be, when it came to books. ‘Use ’em up and cast ’em aside’ was my motto, as I notched up conquests on the bedpost, and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. I made bibliophile a dirty word. ‘Use it gently, won’t you?’ people said when they lent me books, and I laughed, callously, with a succession of ‘Heh!’ noises. Living dangerously, I defied P.J. O’Rourke’s prudent advice that you should always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. Let death surprise me in flagrante with the Jeeves Omnibus, I cared not. And now here I am, stuck in terminal monogamy with Possession, a book I shall certainly die in the middle of, because I shall never finish it. I keep reading the same bits over and over again, you see, because the story glances off my imagination without sticking. ‘Try skim-reading,’ my friends advise me, but I am not that kind of girl. I weep, I rage, I do the kneeling and hammering thing on the carpet. But the book remains calm and implacable on the coffee table, its nice blue ribbon marking my place. I complain about Possession to my mum on the phone (‘We just don’t get on, mum’), and she says loyally: ‘Why don’t you bust up, like you did with old whatsisname, Henry James, that time?’

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Sometimes, when you are unhappy in a relationship, it is good to talk about it. But it breaks your heart to think how casually it was undertaken in the first place. I mean, I only thought, ‘Better not take a funny book’ (since it sometimes disturbs people’s dinners when you suddenly bark explosively, sending bits of halfdigested bread roll across the room); and ‘I won’t take any Anita Brookner, especially not the ones about lonely old maids reading in restaurants.’ Of such chance decisions are our manacles forged. It is no good regretting it now. It is no good thinking of Dorothy Parker’s famous line, ‘This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly, it should be thrown with great force.’ I sit glumly in my living room, humming the tune to ‘A Fine Romance’ in a minor key, and guiltily running my eyes over the books pages of newspapers while pretending not to. Possession does not satisfy me: it is as simple as that. And all I can do is pace outside Waterstone’s on wet afternoons, feverishly wondering whether I dare run in, grab a copy of Madame Bovary and take it on an illicit ride in a cab.

News Stories That Captured My Imagination




I would like you to imagine the following narrative and see what is wrong with it. A woman, in Virginia, drives at top speed away from the house where she has just severed her husband’s penis. She is by nature a long-suffering person (as evidenced by her placid acceptance of her married name—Bobbitt—with all its connotations of finger puppets), but under the strain of the relationship she has finally snapped like a dry stick, and now she hares away from the grisly scene. She tosses the offending pizzle from the car window and drives on. All this may sound implausible, but in credibility terms it is easy meat compared with the next bit. For, shortly after, the police arrive, locate the member, pack it in ice and neenaw it to a hospital (doubtless singing encouraging songs to it, to keep its peck— I mean, er, to boost its morale), where it is successfully re-attached to a grateful Mr Bobbitt. Now my point is this. If you leave a trowel in the long grass next to the shed, you can’t find it, can you? If you drop a clothes-peg on the kitchen floor and it bounces sideways, it can disappear for weeks. Yet for some reason Mr Bobbitt’s severed member was found easily by the side of a busy road. Is this not suspicious? If I were Mr Bobbitt, what would really worry me right now is not the imminent outcome of the court case against Mrs Bobbitt, nor even the off-colour willy-jokes at my expense (‘It will never stand up in court,’ and so on). No, I would be thinking: do I have the right willy? What if those well-meaning state troopers, scouring the dusty roadside (‘There it is! We got it!’), actually located somebody else’s? You may not remember the old German film The Hands of Orlac, but it is relevant, I promise. The plot concerned a virtuoso pianist who by a crushing misfortune loses both his hands in a railway accident, but whose career is ostensibly saved when a scientist secretly sews on some donor hands belonging to a freshly hanged murderer, whose dexterous speciality happened to be strangling and knife-throwing. Doubtless you can see where this is leading. The post-operative pianist peers at his big mitts (‘They don’t look like mine,’ he comments, but tragically lets it pass), and then tries to practise some scales, only to find that—musically speaking—his new fingers have ‘Geest’ and ‘Fyffes’ written all over them. It is peculiar. Then one day his fiancée’s newspaper is snatched by a gust of wind, and he automatically picks up a Sabatier, yells ‘Leave this to me!’, and hurls the knife with such deadly accuracy that it nails the paper to the floor. Naturally, there is a significant pause while she looks at him, and he looks at the knife, and then they both look at his sewn-on hands, with glum expressions.

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Reports of Mr Bobbitt’s operation tell us it was only partially successful. In other words, it is not the willy that it used to be. Enough said, I think. Much attention Stateside has focused on the advisability of women taking the law into their own hands, and on the disturbing idea that here, in the Bobbitt emasculation, is the most terrifying of all female revenges. But of course it isn’t, not by a long measure. A proper job would involve detailed pre-planning, and in particular the planting of a look-alike willy on a main road (a stand-in!), possibly next to a large sign with ‘I think this is what you’re looking for, officer’ written in large letters upon it. In the sweetest of all possible revenges, Mr Bobbitt would therefore emerge from his anaesthetic and say, ‘Funny, doesn’t look like mine,’ but cast such doubt immediately from his thoughts, as impossibly far-fetched. Tattooed serial numbers would seem to be the answer, if any man is worried. But I doubt Mrs Bobbitt with her kitchen knife has started a trend, or anything. Most women are rightly repulsed by the idea of mutilation; if there is a nasty cackle of joy among certain feminists at the Bobbitt news, it’s just that there is something irresistibly hilarious at the idea of standing between a man and his willy, for however brief a span. I just hope the Hollywood Bobbitt films have thought of the Orlac angle. It would be a shame not to grab it up, rush it to the studios, and stitch it on sharpish. After all, it wouldn’t even matter if it didn’t quite fit.  ‘Bob Dylan has been spotted looking at property in Crouch End . . .’ Scene: The well-furnished drawing-room of a large house in Crouch End, north London, one afternoon in August. Birds twitter in the garden beyond; a doorbell rings; a dog barks. From the hallway, a small shriek of surprise is followed by low murmurings of welcome. The door to the drawing-room opens briefly and an estate agent is heard to say, ‘Upstairs first, I think,’ before a woman, evidently distraught, rushes in, slams the door and grabs the telephone. She dials and waits, screwing up her face and tap-dancing on the parquet in anguish and impatience. Finally her call is answered by a man with a German accent. WOMAN: Doctor Fiegelman? Thank God you’re there. It’s happening again. DR FIEGELMAN (on phone): Go on. WOMAN (with strangled cry): It’s Bob Dylan, doctor. He wants to buy the house. DR F: Mein Gott, this is serious. Are you sitting down? WOMAN: No. DR F: I think you should sit down. The woman miserably slides down the wall until she is sitting on the floor. WOMAN (whispering): Done it. DR F: Good. Now, taking your time, what exactly is it that makes you think Bob Dylan wants to buy your house in Crouch End?

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WOMAN:

The fact that he is currently upstairs with an estate agent investigating the airing cupboard! DR F: I see. And when did this start? WOMAN: The minute I opened the door. DR F: Mm. WOMAN: You’ve got to help me, doctor. DR F: And I shall. But I thought we finished with all this after Al Pacino bought that old cooker-hood you advertised in Loot? WOMAN (faintly): So did I. DR F: I mean, Elizabeth Taylor never turned up for the hairdrier, did she? WOMAN: No. Not after we worked on it for two months, five days a week, at £75 a go. DR F: And you realized, in the end, that it wasn’t Warren Beatty who bought the pram? WOMAN: It was—um, David Essex? DR F: That’s right. Not Warren Beatty, but David Essex. That’s very good. You’ve been doing the breathing exercises? WOMAN: Every day. DR F: And how big is this Bob Dylan? WOMAN: Quite small. DR F: Thank God for that, at any rate. Suddenly the door opens, and bob dylan enters the room, carrying a tape-measure and wearing a puzzled expression. The WOMAN whispers hoarsely into the phone, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and hangs up. She scrambles to her feet, looking guilty. WOMAN (nervously): Ha ha. DYLAN smiles politely, strolls to the french window, looks at the view, shrugs, mumbles something appreciative, and exits. The WOMAN points wordlessly at his departing back, and then faints on the hearth-rug. Black-out, curtain. Scene: The same, an hour later. man with briefcase, evidently returning from work, enters to find wife lying insensate on the best Persian. Thinking quickly, he hurls his briefcase at her recumbent form, and it bounces off her head. MAN: Darling, speak to me! WOMAN (rubbing her bonce, indicating the briefcase): Why did you do that? MAN: I didn’t have a glass of water. WOMAN: I see. MAN: Why are you on the carpet? Not another of your delusions, poppet? The WOMAN nods, reluctantly. MAN (sympathetically): Not Michael Jackson offering to spay the cat again? WOMAN: No. Bob Dylan, wanting to buy the house, for £310,000.

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The MAN whistles through his teeth. MAN: £310,000? Well that’s something. Good heavens, £310,000, it might almost cover the therapy. I mean, what did we get for the cooker-hood? WOMAN: Five pounds. But— MAN: I think we should go for it. The doorbell rings. The MAN prepares to answer it. He re-enters, dumbfounded, with ELIZABETH TAYLOR at his side. MISS TAYLOR (for it is she): Sorry I’m late, I’ve come to collect the hairdrier. As the curtain falls, the WOMAN collapses into her husband’s arms, and ROBERT DE NIRO enters whistling with a bucket and ladder, asking to use the tap. End.  The front-page headline of last Thursday’s East London Advertiser was rather alarming, especially for the sort of neurotic pet-owner who periodically grabs her cat by the shoulders and searches its furry, inscrutable face, saying with a choked voice, ‘You’ve got to tell me something. If I died, would you eat me?’ ‘DEAD MAN “EATEN” IN GRUESOME CAT HORROR’ screamed the headline, thereby putting an end to all speculation. Of course I hoped it was a sensational joke—along the lines of the Weekly World News: ‘Bat With Human Face Found (He’s Smart As A Whip, Says Expert)’—but I knew in my heart it was serious. Evidently, this poor chap in Shadwell died of a heart attack, and in the ensuing week his thirty cats— starving hungry, but with no money for Whiskas, and anyway congenitally hopeless with a tin-opener—perpetrated the gruesome cat horror which involved him being ‘eaten’. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Apparently he loved those cats. He thought they loved him back. So far as I could see, the only positive aspect to the story was that he was ‘eaten’ only in inverted commas. I don’t usually see the East London Advertiser, but a kind friend sent me the cutting, thinking I ought to know. Possibly she recalled that my latest effort to tighten the bond with my own cats entails entertaining them each morning with spirited impersonations of the animals they are about to eat, which suddenly smacks of insane recklessness, given the Shadwell experience. ‘Now, what have we got here?’ I say excitedly, examining the tin. They give me a weary ironical look that says, ‘Go on, surprise us.’ ‘Rabbit!’ I raise the tin-opener, and their ears prick up, so I put it down again and they scan the ceiling for flies. ‘A rabbit goes like this,’ I say, assuming the goofy-teeth thing, and waggling my hands on top of my head, in semblance of floppy ears. They look at each other in despair. ‘How’s she going to do liver, that’s what I’d like to know?’ (Incidentally, sorry to interrupt the flow, but for anyone thinking of adopting this pleasurable and essentially harmless daily routine, here are some tips. First, it is hard to imitate salmon unless you have a fairly high ceiling, for the leaping

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upstream. Kidneys and liver are indeed virtually impossible to impersonate, and should therefore be eliminated at the shopping-trolley stage. For high-class meals involving crab, one needs an energetic sideways scuttle, so clear all furniture first. The turkey impression comes to life splendidly if you can be bothered to tie empty red balloons to the sides of your head. Beef, lamb and duck are a doddle, obviously. And finally, a word of warning: if you find yourself trying to impersonate a chunk per se, you may have let things get out of hand.) Anyway, in my initial alarm at this story, I kept thinking of that famous scene in Charlie Chaplin: the snow-bound cabin, the two companions ravenous, and the fat man with the heavy eye-liner hallucinating that the little fellow is a chicken. How ghastly to think this is happening in my own home—and not just when I am selflessly attempting to enliven mealtimes with a spot of one-sided Old MacDonald charades. When they watch me trotting to the shed, those cats just see a huge tin of Whiskas on legs. When I’m asleep, they see a huge tin of Whiskas, with legs, lying on its side. But the interesting thing about the Shadwell story was the line, ‘The RSPCA had been called in, to destroy the cats.’ What? Destroyed? Why on earth would you do that? Suddenly all my sympathies swung the other way. These cats should be counselled for post-traumatic stress. It is a well-observed fact that in extremis human beings will cannibalize each other; and we don’t generally hand the bewildered survivors to a humane vet afterwards. These cats needed food, there was nothing depraved about it. Imagine you were locked in a Kellogg’s warehouse, and helped yourself to a few Rice Krispies to keep yourself alive. At the end of the week, the police burst in, and you say, ‘Thank God you’ve come, there’s not a drop of milk in this place, can you believe that?’ But they survey the scene—snap, crackle and pop all over the place—and shrink back, screaming. ‘CEREALS “EATEN” IN GRUESOME VEGETARIAN HORROR’ runs the headline in next week’s paper, and you are peremptorily taken out and shot.

The Single Woman Considers Going Out but Doesn’t Fancy the Hassle




I have been toying with an idea for a short story. It’s a variation on the film Thelma and Louise, in which a third, previously overlooked woman character (let’s call her Abigail) gets a phone call from Louise. ‘Git yer bags, honey, me and Thelma we’re headin’ fer the mountens.’ ‘Count me in,’ yells the feisty Abigail as the soundtrack swells with up-beat jive. She paints her lips, grabs a sweater, pulls on her cowgirl boots, swings through the door and then stops on the porch. Damn. The music ceases abruptly. She puts down her bag and kicks it. Damn again. What has she been thinking of ? How can she go? How can she possibly go on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure with Louise and Thelma today—when she’s already started defrosting a chicken? I intend to call the story ‘The Road More Travelled’, because I feel the majority of women will identify with Abigail the chicken lady. My sorrowful contention, in fact, is that butter it how you will, we are most of us chicken ladies—rationalizing inaction, inventing pathetic reasons not to do things. Why didn’t the chicken lady cross the road? Because she’d just done her toenails, of course. For every Thelma and Louise accelerating a big green Thunderbird into thin air above the Grand Canyon there are at least a million of us pressing our noses to wet wintry windscreens, deciding we can’t possibly take a five-minute detour on the way back from IKEA. ‘Got to get home!’ Why? ‘It’s bins night.’ The trouble with escape, I suppose, is that it must be dramatic and once-andfor-all; anything else is just holidays. For my own part, I have nothing particularly onerous at home to escape from—only newspaper deadlines, a neglected novel, an EastEnders addiction, and a punishing schedule of cats’ teatimes—yet I seem to battle constantly against powerful flight fantasies. I don’t mean drooling over economy fares to Delhi, either. I mean that regularly I drive in circles at Brighton’s orbital roundabouts, defying the lure of the home exit, and torturing myself with such exotic alternatives as ‘Worthing’ and ‘Shoreham’. Yes, yes, make the break! Turn those wheels, baby! But then I glance at the clock on the dashboard and change my mind. Drat, half-past two, it will be dark in a couple of hours. If you’re going to run away from home, it’s better to hit the road first thing in the morning with a little bag of Marmite sandwiches and a banana. So I take the Brighton turn-off with a familiar mixture of self-loathing and relief, and head back by the usual route. (Today’s unconvincing reason for not escaping: no banana.) I hope I’m not talking to myself here, by the way. Perhaps some readers never

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entertain the ‘Ordinary Woman Completely Disappears’ fantasy; never dream of wearing dark glasses at night and crashing through road-blocks on the A27 at Chichester. But surely every woman turns down small adventures in favour of urgent ironing; says ‘Can’t’ when she really means something else. Perhaps we draw the line so quickly on outlandish opportunities because we fear otherwise it may not get drawn at all. Thelma and Louise discover what they’re capable of once they’re free, and it’s pretty alarming. But back at my short story, I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know what happens to Abigail the chicken lady. In the movie, when Thelma and Louise drive at night through Monument Valley, you get that spooky old Marianne Faithfull song ‘The Eyes of Lucy Jordan’ about the woman who went bonkers because she always stayed home. ‘At the age of 37 / She realized she’d never / Drive through Paris in a sports car / With the warm wind in her hair.’ I have an idea that Abigail has no such regrets. She just continues to defrost the chicken, cooks it, suffers salmonella poisoning and dies—expiring just at the point when Thelma and Louise fly into their ravine. It’s a bit harsh, perhaps. But as Thelma and Louise showed, sometimes you have to be fairly dramatic to make a point.  In the new Penguin Book of British Comic Writing there is a short autobiographical essay by Elizabeth Bowen called ‘On Not Rising to the Occasion’. I recommend it highly, especially if your memory of childhood etiquette disasters is still so vivid it makes you feel like running to the hall and burying your face in an auntie’s funny-smelling coat. Elizabeth Bowen’s childhood was an Edwardian one, so she had proper guidance in suitable behaviour (she probably did not innocently repeat the word ‘git’ in company, as I did), but she still misjudged it sometimes in a very particular way: she ‘overshot the mark’. ‘Thank you, Mrs Robinson, so very, very much for the absolutely wonderful LOVELY party!’ she would say. ‘Well, dear,’ her hostess would reply with a frigid smile, ‘I’m afraid it was hardly so wonderful as all that.’ My own experience of childhood parties was a little different, since I felt awkward in the society of children and generally slipped out during pass-the-parcel to ask Mrs Robinson whether I could help with the washing up—which surprised her, especially if we hadn’t eaten yet. ‘No, you go and have a good time,’ she said, mystified, pushing me out of the kitchen with her leg. Thus, when it came to going-home time, I did not embarrass her with my effusions; I merely cried with relief. ‘Lynne tried to help with the washing up,’ she would inform my older sister, tapping her forehead significantly. ‘Funny,’ said my sister. ‘She doesn’t do that at home.’ But I still managed to overshoot the mark in other ways. At the age of ten, for

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example, I went to a party where a game of forfeits was played—you know, where you are given a task, and the penalty for failure is to kiss a boy. When my turn came (and I had been led back to the games room by a kind but firm Mrs Robinson, who declined my wild-eyed offer of silver—polishing) I was informed that my task was to recite a poem. A limerick would have easily sufficed. But I was nervous, and desperate not to kiss a boy, so I launched into ‘The Highwayman’, a long, galloping poem which unfortunately galloped off with me clinging on to its back, bouncing and helpless. In fact, I had got as far as ‘Tlot-tlot in the frosty silence!’ before the exasperated kids finally flung themselves bodily in front of my runaway poem, waving their arms, to make me stop. Overshooting the mark in Elizabeth Bowen’s sense is actually quite difficult these days, now that we have followed America into a more kissy-huggy way of life. Saying merely ‘Thank you for the absolutely wonderful LOVELY party!’ sounds tame, actually; it raises suspicions that you didn’t enjoy it. In 1978, when Woody Allen’s film Interiors came out, I remember that it seemed genuinely peculiar to see women greet each other with ‘Hey! You look great! Your green is perfect!’ while planting smackeroos on one another’s ear-rings. Nobody I knew behaved like that. But now I don’t know anybody who doesn’t. In fact nowadays, if someone neglects to applaud my green, I actually worry about it afterwards. But what Elizabeth Bowen’s essay brought to my mind most horribly was not the thank-you-for-having-me thing; or even the social smackeroo. What it made me think of most was Selfridges. Because one day, when I was in the basement there, I quite unwittingly overshot the mark, and I still feel embarrassed about it. It happened quite by chance; I had only popped in for some diamanté cat collars. But then I noticed this poor old bloke on a carpet-tiled plinth demonstrating a cordless travel iron, and I’m afraid it was ‘The Highwayman’ all over again. The trouble was, his little crowd was so unresponsive. ‘Now, you see this?’ he said, without much enthusiasm, producing a bone-dry knotted lump of cotton velvet. Nobody moved, or indeed acknowledged his presence, so I piped up, I couldn’t help it. ‘Gosh,’ I chuckled encouragingly, ‘I wouldn’t want to iron that!’ He gave me a look, then gravely un-knotted the velvet and flourished his little iron over it—to amazing effect. Suddenly the cloth was smooth and lovely! Again, nobody clapped, or even murmured. So I said quite loudly, ‘Well, I think that’s quite remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it. What an extraordinary device. I only came in for these cat collars and a whole new world has been revealed.’ And I got increasingly voluble, I don’t know why. ‘That’s amazing,’ I said flatly, as his crowd started to wander off. ‘Do that again. Wow, I can’t believe how those creases are coming out.’ I felt I was doing him a useful turn, although I couldn’t help noticing that by the time the demonstration ended I was the only person left. ‘Thank you,’ I said warmly, ‘that was marvellous,’ and went off to pay

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for the cat collars. And when I looked back, I noticed he was pointing me out to a sales assistant, who was patting him gently on the shoulder. Only when I got home did I realize I had overshot the mark so badly I had sounded like a ‘plant’, by which time it was too late to apologize. I often wonder how close I got, actually, to being clocked over the bonce with a miracle travel iron. It would have been such a pointless way to go. Whatever the merits of this extraordinary velvet-smoother, it was hardly so wonderful as all that.  One of the more obvious advantages of childlessness is that you never have to do the business with the school hamster. We all know the syndrome: it starts with ‘Can we have Raffles at home this weekend?’ and ends when after forty-eight hours of love and attention—feeding, watering and changing straw—the motley, beady-eyed ingrate suddenly kicks the bucket on Sunday night when all the pet shops are shut. Stiff-legged on the floor of his hutch, the hamster peers through its straw with a great eternal question in its lifeless gaze. It appears to be thinking, ‘Get out of that. You can’t, can you?’ But unfortunately single life does bring its own version of the Death of Raffles routine. Since you tend not to take holidays at peak times (such as the first week in August), you can find yourself cheerfully agreeing to be pet-servicer, plantwaterer and fish-food-sprinkler for such a large number of lucky neighbouring holiday-makers that you would certainly bend under the burden of responsibility if the weight of all the flipping door-keys didn’t stagger you first. Currently my key-ring is so heavy with other people’s Chubbs, Banhams and Ingersolls that I am permanently reminded of the great clanking whatsit dragged around by Marley’s Ghost. I am quite happy to do it; besides, they do the same for me. I am just terrified that something will die, like Raffles, and break somebody’s heart. Take the Herbs. For the past fortnight I have tended some little potted herbs, which evidently blossomed and thrived until I came along, but have subsequently withered on the stalk, and are now succumbing in heaps, like a herbaceous equivalent of the last act of Hamlet. Each time I pop my head around the door, a basil plant whispers ‘I die’ or ‘The rest is silence’ and collapses; it is ghastly. To my returning friend it will look as though Agent Orange has swept through her kitchen on a pale horse. Twice a day I creep in, ostensibly to do more hopeful watering, but mainly to confront the horror and measure the devastation. I shall never be able to look a plate of pesto in the face again. Latch-key duty is one of those rare things in life (operating the red button in a nuclear silo is another) where the sense of onerous responsibility is out of all proportion to the teensy effort required. Perhaps that’s why it worries me so much.

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Feeding fish takes precisely fifteen seconds, but the fear of forgetting such a tiny thing gives me sleepless nights. Also, I feel awkward letting myself in to someone’s house: I don’t look around, I don’t breathe, and the sound of my own voice (‘Hello fishies, ha ha, still alive?’) gives me the creeps. The whole operation being so brief and automatic, I assume at midnight I must have got it all mixed up. Perhaps I sprinkled fish-food on the curtains. Perhaps I watered the cat. Of course, some people must do it differently. Keys give them the run of the place, and they love it. They let themselves in, light a cigarette, put the kettle on, and start rummaging in your sock-drawer for interesting ticket-stubs, so that they can startle you a week later by asking ‘How was Night of the Iguana, by the way?’ Obviously this is the sort of fish-food-sprinkler to avoid, but sometimes you don’t recognize them until it is too late. Once, a friend of mine asked a chronically inquisitive chap actually to reside in her flat for a week while she took a holiday; and rashly ignored the warning signals when, immediately on hand-over, he whipped open cupboards and drawers in the manner of a professional burglar, saying, ‘Anywhere you don’t want me to look?’ and ‘Oh how very interesting. Fond of pink.’ Pretty loud warning signals, really; but she was late for a plane, so took a quick mental inventory of sexually incriminating material and decided to risk it. On holiday (with me), she fantasized (with my help) that her house-sitter was currently waltzing around the living-room dressed in her most expensive eveningfrock, boozing direct from the bottle and leafing through her teenage diaries. She never discovered whether this alarming picture had any basis in reality, but when she asked him ‘How was your stay?’ he replied, ‘Well, it did fill a few gaps.’ Having just popped out to see the herbs again, I can announce that a variegated sage has now turned peaky (‘The drink, the drink—I am poisoned’), and my sense of failure is complete. It occurs to me belatedly that the friend who cat-sits for me when I go on holiday makes a point of spending ‘quality time’ with my cats, watching their favourite snooker videos with them and shouting at The Archers in a plucky imitation of me. I should do something similar with the herbs. After all, I know that my friend listens to Radio 3 and reads the Independent. An hour each day in their company, then, with the wireless blaring, and with me pretending to read her newspaper (exclaiming ‘Swipe me, how pompous’ in an authentic Indie-reader kind of way) might set them on the road to recovery. Meanwhile I have started to wear my keys on a girdle, in the fashion of a Victorian housekeeper, shifting it from side to side on alternate days, to prevent curvature of the spine. I have always associated keys with the getting of wisdom, but since unlocking things seems to scare me so much (I lock them up again as quickly as possible) perhaps I should stick to the road of excess, instead. It is not

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much of an insight to boast of, in the end: that acting bored by the Independent might save the life of a flat-leaf parsley.  Having never given a second thought to the practice of diving into cinemas on the merest whim and spending two and a half hours in blissful solitary communion with a large screen and a sack of Opal Fruits, I was rather alarmed to discover recently that some of my friends think this marks me out as a desperate case. ‘I went to see The Fisher King on Wednesday,’ I announce cheerfully. ‘On your own?’ ‘Er, yes.’ ‘Oh dear,’ they say, and catch up my hand for a bout of sympathetic patting and smoothing. ‘I ate two boxes of Fruit Pastilles,’ I add hurriedly. ‘Boy, you should have seen my tongue afterwards!’ But they continue to shake their heads, with tears in their eyes. They think it is awful. There is a stigma attached to it, you see; an atavistic idea that a woman sitting alone in a cinema is a woman self—evidently abandoned to the black dog of depression, and therefore a proper cause for public concern. Does this attitude reflect a rather deep, dark prejudice against the idea of women enjoying their own company? It is possible. The real point is that I never, in any case, feel sorry for myself in a cinema. If you want to feel miserable, there are many more surefire ways of achieving it, after all: sit in a doorway with a homeless person; lean over a parapet on Waterloo Bridge and gaze into the mesmerically choppy waters; go and see how long Starlight Express has been running. The impulse simply to buy a ticket and sit comfortably in a dark public place of entertainment seems by comparison a whoop of life-affirming joy. What I like is the feeling of sanctuary. Hugging my possessions to my chest, sinking low in the seat, and prising great juicy wads of Opal Fruit away from my molars, I feel tremendously comforted by the reflection that I have vanished off the face of the earth; nobody has a clue where I am. The phone won’t ring; motorcycle messengers cannot pursue me. If it didn’t cost £6.50, it would be like stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia. As I huddle down, and prepare to sneer at the now excruciatingly familiar advertisements, I like to imagine that my friends are all ringing each other in panic. ‘She’s gone to earth again.’ ‘Damn.’ ‘Now there’s nothing we can do but wait.’ In old movie thrillers, of course, outlaws on the run frequently took refuge in cinemas. They would stoop as though entering church, shiftily taking aisle seats and removing their hats. They pretended to watch the picture, but kept a constant eye on the door, waiting for the inevitable pair of mackintoshed cops to appear, asking questions of the usherette. For them, the cinema was only a temporary haven; for me, it is total. While I may sometimes feel like a criminal, for instance,

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I have never yet been obliged to shoot my way out of an emergency exit after watching half a reel of the film. But what is the alternative, anyway, to going alone? It is to go with other people— and are you telling me this is preferable? How many times has one agreed, casually, ‘Hey, let’s do a movie!’ only to discover that one’s good friend Mike has never been properly cinema-trained? Me, I like to concentrate on the film; but for the universal Mike the cinema is a place where people are mysteriously quiet and sober-sided, where they have forgotten the value of voluble free-association, and need to be reminded of it. He is a restless kind of guy, and chatty. I mean, is this a funeral, or what? ‘Doesn’t that bloke remind you of Phil?’ he will chuckle loudly, briefly standing up to point at Mickey Rourke. I ignore him, of course, and bite my scarf, hoping that my explicitly hostile body language will tell him to shut up. It doesn’t. ‘Remind me to tell you later what Phil said at lunch-time,’ he adds, with an exaggerated nudge to the ribs. ‘It was such a scream.’ He then performs a nonchalant spot of overhead juggling, using a Malteser, a carton of Kia-Ora and a fully extended umbrella. On really bad days, moreover, it transpires that Mike also suffers strange lapses of concentration, rendering him incapable of following plot. ‘What happened to the blonde girl?’ he suddenly enquires, at a moment of maximum plot interest. ‘Lynne, what happened to the blonde girl?’ he repeats a little more loudly, thinking I haven’t heard. ‘She died,’ I whisper back through clenched teeth. ‘Really? When?’ he asks. At which point I start to look round for the manager. I suppose the tragic image of the single person in the cinema derives from the idea that they can’t have any friends. Perhaps it is time for this assumption to be overturned—since it is more likely, in my opinion, that the lone cinema-goer is simply attempting to preserve the few friendships she has still got left. Personally I associate the plush seat and the bag of chews with nothing other than pleasure and freedom. For me, the really tragic aspect of cinema-going is to hear people say, ‘Oh yes, I wanted to see JFK, but unfortunately I couldn’t persuade anyone to come with me.’ That’s so sad.  I have started getting a bit peculiar in Sainsbury’s. I knew it would happen eventually—that I would stop being Little Miss Reasonable at the check-out, and start getting verbal. ‘There’s no point, you know,’ I say, waving my hand in the face of the woman on the till. ‘There’s no point checking these things through so fast, because I can’t possibly pack them at the same rate.’ She nods, but takes no notice; just sets her jaw and carries on rolling tins down the conveyor belt three times a

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second, in a manner reminiscent of a thousand infernal-machine scenes from Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati movies. I always buy the same things in supermarkets: multiple tins of cat-food, multiple pots of hummus, multiple rolls of swing-bin liners. Take my advice: if you are the teensiest bit neurotic—can’t cope with all the choices in the modern world, check all the taps twelve times before answering the phone, won’t speak at dinner-parties until someone has said the word ‘badger’—then shopping feels much less dangerous if you don’t give any consideration to what you actually want to buy. Cat-food, hummus, bin-liners; cat-food, hummus, bin-liners. I exercise an astounding degree of self-control in this respect, though on every trip I also give myself seven minutes for open-mouthed wonder, as I stand in front of the biscuit displays, eyes all aglow, and look at the lovely, lovely things that can be made by simply rubbing together fat, sugar and flour. When my seven minutes are over, I ritually push my trolley past temptation, and have a little sob by the free-range eggs. The reason I’m going into all this is that I recently had a bit of a shock in the bin-liner department. There I was, feeling safe inside my routine, repeating to myself, ‘Cat-food—yes; hummus—yes; bin-liners . . .’ and scooping an armful of boxes into my trolley, when I noticed a little yellow ‘flash’ had appeared on the side of the box. ‘NEW,’ it said: ‘MULTI-PURPOSE.’ In my confusion I dropped the lot. Staggering slightly, I reached out for support, and knocked some roasting-bags and double-length cling-film onto the floor as well. I tried to calm down by humming Lillibullero and sucking a tranquillizer, but it did no good. Should I climb up on top of the fitment and signal for assistance? What did it mean, ‘MultiPurpose’? What possible other purpose can there be for a bin-liner than to line bins? Had Sainsbury’s brought out a ‘Josceline Dimbleby Book of Bin-Liner Cookery’? I don’t like it; I don’t like it at all. I always thought I knew where I was, knew what I was getting. Of course, I have used some of these so-called multi-purpose bin-liners. And of course they work just as well as the old Uni-Purpose kind ever did. But a sense of certainty has been lost now, that can never be restored. I daren’t go back, not now. What if they’ve printed ‘Not for external use’ on the hummus, or ‘Non-drip’ on the Whiskas?  It’s official. It was in the paper on Saturday. The reason women make good spooks (or employees of the secret service) is that they can deflect awkward personal questions, especially over dinner. ‘So what do you do?’ they are asked, routinely. And instead of excitedly blurting out the latest list of arms-deal

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catastrophes, they cleverly feign a suppressed yawn and say, ‘Me? Oh, nothing. I have a boring desk job at the Ministry of Defence. Paperclips, that kind of thing. Dust, Turkish carpet, Cup-a-Soups, nine to five, calligraphy, tea-trolley, cheese rolls, Argos catalogue, Club biscuits.’ These MI5 women are masterly at it, obviously. I imagine them left out of the general conversation, eating, listening. And whenever the talk threatens to veer back in their direction, they just mutter ‘paperclips’ again, and it’s gone. Men, on the other hand, tend to give the game away. Asked the same question, a man will evidently suck his teeth thoughtfully, smile into the middle distance, and then hoarsely whisper, ‘Ooh, sorry, I’d love to, but classified, careless talk, Brixton, Circus, say no more’—at which everyone promptly stops talking or eating, and someone drops a fork. In the ensuing silence, he pretends to change the subject. ‘Did you say you’d been to Prague for a holiday? Funny, I was once shot in the leg in Pr—.’ He stops, looks around. ‘Whoops, ha ha,’ he jokes, ‘No, but really let’s talk about you and your allotment, I’m sure it’s much more interesting.’ On Saturday, when this intriguing gender fact was first revealed, I have to admit I was confused. I always thought it was the other way around—that women talked openly (in my own case, compulsively) about their jobs, and that men did not. Well-mannered men, in particular, often refuse so obstinately to divulge their occupations—either they consider it impolite to boast, or they think you should know without asking—that you can sit next to a chap for hours, wildly demonstrating the special effects in Jurassic Park (complete with roars, thumps, tussles and realistic squirts of ketchup), before finally discovering that he’s controller of Radio 3, or married to the Princess Royal. Sometimes you don’t find out until it’s too late to apologize. ‘That was the Primate of All England,’ someone will say to you at a party, nodding at your new friend as he wanders off, scratching his head. Numbly, you sink to the floor with your fingers in your mouth. You just asked him to take you dancing. But what impresses me most is the thought of those high-powered women heroically pretending they wear slippers in the office. How do they cope with the follow-up questions? Or is it really true that if you say the words ‘boring desk job’, people will enquire no further? I remember an alarming moment from an innocent girls’ night out in Twickenham, when I came out of the Ladies to rejoin the little group of rugby fans we’d met (what larks!), and bumped into my friend, menacingly lying in wait. ‘Stop saying you’re a journalist,’ she hissed, with the veins curiously sticking out on her neck. ‘Why?’ I said, jumping backwards. ‘Because it scares off the blokes. Tell them you’ve got a boring desk job.’ I was stunned. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘What if they ask a supplementary question?’ She glared. She fumed. She danced on the spot.

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‘And trust you to use the word supplementary!’ she barked, before barging through the swing door with a mighty shove from the shoulder. I realize I could never be a spook. Not just because I would betray secret operations by careless dinner-party chat, but because I consider the invention of alter egos a dangerous practice. Surely it’s hard enough being one person, without deliberately trying to be two. In order to keep saying ‘boring desk job, oh yes, boring desk job’, you would have to believe in it so completely—the Tube journey, the green triplicate forms—that surely one morning you would wake up and find it true, like something blackly paranoid out of Kafka, even down to the Club biscuits. The horror! ‘Help me, someone, I worked for MI5 , and now I have a boring desk job!’ you would yell, but no one would listen. ‘But you always had a boring desk job,’ they would say, with narrowed eyes, like conspirators. ‘Or that’s what you always said.’  The demise of the Protein Man of Oxford Street last week, at the age of seventyeight, came as a bit of a shock. Not that I knew him, of course; it’s just that in common with millions of Londoners I felt I had a vague idea what he had on his mind—mainly because it was written on a placard in big white letters immediately above his head. I apologize if you don’t remember him. How one hates, in a national newspaper, to strike the pose of the metropolitan bore (which reminds me, aren’t they rude in Groucho’s?); yet the ever-present solitary figure in the jostling shopping crowd with his flat cap and specs, his placard, and his deeply peculiar message—LESS PASSION FROM LESS PROTEIN—so far resembles a universal archetype that, as a Londoner, I can hardly believe Stanley Owen-Green just wore a groove in the dusty pavements of Oxford Street for twenty-five years, with outings to Putney Bridge for the Boat Race. Perhaps it helps to say that, like Zelig in the Woody Allen film, the Protein Man was present in every black-and-white picture of London crowds that one has ever seen. The point about Mr Green was that he was against protein. I emphasize this because although he devoted the last third of his life to carrying a placard above his head, and possibly sleeping in an extra-long bed to accommodate it at nights, he did not make it easy for the average foreign shopper, stooped under the weight of cheesy meaty nutty food purchases from Selfridges, to understand immediately what he meant. At the same time as spreading dietary awareness Mr Green also engendered considerable semantic unease, because for twenty-five years one could frown at his splendidly unpunctuated message, ‘Less fish meat bird cheese egg peas beans nuts and sitting’, and somehow miss its drift. ‘What exactly is your beef?’ one might have asked him, hilariously, if one had only thought of it.

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When Stanley Owen-Green started this anti-protein campaign in 1968, of course, food was not generally accepted as the enemy within, the way it is now. Devil-may-care people did not quip: ‘I never met a carbohydrate I didn’t like,’ mainly because nobody would tumble the joke. In those crazy far-off days of prelapsarian ingestion, we bunged all sorts of things in our cake-holes and simply hoped for the best. The idea of ‘Protein Wisdom’ in the late Sixties was revolutionary, therefore. Mr Green sincerely believed that too much ‘married love’ could kill, and that the way to banish its excesses was to reduce one’s intake of fish meat bird. One only hopes he never popped into a picture palace to see Marco Ferreri’s film Blow-Out, in the mistaken belief that it concerned the perils of Formula One. But the trouble was, his placard was double-edged, both literally and metaphorically, and open to misuse. Ironically, those who positively embraced the notion of swooning unto easeful death sated with lust (not to mention nuts peas beans) knew from Mr Green’s placard precisely which passion-packed items to add to their shopping lists. What impressed everyone so much about Mr Green’s campaign, however, was not its faultless logic but its sheer constancy. After twenty years or so, a chap with a popular message might be expected to paint a new sign, take a new angle, jazz up the slogan; but Mr Green seems never to have done so. ‘Less passion from less protein’ was good enough to begin with, and good enough to end with, too. Early reports suggest that the Museum of London will display Mr Green’s placard, which is absolutely right and proper. By rights, I feel, he ought also to be inserted retrospectively into the works of Dickens. Thus, the last tremendous bustling-street sentence of Little Dorrit would read: They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and in shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, and that man, you know, with the ‘Less Passion from Less Protein’ sign above his head, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.

 Fish have rights, you know. I learned this important piece of information last week as I was innocently travelling up an escalator at Tottenham Court Road, where aquatic matters are arguably furthest from a person’s mind. But there it was, one of those little hand-written labels that fanatics attach to the posters; stating it quite plainly, ‘Fish Have Rights’. Of course I laughed out loud—rights to what? fair trial? freedom of expression? abortion on demand?—but then stopped, confused. I mean, perhaps ‘Fish Have Rights’ was a joke. Or maybe it

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was the name of a really famous pop group. Worse, perhaps it signified nothing at all, but had been written by an unreconstructed surrealist, to see whether the word ‘fish’ in peculiar contexts still made people feel vertiginous and paranoid. In which case, I reflected (as I grasped the moving handrail for support), the experiment appeared to be working. But it’s all true. ‘Fish Have Rights’ is the latest thing in the anti-bloodsports campaign, and the British angler is the object not only of moral opprobrium but of sabotage attack. Really. There was a piece in the Sunday Times. Robert Redford has attached a disclaimer to his fly-fishing movie, A River Runs Through It, promising that no little fishies were killed, harmed, or even mildly disgruntled in the making of it, yet the 300-strong Campaign for the Abolition of Angling is still thinking to picket the cinemas (‘This film degrades fish,’ I suppose). I had no idea of all this strength of feeling. Sitting quietly on a river bank under a big umbrella, thoughtfully masticating a cheese roll, our angler looks up in surprise to see a fully rubberized frogman advancing from the water, yelling that he is barbaric. Talk about surreal. What a way to find out that the first right of fish is the right to representation. Personally, I could never love a fish. It is something to do with their short memories. Call me anthropocentric, but I refuse to lavish affection on a creature that, every few seconds, can’t remember where it’s seen you before. All aquarium-owners will gladly tell you that the extremely short memory-span of the fish is its great salvation in captivity, because while it endlessly circles its tank it supposedly thinks, ‘Well, this is interesting; mm, this is interesting; gosh, this is interesting; corks, this is interesting.’ But to me, that retention problem is a stumbling block to sympathy, and I doubt I shall ever march on Parliament with our amnesiac aquatic friends. ‘What do we want?’ we humans would shout. And the fish would give us that blank panicky look, as if to say, ‘How do you mean?’ On the other hand, I do agree that it is odd to call angling a sport, when there is obviously never the slightest possibility that the trout will win. The great outdoors. Man against fish. Well, you have to admit that the contest is unequal. Moreover, the idea that a fish can outwit its predator (‘Mister Carp was too clever for me today’) is not much of a face-saver, in my opinion, and I am always surprised when people resort to it. But what really astounds me in this ‘Fish Have Rights’ business is that any sane person, looking around at the world’s current brutalities, would put angling at the top of their activist agenda. Presumably they watch the news from Bosnia with their mouths open and their eyes all glassy, making little occasional ‘Pup!’ noises with their lips. What it really boils down to, however, is that I just can’t imagine the emotional dynamic involved in wanting to sabotage an angler. How do they get their dander up (especially once they’re encased in a wet-suit)? Whereas the fox-hunt seems to

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have been designed in every detail to invite aggressive response (the horn! the horn!), I don’t see how anyone could work himself into a lather about a bloke with a flask of tea in a fine drizzle being willingly outsmarted by a fish. It doesn’t add up. It’s like attacking a person for quietly reading a magazine. ‘Look at him doing that! Ooh, that really makes me mad!’ The drizzle scenario is like a red rag to a bull, apparently. Which is strange, of course, because in terms of unacceptable bloodsports, a red rag to a bull is really nothing like this at all.  Attempting to cross a tricky road junction in south London recently, I was very nearly struck down by a speeding van. This is the sort of thing that makes me rather angry; in fact, had I not been carrying two heavily occupied cat-baskets at the time (one in each hand), I would have taken great pleasure in thumping the side of the van as it passed (sometimes the BANG resounds wonderfully). I still had the option, of course, of hurling a retaliatory cat-basket down the road after it, but luckily the thought did not occur to me until later. So, as I stood helpless on the tarmac, with the smouldering tyre-tracks running just inches from my feet, all I could do was squint at the receding vehicle in search of an identifying clue. And I got one. On the back of the van were two words I shall never forget: ‘Bengal’ was one, and ‘Prawns’ was the other. As I sat in the vet’s waiting-room and attempted unsuccessfully to comfort my shuddering cats by poking at them through the wire mesh of their baskets, it seemed to me that I had had a lucky escape. Nobody wants to be killed by a van; but it would be a great deal more irritating to be killed by a van with ‘Bengal Prawns’ written on it. ‘How did she die?’ people would ask. ‘I think it was something to do with prawns.’ ‘But she never liked prawns.’ ‘I know.’ I couldn’t help remembering that when Chekhov’s body was returned to Moscow for burial, it was in a cart marked ‘Fresh Oysters’, but this inconsequential fact did nothing to lift my spirits, so I jiggled the cats for a bit and then hummed them a comic song until somebody asked me to stop. I think about death sometimes. Analytically, of course. Recently, for example, I got together with a depressed friend, and we discussed—over a bottle of crème de menthe and a family bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken—our views on suicide. It was jolly interesting. It turned out that our ideas were completely different, and that philosophers ought to have been brought in by the coach-load just to listen to us because what we said was so bloody profound. Her view, you see, was that whereas she often felt like killing herself, she didn’t actually want to die. And I

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said, well that was so, so, amazingly funny, because whereas I often felt that I wanted to die, I didn’t actually want to kill myself. We felt so proud of this extraordinary paradox that we treated ourselves to a large bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream. Perhaps the ‘Bengal Prawns’ thing was a message; a presentiment. But what could it mean? Don’t mess with prawns? One day you will die by prawns? You have taken the name of prawns in vain? I have no idea. But it turned out to be something of an epiphany, in any case; because, strangely enough, it has given me the will to carry on. No bloody prawn, I decided, is going to get the better of me.  Last autumn an Oxford man was prosecuted for strangling next door’s parrot. You may remember the item in the news. The offending bird lived in a cage in the garden, the man had recorded piercing noises from it (up to 90 decibels), and finally it drove him berserk. It was a dramatic story, really, like something from a crack-up movie starring Michael Douglas. Man in specs yells, ‘That’s it! That’s done it,’ breaks down fence, wrestles with door of cage; parrot backs away uncertainly, squawking. Music soars; feathers flurry; shadows struggle; and a bird ladder is kicked over in the fight. The music drops to a low pulse, signifying that the grisly deed is done. The man falls back, stunned, stares at palms of hands. Then silence. The camera pans: empty perch, rocking swing, silver bell, mirror, scattered Trill, cuttlefish, end. That’s how I saw it, anyway. Here was a man pushed beyond endurance by the constant shrieks of a noisy bird (trained by its owners to squawk ‘Mark’, the strangler’s name). And although I can’t remember if he paid a terrible penalty for his crime, what I do remember is empathizing strongly with his frustrations, and thinking that the urge to strangle next door’s parrot is probably one of the most passionate feelings shared by the silent outraged majority in this inwardly seething, overcrowded and latently violent country. Naked and raw, it is, the common urge to break the windscreen of a car whose alarm has been wah-wahing all night; to firebomb a house where a party never stops. Thank God they don’t let us have guns. And now we have the case of Diane Welfare, fined £12,500 last week for broadcasting Radio 1 to her neighbours, amid general cheers that something is finally being done. Hurrah, hurrah. If the court had also burst through the door shouting, ‘That’s it! That’s done it!’ and strangled the stereo or drowned it in the bath, I think I would be literally singing with joy. I don’t care that Miss Welfare can’t pay the fine. I don’t even care that she is a teenage mother with a rotten life. When someone blasts noise at their neighbours, it is selfish and aggressive, and it drives you wild. It gets in your face. Nowadays when new neighbours move in

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downstairs from me, I cut the usual cheery preliminaries and just demand straight off to see the size of their speakers. Anything larger than a cornflake packet and my life is ruined. I will have to write in restaurants and sleep in the car. A man next door to my mother drilled and hammered for two solid years, just beyond the four-inch dividing wall. ‘Evidently he’s fitting [WAR OOOUM, WAR OOOUM] tongue-and-groove pine panelling [whack, whack, whack] all round the living-room,’ yelled my parents, grown pale and jumpy within a fortnight. Six months later, he was still at it. My parents went for walks, turned up the volume on the telly, and never complained because basically they were scared. Meanwhile, by their calculations, the driller ought to have finished going once round the room, so was presumably going round again. As the months turned to years and he didn’t stop, we started to shake our heads and speculate. Either this man was a lunatic, or he had accidentally panelled across the doorways, and was now trapped for ever, drilling and hammering and adding planks, in an evershrinking upright coffin of his own construction. This latter hypothesis pleased us considerably, as it suggested the exercise was finite. Years in the future, we decided, he would be discovered by archaeologists and transferred to a museum still in his six-foot-thick pine box, perfectly preserved in a hammering position, with nails between his teeth. You notice how neighbours of serial killers always gasp and shake their heads, ‘But he was so quiet.’ Too little is made of this insight, in my opinion; the point is missed. ‘We never heard a peep.’ ‘We hardly knew he was there’—these are excellent character references, reasons for praying please, please give me a quiet psychopath next time. After all, neighbours come in just two varieties: those that are no trouble at all, and those that drive you bonkers because they are insomniac rap fans with speakers the size of stationery cupboards. Given the choice between Denis Nielsen and a rap fan as the person upstairs, you would certainly think twice before complaining about the drains.  I saw a woman tackled by a security man in a high street the other day. To be more precise, I heard her. There was a scuffle and a slap-bang as she hit the road, and then a scream, ‘I’m so sorry! Please, I’m so sorry!’—at which point I looked around to see her, young and well dressed, bundled back into Marks & Spencer by a phalanx of strong arms attached to grim faces. The scene was electric—the culprit manhandled to her feet; the shocked onlookers; a plainclothes store manager barking ‘Don’t hurt her’—and was over in seconds. A routine apprehension of a shop-lifter, presumably, but it made all the hair on my arms stand on end. It was that shout of ‘I’m so sorry!’ that did it. ‘Not much point being sorry,’ I heard someone say, as the woman disappeared. Which seemed a bit hard, to me.

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The thing is, people apologize a lot less than they ought to. It is as though saying sorry would cost them some vital bodily fluid; so they step on your toes and then glare at you instead. ‘Your ornament got broken,’ said the decorator the other week, matter-of-factly. He had been banging on a wall, you see, and the vibration had knocked the ornament into the bath, where it shattered. But although the word ‘sorry’ was definitely in the room, I was evidently the only person aware of it. I mournfully poked through the shards of porcelain, and stuck out my bottom lip. ‘I was very fond of that,’ I said. ‘Were you?’ he said in an arch sort of way, as though perhaps I shouldn’t have been. When you’ve got a name like Truss you just learn to apologize early on. I don’t know. I’m sorry. But where was I, on that all-important first day at school, when everybody was told, ‘And remember, kiddies: never apologize, because if you say you are sorry you accept personal culpability and can be sued for millions and millions of pounds’? Possibly I had stopped to apologize to someone. And then, when I sidled in, clutching my new leather satchel and saying ‘Sorry I’m late’, everyone marked me out as a muggins, for life. Of course, motor insurance policies demand that we don’t say sorry at the scene of accident, but I don’t see why this should be taken as a rule of life. In any case, the insurance people don’t tell us what to say instead of ‘Sorry’, if you are one of those sad specimens of humanity to whom the word comes naturally. Imagine you are negotiating Hyde Park Corner and you run into the car in front, all your fault, no doubt about it. Do you (as I did) forget all about the liability stuff, get out of the car and dance on the tarmac, flapping your hands and singing ‘sorry-sorrysorry-sorry’ (to the amusement of the other driver, whose car is unscathed). Or do you take a deep breath and say ‘Silly place to put a roundabout’? I expect you are wondering what all this has to do with ‘single life’. Me too. Except that I do seem to meet an increasing number of men who don’t apologize, and I feel better off without them. Erich Segal never wrote a bestseller about it, but being single means never having to hear someone not say they are sorry. Which is nice. Perhaps my expectations are absurdly high, I don’t know. But I used to have long-into-the-night debates with one chap, who staunchly upheld that if he did something to upset me unintentionally (lose my camera, for example) then apology was not appropriate. ‘I was tired,’ was the nearest thing I got to an apology. Once, when he was an hour late meeting me (and I was worried), he said merely, ‘I washed my jacket, and had to wait for it to dry.’ When someone says this to you, it is not only the word ‘sorry’ that hangs about in the atmosphere, crackling and sending off blue sparks. Unresolved aggression bounces off the walls and carpet in the shape of goats and monkeys. Frustrated to the point of tears, I would sometimes argue that the great merit of apologizing is that the apology can be accepted, and the

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whole thing forgotten. Somehow it is hard to accept ‘I washed my jacket, and had to wait for it to dry’ with any show of grace. And as you may see, I still have not forgotten it. The only time you see public apology these days is in newspapers, when the threat of litigation (or the award of huge damages) forces them to say sorry—like small boys frog-marched to a neighbour’s house and made to apologize for breaking a window. ‘Sorry,’ they mumble. ‘Louder, please, and say it nicely.’ ‘Sorry.’ And you know they are really all pinched up inside about having to do it. No politician will ever apologize to the homeless or to other victims of the recession, because apology is perceived to have an exclusive white-flag function—it means eat dirt, take the blame and be sued for millions and millions of pounds. Whereas I have always taken apology to signify something else—an acknowledgement that, even unintentionally, you have caused somebody hurt. It is about them, not you. The woman who shouted ‘I’m so sorry!’ outside Marks & Spencer obviously had something to be sorry about, but I admire her nevertheless, because she might equally have shouted ‘Fancy leaving all this stuff lying about, it’s asking for trouble!’ or ‘I am postnatally depressed!’ instead. If everyone took the line that either a) I meant to do it so I am not sorry, or b) I didn’t mean to do it, so why the hell should I be sorry, the world will surely be a sorrier place.  Every year at about this time, I decide to enrol for a car maintenance evening class. No more will I be treated like a mug by unscrupulous garages; no more will I shrug and whimper—waving my arms vaguely in the direction of the bonnet— when someone asks if I have checked the oil. I will put my hair in a turban, talk confidently of nuts, and wipe my hands on a greasy rag. So I buy my Floodlight adult education classes book and, grim-faced with determination, circle those dark oily satanic car maintenance courses. But then something goes wrong. I notice a flamenco class that’s nearer home, or conversational Italian, or pastry cooking, and before you can say brakepads I have run smack into the crash barrier of my infirm purpose. I mean, why fiddle with carburettors when you can make choux buns? Why probe a Fiat when you can pop along to the factory in Milan and say, quite casually: ‘Piove da ieri sera’ (‘It has been raining since yesterday evening’)? You can see the dilemma. If you took the flamenco, moreover, at least next time you had a dishonest mechanic to deal with, you could stamp your foot and flounce off with style. I was reminded of all this by the new Which? report on MOT testing. Evidently the Which? team bought six crummy second-hand cars, all of them worthy of a fail, and submitted them for tests with six garages each. The results were remi-

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niscent of the infinite number of monkeys—out of thirty-six tries, one got it right, but only by the law of probability. Most of the garages missed failure points; they also (as you might have guessed) failed things that were perfectly fine. Which? was not interested in the morality of all this, only in the problem of unsafe cars receiving MOTs. For the average punter, however, who writes the large cheque each year, her hand sweaty from shock, there is a larger investigation still to be done. To put it bluntly, these garages ‘see her coming’, so how about a controlled experiment? How about she takes her car in and waves her arms (bill: £300); and Nigel Mansell takes her car in instead, while she waits around the corner (bare test fee: £24)? This is the world we live in, of course. If you are honest about your ignorance (‘I know nothing about engines’), it is a point of honour that they should take advantage of you. Last year my car started making a ticky-ticky noise, like a sewing machine, so I drove to my usual MOT place and asked for an expert diagnosis. ‘You’ll recognize the ticky-ticky noise,’ I said helpfully, ‘It’s the one that makes people look gloomy and say “tappets”.’ They stared at me, with big, giveaway £ signs flashing visibly in their eyeballs. Five hours later, I asked for a progress report. ‘Just phoning around for a new engine,’ they said, alarmingly. ‘Pistons . . . not worth taking the old one apart . . . fifteen hours’ labour at £28 per hour . . . looking at twelve, thirteen hundred quid . . . take eight days.’ I was stunned. Nothing in my conversational Italian had prepared me for this, not even ‘Mi pare un po’ (molto) caro’ (‘I think it is a bit (very) dear’). I said I would think about it, and retrieved the car, mainly because I could not face the tragic prospect of ‘looking at’ twelve or thirteen hundred quid, just to hug it once and say goodbye. Subsequently, of course, I was told by everybody—from taxi drivers to provincial mechanics to small boys on trikes—that the ticky-ticky problem was the camshaft, not pistons, and that the garage’s mistake could not possibly be a genuine one. Perhaps car maintenance should be placed on the national curriculum, alongside sex education. There is the same ‘need to know’, obviously. And perhaps I should just regretfully harden myself to the garage rip-off, and rejoice that the ethic of the grease-gun is not generally extended—or not so flagrantly—to other professions (‘I think it’s just a cough, doctor’; ‘Nothing so simple, I’m afraid. In fact I’m phoning around for a replacement head’). Recently I saw an eight-year-old girl interviewed on television about Jurassic Park. ‘Don’t you think it will be distressing for you to see little children terrorized by dinosaurs?’ the interviewer asked. ‘But that’s life,’ piped the child. ‘It would be silly to shield us from it.’ She had a point. 

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Last Thursday, during the mid-afternoon power-cut that plunged the whole of central London into blacked-out, stuck-in-the-lift chaos, I decided to make the best of the remaining daylight by ferrying some paperbacks up the stairs to my office. We British, I pondered (as I balanced a pile of books in one hand and opened doors with the other), are so accustomed to dealing with the effects of other people’s cock-ups—trains not running, post not arriving, delivery vans not turning up—that some people have stopped being angry, and instead take pride in the fortitude they show in such circumstances. Stuck in a tunnel somewhere near Victoria, they smile indulgently and award themselves medals for bravery in the face of overwhelming cock-up. This habit of shrugging at ineptitude is, I thought as I kicked one of the doors shut with a loud bang, precisely what is wrong with this bloody rotten stinking country. Having my mind thus occupied with large thematic matters, therefore, I did not at first notice the presence of the two strangers who were following me up the stairs. Their briefcases and nasty blue suits betrayed them to be businessmen heading for another part of the building, while their out-of-condition puffing and sweating gave them away as chaps who would normally prefer to take the lift. By way of pleasantry, I imagine, one of them tried to engage me in conversation: ‘What have you done to the lights, then?’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘What have you done to the lights?’ ‘Nothing to do with me,’ I said. ‘No, no,’ he persisted, laughing. ‘Don’t give me that. I expect you plugged your typewriter into the wrong socket, didn’t you, and blacked out the whole of London.’ Now remember: this was a spontaneous remark uttered to a complete stranger; and as such, I regard it as absolutely awe-inspiring. It is like seeing a perfect diamond: what centuries of top-quality British male prejudice it must have taken to refine a mind to such a pitch. This man had only to be presented with the situation of: a) the lift out of order; and b) a woman walking innocently upstairs minding her own business, and his mind instantly synthesized all of the following propositions: a) all women are secretaries; b) women are always to blame, whatever it is; c) women are stupid about electricity, and are always blowing fuses by plugging their heated rollers into light-fittings; d) women welcome gratuitous insults; e) and even if they don’t, there is not much they can do about it, because ‘not being able to take a joke’ is a feminine failing worse than sabotaging London’s electricity supply.

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This man believes all these things; he believes them, moreover, at a deep unconscious level. And because he believes them, he thinks he is better than me. How ironic that I learned all this during a power-cut.  Last week, in a branch of a well-known stationery shop, I had an interesting experience. It went something like this: ME: Excuse me, I can’t see any Amstrad ribbons. Could you . . . (First Assistant points a finger at a low shelf, looks at me as though I am mad, and does not speak.) ME: Oh yes, silly me. Thank you very much. (First Assistant does not react in any way, but then turns to friend and starts discussing lunch-breaks.) ME (at till): I’d like to pay for these please. (Second Assistant silently picks up ribbons and rings up prices on the cash register. He does not announce the total, because of course I can see it quite as well as he can.) ME (showing credit card): Can I pay with this? (Second Assistant wordlessly takes credit card and processes it, so that a bill is printed on the counter.) ME: Have you got a pen? (Second Assistant points to biro next to the till; I sign. He fixes his gaze on the middle distance.) ME (gathering up bag from the counter): Well, I’ll just take this, then. (Nothing.) ME: Great. Lovely. Thanks. Bye-ee. Now you could look at this scene in two ways. First, there is the ‘lonely mad woman’ scenario—you know, she’s got her hair in plaits, she’s got cat-dribble on her ankle-socks, and she’s trying to engage healthy young shop assistants in banal conversation, hoping that this will relieve her feelings of solitude, and temporarily make her life worth living. Give her an inch, this woman, and she will produce a stack of photographs from her shopping-bag (‘Here’s a picture of a rice pudding I made last year’), and start saying ‘Guess how old I am! Not bad for thirty-six!’ On the other hand, there is the argument that says a little bit of eye-contact never hurt anybody, and that however boring it is to say ‘That will be £15.99’ all day, it is an essential part of the job, and of the structure of civilization. Even if young people cannot be trained to say, ‘Can I help you?’, or ‘Did you see we had a new range of those?’, I think there should be a sort of baseline of acceptable shop behaviour which would include: (1) announcing the total loudly enough for the customer to hear it, and (2) saying thanks for the dosh. My own particular bugbears are bookshops (where I know what I want, and understand the system better than the assistants) and hi-fi emporia (where I don’t know anything, but can, nevertheless, spot the tell-tale signs that my guess is as good as theirs). In bookshops I cunningly deploy my knowledge of the alphabet in order to go straight to the right place on the shelf; but if my book is not

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there, I ask. This is where I make my mistake. The assistant, looking slightly offended by my enquiry, slides off his stool, turns a key in his till with an audible huff, and heads for the wrong area of alphabet. ‘Carter should be here,’ I say, but he’s not listening. He is trailing a fingernail along the Peter Ackroyds and Lisa Althers and pursing his lips. ‘Actually,’ I volunteer, ‘Er . . .’. But his concentration is impenetrable, as he works his way through Atwood, Barnes, Bowen, Boyd, Brink, Brookner and Byatt. Finding himself at Dibdin, he performs a few halting changes of gear between forward and reverse drive, until finally settling on the exact space where my finger is resting on the shelf. ‘If it’s not here, we haven’t got it,’ he announces, straightening up. After witnessing this ritual a couple of dozen times, you learn not to ask about any author whose name comes later in the alphabet than F, unless you are writing a thesis on alienation. Sorry to go on in this old-codgerish vein, but since shop assistants are sometimes the only people I speak to all day, I am growing sick and tired of the rudeness. Hi-fi shops I only enter when I’m feeling particularly robust—and even then I try to cushion the experience by imagining that all the staff are blind. This helps a lot, actually. Blindness would excuse them from never looking you in the eye, from being completely unfamiliar with the stock, and from bluffing in transparent ways when asked technical questions. ‘What does this button do?’ you ask. The assistant looks at it in a vague, unseeing way, and says dismissively, ‘Timer.’ ‘Oh, hang on,’ you say, looking up from the instruction leaflet, ‘it says here that it’s a pause button.’ The salesman shrugs, and diverts his attention to an argument at the other end of the counter, where a customer is demanding his money back until he is blue in the face. I don’t know what can be done about all this. I have started barking ‘Howmuchdidyousay?’ into the ears of people on tills, but only because it makes me feel better. My latest idea is to carry a little Sooty glove puppet, so that I can produce it at key moments and talk to it when nobody else is volunteering. ‘What’s that, Sooty?’ I could say, next to the Amstrad ribbons, with Sooty speaking directly into my right ear. ‘Down on the bottom shelf ?’ Sooty would nod his head in the traditional glove-puppet manner of bending three times sharply from the waist. At the till, we could continue. ‘Yes, Sooty? That will be £9.40? Allow me to lend you this biro? Thank you for your custom, and be sure to call again? Well, thank you very much, Sooty. It makes such a nice change from talking to myself.’  Remember the days of ‘kitchen-sink drama’? Having grown up during the heyday of this raw, vigorous genre, I find now that its combined dramatic porcelain, taps

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and U-bends made a deep impression on me, as though dropped on my foot from a height. Placed in an unfamiliar BBC props room full of old white sinks, crude kitchen tables and Ascot water heaters, I feel sure I could identify them (‘Arnold Wesker?’ ‘Shelagh Delaney!’), no problem. Around kitchen sinks, couples were always shouting and glowering at each other. They chucked plates and wrestled with the back door (‘That’s right! Go to yer fancy piece!’) before storming out into the black night. I was reminded of all this emotional turmoil when reading about a comparatively sedate organization called the Polite Society (patron: His Grace the Duke of Devonshire). The Polite Society is committed to maintaining everyday courtesy in British society and in particular believes machines have ruined our capacity for talk. The invention of the dishwasher, its manifesto says (with stars in its eyes), was a tragedy for domestic conversation, since washing-up was a matrimonial lubricant we could not afford to lose—‘The only opportunity man and wife may have to engage in comfortable small talk while she washes and he wipes.’ A number of sweet bygone gender notions are enshrined in this pretty picture, but for the sake of brevity I think we’ll let most of them pass. ‘Oh look, here’s a bit of old cornflake still stuck to the bowl, darling!’ ‘You’re right, dear. Would you like me to commit suicide here at the sink, or shall I just pop myself upstairs?’ As a single person whose tea-towel never gets wet, I do see the point about the dishwasher, of course; it’s no company at all. If you relied on it for anecdotes, you would wait a very long time. But if people don’t want to talk to each other, surely the last thing that will cajole them into a pleasant gossip about the neighbours is a pile of greasy crocks. It is quite easy to wash up together without saying a word, both staring through the uncurtained window at the dark and rain, mouths set in a grim line. And another thing, if they are very keen on each other, surely this Mummy and Daddy would far rather fling those plates in the machine, push a button and retire to a more comfortable room? I was telling my friend Susan about all this wash-wipe nonsense, and she observed, ‘Antony and Cleopatra didn’t do the washing-up together, did they?’—an excellent point. The history of western civilization might have been quite different if instead of trying to impress his dusky Queen with the Battle of Actium, Antony had strapped a pinny over his leather skirt and made with the Brillo. Machines certainly reduce the opportunities for everyday courtesy. If a door works automatically, you feel a fool holding it open; if you get your money from a hole in the wall, you shouldn’t enquire about its Mum’s new hip. On the other hand, this automation does protect the manners-sensitive among us from the irritation of finding doors dropped back in our faces, or speaking to a stooping bank clerk who shows us only the top of his head. What I mean is, nobody can behave badly around an automatic door; and it is rare to walk away from a cash-

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point grumbling, ‘That’s the last time I go there.’ The Polite Society dislikes also the way the Directory Enquiries service now starts off with a real person (‘Which name? Which town?’) and then switches to a computer voice with random vowels, preventing you from saying thanks. But looking at it another way again, at least this means that the operators don’t spend all day exasperated by people hanging up without saying thanks. ‘I don’t believe it. I gave him the number and he just hung up.’ ‘That happened to me, too.’ Back at the kitchen sink, it’s surely obvious that everything in the home is nowadays designed to make maximum time for the telly. That’s just the way it is. People bicker about whose turn it is to load the dishwasher because there’s a juicy kitchen-sink drama on the box. ‘We are not Luddites,’ says the Polite Society, ‘but there is a danger that if we don’t control technology, it will end up controlling us.’ What a shame it’s not that easy. I read this credo as it came off my fax machine, and instead of just shouting ‘Faster!’ and ‘Come on!’, I tried saying ‘Oh, thanks a lot’ and ‘Ta’. Imagine my surprise when it replied, ‘You’re welcome. And by the way, did you notice the new car outside Number 46?’  Hand me that legal aid application form. And lend me that pen. After years of cudgelling my brains for a suitable way of expressing my resentment at growing up in a house filled with tobacco smoke, I have finally hit upon the perfect solution. I shall sue them, take them to court, fleece them for every penny. Ha, let them put that in their pipes. According to the Sunday papers, children subjected to chronic passive smoking can now obtain legal redress for their long-term bronchial problems, and there will be a kind of wheezers’ revolt. The courtroom picture is irresistible. I can see it now: the plaintiff (me) in the witness box, coughing delicately into a linen hanky, and pointing the bony finger of blame; and the rest of them in the dock, huddled together under a yellow mantle of tobacco smoke, doing a group impression of Auld Reekie with the wind in the East. The only trouble with this happy fancy is that my case could easily be knocked down by a few simple questions from a skilled counsel. For example, were my family in fact ignorant of the dangers of tobacco smoke when I was a child? ‘Yes, probably,’ I mumble (into my sputum cup). ‘A little louder,’ they command. ‘Yes,’ I repeat. Did I ever encourage their smoking habits myself ? ‘I did,’ I reply miserably. ‘I bought them novelty ashtrays.’ The judge raises an eyebrow, looks confused. ‘For example, I bought an ashtray at the seaside shaped like a ram’s head, with the words “For Butts” written on it. B U double T S. It was a pun, my lord. Also, I begged to be allowed to make roll-ups in a little silver machine. And whenever the Bob Newhart monologue about Sir Walter Raleigh’s discovery of tobacco was broadcast on the Light Programme—’ (here I break down in peni-

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tent sobs) ‘—I used to laugh with everyone else at the bit where he says “Don’t tell me, Walt. You stick it in your ear.”’ Passive smoking is something I feel so strongly about that I want to set fire to the tea-towels, yet strangely at the same time I find it impossible to make a stand about it retrospectively, especially on the home front. Will people really take their families to court? I don’t believe it. How can you argue with people who, despite the advance of science, despite the warnings on the packets, and despite the fact that coroners now record smoking as a cause of death, keep puffing on the little white sticks and refusing to feel bad about it? Such fierce stupidity is intimidating. To the non-smoker, the behaviour of smoker families tells you quite unambiguously that if you’ve got a problem with this, then the problem is yours and you can keep it. If it makes you want to spit, then there you are. So where my own relatives are concerned I do my smoking very passively indeed. While they light up repeatedly, I fantasize about strapping a battery-driven fan to my forehead, and yelling above the din, ‘Can’t hear you! Got the fan going!’—but unfortunately this helps only as a mental distraction. As a concrete act of defiance, I did once purchase an amusing T-shirt with a Larson cartoon on it (‘The real reason dinosaurs became extinct’—showing a collection of prehistoric beasts furtively taking quick drags like schoolboys). But although I have worn this provocative garment twice to family gatherings, on both occasions I hastily obscured it with a jumper, so that it wouldn’t cause offence or start a row. Of course it is in the Bible, all this. ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes; the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ I don’t remember how the next bit goes, but it’s probably something like ‘Tough banana, saith the Lord.’ I am convinced that even the deity of the Old Testament, with his avenging tooth-for-a-tooth system of justice, would have advised against litigation in this case, on grounds of crushing futility. ‘Car fumes are more dangerous,’ say the smokers, airily; ‘there is a higher chance of dying from a stray microwave.’ Angry as I am about spending my school years feverishly coughing and hawking into lavatory bowls, I know what I am up against, and I know when I am beaten. If they won’t admit they are poisoning themselves, these people, what earthly chance have I got that they’ll admit to poisoning me?  This time last year I had never been inside a register office except for a wedding. Now I am a twice-over veteran of registering family deaths, and I feel I know all about it. The registrar meets you with a smile, invites you to sit at the other side of a desk, and draws your attention to a computer screen on which your answers will appear. You cling to an old brown envelope with ‘Birth certificate’ written on it in familiar handwriting, and experience a mixture of feelings, principal among

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them the terrible misgiving that your errand is a wicked mistake, and that your dad is going to be really dismayed and hurt when he finds out what you’ve done. A couple of months ago, I took my second trip, this time to register the death of my grandmother. We followed the usual form. We were smiled at nicely, invited to sit down, referred to the same bereavement-friendly computer screen. It was a woman registrar this time, rather old-fashioned, with red fingernails, a frilly blouse and a tight suit. Nothing else was different; I sat in the same chair. I even found myself commenting gruesomely, ‘This is just like last time,’ as if I had wanted to see this room again ever in my life. But here we were again, indisputably, and the heart—breakingly bare details of my grandmother’s life (father’s occupation: ‘coal-heaver’) were duly tapped into the computer. My mum, who was desperately upset, occasionally proffered extra details to swell the story, which made the registrar pause patiently with her fingers hovering above the keyboard, waiting to get on. Meanwhile I held mum’s hand and stared glumly at the screen, making sure all the spellings were correct. ‘Now, I’ll just print out the death certificate,’ said the registrar, tapping a few keys. And it was then that it happened. Somewhere between the instruction and the execution fell the shadow, and she suddenly got up, pushed back her chair, forgot we were there, and rapped hard on some frosted partition-glass. ‘Brenda!’ she shouted, in a great lather. ‘It’s happened again!’ The smile had gone; there was something wrong. Mum and I looked at one another, perhaps to reassure ourselves that we had not actually disappeared. The summoned Brenda burst into the room, in a blur of electric blue business suit, and rushed to the machine. ‘What did it say?’ she panted. ‘I don’t know,’ panicked the registrar, wringing the manicured digits. ‘Well, did it say “Disk full”?’ demanded the fearsome Brenda. ‘No, I think it was something else.’ ‘What did the man tell us to do?’ barked Brenda, drumming her heels on the floor. We looked on, mum and I, wondering whether we should quietly leave, but guessing that it is probably a mistake to stop registering a death when you are halfway through. What struck me most forcibly about this scene afterwards was that it could have come straight from an Alan Bennett play. Even the name Brenda had the right touch. How could this registrar not realize that by suddenly shouting ‘Brenda, it’s happened again’ in the middle of a delicate transaction with grieving relatives, she was creating a scene that any drama critic would recognize from a dozen or more modern comedies? It was so strange. Perhaps she doesn’t watch television. Perhaps she has no self-consciousness. Perhaps dealing with death takes away your sense of dramatic irony. The last is certainly true. One of the dubious fringe benefits of your first significant bereavement is learning that the black-suited comic undertaker of popu-

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lar imagination is not only the real thing, but that it isn’t funny and you have to go along with it. You can’t say, ‘Can I have someone who wasn’t in Joe Orton’s Loot, please?’, and you don’t feel like laughing. Our two sets of undertakers have been ugly, seedy characters with dandruff, Brylcreem, ill-cut suits and nicotine stains who perspired in dark glasses as though rarely exposed to the light of day. And we sat there while they absurdly offered us a range of fancy caskets, knowing there was nothing we could do. Stupefied by grief, you surrender. The arrangements for my father’s funeral entailed an hour-long consultation with a jumped-up professional doommerchant who actually wanted us to share the tribulations of the funerary business, even if it meant keeping us in teasing suspense. Can we have the funeral on Tuesday or Wednesday, we asked (wanting a simple yes). At which point he started waxing sarcastic about the unnecessary inconvenience caused by bank holidays, conjured up all sorts of distressing thoughts of coffins log-jammed on the memorial lawn, before finally announcing that he had already booked the crematorium for Wednesday at half past two. Sighs of relief and admiration all round. Our hero. I understand now about Hamlet losing all his mirth. I used to think this meant he didn’t laugh at jokes because he was upset. But I realize now that death is surrounded by dreadful comedy, which you are obliged to participate in, in the role of unlaughing stooge. Nigel Williams was told at the hospital that ‘your father’s not very well. Actually he’s very poorly indeed. In fact, he’s dead.’ Well, it’s all like that. Neighbours come round to tell you they are sorry, and end up compulsively relating (over several cups of tea) all the tragic bereavements in their own family, going back ten years. Dismayed, you can’t believe they are doing it. Is this an Alan Ayckbourn play, or what?

The Trials of Celibacy Explored with Surprising Frankness




The trouble with surprise spells of warm weather is that they make your thoughts run—rather inconveniently, in my case—in the general direction of sex. Damn and blast. What atavistic creatures we are, to be tweaked by the season in such an obvious way. You would have thought you could rise above it, in an age that can invent the multi-purpose bin-liner. Instead of which, all it takes is a small gust of warmish breeze ruffling the hair on the back of your neck, and the next minute you are startling pensioners at the Post Office by singing ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme a Man After Midnight’ while queuing for your tax disc. Perhaps this is why the single person feels an enormous urge to spring-clean; it is Nature’s way of turning surplus sap into a white tornado. ‘Sub-Lim-Ate,’ orders a croaky Dalek voice in one’s head, and it seems wise to pay attention. Right, yes, get cracking. Eradicate the Sex Monster by sheer effort of elbow grease, and meanwhile pray for snow. As an additional precaution, remove any erotic element from your environment, such as Georgia O’Keeffe pictures (the ones that remind you of orgasms), and the Andre Agassi calendar you were so proud of. Deliberately avoid watching A Bouquet of Barbed Wire when it is repeated on TV Heaven, and put all your Gérard Depardieu videos in the shed. But there is an old saying in my family: push sex out of the front door and it will come back through the plughole. ‘Phew,’ I said to the cats last weekend, when all this Superego activity was accomplished. ‘Thank goodness I’ve dealt with that little problem.’ But my sense of security was as ill-founded as Sigourney Weaver’s in Alien. I leaned back in the bath and switched on The Archers, and jumped out of my skin. The Sex Monster was back! And it was running wild in Ambridge! I was aghast. Since when had The Archers been scripted by the ghost of Tennessee Williams? I silenced the radio in a bucket of water, but not before thinking that Jennifer Aldridge’s ‘trips to Felpersham’ sounded nice. Damn and blast again. So I was in a slightly jumpy mood when I went out for a drive on Sunday. On the run from both the Sex Monster and the Jif Imperative I ran straight into my nightmare combination of both—viz, the blokes with squeegees who haunt the traffic lights at Vauxhall Cross. Damn and blast for a third time. They come looming up at you unbidden, these johnnies; and then they clean your windows whether you like it or not. I had forgotten about them, because they disappear in the winter. But on the first warm day they rise up again miraculously, fully armed with buckets of water and beany hats. They are, I fancy, generated out of the swirling grit of Vauxhall by the mystical action of the sun, like crocodiles from the mud of the Nile.

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Allow me to explain why I hate them so much. What happens is that having innocently drawn up at the traffic lights, you are approached by a man (or a kid) with a wet sponge, who is intent on washing your windscreen for a small fee. You mime a polite ‘No thanks’ but he is not deterred. You wave and swivel your palms in the internationally recognized signal for ‘Leave it out, mate, and hop it’, but he slaps the sponge on the glass, so that it dribbles dirty water across your line of vision. ‘Bugger off,’ you shout, but by this time he is wiping off the water, and you notice (at short range, through the glass) that he is the sort of person who breathes through his mouth, and wears the word ‘Hate’ tattooed on his knuckles. Perhaps there are motorists who do not feel intimidated as I do; perhaps they say, ‘Oh goody’ and start rooting in their pockets for change. But perhaps they are not single women, frazzled by the challenge of suppressing their springtime libido, and crazed by the sea-change to The Archers. But it is a point of principle, in any case: if I say ‘No’ to these blokes, I truly believe they should leave me alone. To my mind, washing someone’s windscreen against their will is quite as menacing as accosting them at a bus stop and insisting on manicuring their nails. In the meantime, what is to be done about vanquishing the Sex Monster? Well, this week’s plummeting atmospheric pressure has dealt with the immediate problem, thank goodness. I put the Andre Agassi calendar back on the wall yesterday, and I honestly feel OK. ‘Chew string’ was one helpful suggestion; also, ‘Roll yourself in a length of carpet and recite The Waste Land’ (apparently it works for some people). Back from my ghastly encounter with the Invasion of the Bucket Men, then, I decided to give the carpet-option a try, and it certainly helped. Despite gagging on the dust-balls, I found it amazing how Eliot keeps the Id firmly under wraps, while his unmistakable bass-line rhythm makes the whole experience so jolly: I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones There’s not a soul out there No one to hear my prayer Weialala leia Wallala leialala Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight.

 Of course, a book about the IQ of cats begs a lot of questions to begin with. (‘I am reading a book on cat IQ,’ I mentioned to a friend. ‘Short, is it?’ she said.) But when you are a doting owner, keen to establish proof of your cat’s outstanding

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native wit, you tend to lose sight of what those questions might be. So we sat down a week ago, the cats and I, and mutually ticked a lot of boxes in Melissa Miller’s new Definitive IQ Tests for Cats (Signet, £3.99). The exercise produced quite fascinating results. I mean, according to our relative aggregates, one of the cats is cleverer than I am. Which is weird, really, because despite his mighty cat brain, guess who kept the scores? ‘Look, kitty,’ I said proudly, waving the book near his nose. ‘You achieved 39 in visual skills!’ But, alas, these visual skills did not extend to reading the printed page, or even getting the book into decent focus. Instead, he shrank back in evident distaste, as though the book were a custard pie. I tried another tack. ‘Hey! Fur-face!’ I yelled in his ear. ‘You got 52 on audio abilities!’ But strangely he seemed oblivious to my cry. ‘And in social behaviour you got an amazing total of . . .’ However, my voice trailed off at this point because he had got up and walked out of the room. If the cat is really cleverer than me, I just want to know one thing: why isn’t he writing this article while I lie on top of the shed? But I suppose the answer is obvious when you put it like that. Cats are clever enough to get the better end of the symbiotic deal. ‘Tell you what,’ they say. ‘You write the piece, and I’ll sit on it. You earn the money, and I’ll eat the Friskies.’ In these circumstances, there is not much point attempting tests in verbal reasoning. (‘Now let’s try it one more time. STING is to THING, as STICK is to TH---.’) A lot of nonsense is spoken about the cat’s exceptional brain-to-body weight ratio. But when they introduced the concept of the electronic cat-flap, you may have noticed that they dispensed with the key-pad, because they knew that cats would need the number written down. Miller emphasizes that her book of IQ tests should not be taken seriously, but I fear this is to misunderstand the character of her potential reader, which is bound to be fanatical and competitive. By means of multiple-choice questions, she tests your cat’s intelligence in various situations—does it respond to its name, look with interest out of the window, hide things around the home, enjoy television? The trouble with such multiple-choice tests, however, is that there is a tendency in the respondent (me) to second-guess the top-scoring answer and automatically tick the appropriate box. Anyone who has doodled with a questionnaire in a women’s magazine will recognize the syndrome. You are waiting all day and all evening for your new boyfriend to call. When he finally phones at midnight, do you: A: Break down in tears, explaining between sobs that you have become completely dependent on him? B: Wax sarcastic, and then yell that you never want to see him again, despite the fact that you like him very much?

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C: Act in a mature fashion, explaining that you demand respect for your feelings, and suggesting that he give you his phone number so that you can phone him next time? D: Not answer the phone, because you have just committed suicide.

Now, only a very thick person will not discern that C is the big-bucks answer here. Even if you spend your emotional life in a constant moil of sarcasm, yelling, bawling and throat sharpening, you will nevertheless be fully aware that the answer C will translate as the best personality type when you later consult the answers at the back. So, similarly, if you are filling in a questionnaire on your cat’s IQ, and are asked the following question, you cannot ignore the temptation to respond dishonestly. If your cat could read, which of the following newspapers would it probably buy? A: Financial Times B: Daily Mail C: The Independent D: The Sun

The fact that Cat No 1 is an obvious candidate for Bunty, while Cat No 2 would sit happily for hours with an out-of-date What Car?, is unlikely to deter you from ticking Financial Times with utter confidence, because you know it is the ‘right’ answer. One thing I learnt from the book was that Sir Isaac Newton invented the catflap. It puts all his other distinctions in the shade. The prophet Muhammad, not wanting to disturb a sleeping cat, cut off part of his garment when he got up (bless his heart). Evidently the cat’s special place in human affections (as well as its innate superiority as a species) is well attested historically, but I don’t mind mentioning that I often pause wearily during essays on ‘the cat in history’ to ponder the famous New Yorker cartoon in which a man says: ‘The fact that you cats were considered sacred in ancient Egypt cuts no ice with me.’ However, this book also contains modern stories of cats doing clever things— such as stealing bread from the kitchen and using it as bait for birds—which suggest the undeniable presence of functioning little grey cells concealed beneath the furry ears and eyebrows. Miller recounts one story of a cat which, having observed its owner’s bleary-eyed wake-up routine of ‘stick the kettle on, feed the cat’, attempted to get things moving one morning by retrieving a used teabag from the bin and placing it on the owner’s pillow. This shows amazing intelligence on the part of the cat, if only because it could remember key scenes from The Godfather.

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Mostly, the way you define cat intelligence is by identifying things they won’t do. Why is there no feline equivalent of Champion the Wonder Horse or Rin-TinTin, Flipper or Lassie? Because a cat will not race into a burning building to rescue a baby, that’s why. It is their own peculiar way of proving they are smart. In the heyday of the Hollywood studios, it was uncanny how those hopeful cat-hero scripts somehow always found their way to the bottom of the pile. ‘Tiddles! Only you can save us! Squeeze through this tiny opening, and switch off the infernal machine! Go like the wind, and there’ll be sprats for tea!’ Some joke, obviously. ‘Did somebody say infernal machine?’ the cat says. ‘Blimey, I’m off then.’ This book mentions that there were no cat skeletons found at Pompeii or Herculaneum, and jumps to the conclusion that therefore no cats lived there. But obviously they screeched out of town at the first whiff of sulphur. ‘Tiddles!’ they said in Pompeii. ‘Only you can save us!’ But a flash of cat bum was all that was visible, as the volcano rumbled and split. Centuries later, when the site was excavated, many petrified human bodies were doubtless found in the attitude of surprised cat owners calling to their pets in vain, frozen in time with boxes of Kitbits in their hands. Scrawled on a terracotta brick were some dying words in Latin which, roughly translated, meant, ‘I don’t believe it, the bloody cat has scarpered.’ As I explained earlier, Miller’s tests for cats (the first half of the book) are fairly easy to second-guess. Once you have imagined that your cat’s brain is entirely devoted to wangling the best deal for itself (and that it reads the FT), you are on your way to a hefty score. The second half is more tricky, however, because it is the test for owners, and the hidden agenda is more difficult to gauge. Take the following: Do you buy your cat something special for its birthday, Christmas or other special occasions? A: My cat is treated like any other member of the family. B: No. Cats cannot appreciate the significance of such gifts. C: Although I may remember my cat’s birthday, I don’t buy it anything to celebrate it. D: I’m not sure when my cat’s birthday is, but I always include it in my own special celebrations, giving it extra food or buying it a special treat.

Well, I went for D, because it sounded the best—you know, affectionate without being fanatical. Also, I thought you could eliminate the others. Anyone answering B would obviously not be doing the questionnaire, being too busy running a cold, loveless reform school in a Victorian novel; while the person answering C is self-evidently too mean to buy the book. This only leaves A and D as decent cat-loving responses, and A sounded suspiciously like a trap for loonies. But A scored best, in fact. Because it turns out, in the end, that it is your level of fanaticism that is being tested.

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Some of the questions concern how easily one’s cat takes affront, and whether an owner will avoid saying anything negative (such as ‘pea-brained’) about a cat in its presence. Samuel Johnson, you may remember, had a cat called Hodge that he was fond of; and Miller quotes a wonderful passage from Boswell to illustrate the great man’s sensitivity to the cat’s feelings. I recollect my friend, when I observed Hodge was a fine cat, saying ‘Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I like better than this’; and then, as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, ‘But he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’

I think I prefer fine cats to clever cats. Which is my way of apologizing to my cats, should they ever read this. But imagine if your cat really were cleverer than you, and kept breezing in to say, ‘Did you mean to leave that tap running in the bathroom?’ and ‘You really must read this TLS; it told me quite a few things about Tennyson that I didn’t know.’ Much better that they consider reading a mug’s game and tap-regulation none of their business. All of this IQ testing makes you realize, with a sigh of relief, that brains are not everything.

The Single Woman Stays at Home and Goes Quietly Mad




To some people, Wimbledon is a tennis tournament. To me, it is a sort of binge. Confronted with a mere two weeks of fantastic tennis on the TV, I approach it with the same gimme-gimme intensity as the competition winner allowed three minutes to fill a shopping trolley with free food, or the fat boy attempting a speed record for the consumption of cream buns. ‘More!’ I demand, each evening at 8.15 when BBC2 stops transmitting, and the light begins to fade. The cats exchange glances, as if to say ‘She’s off,’ but I take no notice. I want more, don’t you see, more. More matches, more coverage, more—I don’t know, more male knees. And above all, I want the very beautiful Pat Cash to remain prominent in the men’s singles tournament, despite the unfortunate fact that he was knocked out last Thursday. Bingeing, of course, is something you do on your own. It is therefore one of the great pitfalls of single life. When there is nobody to say, ‘I think that’s enough Wimbledon for one day,’ you don’t know where to stop. Leaving aside those knees for a moment, let’s imagine you had an addiction to—I don’t know, to fruit jelly, but did not live alone. Well, you would simply be obliged to curb those unnatural wobbly cravings, wouldn’t you? It would be no good leaving a nonchalant bowl of Rowntree’s black cherry on the coffee table, because the pretence (‘We were out of olives, so I thought why not’) would fool nobody. But being single means that not only can you buy jelly in telltale catering quantities; you can make it by the gallon-load in the bath, and fill your entire livingroom with great amber columns of it (if you want to), so that it resembles a confectioner’s Monument Valley. Similarly, you can watch two channels of Wimbledon simultaneously, and then the evening highlights, and then your video of the highlights, without anyone objecting that it’s getting out of hand. Believe me, it can happen. Last autumn I conceived a crush on an American leading actor and, in the absence of any restraining sensibility, had reached the jelly-columnsin-the-living-room stage before you could say ‘Jeff ’. It was alarming. One minute I was quite normal, the next I was popping out to see Jeff ’s latest film every time I could contrive a free slot at 1.10pm, 5.05pm or 8.30pm. I considered finding out from Mastermind whether ‘the films of Jeff ’ would be an acceptable specialist subject. And sometimes I pretended that I needed to cross Leicester Square on the way from Baker Street to Euston, so that I could accidentally find myself quite near the big Jeff pictures outside the Odeon. I was on a binge. Virtually overnight, my flat turned into a 24-hour Jeff season-cum-

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masterclass. Friends popped in and found themselves being pushed roughly into seats while I snatched up the video control. ‘Watch the way he says “Small world” in this scene.’ ‘Oh God. More Jeff.’ ‘Have I shown you the bit where he glances away to one side, and sort of rubs his nose before the “Listen, princess” speech? It’s brilliant. The man’s a genius.’ In the end, they gave up expecting me to talk about anything else; instead they patiently cut nice Jeff pictures out of magazines for me, bless their hearts. After all, we are each entitled to find our own peculiar way of dealing with celibacy, and it turned out that this was mine. Jeff. I was even happy. ‘This is great,’ I said. ‘The last time I had a crush on someone it was in the pre-video age, but now I can watch Jeff deliver the “Small world” line fifteen times together if I want to.’ ‘Mmm,’ they agreed. And now it is Wimbledon, and I get so excited I expect tennis on all channels, all day. More. I get so involved that I even relish the on-screen computer statistics, tabling the number of times each player has changed his shirt or wiped his face with his wrist-band. In the old days, when Dan Maskell said, ‘Seventh double-fault,’ I would think, ‘Oh crikey, what an old bore.’ But now I exclaim, ‘Seven!’ and get angry with the commentators for making nothing sensible of such a thrilling statistic. ‘Ah, now, seven double-faults,’ said a Dull Donald during a match last week. ‘Lucky for some, but perhaps just a passing statistic in a famous victory.’ I could not believe it. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I yelled. ‘Good grief!’ Thankfully the Wimbledon binge contains built-in limits, and will be over by Monday. I do not watch tennis at any other time of year: say the words ‘French Open’ and ‘Prudential-Bache Securities Tennis Classic’, and the pulse-rate does not lurch. It is the annual two-week tournament of Wimbledon—the stars! the knees! the knock-out! summer in the city!—that is so unputdownable. It makes me think of warm summer fairs and dances in Thomas Hardy; the travelling circus setting up tents for solstice-week on some pagan hillsite, and the whole town queuing up nightly on hot dusty grass to grab it before it goes. I am getting carried away, I suppose. But honestly, for an all-alone binge, Wimbledon is almost as good as sculpting indoor jelly stacks. And a lot less messy.  What does it mean, anyway: ‘Do not remove lid before cooking’? There you are, in the kitchen, cook-chill dinner in your hand, oven nicely heated to 180 degrees, saliva glands triggered to the point of no return, and you receive this gnomic instruction about the lid which stops you dead in your tracks. Does it mean take the lid off, or don’t take the lid off ? Why does life have to be so complicated?

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‘I’m cooking it now,’ I reason (I have to talk it through, slowly, usually sitting down). ‘And I didn’t take the lid off before. Which was right. Hmm. All right so far, then. So perhaps I should take it off now. But perhaps they mean not to take it off until after it’s cooked. But then of course I will take it off when it’s cooked, won’t I, ha ha, because otherwise I couldn’t eat it. Hmm. So why would they mention it? I mean, if I didn’t take the lid off then I’d have to throw it away uneaten, and all that cooking would have been a waste of time. Hmm. And they show a serving suggestion on the box, so they can’t mean for you not to get the food out, otherwise they’d show a picture of a foil box in a bin. Hmm. And another thing . . .’ This goes on until the ghost of Bertrand Russell whooshes through the kitchen (screaming what sounds like ‘For Pete’s sake’) and dashes the box to the ground. It’s usually Russell, but sometimes it’s Wittgenstein. I have lost a lot of dinners that way. As a consumer, one often finds oneself on the receiving end of superfluous advice, and I suppose it is a measure of one’s mental health how one deals with it. Buying a couple of ice-cube trays the other day, for example, a friend of mine discovered an interesting household tip on the packaging: ‘Keep a tray in the ice-box for those occasional drinks, and keep another in a chest freezer in case of unexpected callers or a surprise party!’ Could have worked that out for myself, thought my friend—but then she is a sensible, well-adjusted person who does not experience semantic vertigo over the removal of tin-foil lids. A more neurotic and literal-minded consumer (i.e. me) would have read this ice-tray advice on the bus home, and been obliged to go back to buy a chest freezer. My hobby, by the way, is replicating serving suggestions. You know: I study the picture on the packet and re-create it with the real food. It is an unusual and creative pastime, I like to think. Sometimes, with a frozen dinner, the serving suggestion seems to be that you just take the food out of the dish and put it on a plate with a sprig of parsley, which is a bit too easy and not much of a challenge, quite honestly. But sometimes you have to add new potatoes or peas or something, and a bottle of wine in the background on a chequered tablecloth, and then you can spend quite a lot of time getting the composition just right. I have never told anybody this before. Sometimes, just for a change, I defy the consumer recommendations. For example, recently on a bottle of hair conditioner I came across the advice: ‘And then just arrange your hair in its usual style!’ And I thought, well, I shan’t then, and I put my head in a bucket instead. I thought the advice was slightly redundant, in retrospect (from inside the bucket). I mean, if they hadn’t said anything I would have arranged my hair in its ‘usual style’ without even thinking about it. I wonder how they know where to draw the line, these people. Perhaps there are other bot-

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tles which advise, ‘Arrange your hair in its usual style, and then have a nice cup of cocoa’. Or, ‘Arrange your hair in its usual style, and then take a holiday in the West Country’. Some manufacturers of prepared meals tell you that, after cooking, you should empty contents on to a plate. Before long they will also tell you to eat contents, burp (optional), wash up the plate, turn off the lights and lock the back door before going to bed. People are not being credited with much initiative, it seems to me. But then I am clearly susceptible, because I read all small print, listen to all advice. ‘Serve chilled,’ says the gazpacho carton, so I go out and stand in the rain without a hat. The strange thing is that when I come back in, the last thing I want to eat is some cold soup. Recently I read some advice for people living on their own. I thought it would be about creating a helpful mental attitude, but it said things such as ‘Don’t open the door to strangers’ and ‘Have baths on a regular basis’. I was reminded of a student journalist who once shadowed me for a day and who told me that the lecturers on the journalism course had given her some pretty good advice. ‘What do they tell you to do when you interview somebody?’ I asked, hoping for some useful interrogation tips. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘they say don’t forget to take your bus fare. And always have a sandwich with you in case of emergency.’ So that’s it, then. I don’t open the door to strangers, and I keep taking the baths. I arrange my hair in its usual style, and I empty contents on to a plate. I carry a sandwich at all times. It’s all you can do, really. I remember that I used to pass a doorway on the way to work each day, where I saw a little sign: ‘Speak into the microphone.’ And even if I was late, I would say ‘Oh, all right then,’ and think of another old Max Miller routine to regale it with.  In the early 1980s, when I was a compulsive Blue Peter viewer (recording it while at work, and priding myself on not missing a single show), there was a very upsetting Thursday evening which I shall never forget. There I was, safe in the usual items (potted biography of Louis Braille narrated by Valerie Singleton; how to make a Dinky Toy car-park out of a cornflake packet and a drinking straw), when suddenly Simon Groom announced brightly, ‘And today we reach the letter M in our Dogs’ Alphabet.’ I felt as though my entire world had been tugged from under me. Did he say ‘Dogs’ Alphabet’? What Dogs’ flipping Alphabet was this, then? I remember standing up abruptly from my working-girl TV dinner, and spilling jelly and custard on the carpet. I choked on some hundreds-andthousands. I was so outraged that I virtually ignored the ensuing scenes of a large mastiff dragging a Blue Peter presenter skidding across the studio floor, knocking

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over those triangular stands with teddies on, amid reassuring shouts of ‘Ha ha, everything is under control.’ I was too angry to enjoy it. ‘When did you do the letter L?’ I shouted, in a sneering tone. ‘Nineteen seventy-two?’ So it is with some trepidation that I announce that today we reach the letter H in our Single Life role-model series. Ahem. The choice is wide: Heidi, Miss Havisham, Hinge and Brackett, Harvey the six-foot rabbit. Oh yes. Each tells you so much about the advantages of the unmarried state—in which you can be mad, Swiss, invisible or purely imaginary, and can run around with your hair on fire. But actually I have invented the Single Life role-model series because I want to discuss the little silhouette woman in Hello! magazine who illustrates the filmson-TV page, and she is such a strange phenomenon that I couldn’t see how else to bring the subject up. She speaks to me, this lonely figure; I don’t know why. Next to the review of each film appears this little illustrated woman, who is evidently watching the TV from a firm 1960s low-armed chair in an empty room. She is wearing outdoor shoes and a knee-length skirt, and she is reacting with bold body language to the quality of the films she is watching. I can imagine her watching that famous Blue Peter episode alongside me, and expressing the whole thing more eloquently, and without words—a hand cupped to her ear (‘What’s this?’); her arms folded in front of her (‘I don’t believe it’); she shakes a fist (‘Someone will pay’). She is a mime, you see, this woman. Her body is her tool. Her role is this. When the film is very good, she stands up and applauds enthusiastically; when the film is entertaining she leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands, possibly holding her breath. When it is only fair, she sits back, with her hands in her lap. And when it is boring, she sticks her legs out and flings back her head, as though she has been shot. I have some quibbles with the authenticity of these reactions, of course. Personally, I lean forward with my head in my hands when the TV is terrible, not good. I jump out of my seat only when I want to ring up Blue Peter and give it a piece of my mind. When the telly is exciting, I lie back happily with a cat on my chest; and when it is excellent, I slide down so far in the chair that the only thing vertical is the top half of my head. But the compelling thing about this woman is not the form but the intensity of her reactions. She concentrates without let-up, whether the stuff is good or not. In the course of a week’s films she leans forwards, leans back, stands up, claps her hands, gets shot, leans forward and leans back—but she never stops watching. Why did Hello! choose this figure? I suspect because she is the antithesis of the couch potato. She is slim and active and self-possessed, and she would never be caught dribbling hot Ribena down her neck by trying to drink it without sitting up—which is what I do, now I come to think of it, while reading Hello!

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She gives the lie to all those worthy sociology projects, in which closed-circuit cameras are rigged up next to people’s television sets, to observe how broadcasting is treated in the home. Through the fishy lens, you see the ghostly figures of Mum and Dad wandering in, reading the paper, blinking stupidly at the screen while exciting car-chase noises and gun shots emanate from it, and occasionally pointing at the picture and saying, ‘I know that bloke. He was in, you know, whatsitcalled. Yeah, he was,’ before wandering out again. I have never seen one of these experiments applied to a person who lives alone, but I think it would be rather different, and a bit disturbing, because of the aforementioned intensity of response: ‘What Dogs’ flipping Alphabet?’ ‘God, I hate Noel Edmonds!’ ‘Why are the weather forecasts so short, for heavens’ sake!’ ‘They’ll never get a self-respecting Dinky car in a car-park made out of cornflake packets!’ and so on. I have great hopes for this woman in Hello! I feel she has room for development, and an obvious life of her own. Her little figure could start popping up elsewhere in the magazine, responding to the articles with exaggerated yawns while reading in the bath, or peering terribly closely with a magnifying glass at the telephoto pictures of the King of Spain. And sometimes, of course, she could fling the magazine aside, turn off the TV, kick off the sensible shoes, and perform the polka with the cat in her arms, the way ordinary single people do. Go for it, my little friend. Live a bit.  A telephone rings. It is tea-time on a day in late June. England. The columnist (a harmless drudge) hastily presses the ‘Mute’ button on her television remote control. The giveaway background noise of ‘Pock, pock, applause, Thirty love’ abruptly ceases. She grabs the receiver. COLUMNIST (defensively, and without punctuation): Hello who’s that of course I’m working good grief up to my armpits in fact Huh do you think I’ve got nothing to do but watch tennis? (Her voice rises to a squeal.) There is a pause, while the caller lets the hysteria subside. FEMALE FRIEND: Psst, it’s me. COLUMNIST: Linda? Oh, thank phew for that. I was just watching Wimbledon. FRIEND: I know, so was I. Did you see him? Andre the Adorable, did you see him? The columnist guiltily surveys the Andre Agassi press cuttings littering the floor of the study, and nods dumbly. She has just finished entering the names of today’s winners in the special men’s knock-out tournament chart. A keen-eyed observer would note that the equivalent chart for the women’s tournament is left curiously blank. Taking a deep breath, she makes a decision. COLUMNIST (carelessly): You mean the Agassi match? Oh, I believe I did just manage to catch every single minute of that one, yes. Mmm. I was particularly im-

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pressed, actually, by the champion’s new short-action serve—118 miles per hour he’s getting—the power of the ground strokes, top-spin, all that. ‘Ooh, I say,’ as Dan Maskell used to exclaim, ha ha. Oh yes, French Open, lob, tiebreak, Gabriela Sabatini. FRIEND: Lynne. You’re talking funny. Can’t we discuss chest hair, like we usually do? Is there somebody there? COLUMNIST: Good heavens, no. It’s just that all these technical sports-reporter aspects, none of them passes me by. More like a fly-swat than a serve, I’d say, that new Agassi action, but still 118 miles per hour. Amazing. Sport can be really interesting, can’t it? Can’t think why I’m usually so dismissive of it. Also, there’s these new, um, graphological racquets . . . and, um, did I mention 118 mph, and the linesmen, gosh, Sue Barker, new balls, fascinating. And on Today at Wimbledon, Humphrey Carpenter can’t even say ‘Ivanisevic’ properly! So what makes me cross— FRIEND: You mean Harry Carpenter. COLUMNIST: What? FRIEND: Not Humphrey Carpenter. COLUMNIST: Well yes. Yes, obviously. So anyway, what makes me cross is this. Here we are, you and I, having this highly informed and sophisticated conversation about the ins and outs of grand slam tennis, and the papers insist that when women become obsessed with Wimbledon, it’s only because of the so-called hunk factor, because of the gorgeous pouting well-built athletic blokes such as Michael Stich and Goran Ivanisevic and—sorry, can’t go on, throat a bit dry. Anyway, the idea is that we’re watching the legs and the midriffs, not the tennis, I mean, that’s absurd, obviously? FRIEND: Eh? COLUMNIST: Absolutely absurd. Pause. FRIEND: But they’ve stopped showing Andre’s midriff, in any case. I phoned up yesterday to complain. COLUMNIST: You did? Good for you. I mean, I hope you also mentioned their excellent coverage of his stunning returns of serve, and inventive cross-court passes? FRIEND: No, I didn’t. I said, I am a licence payer and if I want to see the dreamboat’s tummy, the dreamboat’s tummy I shall see. COLUMNIST (struggling, but steadily losing her grip): Gosh. Whereas me, well, scoreboard, let-cord judge, first service, Cyclops— FRIEND: Give it up, Lynne. COLUMNIST: Shall I? Drop-shot, foot-fault, er . . . Are you sure? FRIEND: Definitely.

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Pause. FRIEND:

I see Lendl got knocked out, then. (resigned but happy): Never fancied him, myself. FRIEND: Nor me. Great player, I suppose? COLUMNIST: No, no. Something to do with those stringy legs and the unattractive way his socks stayed up. FRIEND: I know exactly what you mean. COLUMNIST

 I was interested to read in last Monday’s paper that a possible side-effect of lowfat diets is an increase in aggressive behaviour, especially since I have now reached the stage in my own low-fat diet where I would happily mug somebody for a small sliver of cheese. Aggressive, eh? Take off your glasses and say that. It is the sort of story that makes you uncertain; it muddles things up that were previously clear. Was I being aggressive when I forced copies of Rosemary Conley’s Hip and Thigh Diet on unwilling friends, instructing them to read it (or else)? I looked back with a sad little smile to the innocent days when I could say that the only drawback to low-fat diets is that they make you quite thin, thus making it difficult to store pencils in the folds of your torso. But now, it seemed, there was one of those pesky little hormones to be considered—a hormone moreover that refused to be secreted to the brain unless there was sufficient cholesterol around, the upshot of which might be a propensity for violence. ‘Bastard,’ I said, involuntarily. I scoured the rest of the paper for supporting evidence (linking murders with Ambrosia Low-Fat Rice Pudding) but was disappointed. There was no statistical survey showing that the people who knock off policemen’s helmets invariably prefer St Ivel Gold to butter in a blindfold test. I suppose we shall just have to sit back and wait for the inevitable confirmation of the story from the American law courts. It cannot be long, surely, before the first serial killer is acquitted by an American jury on the grounds of diminished responsibility (by reason of cottage cheese). In my own case it is hard to establish any straightforward cause and effect, since I started the low-fat diet simultaneously with embracing the single life. Any character change, therefore, might certainly be the result of pizza deprivation; but on the other hand, perhaps I have just been unhinged by the burden of sole custody of the cats. The causal borderline is murky. I have noticed, though, that I get extraordinarily jumpy and irrational in the vicinity of high-fat food. For example, the idea of eating crisps now alarms me so much that in Sainsbury’s I remove them surreptitiously from other people’s shopping trolleys, and scuttle off to hide them in the bin-bag section. The fight against fatty food has become a personal mission. Yesterday my next-door neighbour mentioned that she is par-

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tial to a spot of Camembert and I reacted with such horror that she might have said she enjoyed jumping in front of tube trains to test their braking distance. The only way to set one’s mind at rest, I decided, is to do a bit of independent research. Follow a clamping unit around central London, for example, and offer cubes of lard to people whose cars have just been immobilized. ‘Do not attempt to move it!’ I might chuckle, springing out from behind the clamped car and proffering a platter of Cookeen-on-sticks. ‘I wonder if you would be interested in taking part in a little survey I am doing?’ I can imagine some interesting results. Or I could attend the check-out in Sainsbury’s (surrounded by people saying, ‘Funny, what happened to the crisps?’) armed with a tub of low-fat yoghurt and a packet of pork scratchings, so that I can nibble little bits from each, monitoring my reactions. I could stand there with my hand on my head saying, ‘Which way? Which way?’ The check-out is the right place for the experiment because while other people seem undisturbed by the sight of their shopping hurtling serially towards them down the conveyor belt and slamming into a multiple pile-up at the end, I loathe the avoidable frenzy and entertain visions of clonking the check-out lady on the head with a tin of Felix to slow her down. The only trouble is that, what with all the frantic packing and sweating and muttering, I shall probably forget to eat the pork scratchings. I get too worked up, really; and I don’t suppose diet is the answer. Either supermarkets must adopt the American system of packing the bags for the customer, or the government must relax the gun laws. The question: ‘Could you work more slowly please?’ would pack a lot more punch if backed up by a loaded .45. Last week’s article was not only concerned with violence; it also suggested that low levels of cholesterol could be linked to unsuccessful suicide attempts. Great. Wonderful. First class. I am reminded of the time an editor said to me: ‘Perhaps you could just be like Dorothy Parker,’ and I misunderstood. What, keep slashing my wrists and drinking shoe polish? Keep waking up in hospital to hear wisecracking friends say: ‘You’ve got to stop doing this, or you’ll make yourself ill’? If this low-fat existence offers the fate of Dorothy Parker, perhaps it is time to reconsider. After all, even the exciting prospect of death by spontaneous combustion (which I’ve always fancied somehow) is less inviting from the low-fat point of view, since one’s body would burn for a considerably shorter time than would make the option properly worthwhile.  In my flat, I have a small flight of steps, and it worries me. Because one day, in a blur of windmilling arms and high-kicking legs, I am convinced it will shape my end. In itself, this staircase looks innocent of hazard: there are no loose stair

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rods, and if ever I discover ball bearings, bars of soap, or sheets of slippery tinfoil on the top step, I clear them carefully before starting my descent. No, the trouble is, these stairs lead to the kitchen—and anyone who lives with cats will instantly grasp the nature of my fears. For whenever a cat hears someone heading, with a loaded tray, in that direction, he looks up, thinks quickly (but not deeply)—tins! cat-bowl! tea-time!—and makes a blind dash, in the manner of a furry bowling ball hurled with gusto down an alley. There is a heavy expectant pause as he thunders targetwards, and then crash—the pleasant hollow sound of stricken skittles is reluctantly simulated by the windmilling lady with the tray. My only consolation, as I await this disaster, is to muse (albeit tautologically) that ‘most domestic accidents occur in the home’. And how right I am. A recent DTI report about domestic mishaps evidently included the extraordinary statistic that twenty-nine people last year were injured by dressing-gowns, while six named place-mats as their personal Waterloo. Yes, place-mats. Adjust these numbers upwards to account for people too proud to admit to misadventure by warm fluffy towelling or slim cork rectangles and we can see the extent of the danger in our homes. But how was it that 101 people fell victim to their own trousers? How was it that a lone peculiar person was afflicted by a tea-cosy? Crime novelists must be in ecstasy at the news. Suddenly it is permissible for a suspicious detective to peer quizzically at a lifeless body, suck his teeth, and say, ‘Of course, this may be just a straightforward tea-cosy casualty, but I rarely trust the most obvious explanation.’ Ah yes, trousers, dressing-gowns, bread-bins, place-mats, tea-cosies, slippers—all those innocent Christmas gifts now carry the unfortunate connotation of the loaded gun. Personally, I find myself wondering (with a feverish urgency) what sort of place-mat. I mean, the rough raffia sort could give you a nasty scratch, I suppose; and the smooth laminated hunting-scene sort might possibly raise your blood pressure if you were an animal-rights activist. Neither, on the face of it, could land you in hospital. No, only one explanation will satisfy all the scrappy data at my disposal: that instead of umpteen implausible domestic accidents taking place last year entailing tea-cosies and slippers, there was just one enormous out-of-hand Christmas party involving 101 drunken people spilling on to a main road wearing their trousers on their heads, and six attempting to skate across a frozen swimming pool with place-mats strapped to their feet. It’s the only solution that makes sense. ‘Let’s break into the dressing-gown warehouse,’ yells someone wearing a knitted tea-cosy as a balaclava, twenty-nine people following behind him, stumbling. But alas, once inside, blinded by the tea-cosy, he falls against a lever, and from a great height a large bundle of dressing-gowns promptly plummets towards their unwitting bonces. Meanwhile, back at the party, the innocuous game

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‘Toss the slipper in the bread-bin’ has been proceeding safely until somebody has the bright idea of transferring the action downstairs to the kitchen. At which point a cat wakes, looks up, thinks quickly (but not deeply), and—well, you can guess the rest. The DTI does not investigate the statistics, just tabulates them, so it’s no use asking for the true story. Presumably most people made their statements in a state of shock and blamed the wrong thing. ‘Why did you fall downstairs, madam?’ ‘The tray!’ A friend was once waiting in an uphill queue at traffic lights when her car was threatened by a van in front, slowly rolling backwards. Having honked her horn in vain, she ran to the driver’s door, and discovered a woman piling plates on the dashboard. Evidently, they had slipped off; hence the neglect of the handbrake. ‘Plates!’ she laughed, by way of inadequate explanation. ‘But they’re all right, luckily.’  A few years ago the American magazine National Enquirer ran a very helpful tip-list entitled ‘Ten Ways to Spot Whether Your Grandparent is an Alien’. Evidently a large number of American teenagers were racked with worry on this issue and required some official guidelines for confirming or allaying their suspicions. So the Enquirer did its civic duty, telling youngsters to peel their eyes for certain telltale signs. ‘ONE,’ it blared, ‘Gets up in the night for a glass of water. TWO: Remembers things from long ago with clarity, yet can’t summon up details of yesterday afternoon. THREE: Takes naps.’ The article did not explain what dastardly mission these alien wrinklies had been sent to Earth to fulfil, so naturally one formed one’s own theory on the available evidence. Clearly they came here in their silver shiny spaceships with the sole intention of putting their feet up and grabbing forty winks. Independent evidence backs up this notion. For as any astronomer will gladly affirm, very few comfy chairs have thus far been sighted on the surface of Alpha Centauri. I mention all this because, according to a bizarre item in The Times Magazine recently, the American passion for aliens has not declined. True, the National Enquirer no longer carries those entertaining whole-page adverts for genuine extraterrestrial mineral samples (actual size) ostensibly brought back by Wyoming women from adventures in hyperspace. But apparently a new American movie in which a spaceship abducts a humble logger from Arizona (keeping him five days) is billed on its posters as ‘Based on a True Story’. It pulls you up short, this kind of thing. I mean, leaving aside the objection that it can’t possibly be a true story, doesn’t anybody stop to ask why superintelligent aliens would do it? I mean, what’s in it for them?

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It ought to be a source of national pride that in Britain we don’t automatically think in terms of aliens. The ‘Lord Lucan Spotted in Sea of Tranquillity’ story, accompanied by fuzzy aerial photo, somehow fails to grab our imagination, which should be cause for whoops of joy. Brits who abscond from work will possibly resort to far-fetched tales of illness or amnesia, but rarely do they claim to have spent a week in a spaceship unable to phone the office because the aliens (ironically) hadn’t heard of Mercury. ‘So where’ve you been?’ ‘Well, with aliens.’ ‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Was it good?’ ‘Fine, yes. We did some crop circles. They’ve got a special attachment.’ ‘What were the aliens like?’ ‘Funny. They slept a lot, and kept asking me to remind them who I was, and then occasionally they got up for a glass of water.’ Just why America is more susceptible to ‘true-life’ alien stories is hard to account for (at least without being offensive) but it obviously entails a childish confusion about religion and space—which is a reasonable mistake, I suppose, since both originate in the sky. Visitations from the universe are the new-world equivalent of weeping statues in Catholic Europe, and in traditional American space movies, the identification of the visitor with the Messiah is so complete as to be almost laughable. In John Carpenter’s film Starman, the alien comes in peace, is persecuted, raises the dead and ascends on the third day in a blaze of light. The fact that he also samples apple pie (‘Terrific’) and wins half a million dollars in a casino does not detract from the analogy, it simply confirms that this is messianism American-style. Of course, the ludicrous feature of the aliens-from-space belief is that it expects these visitors to take a wise, fair and godlike interest in the way we are running our planet, when it is more likely (as Woody Allen once pointed out) that they will just turn up one day and dump their laundry—socks, underpants, shirts, jackets—with instructions to have it ready by Thursday. Meanwhile they will settle down in front of our TVs for a mass alien after-dinner snooze. Another fond illusion bites the dust, but still, it’s only the same lament that has resounded through the ages. We ask for bread, and they give us stones; we ask for gods, and they give us ironing.  After the price of Whiskas and the paucity of NatWest Servicetills in the Marylebone area, my favourite conversational topic is garden sheds. I can wangle them into any kind of interchange—from the anecdotal (‘Roald Dahl? Writes in his shed, you know’); through the philosophical (‘But how can you tell your shed is

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still there when it’s night-time and you can’t see it?’); to the seductive (‘I’ll just pop down to the shed and slip into something more comfortable’). I am, you see, hoping that people will ask me to tell them more about my shed. But, strangely, no one ever does. The other day I even (Oh God, did I really?) tried to ‘talk sheds’ with Melvyn Bragg. Perhaps one day someone will put together a glossy book called The South London Shed and ask me to write a little piece: about when my shed was built, what additions I’ve made, and how I sit in it all day wearing a straw hat and watch other people do the gardening. But I doubt it. That sort of request goes to the idle rich, like the people who have contributed to The English Garden Room, edited by Elizabeth Dickson (Weidenfeld £8.95). Never have I been more troubled by a largeformat paperback. For it has made me discontented not only with my shed, but with my entire lot in life. It must be said that the book is full of stunningly beautiful photographs. Conservatories are lovely places: huge and healthy plants set against cane furniture, stone paving, tall jardinières, classical statuary, and the odd piano—you can’t go wrong. Lady Aberconway has a large rectangular pool in hers. ‘The surface of the pond,’ says the caption, ‘unites by its reflection two convex shapes in perfect harmony.’ But it’s all this harmony that’s so upsetting. All this tranquillity and all this leisure to enjoy it. I can’t bear to think of it—that some people actually have the time to swing in hammocks. Or is that just an illusion fabricated for the book? Perhaps Princess Nicholas von Preussen is really just as driven as the rest of us— hanging about in the vet’s waiting room with her dachshund (Lily); getting into the slowest queue in Sainsburys. The most violent envy I have ever felt goes out to Mary Douglas-Scott Montagu, who spends her summer months playing Wendy House in a showman’s caravan in the grounds of Beaulieu. She collects up the family pets and a couple of good books and ‘lazes around’. ‘It is the most luxurious and magic escape from the mundane pressures of everyday life.’ Huh. Perhaps this is what such publishing is for: to sustain the existing social order by reducing its readers to a kind of wormy mulch of envy, despair and class hatred. But come the revolution, I can tell you this: there’s going to be a lot of flying glass.  About this time last year, a friend accused me of having ‘let myself go’. And I remember being quite taken aback. I put down the bottle of salad cream I was drinking, and changed the receiver to the other hand, while considering how to reply. ‘But my boyfriend says I’m lovely,’ I protested, at last. ‘He likes me the way I am.’ ‘Oh, come on,’ was the rejoinder. ‘Surely you can see he’s just saying that.’

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I bit my lip, slid down in the chair and unbuttoned the waistband on my elasticated jumbo-sized trousers. Luckily the boyfriend returned at that moment from the chip shop, so I was obliged to ring off. But later, while licking tomato ketchup off the hem of my baggy T-shirt, I told him about the conversation, and asked him what he thought. He said my friend was probably just jealous, and that I should take no notice. But for some reason this cure-all answer failed to satisfy. After all, she was right: I had stopped buying nice clothes, had become addicted to chocolate milk-shakes and taramasalata (sometimes in thrilling combinations), and had started to warm to Shelley Winters as a potential role-model. But what alarmed me most was the memory of my own pathetic little defence: ‘My boyfriend says I’m lovely.’ I could not believe I had said it. Leaving aside the attractive jealousy hypothesis for the time being, I told myself that at least the idea of ‘letting yourself go’ was the wrong phrase, since it belonged to the wrong era. Letting yourself go meant casting aside your boned corset (and having a good scratch), or letting your real eyebrows grow back. You can imagine it in those dour D.H. Lawrence-ish Albert Finney movies (‘What about tha’ wife?’ ‘Me wife? Yon bitch uz let hersel’ go’). Those were the days when women were deemed to be the human equivalent of the Morning Glory, flowering for about twenty minutes and lucky if someone noticed. All of this was comforting. But on the other hand, it is undeniable that I let myself get fat and frowzy when I had a boyfriend; and that the minute I became single again I lost weight in butter-mountain proportions and headed for the gym. To anyone familiar with the life story of Elizabeth Taylor this syndrome is a sad cliché, for which I apologize. Prior to cohabitation, I had looked after my body by feeding it occasional salads; but once safely cocooned in coupledom with a man who did a marvellous impression of a priest granting absolution (‘Hey, go for it, babycakes; life’s too short’) I was singing ‘Bring out the figgy pudding’ from dawn to dusk. This seemed wonderfully liberating until the cold dawn of single life brought me the realization that the only Lonely Hearts advertisements I could answer were the ones that said ‘Send photo of flat’. All of which was how I came to learn about weight-training, and discover my pecs and lats. You wondered where all this was leading, and this is it. Stung by the remark about letting myself go, I decided it was time to pull myself together, which is precisely what weight-training is. You know the way people tune up strings on guitars (dooing-dooing, dung-dung, dang-dang, ding-ding)—well, weight-training is a bit like that, only you have to supply your own sound effects. It is mostly boys who go to my gym, many of them with moustaches, and some of them have even pulled themselves together too tightly. It is amazing. We have muscles all over the place, some of them happy to re-

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spond to attention after about twenty years of disuse. I am particularly fond of the muscles known to us in the weight-training fraternity as ‘lats’ (the latissimus dorsi) because they pull my shoulders down from where they want to be—viz, around my ears. But I have also discovered some muscles called ‘glutes’ which are pretty impressive, since I had previously assumed that there resided nothing in this area beyond wibble and wobble. The jargon is great; I love it. What is a bench press, Auntie Lynne? Well, it is not, as you might think, a huddle in a rugby club changing-room, ho ho. And what do you mean by ‘calf extension’? Well, it has nothing to do with veal, ha ha. The nice man with big beach-ball shoulders who taught me to use the machines was impressed that I picked up the terminology with such relish. ‘What’s next?’ he would say, as we finished our warm-ups. ‘Quads!’ I yelled, like a contestant on a game-show. ‘And what do we use for quads?’ ‘Umm . . . the leg press!’ I was transported by it all. I remember coming home on the Tube and musing, like Alice in the rabbit-hole, ‘Do cats have lats? Do newts have glutes?’ The big issue now is: would I ‘let myself go’ if a man said to me, ‘Listen, two buckets of potato salad won’t be the end of the world’? I honestly could not say. Rather cunningly, I did ask the man with the beach-ball shoulders if he would like to go out for a drink, but it turned out he was married already, which was a crying shame. I had fancied the idea of going dancing with him, and wiggling our lats at one another across a crowded room. Friends said we would not have had much to talk about, but I didn’t care. What a perfect solution to the man-ormuscle dilemma, I thought. I mean, what an ideal chap for keeping a woman on the straight and narrow.  Somewhere along the line, I got the wrong idea about snails. Influenced by my fondness for Brian in The Magic Roundabout, I thought of snails as rather larky characters wearing comical hats and mufflers who deliver wry put-downs. I know this is silly, but you can’t legislate for the power of The Magic Roundabout over a young person’s imagination; and if I grew up expecting sarcasm from molluscs, at least I know where I got the idea. Brian also had a jaunty manner of locomotion, as I recall: reversing back and forth continually, as though engaged in a compulsive seven-point turn. So I rather got the impression that—what with the put-downs and the skidding about—snails were the Bruce Forsyths of the natural world. So it was a bit of a shock to discover, when I finally took responsibility for a garden, that snails are in fact rather stupid organisms that mechanically chomp through marigolds and delphiniums, and are so blindly partial to a drop of Theakston’s Old Peculiar that they can actually be lured into drowning in it.

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Brian’s razor-sharp wit and lightness of foot were clearly unrepresentative of his gastropod friends in general. ‘Where be your gibes now?’ I say, as I gruesomely pile dead snails and empty shells into a sort of garden-path Golgotha (pour encourager les autres). ‘Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were apt to set—er, Dougal and Zebedee in a roar?’ Dealing with pests is one of those problems that women prefer not to face alone. In fact, when discussing separation, I have known women suddenly struck by the thought ‘but who would dispose of the spiders?’ decide on the instant that the calling-off must be called off. It is sad but true that when a man is around, one automatically crouches on top of a wardrobe saying ‘Eek’ while the chap does the business with the coal shovel. It all happens so quickly, you see, that you don’t have time to explore the sexual politics. ‘Cat’s got a frog!’ you shout, and before you know it the man has taken charge, and you are scaling the curtains. I have never actually asked a man outright if he is any good with worms, but it is only a matter of time. There we will be: him, me, moonlight, the heady scent of honeysuckle, the flesh trembling, pushing towards the overwhelming question, and I shall have to spoil it by mentioning worms. The funny thing is, of course, that when no spouse is present to stride manfully worm-wards with a piece of cardboard (‘Don’t worry your head, little missy, I think Mister Worm and I understand one another’), a lone woman simply does it herself. She looks up, sees a worm, thinks ‘Why do cats catch worms? What do they think it proves?’ and then rolls it on to a copy of Hello! and flings it back on the garden. Up until this year, you see, I let the man deal with the snails. ‘Ugh,’ I said, as I watched him pick them up, ‘I couldn’t do that. No, no. I couldn’t do that.’ The idea of handling snails gave me the same species of ab-dabs as the thought of being encased in polystyrene, or forced to listen to a thirty-minute concerto for fingernail and blackboard. Watching my brave chap pulling the little suckers off the pots and plants and hurling them over the wall into an overgrown garden next door (with an encouraging shout of ‘Wheee!’) I would huddle in the doorway and gaze admiringly at his prowess, all the while thinking that, left to me, the garden would solely comprise tall, bare, ravaged stalks and enormous, menacing, overstuffed molluscs blocking the path to the shed. But in fact, of course, I kill them. I don’t shout ‘Wheee’ and lob them over the wall; I patrol the garden with a special killing-bucket and a pair of tongs, making evil ‘snap-snap’ noises and cooing ‘Daddy’s home.’ I used to think all creatures were petals in God’s daisy-chain—but that was before I joined the Marigold Liberation Army, and learned not to feel compassion. After a successful snail-raid, I even add insult to injury by watching my favourite piece of archive footage from Nationwide (shown last year in BBC2’s extravaganza The Lime Grove Story) where a

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huge snail called Boozy is shown supping the froth off a pint before suddenly falling off stone dead with a thump. It makes me laugh every time. I could never love a snail. The great crime writer Patricia Highsmith kept snails, I believe, at her home in Switzerland, but I am not sure this is evidence of affection. She once wrote a terrifying short story in which a foolhardy zoology professor encounters gigantic snails on a remote island, and has his shoulder bitten clean off (munch, munch) by a snail in search of fresh protein. It wasn’t funny, but it helped to get the enemy in perspective. I mean, I think she was saying they’d kill us if they had the chance. Patricia Highsmith was probably intrigued by their homicidal tendencies, and took the more dangerous specimens into town for a pub-crawl, to see how they’d act with a few beers inside them. At which point—of course!—they’d probably put on the hats and mufflers and start saying, ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’ while zig-zagging across the bar in the snails’ equivalent of the hokey-cokey. I never realized it before. All that skidding about and sarcasm that Brian used to do—perhaps he was simply tiddly.  I once heard a very scary story concerning a man who lived alone. I sometimes remember it late at night, and get so nervous that I chew the edge of the duvet. Invited to a friend’s house for dinner, it seems, this man behaved in a perfectly normal, outgoing manner until the moment attention turned to the serving of Brussels sprouts—when he suddenly got strangely serious. ‘One, two, three,’ he said to himself, as he carefully ladled the steaming veggies onto his plate. ‘Ha ha, oh yes. Four, five, six, seven.’ The hosts swapped glances, and shifted uncomfortably in their seats. ‘More sprouts, John?’ asked the hostess, after a pause. At which their guest made a loud scoffing noise and stood up, violently pushing back his chair so that it rucked up the carpet. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve got seven sprouts. And forgive me for having two strong sturdy legs to stand on, but seven sprouts is the number of sprouts I have.’ No doubt there are many married people, too, who have strong feelings on the subject of sprouts. One recalls those famous cases of men murdering their wives (and getting off with a light fine and a reprimand) for serving up the incorrect number of roasties, or putting the cruet on the wrong place-mat. But it is sitting alone in the evening, I am sure, that encourages crankiness: start out with a harmless little tendency towards obsessive-compulsive behaviour, and within a few months of single life you are not only talking to the characters in Brookside but also getting dogmatic about vegetable-consumption and forming advanced crackpot theories on the nature of evil. Since nobody contradicts you (and the goldfish doesn’t care) you easily convince yourself that you are ‘on the right lines’.

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Take the chap I met recently in a Pasadena cake shop. He seemed normal enough: just a bit over-keen for a chat. But then he mentioned that during his solitary hours he had given a lot of thought to the identity of the Antichrist, and had finally settled conclusively on Richard Branson. Everything pointed to it, he said. There’s none so blind as those who will not see, etcetera. I thought he was joking, but it gradually dawned on me that he wasn’t, and that moreover he was positioned between me and the door. ‘Set in your ways’—that’s what they call it when single people start getting things out of proportion. ‘Don’t get set in your ways.’ It means: don’t use a protractor when setting the coffee table at an angle to the wall; don’t attach so much importance to changing the date on your kitchen calendar that you scoot home from work mid-morning to check you’ve done it. The image conjured up is of a stupid-looking prehistoric animal sinking in mud and muttering, ‘Actually, I always buy the Radio Times on a Wednesday’ and ‘I asked for kitchen towel, and she bought me yellow.’ One need only spend half an hour in a supermarket to see where ‘getting set in your ways’ can ultimately lead. There is a strange urban myth which says that in supermarkets single people strike up impromptu chats over the rindless streaky in the hope of finding a potential mate. In reality, however, they are more likely to start the conversation because rindless streaky has been occupying their thoughts in the evenings. The trouble, of course, is to recognize when one’s own reasonable preferences and quaint pet theories (attained through a painstaking process of trial and error) turn into pig-headed fixed ideas, or even dangerous obsessions. At what point does it ‘get out of hand’? I have a nasty suspicion that it is a phenomenon you can never observe in your own behaviour—one of those clever irregular verbs: I have rules about things; You are set in your ways; He thinks Richard Branson is the Antichrist. I am assuming, I suppose, that a sane live-in partner prevents the escalation of this behaviour—rather as he might helpfully point out that your clothes are thick with cat-hair or that there is toothpaste up your nostrils. But is it worth taking on a live-in partner just for this function? I can’t believe it is. Perhaps, instead, there ought to be some tall, supernatural protector for single people (along the lines of Superman) who could spot a burgeoning obsession with his X-ray vision and wooosh into our homes (with a fanfare) to prevent it from getting a grip. Thus, just as you were preparing your solitary dinner and thinking ‘I don’t know. Eight sprouts seems too many, yet six sprouts seems too few,’ he would suddenly appear at your side and dash the whole bag to the ground, releasing you

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from their terrible influence. ‘A close call,’ he twinkles (with arms akimbo and a smile reminiscent of Richard Branson’s). ‘Lumme,’ you say, ‘was I really counting sprouts?’ ‘It’s all over now,’ he chuckles, patting you on the shoulder. ‘Just don’t let it happen again, you hear?’ And as he turns horizontal and flies off through the kitchen door with a cheery salute, you slide down the wall to a sitting position and think—with ample justification—‘I wonder if I’m spending too much time on my own?’  Years ago, I was privileged to meet one of the men who first applied the word ‘vector’ to a type of bank account. I met him at an historic moment, actually, because he had just emerged from the selfsame shirtsleeve-and-braces design consultancy think-tank meeting at which the full kennel-name of Vector (‘Indigo Vector’) had been finally settled upon. He looked tired but happy—like a miner, perhaps, at the end of a 12-hour shift, or a brain surgeon who had just achieved a complicated transplant. Of course, the proceedings of this meeting were not disclosed, but from his exhausted but triumphant state I somehow deduced it had resembled the jury room in Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men—you know, sweaty, tense, touch-andgo, life-in-the-balance. Perhaps opposition to ‘Indigo Vector’ had been fierce; the ‘Blue Streak’ lobby was unshiftable. I imagined my chap taking the righteous white-suited Henry Fonda role, quietly fighting his colleagues every inch of the way, and remaining cool while his enemies dabbed their brows with big hankies. Had I never met him at all, however, I would have imagined something quite different. I would have assumed that the naming of a new bank account must be a work of inspiration, and that, as such, it must come from a humble individual sitting alone in a padded cell—rather in the manner of the contract Hollywood writer under the old studio system. We could call him Mankowitz. ‘Get Mankowitz on to this!’ the board would command. And a secretary would place a sheet of paper in Mankowitz’s in-tray, describing the new bank account and expecting a result by noon. Mankowitz would come in at ten, take off his hat, shuffle the papers without removing the long cigarette between his fingers, and then start to type short oneliners, stopping occasionally only to pinch the bridge of his nose under his wirerimmed specs. Indigo Vector. The bank that likes to say yes. I want to be a tomato. For the little things in life.

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They’re tasty, tasty, very very tasty, they’re very tasty. Once bitten, forever smitten. We won’t make a drama out of a crisis.

And then at half past ten, he would stop for coffee. Perhaps I harbour too strong an attachment to romantic notions of solitary genius. Perhaps I have too little respect for the massed talents of the advertising industry. But somehow I prefer the Mankowitz option. The idea of a gaggle of blokes in expensive whistles sitting together and running the paltry word Vector up a flag-pole fills me with a strange and yawning sadness. I remembered all this because I have recently discovered the surreal world of paint colour names (Comet, Murmur, Quiescence, Evensong, Early December) and I simply cannot bear to believe that these were chosen by a committee in a designer boardroom. There is too much poetry involved, too much imaginative intimacy. ‘Right, then,’ I said, at the paint counter. ‘I’ll have a litre of Hazy Downs please, with Tinker for the skirting,’ and I caught my breath at hearing the words. It was as though the spirit of a mad poet had breezed through. Walls of hazy downs; and ‘Tinker’ for the skirting. Wow. Just look at a strip of green Dulux shades—‘Spring dance, April coppice, Verge, Racecourse, Meadow land, Treetop’—and you can see this poet, can’t you, his eyes closed, straining to hear birdsong in the rustling trees outside his cell window. ‘More greens,’ he smiles to himself, momentarily forgetting the shackles that bind him to the damp stone walls. And he falls into a trance. ‘Curly kale,’ he intones, relishing the shapes it makes in his mouth. ‘Shady fern, Mystic moon, Fresh breeze, Elderwater, Trickle.’ ‘What was the last one?’ snaps the man from Dulux who is taking this down. ‘Trickle,’ he repeats. What I am building up to is a confession. I keep meeting people who think I write this column in a darkened room in a small flat, with just cats for company, and that I write it all myself out of my very own brain. Whereas of course this is a mere illusion, and in fact the writing of this column is a well-organized team affair involving a large number of hacks in consultancy roles, a weekly meeting (with minutes), and an all-day creative thrash-out, in which each person writes a paragraph and then the whole thing is put together by a complicated voting procedure. I mean ‘Single Life’? You must be joking. There are loads of us here. Loads. You should see the washing-up. I am sorry to ruin the illusion, but we all have to learn some time that there is no Mankowitz in the advertising industry; there is no mad poet dreaming of Dulux colours; it’s all done by meetings. ‘Now, a few more greens and thank

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goodness we can stop for lunch. Anybody got a word that goes with kale? Anybody?’ ‘Er . . . “yard”, sir.’ ‘Mmm, so you think we should call it “yard kale”, Robbins? Sounds all right to me.’ ‘No, sir. I meant—er, kaleyard.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘There’s something called curly kale in the dictionary, sir.’ ‘Splendid. All right, hands up for curly kale. Next!’  I have never lingered in cosmetics halls. In fact, I have never really understood what they are for. Why do they invariably lurk at the entrance of department stores, blocking one’s progress to the real business inside? Is it a subtle fumigation process? Or is the idea to soften you up? The luxuriant chrome and lights, the shrill exciting perfumes, the gallons of moisturizer (in tiny pots)—I figure that this sensual riot is designed to trip up the women, and remind them that shopping is basically self-flattery and treats. By the time you actually buy something, you see, you feel so madly feminine that you shell out wildly for an extra tube of bath sealant. But I am only guessing, because personally I always draw a deep breath at the threshold to the shop, take a last memorizing look at my list (‘Draino; Cat-flap accessories; Something for getting Ribena stains out of sofa’) and then whiffle quickly and invisibly between the little counters, tacking athwart this alien sea of feminine trinketry with my eyes half-closed against the unaccustomed glamour of it all. If I pause nervously to examine a lipstick, and a lady asks ‘Can I help you?’ I freeze, and then scuttle sharpish to the lifts. But suddenly, a few weeks ago, I felt an urge to paint my fingernails. It was weird and unaccountable. One minute I was quite normal and stable, attempting to play a well-regulated game of hide and seek with cats who can’t (or won’t) count to twenty. And the next, I was overtaken by an access of femininity, humming ‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’ with brio, and breezing into cosmetics halls demanding a range of nail colours and offering to trade unwanted cat-flap accessories by way of payment. Funny how life can change. Single life suddenly looked quite different, you see: I caught a glimpse of another world, originating in the sort of TV advertisement where pink gauze curtains billow sensuously in a boudoir full of white light and a woman with fantastic hair pampers herself with a beauty product (or tampons). Most people probably regard nail varnish as either functional or tacky, but to me it acquired the force of revelation. Previously the idea of pampering myself meant watching the EastEnders omnibus when I had already seen both episodes in the week. But now it meant inhabiting an aura of solitary voluptuousness, spending whole yummy evenings watching paint dry. Now, the interesting thing about nail polish is that it comes without instruc-

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tions. Did you know this? This was my first setback, really, and it was one from which I never properly recovered. The other interesting thing is that nail polish remover, if you splash it about too liberally, removes polish quite indiscriminately—from your best sandals, for example, and your chest of drawers. Also, it is not a good idea to put used cotton buds, soaked with nail polish remover, directly on a mahogany dining table, because not only does the surface mysteriously acquire pits and scars, but the lacerations have white hair growing out of them, which won’t come off again, ever. Within minutes of starting my new regime, I had run up damages to an approximate replacement value of twelve hundred pounds. But I was not downhearted. I had applied a transparent goo of base-coat to all of my fingernails (including the right-hand ones, which were tricky) and was now ready to drink sherbet, eat Turkish delight, and watch an American mini-series until the next stage. ‘I’m strictly a female female,’ I sang, ‘Da da dum di da Dum de dee.’ I picked up the remote control from the carpet and was surprised to discover that a layer of speckled gunk had attached itself to all the nails that had come in contact with the floor. Spit. Peering at the other hand (which looked OK), I cautiously tapped all the nails with a finger to check they were dry. They weren’t. Three hours later my fifth attempt at a base-coat was almost dry, but I was feeling strangely detached from my surroundings, because I had just spent a whole evening not using my fingers. Every impulse to pick up a tissue, or stroke the cat, or wipe hair from my eyes had been followed once (with disastrous results) and thereafter strenuously denied. At one point, the phone had rung, and after a period of whimpering with indecision I had answered it by picking up the receiver between my elbows and then dropping it on the desk, in a manner reminiscent of thriller heroines tied to kitchen chairs. ‘Hello?’ it said faintly from the desktop. ‘Help!’ I yelled, kneeling beside the receiver, and waggling my fingers like a madwoman. ‘Hello?’ it said again, and went dead. Eventually I took the whole lot off again, partly because the removal process was the only one I was good at, partly because I realized that novice nail-painting is not something to be attempted alone, after all. It requires the attendance of slaves. I did a swift impression of Lady Macbeth (damned spot, and all that), and went to bed. And there I dreamed of waltzing through bright cosmetics halls, dressed in pink gauze, carrying bags and bags of lovely self-indulgent stuff for getting Ribena stains out of the sofa.  First, there is something I should explain: in May 1968, when the world stage resounded to the lobbing of cobbles in the streets of Paris, I recorded in my personal diary the purchase of a maroon skirt. I make no apology. To me, you see, at

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twelve years old, this was an événement. Maroon wool, slightly too big, zip at the front, I was proud. Moreover, conscious of the heavy responsibility owed by all diarists to future historians, I thoughtfully taped the price label to the page. ‘Etam,’ it says, ‘£sd: 19/11’. I still have it (the label, not the skirt). It is before me now. In the intervening years, I have of course laughed at the schoolgirl hubris— fancy preserving an Etam label; did I imagine that the wild-eyed time-capsule people would wrest it from my grasp and bury it along with a copy of the Maastricht treaty for unborn post-nuclear generations to gape and wonder at? Ha ha ha. But now something has happened. The University of Reading has acquired a ‘Centre for Ephemera Studies’, dedicated to the preservation of can labels, leaflets, and all such throwaway stuff. Good grief, my Etam label—someone really wants it. It is like waking up in the cold light of a science fiction novel. Well, do it to Julia, that’s what I say. Personally, I wouldn’t want to be the University of Reading at the moment. Leaving aside the obvious horror entailed in suddenly finding oneself transmogrified into a red-brick academic institution in the middle of nowhere, tons of old shed-clearings must daily be screeching through the gates by special courier. ‘More bus tickets from well-wishers,’ says the dumper truck driver, as he cheerfully pulls his lever and sends several hundredweight of brown-paper parcels slithering down in a heap. The remit of the centre is to preserve only printed matter, but the chronic hoarders of carpet off-cuts will be much too excited to notice. ‘People throw these bits away, with no sense of heritage, but we have kept these sacks of Cyril Lord for thirty years,’ says the covering letter. ‘Please don’t try returning it to us, we have moved. We hope you find much interest also in the tins of paint.’ But if the university sinks under the weight of empty seed packets and Brillo boxes, it will only serve them right. What a terrible idea, to confer academic respectability on the worst of human failings. Besides, since we feel guilt about having a throwaway culture, for God’s sake let’s have the exhilaration too. Chuck it right away, Kay; sling it in the bin, Vin; take it to the tip, Pip; dump it in the sea, Lee. There must be fifty ways to lose a label. Who cares if the ‘details of our everyday life’ are not remembered forever? Who do we think we are? This sort of vanity is all right when you are twelve, but let’s snap out of this worship of the design-classic Coke bottle, before it is too late. It used to be the case that cultural artefacts of all sorts—not just H.P. Sauce labels—were consigned to the dustbin. And it was better, healthier, that way. The old made way for the new. Television programmes were shown, then wiped; films were distributed once; records were released, sold, deleted; nice old buildings were wantonly knocked down; and a collection of old cinema tickets was

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something that alarmingly dropped out of a shoebox in front of guests, making you flush red, grab your purse, and run away to Sweden. But now the culture has been telescoped, which is why it’s hard to remember what year it is, and why shopping in the Virgin Megastore is such a depressing experience. When a person can still buy Monkees albums in 1993, it reduces her faith in the natural workings of progress. So here is a rallying call. Let us face forward, dump some big ones, and move on. It needs no ghost of Sigmund Freud to point out that the new discipline of ephemera studies represents anal retention on a vast, global and terrifying scale. Besides, if we carry on like this, there will be no future historians to thank us for the postcard, so it’s all a vainglorious waste of time in any case. By the year 2000, if we are not all dead through millennial terror, economic incompetence, or holy war, I confidently predict we will have disappeared under inundations of books and videos and lovingly preserved Etam labels.  I swore off caviare on Sunday night. The cats took it badly, but I stood firm, and told them they would thank me in the end. Having watched an hour-long Channel 4 documentary about the polluted River Volga and its toxic sturgeon, I sadly added caviare to my mental list of proscribed foods, finding surprisingly little comfort in the thought that I never eat it anyway. According to a current crack’em-up joke among the Volga fishermen (who admittedly rejoice in a very peculiar sense of humour), even the Kremlin bureaucrats no longer dare to eat the stuff, so I was not over-reacting. Industrial pollutants and agricultural pesticides are poisoning the river to a point where the giant beluga no longer swims gaily in its waters but is reduced to a big stuffed ugly fish in a museum, dusted weekly by a woman in a scarf. Given that caviare is not a staple food (and that you have to eat quite a lot of it to feel any ill effects), the programme wasn’t exactly alarmist, and I wasn’t exactly alarmed. But my heart sank as I recognized the beginnings of a new idée fixe. The trouble with food scares is that only rarely are they called off; a warning siren wails out the danger, but there is no equivalent to the All Clear. This means that susceptible, obedient people with no minds of their own (like me) still pick up little trays of Welsh lamb in supermarkets and then put them back down again, just wondering in a vague, confused kind of way whether the effect of Chernobyl will wear off in their lifetimes. It is possible to get stuck. Personally I don’t buy French apples (why, I don’t remember); I don’t buy catfood marked ‘beef ’ (mad cat disease); and I am wary of eggs (Mrs Currie). Making meals is therefore quite difficult, as you can imagine. In fact, if there is ever a scare involving big economy sacks of Maltesers, quite frankly I am done for.

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This is mainly a personality failing, obviously. If nobody says stop, I carry on. I reckon I am one of the very few people alive today who understand why a Japanese soldier would still be fighting the Second World War. A couple of years ago I was obliged to forgo my visits to a very pleasant supervised gym just because every time I was given a repetitive exercise (‘Breathe out and pull; breathe in, relax; out and pull, and in, relax’) I found I would obediently repeat it until the tutor checked up on me, regardless of the interval. ‘Done ten of those yet?’ he would enquire, in a kindly tone. ‘Fifty-six,’ I would blurt out, red-faced. I finally gave it up when I realized that he might one day set me going on an exercise and then pop out to post a letter and be run down by a furniture van. In which case I would be left to row an imaginary skiff for the rest of my natural life. The idea about food scares, presumably, is that you use your own judgement, but without information I don’t understand how it’s done. A fortnight after Chernobyl, do you just decide not to dwell on the nasty idea that contamination lasts thousands of years (or whatever), and choose to make a traditional shepherd’s pie—even if it cooks itself without help and outshines the candlelight on the dining table? ‘Life’s too short,’ you reason (quite aptly, in the circumstances). But isn’t salmonella still rife in the chicken coops, aren’t cattle still waltzing in the pens? They are probably doing a full-scale mazurka by now. On the caviare front there is less to worry about, obviously. ‘I hope there’s no caviare in this,’ is not something the average attentive cat-owner thinks to herself when doling out the Whiskas. On the other hand, the chances of us hearing that the Volga has been cleaned up (even if it happens) are remarkably slim, so the old Japanese soldier syndrome takes over once again, I’m afraid. ‘Don’t eat the prawns,’ Julie Walters once hissed alarmingly in a Victoria Wood sketch. ‘They tread water at sewage outlets with their mouths open.’ Likewise, from now on I shall raise a skinny warning hand at people in the act of eating caviare canapés, and remind them of the latest unfunny sturgeon jokes from the fisherfolk of the Volga. Either that, of course, or only respond to invitations that promise ‘6pm–9pm, Cocktails and Maltesers’.  According to the first-hand reports, what tends to happen is this. You are lying in a hospital bed, approaching death, and then suddenly you lift out of your body and look down on yourself. This is weird enough to start with, of course; but before your rationality can fully take stock—‘That’s very odd, me on the ceiling, I expect it was the toasted cheese’—you are propelled, helpless and at great velocity, along a dark tunnel towards a wonderful welcoming light. No thought of passport, hand-baggage or travellers’ cheques detains you; nor do you slap your hand to your brow with the cry ‘Oh no, I left the iron on.’ Instead, you emerge

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into a beautiful, timeless, tranquil garden where you feel blissfully happy, and decide to stay for eternity, if not weeks. Of course you are also dragged away again. Suddenly, with a dreadful finality, you are dropped back in your body, and it’s all over, your vision is fled, you are condemned to life. But you are never the same again. Possibly your experience confirms the notion of life after death, possibly it proves only that imagination is the last thing to go. Whichever way you see it, you have been blessed. Personally, I have always yearned for an out-of-body-experience. (With a body like mine, so would you.) My only fear was that my idea of paradise is so cheap and materialistic that my tunnel would end, not in the tranquillity of Elysian fields, nor beside still waters, but in a celestial shopping arcade (modelled on Bentalls of Kingston), from which I would return with beany hats and specially printed souvenirs: ‘My sister went to Heaven and all she got me was this lousy T-shirt.’ This sense of personal unworthiness, however, only increases one’s awe at the genuine wonderful thing, and on Sunday I watched BBC1’s Everyman programme about near-death experiences with big round eyes and my mouth open. Even if you don’t believe in Heaven, you can believe in the near-death experience. These people had seen something. They thought it was lovely. It was thirteen years since one woman’s privileged return from the undiscovered country, yet she still had light in her eyes when she spoke about it. In earlier times, these people would have been revered as saints, I thought. The only puzzle was why nobody mentioned Lewis Carroll. Tunnel, garden, I don’t know, it rings bells. What was mentioned, however, was a miserable wetblanket scientific theory which suggested in no uncertain terms that the neardeath experience is a mere perceptual illusion—something that happens inside the brain when your resistance is low—and that in reality you don’t go anywhere, not even Bentalls, you just think you do. This was a shock, especially since it sounded so plausible. Dr Susan Blackmore, a cheerful academic with a nononsense approach and a leaning towards Buddhism, has been researching the phenomenon for years, and what she said, basically, was that your inhibitory cells stop firing, causing masses of excitation. I felt terrible. I sat down. So it was really true, what they told me. There is no shopping after death. ‘What happened to you back there? We thought we’d lost you!’ ‘Oh, it was just some uncontrolled firing in the temporal lobe, silly! The accompanying rush of endorphins (peptide neurotransmitters) just persuaded me I was having a frightfully good time when in fact I wasn’t.’ ‘Oh. So it wasn’t like Heaven, then?’ ‘Well, in a way it was. I mean, I wore a blue frock and had a pony, which was nice, and there was a treacle well and a pile of comics, but it didn’t mean anything. It was just that my brain had lost its grip on the normal model of reality,

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and had constructed one from memory and imagination, rather than from the evidence of the senses.’ I suppose the near-death experience never did prove the existence of the immortal soul, but I have to admit I sneakingly thought it did. But that’s all in the past now. What saddens me equally is the thought that if the near-death experience is an illusion, there is no near-life experience either, which leaves a big question-mark hanging over the glassy-eyed travellers of the London Underground. Previously I had supposed they were dead people on spiritual awayday tickets, investigating the joys of the other side. But if they aren’t, then who the hell are they?

The Only Event of Any Importance That Ever Happened to Me




I got stuck in the lift last week. I had been working a bit late, and the lift was waiting innocently at the right floor, so—fool that I was—I thought I’d travel down in it and save on the wear and tear to the support hosiery. The doors closed pretty efficiently, but then nothing else would work: the doors wouldn’t open again, and the lift wouldn’t move. I told myself to breathe deeply, and not panic. Funnily enough, that didn’t work either. The whole of Hancock’s The Lift flashed before my eyes. I knew I stood a good chance of being rescued, since several people were still dittling about, pretending to be working. Nevertheless I was quite frightened, especially as they didn’t seem able to hear my knocking and calling . . . or my BANGING and SHOUTING . . . or even my POUNDING and SCREAMING. There was a glass panel in the door, and I could see people wandering soundlessly between rooms, totally oblivious to my plight. Had premature burial come to the Old Marylebone Road? Even when at last I managed to attract someone’s attention, the relief was short-lived, since it was soon discovered that the door wouldn’t open from the outside either. Besides, it turned out that my so-called rescuer had watched Billy Wilder’s film Ace in the Hole on television the night before, and was immediately struck by the parallel. Shouting through six inches of metal, she assured me that I would be perfectly all right, of course, but that they might need to drill down from the top. ‘We’ll have you out of there in no time,’ she said. ‘Three weeks at the outside.’ Gradually the alarm went out, and people gathered around the lift to see me in my vertical coffin. Having endured many a Roger Corman movie in my youth, I knew the proper Ligeia drill, but I decided against breaking my fingernails tearing at the glass for their benefit. Instead I behaved impeccably, shrugging and smiling, and waving cheery hellos to the succession of familiar faces who took it in turns to peer solemnly in at me. It was like one of those reconstructions of a baby’s-eye view of childbirth: big faces with impersonal expressions looking in and mouthing stuff like, ‘She’s in there, sure enough. But how are we going to get her out?’ In the end, our fast-thinking Chief Sub ran and located some sort of lift-key which, when properly applied to the door, alarmed him by sending me plummeting down (inside the lift) to freedom. There is only one interesting aspect to this no-doubt commonplace experience. It is that throughout the whole terrifying ordeal, I seemed to hear the voice

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of the Lord. And he said to me, ‘Here you are then, Lynne. Here’s your Margins for next week. Don’t say I never give you anything.’  To celebrate the 3,000th Listener crossword, I thought I might share a little secret with you. Shout it aloud in Gath and Hebron: nobody on the Listener staff has the first idea of how to do the Listener crossword. For years, we have been convinced that the clues are actually coded messages from MI5. Speaking personally, it’s not only crosswords that I can’t do. All sorts of brain teasers leave my brain completely unexcited. The ones I particularly dislike are those that are designed to develop your verbal reasoning skills, where you are supposed to infer a whole system of relationships from a few key bits of information. For example: a) ‘Julie has a dog but it does not have blue eyes’; b) ‘John knows all the words to Melancholy Baby but can’t quite get the tune’; c) ‘Sylvester only recognizes words with fewer than four letters’; d) ‘The dog will sing, but only for Maltesers’. Perhaps my dislike for these exercises explains why I found it so hard to get started on Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Book and the Brotherhood. She launches straight into this kind of information about a vast number of characters (Conrad is taller than Gulliver, though Gulliver is considered tall; Gerard is Tamar’s uncle but Violet’s cousin; Gerard, Jenkin and Duncan all wear dinner-jackets), with nary a thought for those of us hastily sketching diagrams on the fly-leaf. So which puzzles can I do? Well, I will confess that I have a certain aptitude— given the right airport-lounge—for the ones that present you with a block of letters, and ask you to find the hidden words.

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Now, to the untrained eye, this looks like a mere mess of jumbled letters. But I think I can demonstrate something pretty startling.

Reflections on Culture




Since the book is now out, it is too late to ask Susan Hill to be gentle with me. As from yesterday, a surging modern sequel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca has crashed and boiled by moonlight into the bookshops, and my name—Mrs de Winter—is once again in common parlance, along with Rebecca and Mrs Danvers, and Mad Ben the beachcomber. (‘No shell here,’ nods gap-toothed Ben mysteriously in my dreams at night. ‘Been diggin’ since forenoon. No shell here.’) Ho hum. Crash. Boil. That’s the trouble with being shy and mousy. When you are the sort of nervous person who pushes the shards of a broken ornament to the back of a drawer so that the servants don’t find out (‘Oh lord, that’s one of our treasures, isn’t it?’ quips your husband, helpfully), it is natural that people should go right ahead and publish sequels about you, without bothering to ask you first. In my worst moments I think Mrs Danvers was right, I should have chucked myself out of an upstairs window and done everyone a favour. But the trouble with being Rebecca’s nameless heroine is this: supposing Susan Hill had taken me out for a coastal drive and then explained, ‘I’m asking you to be in my new novel, you little fool!’—well, I would have had no option but to swoon my acceptance, wouldn’t I? But I have changed a lot since Rebecca, since those ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea. And I just hope Susan Hill is aware of it. The fact is, I experienced a quite surprising character change just at the point when Daphne du Maurier’s narrative left us—Maxim and me—on that mad, desperate nocturnal drive westwards towards the blazing Manderley. You may remember the scene. I spotted the giveaway glow on the horizon, and suggested, feebly, that it was the northern lights. ‘That’s not the northern lights,’ said hubby, all grim and lantern-jawed (as usual). ‘That’s Manderley.’ And he put his foot down. ‘Maxim,’ I whined. ‘Maxim, what is it?’ But he didn’t answer, just drove faster, much faster. I felt cold, very cold. It was dark, horribly dark. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. ‘It’s the bloody house!’ I yelled, suddenly. ‘That snotty cow in the black frock has set fire to the bloody house!’ Well, you can imagine the consternation. We came off the road. The car juddered to a halt. There was a hiss of steam. The ash still blew towards us with the salt winds of the sea, but I beat it off my jacket saying, ‘Ugh! Ash! Yucky! Look!’ Maxim could not believe his ears. ‘Stop it, you idiot!’ he said, but it was the wrong thing to say. ‘And you can stop calling me an idiot as well!’ I said, and socked him on the jaw. It was terribly peculiar; not like me at all. The author watched in stunned amazement, and then asked very quietly whether she could have a word.

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The whole point of Rebecca, she explained patiently, was that I—as the modest, hapless, mooncalf heroine—should serve as a role-model for readers yet unborn, as the acceptable face of womanhood. Surely I could see that? ‘First we have Rebecca,’ she said; ‘she’s sexy and manipulative and selfish. You see? Then we’ve got Mrs Danvers, who is dark and jealous and self-sacrificing and is obviously everybody’s mother because she knows their faults and judges by impossible standards and rests her chin on their shoulder. And then there’s you, the victim. And you haven’t got a clue, basically. But because you are well intentioned, not very bright, motivated by gratitude and love, and terrorized by a fear of failure, you’re the heroine. Everyone loves you! Trust me! You are a great modern archetype! One day your followers will include the Princess of Wales!’ But I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ So I divorced Maxim, took half the insurance money on Manderley, learnt to sail, wrote a book on sexual politics, broke a lot of ornaments and felt much better. That’s all there is, I think. Except that I decided to call myself Jackie. It comes as a surprise to some people, but as I always say, it’s a great deal better than nothing.  Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up in my little flat, turn on the light, and burst into tears with relief. ‘Oh kitties,’ I gasp. ‘What a terrible dream! I dreamed I was in the Algarve on holiday on my own again!’ The awoken cats (God bless them) at first assume an air of polite concern. But at the word ‘Algarve’, they exchange weary glances (the feline equivalent of ‘Tsk’) and settle their heads back down on their paws. My buried-alive-in-Portugal saga seems to have lost its news value. Meanwhile, I witter on. ‘I am in this café, you see, and I am reading the phrase-book. And all I can say in Portuguese is that I want two coffees, and four teas with milk, and lots of cakes! But I don’t really want all these drinks because I’m on my own! And they keep bringing cakes and teas and coffees, and I don’t know how to say Stop! and the teas keep coming and it’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and . . .’ I look around and see that nobody is listening. The good thing about this Algarve nightmare is that at least it covers everything you might want to have a nightmare about—from waking up in a box, to doing Finals in Sanskrit, to being drowned in a flash flood of Twinings. It’s all there. A friend of mine, who frequently suffers from the Finals dream, says he sometimes manages to double the anxiety by imagining that if he doesn’t pass this impossible exam, he won’t be allowed to reach the age of thirty-five; he will be obliged to go back to eleven and start again. Yike. In a similar exercise, I sometimes ring the changes on my Algarve nightmare by imagining that while I order

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the usual never-ending buckets of tea and coffee, I am unaware the laws of the country have been changed, so I am slung into jail for some sort of beverage transgression. Why am I going on about it? Because I have been studying a little phrase-book I picked up in Italy on my last holiday, and have been rather alarmed by it. L’Inglese come si parla has worried me, I admit, ever since I first discovered I had goofed in the shop and bought the wrong sort of phrase-book—intended for Italian visitors to England, rather than the other way around. ‘What would you charge to drive me to Richmond?’ was the first phrase I saw in it, helpfully spelled out in pretend—phonetics: Huot uud iu ciaadg tu draiv mi tu Ritc’mond? And I thought, hang on, this can’t be right. Richmond is miles away. But what I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was what a nightmare experience the Italian visitor would have if he allowed this little phrase-book to govern his expectations of England. Because close attention reveals this newly printed publication to have been written either: a) by someone trying to push back the boundaries of existential terror; b) by someone who got all his information from watching Ealing comedies; or c) in 1948. It’s the telltale references to trams that first set you thinking. Then you notice that the pubs close at 10 o’clock, the planes stop at Renfrew, and there are jam omelettes on the bill of fare. The world is suddenly all Sidney Tafler and black and white. In a tobacconist’s shop, the choice of cigarettes is Gold Flake, Players and Capstan; and the lonely Italian visitor in search of a girlfriend proceeds at once to a dance hall. ‘Dhis tiun is veri na(i)s, isn’t it?’ he says to his partner, peering over her shoulder at the phrase-book, and speaking like a computer. He riffles a few pages. ‘Iu aa(r) e wanderful daanser! Mei ai sii iu ho(u)um? Huot is iu(r) adres?’ Encouraged to dabble in less formal English, he tells his new lady-friend she is ‘(e) nai(i)s litl bit ov guuz’ (a nice little bit of goods). Something about all this makes me intensely worried on his behalf. I mean, what would happen if he arrived at Victoria Station, and shouted (as he is advised here), ‘Poorter! Te(i)k dhis laghidg tu dhe Braiten trein!’ (‘Porter! Take this luggage to the Brighton train’). There would be some sort of riot. Alas, the British public would never guess he was living in some parallel phrase-book universe, would they? They would just assume he was asking for a punch in the eye. ‘Wash the car, and give it a good greasing,’ he commands at a petrol station. But what’s this? Biff! Boff! Ooof! Crawling back to the car, clutching his abdomen in one hand and his phrase-book in the other, he mutters, ‘Dhets dhe ghidi limit!’ (That’s the giddy limit). I do wonder whether the book was published in a spirit of mischief by someone obsessed with Ealing films, because actually the story that emerges from its pages is rather like an Ealing plot. Poor guileless foreigner (played by Alec Guin-

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ness, perhaps) works hard to overcome loneliness by using authentic popular slang such as ‘nose-rag’, ‘old horse’ and ‘cheese it!’ and nobody knows what the hell he is talking about. ‘Dhets ool mai ai end Beti Maarten!’ he exclaims jocularly (‘That’s all my eye and Betty Martin’), amid general shrugs. To make matters worse, the phrase ‘To pull the plonker’ is mysteriously omitted from L’Inglese come si parla. So the poor bloke keeps hitting the deck without ever understanding the insistent question on all English people’s lips.  Occasionally, we television critics like to reflect on our lives and pull a few strands together. In particular, we like to emphasize that, far from wasting our childhoods (not to mention adulthoods) mindlessly gorming at The Virginian and The Avengers, we spent those couch-potato years in rigorous preparation for our chosen career. ‘It’s been tough,’ we reflect thoughtfully (as our eyes dart unbeckoned to the nearest flickering screen). ‘I mean, er, gosh, Streets of San Francisco, I love this. Oh yes, of course there were a few dodgy moments during the second run of Blankety Blank when I feared I might not make it, that the pace was simply too hard. But I pulled through. And leaving aside the damage to the optic nerve, I can honestly say that watching wall-to-wall drivel was the best—ahem—mental investment I ever made.’ I know, I know. Such pious fraud fools nobody. But in the week that saw the thirty-fifth anniversary of BBC1’s Blue Peter, and in which I calculated that I watched this enjoyable, educative programme, girl and woman, for a total of fifteen years, I simply felt obliged to trawl for a valid extenuation. In reality, of course, I watched it because I loved it, because it was live and dangerous, and because the invited animals acted up, refused to eat, and sometimes dragged presenters clear off the set. Most of all, however, I watched for its suggestion of that strange made-it-myself domestic world (reached, perhaps, through the airingcupboard) in which Mummy’s work-basket was filled with Fablon off-cuts, while Daddy was a kindly twinkler in carpet slippers who would happily drill a hole in a piece of wood (‘Hand it here, youngster!’); you only had to ask. Some people disliked Blue Peter for this cosy middle-class idyll; they got chips on their shoulders. But I thrived on these glimpses of a parallel universe. I adored the fanciful idea of aunties who exclaimed, ‘What a lovely present! How ingenious to think of painting an egg-box and making it into a fabulous jewellery case!’ Wisely, however, I stayed on the right side of the airing-cupboard, not dabbling in glitter and squeezy bottles; also, I recognized cheap tacky home-made stuff when I saw it, and refused to get involved. Only once in thirty-five glorious Blue Peter years did I let slip my guard (oh, woe) and attempt to make ‘jelly eggs’ as a nice surprise for a family Easter. I regretted it instantly. It was a terrible mistake.

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One day, they will find ‘Jelly Eggs’ engraved on my heart, just next to the inexpressibly mournful ‘Copy fits, no queries’. The jelly eggs instructions looked simple enough, but that’s no excuse. 1) Take an egg, make a tiny hole in each end, and then just blow the contents through the tiny weeny hole, leaving the shell empty. 2) Boil up some jelly. 3) Cover one of the tiny holes with a small piece of sticky tape. 4) Pour the jelly into the shell, then pop it into the fridge, where it will set. Now, just picture the surprise of the adults on Easter morning when they take the top off your egg and find the jelly inside! Whatever possessed me to try this at home? Could I blow an egg? No, not without blowing my brains out. Would a piece of sticky tape keep the jelly inside (assuming I could pour it into a tiny hole without a funnel)? No, the only thing that worked, finally, was an Elastoplast—the big brick-red fabric sort, generally used for heels. Would the egg-shell mould the jelly into the shape of a perfect egg? No, because the jelly seeped into the Elastoplast overnight, and sank to halfway. Were the adults dumb-struck with surprise when they ate their Easter breakfast? No, because they had all been involved in this disastrous enterprise at some stage or another, urging me in my own interests to see sense and give the whole thing up. But I never lost my love for Blue Peter. I now hear that under pressure from the real world they have sealed up the old airing-cupboard door, which is a shame. Blue Peter taught me that when my own turn as auntie came around, I should exclaim, ‘That’s lovely, how clever, is it a tissue box with my name on it in glitter?’— thus making a little girl quite happy. So it just goes to show. Watching fifteen years’ worth of television does teach you something, sometimes.  Alas, I am perplexed again. A few weeks ago, a writer chum phoned me to ask for some help with a difficult ethical question, so naturally I pulled a straight face immediately, rested my fingertips lightly together (tricky when holding a receiver) and suggested she proceed. A friend had left an expensive winter coat in her flat, by mistake, she explained, then flown abroad for six weeks. ‘I see,’ I said, nodding thoughtfully; ‘And so? What?’ My chum’s question was this: if I were in her position, would I wear the coat? I was so shocked by the very idea that I instantly abandoned my rational, objective Michael Ignatieff impersonation. ‘No,’ I said flatly. ‘No, I would not.’ ‘Why?’ she asked.

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Well, I said, first I would be worried about the safety of the coat, you know, down the shops, bloke on a ladder, tin of paint, Norman Wisdom, ha ha ha. Second, I would be almost suicidally flummoxed in company if anyone remarked: ‘Nice coat, where’s it from?’ But really and honestly, I wouldn’t wear it because it wasn’t mine. Now my friend was much taken with this tin-of-paint idea. When she rang other people for further ethical and practical viewpoints, she found that the irrational Fear of Paint not only entered other people’s neurotic purview, but could easily be brought to dominate it. But what she didn’t find, apparently, was anyone else who said, ‘No, I wouldn’t wear it because it isn’t mine.’ So she wore the coat, recklessly defied the malign god of magnolia gloss, and eventually decided to write a piece for the Guardian about the whole damn thing. And my point (at last) is this. She told me she was writing an article in which I would—nameless, of course—appear. She read me her description of my response, and told me precisely when the piece would be published. Such careful, respectful and scrupulous behaviour put me to shame. Because when it comes to other people’s anecdotes—other people’s ‘stuff ’ which might come in handy to illustrate a point in a column or a story—I rip it straight off the hanger without asking, shout ‘Yes! This will do nicely!’, and publish it in a newspaper. Which is the exact equivalent of wearing it to the open day at the Jackson Pollock Primal Hurl Art Therapy Group for Particularly Messy Serial Killers. Luckily, my friends are more broadminded than me. I parade their best stuff in public and they don’t get all twisted about it. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz once said that when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. Equally, when a columnist has bosom friends, they find that they no longer have a thing to call their own. Every anecdote they utter goes directly into the writer’s mental dressing-up box, and though any single item may not re-emerge for a decade, it will undoubtedly turn up again one day—albeit crumpled, stained, mildewed, or laced with holes—to the owner’s muffled astonished cry of ‘But surely that was mine originally, wasn’t it?’ It is no extenuation whatever to claim (as I do, frequently) that so long as I attribute stories to ‘a friend’; so long as I don’t tell the story against the originator— well, then it’s all perfectly OK. In her Great Left-Behind Coat Ethics Research, my friend encountered precisely such casuistical chicanery, and I poured scorn on all of it. For instance, perhaps it would be a different ethical kettle of fish if the item were not a coat but a frock? Or if the owner were the sort of person who suffers from amnesia? Or if you only allowed yourself to wear the coat outdoors on Na-

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tional No Decorating Day? Bah, I retorted; the matter is simple. If it doesn’t belong to you, leave it in a cupboard. The rest is sophistry. And so here I am, writing about my friend’s article about borrowing things without asking. And did I ask her? Of course I didn’t. ‘Yes! This will do nicely!’ I yelled excitedly, as I tried it on for size, did a quick twirl, and hacked a few inches off the sleeves with the bread-knife. Such a gigantic fuss about nothing! As the great Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz might have remarked, if they didn’t want me to wear it, they really shouldn’t have left it lying about.  At the cinema these days there is a rather peculiar advert for jeans. It is basically a witty rewriting of Cinderella, but since it appears to have been edited by a madman run wild with a bacon-slicer, the narrative unfolds so precipitately that it takes at least two viewings to get the gist. Anyway, it goes something like this. Clock strikes bong for midnight. Boy rushes off without his jeans. Girl holds jeans to face with funny wistful-but-determined look in her eyes, then hawks jeans around town, getting big fat men to try them on. Finally, she locates her beloved, who buttons up a treat. And that’s it. Allowing for how difficult it is to make trousers even slightly interesting, this ad is a huge success. The thing about fairy tales, surely, is that they can be used to sell anything; indeed, it is almost their primary function. Anyone who thinks it is radical of the Disney studio to turn the heroine of Beauty and the Beast into a modern-thinking self-determined book-lover (‘There must be more than this provincial life!’ she sings discontentedly, several times) is right in only one respect. Yes, it is radical of the Disney studio. Previously Disney sold other things; now it is selling this. A generation of girls grew up believing that to be a heroine (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty) all you required were a decent whistling technique, firstclass handiness with a broom, and an ability to sleep for extended periods in a glass box without mussing your make-up or dribbling on your frock. And as values go, these were probably ok for the time. But my point is this. In the traditional folk tale, women were not these puny types. Big tears did not roll down their pretty faces, and they did not wear rouge. Instead, they rescued princes from enchantment, tipped witches into ovens, all that. The reason we know only of the rescue-me namby-pambies is that we inherit our knowledge of folk tales from the Victorians, whose respect for divergent viewpoints, especially in the realm of sexual politics, was notoriously meagre. Funny how The Sleeping Prince got dropped from the canon, wasn’t it? I wonder why. But as Alison Lurie points out in her marvellous book on children’s literature,

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Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups, even the Grimm brothers tidied up the tales to reflect the mores. ‘In each subsequent edition of the tales,’ writes Lurie, ‘women were given less to say and do.’ At issue, of course, is whether it is cynical and outrageous to impose modern values on traditional stories. When George Cruikshank, the Victorian illustrator, rewrote four of his favourite fairy stories as temperance tracts, Charles Dickens countered with a brilliant essay, ‘Frauds on the Fairies’ (1853), denouncing the practice. But what is odd now is to see how certain Dickens was that the versions he remembered from childhood were necessarily the originals. Cruikshank, thundered Dickens, ‘has altered the text of a fairy story; and against his right to do any such thing we protest with all our might and main . . . Whosoever alters them to suit his own opinions, whatever they are, is guilty of an act of presumption, and appropriates to himself what does not belong to him.’ Dickens boiled with sarcasm (‘Imagine a Total Abstinence edition of Robinson Crusoe, with the rum left out. Imagine a Peace edition, with the gunpowder left out, and the rum left in’); and then embarked on a thoroughly sardonic rewrite of Cinderella incorporating absurdly modish references to tax reform, vegetarianism and, interestingly, the rights of women. Cinderella, in this version, was a moral swot and reviler of meat, who on becoming queen did all sorts of absurdly fashionable things. She ‘threw open the right of voting, and of being elected to public offices, and of making the laws, to the whole of her sex; who thus came to be always gloriously occupied with public life and whom nobody dared to love’. It is the mark of a great writer that he allows his own imagination to scare him like this. Come to think of it, this must have been the version that was read to the infant Neil Lyndon in his cot. Where does it all stop? Well, it won’t stop at all, of course. Walt Disney is supposed to have said, ‘People don’t want fairy stories the way they were written. In the end they’ll probably remember the story the way we film it anyway.’ But now Linda Woolverton, the scriptwriter of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, has started saying she would like to remake ‘the old Disneys’, so it turns out that nothing is sacred after all. Cinderella, she says, needs to stand up to the ugly sisters, stop hanging around with mice, and not necessarily marry the prince. Hmm. Snow White should not stay at home all day but work with her chums in the mines and marry one of the vertically challenged men with pickaxes. And lastly, Sleeping Beauty—the most famously inert character of them all—should ‘track down and personally punish’ her wicked stepmother immediately she wakes up in the glass box. Whether she will punish her stepmother by making her watch the new version of Cinderella is not made clear. I promise I didn’t make any of this up. I just wonder how serious Linda Woolverton was when she said it. Currently she has been let loose by Disney on a remake of the famous animal adventure film The Incredible Journey, which seems at

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first glance to have fewer opportunities for political correctness, although the cat could have a wooden leg. Meanwhile, it ought to be said that Belle may indeed be a book-reader, who swoons at the sight of the Beast’s enormous library, yet she is a traditional heroine in most other respects. She is kind, friendly, chats with cockney teapots, and has enormous eyes. And of course she is everso, everso pretty. But then ‘Passable Looking and the Beast’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it somehow.  Anyone watching the BBC news on Sunday night, with its edited highlights of the Remembrance Day ceremony, will have noted a very curious thing. The newsmen cut out the two minutes’ silence. Thus, the clock went ‘Bong’, the distant cannon went ‘Bang’, and the next thing you knew, they were playing the Last Post and laying wreaths. Since the annual two minutes’ reflective silence is about the most moving thing on television, it is possible that the edit was intended to protect the already raw feelings of the grief-stricken. But I doubt it. What we witnessed here was the consequence of fear, of a feeble failure of nerve. You see, silence on the television is about as unthinkable (Oh no!) as blank lines in a newspaper, thus: In fact, the chances of this gaping white wound not being panic-sutured by someone in the course of the paper’s production (‘What the hell is this? There’s a space on page 18!’) are very slim indeed, and I am thoroughly foolhardy even to attempt it. Gaps are great, however. I firmly believe we should have more gaps, especially in broadcasting. ‘And now on BBC2, er, Nothing. Over on BBC1, in just over ten minutes, good grief, Nothing there, as well.’ Personally, I would embrace the return of the potter’s wheel, the interval bell, the test card, and the inventive use of ‘Normal Programmes Will be Resumed Shortly’, but arguably Nothing could be finer. Don’t other people’s brains get overloaded? Or is it only mine? Has no one else noticed that new books are published every week, without let-up, over and over, till the end of creation? Why don’t they stop sometimes? Why don’t they admit they have run out of ideas? Am I run mad, or just in desperate need of a holiday? Asked recently in a published questionnaire to compose a headline for the event that I would most like to cover, I’m afraid I gave myself away completely. ‘Airwaves eerily silent,’ I wrote, ‘as all networks simultaneously run out of programmes.’ Clearly this is an unusual attitude to our splendiferous burgeoning culture, especially in a television critic, but on the other hand, for God’s sake somebody, help! While others famously ‘surf ’ through the television channels—presumably humming ‘Catch a Wave’ by the Beach Boys as they paddle back out, letting their

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fingertips stiffen from prolonged immersion—I find I can only cope by taking short exhilarating dips, then towelling off vigorously and getting fully dressed again. Sharing a sofa (and a remote control) with someone who uses commercial breaks in cop shows as an opportunity to surf over and ‘see what’s happening in the snooker’ is guaranteed, in fact, to drive me to violence. ‘Shouldn’t we switch back now?’ I say, after a minute has passed. ‘Not yet, this is interesting.’ Pause. ‘Let’s switch back, go on.’ ‘Not yet.’ A longer pause, more charged with tension. There is an irritating click of balls. ‘Give me that thing!’ I shout, suddenly. ‘I want to go back to Columbo!’ At which point a grabbing-and-kicking scuffle breaks out, and the remote control is somehow hurled out of the window, where it lands with a plop in a rain-butt. Recently on Radio 4 the wonderfully repugnant Alan Partridge (spoof Pringlewearing radio personality chat-show host) attempted a one-minute silence, when an interviewee supposedly suffered a fatal heart attack in the chair opposite. ‘And now, the one minute’s silence,’ said Partridge (or something similar). ‘Yes, ahha, here we go . . . very respectful, this . . . in case you’re wondering, anyone who’s just tuned in . . . this is a One Minute Silence . . . about half-way through, I should think . . . it’s very moving, actually . . . perhaps I could use this opportunity to tell you about next week’s show . . . or perhaps not . . . can’t be long now . . . that’s it! Minute’s up! Lovely.’ Well, I’d just like to say I genuinely appreciated what he was trying to do. So here’s another gap: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.  Once, when I was still a literary editor, I was instructed by an ebullient boss to commission a piece from Norman Mailer. ‘Try Norman Mailer,’ he said. ‘If our usual fee isn’t high enough, tell him we can add an extra fifty quid.’ I dropped the tray of cups I was holding. ‘Something wrong?’ he said. Fighting back tears, I forced out the words, ‘Isseny nnuff.’ ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘Isseny nnuff.’ ‘Oh, you never know,’ said my cheery editor, patting me on the shoulder. ‘Tell you what: you can add a hundred. That ought to do it.’ And he went off home. The trouble with having low self-esteem is that you recognize immediately when you are out of your depth. I was out of mine from the moment the Manhattan switchboard-operator took my call. ‘You’re calling from where?’ she asked, making me repeat myself more loudly, so that she could hold up the receiver for everyone else to have a good laugh, too. As I felt myself sinking, I realized I was

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like a character in an American short story, hazarding everything on the tiny chance that someone had once saved Mailer’s life by staunching a gun-shot wound with a copy of The Listener. Mailer’s agent was clearly a very busy man, with little time to mess around with small fry like me. When he at last spoke to me, I was convinced he was having a haircut and manicure at the same time. He started with the bottom line: ‘You ought to know,’ he declared equably, ‘that Norman’s alimony commitments are so titanic that if he writes for anything below his bottom rate he actually ends up in court for defaulting. Now, I’ll tell you that the last time Norman wrote for a magazine, he was paid fifty thousand dollars. Tell me what you are offering and I’ll run it past him.’ I did a rapid calculation on a scrap-pad, and figured we were roughly fortynine and a half thousand dollars short. Did I have sufficient cojones to pledge the magazine into bankruptcy? No I did not. I added an extra hundred to our top fee (‘I can always sell the car,’ I thought), but my effort elicited no cheers or huzzahs from the agent. As he said goodbye, I heard myself say, ‘Don’t you want to know what we’d like him to write about?’ but it was too late. I hung up and went home. I never found out whether he ran it past Norman or not, but I have often envisaged it bowling past Mailer at top speed, just as he was bending down to tie his shoelaces. I have dwelt on this conversation ever since. None of it need be true, of course: the agent may just have been trying to let me down gently. But what a terrible fix for poor Norman. It struck me that we might turn the evidence to our advantage, by printing a slogan across the mast-head: ‘The magazine Norman Mailer can’t afford to write for’. But though I ran this idea past the editor, he didn’t attempt to flag it down.  Contrary to popular preconception, you can meet all sorts on a march to save Radio 4 Long Wave. Oh yes. On Saturday, as our happy band of orderly middleclass protesters set off from Speakers’ Corner and headed for Broadcasting House, I actually found myself demonstrating alongside a woman who reads the Guardian. Hey! Right! So let us, once and for all, forget this slur that the Long Wave Campaign is about fuddy-duddy types who think ‘grass roots’ is something to do with Gardeners’ Question Time. What Saturday’s protest showed was that it is possible to feel very strongly about an issue yet remain polite, that’s all. ‘What do we want?’ yelled our cheerleader. ‘Radio 4!’ we responded, slightly heady at our own daring. ‘Where do we want it?’ ‘Long Wave!’ ‘How do we ask?’ ‘Please!’ It was a small march, admittedly, but the hell with it, we carried lots of balloons. Efforts to recruit bystanders from Oxford Street (‘Come and join us!’) were

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slightly optimistic, I thought—the bewildered looks of shoppers telling us what we knew in our hearts already: that the cause of ‘R4 LW’ is not an instantly emotive one, and that the joke about Duke Hussey being able to pick up FM reception on his leg is a trifle arcane. ‘What are you protesting about?’ a young woman asked the contingent from Belgium. ‘The BBC wants to put Radio 4 on FM only, which means we won’t get it on the Continent any more.’ The woman walked alongside us while she considered this information, in all its many aspects. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said at last, as she nevertheless noticeably slowed her pace and dropped out. ‘Hey, listen, I hope you get what you want.’ And then, as an afterthought, she called after us, ‘This Radio 4, can you get it here?’ There were contingents from all over the place—all of northern Europe, and lots of areas in Britain where trying to get an FM signal is almost as fruitless and frustrating as trying to get a straight answer from the BBC. Embarrassed that personally I did not live in a far-flung outpost of the Long Wave Diaspora, I admitted sotto voce to my exotic Guardian-reading friend that my FM reception is actually OK so long as I don’t attempt to move the radio, or stand more than three feet away from it in leather-soled shoes. She seemed relieved. She admitted likewise that hers was also OK, so long as everyone in the kitchen made only limited lateral movements with their upper bodies, and the fridge door was left open. Neither of us, however, could get FM in our bathrooms, so we formed an instant bond and became the Bathroom Contingent, marching on behalf of Long Wave bathrooms throughout the land. Meanwhile I couldn’t help inwardly pondering the health consequences of repeatedly opening the fridge for the sake of good bits on Pick of the Week. John Birt’s BBC no doubt has many things on its conscience, but the potential for dealing bacteriological food-poisoning to a nation of Guardian readers has surely escaped its purview until now. When we arrived at Broadcasting House, our reception—appropriately enough—was a bit fuzzy, and depended on where you were standing. Suddenly mob-like once we stopped moving, we assembled outside the Langham Hotel and raised our educated voices against those unresponsive grey stone walls, waggling our balloons in an aggressive manner, until eventually a bloke in a suit (Phil Harding) came out to meet us and shoved through the crowd, filmed by BBC news. And that was it; the balloons were collected; we all drifted off to John Lewis for a bit of light shopping. According to reports in the Sunday papers, Mr Harding said, ‘I’m listening; I’m listening,’ but I didn’t hear him. Perhaps I was wearing the wrong shoes. But what I will remember is the weird experience of waiting across the road for something to happen. Extra police materialized—making us feel more agitated, of course—and we started to grow restive. After all, if there was one thing guar-

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anteed to make us livid, it was the feeling of being ignored by the BBC. I had a nasty moment, I can tell you, when it suddenly struck me that if a riot broke out I might go down in broadcasting history as a member of the Bathroom Two.  Since supermarket shopping is probably the most dismal, routine, mindless, time-wasting and wrist-slitting element in most people’s lives, it was at first glance rather baffling to discover that ITV was planning Supermarket Sweep, a weekday morning game show in which contestants are tested (and rewarded) on their ability to answer simple questions about products and then hurtle down the aisles, lobbing big cartons of washing-powder into overloaded trolleys amid whoops of excitement from a studio audience. ‘Oh heavenly doo-dahs, that the culture should be reduced to this,’ I sighed (in a vague, regretful kind of way): ‘Stop the world, I want to get off; to have seen what I have seen, see what I see.’ Admittedly shopping is a skill (some people are certainly better at it than others), but as an intellectual test, you have to admit, it’s just one small step from asking people to spell their own name, or open their own front door and switch the light on. QUESTION:

It’s eaten from a plastic bowl on the floor, by a pet that likes to go for

walks. (tentatively): Dog? Er, dog? Is it? Q: Hmm, I’ll let you have it, but the answer I really wanted was dog food. A: Ah. Yes. I see. ANSWER

The first Supermarket Sweep was shown yesterday, and yes, the above exchange did take place, no kidding. Of course, the programme’s proceedings bore no relation to supermarket shopping in the real nightmare, universal sense (which would have made it interesting): none of the trolleys were fixed so that they slewed violently sideways into the biscuits; no mad people blocked the aisles muttering over a basket of teabags and kitchen roll. The real skill in supermarket shopping is to get round (and out) without the banality of the experience reducing you to screams or blackouts. But none of this was reflected in Supermarket Sweep, which was the opposite of shopping anyway, because the strategy was to locate only the most expensive stuff, and eschew the bargains. How interesting, moreover, that the climactic ‘checkout’ section was cunningly edited for highlights, so we never found out whether the contestants were obliged to yawn and stare at the ceiling while a clueless overalled youth disappeared with their unmarked tin of beans, and then, once out of view, decided to forsake this humdrum life and catch a plane to Guatemala.

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Politically, I get confused by programmes such as this. If the idea is to make uneducated people feel good about themselves, it churns up highly equivocal feelings of, on the one hand, ‘Right on, give them a chance!’ and on the other, ‘Could we please go back to the eighteenth-century notion of improvement and start again?’ In the modern world, careless congratulatory talk has been taken literally, with appalling results. ‘You ought to be on the stage’ was a thoughtless cliché that led straight to karaoke; ‘You ought to be on the telly’ led to Jeremy Beadle; and ultimately, ‘You’re so good at shopping, you ought to go on Mastermind’ led, in the very last tick-tock minutes of civilization, as the hourglass sands drained finally and softly away, to Supermarket Sweep. Personally, I reckon I know the ground-floor layout of John Lewis so intimately I could traverse it blindfold. But it’s odd to think there’s any intrinsic virtue in that. Rather the reverse, really: it’s the shameful sign of a misspent adulthood. The additionally consoling thing for the Supermarket Sweep contestants, of course, is that they can beat the brainboxes in their own arena. Just think, if you put Eric Korn and Irene Thomas (the legendary Round Britain Quiz London team) in this grab-a-trolley-and-run situation, they would almost certainly be rubbish. Told to collect ‘Tuna and sweetcorn cottage cheese, a litre of bleach, and highjuice lemon squash,’ they would pause and frown, musing, putting two and two together, while the others bolted for the shelves in tracksuit and trainers, and performed heroic wheelies by the fridge. ‘Sweetcorn. Mm. Bleach. Lemons,’ says Irene Thomas with a happy quizzical overtone, indicating that she’s spotted the arcane link between these disparate items already. ‘Would Der Rosenkavalier help us here? Yes, I thought it would . . .’ Oh dear. And the answer he wanted was dog food. It just goes to show the limits of a classical education.  In times of stress, I firmly believe, you must reach for the family Bible, close your eyes tight, allow the book to drop open, and stab the page forcefully with a compass point wielded in a random arc. The idea is not just that the violence of the act will make you feel better (although it does), but that fortune will somehow guide you to a relevant helpful passage, while at the same time miraculously preventing you from impaling your other hand to the desk. Superstitious? Certainly, and especially the last bit. But I am sure I have seen evidence of its efficacy, if only in the movies. You know: gangsters staring agape in shock when the book falls open at ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’ (Numbers xxxii, 23) just seconds before a curtained window is suddenly blown to smithereens a couple of feet behind them. Anyway, spending a lot of time on my own, I sometimes devote the odd couple of hours to testing the theory of Bible-dropping, rather as if I were an infinite

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number of monkeys bent on disproving the notion of dramatic genius. The happy sound of ‘Wump! Slash! Ah-hah!’ sometimes emanates from my flat all day long. Where other people might, as a matter of course, consult Patric Walker or the I Ching (or Spillikins) before applying for a job or taking a trip abroad, there are days when I scarcely plan a journey to the post box without first securing some random canonical go-ahead from Deuteronomy in the Authorized Version. I don’t take it seriously, not really. But on the other hand I have had some pretty startling results. Take the other day. I had been experimenting in the kitchen again, had concocted a rather interesting Lentil and Pink Marshmallow Bolognese in a saucepan. Obviously I now required guidance: should I take a picture of it before slinging it in the bin? I shut my eyes, flipped open the Good Book, poked it with the bread knife, and what do you think it said? It said: ‘What is this that thou hast done?’ (Genesis iii, 13). Blimey. How spooky. I tried it again. ‘Wump! Slash! Ah-hah!’ And this time I got II Kings iv, 40: ‘There is death in the pot.’ Sometimes the messages are a bit mysterious. Once, when I had been drawing losers for hours—‘Go up, thou bald head’ (?); ‘And they spoiled the Egyptians’ (?)—and wumping and slashing like an early agricultural machine in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, I suddenly got a rather grumpy-sounding ‘As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly’ (Proverbs xxvi, 11), which drew me up short for a minute. Some significance here, perhaps? Naturally, I decided to have another go. And this time I got ‘The dog is turned to his vomit again’ (II Peter ii, 22). Weird, eh? But completely unfathomable, alas. Anyway, the reason I mention all this is that I recently discovered a potential application for this unusual hobby of mine. Browsing in a religious bookshop one rainy afternoon, and flicking through Bibles (‘Why stand ye here all the day idle?’ met my gaze immediately, so I knew things were running to form), I discovered a rack of biblical posters. And much as I dislike slander in matters of taste, these posters were truly horrid—in the classical sense of making all your hair stick out like spines on a hedgehog. Who could be responsible for these ghastly things, I wondered. I could only suppose that the infinite number of monkeys had been up to their usual tricks. Imagine, if you will, two large fluffy ducklings waddling away down a country lane at sunset, with underneath the legend ‘Can two walk together, except they be agreed?’ I mean, is this sick, or what? A pair of cute kids hold hands in a lush pasture, bathed in summer light, and one holds out a daisy-chain to the other. ‘God loveth a cheerful giver,’ it says. Two tiger cubs embrace roughly, evidently mindful of the injunction of ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’ I ask you, what a paltry use of the imagination. I nearly produced some new vomit to come back to later on.

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But on the other hand, I did rush home with a whole new sense of purpose. My idea was simple: take this ghastly notion to its natural bathetic extreme. A man could be shown reprimanding a cat that has unaccountably stalked out of the room halfway through the EastEnders omnibus: ‘What,’ he says, in a speech bubble, ‘could ye not watch with me one hour?’ Good, eh? A woman, evidently frazzled from shopping, could be shown consulting a list in a dusty foreign market, and looking jolly peeved. ‘Is there no balm in Gilead?’ could be written underneath. I hope my posters will give pleasure somewhere. Meanwhile I shall cheerfully continue with my Bible-bashing. I got ‘We have as it were brought forth wind’ the other day (Isaiah xxvi, 18), and I can’t say it hasn’t given me lots to think about. An acquaintance has gently suggested to me that any big book—telephone directory, Argos Catalogue—will work equally well for my purposes, but I suspect this is a fallacy. Faced with a dilemma, surely nobody wants to know that the answer is an automatic pet-feeder at £12.99, or ‘Mr H. MacGuire, 26 Fulwell Gardens, W6’. Unless of course (by some remote probability) you are Mrs MacGuire, suffering from amnesia. Or you have suddenly acquired an infinite number of monkeys, all demanding meals at funny intervals.  It is only when one watches several weeks of ‘Crime and Punishment’ television that one realizes how little real-life contact one has with the police. It is rather odd. As a viewer, I feel I am so well acquainted with police procedure I could confidently head a murder enquiry; but at the same time, in real life, I have only twice been inside a police station. Talking recently to the producer of a ‘Cops on the Box’ documentary, I was relieved to find he shared this wildly discrepant experience. In making his programme, he said, he hired two actors in uniform to sit in an old white Zephyr (in homage to Z Cars) and walk shoulder-to-shoulder down whitewashed corridors. At one point, he momentarily forgot where he was, turned round to see these two coppers bearing down on him, and jumped aloft with shock. Perhaps this explains why it has stuck in my mind, the time long ago when a real-life local CID bloke, taking a statement from me about a bag-snatching, conformed to his image as portrayed by left-wing television playwrights and thereby delivered a bit of a jolt. He had asked what my job was, to which I truthfully replied I was a literary editor on a magazine (The Listener). He looked interested, so I elaborated. Publishers sent me their new books, I said, and I commissioned reviews; then I edited them, wrote headlines, laid out pages and corrected proofs. ‘It’s a dog’s life,’ I added cheerfully, in case he thought I was showing off. He thought about it, as if he were going to volunteer for a spot of reviewing (people

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often did), and then pronounced the words that have niggled me ever since: ‘I expect there’s room for corruption in that.’ I remember how my mind went blank. I said how d’you mean, corruption? You’ve got something people want, he said; it stands to reason they’ll pay for it. Well naturally I went back to the office next day and shook all the books to see if any fivers fell out, but with no success. I rang up Chatto & Windus and asked for the bribe department, but they denied all knowledge. My detective was evidently wrong in his suspicions. But what alarmed me, obviously, was that this friendly backhander insinuation was the first conversational angle he thought of. While normal people might have said, ‘Do you read all the books?’, ‘What’s Stephen Fry like?’ or ‘So that’s why you smell of book dust and Xerox toner!’, this policeman evidently saw the world as one huge greasy palm, and assumed that everyone else did, too. In retrospect I wish I had countered more effectively. ‘Detective sergeant, are you?’ I might have said, ‘Gosh, I expect there’s room for reading a novel with a pencil in your hand in that.’ So it took me aback, this encounter, the way corruption came up in the first five minutes I ever spent with a policeman. Especially when, merely out of politeness, I turned the conversation round to him (‘But I expect there’s room for corruption in your job?’) and he fobbed me off with a ludicrous story involving a motorist and a ten-bob note. ‘You seem to have left this money in your drivinglicence, sir; we must be more careful,’ he had said, apparently, handing it back confused. In my more paranoid moments I still wonder, though, whether I missed out on something. Whether other literary editors were taking delivery of string bags stuffed with notes in the gents at Waterloo while I was miserably sticking galleys on to layout sheets and getting cow-gum in my eyebrows. The idea of the lit. ed. as wide-boy certainly has its attractions; any gathering of the downtrodden, stoop-gaited chaps (it’s mostly chaps) tells you at a glance that sniffing the bindings is the nearest they get to an illicit activity. So what we obviously require is a culture in which literary editing, not police work, is the theme of tough, uncompromising television shows. ‘I told you,’ the hard-boiled lit. ed. snarls down the phone, while admiring his manicured nails, ‘I want a pony for the Brookner, or the deal’s off.’ The viewing nation would be held in thrall. He’s tough; he’s mean; he edits book reviews. And then, whenever the public chanced to meet a real literary editor in the flesh, they would get the same frisson of second-hand recognition that we currently reserve for the cops.  At the end of last year, when the terrific Radio 4 dramatization of Little Women was underway on Thursday mornings (tough luck for people with jobs), a man wrote

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to Woman’s Hour with an interesting point. Listeners had been challenged to vote on which of Louisa May Alcott’s four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, they identified with—which possibly doesn’t sound very interesting, but actually was. For example, some women curiously opted for Meg (sweet, placid, forgettable), and a few even fancied themselves as the vain affected Amy or the timid moribund Beth. However, the majority opted for the splendid heroine Jo—tomboy, literary genius, portrait of the author as a stormy petrel—perhaps because she seems quite modern, but more likely because identification with Jo is what the author so clearly intends. Like a fool, I hadn’t realized this before. I thought I was the only reader who secretly admired Jo March. But it turns out that the adult female world is crammed with undercover Jo fans, all wishing we could scribble up a storm, scorch our frocks, and exclaim ‘Christopher Columbus!’ despite its not being ladylike. If these names and characters mean nothing to you, I can only say you must blame your classical education. These are female archetypes, mate. How can you possibly understand feminism if you don’t personally recollect the quietly touching scene in which good, wise Mrs March (known as ‘Marmee’) advises her justly furious daughter ‘Never let the sun go down on your anger’? Generations of young female readers have felt so exasperated at this point that they immediately chained themselves to railings or resolved to set fire to something. It all goes very deep. ‘Moral pap for the young’ was how Louisa May Alcott once startlingly described her own books, and the suggestion of a soft, absorbent foodstuff shovelled into girl infants is alarmingly close to the truth as one recalls it. Radio 4’s decision to present Little Women and then its sequel Good Wives (which finished last week, amid sobs in my house, with Jo’s marriage to the penniless Professor Bhaer) was a brilliant one, if only as a kind of catharsis therapy. All those forgotten, repressed episodes somehow fundamental to one’s own childhood were dug up publicly and found not to be so ghastly after all. But what did this chap write in his letter to Woman’s Hour, you want to know. Well, he said that having read Little Women at an early age, not only had he found it useful in understanding women, but he had honestly needed to enquire no further. As far as female taxonomy went, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy covered the lot. If an occasional hybrid crossed his path (a Meg-Beth, an Amy-Jo-Marmee), it was the work of an instant to sort it into its constituent parts. He spoke as someone who had known multitudes of women—but each of them for a shortish period, presumably, the acquaintance always mysteriously ceasing at the precise moment when she discovered his heavily annotated copy of Little Women wedged behind the lavatory-cistern, sussed his creepy game at once and scarpered via the back gate into the sunshine. No woman should stick around with a man who thinks she’s Beth, it’s obvious. When I was twelve years old and chronically ill, my older

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sister cheerfully said that she saw me as a little Beth, and in my innocence I thought she was being nice. But I realize now the sad, sad truth of the matter, that actually she wanted me to croak. Four seems to be the standard number for female types: four sisters in What Katy Did; four Marys in the famous Bunty comic strip; four Golden Girls. When a pilot for a British version of The Golden Girls was broadcast recently, the makers obviously couldn’t think of any new female comic humours to depict, so they adhered to the American originals—vain, dim, sardonic, outrageous—so endorsing the unfortunate impression that this is the full range available. Perhaps the number four gives the illusion of all-round choice; I mean, it always worked for Opal Fruits. For the moment, however, I am far too worried about this longburied identification with Jo March to give it much thought. Good grief, it may even explain why I am disastrously attracted to old foreign blokes with no money.  If I were Barbie, I would be rather hurt by the general reception given to my new dance work-out video. Amid all the hoots of derision, nobody bothers to see its significance from Barbie’s own point of view—her amazing courage, after those years in a creative desert, to ‘pick up the pieces’ and ‘go out on a limb’. It’s not easy being Barbie, you know. For one thing, how would you like it if your boyfriend (Ken) slept in a shoe-box, and melted on contact with radiators? You would feel pretty humiliated, obviously. But remember the publishing disaster of Fear of Bending, Barbie’s teensy-weensy, reveal-all autobiography? Remember her public miniature fury when Claire Bloom snatched the lead in A Doll’s House? Those drunken pavement cat-fights with Tressy outside a small-scale model of the Limelight Club? Those whispers about the itsy-bitsy Betty Ford Clinic? Ah yes, it all comes back to you now, when it’s too late, the damage done. So why shouldn’t she issue a dance work-out video? One thing to be said for Barbie is that she always kept her figure. Obviously there is a slight danger that if you adhered to Barbie’s rigorous hamstring exercises you might end up with your feet (like hers) permanently pointed in a tip-toe—which means that unless you wear the right high heels, you forever topple forwards and bang your bonce. But otherwise Barbie possesses precisely the same qualities as the other supermodels, whose exercise videos are bestsellers. She is plastic, perfect, self-absorbed, and her hair comes ready-lacquered. However, she is also very, very small; so you can derive a certain comfort from the thought that Richard Gere wouldn’t glance at her twice (unless he crunched her underfoot by mistake). Whether I shall buy Dance Work-Out With Barbie depends on my next fortnightly visit to the ‘Body Sculpt’ class, led by ‘Geri’ at the local gym. A young woman whose abductor muscles are strung so tightly that they are visibly teetering on the

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edge of a breakdown, Geri is beginning to annoy me. She is Australian, whiteblonde, long-legged and deep-tanned, with a face like Rosanna Arquette. She wears skimpy Lycra ensembles in purple and lime green with large interesting peep-holes cut from the sides, just to show that in places where the rest of us have grey-white crêpey stuff (which cries aloud for elasticated containment, ‘Pants! Give us pants!’), she has taut brown skin, and that’s all. I am beginning to hate the body sculpt class. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in the wall-to-wall mirror, lumbering out of step, and I think, ‘I don’t have to do this, Woodrow Wyatt doesn’t do this.’ Which shows to what levels of mental desiccation an envy of somebody’s lime-green peep-holes can plunge you. Barbie’s work-out is for five-year-olds, of course. But so, in a way, is the body sculpt class. In fact, few experiences in adult life so readily evoke the wretched emotions of the infants’ playground as to be led in a mindless game of mimicry by a tyrannical bimbo shouting above the music, ‘Do this! Now do that! Back to this, again! Four of these! Two and two! Left leg, right leg, right leg, left leg! Left leg, right leg, right leg, left leg!’ Noticeably, there is no camaraderie among Geri’s brutalized troupe—just as there is none when you are five years old—so you can’t heckle ‘Make your mind up, woman!’ and expect to get a laugh and a breather. Under Geri’s tutelage, the goody-goodies get all the steps right, the others do their earnest best, while I, the only no-hoper, clap my hands at the wrong moments and pray privately that the bell will soon ring for Two-Times Tables or Finger-Painting. I wish Barbie success with her video. Children don’t need it, obviously, but it will be good for the rest of us to face facts. See this dolly? This is what you want to look like. This is what Geri looks like. But in any other context she’d look very, very stupid. Apparently, in the video, Barbie doesn’t do much of the actual dancing; someone called Kim takes over. Meanwhile Barbie presumably has a liedown, phones her analyst, and then smokes a minuscule cigarette from a tiny box. Honestly, if this is a role-model for today’s children, I think we have little to fear.  It is a well-established fact (not acknowledged enough) that in journalism there are only eleven basic ideas. The reason journalists over the age of twenty-five get cynical and start to fall over in public houses is that in their cradles they have been cursed with a particular kind of limited intelligence. They are bright people, but a Bad Fairy has ensured that they are bright enough only to discover the eleven basic ideas for themselves. What they are not bright enough to notice is that everything they do has been done before. Then one day they realize—to the dismay of the Really Good Fairy who gave them the brains—that they have run out

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of ideas. Disillusioned, they are obliged to stand back and watch as other, younger people—the fairy-dust still sparkling on their shoulders—start to discover the eleven ideas all over again. New ideas are, therefore, pretty exciting things within journalism, and I can’t remember the last time anybody had one. But as an example of how desperate everybody is, let us take the example of the word ‘Bratpack’. Within minutes of its coining, this term had been picked up and applied to just about everybody— movie directors, teenage actors, Manhattan writers—before finally coming to rest in the Loose Ends studio in Broadcasting House. That was just the beginning. The next day somebody said, ‘Yeah, but how about “Ratpack” as a term for the media journalists who write about (and occasionally join) the “Bratpack”?’ Brilliant, as Basil Fawlty might say, Brilliant. The richness of imagination was of such quality that even the originators themselves seemed impressed. So I thought I’d join in, get a share of the action, start an entirely original (if a bit derivative) genus of nomenclature. We all want to make our mark, and this seems a simple enough method of doing it. My first thought was that one could refer to all clever French writers—de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus—as the ‘Baccalauréatpack’. What do you think? By the same token Indians, like Jhabvala, Narayan and Desai, might be called the ‘Ghatpack’ (not to be confused with the American tough-guy detective grouping ‘Gatpack’). On a more serious note, writers publishing their work secretly in totalitarian states might be called, simply, the ‘Samizdatpack’. Smartipants writers might be termed the ‘Eclatpack’, while successful, well-heeled NW3-based novel-a-year writers could rejoice in any of the following: ‘Cravatpack’, ‘VATpack’, or, well, ‘Fatpack’. This only leaves the blockbuster writers, who, I think, can be pretty neatly summed up in the term ‘Tatpack’. So there you are. A complete new terminology. Please watch out for any appearance of these terms, for which copyright application is already in the post.  On Sunday morning, a thirty-eight-year-old unpublished poet named Clive was mournfully twiddling a pencil at his special poetry-composing desk, huddled in a greatcoat, when the telephone rang. He paused before answering it, feeling sorry for himself. ‘Nothing rhymes with telephone,’ he said, his face puckering uncontrollably; ‘in fact, why do I bother?’ He picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ he croaked. It was his mother. She sounded agitated. Clive, alarmed, snapped his pencil in half, and then looked at it, aghast. ‘Clive, I’m worried,’ she said. ‘Have you read today’s Sunday Times?’ ‘Of course not.’

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‘Then you don’t know! Oh, that I should have to break such news to my own son! Clive, it says here that a professor in America—is Kentucky still in America? I expect so—has established from studying a thousand important twentiethcentury dead people that poets are by far the most at-risk group for depression, paranoia and suicide!’ ‘Yes?’ Clive shrugged. ‘So what?’ ‘So you never told me that! You said, “Mum, I want to be a poet,” and I let you! You were so sweet, with those big brown eyes, Clive, and you said, “If I can’t be a poet, Mum, I’ll kill myself.” And now I discover you’ve chosen the very profession in which the risk is greatest! You tricked me, Clive!’ ‘You’re hysterical.’ ‘Who is this Sylvia Plath he mentions? Is she a friend of yours? What about W.H. Auden? Is he making you depressed, too? Give up this poetry madness, my son, before it is too late!’ Clive spent the rest of the day indoors. Like Jean Cocteau, he knew that poetry was indispensable, although indispensable to what exactly, he didn’t feel qualified to say. He was deeply offended by the sweeping accusation of poet-paranoia, yet didn’t dare go out to buy the newspaper, for fear he would find an immense placard outside the shop, screaming ‘Poets Are Loonies! Official!’ So instead he wearily copied out some of his old verses—in his best wiggly handwriting, on lined paper—and made packages to send to Marxism Today and The Economist, choosing ‘Lines on the Wedding of Prince Andrew to Lady Sarah Ferguson (revised)’ and ‘Why Is This Black Dog Following Me Around?—An Allegory’. He didn’t know whether these magazines printed poetry, though he somehow felt sure they used to. Last week his submissions to The Listener and Punch had both been returned with just the bald, scribbled legend, ‘Not known at this address’. Clive had taken these harsh rebuffs very much to heart. Suddenly, at about six o’clock, the phone rang again. It was his mother. ‘Clive. I’ve been looking at this article, and you’ve got to tell me something. Were you gloomy by the time you were thirteen?’ ‘Gloomy?’ ‘Just answer the question.’ ‘Well, yes. I suppose I’ve always been . . .’ ‘So it’s not the job that makes you depressed? It’s because you’re sensitive, or high-minded or something, that you chose this particular job in the first place?’ ‘But poetry isn’t a job, Mum, more a result of a struggle in the poet’s mind between something he wants to express and the medium in which he intends to express it.’ There was a pause. ‘Why do you always talk like that, Clive? Do you think Albert Einstein talked to

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his mother like that? No, he didn’t. And why? Because he wasn’t a wimp of a poet, depressed all the time!’ She hung up. Clive wondered whether it was worth phoning back, to make the point that the lives of poets and scientific pioneers were not strictly comparable. He might mention, too, that being an unpublished (and therefore failed) poet was about twenty times more life-endangering than being (say) W.H. Auden, who rarely contended with stinging letters from Caravan and Trailer (‘I read your poems with interest, Mr Auden, but I can’t imagine why you sent them’). But he decided not to bother, and immediately cheered up. He would write an epic poem about rejection letters, simply for his own amusement. To say that writers are generally depressed, he reflected with satisfaction, is on a par with saying that Kentucky professors tell people precisely what they know already.  I don’t know what a reservoir dog is. I mean, I know that a new heist-movie called Reservoir Dogs has just opened, which is where the expression comes from; but after that my information runs out. Evidently the film is rather nasty but brilliant, is set in a warehouse after a failed robbery, and has a great central performance from Harvey Keitel. But curiously there are no dogs. And there is an infamous torture scene, and lots of blood, and fantastic suspense about which of the six conspirators tipped off the police. Yet the canine input, as such, is small. In short, then, nobody should buy a ticket under the illusion that Reservoir Dogs represents the relaunch of the animal picture. If the organizers of this week’s Cruft’s have bought it as a treat for the last day of the show, they should reconsider. I raise this matter not just because I am irredeemably literal-minded, but because when the director of the film appeared on Moving Pictures (BBC2) he seemed to be saying that actually he didn’t know what the title meant either. He just liked it, and when producers had frowned and tut-tutted, he had fobbed them off with a fancy answer about French gangland argot, which like prize mutts they had fallen for. Quentin Tarantino is his name, and this is his first film. He seemed young and over-excited, and was evidently a stranger to the benefits of personal grooming, but to say that he was wised up to the movie business would be like saying Edward Scissorhands was sharp. He knew perfectly well that a title like Reservoir Dogs raises images in people’s minds, but no awkward questions. Also, that the moment it enters common parlance (‘Seen Reservoir Dogs yet?’), it tucks itself into a nice safe corner of the memory where semantics does not intrude. Obscure titles have one great advantage, of course: they flatter the punters. This explains why so many up-market book titles take allusions from other writers, or invoke the names of famous intellectuals. A little while ago there was a spate of titles so obviously following in the footsteps (or possibly claw-prints) of

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Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes, that I began to suspect a directive had gone out from publishers, with the promise of a bag of nuts for the best entry: Balzac’s Horse, Schrödinger’s Cat, Foucault’s Pendulum, Aubrey’s Raven, Kafka’s Dick. I remember vowing at the time that if I were ever to write a novel, I would hitch my skateboard to the bandwagon and plump for Einstein’s Tick, or Savonarola’s Bum, or Darwin’s Teapot, and hang the consequences. It wouldn’t matter that the book didn’t fit the title, because obviously the allusion is so clever it doesn’t have to. And if pushed, like the director of Reservoir Dogs, you could just make something up (‘Darwin’s teapot? Well, obviously, it stands for bone-china fragility in a tough survivalist world’). Mainly, however, you would rely on the fact that somewhere in the back of the collective mind there are philosophical things such as Occam’s Razor, which sound fantastically difficult and all-encompassing and seriously paradoxical, and just right for a modern book. In the end, by the way, I pretty well settled on Heidegger’s Bactrian for my own novel. It’s a title that suggests all sorts of things, including two handy humps of water for emergencies. Occam’s Wash-Mitt I will preserve for another occasion. And just to cover all the angles, I will give my book the full title of Heidegger’s Bactrian: Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Daniel DayLewis. Meanwhile it is slightly worrying to realize how unthinkingly all titles are assimilated in one’s mind. No sooner have you heard of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross than it becomes simply something to get your tongue round, not to ask damn-fool questions about. Recently I met a man who had seen Pygmalion at the National Theatre and who clearly had no idea where the title came from, but had not let this trouble him for an instant. Fair enough. Not everyone carries a Larousse Classical Encyclopedia in their coat pocket. As far as he was concerned, Pygmalion was the name of a famous play by George Bernard Shaw; why did it have to mean anything? Indeed, I just wish I’d said it was French gangland argot, or something, to see how far I would get.  Of course, it was probably just a silly little administrative oversight, but I nevertheless yowled with agony when I realized I hadn’t been invited to this year’s Booker Prize. ‘Will you be going to the dinner?’ my nice literary holiday companions had asked, as we lay beside our swimming-pool in Italy, catching up on our Ian McEwans. ‘Me?’ I said carelessly. ‘To the Booker Prize? On Tuesday 16 October at the Guildhall at 6.15 (drinks in the Old Library)? Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Haven’t really given it much thought.’ I don’t suppose anyone was fooled by this rather obvious dissimulation. When I got home from holiday, I was so desperate to find out whether I had received an

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invitation that I screeched the car to a halt outside the house (leaving it blocking a bus-lane) and rushed inside to ransack every item of post that had arrived in my absence. The cats, who had not seen me for three weeks, looked distinctly pained as I paced up and down, distractedly shuffling envelopes and shouting four-letter words. But when at last I admitted defeat, and lay stunned on a heap of litter, they came and sat on my chest, and discreetly looked the other way. Now, I know what you are asking. Why the fuss? It’s something I can’t explain. But if it is anything to do with pride, why did I phone the Booker Trust three days before the dinner and beg to be admitted? Their kind suggestion was that I could most certainly come to the Guildhall, but that unfortunately I might have to eat my meal in a different room from everyone else (the ‘parlour’) and watch the proceedings on a monitor. Sounds all right, I thought, I can live with that. Just so long as they don’t single me out in any other way—like stamping ‘ONE DRINK ONLY’ on my forehead, or shouting ‘You! Out!’ if I attempted to strike up a conversation with Beryl Bainbridge in the toilets. In the event, however, I didn’t spend much time in the ‘parlour’, because a nice lady came along just after I had completed my first course and said that I could join the main event. ‘Does it matter that I’ve eaten something?’ I asked anxiously. It was quite disconcerting, actually, to be picked out for this honour, and conducted at a brisk pace from the rather cheerless parlour (which reminded me of being in a classroom at eight o’clock in the evening) to the glitz and hubbub of the grown-ups’ dinner. Did I feel proud and exhilarated as we strode along? No; strangely, I was too desperate and anxious to feel either of these things. In fact, what kept coming into my head was an intensely paranoid recollection of an old Nazi trick I had seen in umpteen prisoner-of-war films. Perhaps the Booker people were only telling me I had been released from the parlour, so that—just as I broke into a run—they could shoot me in the back and use me as an example to others. ‘Nobody,’ they could say afterwards, ‘invites herself to the Booker Prize and gets away with it.’  About a month ago, Alan Coren wrote a column on this page about the loss of his novel. Perhaps I should just phone him, but on the other hand I feel I am too distant a relative to intrude on the grief. The thing is, he said he had been writing this novel on the quiet, had fetched up 20,000 words of it, and then lost the whole damn lot when his computer in France was nicked. As it is well attested that a writer cannot possibly reconstruct the thing from memory, his novel-writing days were thus officially over, and it was no great tragedy. He was taking it surprisingly well. Well, obviously one’s chin wobbled a bit. A tear fell into one’s Common Sense

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breakfast food. The man was so brave. The traditional lost manuscript (of which the lost hard disk is the modern equivalent) is a highly touching motif for anyone who has ever attempted a sustained piece of fiction. Our words are our children, you know. Remember the despair of Eilert Lovborg in Hedda Gabler when he realized he had thoughtlessly abandoned his infant manuscript in a whorehouse? How the words ‘child murder’ came up, and in his remorse he shuffled off into the dark Norwegian night with a revolver? I pictured the two gruff French burglars, both played by Arthur Mullard, breaking into Mr Coren’s gaff and shining big rubber torches about. ‘Vous êtes coming wiv us,’ they said in deep voices, alighting on the computer. ‘Non, non,’ piped the novel, its eyes round with panic, ‘Papa! Papa!’ ‘Har, har,’ they laughed, ‘Votre papa habeets en Cricklywood! Il est miles away.’ And then they threw a black sack over its head before . . . well, I can’t go on. But the reason I write this is that at the same time as feeling Lovborgian empathy with Mr Coren’s loss, I also feel intensely envious. You mean, your novel has just gone? Just like that? How absolutely fantastic. Personally, I have reached the late laborious paranoid stage in my own creative outpouring when its unfinished state gnaws at me like a constant reproach, and its mewlings for attention drive me mad with guilt. Which is why, whenever someone innocently asks, ‘How’s the novel?’ I actually feel like screaming, or pulling a gun. ‘Novel?’ I want to yell, waving the weapon in dangerous circles. ‘Did you ask about my novel?’ I fumble with the trigger, wildly push back my fringe, and take a swig from a bottle. ‘What do you know about it? Just what do you think you know about it? You know nothing,’—I start to sob, here—‘Nothing, nothing . . .’ The outburst tails off. I drop the gun. I give myself up. It’s all over. People are only being nice, when they ask. To the enquirer, ‘How’s the novel?’ is like saying ‘How’s your Mum?’—friendly, concerned, non-judgemental. All that’s required by way of response is, ‘Fine thanks, how’s yours?’ But unfortunately this simple question, when filtered through the cornered-animal mentality of the weary last-lap novelist, is transformed into the sort of sneering insinuation that makes homicide justifiable. ‘It was peculiar,’ friends say to one another, when I pop out of the room. ‘All I said was “How’s the novel?” and look, she bit my hand.’ ‘Tsk, tsk,’ the others agree, shaking their heads and peeling back the fresh bandages on their own nicks and flayings. ‘How did you get those bruised ribs again, Terry?’ ‘Well, we were at dinner, and she’d put down her knife and fork, and I said brightly, “Have you finished?” That’s all. And she flew at me.’ They don’t realize how sensitive you can get. They don’t know what it’s like to live constantly with this Tiny Tim of an unfinished book, sitting trusting and wistful in the inglenook of your consciousness waiting for you to fix its calipers and make it well. It’s such a drag. My novel can do nothing independently; I can’t

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pay somebody else to look after it in the afternoons; and if ultimately it gets botched, it will be nobody’s fault but mine. So I keep thinking of Mr Coren’s novel, kidnapped by ruffians, and considering whether, all in all, this unkind fate would not be preferable. ‘How’s the novel?’ people would ask, automatically ducking sideways and shielding their faces with their arms. ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’ I could say dolefully (as if sad). ‘It’s gone.’ ‘What?’ ‘Yes, I left it outside a supermarket, and just my luck, someone lured it away with a packet of crisps.’  The historical Saint Valentine was clubbed to death, you know. And now, seventeen centuries later, by means of one of those great arching ironies to which history is so partial, the rest of us are being clubbed to death by St Valentine’s Day. We are bludgeoned with love, and I am not sure I like it. Formerly St Valentine’s was one of those optional festivals, like Septuagesima, which you could celebrate at your own discretion. It was also, I always thought, associated with the finer, more delicate aspects of love: tremulous, unspoken, violet-scented. But a heavy hand in a red velvet glove has taken care of such love-heart nonsense, and St Valentine’s has turned overnight into an excuse for relentless Channel 4 extravaganzas featuring wall-to-wall exhibitionism and rumpy-pumpy. A certain grossness, it must be said, has poked its way into the sweet satin folds of the romance, and ‘Be my Valentine’ is no longer a wistful request. Isn’t February depressing enough, without this? Channel 4 sent me a little bottle of massage oil in celebration of the ‘Love Weekend’ and I have been thinking seriously about drinking it. But leaving aside all the arguments on behalf of lonely stay-at-homes (and romantics) dismayed and alienated by frank, endless sex-talk on the telly, isn’t it just spit-awful to find yet another date in the calendar turned irrevocably into an imperative national event, demanding special film seasons on the box? I mean, where will it end? It was actually a surprise, on Monday, to see the world return to normal, with the banks open, and people going off to work. ‘No holiday, then?’ I breathed in relief, thankful for the small mercy. Personally, I am now dreading next week’s Pancake Day, for fear that the TV channels will be given over to a ‘Night of Batter’. I hardly dare open my Radio Times: BBC2, 7.50pm: a short, irreverent history of the Jif lemon. 8pm: an in-depth profile of modern artists whose chosen medium is pancakeand-gouache. Midnight until 4am: an acclaimed, sobering French movie about the unremembered crêperie wars that shook Paris during the Occupation.

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Channel 4, meanwhile, could fill a studio with talentless ugly nude people with frying-pans on their heads, extracting endless nervous hilarity from the word ‘toss’. It could all happen; I sincerely believe it. Something for everyone, that’s the principle of these theme nights; only unfortunately it usually comes out curiously awry, as everything for someone. I said I would leave aside the special-pleading arguments about lonely stay-athomes struck downhearted and dismal by the excesses of this past weekend, but the pancake analogy somehow invites them back to the forefront again. Because—well, it’s obvious. While for single people (and people not happily in love, which is a different category that includes nearly everyone) the whole dark, heaving Valentine event is so dispiriting it makes the depression of Christmas seem like a hayride to a clambake, Pancake Day requires no special personal circumstances for its enjoyment, and is therefore, actually, a better cause for celebration. Hm, I may be on to something. I mean, you don’t have to be ‘lurved’ as a prerequisite for Pancake Day, just handy with a whisk. I have never thought of it this way before, but the pancake is obviously a great leveller. Old and young, ugly and beautiful, we can all roll them up and squirt them with lemons—and if we choose not to, it’s not because there is anything wrong with us. It is sad to think how St Valentine’s is going—but on the other hand, the hell with it. You’ve got Shrove Tuesday to look forward to. Moreover, there is still time to record a short sequence on video describing your first pancake, your ideal pancake, your lost pancake, or the final pancake that left you feeling a bit sick and sorry for yourself. And the funny thing is, that compared with many of the dreary sexual relationships displayed and analysed on the ‘Love Weekend’, your pancakes will probably appear to have colour, individuality, interest—and above all, depth.  When Raoul Fitzgerald Hernandez O’Flaherty, the hot-blooded Irish-Argentinian international polo ace, called me up on Friday from his helicopter, begging me to join him on a weekend trip to Palm Beach, I admit I was slightly taken aback. This is a bit irregular, I thought. I had planned a nice weekend rearranging my dried fruit collection and mending my string bag, and now here was Randy Raoul hovering spectacularly over my front garden, showering emerald trinkets into my bird-bath, and demanding by loud-hailer that I go and inspect some new ponies. Of course I became an expert on horse-flesh years ago, when I avidly consumed books such as Jill Enjoys Her Ponies. Also, I spent many childhood Sunday afternoons ‘treading in’ (stamping on divots) between chukkas at a nearby polo club. Yet I had a strange feeling that it was my body, not my equine expertise, that

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Raoul was really after. The O’Flaherty triplets are all notorious womanizers, but Raoul is the best lover of the three, ranked number eight in the world! Raoul clearly wanted to pluck me from my flat, lavish all sorts of sexual attention on me, drive me wild with jewels and frocks, and drop hilarious innuendoes about the thrill of goal-scoring. What on earth was a girl to do? Well, the string bag is much better now, you will be relieved to hear. The currants are tucked in neatly behind the prunes. But I am seriously wondering what to do with this copy of Jilly Cooper’s Polo, which seems to be the source of the trouble. What do other women do in these circumstances? As a mere novice to the so-called bonk-buster novel (obliged to read Polo for purely professional reasons) I had no idea it would fill my world with rich, good-looking blokes with strong brown arms akimbo. I poke through my jewellery and can’t believe my eyes. What, no perfect emeralds, gift of an infatuated millionaire? No diamonds? How can it be true that my only ring is the one I bought for a fiver in a place called Mousehole? Thank goodness the Freudian heyday is a thing of the past. Of course I am not the ideal reader for a bonk-buster novel, because I am not married. I am free to get excited in the polo tournament bits (‘Come on, you brave little ponies!’) and to salivate openly during the sex scenes, whereas the target reader will be a married woman on a beach somewhere, obliged to disguise her reactions for the benefit of the husband (not rich, not handsome, and can’t tell a divot from a hole in the ground). While reading, she controls her breathing, tries not to perspire too visibly, and occasionally breaks off during a particularly juicy bit to say offhandedly ‘Not very good, this, actually’, before plunging back again and memorizing the page number for later on. For me personally, on the other hand, Polo recalled all those Jill and Her Ponies books I used to read when I was ten. Who will win the silver cup? Will the pony rescued from cruelty turn into the best little pony in the world? This jolly gymkhana stuff made me feel quite young again, but it also made me wonder whether the Jill in question grew up to become Jilly in later life. It is not impossible. After all, the fictional Jill’s mother was a writer—but an unsuccessful one who clearly overlooked the bankable nature of her own daughter’s pony-mad activities. Poor Jill was obliged to wear second-hand jodhpurs to the Pony Club Gymkhana, which is just the sort of indignity (in bonk-busters, anyway) that makes an ambitious girl grow up aching for a shot at some serious dosh. I am not sure, in retrospect, that we were supposed to despise Jill’s mum for being a hopeless breadwinner. In fact, I used to think it was sweet that when the pig-tailed Jill came home on summer afternoons—all dusty from a hack on Black Boy, all worried about where the next curry-comb was coming from—there would be Mother, leaning out of the window of their little cottage, excitedly waving a small piece of paper. ‘A cheque!’ she would yell. ‘I’ve sold a story in Lon-

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don!’ And my heart would leap. ‘Saddle up Black Boy again, Jill,’ Mother would say. ‘Today we’ll have buns for tea!’ Such innocence. It makes you feel all old and jaded and peculiar. True, I always shout ‘Buns for tea!’ when a cheque arrives in the post, but it is heavily ironic, since I know perfectly well that the money will only service the overdraft, or go half-way towards some car insurance (buns doesn’t come into it). But I prefer the world of ‘Buns for tea!’ to the casual purchase of Renoirs and Ferraris to be found in Polo. Cream puffs evidently mean nothing on the international polo circuit; teacakes make them laugh. I think this is why, in the end, I turned down Raoul’s tempting offer of the Palm Beach trip. So what, if these polo people are good at jewels and orgasms, if they are blind to the value of an honest barm cake? Of course, memory may be playing tricks here: perhaps Jill and her mum sang ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in the evenings, while flipping through glossy magazines for pictures of rich people. Perhaps they would have killed for a chance to fly off to the world of Cartier and great sex, leaving the second-hand jodhpurs in a heap on the ground. In which case, when Raoul O’Flaherty came to call, perhaps I made a rather large mistake.  A few years ago, I met a dynamic woman journalist who told me she was keen to launch a new daily paper aimed at a female readership. Unfortunately for the ensuing discourse, our meeting took place at the wrong end of a highly boozy bookaward dinner, at that delirious point in the evening when you start to pass out in your chair, and think hey, that’s nice, everyone’s a bunny rabbit. So when this charismatic woman mentioned the newspaper idea, I couldn’t think how to react, except with boundless enthusiasm. ‘Great,’ I shouted, so loudly that other people looked round. ‘Brilliant, I mean, brilliant,’ I added, in a whisper, and knocked back another glass of port as if to show how brilliant I thought it really was. ‘Er, how would it be different exactly? What would you put in?’ ‘Well, the main thing is this,’ she said. ‘It’s what you take out.’ I smiled in a vague what’s-she-talkingabout kind of way and concentrated for a couple of minutes on trying to rest my chin on my hand, without success. ‘All right, what do you take out?’ I slurred at last, leaning forward. ‘You take out the sport,’ she said. I never saw this woman again, but I often think of her. Until I met her, I would never have dared to assert that sport was uninteresting to all (or most) women; I just thought I had a blind spot. But now, when I open my Times in the morning, flipping the second section adroitly into the bin (only to rescue it later with a stifled scream and a flurry of soggy tea-bags when I remember the arts pages), I know I am not alone. Similarly, when the Today programme reaches twenty-five

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past the hour (‘Now, time for sport’) and I rush about for precisely five minutes doing the noisy jobs such as bath-running and kettle-boiling, I am confident that countless other people are doing the same. And finally, when a programme such as Sports Review of the Year soaks up two hours of BBC1 peak-time on a Sunday night, I happily regard it as a gap in the schedule, and read a book. Fran Lebowitz spoke for me and for millions, I quite believe, when she said the only thing she had in common with sports fanatics was the right to trial by jury. I mention all this because on Sunday I eschewed the usual literary treat and forced myself to watch Sports Review instead. I had heard about the time-honoured award for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and envisaged it as a bit of a laugh, with household-name sports heroes lined up in swimsuits and sashes (‘Mister Cricket’, ‘Mister 100 Metres’ and so on) trying to impress Desmond Lynam with their breadth of hobbies and love of travel, and nervously pushing back their tiaras as they paraded at the end. Of course, it turned out to be much less interesting than that, with lots of unidentifiable sports people got up like funeral directors, but it did conclude quite as oddly, when Nigel Mansell (the winner, a racing driver) addressed the viewer at home and said that he would like to thank us all for supporting him. For a moment he was so convincing that I almost didn’t notice. ‘Any time, Nige. Don’t mention it, old son,’ I said, wiping a tear. But then I remembered that I never watch racing driving (can’t stand the nyow-nyow; can’t stomach the commentators; can’t follow who’s winning; hate the bit when they squirt champagne). And it suddenly occurred to me: These people don’t know. They really don’t know that sport is a minority interest. When they say ‘England’ and assume you will understand a team of footballers, they forget completely that the word has another (if only a secondary) meaning. Far be it from me to argue that other people should not enjoy sport. It is merely childish to argue against something on the grounds that you don’t know what they see in it. I just wish to point out, for those who didn’t know, that in a large number of households the television news gets switched off automatically when the announcer says, ‘Cricket, and at Edgbaston . . .’ And also that sometimes, when drunk and in the pleasant company of the cast of Watership Down, one can believe for a bright shining moment that the collective indifference is so very marked, it might even be marketable.  How heartening to know that the prime minister buys books he doesn’t have time to read. No piece of news has ever, metaphorically speaking, drawn him closer to my bosom. I doubt it was meant to, however. The thought of him excitedly shuffling his book tokens at Waterstone’s check-out has already elicited sneers—intellectual snobs being always alert for vulgarians proudly displaying their

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embossed Shakespeare with the disclaimer, ‘Of course, it’s not something you can actually read’. But personally, I take great comfort in the news; it gives him a whole new human side. He has faith in the future. At the same time, he sensibly realizes that busy jobs don’t last for ever. He likes books for their own sake. And when people look at his shelves and say, ‘Have you read all these?’, he replies without embarrassment, ‘No, but I live in hope.’ My own sensitivity on this issue I can trace to my days as a guilty, hard-pressed literary editor in an office waist-deep with neglected review copies. ‘Have you read all these?’ people would enquire, innocuously enough, and then draw back in alarm as I scrambled to the window ledge and threatened to jump. They learnt not to ask. At home, I own literally hundreds of books I have bought, but not yet read; but if I say I regard them as a squirrel regards his nuts, I hope you will pardon the expression and catch my drift. I mean, what is the point of owning only books you have read? Where is the challenge or excitement in that? It would be like having a fridge full of food you have already eaten, cupboards of booze that’s already been drunk. Imagine browsing for a meal in the evenings—‘Mm, this moussaka was pretty good last time, and I reckon Mister Retsina could stand another paddle down the old alimentary canal.’ Of course, I have made mistakes, bought books I couldn’t get on with. By rights, I should donate them to passing students, but instead I hoard them, like ill-fitting shoes, in hope that one day I will make the effort to break them in. Henry James is no good at all, God knows I’ve tried, but from the very first sentence I always find myself sinking, disappearing, drowning in dark mud, it’s horrible, horrible, and finally I cry out in Thurberesque despair, ‘Why doesn’t somebody take this damn thing away from me?’ Yet if I retain my copy of The Golden Bowl, it’s not because I am dishonestly feigning an abiding love of Henry James, it’s just because I like to be prepared for all contingencies. Who knows, but one day I may positively yearn for intellectual suffocation in mud? Similarly, who knows, but I might break a leg and catch up on all my Gary Larson ‘Far Side’ books as well. No, I defend the prime minister’s position. First, I think there is a moral imperative to buy books, even if you have little time to read them. After all, the authors wrote them in all good faith; why should they be penalized just because you are busy (temporarily) running the country? I grow very cross in bookshops, watching customers dither over fulfilling their obligation. ‘Just buy it, for heaven’s sake!’ I want to say. ‘What’s the big deal? First Lord of the Treasury salary not good enough for you?’ Second, there is no pleasure to compare with a heavy Waterstone’s bag. And third (obviously), if you wait for the exact appropriate moment to buy the exact appropriate book, it will no longer be in print, stupid.

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I keep trying to imagine the sort of person whose bookshelves don’t say ‘This is what I’m interested in’ but ‘This is what I’ve read, actually; go on, test me.’ What a miserable way to live your life. I remember once a potential boyfriend (it came to nothing) solemnly inspecting my bookshelves as though they were a measure of compatibility, and I thought, lumme, he’ll ask about those German poets, I’m done for. But then he leaned back and said, ‘I see you’ve got M.R. James, Henry James and P.D. James all together here.’ ‘Er, is there a problem?’ I said, nervously. ‘Well, yes,’ he snapped. ‘Alphabetically, Henry should come before M.R. Also, the books should be drawn forward neatly to the extreme edge of the shelves.’ It took me several weeks to realize it, but this reaction said more about him than it did about me.  If M.R. James or Sheridan Le Fanu were alive today, I have no doubt about the particular universal neurosis they would be tapping—terrifying us out of our skins by making a simple story out of our deepest nightmare. The story they would be writing would be called ‘The Newspaper’. On the staircase of the London Library in St James’s Square, a middle-aged clergyman (his hair prematurely white) would meet by chance a young man with whom he had once shared a railway compartment on a journey to York. After a few pleasantries, they would decide to take tea together, perhaps in Fortnum’s. Only when they had seated themselves comfortably in a quiet corner with some Darjeeling and some dry cake would the clergyman relate—in simple, unsensational prose—his terrible story. On a summer morning in the year of 198—, he had bought, he says, a Sunday newspaper. After scanning it for church news, he had left it in his conservatory while he pottered peacefully among his roses, stopping occasionally to make a fuss of Theo, his faithful old Labrador. Returning once to the conservatory for an implement—a trowel, let’s say—he had sensed something odd; something not quite as he had left it. But glancing around, he had seen nothing particularly out of the ordinary: perhaps the newspaper, with his spectacles resting on it, had shifted slightly—but no doubt, he reasoned, Theo had been sniffing about. He thought little more of it, and later shut the conservatory door and strolled up the lane to his pretty parish church for Evensong. Returning later, he thought he heard the dog whimpering. The sound was one he had never heard from Theo before—deep fear was there in that sound. The clergyman, his pulse racing, frantically searched the house for his faithful friend, but only when Theo started to yowl and scratch furiously at the door did he realize that the sound was coming from the conservatory. Tearing open the door, he saw the most terrible sight: the dog, frothing at the mouth, was lying on its side, its

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red eyes starting out of its head, its old heart having given out at last. And in the corner, the Newspaper, no longer an inoffensive two-section broadsheet, but now an indescribably huge, ugly, monstrous, garish, unnecessary object. In the course of a single day, the Newspaper had grown exponentially, in that poor clergyman’s conservatory, to one hundred times its original size. The terror of that moment still seized the clergyman, even in the safety of the tea-room. During their modest repast, his fine bone china teacup rattled and danced on its saucer, and though he broke his madeira cake into pieces, never did he raise a morsel to his lips. The Sunday Times had done for him. It has done for us all.  Personally I would be sorry to see it go, that nice busy roundabout outside Buckingham Palace. Last week’s news that the Royal Parks Review Group wants to pedestrianize it for the sake of tourists has come as a blow. Naturally, I can’t fault their humanitarian motives, indeed I can easily picture the escalating woe their research must have induced, as, faces fixed in a rictus of alarm, they kept their St James’s Park vigil, and monitored the near-hits with a regular muffled shriek. ‘I can’t look!’ they squealed, as every ten minutes a clueless foreign tourist, intent on the Palace, ventured halfway across the road from the Victoria Memorial, stopped, blinked for a moment, panicked, flapped his arms, and then at the very last minute vaulted the crash-barrier out of the path of a roaring cab. But why don’t they look at it from the other point of view? For the average Londoner, this game of high-speed chicken outside a national heritage beauty-spot is one of our very few opportunities to contribute usefully to the tourist industry. It’s our only chance to interact. And it is to our credit, I think, that we do it with such enthusiasm. ‘There’s one!’ we say, dropping down a gear as we sweep round the corner from Birdcage Walk, and accelerate hard. ‘This will give them something to write home about!’ And quite honestly, the tourists do seem to appreciate it, especially when we make jolly local hand-gestures at them through the windscreens and shout ‘Yah, turkeys!’ as we thunder past. Safely arrived at the railings, they giggle red-faced from the chase, pant with pleasure, and sometimes even clutch their chestal area as testimony to the excitement. Which means that the gratified motorist can speed off up Constitution Hill to Hyde Park Corner with the pleasant satisfaction of a job well done. Pave it over, make a namby-pamby promenade, and this precious interaction will most certainly be lost. But not only that; it will also give tourists the wrong impression of our lovely city, in which dangerous jay-walking is surely one of the chief means of expressing individuality and free will. ‘I am going to cross this road now, though hell should bar the way!’ we declare stoutly, as we stride out

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into four lanes of traffic, misjudge the speed of an oncoming motorbike, and pretend not to hear what’s shouted at us as it swerves and skids to a halt at the lights, just twenty yards down the road. Traffic dodging is part of the metropolitan experience, for goodness’ sake, it’s part of being British. What’s the point of coming to London if you never expose yourself to the fear of being run over? You might as well stay at home and knit fjords, or whatever it is that foreigners do. Our high pedestrian accident rate should be made a glowing feature of tourism campaigns, not swept under the carpet. Look at it in a positive light, and these foreigners are returning to their homes equipped with a life skill they could not possibly acquire anywhere else outside the Third World. No, if London’s tourists deserve sympathy, it’s for other things. The place is expensive and unfriendly, you can’t get a coffee after half past five, London airport is curiously nowhere near London, and as for linguistic proficiency, well, let’s just say our spoken English needs work. But since we don’t make strenuous efforts to protect our honoured visitors from anything else in this hostile, uncomfortable culture, it is definitely a bit peculiar to want to save them from the cars. I mean, good grief, let’s not get xenophobic here, but they do make these cars, you know. We only buy them and then drive in a reckless manner, as God intended. So let’s stop pussyfooting around. Leave that roundabout precisely where it is, with the traffic going clockwise to confuse the foreigners. After all, it could well be true that for every Japanese or German car squealing round and round the Victoria Memorial, sufficient funds flow back into the Japanese or German national kitty for several lucky people to pack a suitcase, fly to London, run across the road outside Buckingham Palace, and be almost knocked down. And if that’s not a circular irony, then I don’t know what is.  Should you ever feel the urge to see where Jim Morrison is buried (Jim Morrison of the Doors, d. 1971), I now feel pretty confident I can guide you to the spot. Prior to last weekend, I had only the vaguest idea that Morrison was interred somewhere in France; but now, having navigated a friend around the famous Parisian cemetery of Père-Lachaise (‘Next stop Balzac, this way, step along’), I am an authority on Morrison’s precise whereabouts, despite having no personal interest in him whatsoever. People just kept asking us, that’s all, because we had a map. ‘Jim Morrison?’ they enquired earnestly, these young Italian girls with rucksacks and brown legs, born circa 1975. ‘Er, oh yes, down here, turn right, follow the crowd,’ we said, mystified. It seemed a bit peculiar, all this fuss. My friend and I appeared to be missing

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the point of Père-Lachaise, getting excited about Rossini and Colette, when we obviously should have been focusing our dilated eyeballs to scrawl, ‘We miss you JIM, where are you JIM, are you dead then JIM’ on the side of somebody else’s tomb abutting the mighty Morrison’s. What terrible luck for those bourgeois Parisian families, incidentally, who found themselves slap-bang next to a blown-out Sixties youth icon. No chance of resting in peace. An American couple asked us near the gate who was buried in Père-Lachaise. ‘Who isn’t?’ we exclaimed, jabbing wildly at our map. ‘No, look, Proust, Bizet, Géricault’ (no response); ‘Er, Chopin, Modigliani, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison—’ ‘Really? Jim Morrison?’ they interrupted. And they went off happy. We could see they were impressed. But as we continued our tour of this starry necropolis, sadly taking note of the fact that devotees of A la Recherche had failed to write, ‘I can’t live without you MARCEL, Come back MARCEL, This is what happens when you go out MARCEL’ on the grave of Proust, I suppose we should have realized that Jim Morrison, for all his paucity of talent or achievement, really is the point of Père-Lachaise. What does it matter that Proust is here? He is only where he ought to be. In any cemetery, the deepest sentiment is rightly reserved for the exile or itinerant who happened to step on a bee in an unlikely place, and got buried before anyone noticed. For the best effect, Proust should be in Florida. ‘No no MARCEL’ we would write. ‘Whatever possessed you MARCEL.’ I speak as someone who has wept openly at the Keats-Shelley memorial in Rome, has stood bereft at the tomb of Henry Fielding in Lisbon, but who visits Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey dry-eyed and impervious. It is the sorry truth: the sight of a hero properly interred in his own country is rarely an occasion for a Kleenex, whereas the idea of poor Fielding, one of England’s greatest (and most English) writers, embarking for Lisbon in 1754, arriving there, loathing it, and dying in just a few weeks, is somehow heartbreaking. Furthermore, it adds to the touching romance of the thing that his monument is nowadays difficult to find. I remember asking a bemused Portuguese leaf-sweeper for directions, and he clearly had no idea what I was driving at—even when I helpfully mimed scenes from the movie of Tom Jones. All this has been much on my mind because, two or three weeks from now, I hope to stand on a hilltop in Western Samoa looking at the tomb of Robert Louis Stevenson, on which his famous ‘Requiem’ is engraved. Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie, Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

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And, well, pardon me for sniffing, I must have a cold coming on, but why does nobody understand that this is intensely moving? They understand about Jim Morrison, but ‘Stevenson?’ they say, ‘I don’t get it. Surely he invented the Rocket and that was that.’ Clearly I’ve got a big job ahead of me, scrawling, ‘All right LOUIS, It’s your centenary soon LOUIS, They are hoping to do a commemorative stamp LOUIS.’ But it really shouldn’t be necessary, when the poem says it all: This be the verse you grave for me, Here he lies where he longed to be, Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

I bet JIM wishes he’d thought of that.

Crackers Already




If the build-up to Christmas is depressing for no other reason, it is because Ambridge is annually gripped by showbiz fever. Rural readers will no doubt assure me that English village life in Advent really is abuzz with pantomime rehearsals and sheet-music distribution, and I suppose I will have to believe it. But the thought of Jill Archer efficiently running up yet another dozen chorus-line costumes on her Singer treadle, of Bert Fry practising his basso profundo in the byre, of Linda Snell bustling importantly with clipboard and Tiggy-whistle, makes me shake my head with genuine sadness. There are several reasons. First, it is essentially the same story every time (although this year, admittedly, the panto has been cancelled in favour of the even duller concert); second, the annual repetition reminds me of my own mortality; third, I don’t believe in this universal urge to leap on stage in a funny suit; and fourth, it gives me the shuddering Christmassy ab-dabs to think of the lights going up after the show each year to reveal a silent audience of—what? Much has been made of the popular ‘unheard’ characters in The Archers—such people as Higgs, Shane and Pru Forrest, who neatly contrive to pop out suddenly (‘He was here a minute ago—’) to check the Bentley, the quiche, or the victoria sponge, and so avoid contact with the listening public. But only at Christmas does one become powerfully aware of the Ambridge plebs—that mob of mute, unnamed, disenfranchised villagers who must surely constitute the bums on seats for each miserably jolly extravaganza the Ambridge nobs can dream up for their delectation. Who are they, these faceless inferiors? What does it feel like to be valued only for one’s bum? The rest of the year, they patronize the village shop, use the services of the doctor and vet, buy pints of Shires in the Bull, and take early morning swims at the Grey Gables health club—and presumably don’t feel particularly second-class or invisible. But at Christmas, as they shuffle into that village hall, sit down and open their programmes, their wraith-like howls of bitter dismay must be audible all the way to Borchester. I was put in mind of these non-people when reading yesterday of the nineyear-old Shetland schoolgirl whose mother is keeping her at home because of a disagreement with the head teacher. Nothing remarkable in that, you might think, until you discover that the girl (poor thing) is the real-life equivalent of the Ambridge nobs. If this school has a panto, she stars in it automatically. If it has a hockey team, she is its captain and goalie. And if there is a maths test she sets the standard. She is, in short, the only child at the school; and no wonder she is having problems. Other children can stand at the back when netball teams are picked; they can bend down and tie up their shoelaces. Not this girl. For her,

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there is no hiding place; she is forever in the spotlight. And every time the English teacher says, ‘Now who’s going to read aloud this morning?’, she is obliged resignedly to raise her hand, otherwise the whole pedagogic caboodle crumbles instantly to dust. On speech day, when she wins all the prizes but nobody claps, she must dearly wish for another life. Where the intense weirdness comes in, however, is that initially she was sent home for misbehaviour—a very strange case of pour encourager les autres. Sometimes she must dream of classmates—of skipping while other people turn the rope, of marble games in which you lose the yellow one and go home crying, of rough children pushing you into a hedge for no reason—just as Phil Archer must sometimes think that in a place like Ambridge there must be some other muggins who can play the joanna. But at least she knows that having been sent home, she is not the subject of a whispering campaign. One just wonders whether her head teacher, having evidently lost his patience with the girl and said, ‘You! Trouble-maker! Out!’, really felt much better when she’d obeyed, shrugged and gone home. Is the school running more smoothly now? Do the nativity play rehearsals progress without incident? In this Shetland school, as in Ambridge, I suspect you may eavesdrop on the festivities this year, and hear the famous eerie sound of one hand clapping.  The announcement of the Princess of Wales’s controversial Christmas holiday plans contained an important sub-text, I thought, which somehow got ignored in the usual flurry of pecking and stripping to the bone when the vultures descended. ‘You are blind!’ I shouted at nobody in particular, as I pawed through my heap of tabloids. I mean, of course, yes, Diana’s decision to spend Christmas away from the royal in-laws has ‘fuelled speculation’ (yawn). And yes, too, it has encouraged sentimental visions of Christmas Future at Sandringham, with the royal family casting sad-eyed Cratchit-like glances at the forlorn little wooden stool on which the princess formerly sat. But in the rush for that 4-star speculation-fuel, nobody noticed that in terms of universal yuletide family politics, Diana had achieved a tremendous coup. She had really caught them on the hop. To announce your Christmas plans in the first week of November is the mark of a brilliant tactician, family-wise. They can’t possibly have been prepared for it. What she did was the equivalent of winning the race while her competitors were still indoors lacing up their plimsolls. Christmas is an awful thing, in my book. Ding Dong Merrily has little to do with it; and there is a limit to the number of times you can pretend not to know the ending of Superman II. Sometimes I sit back and imagine that Christmas will

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really be cancelled this year, and the idea fills me with excitement. So I envy the princess her determined effort to avoid the tidal pull of the family Christmas, and I would emulate her like a shot (‘Off to Morocco, sorry!’) if I did not suffer currently from ‘denial’. You know that you can be ‘in denial’ about bereavement or alcoholism? Well, I have a theory that you can also be ‘in denial’ about Christmas, which makes it ultimately more dangerous. Denial lasts a long, long time. You can recognize people in denial because we stand aghast in department stores and scoff loudly, ‘Hell’s bells, not crackers already!’ (leaving other shoppers to interpret this outburst as they will). Out of every magazine you pick up, there slithers a heavy catalogue of ingenious Christmas gifts, which you stare at uncomprehendingly. What’s this, you say; a pair of slippers with headlights built in? If this is Christmas, you declare, you will have no part of it. But mixed with this denial is guilt, of course, because one can’t help noticing that other people have ‘started’. It is somehow awful to hear. ‘Have you started yet?’ they say, sort-of casually. ‘No, it’s only November. Ha ha. You?’ ‘Mmm. Three weeks ago.’ ‘Oh.’ Meanwhile relations start mentioning casually on the phone the lovely present they bought you while on holiday in July, the news of which makes you feel strangely weightless. Presumably there are people in the world on whom this sort of moral blackmail makes no impression, but personally I allow it to flood me with feelings of inadequacy, year after year. And this, I might add, despite my certain knowledge, borne of dismally consistent experience, that the much-vaunted holiday present will turn out on Christmas morning to be a small box of fudge or a red plastic ball-point with my name on it. Anyway, to return to the theory of stages, this powerful guilt phase finally propels you into an eruption of frantic activity, then a brief spell of euphoria, closely followed by let-down, anger, and finally blank exhaustion. And that’s it. Another consumer Christmas, another absolutely pointless exercise, which you knew you didn’t want to get involved in from the start. This is what I hate about Christmas, that while I object to it very loudly, and can see with painful clarity that it is a form of mass hysteria, I always end up participating anyway, and going the whole hog. We all do. Any form of protest—principled refusal to buy cheese footballs, for example—is feeble and simply makes you look mean. The idea, therefore, of the princess stating her intentions so clearly and forcibly in regard to the Sandringham three-line whip is really quite inspiring. Based on no evidence whatsoever, I shall assume, too, that when her Aunt Mar-

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garet pops her coat on and announces her intention of getting ‘started’, Diana will snap, ‘Well, just don’t get me a box of fudge like last year’—something I have always wanted to say, Diana, but fear I never shall.  Go on, guess. What’s this? Jing, jing, jing, jing-jing-jingaling, jing-jing-a-jing-alingjing. Dee dee da, lovely weather for a sleigh ride together la laaah. Gosh, that’s better. When a girl has spent three solid weekends at home poring over those special goody-crammed Christmas gift catalogues, she fancies she feels the sting of snow on her face, smells the rich vinyl on the Perry Como records, hears sleighbells on the roof, and remembers the exact weight, shape and fragrance of a tub of Lily of the Valley talcum powder unwrapped on Christmas morn. Oh yes. In short, she is almost clinically depressed. ‘Who wants all this stuff ?’ she wails, disconsolately flipping the gaudy, fun-packed pages. She looks back on her life and sees a great endless Jacob Marley charm bracelet made up of all the unwanted Christmas presents she has misguidedly given since the age of six. ‘It still goes on,’ she groans, flapping a catalogue from Boots or Debenhams. ‘Oh yes, they even—and I hardly believe it—still have a section called “For Him”.’ It is only at Christmas that I feel genuinely sorry for men. They get a terrible deal, and these catalogues are testimony to life’s dreadful gender unfairness. From being an ordinary individual—albeit a moron, genius, couch potato, whatever—a man at Christmas becomes in his family’s festively fevered mind an entirely notional ‘For Him’ entity who revels implausibly in manicure sets and backgammon boards and special golf-motif alarm clocks. For men, Christmas morning is a very mystifying time, requiring an almost saintly selfless pretence. ‘Oh look, a jigsaw depicting a huge plate of baked beans. How er, lovely. Ha, ha, that should keep me busy.’ It is a very curious thing. Forbidden to buy socks and hankies, I once bought my father a beautiful leather-and-silver-plate hip flask and fully expected him to be stunned with gratitude, regardless of the significant fact that he never (ever) drank. But as Susan Carter so rightly whined in a recent episode of The Archers, ‘Men are so difficult to buy for.’ Which is why, as a sort of punishment presumably, they get landed with travel shoe-care kits, novelty calculators, tiddly-cricket and Brut aftershave. ‘Well, you’re just too difficult to buy for’ is the bristling sub-text of each gift, especially when thrust upon a man who: a) b) c) d)

wears trainers, and never goes anywhere; has a calculator already; has never played a parlour game in his life; and has sported a large bushy beard for the past twenty years.

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Being currently mateless, I feel I can expand on this topic without hurting anyone’s feelings. So why are ‘men’ so difficult to buy for? Well, let us take Susan Carter’s husband Neil as an example, and apply the usual mental processes by which a thoughtful gift-buyer selects a winner. What makes Neil happy? Um, ooh. Well, um. Pigs? Let’s try another angle. What does Neil aspire to? Hmm, no, sorry, this is trickier than I thought. All right, for heaven’s sake, does he already have an alarm clock disguised as a miniature old-fashioned petrol pump, or a jigsaw depicting an enormous plate of baked beans? I am not saying that all men are Neil Carter. If they were, the world would be full of pig farms, and we shouldn’t be able to move for co-op feed orders. Perhaps I am just trying to justify my strange decision, last year, to buy a dear (male) friend a gaily printed cotton bandanna (the sort cowboys wear over their noses on dusty cattle-drives), accompanied by a dandy booklet entitled Thirty-Five Things to do with a Bandanna. My only excuse is that it just seemed like the ultimate male Christmas gift. My friend could try it on, read about it, and puzzle very deeply over my reasons for giving it to him. And then afterwards, utterly stumped, he could put it in a drawer and wonder.  Christmas in our house starts on Christmas Eve with the ritual of the food blender. Once a year, I like to trot down to the shed to pull it out from under the lawnmower, blow off the grass and spiders, look at the blade to make sure it’s clean, and then begin—whipping together my special recipe of Paxo stuffing, cherry mincemeat, Bailey’s Irish Cream, chicken fat, Warninck’s Avocaat, cobwebs, After Eight Mints and Bisto (to taste). When blended together in the right proportions, it looks a bit like cat vomit, but it makes a terrific all-purpose Christmas sauce, which can transform even your slimmer’s meal of cottage cheese with prawns into a festive occasion. It also means that you always have something suitable in the fridge for dealing with those unexpected visitors on Boxing Day. (They won’t trouble you again.) On Christmas Day after lunch, I like the whole family to gather around the fire and play word-games. Which is a shame, because a) I don’t have a fire; and b) everybody except me is a cat. The gratification of being able to beat a cat at Scrabble palled after the first couple of Christmases, and I wasn’t sorry to throw in the towel. In any case, he always wanted to check everything in the dictionary, and it

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took forever. So now we play more simple party games. They hide the remote control for the TV, and I look for it; or they pretend that they didn’t buy me anything again this year, and I pretend to believe them; or they vomit their Turkey Whiskas with Surprise Christmas Sauce, and I have to guess which bowl holds the uneaten dinner, and which the regurgitated. We like to watch the TV on Christmas Day. Which is all right, because I’ve got one of those. As in every family, there are the usual fights over which channel it’s going to be. I have already settled with them that we will tune in to Back to the Future on Christmas Day, but I’m a bit worried that they won’t be able to follow it, and that I’ll have to spend so much time explaining bits that have just happened that I will miss the next bits. (Just like the time we all watched It’s a Wonderful Life.) On Christmas Night I like to reflect on life. What is life like? Life is like hoping for a racing bike for Christmas, and getting a Spirograph. Life is like starting a painting-by-numbers in a great fit of enthusiasm and then realizing that the little pot of blue will never be enough for the great expanse of sky, and that you should have thinned it out when you started. Life is like being given a dart-board, then being told there’s nowhere in the house that you can play darts. Life is like chewing your Christmas pudding really carefully because you are fearful you may be the lucky one with the threepenny bit. That’s what I like to do at Christmas.

The Arnolds Feign Death Until the Wagners, Sensing Awkwardness, are Compelled to Leave . . .




A couple of weeks ago, on Radio 4’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, the late great Les Dawson confessed to a fault he had never been able to cure. ‘What do you like least about yourself ?’ asked Anthony Clare (as he often does). That I can’t say no to people, said Dawson; that I want to please them and, worst of all, that I’m never the person at the pub who just looks at his watch and decides it’s time to go home. Bless you, Les Dawson, I thought. In a generally sympathetic interview, this admission was surely the most endearing moment of all. As someone who has blithely waved away the last guests at other people’s dinners, gamely collected glasses and turned off lights at other people’s office parties, said ‘Gosh, that’s kind’ to the fifth weary offer of coffee from hosts stapling their eyelids to their foreheads and propping their chins on broom-handles, I felt I knew precisely what he meant. Sometimes I worry that I live inside a Gary Larson cartoon, the one that’s captioned: ‘The Arnolds feign death until the Wagners, sensing awkwardness, are compelled to leave.’ Why does this awkwardness arise? No doubt the non-suffering majority (those decisive watch-glancers, coat-grabbers and leave-takers) think that we dreary obtuse Wagners refuse to collect our hats because we fear that people will talk about us. But it’s nothing so simple. No, in fact we just feel that saying goodbye admits a failure to bond, and we can’t stand it. I remember once interviewing Stephen Fry for a Sunday newspaper, spending two or three pleasant and fruitful hours in a Soho restaurant with him and then—on the pavement outside—finding myself completely unable to say ‘Westward ho!’ and strike off in a different direction, because I felt it would ruin everything. ‘Well, I’m going this way,’ he said, courteously offering his hand and wishing me luck. ‘Oh, that’s lucky, I can go that way!’ I exclaimed nerdishly, utterly deaf to my cue. We walked towards Shaftesbury Avenue, where by chance he spied a 19 bus. ‘I believe this will take me to Islington,’ he said, jumping aboard and waving. ‘Great idea,’ I agreed, and jumped on, too. (It gives me no pleasure to recount this, believe me.) ‘Do you know, I think I’ll go upstairs,’ he said, in a courteous last-ditch attempt to lose me, as we turned left at Cambridge Circus and sped up Charing Cross Road. At which point (outside Foyles) I finally realized it was time to say goodbye. I disembarked, spent half an hour in a bookshop, and thought no more about it until I re-emerged and saw to my alarm that he was studying the window op-

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posite. Clearly the long-suffering chap had likewise got off the bus immediately I was out of sight. I often call to mind this excruciating memory when interviewers record their meetings with celebrities entirely in a manner to flatter themselves, registering every ‘um’ and ‘er’ of the responses while somehow forgetting to mention that there is another side to the story: that their own questions were offensive or ill-informed, or that they suddenly suffered a copious nosebleed just at the moment when the taperecorder unspooled yards of tape which became entangled with the dog. I think with fondness of the actor Brian Cox, who patiently allowed me to interview him twice, because on the first occasion my tape-recorder silently self-combusted on his dressing-room sofa (leaving a hole). But mainly I think of those poor blighters— playwrights, directors, actors—who politely talked for several hours, until it finally (and horribly) dawned on them that ‘enough’s enough’ was an expression which, despite being in English, held no meaning for me whatsoever. Why isn’t there therapy for this condition? After all, it would be incredibly simple to organize. Just get a group of fellow-sufferers together in a big room and then, well, make us all go home again. Fiddling with one’s travelcard or carkeys while making vague dithery ‘Gosh, is that the time?’ noises would be strictly forbidden unless properly ‘followed through’. After two or three hours, the group leader might helpfully collapse to the floor and feign death (like the Arnolds) to see if it helped. And anyone who staunchly waved farewell and then, ten minutes later, popped a head round the door to ask ‘Was that all right?’ would be sent to Coventry forthwith.  Last week, a Durham cricketer’s wife visiting her parents in Australia received a rather startling telecommunication from her husband—to wit, a fax informing her that the marriage was over. In terms of goodbyes, it certainly had efficiency to commend it. ‘Page 1 of 1’, it presumably announced at the top; ‘FROM: Graeme Fowler, TO: ex-wife’. But was this act of arm’s-length brush-off ‘callous and cold’, merely? After all, the fax was swift and modern in its brutality, it will fade in time (literally), and mercifully it prevented the cliché marital bust-up which invariably degenerates into scuffle and fisticuffs. To peer and strain even further to see a bright side, at least the cricketer did not line her up on a parade ground and bark, ‘All those who are married to me, take one step forward. Where the hell do you think you’re going, Mrs Fowler?’ Faxes for this purpose are quite rare. The more common goodbye disguises itself, for reasons of humdrum cowardliness, as ‘See you later’ and ‘I’ll phone you back’. Last week I moved house—from London to Brighton—but like a genuine spineless dastard I flatly denied its implications on personal relationships to the

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last. ‘So we’ll not be seeing you,’ London neighbours said. ‘Of course you will,’ I declared heartily. ‘I’ll be back, you won’t know I’ve gone, in any case Brighton’s not far, just find East Croydon and it’s easy.’ Why endure the pain and tears (your own, not theirs) when you can avoid it with denial? Personally I have always admired those famous dying words which, instead of solemnly commending the soul to the maker, express ‘Much better, thanks; in fact, I fancy I could eat one of Mrs Miggins’s meat pies.’ H.G. Wells’s ‘Go away, I’m all right’ is a particular favourite, but it runs close with Lord Palmerston’s grandiloquent, ‘Die, my dear doctor? That’s the last thing I shall do.’ So when I indulge myself unforgivably by mentioning that this Times column will of course continue for ever (and see you next week, and the week after that, phone you later, go away I’m all right), perhaps you will deduce what I’m getting at. To return to the matter in hand—the Fowler fax—I find that I distrust the temptation to jump to conclusions, to assume it came to Mrs Fowler as a bolt from the sky. It sounds to me more like the act of a desperate person, driven to exasperated lengths. Conceivably, Mr Fowler had been leaving clues for weeks, and had finally exhausted his ingenuity. One remembers the Victoria Wood sketch that went: ‘Jeff ’s gone.’ ‘For good?’ ‘Well, he’s taken the toolshed.’ Mrs Fowler may just have been slow on the uptake. One imagines her wandering through the bare, curtainless house, musing ‘Funny, where’s Graeme got to?’, seemingly blind to the words ‘I’m off, then’ and ‘I mean it’ sprayed with paint on the living-room walls. Personally, the only time I successfully said goodbye—really felt it, surrendered to it, explored it—was when my wise Chinese acupuncturist left London for Los Angeles. (I know how this must sound, but I’ll carry on anyway.) The point was, we had discussed my attitude to separation trauma, so she helped me face a real goodbye (with her), with an emotional result that was positively startling in its depth and scope. The only trouble was, it made me feel like a character from a Woody Allen movie. ‘Why are you sobbing?’ my surprised colleagues asked, back at the office. ‘Why do you think?’ I wailed. ‘Because my acupuncturist has left for the Coast!’ Possibly it was the most pure and truthful emotional moment of my life, but in the end it proved limiting, because when she returned last year I couldn’t face her, too much salt water having passed under that particular bridge. There is a lesson here, I feel. If only she had left me with ‘No, I’ll soon be home, Los Angeles isn’t far, just find the Great Circle and it’s easy,’ I would have been back to see her, like a shot, and would now be cheerfully bristling with acupuncture needles like quills upon the fretful porpentine. 

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When night falls and she doesn’t come in for her tea, I usually start to worry. So I go outside and call for her (the old story), and then feel helpless when she still doesn’t come. I tell myself that probably she is ‘eating out tonight’—because I know how easily she insinuates herself into other houses, and then cadges a meal by acting weak and pathetic. At the end of such an evening, she will come home to me in a telltale over-excited state, not really interested in food. Still, I will say this for her: she always makes sure I’m all right. Out comes the tin-opener, and there’s half a tin of Felix, a handful of Kitty Crunch for my little jaws to work on, even a tub of Sheba if she’s been drinking. But it’s not the food I am worried about. It’s just that I am only properly happy when I know she is safe indoors, curled up asleep on that warm hairy rug of hers, her ears flicking contentedly as she dreams of Jeff Bridges. She was thirty-one when I got her. Mangy and with a bit of a whiff, but also affectionate. She took time to settle down, and it was clear she had been badly treated in the past, because her mood swings were abrupt and inscrutable—one minute running about like a maniac, the next flaked out in weird angular poses in random places on the carpet. But gradually I earned her trust (and she learned some basic grooming), and now she has this peculiar habit of rubbing her face against my leg, which is quite pleasant actually, though a bit of a nuisance when you are trying to walk downstairs. To friends who haven’t got one, I always say, ‘Get one.’ I mean it, no hesitation. Yes, they are selfish. Yes, they moult. Yes, they yowl a bit in the night-time and they make it difficult for you to go on holiday. But they make it up to you in so many ways. For one thing, they can sometimes be persuaded to pose with ribbons around their necks. And for another, they are absolutely fascinating to watch. For example, mine spends hour after hour just staring at a big box in the corner of the living-room, not moving an inch, but silently grinding her teeth and tensing her muscles as if to pounce. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: I am convinced they can see things we can’t see. For about three years, actually, I had a pair—a male as well as a female—but the male disappeared one day last summer, as abruptly as he arrived, and I never found out what became of him. Run over, possibly. Or locked in a garage by mistake. The sense of loss was awful (that’s the problem with getting too attached). They are so frightfully independent, yet incredibly stupid at the same time, so they run into danger while you sit at home worrying yourself demented. Anyway, my dilemma was: should I get a new one immediately (friends said, ‘Get a younger one this time’)? But I was worried how the female would react; she might resent it. Certainly she got a bit thin and straggly when he first disappeared, and clawed at the windows. But now she is back to sleeping twenty hours

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a day, and quite often buries her face in a bowl of food, so I think she has probably fallen on her feet. I have had her for six years, and she still surprises me. Her only unacceptable habit is that sometimes during the day she will suddenly drop whatever she is doing, dash for the door and disappear; and then an hour later return with all sorts of inedible rubbish—vegetables, pasta, washing-powder—which she dumps on the doormat, looking pleased with herself. It happens about once a week. Evidently this is standard behaviour, especially from childless females, and I ought to respond magnanimously to these offerings (‘Muesli, how lovely’) rather than offend her. But it is so clearly a throwback to some primitive hunting-andgathering instinct that it unsettles me completely. I just don’t like to face up to the fact that, you know, deep down, she’s an animal. ‘Look what I got,’ she trills, and starts spreading the stuff on the floor. ‘Oh yuk,’ I say. ‘Why ever did you bring home yoghurt?’ And I give her one of my looks. Sorry, there’s not much point to this. I just thought I’d fill you in. A couple of years ago, you see, she read a pile of books called things like Catwatching and Do Cats Need Shrinks? and learned some quasi-scientific nonsense about cat behaviour that has honestly given me the pip. For example, she now believes that in the cat world it is a sign of friendship to narrow your eyes. I ask you. Round eyes means aggression, you see; while slitty eyes means ‘I’m just a sweet old pussy-cat and I’m your friend.’ Several times a day, then, she catches my eye deliberately and then squints. It gives me the screaming ab-dabs. But on the other hand, how sweet of her to try to get an insight. She read somewhere else that cats respond at some deep atavistic level if you lie on the floor, chest up. So she does this, too, and although I have no idea what atavism is, I certainly appreciate a nice thick warm body to lie on, so I clamber aboard, no problem. And this is how I think I will leave you, actually: with me snoozing happily on my pet. She is happy, lying here chest up, eyes a-squint, for she is cocooned in the pitiable belief that she is practising cat psychology, when in fact cat psychology is practising on her.

About the Author




Lynne Truss is a writer and journalist who started out as a literary editor with a blue pencil and then got sidetracked. The author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas, she spent six years as the television critic of The Times of London, followed by four (rather peculiar) years as a sports columnist for the same newspaper. She won Columnist of the Year for her work for Women’s Journal. She is the author of the number-one bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which has sold more than one million copies and won the national British Book Award. She lives in Brighton, England.