Vacant Possession Part 2

"All right."

"But it'll break up your community."

"Not my community. I wasn't born here."

"Oh, I see. But still, you won't like life in a towerblock."

"I shan't mind. You can throw things off the balconies."

Sylvia gave her a sideways look, then switched her attention back to the road. She slowed down. Small brown children played by the kerb, barelegged in the July heat, crouching in the gutter and darting out into the road. There was not a blade of gra.s.s for miles. Midsummer brought out the worst in it, baking the cracks in the pavements, raising a stench from the dustbins. The long ginnels that ran between the houses discharged a dim effulgence of stale sweat and stale spices; a thin ginger cat slept on a coal-shed roof, its scarred limbs splayed, its eyes screwed tight against the glare. Not a tree, not a patch of shade. "Displacing people from their environment," Sylvia said. "You'd think the lesson would be learned by now."

"Here it is. Eugene Terrace."

"Whereabouts?"

"This will do." Lizzie opened the car door and began to lever her bloated body out of the seat, swivelling sideways and kicking her feet over the kerb. Her ankle chain flashed in the sunlight. Out at last, she leaned down and stuck her face in at the pa.s.senger door. "Thanks a million, Mrs. S." Inside the leopard-skin jacket she was perspiring heavily, and patches of grease were breaking through her face powder; she gave a terrifying impression of imminent dissolution, as if fire had broken out at Madame Tussaud's.

Sylvia drew back from her grinning mouth and heavy scent. "Is this where you live, at this shop?"

"Over the top. It's temporary. I'm stopping with a friend, he's got lodgings here."

"See you Thursday then." She watched Lizzie, waddling towards the side door of the fly-blown corner grocery. I wonder what she means about working at night? Can she possibly be a prost.i.tute? Surely not; she was too grotesque for anyone's taste. Lizzie stopped, ferreting in her bag for her door key. There was something unreal about her, as if she were a puppet, or an ill.u.s.tration loosed from the pages of a book. Suddenly, and with awful clarity, Sylvia understood her mingled repulsion and fascination, the p.r.i.c.kling of kins.h.i.+p which had made her take the creature on. It was herself she was seeing, Sylvia Sidney of ten years back, the masklike maquillage, the jelly-flesh wobbling like a sow's; the great big beautiful baby doll. She felt suddenly sick. She groped for the gear lever.

Lizzie Blank, known otherwise as Muriel Axon, turned her key in the lock; and entered the dismal pa.s.sageway of Mukerjee's All-Asia Emporium.

CHAPTER 2.

The Mukerjees' stock in trade blocked most of the narrow pa.s.sage: tinned cream of tomato soup in cartons of three dozen, boxes of pre-cooked rice and deodorant sprays, toothpicks, lavender furniture polish, and fancy bun cases. Muriel walked sideways between the boxes, holding her shopping bag across her chest, and went upstairs in the dark. She found she had forgotten the pa.s.sword again, so she booted the door until the sentiment "Christ is risen" came feebly from within.

The room was full of shadows and swirling dust, the sun kept out by a yellowing paper blind. Muriel walked to the window and released it; it shot up and out of her hand with a soft flurry like the exit of a family of rats. She looked out over the roofs of the outdoor privies and the coal sheds.

"Stir your stumps," she advised the man on the bed.

It was Emmanuel Crisp, her friend, her mentor, her old mucker from the long-stay hospital; it was Emmanuel Crisp, who liked to pretend he was a vicar, and who got put away for it. He'd been a troublesome sort of lunatic, always needing big injections; whereas she, whose antecedents were much worse, had given no bother at all; always neat, clean, and biddable, at least after the first few years.

Crisp flapped a hand over his eyes to s.h.i.+eld them from the sun. "h.e.l.lo there, Muriel. I thought it was you, kicking."

"I'm not Muriel. I'm Lizzie Blank."

"But you are Muriel really, aren't you?"

"Sometimes. But today I'm Lizzie Blank, because I've got my wig on, haven't I, and my make-up?"

Crisp studied her. "It's wonderful how you get transmogrified."

"I've got my job to do," she said grimly.

Emmanuel lay back on the bed. He was an exhausted man, with his greenish pallor and his high-pitched giggle. It was the day trip to York that had tired him. It had been their best get-together with old friends since they'd all been turfed out of Fulmers Moor Hospital, and left to fend for themselves.

"Sholto enjoyed it," Muriel said. "He didn't have a fit. It was only the excitement that made him sick."

Crisp's jaws worked around a yawn. He slid his long frame into a sitting position. "Do you have my press cuttings?"

Muriel took the newspapers out of her bag and tossed them onto the table. "It's hot in here." She pulled off her wig and dropped it by the Daily Telegraph; then, on second thoughts, arranged it on its stand, on the blank-faced head of white polystyrene that she kept on top of Crisp's chest of drawers. She didn't live here; she had a room of her own. But everything was arranged for her convenience.

"Well?" she asked Crisp.

Emmanuel looked up, gratified. "AN ACT OF G.o.d," he read. Muriel said, "Do you want me to go for some fish and chips?"

"I couldn't eat. I'm too excited."

"Suit yourself. I've had my lunch with my employers. They're not too pleased about the practice I had in their kitchen."

"They'll get it on their insurance," Crisp said, absorbed. "Heretics have no insurance." He smiled as he read. Muriel yawned, and scratched her itching scalp.

"I'm going to change," she said. "Don't watch me, Crisp."

She took off her leopard-skin jacket and hung it in the wardrobe, kicked off her shoes with a groan, and delved about under the bed for the flat open sandals that Muriel wore. She hauled up her skirt and released her black stockings from their suspenders. From under his eyelids Crisp watched her, rubbing with her fingertips at the indentations the suspenders had left in her blue-white flesh. Her blouse went over her head and onto the floor, and with a grunt she undid the fastening of her painful padded bra.s.siere. Her own body, free from Lizzie's underpinnings, seemed flat and meagre. "Give me a towel," she said to Crisp. He watched her as she scrubbed off Lizzie's mouth, erased her lurid eyelids. After five minutes Muriel was back; her almost colourless eyes, her bland inexpressive features, her short dark hair now beginning to grey.

"Are you getting a multiple personality?" Crisp asked her.

She gave him a look. "I know who I am," she said.

She put on Muriel's skirt, and a limp cheesecloth blouse, embroidered on the bodice with blue flowers. She had a faraway look, Crisp thought; she was planning what she would do on the street. "Don't go," he said. "We could pa.s.s the afternoon in a study of the Psalms."

"Stuff that," Muriel said. "Where's my collecting box?"

"Bodily resurrection is a fact."

"I never said different. Don't go picking quarrels."

"Do you know, it's not the first fire at York Minster. Jonathan Martin, 1829, described as a lunatic. Emmanuel Crisp, 1984, right hand of the Lord."

"I hear you, talking like a nutter. Trying to get yourself readmitted."

"What if I am? We all pretend to be something we're not. Especially you, Muriel." She was heading for the door. "Don't leave me on my own. I feel jittery."

"Well, what is it you want to do then?"

"Stay with me a bit. You can talk to me if you like."

"What about?"

"About your life. I could give you absolution, Muriel."

She hesitated, came back into the room. "What's that?"

"Forgiveness for your sins."

"What's forgiving? It doesn't change anything. Anyway, I don't do sins."

"Your crimes, then. It's a nice point."

"But I don't like remembering, Crisp. It upsets me, thinking about my mother and all that. I'd like to oblige you. But it gives me a pain behind my eyes."

"Do you good to have a pain. You're a malicious old bat."

"What about you? Burning down churches?"

"I do it for G.o.d."

"I do it for me. I do it for fun. I do what I like."

But already the unwelcome process had begun. Her recall had nothing dim about it. Ten years ago, she had been a woman with a mother and a child. She'd had a lifetime of Mother, but the baby she'd only had for a few days. She had disposed of both of them: 1975. Only hours after the disposal, her life had changed completely; chance had shackled her in the long chain of events that brought her to where she was now. And they say crime doesn't pay! She was better off now than she'd ever been; it was only one of the things people said to comfort themselves. Before that dark February afternoon, with the social worker screaming in an upstairs room, she'd been nothing but a girl at home; a girl at home with her mother at 2, Buckingham Avenue, for thirty-four years.

Mother was not an easy woman. She was a landlord, a gaoler. She did a manoeuvre she called "keeping ourselves to ourselves." It involved close planning, bad manners; cowering in the back room if anyone came knocking at the door. It was not age that did this to Mother; it had always been her policy. When Muriel went to school, Mother waited for her by the gate. She took her by the neck and by the arm and hauled her home.

This was Muriel's life: days, whole weeks together, when Mother didn't let her out of the house in the mornings. She locked her in the bedroom, or hid her shoes. At St. David's School on Arlington Road, she was nothing but an object of remark. None of the remarks were flattering. She rocked on her chair, played with her fingers. She would not write, could not, had never learned, forgotten how. At the sound of a bell the children rushed out of the room and fought each other in an asphalt circus behind bars. She stood and watched the others, rubbing her arm above the elbow where Mother's fingers left her permanently bruised. She licked some rust from the railings; there was iron on her tongue, salt, ice. She laid about her with her fists. Soon this part of life was over; Mother kept her at home.

The streets, Mother said, were dangerous for a growing girl. There were attacks, impregnations, thefts. She could make your flesh crawl with her tales. By and by a man came to the house, making enquiries. His name was Mr. Hutchinson, and he was called an attendance officer. Mother dodged him for a month; finally she let him in. "Are you Mrs. Evelyn Axon?" he asked. He saw Muriel, sitting on a stool in the kitchen. He called her my dear. Mother sneered. Oh dear, my dear, she said, isn't it a gorgeous little cretin, a muttonhead, an oaf, and is it precisely what you want, sir, for your select conservatoire? Mr. Hutchinson had a cardboard file which he stored under his arm. He took a step backwards, away from Mother, holding the file across the breast of his fawn overcoat. It brought him up against the door of the lean-to; confused, he turned and fumbled for the handle, and found himself treading in the mulch of old cardboard and newspaper that was always underfoot in winter, breathing in the dank lean-to air. Cobwebs trailed across his gla.s.ses. From her stool, Muriel laughed out loud.

After Mr. Hutchinson had been retrieved from the lean-to and set on his way out of the front door, Mother had taken her aside and said: stupidity is the better part of valour. Doltishness is the best defence. After that, there had been similar visitors; meeting similar fates, if they got in at all. The Welfare, Mother called them. There had been a time when, just to keep them happy, Mother had let her go in a bus once a week to the handicapped cla.s.s. She sat with other people in a room, four of them round each table. She cut out shapes in felt and sewed them with great tough st.i.tches onto other felt. She got thin strips of cane and bent them up into baskets; and while she did this she spoke to no one, keeping her lips closed and preserving her eyes behind the thick gla.s.ses that the Welfare had got for her. Presently the materials were taken away, and they were given tea and biscuits.

A few months pa.s.sed, and the results of freedom were visible. Mother kept her at home again. For decades she had sat imprisoned in the house; now she sat in the house behind the bulk of her pregnant belly. How did you get in that condition? her friend Sholto had once asked her. She had thought back, leaning on the hospital fence, looking over it into the world. I gave them the slip, she said. Mother took me to the door, down the path I went, round the corner, where I saw the dog lying on the path, the fox-terrier dog that lay there every Thursday afternoon; and I gave it a kick. I walked on, and I stood, and when I saw that little bus coming, I just turned myself round and went the other way.

I gave them the slip, she said. I went for a go in the park, looking in the litter bins, going in the summer house, getting on those swings. I should have been at my cla.s.s doing basket weaving and community singing but I went for this go in the park instead. And your beau, Sholto asked; he had a little fiddle? He was a professional man, Muriel said; he had a lovely tweed coat, and some credit cards.

So it came about, she said sonorously to Sholto.

Sholto could keep a secret. He rolled her a cigarette, she smoked it leaning on the fence, and then they went in for their dinner. They had just got the cafeteria system. They took a tray and stood in a line and got brown baked beans and white fish pie. A few people arranged it into patterns, but Muriel had no heart for it. Talking about the past upset her: the cold and discomfort, Mother's bullying, the lack of proper food, the musty unlit rooms inside the house, and the screen of dark trees outside. Buckingham Avenue was so silent you could hear the dust move, and Mother's dying thoughts rustle through her skull; Christmas 1974, mice in the kitchen cupboards, two seasonal envelopes coming through the door. Miss Florence Sidney, their neighbour, came with a plate full of warm mince pies. Muriel was shut up; their fragrance, wafting up the staircase, made her jaws ache. Mother put Miss Sidney in her place. She forced raw whisky on her, bawled out "Merry Christmas," and booted her out in short order. One of Miss Sidney's pies leaped from the plate as she scurried down the hall, and smashed and opened itself on the dusty parquet floor. Muriel came down; she put her finger into its steaming golden insides and tasted it. Evelyn shooed her off, pushed her into the back room. She told her to let it lie. Next day it was gone.

Mother had knocked over the paraffin heater. She had groaned in the wet weather when her knees and hips gave her pain. She had taken away Muriel's cards from the Welfare and burned them, and forbidden her to play in the garden for fear that the neighbours might see her and report on her state. Mother was afraid of the neighbours. She was afraid of ghosts, of changelings. She complained that as she walked down the hallway little claws pulled at her skirt, little devil's crabs with no bodies, sliding noiselessly away from under her feet.

At one time, her trade had been giving seances for the neighbours. Mrs. Sidney, the pie-maker's mother, had called in to speak to her late husband, and had got scared so badly at Mother's proficiency that she had turned funny, and shortly afterwards had been sent away. People had come from the other side of town; once a woman had come all the way from Crewe, bringing a parcel of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof to sustain her during her trip on the train. Afternoons, Mother had spent in the front parlour; groaning, sweating, making the bleak monosyllabic conversations that the dead enjoy. Evening, money in her purse; she would sn.i.g.g.e.r, and go and put the kettle on. One day, as she headed for the kitchen, a black wall of panic rose up in front of her and blocked her path. Muriel, lurking at the foot of the stairs, watched Mother's throat gaping for air, watched her raise a fist and first hammer, then claw at the wall; saw her lift her feet and tussle in the thick air, treading and weaving inside her big woollen cardigan like a dancing bear.

The episode pa.s.sed. I had a black-out, Mother said. It's my age.

After that Mother had regretted her seances. The house was full of what she had conjured up; a three-bed two-reception property on a large corner plot, all jostled and crammed with the teeth-baring dead, stranded souls whistling in the cavity walls, half-animated corpses under the flagstones outside. One bedroom, which they called the spare room, had its special tenants. Without eyes and ears, they made themselves known by shuffling; by the soft sucking of their breath, in and out; but they had no lungs. They were malign intentions, Mother said, waiting to be joined to bodies; they were the notions of the dead, expecting flesh.

Mother was now seventy years old; tired, done for, blue stains under her eyes. She'd tried to make a living and now she was to be penalised. No one can help you, she said. No one ever will. They were on their own. They never went out, because they were afraid of what might happen in the house while they were away.

Muriel could see herself as she was then; her pudding face above her smock. Days went by when they never spoke.

She felt a movement inside her, very strange. Mother said, you're occupied. It would be another mute, an ugly, a ne'er-do-well. She felt it ready to burst out, and that she would die. She knew about death very well, believing that her little thoughts would empty out of her head, and roll round and round in the spare room, picking up the dust from the floor.

Mother got books from the public library, first aid. When the baby started to be born she got out her reading gla.s.ses. She fumbled around in the bedroom, cursing. She went round the house with a torch, s.h.i.+ning into all the dark corners. Muriel had a pain, a private pain, and she felt that something was going to come of it.

Next day Mother was tired. She made no secret of it; she had entertained hopes that a better sort of infant would be forthcoming. It was an evil-smelling sc.r.a.p, greedy, drinking up everything that it was offered; it gave evidence of an intemperate nature, of an agitating character. It had a strange face, unlike theirs. It cried incessantly, like an animal shut up in a shed. I'm afraid it's worse than I thought, Mother said.

On the third day she broke it to her: it's not human. It's a changeling, Muriel; you've been duped.

But Mother was never at a loss. She had a theory, and her theory was this: you take a firm line, stand no nonsense, and arrange to get a human child back. How?

You find some water, a river; but there was no river, not without taking the bus. Luckily there was the ca.n.a.l, and the ca.n.a.l would do. Float off the wastrel, the subst.i.tute; wait a bit, and the chances are you'll get another in return. It's the recommended method.

Hearing this theory, Muriel had laughed. The Welfare never told me that, she said, and you get to know things from the Welfare. Such as? Mother demanded. Such as supplementary benefit, rebate on your rent. Mother gave her a slap. It was tried and tested, she said. Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, is that a proverb with which you are unfamiliar? Muriel saw by the quivering of her mother's face that she was at the end of her tether. She was afraid of the changeling and would not have it in the house. I could telephone the authorities, she said, and have you both locked up.

Of course Mother knew more than she did; she had years of experience, with the living and the dead. "All right," Muriel said. She was persuaded.

And so the day came to try the subst.i.tution. It was a raw winter's day, with a smell of earth and water. They walked over the fields to the ca.n.a.l bank, meeting no one. They set the box carefully on the surface of the water, the cardboard box with the baby inside. "Sink or swim," Mother said. The baby had not made a sound; it had given up crying by then, and they had put a blanket over its face and folded over the flaps of the box. It was not cruelty, merely a precaution; Mother knew what she was doing and didn't want interference.

Below the water was a slimy substance which Muriel found interesting. She put her hand in, and brought it out dripping. Mother gave her a handkerchief to dry it on. They watched the cardboard box, growing soggy, bobbing in the water. There was no sign of the swap. The two babies were already confused in her mind; cold, stunted, condemned to the changeling life, their scant humanity draining away from them year by year. The box dipped in the water and was soon lost from view; the days were short, and there was not much light under the trees. Was it a boy or a girl? Sholto had asked her. I don't know, she replied; it was all so long ago. She had felt on the ca.n.a.l bank-or was it only later that she felt it?-a small gnawing inside that she called regret. It was all she had, and now it was drowning. It was true that her knowledge of matters was limited, but it was possible that everything, from her go in the park onwards, could have worked out differently. It was not regret for the infant she felt; after all, she hardly knew it. Perhaps it was for herself then; she wondered for a moment how she came to be alive, how it was that her old mother had not brought her here and floated her off one day in the hope of getting in exchange a human child. She brushed the thought away, rubbing her slimy hand down the sleeve of her winter coat. She was hungry. Mother said it had not worked. It was time to be getting home; darkness was closing in rapidly over the fields.

They returned home. It was only five o'clock, but it felt like the middle of the night. The lightbulb had gone in the hall. Her tummy was rumbling. When the knock came at the front door, Mother said, it's that gas man again, I suppose we'll have to let him in sooner or later. She gave Muriel a shove in the ribs, told her to stay in the back room. Make yourself scarce, she said.

But when Evelyn opened the front door it wasn't the gas man at all. It was Miss Isabel Field from the Welfare, the lady they had been keeping out for months.

Mother had dropped her guard, and she probably knew then that she was going to suffer for it. But first she tried to retrieve her error, smiling sweetly at the girl, leading her up the stairs. Muriel leaned against the door of the back room, breathing, listening. As soon as Mother had ushered Miss Field into the spare room, she turned the key on her. Muriel came out into the hall. She sat on the stairs, her knees drawn up to her chin, and listened to Miss Field suffering. How she screamed! How she hammered at the door! How she hammered on the window! She'd put her hand through the gla.s.s if she didn't take care.

When the banging started at the back of the house too, the devil got into Muriel; she said right, solve this one, Mother, but she didn't dare to say it out loud. The sound of the words and the sound of the hammering went round and round and reverberated in her head as she padded in her bedroom slippers towards the kitchen door.

And then came the invasion. A man burst in. He ran through the house, shouting. Mother came after, striving and yelling; white in the face, wrapped in her cardigan, as fast as she could caper. Up the stairs ran sweating man. After him went Mother. The next moment she lay in a heap on the floor at the bottom. Muriel, behind the front door, stood regarding her.

a.s.sembled in the hall now were Miss Florence Sidney, who baked mince pies; Miss Sidney's brother Colin; and the welfare worker, Miss Isabel Field. Miss Field said she was leaving the profession. It was too much, she said, to be locked up in a bedroom by some type of madwoman when you were only trying to do a home visit. She was trembling, crying a little. Miss Sidney's brother got down on the floor and lay on top of Mother. He fastened his mouth voraciously over hers. Mother did not respond; it was ages since she'd had the attentions of a man. After a few minutes, Colin Sidney pushed himself upright, wiped his mouth, and looked down at Mother lying between his legs. He raised his fist and hit her chest a tremendous blow; two blows, then three. Muriel watched closely, sharing his disappointment that Mother seemed to feel nothing of all this. Presently he gave up on her. He lurched to his feet, talking, breathing heavily. She was hanging on to me, he said, as I tried to get upstairs; like a maniac, Miss Field, you were pounding on the bedroom door. I shrugged her off, shrugged is all I did; she slipped, she lost her footing. Now, Colin, said his sister, Florence, now, Colin, the ambulance is on its way, no one is blaming you. You did the right thing to rescue me, Miss Field said; locked in that room by myself I felt something pulling at my skirt. She s.h.i.+vered. Colin took off his jacket and put it round her shoulders. There you are, Miss Er, he said. Field, she told him. Victor of the Field, Muriel whispered. For a moment they stared at her; they were not sure if she had spoken or not.

When Miss Sidney was out doing her telephoning, the brother and the social worker turned to each other. They acted as if no one was there; not her in the bedroom slippers, not Mother in a heap. They were people who had met before; their eyes met, and then their hands. She would not be surprised if they had not met on a go in the park. She had a grievance against the social worker, with her trim waist and pale pretty face. She herself was still bloated from her pregnancy, but the girl did not know that. The baby was something they'd kept to themselves; a private trial, which they had faced in their own way.

Miss Sidney was back now. She turned to Muriel. Now, Muriel, she said, I don't want you to upset yourself, and what we could do with is a blanket to cover up your poor old mum. Let her s.h.i.+ver, Muriel thought, noticing that she did not. Already the grievances of a lifetime were rising up in her mind. Did other people live like this? She had no idea. The social worker said that the place was like a morgue. She bent over Mother, turning her head with her slim white hand. No one's blaming you, she said to Colin Sidney; she's had a heart attack. Mother's face was a strange mottled colour; its expression was one of astonishment.

In the last few moments of Mother's life, she, Muriel, had come up the stairs from the bottom. Whilst Mother was slipping, sliding, clutching with one hand at the banister and the other at her chest, she had knitted her fingers into the back of Mother's cardigan, she had taken her by the scruff and bounced her slam, slam, against the wall; and this was why, when Mother died, she looked so surprised.

There were now more people in the house than Muriel could ever remember; more, at any rate, than since Father's funeral. She had been only a child then; she had wondered why Clifford Axon couldn't be buried at the back, outside the lean-to, but her mother had said no, she wanted him off the premises. Thirty years had pa.s.sed; life was going to alter. In the midst of her speculations, her stomach rumbled again quite audibly. Murder makes me famished, she thought. She took a final look at her mother, then went into the kitchen and cut herself a piece of bread. She rummaged in the cupboards and found a pot of some kind of red jam. The old cow, she thought, she was keeping this for herself. There was quite a lot left, three-quarters of the pot. She got a knife from the cutlery drawer and spread the jam carefully, very thick and right to the edges of the bread. When Colin Sidney came in she offered him a bite, but he did not seem interested. She could hear the social worker being sick again. Vehicles drew up outside, and uniformed men took Evelyn away.

Soon after these events, Muriel left home herself. She understood that she would be going away for some years, to recuperate from her time with her mother. A woman called Tidmarsh collected her. She put a plastic bag in the boot of the car, containing Muriel's personal effects; the two smocks that Mother had made for her out of a pair of old curtains, and a few other odds and ends she found in the drawers. Muriel looked back at the house where until now she had always lived. She felt a terrible sense of incompleteness, as if something that mattered to her had been abandoned in one of the rooms. She pawed at the woman's arm, trying to get her to turn back, but the woman shook herself free and yelled out that they would have an accident. How was Muriel to know? She had never been in a car before, only the minibus.

Mother had always threatened her that if she didn't do as she was told, she'd be rounded up with the other ne'er-do-wells, and taken off and ga.s.sed. It had happened once, Evelyn said; and the whole world profits by example. So was this it? She felt no emotion; she did not know what ga.s.sed would be like. She looked out at the factory walls as they pa.s.sed, her head lolling against the gla.s.s, shaking with the vibrations of the car.

It was a mild spring day, but the women in the streets were still bundled into their heavy coats. They pushed children in trolleys, their heads bowed against the breeze. Sunlight dappled the gla.s.s of a bus shelter. The mill gates and little rows of shops gave way to an area of semi-detached houses with white painted fences and pretty flowering shrubs in the gardens. A red housing estate climbed up the side of a hill. Soon they were in the country. Miss Tidmarsh wound her window down, and the smell of fresh gra.s.s filled the car. They turned into a gateway, into a gravelled drive shaded by towering hedges. Clouds flew across the windscreen. The car nosed onwards, through the summer ahead; birds wheeled over the fields.

The house itself, a crumbling grey core, looked out over the fields and towards the road. Gravel paths ran away from it, with flower beds on either side. There were parked cars, an ambulance, a scatter of Nissen huts and sheds, and a colony of new buildings, made of metal and varnished wood and plate gla.s.s. Beyond these was a belt of dark trees, and more fields. There was a faint ground mist, and moisture in the air.