D.H. Gamon: 2010

[David writes: This is the second of the stories with the general title 'A Time of Healing' -- maybe a question mark ought to be added here. 'Up Gritnells' is at least a competently written popular novel, though short. ' A Decent Girl' aka 'All Lize' is or was a sympathetic study of character. This second story looks over the shoulder of Dave. I don't entirely like what I've written (indeed, I don't entirely like him!) and this is likely to be cut considerably, so probably will finish up as a long short story rather than a novel. Though it was written third, I am going to rewrite it second.]

He's eighteen. Very clever. In his way. His grandmother goes and dies in the middle of his last in-school exams. He was part-inclined to think she'd done it to put him off (it didn't, of course.) She was old, of course, to him; grandmothers are. But not ancient -- early sixties. Her husband had died long before Dave was born. A Great Hero, apparently, though what was great or heroic about him is vague. And Dave looked just like this marvellous being apart from the colour of his hair, he's been told -- very frequently indeed. His mother's mother is the grandmother I'm talking about. Her death and her being dead - whatever he felt or felt he ought to have felt was buried too. English, of course. Later on fellow-workers were to think him cold. Correct, but cold. This was obtuse of them, despite Ph.Ds etc. Dave, his mother Lize, his aunt Belinda, his grandmother Bessie all live in that little house, or did, 12 St. Osgyth's. Alf too, his father, at least he sleeps there, doesn't offer opinions or experiences much, or bring in money to speak of, his life such as it is is mostly elsewhere. When David visits with his wife nowadays he resists almost successfully thinking the house is too small, ill-built and shabby. Lize and her sister grew up there, never left. Alf joined them after the marriage. A year later Dave, their only child, 'came along.' It wasn't until Bessie died that the others realised how clever-silently she'd been getting everything and everyone to go her way, and spoiling Dave. 'He's so fussed over and waited on it's a wonder he can play with himself himself instead of getting someone else to do it for him' is the sort of thing Belinda says ~ she's often crudely amusing. Gran had liked to go on (and on and on and on) about what a hard time she'd had in life, widowed so early with two small children, etc; that it was undoubtedly true, or true enough, didn't make it interesting to hear yet again. And that it was a kind of vanity and self-praise, she never thought. She wasn't quite as tough as she liked to make out to herself. She's dying now mainly because she's worn out. Emotionally, more than physically. 'Why go on?' she may well have said to herself. 'What for?' A lot of deaths, (even most?), may be caused like that. In fact, she may not have been tough at all. She had been a servant, used to fading into the wallpaper, she had not been able to develop resources of personality. 'If something happens to me...' Bessie had begun many sentences like that, and what a stupid evasion that is; there's no if, Bessie, not for you nor me nor anybody, that's 100% guaranteed, so why not say so? Well -- After a breakdown of some sort a few months back, though no-one could determine what sort, Bessie had been hospitalised; she had found it very boring there, despite being inured to boredom, and had come home, where it was familiar and therefore reassuring, but scarcely more exciting. She refused to go back, and what Bessie wanted she nearly always got, especially at 12. They all liked their GP Ostlethwaite tremendously, despite his brusque manner; he came to see her nearly every day. Belinda (or Blowsy or Belle or Blowse) wasn't much use when Bessie was dying. Dave was even less. Though since the main things to be done were to wash the old woman lying there and to give her bedpans it's hard to see how he could have been. He ought to have made more time to talk to her. But he was at the stage of life where it is for one thing very easy to get bored and for another you believe that being bored is more fearful than cancer. He's not to blame -- much. And how little, how very little, she had said to him in all those years except about trivial matters! Such women call that 'keeping meself to meself.' That he loved her without understanding her and that the reverse also is true ought to go without saying. And, for all his well-trained scientist's power of observation, that he did not notice the strain his mother was under, trying to keep going when she could at her shop-assistant's job, the family's only regular income, as well as nursing Bessie -- the sun comes up every morning and if you're up early enough yourself you may just sometimes stop and look at it, but not being aware of it is a lifetime habit and that parents manage and provide is as unawaredly assumed and as ungratefully received. He expected to do very well in his 'A' Levels. He did. That was the kind of thing he was always right about. He was at Sharth, the greatest school in the county, in fact it has usurped the name of the town (even though outside the West Country it's maybe not as famous.) He was a scholarship boy among the children of the rich, and, unlike many such, had the sense to be proud of it. He said to himself right at the beginning, I've got twice as many brains as this lot, otherwise I wouldn't be here at all. Then he said it again and forgot the matter. He was quite tall, and strong for his height. He did well at 'games', Rugby especially, which gave him status with other boys and the masters; until recently Sharth had been for boys only. Though when he got to fifteen he began to think, 'what's it all for?' and played less willingly. Nowadays he rarely watches sport, not even on television. It was his sports achievements rather than his cleverness which got him to be a full prefect. Tom Gritnell-Ferrace regretted that he never did in his own time there; then he felt almost amused at so old a wound re-awaking. (Dads was 'Alf' to him when he helped him in his garden, he was 'Boss' or 'Mr Ferrace' to Alf.) This gardening and other casual though usually skilled work was Alf's only financial contribution to the household. He was very clever in his way, but not persistent. He also drank and betted a lot, though not a smoker. Tom by contrast was honest, truthful, earnest, virtuous. Always. His daughter Pasqueline found this very reliability, Tom's, I mean, tiresome. 'So Pree Dictable! Tee Dee Yus!' she'd say; at that time of life she had a habit of drawing words out syllable by syllable like that. And of course she would instantly fire up into bad temper if anyone else criticised him, or if teased about her physical clumsiness then, which was why she was, (and was, and was.) Dave loved Sharth. She detested it, while aware of its status. She was picked on a great deal; her being 'founder's kin' and her ancestors since at least 1800 being known did not help, but mainly it was because of something unidentifiable in herself that she drew forth a sneering nastiness from other pupils who in other circumstances were, one can almost be sure, pleasant enough, they gave her Hell. 'Christ, I'm the bloody jakes all the shit in the school runs down!' she said once. And she was a beautiful girl too, Dave thought, gorgeous hair, elegantly slender, and the clumsiness was passing. Did Dave ever say that to her? Guess! Dave and Tom get on well. They share a love of privacy and a quiet stubbornness. They often meet, because Dave and Pask have grown to be friends. Not boyfriend and girlfriend, however; they allege that this would be a misinterpretation. Well! The moment came when Dave's unnecessary revision was interrupted by Lize coming to say that Gran 'couldn't hold out much longer' and wanted to see him. So he marked his place in his book and stood up to act his role, composing his features appropriately. He was curious about an experience he'd never had before, hearing someone's Last Words. And too he wanted it to be noticed, by his mother, and also by himself, that he was behaving well and appropriately. His mother led him up the steep and lifetime-familiar stairs as officiously as one has sometimes seen a wand-carrying verger lead today's preacher up to the high pulpit in Sharth Cathedral, easily visible though it is. Lize stood aside with a very quiet movement to let him go into the bedroom before her, then closed the thin door silently behind him. Warm, stuffy, lavender soap-smelling, both lights on though it was afternoon, the curtains closed. Gran staring hard at him. David bent over her and kissed her forehead. For a queer instant he thought he saw himself as if from outside as he did it, but of course that is impossible. He straightened up, and sat heavily down on the hard cushion of a wickerwork chair painted green with gold bits that was next to the bed, a commode probably. It went crea-eak then squeak as if significantly, as if to say, You'll remember my creak and my squeak now for the rest of your days, mate, so there! (He did.) And he looked at Gran as hard as she was looking at him. Just her head above the bedclothes -- hair iron-grey and brittle, still with a little natural wave in it, face wrinkle-free though dry and soft like a plum which has been off the tree too long. /She made a movement which he failed to interpret correctly as her wanting to take his hand, so he waited. And waited. He wanted her to say Something Important. So did she of course, she had her own relish of the drama of the situation too. But she'd never said anything of that kind down all those years and it was too late to begin now. 'Dave, Dave!' 'Yes, Gran.' Pause./'Dave?' This time she spoke doubtfully, as if his name were the answer to a question she was not sure about. Another pause. A minute or even two, it felt as heavy as twenty. Thick too as black treacle left years deep. Buzz buzz went an insect trapped between curtain and glass. 'Be a good boy, Dave, be a good boy,' was all she found to say. In his heart he promised her that he would be. But he ought to have spoken aloud. Another silence. /

Lize came in. Bessie appeared to be asleep. 'Not long now,' she said, the words themselves would have served for waiting for a bus, and yet her voice was full of unusual resonances like an old-fashioned contralto's. 'Will, will, will!' Gran suddenly said, and began to toss about as if she suddenly had energy. She thrust herself up and exclaimed again, 'Will!' gazing hard at the badly fitting door of the airing cupboard. 'Will!' She then fell back so heavily that it was as well she had several pillows. They assumed of course that she had died. She hadn't. In fact she lived another five or six days, never speaking, eyes open sometimes and mouth working a little. The family agreed among themselves that she was wrong to be so concerned, she had scarcely anything to leave and the tenancy of the house would come to Lize automatically. And Dave of course ('naturally', I almost wrote) put his very best into the exams, though when they were over unlike most others he didn't feel much like celebrating. That next morning Lize woke them all up early, even Alf. Ma had 'passed on', she said. /She and Blowsy that morning had a priestess-like silence and dignity. They glided, they moved as if on castors from one room to another, doing smoothly all that had to be done. Dave, seeing their manner, was amazed. Everything in the house had turned to an odd shininess. He couldn't explain why. Even the air would flick bright now and then. Dustmotes in the sunlight, he assumed. None of them were churchgoers, and yet there was a clergyman, Benedick, whom Lize regarded in the light of a friend, and she wanted him to be the one to bury Gran. There were various difficulties because they weren't in his parish, but she overbore them serenely, making call after call on the telephone which they'd only just had put in. /About midday Alf took Dave up to the 'Blackman' at the other end of the village. They had a plain meal, chips and something, and Alf bought Dave a pint of beer. Even less was said between them than usually. Dave was feeling that this was a decent kindness in this near-stranger. And Dads for all I know was wishing that his offspring belonged by temperament or choice in his own world where it would be an ordinary thing to take a son who was just not old enough up to the 'local' or 'hostelry' and introduce him to whatever pleasures are to be found there. /They came back to a tableau. Three men were in the little hall, their doctor, this vicar and the undertaker. The undertaker who was in the middle was tall and exceptionally thin, Ostlethwaite and Benedick were both short and quite heavily built, so -- with the strain of the day so far -- the contrast was really quite funny, but of course Dave couldn't laugh. /The undertaker's men put the body -- 'yer gran', Belinda called it -- in a long black leather thing with brass handles remarkably like an oversize Gladstone bag (and that was funny too, or at least very queer and unexpected, but of course he couldn't laugh at that either.) They manouevred it downstairs, and put it in an ordinary enough kind of tradesman's van, but black, and that was very shiny too, and took it to do whatever it was that they were going to do, but no-one liked to ask what. /Dave's ma made a strong black pot of what she called for some reason 'chapel bunfight tea'. Belinda thought aloud, Gran had always called her husband 'my Bellows' but surely his given name was 'Will'. Did she see him, in her last conscious moment? 'They do say,' Lize said with the enormous weight of unquestioned authority, 'that they always send someone you love to fetch you.' And, after a bit, in much more her normal manner, 'But that we're not to know, of course.' It was a very long evening. They didn't feel it was right to have the television on, and even Dave couldn't bring himself to read or study anything so soon after the exams. Yes, it was a very long evening. /*

Although this was the dying that affected Dave most, it seemed around that time to be open season on his older relatives. Alf's parents too both died. He wasn't emotionally close to them. Physically, he was; they lived in the next street. Even though he was outstanding both at lessons and games, he was not made Head Boy, solely because of his accent, his fellow-sixthformers deduced (though they differed among themselves as to whether that was a good reason or not.) /He was still a virgin. The other males at Sharth said they were not or that virginity was a burden they were working really hard to get rid of; he did not fully believe either party, or care. He now was devoting all his energies to Cambridge entrance, yet tended already towards despising many others' style of knowledge; they recited what they'd been told to much as parrots could, they had no intellectual passion, no desire to find things out. Truth in other words./That was what he thought, immodestly.

Pask's attitude to her school work, so different from his, irritated him. She was neutral or contemptuous in regard of a great deal which happened at Sharth, and of course she had no family tradition of hypocrisy, could not even imagine pretending to interest in what did not interest her.

'Lat! In!' she'd say. No more, but her tone 'spoke volumes'.

Of course his being irritated with her in this regard irritated her too.

They did kiss at the end of their visits, briefly, almost chastely. It didn't seem important to him, he did not want to prolong it.

She was his only friend, if you mean by that someone you like well enough to invite home. Generally speaking, she understood his boundaries, what he did not want spoken of; she had her own secret thoughts too.

She and Dave first spoke because he tried to help her when she was, as so often then, unhappy, and, as so often then, unsure of its cause. He'd seen her before that occasionally then in Belker Tap, the village where they'd both grown up, not often because she was at Ladywell and he was at the infants-and-juniors. Each, curiously enough, had heard a great deal about the other all their lives, through Bessie, I mean, yet without connecting names and faces.

Which was odd, even extraordinary. There are less than fifteen hundred people in their village, after all ('Tap' the locals call it, 'Belker Tap' on the map.) Everyone talks -- far too much in Dave's unhumble opinion, it's worse than hearing about their dreams -- about remarkable coincidences; this was a remarkable whatever-you-call-it that is the opposite of a coincidence.

He did not reflect much about the the size of their homes; when he did the intimacy of his compared with the huge empty corridors of hers was all in 27's favour. Or the differences in family origins or circumstances; he thought that dwelling upon such things was mad. When he met her, only once, he did not like her aunt Vee-Vee, a highly intelligent, witty and amusing woman, whose humour concerns itself almost entirely with mocking those who are not, as she is, well-bred.

Even before her mother (Em, she called her) upped and decamped, Pask's life at Gritnell's was odd; as if there was something rootedly wrong. Tom 'took to' David. Fortunately - he was there a lot. In his company Tom came as near as he did ever to relaxing. Relaxing was not one of his talents, he was devoured by Duty and Example. He had, you see, firmly and sincerely believed notions about how a gentleman should live and behave, all shot through and underpinned and overarched by how a Christian ditto ditto. He must have strapped them on like armour every morning when he got up ~ that is, if you can believe he'd ever taken them off even in bed! Tom was much respected locally for his high character and high principles, though not entirely liked; you don't want to feel that you're being put up against someone else's virtues as to a yardstick to see how you fail to measure up!

But I must not be too severe. These rigid ideas he had weren't entirely unattractive ones, their subject was how to behave well.

And yet -- well, what was wrong? The house's isolation, for one thing, a quarter of a mile at least from any other building, and its emptiness now; it had been built or adapted for a large family and their servants, but now there were only these two. Pask felt the oddity of her circumstances; she was headstrong and proud in her oddity, yes (why does one to have to be like others, especially when these others are unpleasant?) but not happy in it either.

Dave both as an adolescent and as adult got on well enough with other people in a surly-seeming fashion; if they'd leave him alone he'd them. But Pask hadn't had her corners knocked off (which for some reason is thought infinitely desirable, though it sounds torture.) She spent much of her school time hurting, and yet - how awful! - in some occult fashion encouraging, even needing, even, dare one say, in some fashion wanting their frequent and as-it-were dutiful and mechanical unkindnesses.

If Tom had married another woman, if Em had married another man, they'd have been happier, Pask had thought sometimes, then I ------ but of course it was impossible to complete that sentence! As for Lize and Alf, though they live in a terrace their relationship is semi-detached; Alf goes out most evenings by himself, he drinks with friends Lize scarcely knows, he spends family holidays at home while the others are by the seaside, in eighteen years Dave has never overheard his parents speaking together except about whether it's likely to rain tomorrow and other matters only of that order of importance.

Was Alf ever romantic, sexy, inspiring, why did Lize (taller than he and much more intelligent) choose him rather than another? As a young woman she was pretty too, though she refused point-blank to have her sister as bridesmaid, because Belinda is beautiful (or was then) and that caused offence which has not yet fully passed. Well, Lize and Alf somehow or other must have felt strong attraction to each other to commit themselves for life, and Tom and Em too, though explain it I cannot. Those two couples -- surely it was more than the convention, just then starting to pass, that an adult must be married/remain married, but what, what?

Maybe Dave even as a teenager was undersexed, maybe he was not attracted to Pask's slimness, and wanted, though he did not realise it, someone more fleshy. Whichever it was, he had been part-amused, part-affronted by Elaine's automatic assumption that his intentions towards her daughter -- that phrase was still used then -- were dishonourable ones. He thought that Pask's mother was not particularly clever (he thought that of a lot of people) and found her talent for putting on accents amusing enough though trivial. He was somehow offended by her not dressing better and not attending more to hair and make-up. Before she went he had sometimes eaten meals which Em had cooked -- politely rather than with enjoyment.

And no-one really knew Em. She did not really know herself. And then the unhappiness and misunderstanding and being misunderstood burst like a boil and she disappeared.

Where to, and how she travelled, that wasn't clear. When she went is known within a few hours. It is extremely likely that she financed her going out of her inheritance from her self-made grandfather (which Tom was too scrupulous or too sexist to have touched, took care not even to know how much it was.) It was not even fully clear at this time that she was living still.

She wasn't with her father's people, that much was clear. Tom had 'phoned them from his office, causing wonder and amusement equally to his colleagues who overheard his speaking a foreign language fluently, he has a modern languages degree, after all. Elaine too speaks German more or less fluently, and with an excellent accent, of course, though not because she grew up speaking it with her father, rather because Tom when he had to go away on business for all of ten weeks early in their marriage sent her to stay again with her father's kin and made them promise beforehand not to speak any English to her. 'I thought it was risible that she couldn't speak it, I sent her away to them without giving her much choice, disguising it as an expensive present I was giving her. Foolish! Wrong too maybe! Almost the only thing life teaches you as you get into middle age is not to interfere,' Tom said once to David in a fed-up kind of mood.

Pask's German-born grandfather is a famous -- no, let's say, well-known -- artist, as I've already said. His own wife Elvira had died some years back.

Which brings us back, though not very neatly, to Bessie's 'passing' and what came after. They'd laid her out in a funeral chapel in Bishoprick, the undertakers, that is, and Dave was expected -- no, virtually compelled -- to go and look; not in words, that is not our English way. He jibbed at having to say farewell to this it, this thing, this cold object nine stone or so of meat and bone propelled these sixty-plus years by Bessie's spirit; it meant nothing, it was useless. (He thought, rationally enough; maybe he also felt it was frightening.)

WHY?

He asked then, with no hope of a sensible answer. What possible end would such a visit serve? Gran had gone, obviously, and what was left behind looked approximately like what the body did when alive, but wasn't it. I'm sure, I stress, that when I say that he thought that 'Gran' or 'her spirit' had gone he did not mean that he thought it had gone anywhere, only that the individuality that had been she had ceased utterly, this was his opinion. Ended. Memories only would remain; he thought that these, a kind of Gran-in-me, would continue, yes, but fade, fade, fade....

Lize and Blowsy just weren't having that. They appeared to him to know, not by experience or opinion or personal conviction, but rather in the unshakeably certain way that we all know that ice freezes and fire burns, that Bessie, kind of twice as big all round, went on and would interminably go on going on in some fashion of heavenly city or happy hunting ground that is all around us and within us and exists without being visible or contactable...yet Dave kept such insensitive sneering to himself (mostly); even a consciously clever adolescent sees that there are moments when you need to show diplomacy and not say what you're really thinking, if it keeps them happy (though it didn't.)

They believed all that although they'd never gone to church or even known anybody well who did.

After a while, he faced his own distaste. He had never seen a corpse, and if he was going to form the habit of seeing them he'd rather not start with one who when living he had loved. But the pressure on him was very hard; it was almost as if Lize and Belinda were sure that a curse would fall upon them all at 27 if he did not do this. Alf did not have to (not that he's ever done anything he didn't want to do); he was not, as Dave is, 'her flesh and blood'.

We all ask for advice when we really want confirmation of what is in our minds, so he asked Pask what she thought of this.

'Are you trying to worm out, you wriggler?' she answered in that cut-glass voice of hers; somehow he had the conviction that women who speak like this, while they may be dim, stupid or sneering, as many of them are, have never in their lives been afraid of anyone or anything, not Death, not God even, and it challenged him. Was he being a coward? 'I just don't like the idea, that's all,' he said weakly.

'Christ! You weren't afraid of her while she was living, were you, nice, silly old duck?'

'No, course not.'

'Why are you trying to refuse to go, then?'

'It just doesn't seem right,' he answered, aware here too of the ineloquence he was revealing trying to put his case.

'Bloody Hell, you're the one who's always rabbiting about clear thinking and logical reasoning and not letting emotions crowd over your intellect!'

'"Cloud over" is what I actually say,' Dave tried to put in, but she would not listen to him, she was on her high horse, and all he'd done was provoke her obedience to Rule 1 of the Female Trade Union, which is that A Sister must always uphold the will of another Sister, that is, any other woman whatever, over against the desires of any man whatever; so he thought.

She gave him next half a dozen or so reasons, I forget them now, why he should do this, against his will as it was, yet proposed, partly out of curiosity, to come with him and 'support'.

They went together on the bus up to Bishoprick. Dave wore collar-and-tie, it seemed best somehow. The chapel proved to be a biggish, coolish place with pointy windows and squares of leaded glass, half blue, half of them yellow. There was tape-recorded 'classical' music playing soft. One end of the place had a big table with a pastel-coloured sheet on it. There was no cross or crucifix, only a bunch of flowers on it. So they gathered that the undertaker's 'hall of rest' had been set up to be vaguely holy, in an ecumenical, interdenominational sort of way, in fact it wasn't even any particular religion, oozing a sort of piety which -- supposing any sort is genuine, a supposition Dave was determined not to make -- was false, fake, queer, counterfeit, utterly valueless.

I'm imagining now that he and Pask then were holding hands, like the babes in the wood, though I may be remembering that detail wrongly. Nothing could quite disguise, mind, that Gran's 'casket; was one of six or eight there, so the effect was rather like an assembly line stopped. They had prepared for the visit by opening just this one.

There was a functionary there in a tight, shiny black suit, low-foreheaded. He talked in an 'inner-city' Bishoprick accent and called Dave 'sirr-err' very soft and drawling, and Pask 'young lady' in a loathsome, leery, liltingly oily way, almost lustful. His sorrowful manner was only too evidently put on with his clothes, though why, after all, should he be sorry? It wasn't his grandmother.

It wasn't his own, quite, Dave was thinking. She'd been a pretty enough little woman when she was alive and young, she'd retained the shadow of that even into her sixties. She'd never worn cosmetics, but now she'd taken to maquillage with great enthusiasm and even professional skill; she was lipsticked and face-powdered and eye-lined and mascara'd as if it was still 195o and she had won the beauty contest at the end of the pier. And her clothes, even her best ones, had ever had a functional air, she'd never until now worn a white smock like a choirboy's (a hassock, David thought it was called) or a paper ruff around her chin. They'd got her hair much as it was in life, it's true, and remarkably smooth and tidy, she hadn't moved since the perm. O, and she'd never worn scent either, and might not have chosen lilies-of-the-valley if she had.

And what -- what the devil -- do you say?

It's hard enough talking to the living sometimes, Dave was thinking, they often don't listen, and precious little sense there is in talking to someone you're sure can't hear you or answer you, whose eyes of course are closed.

What you need is not merely the right words for now, this particular moment, but they need to be sapped up from right down in a whole tradition of rhetoric particular to these occasions, and we don't have that any more; or, certainly, he didn't.

Anyway, he muttered, 'Goodbye, Gran' in an embarrassed fashion. Pask did comparatively well, at least less badly. 'Have a good journey, Bessie, ' she offered. Not that she thought Bessie was going anywhere either.

He had been right not to want to come. He certainly hadn't been frightened, or even made unhappy (he'd known she was dead before), but he felt again all his distaste -- which the girl did not share -- for the whole 'caboodle', the parapharnalia of mourning. And the costume was dreadful! If I ever make a will, he resolves, I'll put in it that they must put my corpse in my coffin in my best suit.

About a week later there was Bessy's 'fruneral', as Alf called it. Dave was not 'taken' with Benedick, 1. on principle, and 2. because he insisted that he was the most appropriate person to say 'a few words'. He didn't want to, yet he thought so too. At that stage of her life Lize would have been embarrassed to speak in front of an audience, even of friends and family, Blowsy too, oddly enough.

Tom was not able to come because of a long-standing business commitment. He sent Pask to represent him, though, as she said, she would have come anyway as herself. Dave was not sure whether he was pleased or irritated, a bit of both, I daresay, that she seemed to regard herself as family, as if, because he had no sister, she had applied for the post and been appointed. At the after-service 'do' of tea and sandwiches crowding out their house, some of the wider relatives, especially the older ones (Dave noticed, and it offended him) as soon as they had heard Pask speak, became extremely formal, very stiff-shouldered, give-nothing-away, and the effect of this particular fashion of politeness was rudeness.

Now that she had been lowered down on top of 'my Bellows' forty years after his going, that was the end of Gran, he assumed. She'd live on, he thought, only as once strong but ever less visited memories, kind of 'Gran in me' and they'd all with conscious briskness go about reorganising their own lives without her, which would probably be easier; Lize said that she and Alf would move into the master bedroom soon, well, fairly soon, somehow to do it immediately 'wouldn't be feeling' and they didn't, but afterwards Blowse could have theirs if she wanted, and Dave could stop sleeping in the caravan in the back garden. (I don't know if Pask ever knew he did this.)

But Gran didn't cease, quite. It was as if she hadn't really gone away. A seeming stronger personality might have been missed less, she was always there like a faint scent. You'd be expecting, unconsciously, to see her or hear her as always, and the sudden remembrance that you wouldn't was a mild shock, as if some grit had got into the normally smoothly running mechanism of the universe. Queer.

Have I said that unlike Dave Pask detested 'gym' and 'games'? Probably! She said it a lot herself -- if such people are a minority, they're certainly not a silent minority. But she enjoyed walking, even quite long distances.

Look at the map (after I get round to drawing it, I mean) and it'll make the next sentences clearer. If Dave goes up to see her, he goes down St. Osgyth's pronounced Ossyth's where they live, then left along Allhallows to the Cross, then up the main road which goes over the River Shour at Eastbridge, through the village, past the viaduct at Kinghouse, then left at the top just after Northbridge (also over the twisting river) and along Gritnell's Lane. Pask coming in the other direction can either reverse this route, alternately at Northbridge a bit south of her house she can get on the path beside the river, coming back up at Eastbridge; she can walk the river path, he'll be cycling along the road. That was what happened one evening, he went up to see her by road, she came down to see him walking mostly beside the river, so they missed each other.

So, when he got there, no Pask. Tom, dressed casually for once, invited him in anyway. Always courteous, he was perhaps also lonely, totally by himself in the biggest, the darkest, and the draughtiest house in all the parish. (Dave quite liked the idea of spending time with Pask's father; she was often visiting his mother.)

Dave suspected that Tom, by no means drunk, wasn't entirely sober either. Some of his family are brewers, he said (which Dave already knew) and a cousin had sent over a firkin of ale. A firkin, as Tom escorted Dave into the bright kitchen, proved to be a small barrel on its side on special rests. There was already a wooden tap in one end, and Tom got out a mallet and a special plug, which he knocked into the top very neatly and efficiently, most differently from how Pask would have done it; this plug let air in as one drew beer out, he said.

Now Dave was no drinker; why befuddle a first-class intellect? However, politeness obliged him to drink, and it was partly unlike the beer he'd had at the 'Blackman' with Dads. More resonance, more 'deep', he tried to explain it to himself without quite having the right words (though does anybody?) More interesting, skilfully blended variety of tastes, evidently superior quality, he thought, though without liking it any better.

That was the evening Tom told Dave about sending 'Em' over to learn German, and that now he wished he hadn't. He hinted too that he thought they were both wrong to have opened the presents before Christmas, by which he seemed to mean that they had made love before the ceremony, which almost no-one worries about nowadays. David misunderstood him to mean that the marriage had been hurried on because Pasqueline was already expected; this misunderstanding, later, had no consequences whatever.

Tom poured Dave another glassful unasked, and himself too, drinking hastily, and fell silent. 'Yes,' he said after a while, 'I do try to do things AMDG. Try!'

David understood, and didn't. He'd got an A in O-level Latin, he knew it meant 'to the greater glory of God' but as for God he didn't so much disbelieve in Him (or Her) as have no conception even clear enough to reject. Tom was obviously in a sad mood, and David was truly interested and willing to be helpful, curious as well, and inclined to congratulate himself for being interested and helpful. In one way he was ill-qualified for sympathy; he had never so far failed to do what he wanted to do.

'Blind!' Tom said after a few minutes' silence. 'Complacent too. Why would a man's wife, a mother too, desert?'

David made no answer, he couldn't think of anything to say which would be helpful, and then was praised for it, which he didn't really deserve. 'You're tactful. But it's obvious why. She must have been very, very unhappy, and we failed to notice. It was in front of our eyes! Well, no use blaming Pask, she could be very inconsiderate and demanding earlier on when she was a child, it's me, me that's too blame! I don't look like a wife-beater, do I?'

No, David thought. He's strong for his slightish frame, more athletic than muscular, but his general expression is mild, friendly...and yet he knows from 'Readers' Digest' that it's not only on 'sink estates' that such things happen, and that wives can be violent too....

'I don't look like one. Simple reason, I'm not one. But there are cruelties that are not physical cruelties and maybe all along the years I've been practising them and not fully realising it......You're bicycling, I presume?' he said, filling a third glass not so neatly, catching up some of the 'head' that spilled with a finger and sucking it. 'Better not have any more after this....good strong ale, 'Ferrace's First', we call it.

'Pask was teased very badly at Ladywell. Teachers meant well, no real use. Even a child could see that to take her away would have been acknowledging defeat......o, I must have neglected Elaine, taken her for granted, but worse? It's not what I did, surely, but what I did not do, habit is very strong, even living in this house is a habit, I've been doing it, so to speak, for hundreds of years, all those ancestors. Always here. Modernised the last time in 1780, apart from having electricity put in only about twenty years ago...'

He disgressed into a favourite subject, the history of the house and its site (though in fact not a great deal is known.) 'Parts of the place are four or five hundred years old at least, and there are vague tales...' He appeared to like this phrase so he repeated it. 'Vague tales! of something really old, odd, I mean, happening here, o, o, o, centuries ago, before King Ethrwulf even. Old Caleb renamed it, the lane, you know, before then it was called Pagans' Hill, it's hard to see why, the land's nearly flat nowadays, but Druids or something worse or elves or witches of course as a Christian I don't believe such things have power to harm. Not if you trust in Jesus. Enough.'

David was stung into intellectual dissent. 'But you don't believe in elves or witches, surely?'

Tomas stared at him, quizzical, perhaps amused, possibly even hostile. 'You're not a countryman, are you?'

'Course I am! I've lived here all my life!' (David almost added, for emphasis, that he'd only once ever been to London, but left this out; he didn't want to seem that much of a yokel.)

'Not by temperament, I mean, or experience' Tom said, and grew uncharacteristically lyrical. 'Have you ever been out -- alone; at night -- when there's no moonlight, and the trees, the bushes are rattling and whispering about unknown things, probably just little animals and such going about their little-animally business, but you don't know, you have no means of knowing, you have no torch, and indeed, if you had one, what indeed would it show? The whatever-it-isses would hide from the light.

'Have you ever been out alone, not near to any shelter, and it rains, it rains suddenly and harshly and violently, and you dash for the nearest overhanging rock or tree which isn't anyway very near, and when you get there, perhaps having fallen on the way and with a hand all bloody, the rain just as suddenly stops, leaving you with wet, cold shoulders and hands and kidneys, and then....then there is a Presence, nothing to see of course, something weird and not human, which is willing to bless you if you laugh and take this misadventure as blessing, or laugh at you, long and cruelly, if you do not? Have you ever mucked out? Or held the light when a calf is being born?'

No, he hadn't.

'Do you even know, have you ever been far enough from streetlamps to find out, that this Moon at its full, or around it, casts shadows how deep, how rich, how satiny-black? Have you ever fed yourself blackerries straight from the bramble?'

Well, he had done that, at least he had before they learned about germs and such at the junior school. 'Lillian used to say,' Tom went on, '(she was the woman who helped bring me up, a kind of nanny) that you must never pick the last ripe berry on a sprig, spig she called it,' and, quoting her he burst out suddenly and forcefully in our local tones, '"You gottoo leave the lass' one alone, szee, Tommy boy, for the fay-ries, szee?"'

Tom had never talked to Dave so much. 'Annegrandmother's the same...my own mother, Pask who's the eldest started calling her that and all the others, her cousins, have followed on...she lives in the countryside, she has no feeling for it. She only learned to ride after she was married!'

(David indeed privately regarded riding horses in the same bracket as elocution lessons or getting confirmed in a white frilly veil, the kind of thing only the 'soppy' kind of girl did.)

'Gave it up like a shot when Dad died. Rode badly, when she did. No "music". You know how my father died, I suppose?'

Dave nodded. The whole county knew it. Farms are dangerous places. James Ferrace had fallen from a breaking plank into his own grain silo, for a brief while he'd flailed around as if swimming then his weight drew him under and he'd been choked, as it were drowned, in his own corn.

'I'm talking too much, ' Tom said, and went on doing so. 'Elaine -- my wife, Pask's mother' he added unnecessarily, 'Gone! Why? How very unhappy she must have been!'

'Not entirely your fault, Tom -- surely there was something in her...'

'No. Yes. Well, maybe. A fault, yes, I don't mean in a moral sense, but in a geological sense, a stressline that's going to break eventually...'

Now it crossed Dave's mind here, having had some contact through Alf with men who thought drunkenness the best cure for all kinds of real and imaginary ills, that it was possibly his duty to stay with Tom, even getting less sober himself, and sleep here overnight, a place this size must have spare bedrooms, and Lize could nowadays be telephoned to say where he was. However, the Gritnall's telephone now rang, Tom asked him to answer it by a look, and he went out into the hall, switching lights on as he went.

'Gritnall's, the Ferrace residence,' he said, to a shriek of laughter from Pask at the other end. 'Christ! You sound like the butler in a play!'

This annoyed him slightly, he thought he'd done it well. 'You're at our house, I suppose?' he said without warmth, 'and I'm at yours,' which was really obvious. 'You ought to have phoned first to say you were coming.'

'So ought you,' she said. Both of them, no doubt, were right, and one at least had the sense to see that this could be the foundation of a quarrel and real bitterness, I mean, if he insisted upon his rightness and she on hers. So -- unlike many ten-years-married couples one has known! -- both had sense to desist. 'What are you doing there?' Dave said, trying to put tenderness into his voice (and failing; well, he'd not had much practice.) 'watching the goggle box with your mama,' she said. 'It's not very exciting.' But there's little purpose in recalling every word ~ they arranged to meet in the lounge bar of the 'Blackman' three-quarters of an hour later, but there's not much to tell about that either. I mean, it was sort of half-way, but with Dave not being much of a drinker and having had three half-pints already and Pask actually being a teetotler, it was a stilted half-hour. The pub by the way is in the north of our village, most of the 'facilities' are.

Dave of course told Tom about the planned meeting, though it crossed his mind as to whether it would be unkindness to leave him in his present odd mood. Tom had been altering recently, perhaps not for the better, Dave reflected; in the past, up to only a few months back, he'd done a lot of helping charities, mostly behind the scenes, though he'd sometimes left and collected their pesky little envelopes too, a task which goes oddly with having ancestors. He seemed to have left that kind of thing slide.

'You know why the inn's called that?' Tom said. Well, Dave did, of course, the Negro in the white loincloth was part of the Gritnall coat-of-arms he'd seen every day at school for years. 'It's tidied up,' Tom went on, 'he's bollock-naked in the original. The whole thing's a bad business, a very bad business, a crime.'

Now Dave knew that people who are wearing no clothes, whatever their colour of skin, are sure to be nude, and, in the teeth of the passionately held convictions of his own kind of family, did his best to regard this fact as neither horrible nor remarkable, and thought Tom was being remarkably prudish. 'We're all guilty,' Tom said (by now Dave had lost him completely.) 'One hears that phrase made fun of, but it's true. It's true!'

He seemed to have changed the subject. 'For every sin you see labelled in capital letters 'I'M WRONG. DO ME!' there are others, dozens, hundreds even, which are not labelled.' He was thinking again of Elaine, Dave assumed.

Pask's work at Sharth, never brilliant, had fallen off because of the worry of her mother's absence. (I put 'worth' by mistake there, and am not sure that I was right to correct it.) School tasks were always, mind, things she did unwillingly; if 'They' wanted her to learn something, that in itself was a good reason for not learning it, that was her attitude. She was a natural rebel -- no, not 'rebel'; she made no fuss, she didn't want others to join her, she just resisted. Dave of course was entirely different; for instance, he'd had no interest in Latin whatever, but had worked hard at it and done well because he'd been told to.

She was smoking as they sat in the pub, part of her general dissent. Dave told her, completely truly and completely unoriginally, that it was harmful. 'Don't be a fucking bore!' she said. He - unwisely - pressed the matter. 'Christ! Shut up! You can be a pain sometimes!' she said. He felt a little hurt, and I don't blame him.

Dave understood others just well enough to know that he didn't, much. He knew clearly what he wanted out of life, and how to get it. He thought she was likely to have to want what she got.

Yet some others have done well enough out of inclarity, 'going with the flow', e.g. his 'auntie' (not that he ever called her that) Belinda or Blowsy or Blowse or Baby, who loves luxury and manages even to have more names than most people. He remembers vividly, when he was quite small, only just enough old to do this for himself, going down late one night or early the next morning to get himself a drink - and looking through the half-open door of the front room, seeing by chance Blowsy, to whom someone had given a large bouquet, exclaiming 'pretty flow-ers! pretty flow-ers' half-aloud like a sob, and rubbing them -- she always favoured low-fronted nightwear - over and over across her nearly naked breasts; it was obviously not meant to be witnessed, private because intense, and the other way round too.

He knew better even then to say that he had seen. He was known as 'deep' or 'sharp'; many of his father's family said, with only a little distaste (after all, it wasn't the unlucky child's own fault, or not exactly) that he 'had brains', as if brains were psoriasis. Or eczema; he didn't even then really get on with them.

Belinda was and is different. It's always really surprised him how much he likes her underneath, and that he is pleased to think she likes him too; underneath. She's always teasing, and never is there malice in it. 'Laddy,' she calls him quite often. 'You've always got your nose in a book, laddy, but there's things to be learned you can't learn from a book, ' she says often, and once added, more-or-less to herself, 'and if you weren't kin I'd teach them to you too.' He blushed. Later, thinking about it in bed, he may have wanked; but I don't say he did, even characters in a book need privacy sometimes.

Anyway, (as I'm going to tell told in the third of these three stories, the one I haven't got round to transscribing to my blog yet) there had been this mysterious picture postcard. To Bessie from Prague. Not to Tom or Pask, see, that in itself was odd. It wasn't Elaine's writing, all spiky and foreign-looking, and there was nothing on it except the address, but (knowing no-one in that city, barely more of it than the name) they'd all decided it must be Elaine's way, getting someone else to address it -- there was no message -- of letting them all in Tap know that she was still alive.

Pask had immediately started the hare that Tom should borrow a caravan, hook it up behind his Land Rover, and that they two, and perhaps David too, perhaps even Lize as well, should go to Prague and look for her. But David ever-sensible had said that this ppc was a poor argument that Elaine was there, and no argument at all that she would remain there, and in any case it was the capital, there must be hundreds of thousands or even millions of people there, and where once there could they start looking for her. And what about language problems too?

He put over these points very argumentatively, and so appeared to Pasqueline to have even less empathy than he did. He missed Gran, but not being there was what dead people did so you couldn't blame them, but for Pask, knowing or certainly hoping, that her mother was alive and presumably was choosing to go on being away, that was worse than a bereavement.

One evening Pask is at home doing her prep on an ornate table in the drawing room, ormulu insets. Anglepoise lamp, then twenty or more feet of semi-darkness to where Tom is sitting in by a standard lamp in front of their little television, looking at without much attention a 'Guardian' article. Sitting in an armchair of good quality, very good workmanship, very comfortable, not a bit fashionable, and rather old; in other words like much of the rest of their furniture.

The 'phone rings. Each wills the other to answer it; all at once Pask seems to think her homework is very important. Tom reluctantly puts his newspaper down and goes out into the cold hall...

She stops her writing and half-listens. He usually gives the number when he picks up the telephone, but this particular time he says 'Hel--!' and cuts himself short. There's a moment's space, then he says, 'My dear! Why, why?' his voice rising to be passionate. And next, almost shouting, 'Where for God's sake are you?'

By then Pask has stood as if she's been yanked up with a wire. She doesn't move yet. Next she hears him say, 'Hello, hello! Anyone there?' kind of thing several times, increasingly disappointed tones.

She comes out to him there. He appears delighted and horror-struck both at once. 'Was it Em?' she says in a whisper, and almost chokes. 'Just the five words,' he says, '"We're not coming back yet" and she rang off. Or was cut off, I don't know.' And he puts his arms around Pask and hugs her just like he's not done since she was about eight, for even an Englishman of his type isn't quite so stuffed-shirt as he would have been a generation ago.

All this that's just happened is immediately set hard in Tom's mind as if it's bosticked. He runs it through again and again: his reading the newspaper article about China half-aware, his going to the 'phone mildly curious and very mildly irritated, then her voice unheard for so long, how his heart beat fiercely 'like a young man's in love', he will say later; whether there was hiss behind her voice or it was perfectly clear he can't in fact remember, but he does not doubt who it was --

--and he's still holding Pask when it rings again and both leap to answer it, he gets there first, but it's just an ordinary call on an ordinary matter, in fact it's Dave wanting to speak to Pask; they tell him about Em's call excitedly.

He wasn't of course to have known. What a pity that he had 'phoned when he did, he was to say later; if he had not it might just have been possible to trace Em's call back along those perhaps thousands of miles of wire, probably not, however, because....and he went on to give a technical explanation which neither of them understood.

All three were assuming the call had been coming from abroad, though the evidence for this, or against either, was non-existing.

Now at that time Tom had been working for the same insurance company for nearly twenty years, and had had only three days off with illness in all that time, until Elaine's going. Even immediately after that he didn't miss a day's work, though that was partly because her absence was discovered late that Friday. But the morning following this call, a Wednesday, because he'd scarcely slept, and had turned and turned and turned for so much of the night in that mahogany-headed double bed now far too big for one, he had actually 'phoned in sick. Later on that day, both a little bored and with his ever-vigilant conscience niggling, he wished he hadn't, and got Alyss his assistant (a stunner, I'm told) to bring him some work to catch up with

that evening 'if she happened to be passing.'

Which of course she did. She had to pass the end of the Lane to get home, also she greatly admires him. He was dressed then as he had been since the morning, formal-casual, tweed suit, check shirt and that funny style of tie that goes inside the collar. After a cup of tea with Alyss (who can't stand coffee at any time of day) he enthusuastically began the paperwork. He was eager to have something to fill his mind. Other than fretting, that is; it was all like a half-healed deep wound cut suddenly open.

Pask came to Sharth as normally during this time, and went through the next day, after the unexplained call, in a bored daze which occasionally, when as often she was provoked, flared into a useless because powerless anger. There was no Geneva Convention weakness to stop her 'brothers and sisters' mocking her because of her aching guilt and love re her mother -- well, obviously, it was their duty!

Pask and Dave never seek each other out there. Even if they pass in the corridors they do not smile or nod. Yet of course everybody knows and gloats over their friendship, it's not called a 'public' school for nothing.

He wished afterwards -- long afterwards -- that he'd been better at listening to and comforting her at that time, 'but if I had been, I would not have been me, would I? Interesting question!'

He rather envied the easy relationship she had now with her father. His own with his was limited to comments on the weather, etc; maybe, he reflected later (much later!) Alf was sad about that too. Once their washing machine went wrong. Dave thought it was a slipping fanbelt, he went in a shop and bought a newer therefore tighter one, with his own money too, and Alf and he fitted it together; those five minutes were the nearest they'd approached comradeship for years and years.

His mother Lize's bad eyesight has never prevented her seeing what in her opinion he's doing wrong or (far more likely!) not doing what he ought.

Without realising it, like most teenagers, he still relies on his parents just being there much, much more than he allows himself to think.

Now Lize -- Is this an awkward transition? Well, if it is, it is; just put up with it! -- Lize like practically everyone else in the village has speculated about 'Em''s motives in disappearing, and got nowhere. Rather a good idea, to go off at fortyish (like herself) and enjoy your own company/experiences, Lize was inclined to think. No, at their kind of age, you're not over the hill -- yet! not quite! but, to extend the metaphor, (not that Lize would herself have used such a phrase then) you've reached the top of it and looking down into the deep valley in front where are travelling on the fully middle-aged, the elderly, the ancient, many of them hiding bitter regret that they have not done...something-or-other, whatever it is that they wanted to do or thought they wanted to do when younger; all the same, she had loves and duties...

She said something approximately of that sort to Dave once, who said that we can't ever enter fully into another person's experience, whatever novelists and religious persons say, and he has no brief for either. In fact, we don't even ever fully understand ourselves, Lize reflected, but did not say it aloud in case Dave would disagree.

So -- why did Elaine go? Why hadn't she come back? Or come back yet? She seems to have meant it to be understood now that one day she would.

Dave met Seydell-Mertz, Pask's grandfather, in the street about now, and the old artist held forth to him at some length about this, with Dave politely but not really helpfully going along with what he imagined the old man's notion of how a young man should behave when an elder holds forth, listening seeming-attentively and agreeing; women, the old chap said, seeming to confuse them with other domestic animals, should be treated always very gently and always very firmly, like dogs and horses. How handsome, dreamy and courteous he always is! And so evidently, in manner, dress, attitudes a gentleman, more even than Tom! But I can't record that his own marriage was notably successful.

Was Pask like her mother, D. wondered. She -- Pask -- has a core of integrity (or is it brute stubbornness?) She won't yield. She won't bend. She won't, except literally, play other people's tunes. She'll be awkward and annoying, yes, but dishonest or disloyal towards her own inner self she won't be.

Compare Pask with Bessie. Who is more socially self-possessed? Who presents herself better, in terms of showing others her true nature, or rather what she would like others to think it is? Bessie, of course! What! WHAT? This dim old cleaner who speaks in a fashion so deeply rooted in her locality that outsiders would need subtitles? Compared with this young woman from a prosperous family, even if hers is not the most prosperous branch of it? O yes! Bessie plays her chosen part so wonderfully -- she even takes in herself -- that she deserves an Oscar; the dimness, the strong accent, aren't these just peasant cunning (or self-protection)? But Pask is not so convincing. Mind you, Pask at the time of which I am writing here is only about fifteen.

'People "get on" in the world not because they pretend like hypocrites to conform, but because they lap up what they are given, they really genuinely and sincerely and -- my Christ! -- voluntarily devour whatever shit others put on their plates for them to swallow,' she said once; I'm not sure if that's cynical or not.

Another saying of Pask's is worth recording, this was a little later, when she went through a Socialist phase and wanted or affected to want that Britain should have a revolution like Russia's. 'The capitalist system is big and ugly like an alligator. You can't kill an alligator by pulling out its feathers one by one!'

She did indifferently in GCSEs that year. Dave was upset for her; she wasn't. He'd sailed through his earlier, of course. Pask's indifference annoyed him (and her smoking - yet again - as she told him she was indifferent. ) She didn't on the surface appear to care much for Sharth or what happened there. Linda Forde, the Latin mistress, both fascinated and irritated her; just down from Oxford, she wasn't much older than them. She's lithe and slim (or skinny, according to your tastes.) She has a sharp tongue to lash with any boy -- it was boys, mainly -- who tried to take advantage. How could she embark on forty years 'forty fucking years!' Pask called them, 'of telling people what none of them want to know? Jesus, she'll still be rabbiting on about 'de bello Gallico' when people are living on the Moon!'

(I mention Linda here because it's struck me that her life so far might make another novel.)

Dave, believe it or not, was scrupulous about not kissing Pask except at goodbyes. She almost certainly wanted him to do more and did not know, could not imagine, how to ask.

He's not queer. He has regard for her innocence, and even her own. There may be folk who regard that as very queer indeed.

Pask has usually called Elaine 'Em' (M for Mother) to her face, or did when her face was around to be called. (How well, by the way, she had continued the house's tradition of people living in it in 'inelegant idleness', as Tom, who is faintly leftish, remember, had called it in his family tree book; 'inelegant uselessness', he knew others would call it; he could not really convince himself that his ancestors had done real harm, living off the fortune Sir Caleb had left them, and yet little real good either. They had lots of investments, barely knew themselves what they were, and the wealth grew slowly down the years, during which the family grew rapidly.

Yes, money had swept in like a river, like a flood. That is, it had once. But they were not gracious, they were -- considering their opportunities -- not particularly cultured, they married sensible-looking rather than beautiful women, their own cousins often, and they were not even remarkably wealthy, unlike the Franklyns or Lord Demnet.

At the top of the back of the house there are four attic windows, the rooms where the servants slept; now of course there are none. It is damp and sad and empty up there. On the first floor, that is, what the Americans more sensibly call the second, there are damp, sad empty rooms too. No, worse than that, somehow lonely rooms; as if something-or-other is there, something strong in its weakness, not wholly powerless, wanting, needing, desiring.....what? I would not like to sleep anywhere in that house myself.

Tom however is extraordinarily brave or extraordinarily obtuse. Once in his bachelor days, as he settled down in his single bed in the kitchen, he'd just put out the light, when just for a second or part of it there was a green flash. Heaven knows what it was, or ought I to say rather the Devil does? Tom just shrugged, thinking it must be....well, what did he think? Something he ate? Unlikely. However, he responded not at all, did not suddenly switch the light on, just went on composing himself to sleep, scarcely listening to the creaks which he knew full well were the old house's old planks settling themselves on its ancient joists, or the rustlings that were almost certainly mice.

By the way, an odd aspect of the house is that it was rebuilt according to a unique measure called the Gritnall's yard. People had kept telling Caleb that he was two yards tall. He wasn't, he was six foot three, so he invented for himself this Gritnall yard, thirty-seven and a half inches, and -- he was a very rich and very stubborn man, he could do what he liked -- had his additions made in multiples and divisions of that yard. You don't realise it at all, but unconsciously you expect a building to match the old yard measurement of thirty-six inches, and that it does not is just faintly disturbing. Yet this particular unease, unlike that I was writing of in the last paragraph but one, is able to be rationally explained.

Yet I would not feel that Tom is insensitive. That strange very brief brilliance happened about the time he first knew Elaine, whose father's untidiness and disorganisation in everything except his clothes and his art never ceased to exasperate his wife. (What was her name again? Elvira. She was one of those people all too easily overlooked and forgotten.) She was almost neurotically tidy, had the kind of dull practical competence inbred in those brought up to 'business'. Certainly no room in her house was neglected, useless, etc. Her husband a few years after their marriage (their bungalow is last in a row) had purchased a barn next to it and adapted it to be his studio; that was where he spent nearly all his time most days.

The bungalow was cheaply and even badly built, with big windows. It was very much smaller than the daughter's new home, which, after a few month's marriage, she once hurt Tom by saying, was rather like the huge railway station at Chapels Mead in Bishoprick. Maybe it was from there she had gone on the first stage of her journey to -????- ; she had not learned to drive a car, she had not that much initiative, and even the thought of flying miles up faster than a bullet for some reason terrified her.

Elaine, after all, is a reasonably intelligent woman who has had a fair education, but her 'effectiveness quotient' (I am inventing a measure, like Caleb) has been remarkably low. She lacked notable talents, did not make friends easily, if at all; and her being aware of that maybe partly explained her depression. It is hard to imagine, unless under the pressure of necessity her character changes, that she will be able to travel alone and live alone without misfortune.

'Depression', one would have thought, was too strong a word, though she certainly didn't normally appear cheerful. There was a 'little woman' (Bessie) for most of the cleaning, and all Elaine did in the house was to prepare meals, often vegetarian, which were edible only. Her do-littleness compared badly with the energy of her sister-in-law; Vee-Vee for all her appearance of sophistication and snobbery, knew how to paper or paint a room, milk a cow, even do carpentry, as well as how to present herself, on the kind of formal occasions Elaine avoided, as beautiful, elegant and all that.

Tom, for all his remarkable ingenuity in petty things -- he loved making models -- balked at large do-it-yourself projects. The vast house needed vast capital to set it right, and that he did not have. Mind, his income was highish; 'a good screw' he called it, innocent of the more up-to-date meaning of that phrase, and he fairly easily afforded his daughter's Sharth fees. But the house decayed; repairs unless structural were neglected.

Dave might have found it amusing that Pask and Tom now 'rubbed along' together much like an old married couple. They took turns in preparing what they called 'supper' and competed to see who could make the best meals; food was much better, and much more was spent on it, than when Elaine was in charge.

Tom had been popular as he was growing up, as he told me once; Mollie, the former doctor's daughter, was especially friendly with him. He regretted that since leaving Oxford he seemed to have mislaid that talent; he was too full of simple goodwill himself to realise that his big house was envied.

Dave by now often spent nearly all or part of his evenings at Gritnall's. Coming quite early one night he parked his bike behind the old stable and found Pask with Alyss, who'd come to consult Tom; a problem had come up at work soon after he'd left. For some reason, however, he hadn't yet come home.

As Dave walked in through the kitchen door two things hit him bang! bang! He was not notably sensitive to atmosphere but he couldn't miss these. 1) Alyss was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen except on television. 2) Pask disliked her. Maybe that's different aspects of one thing.

Tall, excellent posture, high-carried full bosom, auburn hair, evidently tailor-made grey business clothes, tasteful 'accessories', marvellous self-confidence. Nature had made her to be gawped at. She aided Nature by piling up her shining hair, and dared to wear a necklace and bracelets of red coral -- yes, red (or imitation coral, perhaps.) Only her voice, which Dave intuited Pask was measuring against her own, was unsplendid -- rather too high, and in accent as it were damaged, not properly West of England, not fully anything else.

Pask was making deliberately 'heavy weather' of seeming to try to attempt to be the gracious hostess, offering sherry etc., amazingly unconvincing. Alyss was leaning towards treating her as a little girl too childishly silly to know when Daddy would get home. Dave had seen in the local paper recently that Alyss's policeman brother had been in a car accident and had a broken leg, and he knew him after a fashion through having played Rugby against him; so, and not unhappy to have a reason to address this goddess-like creature, he politely enquired how this other Tom was. 'Recovering, though slowly, ' Alyss answered; she had clear green eyes like some cats'. Dave nearly blushed when she turned them on him; he was feeling that he and Pask were habitants of some lower greyer world than she. He could not think of a second remark to make.

Tom Ferrace then appeared. Dave thought Alyss turned to him both with some relief, but also admiringly, speaking with a hint of gush, very different from her cool manner to the two teenagers. She's much the same height as Tom, especially with all that piled-up vivid hair, but she contrived to sketch looking up at him.

Tom disposed of the trouble in a few sentences of advice which, Dave thought, proved his own easy competence in his own line of work (which he'd never had reason to doubt, not that he'd ever had reason to think about it before.) These ordinary words apparently struck Alyss as amazingly brilliant.

She left a few moments later. She had some kind of green small car, very shiny outside and in, only a few months from new; unlike Tom, whose oldish and shabby Land Rover it had been parked beside, she's very keen on making an excellent first impression.

Now it annoyed and surprised Dave to intuit that Pask was jealous of this Alyss, not because he had evidently thought she was good-looking, but because of the attention, though courteous only, that her 'Fa' had paid her; that is, Dave was jealous of Pask being jealous of Alyss because she was jealous of Tom's attitude to her; (you and I, reader, have of course never been so trivial.)

'Why does she bother to come here?' Pasqueline complained. 'It was surely nothing that couldn't have been managed on the telephone. ' 'It's on her way home,' Tom said mildly. 'Nonsense, Fa, the Lane isn't on the way to anywhere!' (That's true, fifty yards on past the house the road such as it is becomes rutted brown mud.) 'Where does she live anyway?' Pask continued, seeming as if compelled to talk about Alyss against her will. 'She has a flat in Bishoprick, I think, beside the Docks. She'd certainly have to pass the end of our lane.'

Pask went on preparing the meal, it was her turn, but with rather more clattering of saucepans, etc. and knocking things from their right place than was necessary. After a while Dave offered to help; she refused briefly and bluntly, so he sat down again feeling 'miffty'. 'Fa' looked up from his 'Guardian' -- he was reading it on the other side of the kitchen table -- and raised his eyebrows at Dave with slightly mocking tenderness. He later tried to talk a bit about political events in Africa...

The meal with finally ready, a little later. Miss Sherrin had delayed her, Pask said. 'Why don't you call her Alyss?' Tom said. 'Misss Alysss Shsherrin!' Pask exclaimed, trying, and I'm afraid succeeding, for the snobbishly affronted tones of her lamentable aunt. 'What were her parents thinking of when they christened her that?'

'Not of pleasing you, evidently!' Tom said, snappishly for him. Dave was inclined to tease, just for once; he tried to think of a word to praise Alyss which had plenty of esses in it. But although his intelligence is deep or wide, or even because of it, he's not particularly quick and it was only half an hour later when the opportunity was past that he thought of 'sscrumptiouss'.

Was that the night Pask showed Dave the box of old photographs, or was that another time? When she did she contrived to appear blasee about those of her mother; this kind of affectation was called good breeding at Ladywell. Whether it was that evening he saw the photographs, or another, nothing worth writing down happened in the next hour or two. Dave left them about quarter to ten. By just after 10.30 Tom and Pask had both gone to bed, by 11.00 they were both asleep.

About an hour and a half after that, both of them were asleep. They had not closed the double gates to the Lane; they never do. One of those cheap Eastern European cars, quite new, drew slowly and almost silently into the courtyard. The woman who'd been driving it got out and took a case from the front passenger seat.

Then she took from the back a baby in a carry-cot, and went to the front door. She got the key from her handbag and let herself in.

Elaine had been away about a year, as I say.

There wasn't of course any light on in the big hall. Yet it was nearly full moon; shining through the fanlight, drawing out over the ceiling huge and distorted its quartered half-circle. The big water-colours of the Lake District, the wide stairs with their good but worn-out carpet, the oak banisters crudely carved as bulrushes, the little fireplace empty except for pinecones and silver foil, the overstuffed black leather chairs, the telephone table with its untidy directories, the poorly balanced coatrack, the faint chill as always...the woman paid all these very little attention. Nothing appeared changed; she did not bother to think how surprised she would have been if it had. And the same faint sweetish odour as of fruit, or maybe little dead animals, long rotted.

She had left the thick main door open. She put down the cot and the suitcase and the one or two other things she'd also carried, and went back to the threshhold and did one of the breathing exercises she had by now half-forgotten, spending a minute or two like this. 'Let's get some fresh air into the old place, for God's sake!' she had explained, if only as a kind of aloud thought, with an undertowed thought, I do hope Baby will not cry.

Nothing has altered. Nothing ever has here, she said to herself with a mixture of affection and exasperation; the affection was new. Hundreds of years the same. Might as well be thousands!

It had been a very long day, evidently it was best to get to bed.

She had by now closed the door gently, very nearly silently -- click! went the latch. The house had drawn in upon her. Yes, it had marked down her presence as if in a school register. The house was aware that she was here, even though no-one living yet did. She was sure of that, convinced.

She picked up her loads again, and went up the stairs. Her movement was not awkward, despite the almost instinctive near-hop to avoid the third stair from the top, which, she had once been used to grumble, screamed as if to awaken the dead -- a comparison she had come across ready-made, she did not ponder its meaning.

At the top of the flight she paused on the half-landing. There is a picture here of Tom's tiresome great-aunt, painted when she was young, in the twenties. The stairs up until here are a 'feature' of the old house, they continue on the left more steeply, in a 'dog-leg' turn, steeper, narrower.

Yes, Baby was sleeping still, Baby surely had found the very long journey tiring also.

She left the child there and went down quietly to the kitchen, where she filled the electric kettle. She got her rubber hot-water-bottle from its usual place in the cupboard, put nearly boiling water in it, waved her hand over the vapour, and 'huffed' at it. She squeezed gently with the other hand so that the water rose to the lip, screwed in the stopper, upended the bottle over the sink to shake off drips, and went back up the stairs, picking up the carrycot, etc. The single bed in the dressing-room, she had thought, would surely be unaired.

Here little moonshine entered; the room was at the back. She risked putting on the bedside light to disrobe, taking her nightdress from the top of the case, putting it still folded as it was and only a little creased, on the hot-water-bottle where the bed was turned down. She took off all her clothes, laying them passably neatly on the chair at which Tom customarily knelt to say his prayers, pushed the bottle two or three times down the bed, cuddled it to her (it had a tatty woollen cover) and was asleep nearly at once. She had never slept in this particular room before, but an unfamiliar bed no longer worried her.

About three the child woke her up.

About three a.m. Tom woke up. What was it? An odd sound. Couldn't be associated with anything. Nocturnal animal? A countryman, surely, would sleep through that! Even while he was thinking this, there was another strange noise, a kind of gulping.

He pushed further up the bed, hearing leu-Petta! leu Petta! leu Petta! which did not at first seem to be the movement of his heart.

The Moon was above the house now, yet still gave a little illumination in their bedroom -- his bedroom now. The curtains were old, even ragged, he could see their worn threads.

Queer. A dream? But that is ever the too glib explanation for any night-time disturbance. And he certainly hadn't been asleep when he heard the second noise, whatever it was. Pask? But if she were to cry out in her sleep, unlikely though that is (for he regards her as unimaginative) then surely she would have needed to cry out louder from half a corridor away in order to wake him, and certainly it was not her voice. There had been no words, just an inarticulate sound. He thought now it might be the mew of a cat which somehow had got into the house; he was almost certain that it was inside, and near.

A silence had followed the gulp. Or was there now a rustling, again close? He thought, both at once, that a father must protect his daughter/a householder his property. Was that a light under the door -- just for a second?

By this point, only about a minute out of sleep, he was sitting up straight in the bed, remembering with his body -- fingers of ice rasping his spine -- his murdered cousin. No, no, be sensible! he tells himself. Making an effort to be so (he too takes deep breaths) he controls the irrational aspect of his fear, which takes perhaps one other minute.

He reaches out for his dressing gown. He knows himself to be no coward, but accuses himself of being a fusspot; investigating is more important than keeping warm. He can just see, and takes up, a powerful torch he has kept for many years by the side of his bed over against just this eventuality. Holding it, weighing it indeed in case it might be needed as a weapon, he gets out of bed with elaborate slowness and therefore completely silently. The figures on the digital clock, 3.04 changing to 3.05 as he reaches, tinge his hand pink.

He moves across the floor, chilly, barefoot, as quietly as if he were himself an intruder, a thief (so much more likely in an isolated house than a ghost, he reassures himself.)

Again the whimper, and this time a very, very quiet answering voice, which, though barely heard, is repetitive, meaningless. Now he is more intrigued than scared.

He flings back the door to the dressing-room and switches on the torch both together. He has aimed it head-height, he sees wallpaper only, moves the light up and down.

On the bed something is lying. Something not alive, he thinks first. A corpse! But how --? He is confused and horrified. As a reflex his hand goes to the switch, the overhead light comes on, amazed he sees -- a woman, and suckling a child!

Amazement, envy, an aesthetic delight, tenderness -- affront too, a feeling of being invaded -- dash through him. A half-second later, he recognises his wife. Gratitude at her return, also, mild-tempered though he is usually, a readiness to anger. 'My G--!' he begins.

A little explanation of what has happened so quickly. He was keyed up to fight, if absolutely necessary. Physically agile, quite strong, he could have done it if -- (also, he was keyed up to lie, which he has almost never done; he must tell such a person he is alone in the vast house.) Envy because no man however skilled can please a woman through her breast as much as can a child. Memories of the Virgin and Child in pictures seen in Florence and elsewhere are quarter-remembered, as too his faith which they illustrate.

Yes, it is really Elaine. For just a moment he had thought her a stranger.

She looks a little sunburt, a little lined, but confident somehow. She has had an affair while absent, she has come to ask forgiveness, she must be put away privily, but not now, not certainly until the morning.

As if by telepathic agreement (why 'as if'? surely it is really so) she now turns on the gentler bedside light as he switches off that one hanging overhead.

So she has come to ask forgiveness, protection somehow, or -- well, he does not really know what or how to think, even though down all those years his prep school, his public school and his ancient university had been telling him, though not in words, that they were readying him for any eventuality.

He is a decent man, but cautious both by profession and long habit. He must treat her generously, yes, but where is the money to do so to be found? Also he must set his teeth over against being a laughing-stock, though it will be no worse than Uncle Ernest's trouble, surely....

After a brief pause. 'You've come back' is his uninspired remark.

'As you see,' she answers.

He comes nearer. 'I hope you are well,' he says futile-politely.

'Yes, thank you, ' she answers. 'Speak quietly' (though he has) 'the baby is almost asleep.'

She moves the child away, does not cover herself. He gazes for a second or so at the huge glistening nipple, then looks away feeling uncouth, stares at the infant instead.

'Tom,' she says now, 'say hello to your son.'

He almost falls over, saves himself, plonks himself clumsily on the bed next to them. Love or gratitude or wonder or some other very strong emotion or mixing of emotions seem to drown him. He cannot see, a redness has half-filled his eyes. When they clear it is as if the baby is smiling.

Elaine reminds him that just before she went, earlier that very morning, they had, spontaneously for once, made love -- at much this time, even at much this phase of the moon. 'O my dear!' he says, choking, more like a man who is hearing rather of a death, and discovers that he wants very much to do again just that. Here, in decency, we must leave them.

Pask too has woken, a little later, in her messy room. She is wearing imitation-silk blue pyjamas made in China. Her undersheet is folded uncomfortably beneath her; she never makes the bed properly. She has been too hot under the duvet and the room is too cold to do without, so she put outside it one well-fleshed leg, hoping in this way to average out her body temperature, and it is, now she has awakened, tingling. That is, if she has really come out of sleep.

But she is not sure that she really has, and is unconcerned about this. She has often recently had what are called 'lucid' dreams, or experiences which touch upon that edge; in them the dreamer is as much, or even more, in control of surroundings and events, than in the daylight. This is strange.

She does not know (how could she?) that she is blessed with excellent night vision. It has to be very dark indeed before she cannot see well enough at least to find her way around. Put these two together, the seeing in the dark and the queer ability to dream true, and it explains what follows, or nearly.

Yes, her leg is chilly, the rest of her is too hot, so to cool herself fully she sets out down to the kitchen, to get from the mumbling refrigerator either milk from Tap Dairy or mineral water ('percolated through the limestone and old red sandstone that form the Demnet Hills', the bottle's label reads); that too is delivered by the milkman.

She gets out of the bed, and is aware, sensuously, of the room's cold upon her flesh; the radiator which is on one wall is on full, though almost useless.She steps over discarded schoolwear, and finds the door handle easily, though some would grope for it.

The long corridor with its eight twelve-paned sash windows, curtainless, springs into view; they overlook part of their garden and the abandoned tennis court. She turns right along the corridor, and, passing her father's dressing room, hears an odd noise without realising that it is so.

Down the servants' steps into the kitchen; she is not as clumsy now as before. Keep remembering that she is not clear whether she is dreaming or awake, and in either case is doing the kind of semi-automatic actions which do not demand full wakefulness.

She gets a tumbler from a cupboard, and although there is another bottle of milk half-used, opens another one to have the cream at the top. She closes the frig., drinks, and goes across the biggish room to put the glass beside the sink to be washed up when it is day. A little red light glows here above a socket, and the electric kettle still feels warm. She is very nearly sure that this ought not to be so, therefore this is evidence that she is lucid-dreaming,

So -- if she is asleep, really, and if the kettle feels warm, and if she can still taste milk, and if the matting feels rough to her feet, all these serve only to confirm what previously though not often she has experienced, the amazingly precise faking of ordinary daily sensations which night's visions forge.

Up the stairs again. There is still that sound, slowly rhythmic. She is a virgin, does not know from her own precious experiencing what makes a bed speak so, And yet, at another level above or below that plane on which we move usually, her body does know, it knows by instinct what that rhythm is, which made her and all her people. Therefore she goes back into her single bedroom a little envious, a little bitter, a little like, in her heart or soul, the fifty-year-old spinster it may be her misfortune to grow into.

Pask within a brief time is again asleep, but often groans and tosses, so that an observer, even if unintelligent, (but there is none, of course?) would understand her sleep not to be refreshing.

Afterwards Elaine said, 'That door from our bedroom used to squeak.'

'I know,' said Tom, 'I oiled it.'

The next morning he was up earlier than usual. He had dressed for the office with even more than his usual care, humming to himself. If he had not thought that kind of self-attention-seeking a little vulgar, he might even have put a flower in his buttonhole. He had unwrapped a new shirt to wear, later found her had taken out all the many pins save one. He was wearing a newly dry-cleaned suit, and had knotted his college's summer tie which no-one had ever recognised. He had on shoes only a month from new, and carefully polished, as ever, the night before. He looked not merely tidy, but strong, fit, even young -- well, as much as forty can.

Going down alone to breakfast, by arrangement with Elaine, he looked pityingly, almost sarcastically, at his listless daughter. It is teenagers who are supposewd to be full of energy, to rejoice in living, to have plenty of 'oomph', and the middle-aged -- he certainly didn't feel that this morning! --who are supposedly pale and dull, as Pask is now, bending over to take up the cereal packet,

After a moment Pask registered the contrast too.'You look cheerful, Fa,' she said. Yes, so he did. Yet thoughtful too; how was he going to tell her? In the event it didn't come about according to his plan (that is, the one he hadn't quite made) because there was a noise upstairs, which, Pask said, was oddly like a baby crying. 'It is, ' he said. And, 'Listen, my dear,' -- she did not seem to be responding fully, 'it's your brother.'

Now had these words been spoken in French she would (such are the benefits of an independent school education) have understood them at once. 'C'est ton frere'. That is, if they were part of some exercise in which surface meaning only mattered -- but since she had never had, nor ever actually imagined, nor ever even consciously wanted there to be, a male human being who was offspring too of both her parents, this meant only mystifying nonsense to her. She jumped up confused, then obeyed very willingly her father's instruction to sit down again for the moment, and did not resent his addressing her as shortly and simply as if she were yet a little child.

A few moments later Elaine came down into the kitchen with her baby. Pask jumped up, she kissed her (which she had not done for years), cried, and turned her attention to the child, kissed him too, took him from Elaine, made silly noises at him, kissed him, sat down with him, cried, tried to hug him, immediately decided that was too rough, cried, laughed, kissed again, etc. She was not -- thank God! -- remembering at this point that she is a lady.

For this while she restrained her curiosity to hear her mother's story. Suppose rather that Pasqueline had travelled with her, had followed every week of the preegnancy with curiosity, jealousy, even awe, there would even so have been some First Occasion on which she and her brother first met; her getting to know him was a journey whose first step she would have had to take even in that case.

It was understanding the change in temperament or disposition of her mother which was to provide a less expected journey.

A telephone call. 'Hello! Hello, Lize! Gosh! How are you! What a nice sunny day!' 'Hello, Pask. You sound very bubbly.' 'Do I? Do I really? Well, I'm not surprised! I've got some news, it's marvellous, it's fascinating, but crumbs! I'd better tell David first. Is he there? 'What, is it your GCSE results already, isn't it too early? 'No, no, Lize, it's not any of that boring stuff, it's much more interesting! ' You don't mean...? Is it your mother? Has she come back?' 'Well, I would rather tell him first if you don't mind.' 'Well, there I can't help you, my love, he's out doing something clever to the electrics of Humphrey Pumphrey's car...' ' O, d'you think I could call him there, it's awfully important.' 'Well, to be honest I'd rather you didn't, they're not easy people, except Humph himself.' 'O!!! What a pain! What a bore! It's really awfully important.' 'No, hang about, he's just come in the back door...'

Lize calls Dave through, flapping her hand at him in the bossy way she has, saying (covering the mouthpiece of the 'phone ineffectually) Pask's very excited about something and she reckons it's that mother of hers come back from wherever she'd gone to, and grinning, showing her upper teeth and biting the lower lip. Lize was nosy and pleased both together.

So Dave took the instrument. 'Hullo, it's me. What's up?' 'It's Em! After all this time! She's come back!' Dave was unsure how to react; Elaine had been away more than half the time he'd known Pask, he wasn't much surprised, or pleased really, he has a heavyweight type of good mind, and once it got stuck in it that Elaine was away he tended to assume that she always would be and hadn't prepared any suitable emotions over against her return. So the pause that followed this announcement, albeit only a few seconds long, began to seem odd to both of them. 'Well done!' he said finally. Then he thought that was a bit odd to say and added 'I'm glad for you', not because he was, but because he intuited that Pask would think that was what he ought to feel. 'Where's she been?' 'O, I don't know, Czechoslovenia or whatever it's called nowadays -- but guess what!' He couldn't, of course, then out it all came about little 'Bro' (rhymes with 'grow') which was what already she was calling him, and little Bro was really the most wonderful child ever spawned; yes, Dave reflected, jealous already, by a miracle more amazing that anything the Bible requires us to credit, this new child's rear end was giving forth, instead of poo, the sun's life-giving rays. Yes, half-jealous, Dave was also amused at his jealousy. And, he understood, he had to drop everything already planned for the rest of the morning and get up to Gritnall's as soon as he could to worship him. Otherwise, (he understood the 'subtext' even though he did not know that word) she would make things very sticky between them. How very queer it is, he had here and at other times and places good cause to reflect, that women who have such power to make you do what you don't want to are miscalled the weaker sex.

When Lize heard this news, as soon as he'd put the 'phone down, naturally, she was what she calls 'ighlydelighted'. She gave a kind of whoop and made as if to throw her pinny back up over her head, but it wasn't long enough. Then she got a big thick chocolate bar, the sort that costs several pounds, out of its hiding place, and gave it to Dave to give to the child, which was far too young, he said, but she said Elaine could have it anyway, it 'showed willing.'

That day was a Bank Holiday, did I say? On second thoughts, I'm not sure it was -- yet for some reason Pask and Dave did not have school or Tom work (or church, so it can't have been a Sunday.) Anyway, Dave recalls, he was there in just over twenty minutes and a queer, cheap-looking but newish East European car he had never seen there before was parked outside.

'Come in, come on in, my dear chap!' Tom shouted while he was still putting the lock on his bike, and, as he came through the door he added, with a strange mixing of boasting and apology, that Elaine had already been starting to be pregnant when she had gone and that nobody had known, not even herself.

They'd got it - him - in his carrycot on the main table in the kitchen so that they could adore him the better, Dave observed. He formed the opinion (not having seen many babies close to) that this Bro. creature was quite a good example of one, very clear skin, bright-as-mirror eyes, little button nose, legs, fingers, toes and so forth tiny but the usual number. He was quite willing to go gooey-ooey-ooey to it and flick a hand in the air under its fizzog (face) as if he were mindful of tickling it but actually wouldn't, which in his opinion is the usual thing to do with babies, and even to pretend that this room where food is prepared and eaten was not now stinking like an exceptionally badly kept public toilet, that was his understanding of what is required by good manners, and then he'd want to forget it. But it looked to him rather, from Pask's expression, as if she'd given herself, and him too, a lifetime sentence to worship.

Yes, Pasqueline's fizz was glowing as if she'd rubbed it in the butter dish. She was gazing unblinking at Bro, not at himself, so David turned his attention instead to Elaine, who was more peacefully happy. Now if I'd met this Mark II version somewhere else, he said later, I'd have thought how strikingly like Tom Ferrace's wife she is in appearance, must be her sister or close cousin or something. Because this woman had an air of competence, of self-accepting, that he'd not seen in her before, and nor had anyone else there much, he wouldn't have minded betting. She had that even sitting still and doing nothing.

Elaine was regarding Dave quizzically, perhaps noting changes in him also. Yes, she did look straight at him, not slide her eyes along the floor and then glance away, which used often to be her bad habit.

'Good to see you again, Elaine!' he heard someone saying affably; (incidentally it was almost the first time he spoke her name.) This person put out a hand and shook hers enthusiastically. Dave was amazed to hear himself being so 'outforthcoming'. 'How well you're looking!' he rabbited on. 'Seems foreign holidays are good for you!' He was sounding here more like his own mother than like himself, conceivably because his own personality had yet to take on board this new factor in their-all relationship, and so he had to copy the vocab. and manner of someone else.

'I shall tell you all three in some detail on another occasion what has happened to me, where I have been, whom I have met, and so forth, ' Elaine said. 'I recognise that I have hurt those whom I love and who love me, and I have already apologised to them for that. But haven't you, two of you at least, observed already that for me this interval has been a time of healing?' She appeared fully to intend to express herself in this ceremonious fashion, I suppose to underline to them the significance of the transformation that had taken place, as it were off-stage.

Little Bro now did one of the few actions babies can. Looking piously heavenward, then frowning with effort, clenching his gums, he pooed. Pask, who seemed to have been deprived overnight of any ability to smell, reacted delightedly; she was actually rivalling Elaine to give him the necessary attention, and Elaine (cunningly, Dave thought) yielded her place.

He watched. The child's sister took it some distance away to another smaller table (for even idolaters have some notion of what is decorous) and opened a bag with the necessaries in it, and bent to the inevitable, but he would have thought repulsive, task with holy joy. He even imagined that she took longer than was necessary to draw out the pleasure. She showed none of the unhandiness she often brought to cooking, etc.

'Yes, I always wanted a son,' Tom said to himself, in a slightful doubtful tone as if wondering whether after all he really had. 'To carry on the family name. A daughter changes hers, after all...' and he returned to thoughtful silence.

Now he was done Pask was holding him up in the air, going cutchy-coo and all that. Well, she is a woman, after all, Dave reflected, attempting tolerance, and plenty of girls her age, if you're to believe the Sunday papers, already have several children by now. (And he'd been there ten minutes, yet nobody had offered him coffee or tea, they're usually so polite that way.)

Well, he was used to Pask's admiring attention, though never to the degree that the baby was getting. Maybe it'll shake down, not to be so obsessive later, he thought.

Somehow their friendship appeared to him an organic growth. But (he thought now, realising how he valued it) would it survive his time at university? Or would being apart strengthen it, would it even change into...well, marriage?

Deeply conservative, he wants everything always to be the same. Yet he wants to get away and get on. You can't climb a ladder if it's made of licquorice sticks, life is best solid and predictable, even almost boring. But Gran's death and now Bro's birth -- these upset things. No, things should remain as they are.

Or, better still, change, and for the better, slowly, with dignity.

This child is about sixteen years younger than Pasqueline, about eighteen younger than Dave. My God! he thought, almost panicking, suppose Ma and Dads took a leaf out the Ferraces' book, and gave him a sib! But he comforted himself by thinking of the way they behaved to each other, not hostile at all, but they certainly never seemed affectionate.

'No. Not where you can look at them!' Outside him, this voice, he almost reckoned. It was really just as if someone else in the kitchen had spoken, loudly and authoratively, not like his own thought at all. But then someone who really was there, in the kitchen of the big shabby house, about 9.20 in the morning, said, 'David, you're in a brown study'. 'Whatever that is,' he answered automatically. Someone else gave him some fizzy yellowish stuff in a tall thin glass -- to toast young Whatsisname, he gathered.

Yes, the child had names. Elaine had been amazingly efficient. She knew that Tom with his unthinking love of his country would dislike any difficulty about the child's nationality, therefore she'd registered Thingy's birth at 'our Embassy', which sufficed to make him a real genuine accept-no-imitations bona fide freeborn Englishman and subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Provisionally she'd given it names, George Henry; George was a family name on Tom's side, Henry was an englished-up version of her father's name.

That too was important to Tom; it wasn't just a question of having a label so that you didn't have to say 'hey, you!' when everybody is 'you'. He approved after some thought. 'Yes, for the moment, ' he said, and perhaps Tomas too after me'. (That was one of those meotic perhapses which means unquestionably.) 'You did not think to have him baptised too, I suppose?' he said.

No, she hadn't. He looked for a short while as if he opined that she was at fault here, but his general happiness overbore it. Dave saw that he and the two women were standing, and hastened to stand too. They clinked glasses, which seemed to be the done thing, above the child, now back in his carrycot. The fizz went up Dave's nose uncomfortably, but he fought successfully the need to cough or sneeze.

Now, was it a Sunday? I can't remember, quite, but I think not. The conversation now turned to what Dave thought of as Sunday things. Tom wanted the sprog christened (or was it baptised?) as soon as possible (or were they the same thing, Dave wondered, unsure and indifferent whether it had been done to him.) Godparents might be a problem, Tom thought aloud, which Pask gave more attention than Dave thought it deserved; in fact she was wanting very much to be asked herself, yet thinking that since she didn't believe in Christianity she'd have to refuse, yet wanting to be asked for all that. She wasn't.

In fact it was three weeks from then, and quite a 'do'. Dave had to have his best suit dry-cleaned specially. Afterwards there was a 'luncheon' at Tom's elder brother's house, the idea being apparently that this was the Ferrace family home rather than Gritnell's, so a new family member must be welcomed there,

It was the first time and almost the last that Dave met Vee-Vee. He did not like her, or the cousins, who were 'sophisticated' and openly talked of their own sexual experiences, twitting Pask about 'your parents' little accident', deliberately unkind.

Vee-Vee much liked old Heinrich, whom she'd never met before. He was evidently 'people like us', as far as a foreigner could be; he had excellent anachronistic Continental manners, and gave his grandson an elaborate (though hideous) silver concotion which had been in his own line for generations, he said.

Tom himself was one of the sponsors, which apparently is sometimes allowed. Benedick Hunsden, the short parson who'd buried Bessie, conducted the ceremony. His cuddly wife who'd been at school with Elaine had had the sense to do her own travelling before rather than years after marriage.

Bro. endured the fuss calmly, he was not one of those tedious always-yelling babies. Thomas (with an aitch) George Henry he was called. Later on he was always known as Harry.

Let me tell briefly and bluntly the outer events which occurred to Elaine.

She had done a dreadful thing, and would not face, at least not for many months, the fact that she had; it was not real to her. Betrayal of your country is bad, surely; betrayal of your loved ones far worse. But she was fleeing, fleeing as if in terror, as refugees do who crowd the streets and are gunned down from aeroplanes (for sound military reasons, of course.) Was she entirely a free agent in this?

She took one largish case and (like the owl and the pussycat) plenty of money; after the event it seemed that this had been the right decision. Withdrawals -- and telephone calls -- which nowadays may be traced in an instant, were then with more difficulty traceable; 'plastic' was not yet near-compulsory.

She walked to the end of the Lane, caught a bus to Bishoprick, from there took the London train. At one point on this journey a neat elderly man sitting opposite her, smiling deferentially, offered her his newspaper to read. She did not want it, but immediately decided that it would be less memorable if she did. She crossed London by bus, and took another train south. She had not yet been missed. Her tension had by now eased a little; she willed herself to sleep, holding the casehandle.

At seven o'clock she got on the ferry. There was a second bunk in her cabin; no-one was there, which pleased her. It was already a little dark there, though not quiet -- the engines whooshed continually. Now there is not much to be done on a Channel crossing -- you can walk the outer deck and look at the sea, you can walk inside and look at your fellow-passengers, or the duty-free shop, you can eat indifferent food even if you are not hungry, and drink -- the choice is enormous -- even though you are not thirsty. You can also buy and read a newspaper, even though you do not really care what has happened in the outer world. And you may try to sleep even though you are not tired, as long as you can stand the motion of the boat.

But she couldn't sleep. There was a light which could not be put off. And she was uncomfortable. She had only half undressed, and was lying shoeless on the bunk with her blouse pulled from her unbuttoned skirt, her brassiere loose behind, etc. Somehow she had hoped not to disrobe herself and to reclothe herself in a 'nightie', it seemed too final a break with home. However, after an hour or so, that was what she did.

She did not expect to sleep, even so. But she must have done, she worked out; it was somehow morning, the cabin light looked less bright, the motion of the ship had subtly changed, etc.; what was lacking was any sense of bodily refreshment .

She washed and dressed, went to buy breakfast, sitting feeling dowdy (not that they cared about her feelings or even noticed her presence) at a table with three smart, sophisticated, brittle (and to her incomprehensible) people, who spoke French, because they were.

Now her talent for accents produces, here in France, a curious effect. She sounds Parisian, even grandly so, and yet hesitates over common words. Her vocabulary is very small, her knowledge of grammar very thin, she is almost helpless. Nor has she visited France infrequently, but when she has been there before a mixture of idleness and common sense has made her leave all speaking to Tom, who has after all a Modern Languages degree from Oxford (and queer it is, by the way, to see this stiff Englishman making all the appropriate gestures.)

But a French port, even to someone who is curious by nature, is rather like an English one. They had laid on a minibus to take passengers to the railway station. Here she separated and went to a bank, almost getting run over because she looked the wrong way before crossing the street. She got herself francs.

How very much smarter and faster French trains were than English then. Even she noticed that; our carriages seemed to have been made of originally dirty parts and have never been cleaned since. There was one annoying and embarassing incident which ought to have been pleasant; a fat farmer and his fatter wife travelling with three grandchildren, seeing that she was a stranger, kindly offered, even insisted, that she share their elaborate picnic, which they had brought in a large hamper. She stammered thanks, rubbed her throat as if to indicate that she had laryngitis, but had unfortunately to infer that because of that she would be remembered; so to speak, their warmth chilled her.

And she knew what she was fleeing from; almost for the first time she asked, where was she going?

Another journey, she did not know it yet, was taking place in the warm dark wetness of her body.

Into Paris early afternoon. At the tourist office -- they spoke English there of course -- they directed her to a cheap hotel. Her room was small, and cleanish, had an excellent goose-down mattress. She could see down from it onto a central courtyard full half-covered dustbins and probably rats. There was a very old-fashioned looking telephone there; she had no use for it.

It was a very long day for someone with so few resources, a very long day indeed. But she had the idea that she must rest.

And irritating she found that resting. Even so, though she was not yet being healed, what was to heal her was gathering its virtues occulted.

Another meal, and she went early to bed. There was a cigarette-smelling television room where she stayed an hour or so alone, but, after all, the programmes were all in French. The next morning, after breakfast, a taxi; she might be remembered, but she could not manage the bus or the metro.

She took a train across the flat country where her grandfathers had laboured industriously decades back at trying to kill each other, unsuccessfully, even though thousands of other men had died in an afternoon. The placenames meant nothing to her.

Into Belgium, though not for long. She paused there for another empty evening and another night without much rest; at Aix, which also had no historical resonances for her. Crossing into Germany meant -- certainly not that she felt herself among her own people, there was so far no place on earth where she had felt that -- yet liberty of a kind, she could now understand and be understood.

Therefore she could go slower, she could pick more easily how she might travel, she could depart from the tourist routes where, she thought, it would be easier to follow her. She could buy a one-way ticket on any bus; she enjoyed buses.

She was in a sense bored. She was observing very little, she was not speaking to anybody except through the necessities of travelling or to avoid that notice which omission of the barest politenesses would bring. This emptiness of mind was easing, though as yet a very little only, the wounding of her soul; 'meditation' is perhaps just a grand word for this therapeutic fashion of boredom.

By Eshweiler she came to Julich, from there - it is by no means the most convenient route -- into Dusseldorf through Eisdorf, Bergheim, Kaster Bedburg, Romerskirchen, Orevenbrach, Dormach, Wevelinghoven and other small places, some of them nearly unchanged since the time of their splendid and unforgotten petty dukes two centuries and more ago; they had been unbombed because insignificant. Dusseldorf's busy seriousness repelled her now just as it had on her first visit more than twenty years before.

Elaine went out from there to her paternal family's home. She did not know until she was seeing it, leaning upon the gate (the long low red house was on the other side of fields which first rose slightly, then fell, a little river behind, leaned over by trees), I say that she did not know until she was seeing it that she had come only for that quizzical looking. To try with it as with an enemy. A very long, low, red house, mostly one tall storey; not frightening in itself.

She had not come to visit, only for this looking; she had not known that until now. This confrontation.

Yes, it had power over her even now. But she stared it out.

Then walked briskly back to Mertz village, trusting that no-one would be met who'd recognise her from past visits. No-one was.

Back in Dusseldorf, another hotel, and not quite unfamiliar food.

She went on the next day, and several others. She cannot quite remember her route. At times she went to bed not knowing what language it was that people outside the hotel were speaking. Danzig, Warsaw (ten days there, being in a capital was somehow reassuring) and finally, Prague.

By then her period ought to have come. It had not. A result of the difficulties of travelling? 'The change' somewhat early? She gave that little thought.

'But -- Christ! -- Em! What did you doooo all that time?' Pask almost wailed, drawing out the 'do' like an owl's too-whoo almost. Dave was there; he wanted to know also.

Not without amusement at the effect she was to have, Elaine spoke words which were like pan-sizzling sausages splitting. Which, she explained, meant that she had learned to speak Czech like a Prague native. She'd also learned how to drive a car, which byte of info she offered with a grin, because everyone (including herself) had assumed she was incapable of it. Also, she'd read a bit, gone to the theatre and concerts sometimes, visited big churches and art galleries, the sort of thing most visitors do, though she had taken no great pleasure in those things. And had listened to the radio; more and more as the language became clear.

She'd gone on with Yoga at first, but had gradually given it up as she got bigger. She was sure that she had become less clumsy, despite that. Towards the end, getting bigger in itself had become almost a full-time occupation. And she'd seen doctors and midwives, of course. There weren't any complications, despite her age and the hard time she'd had with Pask, though she'd half-expected there would be, she'd been told sixteen-odd years before that it was unlikely she'd ever have another baby; of course she'd had to be reassured, and not just once either. But there were only the usual difficulties, she said; neither of her hearers fully understood her there, neither felt inclined to ask her to explain further.

This interview (a pompous word, but it felt like that) was when Em had been back about a fortnight. In their main sitting room, (Tom calls it 'the drawing room') where there is a picture of one of Pask's Gritnall relatives as Lord Mayor of somewhere-or-other, Dave was noticing, and (protected by a heavy glass case) Tom's model of a Tudor warship. Pask now, as almost always when they met, was dandling Bro. You'd have thought he was sewn on her knee! David felt jealous. Every ninety seconds or so she would half suffocate the child with kisses, overwhelmed by passion which always seemed to her an astonishment, though Bro appeared not surprised at all.

'You two ought to see Prague. It's very interesting,' Elaine said, though without going on to say anything particularly interesting about it; she was good at observing people, but not places. 'I suppose you saw the card I sent your grandmother, David?'

'Yes.'

'So did I,' Pask said, dragging attention from the baby diddle diddle diddle, attempting to put over her resentment that the sole communication in so long an absence was not to her, Em's child, but she failed, because 1. her general happiness now she was a sister overbore it, and 2. even the new, refurbished, much-improved version of Elaine can be obtuse sometimes, 'she's not one for taking hints much', as Lize says.

'Imagine - ' Elaine is going on, ' Well, I don't know about acres, but a huge area, two miles across or even more, and it's full of palaces, grand churches, castles, opera houses, big squares and so forth, even the town library is ornate. There wasn't any war damage, remember Chamberlain just let the Nazis walk in, and it's all been lovingly preserved, this central part, even through the long Communist times, stone by stone just as it ever was, and redecorated every inch, even the gorgeous-boastful coats of arms of the princely families tricked out all in gold and blood red. But the same government has ringed round this splendid-sumptuous old town with five times the size of it, scores or even hundreds of jerry-built faceless blocks like the worst sort of council flats, all grey and cheap and shutting each other's light out. And mostly so overcrowded inside, I heard, that even newly married couples are lucky to get a curtained-off half of a bedroom to themselves.

'I was allowing myself fifty pounds a week, which made me almost rich, the general standard of living was so low. It was dipping into capital, of course, and that's the thing you're always told you must never do, even that it's more wicked than murder. But I thought, what is money for if not to spend. At that rate I could live, I reckoned, o, years and years....no, I didn't really think how long I was going to live there and like that. See, I was trying to free myself, but I didn't know from what and that made it specially difficult to begin.'

She was quiet for a moment, then went on. 'So I'd promoted myself to being rich, by local standards. But I couldn't go on living in hotels - too impersonal. I met this man -- no, it was nothing like that, he was one of those who likes to practise his English -- and he it was who addressed the ppc to Bessie for me. And through him I got introduced to a Protestant clergyman and his wife. She was an infants teacher, which I'd begun to train for myself. They'd got an apartment in the old city which had belonged to her father; apparently even under Communism there were some things you could inherit. It was only two-bedroomed, not large, but in a very heavily built stone block, and all their furniture there was old and hard-wearing. Their younger son had just moved out. He'd graduated at 'Charles', which is what they call their university for some reason....Now some things change a lot and some things don't change at all if you go a thousand miles from home, and one of the ones which doesn't change, not at all, is that teachers and ministers of religion and such are very badly paid, or think they are, which is much the same thing, so they were living in superior accomodation to most people's, but otherwise hard-up, respectable and what used to be called shabby-genteel.

'It took about three weeks of edging towards it, negociation, inviting them to the hotel restaurant, going for meals in their home -- I let my vegetarianism slip rather, I didn't want to be an awkward guest. The Reverend Doctor spoke English quite well in a way, but very much out of the grammar book, stiff, no flow to it, and his wife, a more spontaneous person, not at all. Anyway, I proposed to them that I should come and live in their flat and rent the spare bedroom and learn their language from them, and they thought about it for a while, I think they, and especially he, thought that having a lodger was common, but eventually I did do just that...'

Dr Minister, she said, was a scholar. There were books everywhere, many of them very big, Greek and Hebrew many of them, about religion, probably. Mrs was more practical. Both thoroughly decent in their plain way, they never tried to foist their beliefs on her.

He was very tall and very thin, looked as if he never ate, ate like death in fact and his table manners were surprisingly uncouth, Mrs was plump and cheerful and a good cook in her country's fashion, though what she put on the table was strange at first. 'They don't have turkey for Christmas, but carp! and that sort of change takes an awful lot of getting used to, much more than you'd think, much more than a different language, even, which I found to my own surprise I picked up pretty quickly'. Sometimes it took all of the wife's ingenuity to 'make do', there were unforeseen shortages of all kinds of things, even bread.

But Elaine hadn't been living there long before, to her great embarrassment, she was violently sick one morning. There was only one loo in the flat, and Dr Minister was in it at the time. She made quite a mess, and it was before their charwoman arrived too -- very awkward, yet forgettable. But the next morning the same thing happened, much the same time too, but fortunately that time the loo was free. She'd opened the little window afterwards, but she couldn't disguise paleness and a slight weepiness.

This time Mrs had patted Elaine's stomach knowingly, she'd smiled a lot, and her foreign guest - not at her best, feeling and no doubt seeming somewhat 'thick' - had grinned and nodded. Mrs, carrying on smiling, had folded her arms, held them away from her body and moved them from side to side.

As if she were doing the hornpipe! Elaine thought irritatedly. Why??

And then she saw. Mrs thought she was going to have a baby!! Why, how ridiculous! She denied it by nodding her head vigorously. But Mrs put out her hand to Elaine's wedding ring and looked her calmly in the eyes.

'What ought to have happened hadn't. I thought it was the upset and travelling the long distance. Stress. But I went on being sick in the mornings, so I had to think, yes, well, that could be the explanation, yes. It wasn't impossible, I won't say more than that. So after a while they found me an English-speaking GP to do the tests. Now when I was told that I was going to have you, Pask, I was pleased, but this time round it was more bewildering than anything. But it was still early days, he said, they could get rid of it for me if I liked.' (Here Pask interrupted, shouting, 'O no, no, no! Bro, Bro, Bro!!' and hugging him greedily.) 'I won't say I didn't consider it, stuck abroad as I was, and not yet able to speak the language yet. But I thought, no, it'll be something of my very own, a souvenir of past times, that was really what my answer no meant, or seemed to.

'You see, at that time I'd got the fixed idea that I wasn't coming back to England ever, or at least not to Gritnell's, it's only recently I've begun to think of it as home, and as for my relations in Germany, for various reasons I certainly wasn't going to go to them!' (This last word she pronounced with a certain contempt.) 'And I felt at the time even passionately that I wouldn't ever be in contact with you lot in Belker again.'

Here Pask looked so very hurt that Elaine back-tracked and said, 'Now I'm not saying that was right, to feel that, I mean, it's just that was how I was feeling then. Matter of fact. Later I came to feel differently. Well, obviously I did.'

'But WHY, Em, WHY?' Pask wailed. 'Why did you feel that? Was it something we'd done?'

'No', Elaine answered, drily here. 'It was rather something that you - both of you - hadn't done.' She added no more; to Dave, so recently a child, she appeared at that moment for the first time truly adult.

She didn't, or not at this point, anyway, reflect upon whether there were not also faults in her.

'I must ask you to comprehend imaginatively' - she had developed a liking for long words while away - 'that, yes, I was in a sense unbalanced, mentally. But the first stage towards recovery when you are unwell is always to realise that you are ill. And, you know,' she added calmly, it is I who have changed through my absence, not you or your father, nor the house itself, or not much.'

She had more physical energy than she used to have, Dave observed, though she was cunning enough to let Pask be a fashion of unpaid nanny and do most of the work of the baby. Later on Dave was to observe that Bro got himself teeth, stood, walked, spoke - rather a lot - and even finally was got out of nappies, every step in this ordinary process or progress lauded by his awed sister, as if no other child ever had; (eighteen years later he was to go to a provincial university to study electrical engineering.)

'No, I really was unhappy those first months with the Ministers. A lot of the feelings of unhappiness I'd had which were like vague aches before, now emerged and hit me around as if I'd been bashed with clubs.

'I'd spend a lot of time in the bedroom, with my outdoor coat on - there wasn't much heating - sitting on my calves on the bed, not thinking, nor certainly even feeling clearly, just letting emotions sweep over me or past me...

'And the Ministers showed their real good will by not trying to jolly me out of it, just letting me get on with it. No-one can help you much except yourself when you're like this, and it takes time, time, time - things boiling up in me...'

Her retelling that, even healed, in that tragic house, what was it helping to awaken?

'There was something too which though in no way my fault I was carrying with me, something heavy. Not wrong that I had done -- I don't believe much in conscience -- rather wrong that had been done to me, which I needed to erase, or forgive. NOT MY FAULT!' she added loudly. 'And yet I had to bear the consequences, I had to get rid of it. And I did, I have. Well, almost. No, ' she adds after a while, 'I will not particularise.'

Now, while Elaine was turning over in her mind (and over), in the semi-darkness of her mind, I should have said, the practical-spirited Mrs Minister, who, Elaine perceived, though kindly and patient, had little real tolerance for such introspection, was begging or buying cheaply from her husband's congregation, from the younger members, that is, clothes, blankets, nappies, safety pins and all the hundred and more things infants need. These half-filled a solid chest of drawers in some dark wood, triangular in plan, and with gently curved sides, which they put in Elaine's room; it held a lot, even if it looked funny. The Ministers' elder son, Elaine thought she understood (though nothing was said) was homosexual, the younger was not yet established in any profession so unlikely to marry yet. The older woman -- yet not so very much older than herself, after all at her age Elaine could just about have been a grandmother -- could busy herself usefully and agreeably much as if Elaine was a cherished daughter-in-law. The learned doctor took only a benevolent and distant interest; after all, these were women's matters and therefore not important.

By the way, Pask did not much relish the memory of her grandmother Elaine's mother, Elvira I think her name was. 'Not a lady,' Pask said to me once, expecting me to understand; I'm not sure I did. Narrow in imagination, I gathered she was, another time - rigid ideas. Social behaviour was all Elaine learned from her -- how actions would be reflected in the minds of family or neighbours who apparently had nothing else whatever to reflect upon. Tiresome. On the other hand, she was a good cook and made her own dresses, which she called 'frocks'.

Elaine's father, 'the old gentleman' as people call him now, very rarely went away from home, and yet was always absent, living in his art. When he began to be moderately successful the pair were moderately prosperous, for which Elvira was quite as ungrateful as she had been critical of earlier poverty.

In the barn next door Seydell-Mertz crafted out of Belinda nudes something like Vernier's or Russell Flints in their innocent voluptuousness (though he was not a painter of their standing.) Elvira did not permit Elaine to see them, but of course she did. She was an only child, knew little of boys except that they were rough and noisy, and, worst, that they would become men. Men, like other foreigners, were tiresome rather than interesting, her mother taught her, though sometimes comically tiresome.

Not all Elaine's liveliness was squeezed out by her father's faintly benevolent neglect and her mother's wrong sort of care. She began to enjoy her secondary school. She was actually moderately popular there; some of her class -- Katharine, her friend now, wasn't one -- enjoyed her skill at imitating the teachers. And there was - then! nearly thirty years before -- a wit about her, a suggestion of daring, even though she never openly defied authority.

The child's body was turning into a woman's naturally. This her mother saw as a sad and pitiable thing, a misfortune to be spoken of as little as possible, as nearly shameful.

Yet it was interesting, fascinating, frightening sometimes, to have these new bits and feelings and to see or perceive that others had them too, With them came a new awareness of the visual; it was not just boys and men, it was every person or object whose shape and colour were now vivid. But the famous artist's daughter could not draw.

Education then was almost entirely passive, and passively resisted. The yesterday's-overboiled-cabbage-smelling school had grey chipped corridors and scrawled-over desks; it had high classrooms chilly despite their thick horizontals of heating pipes, and darkish despite their high long windows (each of which had involved metal apparatus for opening and closing such as you would imagine sufficient to steer a liner.) It was not a place to which anyone went cheerfully. The work given was at best taken as a duty, a bite chomped from spare time in which the girls might not do anything else particularly but yet had a sense of property in it, it was their own nothing. The most admired teachers were those who were cunning and cruel, the most admired pupils were those who were cunning and cruel, even devilishly, to those who were not; this long-settled and long-unquestioned injustice (it was very like the Roman Church in Spain about 1550 in the account of the most bigoted English-Protestant historian) had all mangled and mixed up in it a great deal of the usual blather about fairness, sportsmanship, decent behaviour and so on. At least no-one mentioned beauty, not once, never, in all those seven years. (That was then; I have been asked to point out that things are completely different nowadays.)

Among the various subjects Elaine half-learned was German. Her father she barely knew. He was lovely, he was as huggy as a teddy bear - sometimes, he was frightening as a grisly - now and then, he was like the sun, he had all sorts of crazy ideas, amusing but impractical, which came to nothing, or very little. She would no more have dreamed of asking him to help with her German than -- o, what is fantastic enough comparison? --- of asking Jesus to help with her RE. Heinrich left not only the day-to-day running of his daughter's life to her grey mother, rather almost every aspect of her life.

Theirs was not one of those noisily quarrelsome houses; the mother and father were usually at odds, but almost silently. Elaine as a child inclined to her mother's side, as a teenager to her father's. I suppose he was over-sexed.

Her teachers were women, all but one; some of them had husbands, but chose not to seem to. Elaine vaguely and uninterestedly assumed that she herself would marry, because most women did. She was not a high flyer who would go to university, she was not a low flyer who would type in an office, she had to be either a nurse, her schoolmistresses assumed, or herself a teacher, though at half-despised junior schools.

Elvira was interested in helping with the ever-present (and almost purposeless?) homework, though not in practice helpful. Elaine wanted to get it done quickly rather than well. She wanted to 'get by' without drawing unfavourable attention to herself, or even favourable; she had observed this much, that schools love to make both heroines and villains, and cast both roles badly.

She had begun to make comparisons with other pupils' homes which were not in her own home's favour; she wished she was normal.

And she often went to see her cousin Madge. In early childhood when their mothers, who were sisters, visited each other frequently, the two little girls had been compelled to play together, little in common though they had except half their grandparents and being roughly of an age. Nowadays the mothers are not as close (no wonder; one of them is dead) but Elaine, conservative by nature, used in her teens to visit Madge often - and, indeed, often uninvited or unexpected. What was good in her in this was that her loyalty to her cousin, once given, would not be withdrawn; what was bad was that she did not see her clearly, as one not worthy of such devotion, 'cheap', 'common' or whatever, sometimes pettily vindictive, sometimes unwilling to be polite enough to cover boredom.

Madge, an only child too, had had good parents. They kept an ironmongery. They were always welcoming, they were always good-natured, though often busy, on a visit the sheer number and unexpectedness of the goods they sold was always entertaining. They lived above and behind the shop, and the wooden ceiling of their downstairs rooms was the floor of the upstairs ones. They agreed together about everything. (Everything? Well, they only had only one idea: to make as much money as possible, yes, but openly and honestly, by hard work and fair dealing. Intellectuals they weren't; they voted Tory.)

Elaine liked to show off to her schoolfellows. She mimicked the teachers; I repeat this because she repeated it. She liked it that her father was well-known, at least in the immediate area, and there was something - in her own eyes, anyway - of glamour in being descended from her country's so-recent enemies. But to Madge she revealed another facet - solitary, uncertain, nervous. Madge, envious of her (she had passed the 11+ and Madge had not), took upon herself in relation to Elaine thew role of adviser, confidant, almost dictator; 'if I were you, I'd....'

Now what we all want in our confessors, I don't mean just priests and such, I mean anyone to whom we pour out our hearts, is discretion, silence, etc., 'the seal'. Madge in effect broke it.

Elaine when back home had learned that in all those months' absence Madge had not once 'phoned Tom to see if there was news of her, not once, can imagine her justifications, she has a business to run, the customers don't see a quarter of the work she does really, etc. etc. She will not resume this intimacy.

(Why did she, at first reluctantly, then at last yearningly, want, after all, to return? She scarcely knows herself. Love? Duty? Habit?)

Elaine has had always a fixed notion, of an eighteenth-century kind, that it is your own family that you must seek your closest friends. Nowadays -- even though Vee-Vee is amazed she does not show it -- she seeks often the company of her sister-in-law. They are near neighbours, after all, and now that Elaine has her own car, how easy to drive down less than a mile to the farmhouse so that the baby can see his aunt? And how easy, for someone of her own talents, to alter her vowels so that they are unremarked by Vee-Vee.

Who has indeed too-rigid ideas about all sorts of matters, instilled in her by her own mother first, and later by the Anglican nuns who were her schoolmistresses, who like herself trembled on the edge of being high-born. Vee-Vee has often appeared unkind, even inhumane, in participating in an unfortunate English tradition of making humour out of social differences. Yet underneath she is kind, she loves babies, she has had four of her own; now teenagers, they are away more than half the year, preparing, as is right, for when they will be away nearly always.

Vee-Vee cuddles Harry to her generous breasts and makes goo-goo talk. She finds the new version of Elaine surprisingly conversible, and, as I said, approved of her father when they met. Tom she thinks a dry stick, yet a gentlemanly kind of dry stick.

And something might be made of Pasqueline, who is young enough to change, thinks Vee-Vee, who, always mindful of social duties as Pask herself is mindful of them sometimes, always enquires of her from her mother, rather however out of politeness than with warmth. A little awkward, Vee-Vee finds her; she cannot gently impose herself on her company and so lead their talk where she wants it to go, and yet she cannot fully hide her irritation or even boredom when others speak of what doesn't interest her.

Intelligent enough. Pretty enough. Good hair and skin. What she needs to civilise her wholly is a boy-friend from a decent family, and for that boy's parents to take a kindly as-it-were teacherly interest in her. But that young man is not to be one of her own sons, over and apart from the objection that they are cousins (and certainly they have shown no inclination that way); no, her boys will find grander mates. And her own daughters -- the younger has inherited the bosom which twenty years past made one other of the Young Conservatives say that Vee-Vee in a low dress was the sight most of all worth seeing in all of tourist-crawling Demnetshire -- no, she would not encourage a close friendship with her. But how well Pask speaks, coolly and clearly and purely, like Vee-Vee herself, not as her own daughters do because it is thought fashionable to seem to be ashamed (though of course they are not) of seeming -- horrible word! -- 'posh'.

So Elaine visits Vee-Vee often now, and is welcomed, though the two families do not mix much, only on semi-formal occasions. The two brothers look very different: James, like his father James before him, is almost six feet high, enormously strong and has the proportions of a professional wrestler. He has to pay very expensive tailors to disguise this resemblance. Tom, the younger by only just over a year, is much the same height though appears much taller, being slim. Once he was good at athletics and tennis. He looks far more like their half-Scots mother --Annegrandmother, Pask as a toddler called her, and still does -- who is nowadays granny-flatted in the new extension to the old farmhouse.

There is a contrast of temperament between the two brothers also. Tom, despite a theoretical knowledge of farming which is becoming rapidly out of date, is principally a man of the indoors, lives mostly in his thoughts, reads a lot. James, who relishes being rich, is or seems to be 'matey'; when there is any especially hard work to be done on his farm he will go out with his men, not just direct them but outwork them too, share cider and sandwiches with them, talk dialect sometimes, piss in the hedge like them; 'Boss' they call him always, do not mislike him, yet fear him a little.

Now Tom, less outgoing, never frightened anybody; it might have been better for him if he had -- no, of course it would have. Well, his self-effacement may be due to being the younger brother, 'spare' not 'heir.' Maybe his whole manner of meeting people owes a great deal to his having been brought up, to a great extent, by his fierce aunt. (His manner towards her, a relative once said of him when he was not present, really was not intended as 'sucking up'; no, said another cousin who was there, that's what makes it sucking up.) And why genealogize, why undust the cobwebby reaches of dead family? Maybe because he was not quite 'chums' with his living parents? And what of his religious beliefs, in which he is alone among modern-day Ferraces? Was it fear, prudence, rather than love, they asked. (No, it wasn't.)

But it is odd to have grown up as a very frequent visitor to a house where one of his close or closish relatives was murdered, even though never was it spoken of save at great need. And to own it now -- it is nearly twenty years -- and avoid thinking of it. But WHY? he might ask, but doesn't. Why should anyone so unharmful, as innocent, as mildly talented, as nearly useless, as dull even, as Cousin Hetty have been 'done in'? How could a sensible, decent, ordinary woman such as she have inspired violence, hatred?

No explanation.

He has, not by accident, left her out of the abbreviated pedigree displayed in the hall.

Except for the first few days, his spirits have not risen since his wife came back. He does much less voluntary work now, drinks somewhat more of 'Ferrace's First' and other alcohol than he used to. He seeks to be alone (in a big house, that is only too easy); he broods, though he could not say afterwards exactly upon what.

Not, generally speaking, upon sexual matters, and yet....he knows that Alyss's 'boyfriend' or 'partner' moved out of their co-owned flat a half-year ago. He -- Tom -- helped her then, mainly by recommending a lawyer, yet another cousin, to help her or them disentangle the complications. Yes, with his wife missing and possibly dead he thought now and then that he might replace this Sean. And indignantly dismissed such thought, which after a while came again. Partly because Alyss, fifteen years or so younger than he, has 'career prospects' which will surely take her away from Demnet. No, he admires Alyss's beauty as he might admire that of Bishoprick Cathedral (he tells himself), free of any desire to possess it.

He has never been lustful, he thinks, pouring himself another half-pint of ale, and contriving to forget at this moment entirely what happened in the garden not fifty yards away seventeen years back. Yes, even in his late teens (he tells himself, and it is partly true) young women who were his contemporaries felt safe with him. It was good to feel trusted.

Mollie. What happened to Mollie?

He starts, visibly. She was nineteen, he sixteen, when they first knew each other. Therefore Mollie, presumably still alive, must now be forty-three. He reacts to this simple arithmetic with shock and something near disgust; he tastes forty-three as if he were still himself sixteen -- an immense heavy accumulation of lentative time. He sees Mollie now in his memory as she was then, fashionably dressed and hair-styled and made-up, and how odd those fashions now look!

But what happened to her, where is she now? She was the previous GP's daughter, there are records of such people, as no-one knows better than a genealogist...but if she no longer wishes to be known it would be graceless to try to find out. And she probably assumes, if she thinks of him even at all, that he lives still where he was rooted.

He kissed her once. Just once, but o how sweet! He was eighteen then or almost nineteen, between school and Oxford (or was it a year later? certainly it was summer.) They had gone walking together in the Bishop Wood - but how that walk had begun, where they had met, whether in someone's house by chance or by invitation or arrangement or in the street, that has gone from memory.

He remembers her now that day as being very smartly dressed in black to contrast with her fair hair -- too smartly for a country walk, maybe he is fusing in memory two different meetings. Yes, thick, shiny golden-blonde, slightly wavy hair down just below her shoulders...

There were several things worrying her that day. She needed to talk about them to someone and he was usefully there. They walked miles together, and she talked -- it was good to be so trusted, and yet (he realises now, did not then) he was sad that he was not rated as rival to the young men in her confession.

She was right to trust him; he has scruples even yet about calling to mind what she actually said, 'Yes, I knew it was wrong, while I was doing it, I mean, and yet, in those circs, it seemed fated. What else could I have done?' (Even in youth he had the wisdom not to try to answer this.)

No, he had listened, and said almost nothing. Strange that he never thought seriously about being a priest.

Eventually, she had become quiet. They were climbing a hill, almost bare except for a few trees right at the top, called 'The Tump' locally. Can she really have been wearing black that day? He remembers her exclaiming 'Let's rest!' and throwing herself down on her back.

He'd sat down more carefully beside her and pointed out landmarks. One could see twenty or thirty miles from there on a clear day, and it was a clear day, to the power station on the coast at Instridge, so huge that it was visible even so far away, standing in a great sweep of bay. When he'd been at school, he told her, he and a friend one half-term had walked from home down through Demnet and North Devon as far as Bude, the first village in Cornwall, staying in hostels and b-and-b's, and afterwards hitch-hiked back. They'd kept mostly to coastal paths, he says. (It strikes him now, almost a quarter of a century on, that Mollie had not found that very interesting. He had not said that from lonely beaches his friend would swim naked, though he would not.)

By now, having walked today far further than they had intended, as far as they had intended anything, Mollie and he were wishing that they had brought something to drink. They went back much more quietly by the reverse of their path out, surprised they had been away so long.

When they parted, at the house door round the corner from the surgery, he had said, with a strange authority which at that time had seemed perfectly natural, 'It will all come all right. I promise you that it will.' And added, 'Now I will kiss you' as if that was to prove it.

She'd held her beautiful face up to him as if obediently and they'd touched lips. They had met again after that, but not often, and only when others were there, and when they had they had spoken only casually...

Yes, when he was a young man girls -- young women -- of his own sort had always regarded him as kind, pleasant, conversible, rather than as glamorous, sexy, dangerous. This middle-aged man (and in his soul he has never been anything different) is not regretting this. Her lips were full, rather dry, her lipstick had tasted faintly soapy, later it had a little stained his handkerchief. Her lips against his, so gentle and warm -- how long? a few seconds only, the slight soapiness in his mouth -- My God! It is there still!

And, shocked by the force of the illusion, Tom lowers his long nose into the beerpot and takes a long swig.

Such reflection, remembering mostly, imagining a little, self-congratulation partly and just tinctured with regret, sentimentality almost, certainly appears harmless enough. Yet what black darknesses are there deep and occult in that ancient house founded and built on blood which may be stirred to wakefulness by them, and once stirred out of sleep, brought further on the path to action? What moves them? O, once they are near to waking, almost anything will do!

Now Dave, like most teenagers, perhaps, and, even more like most clever teenagers, was concerned mainly for himself, No 1, but not after all entirely; he was not in love with Pask, and did not dream that she was in love with him, but he 'was fond' of her and, to a lesser extent, of her parents too. So he hoped that 'Bro' -- 'Baby S. Nappyfiller, Esquire' as he called him privately -- would help their all relationship. This was indeed partly the case.

Elaine appeared to him a normal and not very interesting woman apart from her ventures into vivid story-telling ('Swonderful. The way she dooze them voices!' as his late gran said.) And he saw clearly enough that these three lived beside and around each other, they didn't fully cohere as a family, in that big, draughty, chilly, and mostly shabby old-style mansion. He quietly mocked the idea of there being ghosts there, of course; that was the kind of thing owners of old houses felt obliged to say. Besides that, there is of course no such thing, though that business a while back of the especially cold spot on the landing was odd, no-one could dispute.

The three's 'dynamic' had subtly changed, he noted ~ Elaine-II wasn't bossy even now, but a woman who had travelled thousands of miles by herself had resources of self-reliance, she was listened to, she no longer nearly always agreed with Tom, Tom who, like many quiet-spoken people, did not himself realise how stubborn and self-centred he could be.

Appointed by her a fashion of older brother, David advised or as she would say nagged Pask; she was intelligent enough to do better at her A-levels than she seemed likely to, she really must work harder, she needed to 'get her qualifications' as the inexpressively vulgar phrase has it. She would not take things seriously enough, he thought, and because her ancestors had been rich, though her parents were not (this reason he kept to himself) she had an attitude of 'entitlement'. James Ferrace's side of her family, as I have said, had annoyed him the only time he met them as a group; they probably couldn't have avoided seeming arrogant to someone like him even if they had tried, though he was sure they hadn't.

Having easy money through inheritance underpropped all the James Ferrace lot said or thought or did. Pask, he thought (wrongly, by the way) took a similar stance but had no money - she'd soon have to earn her living like very nearly everybody does.

Therefore she couldn't afford to amuse herself by being half-idle now, that was just-turned-eighteen Dave's opinion. My Christ, she'd say, and giggle, he was so boring and serious nowadays, what the FXXX would he be like when he's forty?

No, nothing seemed to interest her except music and mocking him gently. They'd be working together and she'd be finished before him (long before) and then she'd twist herself round so that she was sitting half-slumped or half-lying down and her head would come between him and his book or notes and she'd stick her tongue out or make kissy movements with her lips or screw up the rest of her face in towards her nose or shake her thick dark-reddish hair about, and, yes, it was all very charming in a puppy-doggy sort of way, but also annoying, it suggested she has an IQ of about 40 which isn't at all the case. (Although of course she is not as clever as he.)

Sometimes he'd let himself be distracted for a minute or two, sometimes he'd just wave in a dismissive fashion and turn away. ('Jee! Suss! Some-Times You're Re-ah-lly Bor!Ing!' she'd say in that way she had then of emphasising each separate syllable.) One way or another, however, she'd be obliged to find something else to do, quietly not to disturb him. Mayhap she likes him partly because he can be stubborn rather like her dad.

Other occasions, mind, he'd take her out for tea in a tea shop, or something like that. Once when he did she surprised him by saying, 'I wish my father was more like yours.'

What? he thought. Dads was a very accomplished workman, true, but in other respects -- though he'd punch anyone else who said so -- a bit of a dunce. If there's ever a thought in Alf's head apart from where the next beer's coming from it must be pretty lonely all on its own-ee-oh, is Dave's opinion. Tom is a professional man, he was at Oxford, though only for some footling Arts degree, he can converge and diverge: articulate.

Sometimes Dave lacks what Jane Austen calls 'advantage of manner'. 'What d'you mean?' he asked, fork half-way to his mouth, in the same tone as if he'd said 'what the devil d'you mean?'

'Your father, he's restful. He's always calm, and that makes other people calm round him. He's content, doesn't want things to be different.'

'What you're really saying is that Dads is unimaginative, unstimulating.'

'Christ! My bloody father isn't all that fucking exciting!' she replies. (I'm sorry about the rude words [especially 'Christ' which some will think the rudest word of all], I've just got to repeat what she said.)' 'But he speaks three languages...' 'Yes, and he's a pain in all three!' ' I don't think you're being quite fair.' 'Well, maybe not,' (a rare concession, this) 'but -- I suppose it's something to do with his church stuff or voting Liberal or something -- he's too bloody aware of all the things wrong with the world, he's sort-of carrying them and worrying about them lots of the time -- and he wants to put the whole bloody kerfuffle right and he knows he can't do anything much, he's just a nobody in a far-off village, it gets him down, that and other things, he's a born worrier, my God! it suits him to be in the insurance business, it's his very job to worry -- and all this worry gets him down, it even explains these dreadful colds he gets twice a year, I'm sure it does, your dad's a lot healthier. Well, isn't he?'

(True -- Alf had never spent a day in bed; he'd never got up early either.)

She went on (and on, more or less repeating herself, as one does) and blaming her father for a fault, if it is a fault, which was soon to be in her also. 'Look, I can't be doing with it, as Annegrandmother would say. All that worry. I'm sure it's always there. Even when outwardly he's quite cheerful. I can't take responsibility for earthquakes and famines and that kind of thing just because I'm not Jesus. It's down to Him. If he exists, I mean. What can we do about it? Fa's too bloody conscientious...'

'You can swap if you like. My dad's said nothing worth remembering the past eighteen years, and probably not for the twenty-two before that, and I don't imagine he'll start today. And he drinks too much, the whole village knows...' (The whole street, anyway. Now Alf is not a drunkard, but late at night when the others are in bed he's often unsober enough to have difficulty finding the keyhole, even though there's a streetlamp ten feet away which lights it.)

'All this pubbing shows he's friendly and sociable, doesn't it?' Pask says, very generously considering she's a teetotaller herself. 'He goes to the "Blackman" and sees his friends, he buys them drinks, they buy him drinks, and they all talk together. He's not a solitary like Fa.'

This pulled Dave up. Yes, Dads/Alf was out almost every evening. It was nearly certain he was 'up pub' and nearly certain that this, dull though it sounds, was what happened there. But it struck Dave that he didn't actually know that, see? He'd never been with him in the evening, only once or twice at dinnertime, and when Pask and he had met there a few months back they'd been in the lounge bar and Alf -- presumably, though they hadn't seen or heard him -- had been in the public one.

Pask went on, 'Fa's always been inclined that way, but recently he's got far too keen on being by himself. Either I didn't realise it developing, even more, I mean, while Em was away, or I thought it decorous' -- Linda-at-school's favourite word -- 'I mean, if a man's wife's not around and he doesn't know where she is and he sits around a lot brooding by himself, why, that's how it ought to be. But it's still going on now she's come back, and it's not right, it's not right, there're so many things he's just given up, all that fiddle-faddling model-making for one...I tell you, David, he's losing track?'

'What's that mean?' he said, his mouth half full, he'd started eating again by now.

'He's not himself.'

'Oh. Who's he being, then?'

'Don't be gratuitously thick, it doesn't become you.'

Then they pause for a moment, and laugh, both seeing that she has again used one of Linda-at-school's favourite phrases. (More about that lady -- no, she's not a lady, quite, later on. Perhaps.)

'You know exactly what I mean,' she resumes. 'He's behaving out of character. He used to be so much more...well, active.' In saying this she didn't perhaps allow enough for the shock, however pleasant, of becoming a father again when settled into middle age. Dave thought privately that she was expecting more from her father, and too from the New Brother alias Miracle, than was reasonable. She thought (he thought) that Harry -- a baby, for goshakes! -- would make Everything Come Right, that the Time of Healing was Accomplished; it wasn't, or wasn't quite. Or if it was going to be it would take years, decades, even centuries, far more time than so recent an adult as David could imagine or feel.

Yet instinct or observation (and love too, let's not forget love) made his daughter right about her father Tom -- a man already beginning to look forward to his pension, and now having to think, as such people obsessively do, about school fees and how they are to be scraped up.

Tom was not going to confide in teenagers, if anybody; he may have spoken to this Benedick vicar chap, I don't know. He was one who because of conventions of restraint and good breeding had always appeared to be calm, but was he, deep down? But what symptoms did he have of the coming crisis? He worked effectively all day, in the evenings he did a bit of light reading, watched television, spoke to his family, wasn't alone anything like as much as Pask thought, at the weekends if it didn't rain he did some gardening -- so many spend their free time like that. It's not a purposive way of filling up your hours, but wicked or evil or exploitative?

-- Well!

At least he was no longer often late or very late home. He seemed to have broken off connection with 'good causes'. So he ought to have had more energy, not less. Mind, he did do his share of bathing and nappying and (at that stage) putting to bed. But he was wasting time, often, even when he seemed occupied. Ought he to revise his family tree book? He'd spend part of several evenings looking through folders about it, and then decide, no, he oughtn't. Or what about making a proper list of the hundred or so paintings, etc., still left in the house, their artists, subjects, dates, provenance, etc? Now that would have been a seeming-useful task, and just the kind of thing he used to enjoy doing with a thoroughness completely admirable (or boring) -- but one which he abandoned only hours after it had been started. And then -- this lasted rather longer -- suppose he was to try to turn old Gritnall's life into a novel? It was a 'strong' story -- a man who began with few or no advantages, rather the opposite, finishing so widely respected as a public benefactor, whose generosities in many cases continue today, a local hero. And Tom probably knows more about him than anybody living, besides being descended from him several times over.

Elaine and Pask encouraged him. He spent part of five weekends in succession (though, come to think of it, not very long parts) writing fast in longhand, then one Sunday exclaimed, 'No! It's disgusting!' and, though the wind that afternoon was towards rather than away from the back of the house he made a bonfire especially to destroy what he'd made -- about forty close-written pages.

Which did not burn easily, nor without smoke. Wouldn't the dustbin have done instead? Elaine asked mildly.

Tom felt called upon to make what was, for him, nowadays, a long speech. He explained that he'd been thoroughly shocked (among other things) to discover how little talent he had in that way, and really wanted to be rid of it, finally, completely and for ever. He then stomped upstairs (he very rarely stomped) to have a bath. He seemed very angry, presumably only with himself.

It can't have been a very pleasant bath. Their hot water system, unlike the Dandoes', is erratic, and one of the many rules for working round it is, save in emergency, only to bath in the evening. And who knows that better than Fa? Pask thought. After all, it was he who made these rules.

Tom went about now through a period of what was for him scepticism about religion. He was suddenly inclined to question, not so much the religious view of life, but his long-standing Anglo-Catholicism. (What's that? Church of England with knobs on, someone said, incense and candles and lacey costumes and such.) He read books about Buddhism and Spiritualism and that kind of thing.

This interest, or line of enquiry, was to have a most surprising, and important, indirect consequence later on.

Dave thought glibly -- not regarding Tom's investigation with much (or any) sympathy, that if religion was the answer it must have been a stupid kind of question. Like many, though in this respect he was ill-informed, he saw religion only as the motive for cruelty.

Tom's sampling of other approaches was maybe more suited to Dave's age than his own. For a while he bunked off Sunday High Mass at our parish church St Ethrwulf King and Martyr and went elsewhere. He already liked what he knew about the Society of Friends, or Quakers, esteeming them as much his own sort though with a plainer taste in ceremonial, and when he joined them for their near-silent worship in the next village south it was naive of him to be amazed to find them much as he had imagined; more about them later.

Tom didn't have the same feelings about Spiritualism. He saw its followers as people of little social or intellectual weight (as a good Liberal he would not even think 'ignorant' or 'plebs' but of course that was how he was feeling.) However, prejudice must not hamper exploration.

Their nearest local flock -- he learned from an advt. in the free newspaper -- uses a hall above a closing-down furniture shop at the Bishoprick end of the Sharth-Bishoprick road about a mile on from Madge's pub; it is at the top of a long hill, her pub is at the bottom. (The furniture shop, by the way, has had a 'closing down sale' advertised every week for thirty years now.) Hither went Tom one Sunday. The Quaker meeting-house had been airy, light and clean, almost elegant in a plain and austere way, and it had been designed and built for worship. This however was just a middling-sized hired room in which benches were set out with brown hymnbooks on them; at the front there were some chairs facing forward and a table with flowers in a bulgy brass vase on it, ten yards or so from the only door. Everything was a bit or more than a bit shabby; the worn curtains which helped to make it gloomy were of an uncertain dry material, blackcurrant-juice-coloured, dusty.

The congregation was few. About a dozen women, middle-aged or old, half of them very smartly dressed and made up; the rest men in their sixties. One of these manned the door. He had grabbed Tom's hand and called him 'brother'. His friendliness was obviously sincere. He was smiling, humble, respectable, decent, not very masculine.

After a while another such man and a shabby woman came to the front and the people fell silent. A hymn was sung, familiar enough but with 'Jesus' replaced by 'Goodness' or 'Beauty'. Tom sang softly, not to draw attention to his accent. A man came in late and sat behind him.

There were prayers next, then another hymn, announcements, another hymn, reading from a big book, another hymn, another reading; these passages commended a heartfelt benevolence towards all men and women, girls and boys, mammals, fish, insects, mountains and hills and cliffs and rivers and beaches. Beeches too, trees were included. How could any person of goodwill object? But it was all so very vague! Then yet another hymn.

This took them to where in most services there is a sermon, but instead the thickset woman who had come in with the leader, who up until then had been by herself in the front row, came out by evidently expected invitation (she was named as 'Sister' MacFadeyan) and settled herself in a large round-backed armchair, looking briefly at the others before she went into a manner of coma.

She lolled, her jaw open, her hair loose, her upper lip faintly sweaty, her unfirm buttocks slid across the chair's dusty, slate-blue cushion, not pulling it with them, and her black skirt came up over and past her knees, which fell apart as all her muscles loosened -- a posture which brought to Tom's mind, embarrassingly enough, thoughts which he generally resisted and which, especially, her lack of youth or beauty or elegance otherwise precluded...

...She began to breathe heavily and rather noisily, very slowly; the effect was relaxing. Then she started to speak in a deep voice, like a man; supposedly this was one who had 'passed on', her 'control'.

It ought to have been creepy, hearing a dead man speak. But it wasn't. 'He' relayed at second hand ('Your friend, the one who has crossed the River, he says...') several tritely reassuring messages from the Opposite Bank, where the deceased, you had to infer, lived quite comfortably, though modestly and unpretentiously, very much as you might on holiday at a well-run family bed-and-breakfast place in some unexciting South Coast village, Burton Bradstock, say. One of the oldish men stood up. He seemed to think this message was for himself personally, from his brother Albert who had recently 'abandoned this earth plane', he declared, modestly proud. Other such messages followed; some of them, not all, were claimed as personal too.

These people were gullible, Tom thought. He felt faintly unclean. Yet he did not doubt the 'medium''s own sincerity or belief. She believed absolutely and unamazedly that she was truly In Contact, that the Dead who are by definition silent were speaking through her. And how blase everyone there was, as emotionally moved as if waiting in the rain for a bus!

The man in charge now called Sister MacFadeyan to herself in what were probably ritual words. She stood up, looking dazed, and was helped back to the front row; she did not stand during the final hymn.

She and the leader walked to the back, the others sat and buzzed chat of 'how is your rheumatism now, auntie?' level of banality, their minds probably with the other joints they had left cooking for Sunday dinner.

Tom, mildly embarrassed, decided to go out first. He saw that the leader was offering Mrs MacFadyean a five pound note, which she at first refused.

'Appal! Appal! Appal!' a man spoke loudly. It was a black man in his twenties, a Negro (Tom would have used that word then), handsome, smartly though cheaply dressed, evidently the man who had come in last, who was standing and shouting, 'Appal! Appal! Appal!'

A couple or so of the phlegmatic congregation sparked into interest. 'A prophecy!' they exclaimed. And, believe it or not, settled into their chairs again looking at him.

'Appal! Appal! Appal!' the black man went on shouting -- no, not shouting, but he held attention with as-it-were inbred authority. He had a deep, even musical voice.

No, it wasn't 'appal' he was shouting, but 'a pall! a pall! a pall!' he must have been crying, because he changed now to 'a pall of sin! a pall of sin!' and went on further, 'A pall of sin, a pall of sin, a pall of sin lies over Bishoprick because of the slave trade! A generation, a generation, and it will pass! A pall of sin lies over Bishoprick because of the slaves!'

In mad horror Tom ran out and down the stairs. He stopped on the pavement, flashing his eyes left to a restaurant and shops, opposite to a Methodist chapel whose congregation also were leaving, passing among a group of lounging purposeless teenage girls, (each group very nearly invisible to the other), behind him to a terraced street with a long red secondary school in it, up to a half-blue sky, down to a gutter with ice-cream wrappers, etc. All this looked grey and threatening to him. Worse, men and women going along the pavement began to appear as walking corpses, dead, half-rotten. A caravan passed and its car's driver seemed to have his nose-bone protruding from his decaying skin.

It was an ordinary, even boring, Sunday scene, but to Tom it was a vision of Hell. No-one looked at him.

Until, five minutes later, one did. It was to Tom as if the flesh crept or dripped from its skull and the words it voiced meant nothing. He stared at it, too terrified to run, his mouth bubbling.

What had happened to him? A temporary though strong lunacy. By chance or God's blessing despite it one who knew him was there, and with initiative enough to take control.

She is discreet, Lize, she has never spoken of it. Except to herself, and she has told it like this: 'I'd just been in by bus to see Mother's friend, "Auntie" Millie I'd always called her, and brought her some fruit. She said as usual, "I've bin feeling a bit parky, dear, I always do this time of year"' ('parky' is dialect for unwell) 'and other not very interesting things, but she likes the chinwag and the company and the excuse to get out the best china. I was a bit early for the bus back, fault on the right side.

'And there was this -- looney is the only word! Gibbering. He'd wet himself, yes, and the other thing too. I didn't know who it was, or why he'd got like that, and folk going by were pretending not to see him, in case they felt obliged to offer him help, which wasn't much to their credit. But I really thought I should, though I didn't know how.

'He was obviously too terrified himself to do anyone any harm, so they didn't have that excuse.

'Then I realised it was Tom Ferrace. I'm not sure if that made it worse or better. "It's me, Tom! Lize! Lize Dando, Tom!" I shouted. He took no notice. Well, it wasn't a moment for being polite, so I reached out and took his keys from his trouser pocket, and, God knows what he thought I was doing, he cowered away weakly, but with my right hand I held on tight to his left arm and I waved the keys in front of his face and shouted "Your car, Tom! Where's your car?" quite a few times. I think he felt the keys were some sort weapon, but at last it got through to him and he pulled me very gently to where his old Landover was and I helped him into the passenger seat and started it up. It was raining, just a bit.

"I'd never driven anything that sort before. He was very bad, worse than he had been, looked at me as if I was the Devil, almost, but I strapped him in, and myself of course, and jerked the car out of where it had been parked in on the yellow zig-zags outside the school which don't really apply Sunday mornings. Well, what with his awful state and its being an unfamiliar vehicle and feeling pretty screwed up myself in an ordinary sort way, not anything like poor old Tom of course, I wasn't driving particular well, but I managed. And of course it was hard to think of anything to say, though since he seemed in his mind to be staring at something absolutely horrible, that didn't arise at first. And can you pretend you can't smell? It might be polite, but is it sensible?

'Half an hour the journey was at most. After twenty minutes or so he seemed partly to be recovering, and moaned and covered his face with one hand. "Bad business, Tom," I said as sympathetically as I could. "Very bad business," he replied, seeming to be thinking of something else.

'Well, I turned along the Lane to his house, and wondered whether to leave him at the big front door or the side one to the kitchen, I reckoned he'd want to get into the house unseen if he could. I'd got out of the car with the keys in my hand and he held out his for them in quite a masterful way so obviously he'd decided for himself. Then I walked home.

'He hadn't said "thank you" or "goodbye" or anything. But the day after, no, it was the Tuesday, the day after that, a huge bunch of flowers came for me, which I'd never had before. Or since -- no, not never, that was just the only one time.'

What's happened to poor, dear old Tom? Apart from bad colds sometimes he's been physically healthy his whole life. Mentally too, you'd think. He takes little formal exercise nowadays, but his work (insuring farms, etc.) requires a lot of clambering about. He has recently tended to drink too much, true. He has never smoked, nor taken illegal drugs, nor even known anyone who has. He has never been with a whore. He likes traditional English food (generally) and eats moderately of it. He works hard, or hardish, and -- much more to the point! -- effectively; he knows his job. He leaves earlier than he need for the office in case there are traffic jams. If politeness obliges him to waste time by having after-inspection tea and cake with clients, he scrupulously makes up that time; and is just as scrupulous in not doing unsought-for extra work. They (before Em's disappearance) took wholesome family holidays. He won't 'loll' on a beach, and regards with distaste the opportunities such lolling provides for seeing others near naked; instead there have been semi-active visits to old towns, churches, and to manoirs, chateaux, etc., where, though privately scornful of noble titles, he always addresses the chateleine formally as madame la baronne or whatever. Moderate by taste and temperament and education, disliking equally the greedy and workaholic and the idle and useless, he doesn't deserve what has happened to him.

And yet as so many of us have good cause to remark, one's life and one's deservings have little connection.

So he goes to see our GP Doug Ostlethwaite and gives him a (rather edited) account of what happened, is given a tonic, advice to rest, and stronger advice to avoid going to such assemblies ever again -- Doug is a good friend and a good doctor, generally, but this isn't much use.

Once or twice in the office Alyss has lifted her beautiful wide pale face in his direction, perhaps trying to think out some difficulty arising out of her work, perhaps concerned for him, he doesn't know.

'No, we're not responsible for what our ancestors did. We must bear our own sins, but not theirs,' Tom said to David nearly a year later, which David thought trite enough, adding 'even though if any one of them, even hundreds of years ago, had not existed, we ourselves couldn't possibly be here,' which is a less commonplace thought and maybe tends half to destroy the first one.

David by then, now Bro was communicating, by facial expression at least, found him interesting, even felt affection -- just as well, because Pask so much enjoyed being a nursemaid that he was often brought into his rival's company. Trinity had accepted him, by the way, and given him an exhibition, whatever that is.

Because Dave, at this stage at least, did not have strong physical passions, they remained friends only.

That huge and partly crumbling house, (so many rooms, and none of them comfortable!) if it had been mine I'd have had it knocked down and built either a smaller modern house or --there was plenty of land -- an 'estate'/'development' of twenty or more and grown rich. Tom with his obsessions with history, tradition, genealogy did not even think of this as a rejected temptation. It attracts architectural students occasionally.

There is something...what? brooding or maybe evil about that house -- parts of it, anyway. Has anyone been happy there, I wonder. It -- the house or the malice in it -- not being alive in the normal sense of the word therefore cannot die. It has a horrible patience.

It can observe, it can reckon up weaknesses. It is a guardian; guardian of what? Of itself, mostly. Even Dave who sneers at such things has felt inexplicable unease sometimes in its gloomy corridors.

Now, Tom is a good sort of chap on balance. Nothing spectacular, not saintly. Still hurt by his wife's desertion even though she has given him a son. Still vulnerable; wickedness has an infallible nose for the sensitive, the well-meaning-naive, the innocent, it picks them out, it picks them off. 'There's no justice in this life,' as Bessie used often to say, adding 'yer grandad use to say,' though he never did. Yes, there are people -- things? spirits?? -- who observe kindness in people and then karate-chop them hard and cruel.

'Stress,' Doug Ostlethwaite called it when Tom saw him the third or fourth time, adding 'with a morose relish' -- that was the phrase Tom used retelling it -- 'Don't think I know what I'm doing, because I don't, quite. Come to me with a bruised heel and I know exactly what I'm doing; a bruised soul is different.'

It wasn't depression, really, more a buried sorrow coming to the surface, planted there by the bossy aunt, perhaps. Annegrandmother as a young woman had detested her interference, and had not known how to resist it; first her father then her husband and his relatives had had more power over her than, at the time, and even more nowadays when she looks back (by 'nowadays' I mean at the time I am writing about) seemed just or right. 'I was too much the wee obedient little wifie,' she says, '"the little woman". Not physically, I was taller than my husband James. But I was the moon to his sun ever.

'An outsider too. A towny who'd scarcely been on a horse. And they under their suaveness led on by superstitions older than Adam, even. Just not knowing what they thought everybody knew -- putting your car into neutral over the cattle grid, that kind of thing. They laughed at me, by no means always kindly.

'And if there's ever been a time when "Ferrace" or "Gritnell" even hasn't been a word to conjure with in this little village, they'd forgotten it long since.' (She, I suppose, did not know the original meaning of 'conjure'; look it up.) 'Individually they were just about bearable, though as a group...! And even the aunt who got so much on my nerves, I'll admit, essentially meant well, in tandem with always wanting her own way. No, I yielded to them too much.

'Mind, I was better-looking than any of them, that's what first caught my husband's eye. After a few months of marriage though I was running about after all of them, especially Aunt, almost as much as that poor Hetty who came to such a bad end. And I know that Aunt faced cancer and enormous pain with courage like a major-general's. But her attitude, and they all had it more or less, and of course they'd all been marrying each other for centuries, was: no-one is really good enough for One of Us.

'I've treated my own daughters-in-law better, ye ken.' (Her Scotticisms always seemed put on to me.) 'I was an outsider, though once I'd given James sons I was half accepted, three-quarters, even. And I was beautiful when young -- o dear, I think I've said that already. The sons were my purpose as far as they were concerned; if it wasn't to be one of themselves, then, any unhideous young woman who spoke clearly and didn't chew with her mouth open would have done. So I was nearly accepted in the end. But James's attitude in essentials was just like theirs, I didn't matter much in myself; of course, he liked having sex with me, but any other young healthy woman would have done just as well.

'James -- my husband, I mean, though James my son is much the same, he had strong and forceful and rather limited opinions which weren't half as original as he thought. "A gentleman never complains" was one of his sayings, therefore any objections by me to how things were was "carping" or "whining", "wringing on" or "whinging" or "fussbudgeting" or any of another half dozen of so what-d'you-call-ems, similes' -- she meant synonyms -- 'And I had to take my son, my younger son, who I preferred, I suppose because he looked more like me, up to that big dark house to be swallowed up by it. And it did, it did, it has him still. He loves it, I know.

'And he loved Aunt. Not many people did. She frightened them a little. She loved him too in her way, but it was a greedy way. She had arthritis, and when he was six she'd lean on him and use him like a human walking stick, it was too much to ask; if she'd fallen and broken an arm or a leg, think what he'd have felt! Even at that age, he was conscientious, maybe too much so. And going on and on about the Family, the Family...My own mother and she didn't get on; Mummy used to say, "Roots, roots, she's always talking about roots! That woman ought to take her shoes and stockings off and look at her feet and see that, no, she doesn't have any roots!"

'It's about twenty years since we buried Aunt. But it's as if she's still there in her house, at least for Tom, getting her way still through the house -- somehow or other. I don't go there much, and Pasqueline doesn't come to see me as much as I could wish...

'Look, young man. Free advice! Don't respect the old just for being old. What did Maria ever do or achieve, for goodness' sake? If they've accomplished something, respect them for that, of course, but not just for decades spent cluttering up the earth!' (I nodded agreement, of course, and thought how irritated she would have been if I had not stood up when she came in.)

Anne blamed herself for 'lack of what is called "assertiveness" nowadays'. Not one of Pask's faults. (How English Pask is, despite her foreign blood!) Either personal integrity or sheer whatever-the-government-is-I'm- against-it cussedness made her refuse to do or think or believe anything, anything at all, just because most others did.

She never put herself out to please people, Fa, Dave, Em, Linda, Vee-Vee or her contemporaries and relations generally. From Sharth's point of view her attitude was always verging upon insolence and insubordination, yet never quite over the verge. Dave worried about this.'What're they going to put on your reference when you leave?' he asked. 'Littler bishrics than Lezz's!' she cried in her posh-vulgar way, jerking her shoulders back.

('Bishric' is our local slang for 'breast'.) Dave, though he thought the comparison was all in Pask's favour, all the same was irritated by her frivolity.

But 'Lezz' -- Lisbeth Bubswith -- had much kudos: captain of Girls' Hockey since she was fourteen, and, those of her fellow-pupils who thought about such matters (nearly all) considered, sure to be Head Girl eventually. She was a natural leader, she could appear fair-minded, she could inspire others to do or even exceed their best, she knew how, and whom to wither by judicious sarcasm, she could organise, administer, delegate. Dave respected these qualities in her; Pask said Lezz just had an instinct whose bums it was safe to kick and whose it was best to lick, and would have in any conceivable new situation in later life, she was sure to 'get on' out of school as well as in it, but there was nothing admirable about her except the fatty protruberences on her chest. Pask could be sharp-tongued sometimes, and maybe was a little jealous; you can probably guess the other nickname male pupils had for Lezz. Of course if Lezz has had any 'relationships' she has had the tact not to have them with Sharthians.

'What are you good at, what do you work at, other than your music, I mean?' Dave asked once exasperated.

'I'm first-rate at being me, ' Pask answered dignified.

Now, what is the difference between being fifty-five years old and fifty-seven? Two years, evidently. Such people meet as equals, but when you're just past eighteen, as Dave is now, a sixteen-year-old like Pask can sometimes seem just a kid.

But she was more serious than he allowed. 'O, people at Sharth think -- already! at our age, for God's sake! -- that they have their whole lives sown up:-- A-levels, degree, another one perhaps, good-status job, high salary, promotion to higher status, even more money, work hard, spend sensibly, retire on a good pension into a biggish house in a village like this but smarter, walk the dog...Linda's much like that, I suppose.' 'Won't get rich teaching,' David said. 'O, otherwise then!' Linda, slim, unfashionably dressed, no glasses oddly enough, quick with put-downs, not always a clear explainer, why Pask worried about her so much isn't clear, or isn't yet. Linda was just about the youngest member of staff; eventually she married an older man, the German master, but that's to come.

Sharth indeed had given up on Pask, the teachers, I mean. Whatever credit she'd had to start with as 'founder's kin' was long overdrawn; they thought she'd use her real though limited talent at music to go to 'some sort of college or other' and 'get some kind of certificate or other', they didn't really care. (Oxbridge people can be very snooty about what is not Oxbridge; probably you already know that.)

She held teachers and teaching in low esteem; they hadn't known, or hadn't cared, that she was made a cruel joke of when younger, and they hadn't cared to know or to find out what they could have done about it, except tolerate it and therefore tacitly encourage it. She was absolutely determined never to teach; teachers are superstitious and conformist, she thought, not exactly evil, yet thoughtless and cowardly often, and desirous, almost quietly lecherous, always to be on the winning side; if she were one of them her colleagues would let her be ill-treated, they'd be afaid her bad luck might rub off on them...(I'm telling you what she thought, not saying that I necessarily agree with it.)

All the same, what was she to do when she would leave school, only not quite twenty months ahead? She was most unclear yet.

'No,' she said to Dave. 'If I were to be a teacher I'd probably be so unhappy that I'd top myself. And then what? It wouldn't really solve anything, would it?'

Dave was so shocked to realise that nowadays, unlike when his gran died not very long back, Pask was envisaging some kind of Future Life that he was even less sympathetic than normally. She has very little idea of logical reasoning, he thought but did not say. And the worst of speculating about life after death was that it was very difficult to do without dragging in the notion of G--

For all their partial lack of understanding, each was to look back much later and wonder if there had been in all their lives as good a friend as the other.

Pask was, and is, one whose inner life is (almost) all-important to her. Now Dave is no extrovert; in his whole life he's never given a party, though very occasionally he has gone to one organised by others and found that he has enjoyed it after all, moderately. At Sharth they were always praising the idea of loyalty, but it was always something outside yourself they meant, the Country, the School, etc.; Pask was loyal too, but loyal to her own self -- yes, even although, as is commoner at her sort of age even that at any other, she was not quite sure what that self was (see her dream, or vision, later.) There were good aspects to this. She would never 'suck up' either to equals or superiors to try to get herself rated flavour-of-the-month. And a bad side too; she could be stubborn, obstructive or as Sharthians call it swell-headed.

Her cousins about a mile away had as little to do with her as if she did not exist. Her fellow-pupils with this one exception did not seek out her company. Despite 'Bro', even now she was sometimes lonely.

About this time she grew interested in Socialism, which Dave thought irrelevant. Lize had always been a Labour supporter; she addressed envelopes, delivered leaflets and all that when elections came round, provoking Alf who could never be bothered to go up to vote in the chapel rooms half a mile away to exclaim in seeming concern, 'Haven't you got enough to do already?' This was not however in Lize a political or philosophical conviction, she just felt that the Labour Party had more interest in people like herself. But Pask, briefly, grew eloquent about the Evils and Tyrranies of Capitalism. 'Wrong!' she exclaimed like a rifle shot. 'It's like a crocodile, big and cruel and always lying in wait, hideously ugly and very, very well-armoured.' Dave said how Lize addressed envelopes, etc. 'Useless!' she exclaimed, 'You can't kill an alligator by plucking out its feathers one by one!' She was coming to want, you see, that others should do something to make the world a better place, from which thought followed on that she herself should do so.

Dave's ma had had a difficult time just before now. Lize was 'under psychiatric observation' for some time, (see earlier) which is a kind(ish) way doctors have of saying, 'We're not sure you're insane, on the other hand we're not sure you're not.' Dave who saw everything in relation to himself resented this misfortune of hers, it put him under a great strain; and indeed, the death of so many relations about then was undoubtedly difficult-making. Yet in some while this suffering produced for Lize too a time of healing; much as Elaine's long absence had been for her, and in a way it was bound up in it too.

Lize had altered, maybe for the better. Her own friendship with Pask was part of that. She had decided to remedy deficiencies in her education too, as if she had inherited a love of learning from her son. This was certainly not intended as unkindness to Alf, yet it had that effect; they drew apart, or rather drew apart even further, as a result.

Alf couldn't quite focus it, he couldn't quite express it, what this meant to him. Tom by contrast except at the very worst could always find the right words, and too could speak to the vicar and the doctor as an equal. Yes, there's a sadness in Alf.

Lize often asked Dave things she did not know, but thought he did. She was nearly always right about that, and when he did not know he worked at finding it out. She became a companion; she joined in his friendly and how often disagreements with Pask. How much they all three enjoyed this!

And Blowse listened on with a mixed attitude. Yes, these three knew more than she did, and that made them alien but fascinating, it was like observing Martians or a beehive. And she was, though she took care not to seem it, cautious what she said or how she behaved to them.

And Blowse had still that particular sort of confidence which a beautiful woman always has, even into old age. Pask, she thought, had excellent skin, ought to make more of herself. And later on when school was behind her she grew keen on exercise of the walking/cycling sort best done alone, partly for health and partly because they made for cheap holidays; she didn't have much cash.

Appraising the lines forming at her mouth's sides, middle-age's calling card, Blowse thought, for once, about her own future. Her figure once opulent was now tending towards the comfortable. She'd never dieted much, she was a stone or two overweight (the gentlemen like something to hold on to, she'd say) and always had been, though it used to be firmer. She loved eating and visited her secret not-so-secret brandy bottle often. As a toddler Dave had found it and drunk from it and had been rushed to hospital in an ambulance; I don't think he was ever drunk any other time.

(O, by the way, am I -- I do not mean the 'I' who is the narrator who lives in Belker, but I David your author -- guilty of not 'showing, but telling'? Yes, I am! And I'm not a bit ashamed of it either!)

How old is Blowse? Dave doesn't know. A curious ignorance to have about someone you live in the same house with; the reason is, Blowse has blurred that knowledge, yes, even in the mind of her whom she views so frequently in the mirror. When Dave first remembers her she was already grown up physically; mentally he's not sure she's ever achieved.

One morning she says, 'I'm going to get married.'

'Oh,' says Lize, and after only a very short break, 'Congratulations!' and after another even shorter, 'And who's the lucky fella?'

'Don't count your horses,' says Blowse. 'I mean, I've decided it's about time.

'And don't you think, ' she says, looking round at them as if they two were the Albert Hall and in a half-second putting on sexiness like a garment, 'that a girl like me can't find a husband pretty quick?'

No, they didn't doubt it. She was like a cream cake then, soft and sweet and delicious. The thought flashed into Dave's mind that he wouldn't mind being the chap himself, if she wasn't (a) a close relation, (b) older than he, and (c) such a fool. And flashed out again.

He told Pask of Blowsy's plan. She laughed. Didn't he know, she said, that her Gramps had been shagging the arse off Blowsy yonks and yonks in that barn he calls his studio?

Dave didn't much like her choice of words. If she married Gramps, he said, wouldn't that make him her uncle or something, and then she - Pask - would have to do what he told her? It was intended more or less as a joke, but Pask like a dutiful woman of her time fired up at the idea of obeying a man.

As for Lize, 'If that Blowse ever has a child,' she said, 'she'll spoil it rotten. Stands to reason. She's never been firm with herself, how's she going to be firm with anyone else?' And she imagined herself cast, not very willingly, in the role of (probably unpaid) babysitter. Lize still hurt just a little about being called 'the clever one' when she herself was a child over against Blowse being 'the pretty one.' And of course Lize had never approved of Blowse's lifestyle; Gran had always pretended not to know. 'We must try not to judge,' Lize said, but had for all that.

But, Lize, we can't ever in reality fully understand another person's opportunities/temptations. We mustn't give blame. But as for shouldering the burden of another person's sin, and he dead very nearly two hundred years, which was what Tom was doing, that really was mad.

Blowse did very soon manoevre a man into proposing. She took it for granted, as all the Dandoes would have, that the next thing to do was to introduce him to her family, including Pask. (If Gramps was upset, he didn't show it; maybe Blowsy had told him it would make no difference, maybe that was even true.) This man was a widower in his thirties with a small daughter at Ladywell, in the shadow of Sharth Cathedral, where even now the day girls must shake hands with the headmistress and curtsey to her each day as they leave to go home. He was a designer of some kind and had a biggish house on the main road.

He'd given Blowse a big, expensive old-fashioned ring. He detailed its excellences, which Dave, who had never been in, or even really noticed, a jeweller's shop found mystifying.

He took all five of them out one evening -- yes, even Alf had been cajoled into his suit -- to a Berni Inn near the dock at Bishoprick. And a very good meal it was too, he didn't spare expense, and those who asked for a sherry before the meal got it in a schooner.

No-one could find any objection to him (though, mind, all six were on their best behaviour). Dave thought he was a man of no great intellectuality, but that that was something which wouldn't upset Blowse. Diffidently at the meal's end he raised what himself thought they might find a problem; he was a Roman Catholic, not much of a churchgoer, true, but he was, and he'd want to be married in a Catholic ceremony this time too and would feel easier if his fiancee would come over. Brief silence. 'All right then,' Blowse said.

Dave commented, 'I don't know how a woman behaves who's deeply in love and counting down every minute to The Wedding. Not as sensibly and fore-sightedly as Blowse did, I bet. She bought a very expensive white dress, or rather he did at her suggestion, may have cost thousands, and I believe it was second-hand too, she organised down to the last detail a reception in a big hotel, and obliged myself -- well, Dads would have been hopeless -- to give her away, wearing a tail-coat too. Such a to-do there was, rehearsing so many times, that I said to myself 'And you're welcome to her' when I was at last doing it for real before the florid altar which went up and up and up as if it was a wedding-cake itself. And after they were done she knelt down with him and a man in a dress gave them each a little biscuit, which I suppose is usual.

'Here's something odd. Once married, and living only three-quarters of a mile away in the village itself, Blowse to a remarkable extent disappeared from all our lives. By the way, she made an excellent stepmother.'

And had she, that last night when she and Dave were alone together, just before she converted and was obliged to repent each and all of her sins, thinking she might as well commit one more and have it included in the job lot, given Dave the great present of making him a man, as she saw it? If so, neither spoke of it ever, possibly of course because it had not occurred.

Pask continued to annoy Dave. She spoke beautifully, she knew how to ride a horse, though didn't often, she knew whether 'pudding' or 'dessert' was 'correct', she knew as if by instinct what forks and spoons to use at a grand meal, and -- and what? Deep down she was unsure about all sorts of things. Very attractive, mind, that smooth, long, dark hair, the gentle-smooth line of her slim body, even - nowadays - her graceful movements. Yes, he thought it, and why didn't he say all that? Yes, he could see why a man - someone else - could fall in love with her. Why didn't he think it might be him?

There are times when I'd like to take him off the page and kick him! What a fool, a fool of the kind that only a very intelligent young man could be, perhaps, but a fool all the same!

So they remained 'just friends'. Pity.

Meanwhile Tom is having, in a restrained, English and gentlemanly manner, a nervous breakdown. He remains, as always, enormously proud of being descended from the 'last of the merchant princes' Gritnall and is as always faintly indignant that many of his family are indifferent to that. But he never faced until now what it was that Gritnall traded in - men. Women, children, babies maybe. This high-principled, very generous, public-spirited man -- he was truly all these and more as far as his own community was concerned -- exported guns and trinkets to Africa, he imported sugar from Jamaica. For what were the guns and trinkets sold, what was sold to get cash to buy the sugar? The middle of the triple exchange Tom's not thought about till now -- chained naked leg and arm, deck over deck, little or vile food, the ship heaving day and night, the nights utterly dark, almost no air, no exercise, lying in their own excrements, and hating, hating, hating...cargo, freight packed very tight to maximise profits, in a really bad storm they will be thrown overboard to lighten ship as tea or spices would be, and the captain will apologise later to the owner, though not much, for disposing of his vendable property; 'My first concern, sir, as you know very well, must be the safety of my ship.' 'My ship, captain.' 'Sir, of course.' Though in a calm the seamen will remember after all that their cargo is human, and bring up to deck women and boys to be first hosed down and then raped.

Whether suffering was greater in Hitler's camps might be debated; whether the number of those who suffered was greater might be discussed too.

It is true. It is horrible beyond words. Tom still benefits, indirectly; it built his house.

But he did not do it himself.

He is pulled different ways by honour and shame. He is silent inside. Yet he eats and drinks and works and even goes occasionally to social gatherings 'on auto-pilot.'

Having a son, though he did not know it until he had one, is the blessing he has always most desired. Any child, even if discouraged, will ask about what family he comes from. And what then will Tom say?

His religious faith, real in its way, has not helped him much. It uses up all his capacity for belief, leaving none spare for the oily self-congratulating platitudes of psychologists and such, which appeared to him on the sole occasion he encountered them of as much true value as newspaper horoscopes or a peasant granny reading teacups.

Tom went to sleep now not with his wife nor in the dressing-room but in the only spare bedroom properly furnished; his occupying it, David noted anthropologist-like, offended Pask's notions of hospitality; one should always be ready for guests. (As for spiders, mice, or even rats, she appeared to regard them over-tolerantly as fellow-inhabitants of their home.)

Tom now was feeling passion -- not lust (he was forty) but rather guilt which drowned everything else. And it was not deserved, it was even, in itself, wrong; we must repent our own sins, but not other people's, as Benedick sensibly remarked. And his feeling such pain may well have appeared only self-indulgence to those begging in the streets. To be suffering thus (mind, it really was suffering) and live in a big house, be well-educated, of good family, earn a decent income from a secure job; they would exchange very cheerfully; and of course he knew it very well.

Tom prays every night, and some mornings. He has returned to the bells and smells of a Sunday. He has resumed this habit, this good habit as he would call it, partly because habit is always strong, and especially so upon a conservative-minded man of forty. He has no burning faith, it is loyalty, 'I've started, so I'll finish', but pray and communicate he does.

Pask liked very much what she heard from him about the Friends' ('Quakers'') meeting and went there herself, taking Dave too.

Of course, he had sat in silence for an hour many times before, listening to lectures, but there others had been talking and engaging his thoughts.

Silence. A big clock is behind him but it would obviously seem rude to turn round and look. Old-fashioned, 'short case'. Tick, pause, tick, it goes, then

Tick.

Pause.

Tick.

For most of the time it's the only sound. Sunday traffic faintly. Many of the people there have an eighteenth-century, oil-painted look; probably they intermarry. Some men keep their hats on (unusally for a religious assembly there are more men than women.) They look as if they wash more often than most people, but don't need to much; you can't imagine any of them working on the engine of a car. They are all plainly but quite well dressed.

Nothing happens.

Tick.

And, eventually, Tick again.

Nothing happens.

At first it's boring. Dave half-wanted an itch so that he could scratch it for something to do. He wanted/needed/ desired even something to look at.

Odd thoughts came -- meeting his mother's uncle the solitary time, the cost of woolly gloves, the resemblance of some pin-ups to corpses, good sandwiches in a cafe never again visited....and next, as if by transmission from the others' minds, peace...

Yes, it's better to have no thoughts than petty ones -- and yet as soon as you've thought that the peace is gone!

There's no 'screen-saver' in your head. Look at anything, anything at all, keeping your eyes quite still, even for as little as thirty seconds, and they begin to blank out. A whole minute, and they're painted over with a yellow-purple colour which just does not exist. You blink, and find that you have been looking at a woman suckling a baby. She's unconcerned, but might not like it if she noticed that your eyes were directioned as if they were seeing her, so you look away, and soon the yellow-purple comes again....

The quiet becomes restful, almost erotic. Do I mean that? Sensual, anyway. You feel 'filled' though you don't know what with, or bother to think about it -- a bit like the feeling after a hot bath though without the warmth and damp. (Probably the identical sensation would come over you if you sat quiet and unmoving anywhere or anywhen else, but you wouldn't, somehow. The others' example or support helps you to achieve this state.)

Dave paid one visit only - no, two. Pask, though, really took to it; it 'spoke to her condition' as those innocent people say, and replaced Socialism in a flash. Dave surmised that he could have said afterwards that he had enjoyed it, in fact just because he had so little idea of time passing; at the end two men who in a democratic way are in charge (sitting at the front facing the others, they can see the clock) stand up and shake each other's hands, otherwise, maybe, everybody would be there still.

Afterwards Dave felt he'd liked it too much. He shook himself, almost as a dog does when he's embarrassed.

Her attendance at 'meeting' became a (nearly) regular thing. Dave wished she would not go; Dave knew by now that she did not take his wishes into consideration -- not not at all, just not much.

The peacefulness of the meetings did not extend into Em's attempting to teach Pask to drive; a car and a clumsy person (and she became one once more when she sat behind the wheel) are not a good mixture! Pask swore, and Em was emotionally hurt. Despite her travels she had fallen by now into the mode of giving unasked-for advice, forgetting how irritating she had found that in her own mother; because of her travels she tended to think (Pask didn't agree!) that she was well-qualified to give this.

Despite this initial clumsiness, Pask later got an HGIII license - I'll perhaps tell you about this later on.

But Dave, and well as Pask, and, in a deeper, more permanent sense, Elaine too, they were all hurt emotionally at about this time. Their friend/father/husband Tom was unhappy, and they did not know why, they wanted to help but did not know how to, which often made them -- Em and Pask certainly - sharp and irritable with him. Did that help him? Guess!

They didn't listen - enough, they didn't talk to him - enough. Or rather they did both, yet not quite in the right way. Elaine has the excuse of not being notably intelligent, and Dave and Pask are immature (indeed, how unbearable they'd be at their age if they were not, Lezz!)

And there was something in the house which joys in suffering, feeding upon it.

The person who helped Tom most was Lize. Nothing sexual, Dave was sure. So he would have said if anyone'd asked him, but to himself he said, no, on balance, probably not. But it was odd for Dave to come back from school very late one day and find Tom by himself in their little front room - quiet, but appearing somehow to have recently been talking a lot. Tom wasn't at all embarrassed. 'Hello, David,' he said, 'I've just been speaking to your mother...' he went on, pretty unnecessarily because Dave couldn't assume that he'd been there silent all the time, that is, however long he'd been there.

And it was as if he was just going to say 'about' but Lize came in with a cup of tea for him. Lize smiled a little (she herself is more relaxed these days) and they both asked him about his school day with such a genuine-seeming show of interest that, for once, Dave was forthcoming about it; even though this was almost certainly a ploy to change the subject before the subject had even been raised.

Twice or three times more this happened - which made it seem likely, Dave thought, that Tom was there also other times when they didn't happen to meet. And whether Alf knows about it and what he thinks of it if he does...tiddley-pom!

Now David was not quite such a vulgarian as to call anyone with any sort of faith a 'religious maniac', but he was suspicious of what seemed to him far-too-easy answers; he observed that some though not all believers are complacent. He was not entirely happy with Pask's new interest. (And commitment? Well, at this stage only almost.)

From her Socialist reading and elsewhere she'd got the idea that there were things wrong with the world, 'things which only people of our age now can put right or try to put right. Even when you're twenty-five you've got a mortgage and a family, likely. Mort! Gage! It sounds like chains, it sounds like death! And it is too! People say they have a mortgage but in fact it has them, they'll do almost anything to serve it. But we're free! For now! We can choose to go on being free!' etc.

All of which did not much interest Dave and moved him not at all. Yes, he saw that she had good intentions, untargeted though they were as yet. But he hadn't the slightest desire himself to set wrongs right (except if they affected him personally), he had his own agenda.

Certain things, I say, were important to him, but that was not; he would have been a liar if he had said it was, and a liar is what he never will be.

No, a scientist does not lie. A scientist controls his emotions, shoos them out of the lab. He understood that; he thought he understood himself.

Pask didn't -- understand herself, I mean. Adults do, of course, but she was only a teenager; that is, teenagers, in some moods, credit that adults do.

She's turning into a different kind of person. Awkwardly. Who won't explain her motives.

About this time it was that she had that curious dream I said I'd tell you about, or rather vision. See what you think of it; David, who prided himself on never dreaming and rejected all superstition, at least had the manners to say nothing much when Pask told him about it, understanding that it was very important to her.

She was outdoors on a warm slightly cloudy day. She was naked or almost.

That was neither embarrassing nor sexy, evidently she was in a place where clothes did not count for much. Almost as evidently, she was in a place where either there were no rules and laws or those that existed were so obviously just that no-one would even imagine breaking them. She felt free. It was Spring.

In front of her was a huge arch of gold-coloured stone. She walked through it. Past it - she was still outdoors - the sense of freedom, if possible, intensified.

She became aware now of a middle-aged woman sitting before her on a huge chair, dressed in a slate-grey garment, full in cut, of some rich though not thick material. Throne might be a better word for her seat. The woman - lady, rather - Lady, even - looked at Pask with great kindness (though there was something in her face which indicated that she could also be severe), and, bending forwards, rested her hand on her head. That was all.

As Pask said later, 'If I was an RC I'd have thought it was the Virgin Mary.'

She had slept on dreamlessly for another hour, and woke up early (it was spring in her own world too, the morning was bright.) She was certain that this blessing meant not only that she had the Lady's 'countenance' or moral support, but that there would be practical help too. It increased her self-confidence, her never-absent courage.

When Bro was older, and, an inquisitive child, was always asking questions, what's this? how does it work? will it work at all if I unscrew this part? Elaine and Pask tried not to find it tiresome - it was obviously a sign of intelligence - and David was very patient; it was the sort of curiosity out of which science is born.

Of course Bro must go to Sharth, Tom regarded that as a given, though how to pay for it was not. Elaine agreed unenthusiastically; she hadn't been happy herself in what Vee-Vee called with a particular 'ride' in her voice, 'the state system', and yet...well, she supposed that when the time came for their son to marry, unless England changes out of recognition, having gone to a 'public' school would give him more choice.

But he must not board, Tom also decided. He had had only one unhappy experience as a boarder, but it marked him. He was fifteen, alone in the showers, later than the rest for some reason, and a prefect (they were always prowling round) had come in suddenly and exclaiming 'You're coming on fine, boy!' had grabbed at his testicles as if in compliment or rough joke, then as quickly went out, leaving young Tom profoundly shocked by his action, a little hurt physically, but soon erect, shocked too to understand that now the assault was past he had in a way enjoyed it and was frantically wanking, which he had been taught was wrong and had always, even almost successfully, resisted.

That prefect is now a provincial high court judge, 'his Honour'.

Let me explain what is going on, even though melodramatically. That which is in the house, like any other warrior, scouts its enemy. It's used to, and does not rate much, Tom's Sunday church, his nightly prayers, his charities; it likes his over-reliance on 'Ferrace's First'. Tom's virtues are real enough, but weak ones, it reckons, habitual, mechanical, unimaginative.

Even when Tom, younger, had more heart, even when he was an innocent-seeming child, odd things happened up at Gritnell's. No, not just odd, nasty; the most obvious that is known, the murder of Hetty. He was only a little boy, Aunt and her servant Nell tried to keep it from him, 'Cousin Hetty's gone away' kind of thing, he wasn't deceived for a moment, of course; the adults were fooling themselves, as they so often do, into thinking they were fooling the child. He knew very well - then! - that there was some evil there.

What made Lize regarded as possibly mad, let me remind you, was that, as she understood it, Hetty's ghost was revisting Gritnell's and, attaching itself in some way to Bessie, had moved down to 27. Certainly there were odd incidents there, a smashed picture, the freezer switched off, sugar and flour flung around the kitchen, etc.; only the first of these was witnessed. And Lize, she believed, had seen off Hetty all by herself (see her own account), not just benefiting themselves by ridding their house of irritating petty interruptions to their routine, but benefiting Hetty o so much more by freeing her to go onwards into Heaven. But Lize had only hinted at most of this, and the jerky imperfection of her version had made it even less credible.

But those who die in bed, warned, die peacefully, some of them even joyfully. But murdered you'd be full of anger and shock and incomprehension, indeed you might not even understand that you were dead, you'd want to revisit familiar places. And if there was something or someone truly terrible in that house, might he not encourage you? Might you not, almost innocent, be an instrument of his wickedness?

Think of this: in a war, do you hit your enemy where he is strongest, or where he is weakest? And the weakest thing at Gritnell's was the toddler.

Almost as soon as he could talk, Bro started to give concern. It wasn't a nightmare, it was more of a waking dream (not of course that he had these concepts); in itself it was not very scary either. Not at first.

His parents had themselves made a small room next to the dressing-room into Bro's bedroom, which they called 'the nursery'. Tom's room was further along the corridor; remember that nowadays he is sleeping alone. He'd often come as well if Bro called out for Em in the night. Pask too occasionally. The family slept in various places along the nearly forty yards of that draughty corridor, ill-lit even when the lights were on, draughty and even dusty; this is on the second floor of the house, as Americans would call it; the lower-ceilinged third floor once intended for servants is completely empty nowadays of course.

As he'd go to sleep Harry (fifteen months or so old) would murmer 'black man, black man' to himself, and look into the corner of the room where, he insisted, the black man sat. Em thought he'd been too impressed by the coat of arms which was everywhere in the house, or so she said, though it was only in one or two places.

But this was a friend, as Harry understood it - employed by his parents to protect him. Yet it was odd that they could not see it. A sentinel, a watchman, who sat and sat, not seeming to look at Bro, not even seeming to breathe much. Well, at his age you don't know what's normal and what's not; since your parents are evidently very powerful, as if emperor and empress, what is remarkable in their setting a guard?

Now people generally, or certainly people like Em, don't listen enough to children. Their talking is noise, like the wind under a door, scarcely as meaningful as a dog's bark. Em lacks the right kind of intelligence, the right kind of sensitivity, to respond adequately. Em of course is the sort of grown-up who's always snobbishly aware of the assured superiority of being an adult.

Pask, however, once when she was putting Harry to bed, inadvertently followed his gaze to the corner, when he muttered 'black man, black man' --not in fear, but trustingly, even affectionately; saw nothing but the room's corner, of course. A few evenings later she got Bro to describe him -- tall, thin, long arms -- and went away puzzled, leaving the door wide so that light from the corridor came in. She sent up a quick prayer for Bro's protection (she had only just learned how) and went away doubtfully.

It helped. At least I think it did. But not enough. Next evening the intruder seemed to have come nearer, or it may be had grown bigger. And now it lifted its face towards the child....

'Nasty! Nasty! Nasty!' I imagine that Bro at this early stage did not have the word 'very' but he had the idea of repeating words or speaking them a bit louder for emphasis, maybe that is instinct.

Fifteen years later, Harry (who still remembered only too well) made a series of drawings of it. The face was handsome, surely. Long and rather thin, a curved delicate nose, well-made lips, ears small and round, close to the head, no beard, a multitude of tight curls. The eyes unpleasant, whites dry as if never blinked, irises a very light grewen, a pink line where some of the inner lower eyelids showed. Expressionless; if it (he?) had any thoughts they were not shown. The face gave no indication of cleverness. Once looked towards it was hard to look away from. It kept staring.

It was all over a deep dry dark purple colour like some unpleasant fungus. The half-glimpsed figure was almost in darkness; it seemed neither bare nor clothed, scaled lightly or possibly finely feathered, unmoving; what need had it to move.

It is wrong to encourage a child in unwholesome fancies, it is wrong to encourage a child - any child of their sort, but arguably a boy especially - in any expression of cowardice, at the same time it is wrong not to meet for a child, so young, so vulnerable and so very much loved, any dangeer whatever even though it should cost you your life. Or sanity. These are a few of Pasqueline's 'given's.

But, to David's regret, she has become thanks to the Friends' meetings, what he calls 'religious'. She now assumes that there is an invisible world, that it is of greater significance and meaning than the visible one, that some of its inhabitants are wicked.She has lost the thick armouring which certainty in unbelief provides; she too may be vulnerable.

As yet, however, she is inclined to jolly him out of this fixed delusion (as she understands it to be -- so far.) 'Don't be a twit, Bro love. Look! There's nothing there!' she says, putting him to bed, and firmly, 'There's nothing there!'

And she switches on the overhead light, but for all that looks carefully herself. A weak night light is always left on for him; she makes doubly sure that it is tonight.

And she leaves him. The trouble is, she is a little doubtful. The little boy's manner has been so sure, so unchildlike, so truthful-seeming. No, it's nonsense! It must be nonsense. But --

There are so many things the child does not understand, yet he is clear that Pask is more sympathetic to his troublement than either parent. He tries to manoeuvre things so that his sister will put him to bed, often succeedss.

Until recently sturdy, even noisy, he begins to lose colour; perhaps he -- though growth comes in spurts, of course -- is not growing as he ought. Elaine, still now and again sleepless, though less frequently than before her long absence, getting up in the night, imagining a loo need or peckishness, naturally enough looks in on him as she passes, and most usually finds him too awake, and silent. Staring, thinking. Pask when she puts him to bed usually goes to her own bedroom afterwards on the excuse of doing 'prep' there, leaving both doors part-open, other evenings she forgets.

Unfortunately Bro has now stopped complaining that there is a 'black man' or 'nasty man' in the corner of his room nights, so his parents now are inclined to dismiss it as 'a phase'. Yet he sees the demon still. Fascinated into silece by evil, or some othere reason, he speaks no more of it.

'The bairn's ailing!' his indestructible great-grandfather says offended when they take Bro to the nusing home to visit. They don't, often; what can ninety-five say to a few months? That's why Harry's increasing weakness is more obvious to Sholto, seeing him rarely, than to those who see him ever day to whom the damage is imperceptible.

Yes, the child has started to take on a suggestion of a plant grown where there isn't much light -- too tall, too soft, too thin, too pale. They take up the suggestion, demand rather, of the ancient lawyer and Bro is taken to the nurse, and from the nurse to the GP. Yes, there are symptoms, but symptoms of what is unclear. Ostlethwaite writes to the specialist in Paediatrics at Bishopric General to make them an appointment.

Zest - sparkle - that ever-amusing, ever-tedious, never-pausing question-asking - 'mojo', it's called now - that hope - that need and power to grow - in two words, his life; where is it going? what is it feeding? What victory has 'it' in prospect? To what wicked use might it put that energy stolen in what victory?

Fa takes the morning off. He and Em together accompany Bro to the General. They sit waiting on metal-and-canvas chairs in a squeaking line of such chairs, they do not read the tatty-colourful magazines, they do not drink the harsh tea which volunteers offer cheaply. They feel like suppliants.

After examining the toddler in almost complete silence for fifteen or twenty minutes, the specialist Mr Snith questions them lengthily and incisively and not quite courteously about Bro's diet, clothing, digestion, exercise, his bodily wastes, how often he is bathed, whether and how often played with, his toys, their own health, et cetera et cetera, indeed every aspect of the child's life, and they answer volubly and a little indignantly. No, only in petty matters may the Gritnell-Ferraces be faulted, they are loving parents and comfortably off. 'A change of air' is suggested casually (too casually); they tell him they are all four going abroad next week, they have planned it for months. The specialist can scarcely disapprove.

The uninvited guest continues to be seen at night. Usually. By the child, that is, no-one else sees. He still does not move. Originally leanly and athletically strong, he nowadays has gained the heavy-muscled look of a boby-builder, so thickly powerful he is becoming. He is leaning his back against the wall, almost squatting, half sitting upon the air. It is unlikely that he can speak; certainly he does not. There is a hint of anger or lust about him now.

He is slowly killing the child, not by his own wickedness, rather out of that blindly loyal obedience to another's wishes that so many call virtue, especially in war. Maybe his thin lips pucker, maybe they draw in Bro's life as if sipping it delicately from out the air, maybe there is no movement at all yet, as yet. It is unlikely that he has any personal will or intention. Except to go on obeying.

'Poor little Bro, God help him!' Pask said. He had begun now, months after the first visitation, to look very 'peaky'. Even so, his appearance would not have been remarkable in a child who had always been pale, his spiritlessness ditto in a child always lethargic. He could, even now, have been developing perfectly well -- no, I mean passably well -- if only he had been somebody else!

Remember that he had stopped saying 'black man', 'nasty man' et cetera. Well, they went off to Normandy soon after for three weeks. Pask's 'parentoes' (a Sharth slang word) had debated taking David too, at some length, however in the end had decided not too, so he got only picture postcards. 'We saw this [cat drawing] -o TDyuss!' kind of thing, and just one quick 'phone call. She had been half-thinking herself too old for family holidays, but she enjoyed helping with Bro, and too hadn't much idea how she'd spend the time if she wasn't alone. Her French was indifferent or worse, so she made little human contact. Anyway, during that time Bro began to seem, as they say, more himself, and they brought home a lively healthy child who had eaten and slept well and normally.

And put him to rest, of course, in the same bedroom. And he grew weak again. When Dave biked up there one evening, (this, I suppose, was the end of June or thereabouts, they had been in France in the Easter hols) he found that Pask and Fa were -- this was surprising -- 'having words' as they say down 27, and, though of course they're not given to expressing feelings outwardly much, they were only too evidently very angry with each other.

Now Pask is not, nor is Dave, one of these 'rebellious' teenagers always against their family, I even wonder if they exist any more nowadays except in books. But her colour was high (which Dave thought suited her), she was speaking unnecessarily loudly, and there was something guarded about Tom's face, besides its also being pinkish, as if he hadn't expected this sort of attack from that quarter. Pask was smoking too, which she has never done before or since, or Dave hasn't seen it, in her parentoes' presence. And swearing too. 'It's the room, Fa! I tell you, it's the bloody fucking room!' she was kind of shouting in an undertone, if you get my meaning.

Tom wasn't having any. He was as fed-up as anyone's ever seen him and calling her 'my dear' but in a patronising not affectionate tone. His view -- well, according to Dave he was offering it as if thoughtfully concluded, but (a) it wasn't really thought through, (b) it was about 101% emotion, not reasoning -- his view was along the lines of 1. there is nothing, Nothing Whatever, wrong with My House, and to suggest it was personally insulting, 2. Let's leave things as they are even if they're bad because it's too much bother to change (a favourite attitude of most people older than, say, thirty-two, and lots of people younger too), and 3. (and there was some reason here) one place is very like another, certainly within the same house, same air, same climate, same temperature and all that, and 4. that Pask was carried away by emotion (but see 2) and therefore not thinking straight.

'Well! Wasn't Bro better at the gite?'

'Of course he was, Pasqueline, my dear, I'm not denying that, but what you're saying - alleging - is just the purest superstition!'

It was obvious to David, but he could not find words to say it, that they'd be better to go back to how this row must have started, their shared concern for Bro, and try to abandon this mere opposition of wills. But he saw that Pask was going to lose, and almost rightly too; she ought to have tried to charm or persuade him rather than demand, it was his house not hers and he had every right to insist that what he wanted there was done.

But Pask can be very stubborn indeed, and so can Tom. And, despite a reasonably high salary, he's always worried about money -- to adapt another room for the child would cost hundreds if not thousands, he's thinking.

Impasse.

This was downstairs in what they called the drawing room. I don't know where Em was at this time. It ended with Fa saying acidly, 'Why don't you take David to the kitchen and give him something to drink?' which is almost as near to rudeness as he's ever got with anyone. Pask flounced out, and David, with an apologetic look towards Tom which he did not see, was obliged to follow. 'I am right! He'll see that I am in the end!' she told him.

Later on she kissed him rather a lot, but he didn't repond much because (a) the blinds weren't pulled down (not that anyone drives along the Lane much) and (b) in that respect he is, or was then, fish-cold. And she retold the quarrel to him, not briefly either, as one does, even though he'd been there for most of it, and in any case already understood her side of it. Needless to say, this reiteration convinced her even more thoroughly that she had been in the right. (She was, too; that was to be proved later, or as nearly proved as such a case may be.)

But, of course, neither Pask nor her father were strong on diplomacy, she was like him in that as well as in looks. Her instinct was right, her manner of putting it forward was not, rude or rudish, irritation-making. However, you mustn't think for a moment that Tom was not seriuously concerned too.

Poor young Bro had already by then, though they'd only been back four days, started going down again visibly.

Em is not (unlike the other two) an arguer, but she came round to Pask's assumption in the next weeks, having seenhim again get paler, etc., and, having begun to vomit up his food almost as saoon as he'd eaten it, starting to refuse to eat at all: why bother? So she leant her almost unspoken backing to Pask when she returned to the matter, and this time -- I think it was Dave's suggestion, the experimental aspect of it feels like him -- it was agreed that Bro and Pask should temporarily swap bedrooms. Both rooms already had integral washbasins, so no expense was involved, only a few hours' effort moving beds etc. around. Tom agreed as long as she kept her new bedroom door ajar in case Bro cried out for Em in the night (he was now further away from her), though this was no longer his habit.

Pask had never slept anywhere at Gritnell's except where she always had; it had been the eldest daughter's bedroom (of course she was the only one) ever since the renovation in the 1790s.

The strangeness of it kept her awake a few hours the first night, she said to Dave. Tom still kept most of his clothes in the wardrobe in the dressing-room, so he got into his pyjamas there before passing hers to go to his own bedroom, yet she did not hear him pass that first night, and wondered 'if the parentoes were doing...well, you know what I mean'. David knew, of course, but thought it was tasteless to say so.

Once she did get to sleep that night, and the subsequent nights, she slept deep. No visions, no nightmares, no dreams that she recalled. Bro that first night probably slept well. Maybe he was harder to wake than usually in the morning; maybe that was a good sign.

After two weeks of this rearrangement Bro seemed on his way to reegaining the benefits the Normandy holiday had brought him. And Pask? She was watery-eyed, thinner and paler than usual, runny-nosed, etc. etc. and had developed the irritable manner of one always on the edge of losing her temper -- but never dids; it would have requireds more vigour than she appeared to have. Sleepy she was too intellectually. Dave felt required to spell it out to her that her own case seemed to be nearly proved, i.e. that there really was something enervating (i.e. weakening) about that particular room.

'No sense in changing yet again...it's MY room now,' in a dreamy tone.

'No!' he said; no response from her.

'No!' he said louder. 'There bloody-well is sense!' He never swears, and he never emphasises his point by grasping Pask by her delicately-made shoulders and almost forcing her to look at him; well, hardly ever, because he was doing both now. 'Look! Think! Listen! If the old nursery you're in now is unhealthy, and that's not completely proved but there's good evidence that way, just look in the mirror! If it's bad for you much the same way it was for him, it'd probably be unhealthy for Tom or Em or me or anybody, but, speaking personally, I don't want to find out.

'So, what follows? You yourself have got to come out of it, isn't that absolutely obvious? This house isn't a pokey jerry-built little council house, to use your aunt's charmless phrase, there are plenty of empty rooms, you can move easily enough, so can he...' It was a long speech for him, he'd never been interested in the school debating society.

He cared for all of them, see, but thought them all in a way self-absorbed, living in a dream world in which they were frightfully important and underlining it by a refusal to give themselves airs about it.

Pask's health got worse. Tom told Dave privately (and vaguely)that it was with her after the manner of women, but it wouldn't stop being with her after the manner of women.

Dave was a little embarrassed, but after a while said, 'It IS the room, Tom.'

'Nonsense!' Tom answered roundly, but since roundly isn't his usual manner that in itself was unconvincing.

They were both silent for a moment. Tom muttered to himself, 'But if that were so it would be like a curse.'

Further silence. 'You're the scientist; what would be the mechanism of such a thing?'

And answered himself, 'But if your house is on fire you don't just sit there and wonder if the last electrician you had in was properly qualified. No! You act!'

Snag, however - Pask's now extreme unwillingness to move again. She loved her new room, the nursery, she said - her voice was low, even sensuous. She too was obstinate. 'I can't rattle around from one place to another, changing and rechanging every few weeks, I'd be like a teetotum, ' she said. 'Whatever that is,' David added.

Now it is difficult for a normally mild-mannered and mild-tempered chap like Tom to exercise authority effectively, unless maybe he is very sure of his ground indeed. If you say to somebody, 'Do this or that!' and he or she -- maybe it's more commonly a she - digs in heels and says, 'No, I won't!', especially if it is said more-or-less politely, what further recourse is there except physical violence, which was most definitely not Tom's way? This is after all a remarkably civilised home -- too much so, arguably, they're often out of touch with their own emotions, English-fashion.

Impasse. But Pask's poor physical health and general listlessness continued, it even got to the point where her teachers noticed and one of them 'phoned Elaine about it, so you can see how very bad it was. But fortunately this wasn't the only thing going on in her life. When you tell a story, you have to edit; other events not mentioned yet cut across. So I haven't told you yet that one of Pask's A-levels was Eng. Lit, and that there was a near-compulsory three day coach-trip in the half-term to Stratford-on-Avon to see among other things performances of Henry IV, I and II.

And when Pask got back from it all her stuff had been moved back to her own old bedroom, the little room next to Tom's had been hastily and cheaply done up for the child with bars on the window, etc. and where the doorway into Harry's previous room which had temporarily been hers hads been there was just a newly painted wall. Not very well painted; it had been done while the plaster over the new brickwork and the brickwork itself was still wet.

That offended Alf slightly, being asked to do that, it hurt his sense of integrity as a craftsman, though he did it all the same; 'who pays the piper calls the tune', he said.

It offended Dave too, Tom's having employed Dads when there were others who could have done the job as well. His pride was rankled, he felt Tom was trying to give money to him indirectly. And he didn't like his two so different worlds jammed into nearness - happy are those who have never had that problem!

But Alf's offense, and Dave's, were as nothing to Pask's meeting with this fait accompli. The bedroom which had soon become hers, which she had so quickly grown to love (she thought) was now denied her, and anybody else too. Not owning a sledgehammer, there was nothing whatever she could do about it! Yet her health and morale improved very quickly once she was back in her own place.

Bro's did too now that he was sleeping in his new bedroom; in fact he soon became remarkably strong for his age.

And there's never been any recurrence of the problem, or not in the twenty-plus years since. Whether this devil he saw was unhealthy imagination, or whether it - something - something vile - really was there and is now imprisoned and therefore powerless....who can tell? There's no clear conclusion to be drawn.

Well, I'd better draw this third story to a close. Fashion one artificially, rather - they're all still alive. I may or may not continue it into a fourth, though probably not. Timescheme of this third story? That's not entirely clear even to me. By now Dave has been at Cambridge a year -- 'now' being the time I'm choosing not quite arbitrarily to end -- so he's an undergraduate at Trinity and Pask is squaring up to A-levels about as unconfidently as she did to the Os, and quite right she is to be unconfident too.

So the events of this story just past take two years? But that doesn't fit, quite. I seem to be recording just over the two years of Pask's teenage life, or rather some parts of it only, but Dave's life over the same period, somehow that doesn't seem to have taken so long, which is pretty odd. I suppose they were maturing at different rates. I have confused myself, so no wonder I'm confusing you.

Put it this way: What is the purpose of life? To be like Jesus, some would say. Yet it seems to me rather that the correct answer is to be your own true self. As Thoreau said, 'If I am not my self, who will be?' Nor are those two answers as opposite as may first appear. Maturing - and how very many people never achieve it, or even begin! - is doing just that.

At Cambridge David had the opportunity to meet some young women who were very clever indeed, and an even larger number of those who thought they were. He was a little ashamed of Pask by contrast, of her unwillingness to give her best to a school of which he was so proud himself. His rebuking her for this set her off in a rant. 'Chr-i-ist! I mean, bugger! Don't you think nineteen is a bit young to be a fucking middle-aged bore?' and on and on and ON in that style. Yet nowadays Professor Dando who is still from time to time in contact will acknowledge reluctantly that Pask has achieved great things in her own cranky way. More of that later, perhaps.

Now Dando does not blame his own parents seriously or resentfully (as many of us do, into middle age or even oldagepensionhood.) He outstripped them early and easily, but they did not prevent. But he felt that Tom, who in any case would have been a better father for a boy than a girl) didn't give Pask as she grew up as much of his time or real interest as he ought to have done; he sought out solitude in his model-making; he wrote a book about family members who, being dead, might not have needed to be remembered; he gave time to ever-hungry local and national charities; paid her school fees of course; paid indirectly for her food, clothing and warmth, and quite often asked how she was without fully listening to the answer, just as one does with strangers; grew shy and curious and in a fashion idolising as she became a woman. She wasn't frozen or starving, of course, but did he go far enough? (Does anybody? Ever?)

Here we go. We are 'motoring'. That's why, or partly why, the poor little girl was crying on the bus years back. See, Em wasn't 'there for her' either. There was the yoga, the vegetarianism, the newagery, there were the as-if compulsory frequent visits to Madge who was no help and Katharine who at least tried, there was the vagueness, the inability to focus her mind correctly either on big things or small which showed itself in the untidiness, always, and even shabbiness, often, of her dress, the oiliness of her skin, the not-quite combing of her hair, all kinds of ways in which -- never a beauty and past forty when Dave first knew her -- she was ever unconsciously insulting her husband (call that sexist if you like) and also devaluing herself. Her 'letting herself go' was surely sign of a deeper malaise. And Tom, limited by prudence, ethics, religion, etc., never went further than just looking at another woman (Alyss, I mean); well, not much further, sometimes he imagined....

Hair, skin, clothes are all amazingly better now she is back. And self-confidence, too, or rather it is all part of the same; now and then she might pass for Pask's elder sister -- possibly! These years have indeed been a time of healing; for Elaine; for Lize; not really for the house.

Elaine has gone down into suffering as if into the waters of baptism, she's looked suffering bravely in the face, she's come up out of it -- not without causing others pain -- what? transformed, radiant, redeemed, 'saved? Those words overstate the change; much improved, a better person, certainly.

What was the root of all that brooding in the Ministers' stuffy Prague flat? Essentially, just what happened one afternoon so many years before. She saw it over and over, she looked at it from all directions as if it was a great jewel with many facets (it wasn't, even metaphorically.) She hoped to understand it by reimagining it, and - almost - she did.

It's warm. The barn is open on the outside, there is sweet new hay in it. The next field not yet mown is dotted with shiny little yellow flowers about six inches high, they are probably called buttercups in England, she is not sure, a corner of the grass has strangely irregular holes in it which she believes have been made by Dasche (badgers), one of the few words she knows, in the distance there is a baling machine, a noisy irregularly clattering thing but quite far away, men are shouting at each other sometimes, they seem uncouth yet jolly, she does not know what they are saying, their little dogs go arf-arf chasing rabbits or birds, the air is thick and sweet and weighty upon her like clear honey, scented with -- what? cow parsley, perhaps, she does not know; though a villager her whole life so far she has been brought up as if in a town. The odour is as heavy as that of the beer barrels was in G'anpa's cellar.

She wades in the river. It is just deep enough to swim but she hasn't yet; anyway, she is not much of a swimmer. She has got past the little stones and sticks where it was shallower. There was lots of soft mud turned up there, her toes spread wide pushing down into it. This mud was warmer than the water. Going further in has washed the dirt from her calves, the wetness has cooled her too; it is a very hot day. There are very small silver fish darting, they are much like paperclips.

The sunlight holds her like a dress. Her real dress and other garments are left tidy on the bank. She is faintly ashamed to discover that she is not at all ashamed to be completely naked -- but she is alone, or is in effect, the other has gone on. It is a wider, deeper, though slower, than the Shour which runs through the village at home.

A hundred yards further downstream the man is doing the crawl, a stroke she has never learned, neatly, not showily. He only turned his eyes back casually once as if gazing in her general direction rather than particularly at her -- but she had been fascinated by him, she had never before seen and had scarcely even wondered about a man's privacies; odd and comic, almost, how straight and smooth and strong the rest of him!

And afterwards, what happened? She knows what happened, of course, but how it is to be regarded, in what light, that's the difficulty; but, she has saiod to herself, it was ordinary enough, considered as an experience, and it had to happen, surely, some time or another.

But --

How to -- how to, what? Make it fit in, make it relate to everything else, her whole life, that went before and after? The Victorian-novelly, she was seduced, dishonoured, ruined, betrayed, she fell? No, that does not feel as if it applies, it is just melodramatic. The churchy-moral, she committed the sin of fornication and has never repented it? Not that either, that too is melodramatic, for her false. The cheerful-pagan, she was introduced to a great new joy? No, it wasn't a great delight, she found it curious and very pleasant and certainly interesting enough. The pagan-moral which matched so well what his country had recently been, she fulfilled her destiny as woman, ceased to be child? The merely personal, financial almost, she had been sleight-of-handed out of something she greatly treasured, which she owned no longer, which she had given away not unwillingly yet not fully consenting, no, no fully, even so, in truth led on more by curiosity than desire?

A gift which had not been much valued received, it seemed, for apart from exchanging conventional chat as people living in the same house cannot avoid, during the next few days, as they came together inevitably sometimes in the big but not very big family house, they have never again spoken together.

Or the practical-thankful, ever; in television plays in those days girls who did it when they weren't married always and instantly got pregnant, and she had not, and only too easily imagined what Ma would have said and said about the disgrace (but Papa?)

It had its comic aspect, being robbed of something she scarcely knewq she had, not regretting it, not valuing it, until it was gone. And of course to him she had been not Elaine, a Person, but rather Woman, that is, anything female would have done, not Whole. (Not Whole, just a hole, she though suddenly, and giggled as she might have done as a schoolgirl.)

It ought to have been like a miracle, but it was not. Not that it was in any way at all bad or unpleasant, it just didn't have the beauty, the - the - (her mind gropes for the not absolutely unfamiliar words) the nimbus, the aureole, the halo, the shining-amazing glory like the Sun in his splendour, the - the - the...well, whatever it was that it didn't have, the something-or-other, which, which somehow or other she feels it ought to have had.

Was he cruel, or rough, or coarse? No, he knew full well what he was doing, it was certainly not the first time for him, he evidently regarded himself as a skilled workman at the task; she understands that now, almost did then. And so young, strong, handsome, well-made, of better looks and figure than Tom ever.

Too persuasive, yet persuasive only. He had come upon her unexpected, she had just got out, she was wondering how to get dry without a towel, the sun was drying her already. She'd thought he was many yards away. He had said nothing to invite her, he'd just held her - first with his hands on her upper arms, lightly, only that, later, very soon, they were behind her back but not clasped together, he was not grabbing her in any way, he was not constraining her, she might well have said 'excuse me -- bitte'

yet she had not, she might so easily have slipped away.

She'd raised her face to his, an almost puzzled expression on her, but which also inevitably raised her mouth to his, which was on her lips first, then fast and hot, though gently, upon her neck and bosom, and the change in him, so strange and even ugly and yet so right, so as-if-always familiar, his hands on her bottom and then where she had never even imagined another's hands could go - the excitement! - his taking her lightly by the wrist, leading her, both of them led by that strange-swollen thing like an unfamiliar root vegetable glimpsed at the greengrocer's, leading her into the darkness of the barn.

The weird thing shook out of rhythm with each step of his. He had wet 'daps' (gymshoes) on his feet, she had nothing and the floor hurt just a little, she remembers now, did not consider then. The darkness which had been like blindness first lightened to grey, there was dust in her nose ands eyes, he indicated to her by a gesture where there was a blanket, not very clean, over some bales, they sat down, kissed wetly, he pushed her back, not forced her, it was gentle, she went back, her legs as of themselves came apart.

Her heart beat hard. She felt important. Yes, more than ever before or since, a newly-made lord mayor first wearing his chain couldn't have felt more so. And strong too, he must have weighed half as much again and she but she did not notice that. Some pain, but it was taken up into ... well, not joy exactly, but pleasure, some warmth, then for a moment she ceased to be Elaine

And ---

Well, she had come to. Back to normal (normal-ish) awareness, sense. He looked worn now, sleep-struck, pitiful, almost silly. What am I doing here? Why am I damp? Why am I half-crushed? Why, especially, have I got no clothes on?

She almost at once remembered. She tried to push him from her pettishly. He didn't move. Making more of an effort, she got him aside/got away, went back to the river, and washed there a bit, that was needful. She was tempted to unwish what had gone just before, refused to. She did not quite understand; she did not understand all sorts of things, but she knew that she must not talk of this.

God, lots of German men get ugly in middle-age, it must be all that beer and cabbage and heavy-stuffed sausages and more beerand cabbage and heavy-stuffed sausages. What must he look like today, for all she knows with a great roll of solid fat round his neck like a choker? It was not wrong that they had done what they had done (she decided, then undecided it, then decided it again, indeed every time she was to think of it the rest of her life she looked at it from a new angle) yet his indifference afterwards, that was hurtful during the week or so remaining of the visit, and he remained indifferent always after, there has never been as much as a Christmas card and it is getting on for thirty years....And if they meet again, she imagines, it is unlikely, yet they are kin still, it just might happen that she and he are both invited to a wedding or baptism, though it has not occurred yet, though (of course) they are kin still...what could they say to each other except how are you, it's been a long time, mere trivia?

Bro's conception, so many years later, that was the only time she had felt passion, or nearly.

Yes, it mattered. What occurred that afternoon. But did it matter enough, then? And it came to matter enormously, later -- just because it did not matter enough at the time and soon after. Now it has receded -- but will it always stay in the background? She doubts that. Maybe it explains why she failed to become a teacher. And other failures in relationship; even now she is not quite easy with Dave. It is all healed over at last, yes, surely it is, but isn't there a scar?

Need I even say that she would never tell Dave all this?

How, if he were in the habit of writing narrative, would Dave conclude this story?

Imagine him writing at twenty-five or so, 'I kept in touch with Pask through all my six-year Cambridge time, and indeed after, more-or-less. She visited me there twice; or perhaps three times, I don't quite remember. We saw something of each other in what are called the 'vacs' (holidays). There was, I suppose it was inevitable, another girl 'up' with me (i.e. at the same university) to whom I grew close; nowadays we intend to marry; I don't want to say more about her than that.

'Reckon it up in ordinary terms, I'm successful in life and she's not. I took my Ph.D, I have rational hope of being a distinguished man, even famous in my own field, by the time I'm forty. I always knew that would happen. As for fame outside my own field, that's neither likely nor wanted.

'I've lived a very even and predictable life, which is what I've always wanted. My father's disappearance, (just possibly suicide) is almost the sole thing which couldn't have been foreseen. Except - of course - in outward circumstances, I am just the same, I mean the person inside, as I have always been, and expect to continue being.

'So there's been no 'time of healing' for me. I'm relieved about that; I'd thank old beardie in the sky completely sincerely for that if I thought he was up there.

'Elaine certainly, Tom and Pask probably, they've been so deeply wounded that they've needed wholeness/healing.

'I haven't. Wouldn't you rather be me than any of them?'

ENDS.

D.H. Gamon

Wednesday 29 September 2010

Very brief autobiography

Brief 'philosophy'

Thursday 28 January 2010

A TIME OF HEALING/THE DEMON IN THE HOUSE (3rd: to be entered)

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