DAVID NOBBS
The Second Life of Sally Mottram

Dedication

For Chris

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

BOOK ONE: The First Day

1. Two nines and a six

2. In the cul-de-sac

3. Purely routine

4. A lovely evening

5. The Fazackerly sisters

6. A very short chapter, but fear of a very long evening

7. Marigold goes to a party

8. Ben arrives home late

BOOK TWO: Sally Makes a Journey, and a Decision

9. Going south

10. A small flat in Barnet

11. Sam’s worry

12. In which Totnes is mentioned many times

13. Uncharacteristic behaviour

14. A surprise

BOOK THREE: The Work Begins

15. A Tuesday in spring

16. The Great Bruise Special

17. Sally breaks new ground

BOOK FOUR: Conrad

18. The great cities of Italy

19. A thousand miles apart

20. A long, hot summer

21. Sally’s dread

22. Dinner for two

23. The march

24. The waiting

25. A grand night in the hills

26. Marigold seeks advice

27. A resounding whisper

28. A glorious weekend

29. A difficult meal

30. Sally confronts her soul

BOOK FIVE: Transition

31. An emissary with a wet handshake

32. A life of luxury

33. A hard decision

34. An unfinished manuscript

35. An envelope of distinction

36. Public and private changes

37. Flood control

38. The remorseless passage of time

39. Before the deluge

40. The deluge

41. After the deluge

BOOK SIX: The Last Day

42. Morning

43. Afternoon

44. Evening

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by David Nobbs

Copyright

About the Publisher

BOOK ONE
The First Day

Of course they didn’t know, on that day, that it was the first day.

ONE
Two nines and a six

Sally Mottram had never liked Potherthwaite. She had never even liked the North of England. She endured it because of Barry’s business.

She liked it less than ever today. She had walked the length of the High Street, as part of her exercise routine, and because she wanted to call in at the bookshop on the Potherthwaite Quays – the plural was an exaggeration. There she had received the devastating news that the bookshop would close in three weeks, unable to match the special offers given elsewhere in a world where a book is expected to be a little cheaper than a starter in Pizza Express.

On the Quays there was a very basic café and an empty building with a rusting sign that stated ‘The Terminus Bist o’. The bistro had closed its doors – another exaggeration, its door – seven months ago. Soon ‘The Canal Bookshop’ would also be empty. One day a letter would drop off there too, and ‘The anal Bookshop’ would fester among the floods for ever.

This was the scene at the end of the Potherthwaite Arm of the Rackstraw and Sladfield Canal, which the great Sir Norman Oldfield no less had once planned to turn into a rival for Wigan Pier. Sally stood and looked at the dereliction. Up the canal, three narrowboats lay moored. One had sunk, but the canal was so shallow that it was hard to notice this. The second was rotting, as was its occupant, a sculptor who had suffered from sculptor’s block for seventeen years. The third was beautifully maintained, and lived in by a rather posh couple, who had once just managed to get to the Quays through the silt, only to find that there was no longer enough water in the cut for them to turn round and go home. They had lived there for eight and a half years now, getting slowly older and slower, but always offering generous noggins to their new friends.

Something had to be done about Potherthwaite, but who would do it?

She turned her back on the sad scene, and began to walk along the unimaginatively named Quays Approach towards the east end of the long High Street. Waddling complacently towards her was Linda Oughtibridge. Some people thought she did the flowers for the church quite beautifully. Others didn’t. Linda Oughtibridge was in the former camp, Sally Mottram in the latter. Sally noticed something that afternoon that had never occurred to her before. Linda Oughtibridge was just about the squarest woman she had ever seen.

‘Oh, good afternoon, Mrs Mottram,’ said Linda Oughtibridge in a voice treacly with false enthusiasm. ‘Not a bad day.’

Not a bad day! This was almost the final straw for Sally. It was a vile day. The lowering sky was uniformly grey. True, it was dry, but there was dampness in the chill air. True also that there was no wind, but the stillness was so complete that the air almost became solid; walking through it was hard work.

There’s a certain kind of smile that demands to be wiped off a person’s face, and there’s a certain kind of face that demands to have the smile wiped off it. Linda Oughtibridge possessed just such a face, and just such a smile, and she was smiling now. The words formed themselves irresistibly in Sally’s brain.

‘Oh, piss off!’

The shocking words hurtled from her brain towards her lips, where she clamped down on them just in time.

‘Not so bad, Mrs Oughtibridge.’

In twenty-four years of meeting, neither Sally nor Linda had ever ventured into Christian-name territory.

The narrowness of her escape brought Sally Mottram’s flesh out in goose pimples. She had nice flesh; she was an attractive woman in a slightly restrained way, but with an elegant shapely backside over which at least two men in the town fantasized furiously. She was forty-seven, and was experimenting, but not too boldly, with hair the colour of straw. She had a husband and two grown-up children, a boy and a girl. Her husband was a lawyer. She was not the sort of person who said ‘Piss off’ to esteemed arrangers of the church’s flowers.

She walked slowly along High Street East, past two pubs, one of them boarded up, past two nearly-new dress shops, three charity shops and five empty buildings.

She passed a rash of tediously named enterprises – the Potherthwaite Café, the Potherthwaite Arms, the Potherthwaite and Rackstraw Building Society – and stepped into the Market Place, which was full of unlovely parked cars. The two best buildings were banks. The Town Hall, on the south side of the square, had architectural pretensions that it didn’t quite justify. The George Hotel had once looked handsome, but was peeling badly. On the west side of the square was the Victorian church, stone, solid and almost as square as Linda Oughtibridge. The church had been built to look instantly old. Paradoxically, it looked less old with every year that passed.

A noticeboard outside the church announced: ‘If you want to be saved, there’s always a welcome here.’ Beneath it someone had scrawled: ‘If you don’t, call at 9 Canal Basin and ask for Sophie.’

Beyond the church, the River Pother crossed under the High Street at an angle. Sally paused on the bridge, and looked down at the sullen stream. There had once been dippers, inappropriately lively and pretty, dipping eponymously on the little rocks in the middle of the river. There were no dippers now. Today there were only the two bipolar mallard, swimming listlessly against the sluggish waters.

She stopped to take in the scene. The river curved round the edge of the graveyard and ran north-east to the great textile mills, not a window unbroken now. Beyond the mills, rows of houses climbed the lower slopes of Baggit Moor as if turned to stone while striving to escape from the river’s last flood. She shuddered. She had almost said ‘Piss off’ to Mrs Oughtibridge. It was time to take herself in hand. It was time to get a grip.

She walked across the square into High Street West. A large furniture van passed her in the slow traffic that was clogging the grim road. ‘Barnard’s Removals. Serving Chichester and the World’.

Oh no. Marigold Boyce-Willoughby was walking towards her; she was a friend, and she couldn’t snub her. Sally found sympathy easy to feel, yet very hard to express. But she would have to.

‘Afternoon, Sally.’

‘Afternoon, Marigold.’

‘Better day today.’

The awful thing was that this was true.

‘I suppose so. At least it’s dry. Almost. Marigold, I … um …’

‘Don’t say it.’

‘No, but I …’

‘Don’t say you’re sorry. I’m not. I’ve had men up to here.’

Sally turned away, for fear that she would smile at this unfortunate phrase.

‘I’ll get by.’

‘Of course you will, Marigold.’

‘I have before.’

‘I know.’

‘I will again.’

‘I know. Well … um … I must be on my way. Barry’s a stickler for his tea.’

Oh God, why had she said that? What an awful picture of their life it painted, and their life was happy, wasn’t it? Marigold made it worse by commenting on it. Well, she would. She liked Marigold, but it was small wonder that three husbands had walked out on her.

‘Oh well,’ said Marigold Boyce-Willoughby. ‘You’d best be on your way. Mustn’t keep a stickler waiting.’

She would forgive the sarcasm, under the circumstances. After all, she was a Christian … a long while ago.

She walked on, on on on, as it felt. She passed the post office, and the forbidden territory of William Hill, never been in, couldn’t, imagine what folk would say! ‘I saw Sally Mottram in William Hill’s. She was pretending she didn’t know how to fill in a betting slip. Didn’t fool me. She’s a secret gambler.’

There is no sense of an incline in Potherthwaite High Street when you walk from west to east, but Sally found her legs growing tense and weary as she climbed gently from east to west. Surely the incline that day was just a little steeper than usual? She found herself wondering if the High Street was a geological oddity, level in one direction, uphill in the other.

She crossed the road. It was an entirely negative move, symbolic of Potherthwaite. She wanted to avoid walking on the edge of the waste ground, which stood like two missing front teeth in the unsmiling mouth of High Street West. The local department store, Willis and Frond, had failed seven years ago. The failure had been followed by several years of fierce lethargy, but now there were plans to pull down the adjoining delicatessen – yes, it was called ‘The Potherthwaite Deli’ – and build a large supermarket on the site. She shuddered. Potherthwaite already had a supermarket, tucked away at the head of the valley, beyond the allotments. It didn’t need two.

She hated walking on the edge of that gaping pit, not because she might fall into it – a criss-cross of barriers had been erected by the Overkill Department of the Health and Safety Office – but because she wouldn’t be able to resist looking down and seeing all the rubbish people had dumped there. Her neighbour referred to it as Condom and Coca-Cola Corner. It made her feel so angry that she could scarcely breathe.

Ahead of her, the removals van had its right-hand indicators on. It was going to turn in to the cul-de-sac. Some lucky people were going to move, escape from Potherthwaite, settle in or near Chichester. Hayling Island, perhaps, the gentle waves dappled with sunlight; the weather was different down south.

Luke Warburton, Johnny Blackstock and Digger Llewellyn were playing on the waste ground, idly kicking an empty Diet Coke tin around, bored out of their tiny minds in this tiny-minded town. Ben Wardle, that strange boy, appeared to be building a column of stones, placing a stone rather perilously on the top with infinite care. Johnny Blackstock, for whom the word ‘unstrange’ might have to be invented, strolled over and kicked the stones down. Luke Warburton and Digger Llewellyn thought this the funniest thing they had ever seen. Sally hurried on.

Mrs Oughtibridge – Sally was no longer religious, she didn’t believe in miracles, but it was almost a miracle that there was a Mr Oughtibridge – condemned all youngsters as wastrels, pointing out that there was a perfectly good youth club to which they never went. Sally hadn’t liked the little drama played out on the waste ground, but she had some sympathy for them. When she was their age she wouldn’t have been seen dead in a youth club, particularly a perfectly good one. Sometimes, when she was young, she had been naughty. She hadn’t been naughty now for twenty-five years. She didn’t think she would ever be naughty again. She did have thoughts, she was still attractive and attracted, but she dismissed them. Barry might not be the most vibrant man in the world, or even in Potherthwaite, or even for that matter in Oxford Road, or even the south side of Oxford Road. He didn’t go in for dramatic or romantic gestures. Men who are sticklers for their tea usually don’t. But he was a good man. Suddenly she felt that she wanted to get home, hoped he’d be back early, loved him in her way.

She crossed the road again, deftly dodging the slow-moving traffic. The removals van had disappeared into the cul-de-sac.

She passed ‘Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow’ – how she hated attempts at funny names for small businesses. She passed ‘The Kosy Korner Kafé’, on the corner of Canal Road which led to Canal Basin, the town’s minuscule red-light district.

She took a brief glance up the cul-de-sac, being mildly keen, in the dreary waste of that long, grey, almost motionless, late afternoon, to discover the identity of the lucky people who were leaving stony-faced Potherthwaite for the sunny environs of Chichester.

The big double doors at the back of the van were down, and the first items of furniture were being removed and taken into one of the semi-detached, Gothic-windowed old Victorian town houses in Potherthwaite’s Conservation Area. These were not lucky people at all. They were either deeply unfortunate people or really rather thick people. They were moving from the exciting creeks of Chichester Harbour to the cul-de-sac under Baggit Moor. Sally thought, from the position of the van, that they must be moving into number 9.

She should have realized that at five o’clock a furniture van would be delivering, not arriving to load up, but the sight of the van had set her thoughts rolling in a familiar direction, that of escape down south, and there had been no room for even the consideration of people moving to Potherthwaite from anywhere, let alone Sussex. As she stood staring at the furniture being removed, she was actually seeing that mythical day when her furniture van would set off, taking Barry and her down south, to glorious Godalming perhaps, or even cloistered Chichester.

But her fantasy didn’t last long. Barry would never move; he had his solid little business, his valued clients. He wasn’t one for grand gestures or for brave moves, and she could never leave him.

As she passed the turning into Cadwallader Road – how did they choose these street names? Cadwallader was absurd, it was a street of small terrace houses – she glanced at number 6 as usual. The curtains were closed in the front room. Sally always glanced at those curtains. It saddened her when they were closed, and cheered her when they were open, which was ridiculous, because Ellie Fazackerly was bedridden, had been for years – how many? Didn’t bear thinking about – couldn’t get up to see the view, not that you would want to see the view even if you could, but Sally was a humane person and she couldn’t bear to think of poor Ellie Fazackerly, trapped in her bed, second after second, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, always. Of course a lot of people didn’t feel sorry for Ellie. All her own fault. Brought it on herself. Saw her eat seven pies in half an hour once.

But Sally did feel sorry, and she thought of calling on Ellie, helping a few of those minutes to pass. But Barry was a stickler for his tea, however unwise it was to broadcast the fact, and he was a good man, on balance, and not every woman could say that about her husband.

She was coming to the edge of the town centre now, and High Street West was beginning to lose what little charm it had. To the right was Vernon Road, home to three adjacent Indian restaurants, the Old Bengal, the New Bengal (family feud) and the Taj Mahal. Already the smell of frying spices was drifting in the evening breeze. On the end wall of a Chinese takeaway, beneath a window beyond which rows of cheap pink clothes were hanging, someone had sprayed ‘Immirgants Go Home’ in angry black.

Now, at a confusing mini-roundabout, High Street West breathed its last. To the left were allotments, extensive, too extensive for these busy times, sadly. Many of them were badly cared for, and quite a few were unoccupied. Beyond them was only the supermarket and its huge car park, and then the bare inhospitable hills marked the head of the Pother Valley.

To the right, the moment you left the remnants of High Street West, you were suddenly in smarter territory. The houses were larger than anywhere else in the town, most of them were detached, and two or three even had swimming pools, which was ridiculous in that climate. Even the occasional solar panel spoke of wild optimism.

Now the road forked. Sally took the right-hand fork, along Oxford Road. Beyond the road, at the head of the valley, high above the rushing streams that formed the headwaters of the Pother, stood the nearest things to spires that Oxford Road afforded. Eight vast windmills stood guard on the tops of the hills, motionless and silent in the still air, neutered by nature.

Peter Sparling was walking towards her with his Labrador, and she knew the sort of thing he was going to say, and she dreaded it.

‘Not a bad day.’

She thought of the shock there would be if she told Peter Sparling to piss off. Or worse. Something sarcastic was needed, though. She had to bleed this sudden overwhelming feeling of frustration.

‘Yes, not bad at all,’ she said. ‘Very little thunder, the lightning scarcely forked, and not a tsunami in sight. Mustn’t grumble, eh, Peter?’

Peter Sparling gave her a puzzled look, said ‘Come on, Kenneth’, as if urging his beloved dog out of the contaminated area surrounding this madwoman, and walked on.

Sally walked on up Oxford Road, past ‘Windy Corner’, the home of the town’s only psychiatrist, the overworked Dr Mallet, and past the trim, neat, lifeless garden of ‘Mount Teidi’, where her neighbours the Hammonds were so silent that she often thought they must be in Tenerife when they were in fact at home.

Everything was silent today. The silence oppressed her.

She opened the gate into the immaculate garden of ‘The Larches’, just as lifeless at this early moment in the year, but full of the promise of bloom. She noticed a weed or two, and decided to let them live a little longer; she wasn’t obsessive, she wasn’t a Hammond.

She put her key in the lock, turned it, opened the door, entered the hall.

Inside the house it was silent too. She saw him straight away, and, that day, he was definitely not being a stickler for his tea. That day he had done something that was definitely dramatic, and might even be considered by some people to be brave. He was hanging from a beam at the top of the stairs. There was a rope round his neck. He was very, very dead.

TWO
In the cul-de-sac

‘They’re old,’ said Arnold Buss in a low voice.

‘And we aren’t?’ said Jill, also in a low voice, although it was absurd to feel the need to speak so quietly, as their new neighbours had only just pulled up behind the furniture van, and were busy getting things out of the ample boot of their silver VW Passat.

The Busses were standing a little back from the window, Arnold further back than Jill, in the cold spare front room on the first floor of number 11 Moor Brow, which was always referred to as ‘The Cul-de-Sac’, as if Potherthwaite was actually rather proud of having such a thing as a cul-de-sac. They didn’t want to be caught peering out. Arnold had taught history, and Jill had been in the forefront of the world of the colonoscopy in the District Hospital. It wouldn’t do to be seen to be curious about their new neighbours.

The man, now carrying two small suitcases, suddenly looked up to examine his new surroundings. Jill and Arnold hurriedly stepped back even further from the window.

‘I don’t like the look of their standard lamps,’ said Arnold.

‘What’s wrong with them?’

‘Ostentatious. They’re going to be materialistic. I know the type.’

‘And what did they do for a living?’

‘I don’t know. How could I possibly know that?’

‘I’d have thought their occasional tables might tell you.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly, Jill. Where are you going?’

Jill Buss was striding towards the door with a sudden sense of purpose. It unnerved Arnold when she showed a sense of purpose.

‘I’m going to tidy my make-up, if you must know.’

This was dreadful news. No good could come out of Jill tidying her make-up. Arnold was not sociable.

‘And why might you be going to tidy your make-up at this moment?’

But Jill was far ahead, out of earshot. She had marched across the landing, now she burst through their large bedroom – the rooms were big in these old houses – strode into her en-suite – they had separate bathrooms, the en-suite was her stronghold – and shut the door in Arnold’s face. She didn’t like him in the room when she was doing her make-up; he could never resist sarcasm. ‘We’re going to the pub for the early bird, not Buckingham Palace.’

He hesitated, then plucked up his courage, opened the door, and went in.

‘Arnold! I might have been on the toilet.’

‘You aren’t.’

‘But I might have been, that’s the point. You couldn’t know I wasn’t.’

‘I’m surprised that …’ He stopped. What he had been about to say wasn’t wise, wasn’t wise at all.

‘You’re surprised what?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, come on, Arnold, what?’

He sighed. His sighs were deep and frequent.

‘I’m surprised that a woman who earned her living giving people colonoscopies should be so ladylike about going to the toilet in front of a man who has known her and her body for forty-four years. Why are you touching up your face, Jill?’

‘I’m going round to see them, if you must know.’

‘See them? See who?’

‘Arnold! You aren’t stupid. Don’t pretend to be. Them. Our new neighbours.’

Arnold’s mouth dropped open. He looked as if he’d had a stroke. He could see his appalled face staring out at him from behind Jill’s still-lovely face in the mirror. It was a bad moment. He was terrified of having a stroke, and ending up looking as he looked at this moment, and it was painful to see his face there, haggard, rigid and grey, just behind hers. She looked infuriatingly attractive still, the softness of her auburn hair, the strong curves of the nostrils, the elegance of the upper lip. Even the lines of her face, because they came from smiles more than from grimaces, enhanced her charm. He looked so much older than her. He was older, but only by a year, seventy-three to her seventy-two. No, the picture he saw in her mirror in her bathroom did not please him. But worse even than that was her announcement. Going round to see them!

‘See them, Jill? Why?’

‘Welcome them. See if they need anything. Don’t you want to be friendly?’

‘Of course I do. If they’re the sort of people we want to be friendly with. But they might be Jehovah’s Witnesses. They might be shoplifters. They might be Liberal Democrats. They might be Catholics. They might be vegetarians. They might be Welsh.’

‘They might be Welsh vegetarian Liberal Democrat Catholic shoplifters.’

‘Exactly. Now do you see why I don’t want you to just charge round there?’

‘So how do you propose that we find out if they’re our sort of people? Do we send them a questionnaire?’

‘Don’t be silly. We observe them. We listen. Do they argue? Do they shout? What sort of music do they play? Does he put the box on when he mows the lawn? Do they hang out the washing in a seemly manner? What quality are their underclothes? Do they put the bins out properly? Do they have dogs?’

‘How many times do they pee in the night?’

‘You’re not taking this seriously.’

Jill turned round, away from the mirror, to give him a sober look.

‘I am, you know,’ she said. ‘We’ve been attached on to an empty house for more than two years. This means change, this could be the end of paradise, of course we’re edgy, but we’re human beings, and they’ll be knackered, and they’ll be edgy too, they’ll need cheering up, I would think, coming to Potherthwaite from Chichester, I would be … so …’

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep running Potherthwaite down, Jill. It isn’t Venice, but it’s home. And you only run it down to rile me.’

Arnold was writing a history of Potherthwaite. It was called ‘A Complete History of Potherthwaite’. It was very long already, because he was unable to leave anything out, now that he had described it as complete, but also because he was terrified of finishing it, which was in truth why he had described it as complete.

‘They’ll be stressed. They may not have anything to cook with. I’m going to invite them for supper.’

‘Jill. This is recklessness personified.’

‘Yes. Let’s live a little.’

Arnold left the bathroom quietly, shut the door carefully, left her to it. He had almost said ‘I don’t want to live a little, I’m seventy-three’, but luckily he had thought better of it.

So twenty minutes later, having titivated herself to her satisfaction, and looking, she knew, rather stunning for a seventy-two-year-old, Jill called on the neighbours.

There were eight identical buildings in the cul-de-sac, four on each side of the road. Each building was divided into two identical residences, dignified and solemn in dark, stern stone, listed buildings on which no bright paint could be used. The new neighbours’ house was joined to the Busses’ on the southern side.

In the slowly fading light of a day that had never been fully light, Jill strode up the wilderness that was the neglected front garden of number 9.

She rang the doorbell, and wondered what Arnold would say if they were Muslims. She heard a key and then another key – what were these people frightened of? – and suddenly the front door was open.

The woman who was standing there was shorter than Jill, older than Jill, less attractive than Jill, but could have looked a great deal better than she did if she had made the best of herself. True, she had just endured a tiring journey, but Jill knew that this woman had long ago given up making the best of herself, and this irritated her.

They introduced themselves. The woman’s name was Olive Patterson. Jill didn’t waste time on small talk.

‘I wondered … I expect you’ve had a long journey, you must be tired … I wondered … because I don’t expect you’ll have unpacked your cooking utensils and things, Arnold and I … that’s my husband … we wondered … would you like to pop round for a bit of supper tonight?’

Confusion painted a faint red glow on to Olive Patterson’s pallid cheeks.

‘Oh, that’s so kind of you,’ said Olive. ‘So kind. No, it is, that is so kind, really, really kind, but really we’re … we’re fine, we’re all right … and I mean we had a sandwich in the car, at a service station … well, we had it in the car because you don’t want to both leave the car at the same time, with so much stuff in it, do you? I mean, who can you trust these days? You can’t, can you? So, no, we’re all right, but thank you, thank you again, we so appreciate … Harry … that’s my husband … will really appreciate your offer … but we don’t want to be a nuisance, and we really will be all right, honestly, but, as I say, that is so kind, thank you, but … as I say, another time.’

So Jill went back home, feeling strangely disappointed, but when Olive told Harry what she had said (though not at such great length) he exploded. He told her that in his opinion it was rude to refuse such a friendly offer, it was the first good thing that had happened all day, and he was going round to say they’d changed their minds. Olive pleaded with him – it would make her look silly. He told her that she was silly, and off he went.

A minute or two later, he met Jill’s eyes for the first time, and they held each other’s eyes a second or two longer than might have been expected at the door of a listed building in a cul-de-sac in Potherthwaite at the darkening death of a gloomy late winter’s day. He told her that if the offer was still on they would be delighted. She told him that the offer was indeed still on, and he was indeed delighted.

Bang on half past seven – Olive hated to be late – Jill led the Pattersons into the lounge, which was a large, high-ceilinged room with a chandelier, furnished with a curious mix of Arnold’s reticence and Jill’s ebullience. Jill had dressed down, Olive had dressed up, but Jill still looked the smarter. Arnold looked formal and old-fashioned in jacket and tie and a pale blue shirt with silver cufflinks. Harry was in full ‘they’ll know we haven’t had time to unpack’ mode. How different the two men were: Arnold tall and slim and grizzled, with salt-and-pepper hair and a very obedient little salt-and-pepper moustache; Harry short, not fat but bursting at the seams of his casual clothes, and as bald as a balloon.

Harry glanced round the room, taking in the reticent chairs and the ebullient vases, and said, ‘Nice gaff. Nice room. Just trying to guess, who bought what?’

‘Harry!’ said Olive.

‘I embarrass her,’ said Harry complacently. ‘Sorry, doll.’

‘This is so kind of you,’ said Olive, forced into speech.

‘What are neighbours for?’ said Arnold gravely.

Jill was puzzled by a rather odd look that had passed between Olive and Arnold, almost an exchange of sign language. It was time to leap into action.

‘Now, what would we all like to drink?’ she asked.

‘A small sherry, please,’ said Olive shyly, half blushing at her boldness in asking for alcohol at all. I don’t want to be beholden, said her blush.

‘A gin and tonic, please,’ said Harry with a huge grin. Large one please if poss, said his grin.

‘Usual, Arnold?’

‘Of course,’ said Arnold complacently.

‘Right. I’ll just go and get them,’ said Jill, looking meaningfully at Arnold, for whom the look clearly had no meaning.

‘Let me help,’ said Harry hastily.

‘That’s very kind,’ said Jill, looking not at him but at Arnold.

When Jill and Harry had left the room, there was a moment’s silence. Olive broke it.

‘I thought, “Is it? It can’t be.” But it is, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Arnold. ‘Oh yes, Olive. It is indeed.’

THREE
Purely routine

The policeman had explained to Sally that because there was no suicide note they had to make certain inquiries. It was purely routine. Had she any idea why Barry had killed himself?

She had shaken her head.

Strangely, she had felt nothing. ‘Cry if you want to,’ a female officer had said. ‘Feel free.’ But she hadn’t been able to.

‘I’m afraid nobody can go upstairs,’ Inspector Pellet had explained. ‘It’s designated a crime scene. Purely routine.’

He had made gestures to the female officer to get Sally out of the way. He hadn’t wanted her to be in the house while they examined the rope, tested for fingerprints, searched for minute traces of thread dropped from clothes, or earth brought in on shoes. It wouldn’t be a thorough search, of course – there was really no doubt that he’d killed himself – but things had to be done by the book these days.

The female officer, PC Cartwright, had put her arm round Sally, to lead her towards the door of her own home. Inspector Pellet had turned and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Mottram. We don’t need to bother you again tonight, and we have no reason to think that this is anything but …’ He had hesitated. He hadn’t wanted to say the word. He’d been to a two-day seminar on Tact and Consideration in the Isle of Wight in 2007, and it had stayed with him. ‘… what it appears to be. However, an officer will want to talk to you in the morning, when you’ve …’ He had been about to say ‘had a good night’s sleep’ but had realized that this was unlikely. He had abandoned that sentence and had asked, uneasily, ‘And … um … we … um … we might have to ask to borrow your computer. So … um … if you’re needing to use it …’ He had let that sentence go unfinished too.

‘I don’t use the computer,’ she had said.

‘Ah!’

Inspector Pellet had winced. He had realized that the emphasis he had put on that ‘Ah!’ might carry with it the implication that, in the knowledge that she would never be able to discover them, it was therefore possible that this seemingly innocent lawyer had thought it safe to save large numbers of horribly indecent photos of young children and domestic pets, or of the wives of fellow lawyers caught in flagrante. Or both. In truth the inspector was a nice, sensitive family man and had driven himself close to depression due to his attempts to follow what he had learnt at the seminar all those years ago.

Luckily Sally had been so shattered and so bewildered, and also so innocent, that she had been completely incapable of picking up any implications, let alone ones so extreme. PC Cartwright had led her out of her own front door, pushing her in such a direction that she would have risked dislocating her neck if she had attempted to turn to take one last look at her husband hanging there.

When they were outside, PC Cartwright had asked her, ‘Have you any children you could go to?’

‘Well, my daughter, I suppose,’ she had said.

‘Right. Good. And where does she live?’

‘New Zealand. That’s the only bugbear.’

PC Cartwright had looked at her in astonishment.

‘I probably won’t,’ Sally had added.

‘No. I meant … now. For a couple of hours like, while they … till you can return.’

‘Oh. Of course. I’m sorry. I was being stupid.’

‘No, not at all, lovey. You’re in shock.’

‘Yes. Yes, I am. No. No, I haven’t. My son’s in Barnet.’

‘Neighbours?’

‘Well … It’s not the most … um …’

‘… sociable street in Potherthwaite?’

‘No. And my husband isn’t … wasn’t … oh God … oh God …’

‘Now now. There there. There … um … surely there must be somebody?’

‘Well, there’s the Hammonds, but … I think they’re in Tenerife. Peter Sparling’s around, I saw him earlier with Kenneth. I could go to them, I suppose.’

‘Oh. Right. Well. Good. I’ll take you. Can you walk it?’

‘Oh yes. It’s only five houses.’

PC Cartwright had led Sally slowly along the road. If there had been any passers-by, they might have thought she was disabled.

‘I’m sure they’ll look after you,’ she’d said, and then she’d lowered her voice, as if she hadn’t wanted her progressive views to be overheard by any colleagues who might be lurking in the bushes. ‘Gays can be very considerate and understanding. It’s with the female hormones, I suppose.’

‘Gays?’

‘Peter and Kenneth.’

‘Oh. No no. Kenneth’s a Labrador.’

PC Cartwright had looked astonished, then shocked, then just bewildered. She had entirely forgotten that she had been to an afternoon seminar on Not Making Assumptions at a moated country house outside Droitwich in 2009. And if she had remembered that she had been, she would still have forgotten what she had learnt.

‘P’r’aps you should just wait a moment at the gate, love,’ PC Cartwright had said, when they arrived at the Sparlings’ house. ‘Best for me to explain, p’r’aps.’

So Sally had stood in the cold at the gate of ‘Ambleside’, and had endured the unpleasant experience of watching two people discussing her, and wondering what had been said when Peter Sparling had shaken his head, and when PC Cartwright had suddenly turned round to have a look at her by the gate.

Then they had shaken hands and Peter had come striding over the cut grass.

‘Sally! Sally! I am so sorry,’ he’d said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Come in. Come in.’

‘Thank you. Thank you.’

‘Will you be all right, lovey?’ PC Cartwright had asked.

‘I’ll be fine. Thank you.’

Sally was going to be brave. She wasn’t even going to be upset by this woman she had never met before calling her ‘lovey’.

‘We’ll come and let you know when it’s all right to go back.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Not long, I wouldn’t think.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Purely routine, lovey.’

‘Thank you.’

Myfanwy and Peter Sparling had made Sally comfortable by the roaring fire, and had plied her with gin and tonic. Myfanwy, who talked like a mountain stream, had found more words for ‘sorry’ than most people even knew. Sally had told them of PC Cartwright’s confusion over Kenneth. They’d had to laugh. In fact Sally had laughed too, and in that charged moment the laughter had become hysterical, and then, just as the laughter had died, Kenneth had farted, and none of them had been able to look at each other. They had controlled themselves heroically, and in the flat silence that always follows hysterics, Peter and Myfanwy had apologized for laughing, and Sally had said, ‘No, please. I wanted you to laugh. That’s why I told you. Life must go on.’

And she had thought, ‘Must it?’ Back home all alone now she recalled that moment and she thought, ‘Must it? But how? How can it?’

After that, they had talked soberly. The Sparlings had raised Barry to something only just short of a saint, the question of why he had done it had been raised but not answered, and Sally had said, ‘But why didn’t he leave a note?’ with such force that even Myfanwy had made no attempt to provide a facile answer. Sally had seen that Myfanwy was very close to tears, the easy yet genuine tears of South Wales. Myfanwy had lowered the emotional tension but only slightly by saying, ‘I can’t believe that only … what would it be? … four hours ago … Peter and you were talking quite casually having no idea what had happened. I can’t get my head round it.’ And then they had reminisced about a trip the four of them had made to Whitby for fish and chips at the Magpie, and they had agreed that they should have done that sort of thing more often, but you don’t know what’s going to happen, do you? That’s right, you don’t. Just as well, perhaps. And Peter had said, ‘I can’t get my head round it either, Sally. There we were, you and I, talking about the weather …’ a frown had passed across his face as he’d remembered Sally’s strange comment about lightning and tsunamis ‘… and we had no idea what had happened,’ and all the time Sally had been wondering, underneath the talk and the socializing and the memories and the gin and tonic and the log fire, how far they had got at ‘The Larches’, whether they had taken Barry down yet.

Father Time is a playful patriarch. Sally would have said that they had been sitting there for two hours at least, but it turned out that it had only been just over an hour before PC Cartwright had come to tell her that it was all right for her to go home.

She hadn’t wanted to have to talk any more. There was nothing anybody could do. The rest of her life was up to her now, though of course she had no idea of the immense consequences of that thought. But she hadn’t liked to leave straight away. Even at this dreadful moment that would have seemed like a betrayal of the social code here in the posh end of Potherthwaite.

At last she had decided that it would be all right to leave. The Sparlings had insisted on escorting her home, and she had been glad of that. The street lamps in Oxford Road were few and dim, and there was no chance of the moon breaking through the thick motionless clouds.

They had offered to come in. They had invited her to collect a few things and go back and stay with them for the night, and she had known that they had meant it most sincerely. It had been tempting, and she had very nearly agreed.

Now that she stood, all alone in her sitting room, all alone in the house, she felt hugely grateful to the Sparlings, but she would resist the temptation to go back. She could hardly bear to stay in the house on her own, though. Was there anywhere else she could go?

Of course there was.

There was even a place to which she wanted to go.

There was a place to which she must go.

FOUR
A lovely evening

Olive’s heart sank at the sight of the dining table. Jill had laid it beautifully, and it was lit by two tall candles in handsome, gleaming candlesticks. The room was quite small, with pale green wallpaper. Smart red curtains covered the French windows that led to the back garden. There were six decanters on the sideboard. She would never match this.

She caught Arnold’s glance and had an uneasy feeling that he could read her mind.

She didn’t like the starter, which was a peach stuffed with a mixture of yoghourt and mild spices. She didn’t like peaches or yoghourt, she didn’t like mixtures, and she didn’t like mild spices, although she didn’t dislike them as much as she disliked spices that weren’t mild. It crossed her mind that they would need to find a good doctor pretty quickly. She would miss Dr Renwick. She hoped Harry wouldn’t ask them who their doctor was. They would have to go to him, if he did, and she didn’t want the state of her kidneys to become public knowledge throughout the cul-de-sac.

‘This is just something rustled up from the store cupboard,’ said Jill.

‘It’s delicious,’ said Olive. ‘How clever of you to be able to rustle things up.’

Harry gave her his ‘don’t overdo the compliments, it’s a form of running yourself down’ frown, and of course, now that she had said it was delicious, she would have to eat every mouthful.

‘I always eat slowly when I love things,’ she said.

Harry gave her his ‘when you’re in a hole, don’t dig’ frown.

The others had finished. She could hardly get it down. To help herself get through it she thought back to that brief romance forty-eight years ago. Well, not so brief. A few months. But a few months in which they’d had so much shyness and ignorance to overcome, so many inhibitions to let out, that it had never reached its climax, or any climax. She wondered what her life would have been like if she had married Arnold. She wasn’t attracted to him now. She couldn’t imagine life with him. She felt that she ought to say something, and was on the point of asking him if he’d ever been back to Cheltenham, when she realized that this question would have let the cat well and truly out of the bag.

In their brief, urgent, almost whispered chat, back in the chandeliered lounge, while Harry had helped Jill fix the drinks, after consideration of the fact that it was a small world, after the horrified realization that they had last seen each other forty-eight years ago, after the lies about how kindly time had treated them, Arnold had made it clear that he didn’t want to tell Jill and Harry about it. She had thought this unwise. There was nothing to hide, so why hide it? She would have been horrified if she had known his reason, which was partly mere laziness and dislike of emotion past, present or future, but also at least a touch of shame. Olive was not now a trophy about whom one would boast.

At last, in the chandeliered dining room, she had finished her starter. She smiled at the company. It was evident to them that the smile was hard work.

‘Delicious,’ she said.

‘I’ll get the main course.’

Harry and Olive both realized that Arnold wouldn’t lift a finger. He’d been Head of History for twenty-nine years, after all. The fact that there had only ever been one other teacher in the department, and he had been either on work experience or a supply teacher, was of no account. Arnold had gone down in history as Head of History. He had thought it a great job in this modern world – to be paid to live in the past.

Harry waited a few seconds – he was not entirely insensitive, despite what people said – and called out, ‘Can I help?’

‘Thank you,’ called out Jill from the kitchen.

Harry hurried off, and a curious thing happened. Both Arnold and Olive realized that they had nothing whatsoever to say to each other. They couldn’t analyse their months of ‘walking out’ as it had been called in those distant days. It had been enjoyable, they had both felt romantic at times, but nothing worth recalling had happened. Do you remember the day we got the dates mixed up and went to the wrong film? Do you remember that French restaurant where we didn’t know what globe artichokes were and had to be shown how to eat them? Do you remember when I snagged my stockings on the door of the taxi? It was not the stuff of rich reminiscence.

Nor was ‘So what have you been up to?’ likely to yield a great harvest.

When I qualified as a teacher I taught history in Hereford and then in Hartlepool, where I met Jill. Shortly after that I was appointed Head of Department here, and remained it till I retired. I’m writing the definitive book on the history of Potherthwaite, which is also the only book on the history of Potherthwaite.

I was Harry’s secretary. He was fun. He was good-looking. He had hair in those days. We married young, had three children, all of whom have done just about OK. I stayed as Harry’s secretary. He was in and out of things, no one else could understand his affairs. His business affairs, I mean. He’s never had the other kind. Well, as far as I know. No time. We’ve lived in nine houses. Harry has a boat. I hate boats.

None of that was worth going into, so they didn’t go into it. But the curious part of it was that in not having anything to say they found common ground. They hoped Harry and Jill would take at least a few minutes; they were restful together.

And Arnold smiled. Olive could have had no idea just how rare his smiles had become – there hadn’t been many in Cheltenham, but lately there had been very, very few. But when she saw that smile, just a little frisson of regret passed through her, and she understood for the first time what Jill had once seen in him.

The smile emboldened her to ask a question.

‘Don’t you think we should tell them? Wouldn’t it be easier? Don’t you think if we don’t we’ll be treading on eggshells?’

‘Don’t forget I was a history teacher, Olive,’ he replied.

Somehow I don’t think there’s any danger of that, thought Olive.

‘If we tell them, it becomes part of our shared knowledge, it lives on in all our memories and will become a part of our common experience. If we don’t tell them it will remain a piece of history. It will fade.’

‘Do you want it to fade?’ Olive was surprised by her boldness.

Arnold paused, thinking carefully what to say.

‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘It was good then, but there’s no point in its being part of our lives now. It has no relevance.’

‘I’m not good at secrets. I almost mentioned Cheltenham earlier.’

‘It’s fresh in our minds. It’ll fade. The whole thing will be forgotten. Shh. They’re coming.’

Harry was carrying a huge dish, which he plonked on a mat on the table. Jill brought a smaller bowl.

‘That smells lovely,’ said Olive.

‘Just a casserole. The old standby,’ said Jill.

‘Lovely,’ said Olive.

‘Haven’t you even poured more wine, Arnold?’ said Jill.

‘Sorry,’ said Arnold, looking anything but sorry. ‘The host fails in his duty yet again.’

He stood up, lifted the white wine bottle, poured a small amount into Olive’s glass.

‘Thank you,’ said Olive. ‘Lovely. I can’t drink red, I’m afraid.’

Harry gave her his ‘don’t advertise your shortcomings’ frown.

Arnold poured regrettably small amounts of red wine into Harry and Jill’s glasses, and nothing into his own.

As she served the food, Jill told them that Harry had been chatting about his boat.

‘What sort of boat?’ asked Arnold.

‘Oh, are you interested in boats?’ said Harry.

‘Not remotely,’ said Arnold. ‘I was trying to please Jill by being proactive in the conversation, as a good host should. It seems I’ve chalked up another failure.’

‘Don’t be disagreeable, darling,’ said Jill. ‘And you still haven’t told us what sort of boat it is?’

‘She’s a thirty-foot yawl,’ said Harry.

Arnold and Jill hadn’t any idea what a thirty-foot yawl was.

‘Tell Arnold what you said, Harry,’ said Jill.

‘I said that I’ve got to bring her round from Emsworth, that’s where I keep her. Olive doesn’t sail.’

‘I tried,’ interrupted Olive, ‘but I got very sick.’

Harry gave her his ‘I think you’re forgetting the frown I gave you a few minutes ago’ frown.

‘So Harry suggested, because it’s a big ask to do it on his own, that I help bring her round to somewhere nearer. That’s all.’

‘Quick work!’ gleamed Arnold.

‘Don’t be stupid, Arnold,’ said Jill. ‘We’re talking boats, not sex. I love you, God knows why sometimes.’

‘This is lovely,’ said Olive. ‘Spicy.’

‘I’ve told you you should put more herbs in your stews,’ said Harry.

‘I have to ask you this,’ said Jill. ‘Arnold’s life has been here and we’ve grown to like it, in a funny sort of way, but what’s brought you here from … where was it?’

‘Emsworth. Chichester Harbour. Near Chichester, not surprisingly. Family.’

‘Oh, you have family in Potherthwaite?’

‘No. We have family in Emsworth.’ Harry laughed. Jill tried to laugh. Olive smiled faintly. Arnold’s face didn’t flicker. ‘Just joking. No, we have a son and two daughters within thirty or so miles of here, all in different directions. I got the old map and compass out and, believe it or not, the most equidistant place was right here in Potherthwaite, and I said to Olive, we’ve got to start somewhere, let’s start there. And this house came up and, Bob’s your uncle, here we are.’

‘And how nice that is,’ said Jill. ‘Isn’t it, Arnold?’

‘It’s providence,’ said Arnold dryly.

‘Well, don’t expect too much,’ said Jill. ‘The town is in the doldrums, if I can put it that way to a sailing man.’

‘Maybe we can help to take it out of the doldrums,’ said Harry.

Jill gave him a look.

‘Do you mean that?’ she said.

Harry shrugged.

‘Not really, I was just making conversation really,’ he said, ‘but no, if there are things going on, count us in. Eh, Olive? Mustn’t let the grass grow under our feet.’

Olive didn’t even bother to reply to this absurd suggestion. To imagine that she wanted to be counted in to anything! And the only thing to do with grass was to let it grow under your feet. That was the whole point of grass. She took another mouthful. It was far too spicy for her.

‘I know you taught history, Arnold …’ began Harry.

‘Head of History for twenty-nine years.’

‘Quite. But what was it you said you did at the hospital, Jill?’

‘Jill was the big noise in the endoscopy department,’ said Arnold.

Olive found herself crunching on a chilli. She wanted to spit it out. How could she?

‘Some said she was the endoscopy department. What she doesn’t know about the large intestine isn’t worth knowing.’

Olive gasped, retched, put her hand over her mouth and rushed out of the room.

Harry jumped up.

‘She won’t know where it is,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’

‘At the end of the corridor, last door on the right,’ said Jill.

Harry rushed out, followed by Jill. There was no sign of Olive.

She emerged slowly from the last door on the left.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Wrong room. I’m afraid I’ve thrown up all over your vacuum cleaner.’

‘Will you be all right,’ said Jill, ‘or should I ring Dr Parker? That’s our doctor. Marvellous doctor.’

‘No, no, I’ll be all right now,’ said Olive. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Dr Parker. We’ll need a doctor. We must sign on with him, mustn’t we, Olive?’ said Harry.

‘Her,’ said Jill.

‘What?’

‘He’s a her.’

‘Better still. That’s marvellous, isn’t it, Olive?’ said Harry.

‘Lovely,’ said Olive. ‘I’m so sorry, Jill. It’s a top-of-the-range Dyson too.’

FIVE
The Fazackerly sisters

It wasn’t pleasant walking along Oxford Road in the dark – it was very inadequately lit – but she didn’t trust herself to drive the car. She knew that she was still in shock. Besides, she’d had quite a lot of gin and tonic with the Sparlings.

She walked past ‘Mount Teidi’ – the Hammonds tried to live in Tenerife even when they were in Potherthwaite. Barry had joked that their house should have been named Mount Tidy.

Barry would never joke again.

She hesitated outside ‘Ambleside’. It was tempting to call in, so tempting.

No, she must be strong.

Why? Why on earth should she be strong? She walked towards their gate, even reached out for the latch.

But she walked on. She hesitated in the pool of yellow light from each street lamp, then plunged on into the darkness of the Potherthwaite night.

A girl ran out of the drive of Dr Mallet’s house and nearly collided with her. Sally’s heart almost stopped. The girl looked terrified too, and the large vase she was carrying slipped out of her hands in her shock. She grabbed for the vase at incredible speed, got her arms round it, gained control of it just before it hit the ground, and ran off with it at a great pace. Sally had a vision of golden hair and a very slim body.

Sally’s heartbeat had barely slowed when she heard a cough from the allotments on her right. Oxford Road had become a minefield that day. Her blood curdled. Her heart missed several beats. She hurried across the road, to walk alongside the houses that carried on right into town on that side.

She’d imagined it. She was in an acutely nervous state.

She hadn’t imagined it. There had been a cough. A man’s cough. The cough of a killer.

She walked fast now, listening all the time for footsteps. But there were no footsteps. It occurred to her that it was odd that she should be so frightened. A few minutes ago, in the house, she had felt that she wanted to die. Turn, Sally. Face your killer. Get stabbed.

But he might just rape her and leave her. Besides, there was no one there.

The curtains were drawn in the Rose and Crown. People said that would be the next pub to go. She didn’t care if it did. Why should anybody be happy, with her Barry dead?

She crossed the street again, and turned into Cadwallader Road. The street lights were dim, and one of them was out. In her heightened state she could feel only hostility from the low stone terraces. Their very regularity, the total absence of decorative features, admired by purists, seemed comfortless now. Why on earth was she visiting number 6? Wasn’t it absurd to call on Ellie Fazackerly at this hour?

She had to speak to somebody. She didn’t know Jill Buss quite well enough to call so late. She couldn’t go back to the Sparlings. There was nobody else.

Ellie would be glad to see her. Ellie would be glad to see anybody.

She rang the bell. The moment she had rung it she wished that she hadn’t. Ellie would be watching her favourite television programme, her one way of escaping the prison she had built for herself.

You can’t de-ring a bell.

Perhaps they wouldn’t answer.

She heard footsteps. The door opened. It was Ali. She was the least obese of the three Fazackerly sisters. She was nineteen stone five.

‘Is it …? I just thought I’d call and see Ellie. Is this a bad time?’

‘Nooo! She’s always pleased to see you, Mrs Mottram.’

It was no use trying to get any of the sisters to call her Sally. She was Mrs Mottram, a do-gooder who lived on a higher plane. She had first met the Fazackerly sisters when Ali had fallen in the street; she had rushed to help, and she had escorted her home. She’d known of Ellie’s existence, and a few days later she had called round, to see if Ali was all right but partly also out of sheer curiosity, and she had stood at the doorstep for so long that in the end Ali had felt obliged to ask her in. She was still slightly ashamed of the origins of her concern for Ellie.

Ali led her along the corridor, her shoes squeaking on the lino – they were in a time warp – and took her into the tiny kitchen. Oli was seated at the table, watching television. She tried to get up, not easy. Ali and Oli had lived in the kitchen, in the tiny claustrophobic house, ever since the moment had come when Ellie could no longer go upstairs.

‘No, no, Oli, it’s all right. I’ve just come to have a word with Ellie. You keep watching. How are you?’

‘Very well, thank you, Mrs Mottram.’

Oli was twenty-one stone three. It didn’t help that she worked in the cake factory. Ali was a cleaner at the hospital, where cleaners moved slowly. They both worked antisocial hours, so arranged that one of them was always at home to care for Ellie. They were adamant that they didn’t want any help from anyone else. They were proud people. Only Sally was welcome, and she felt now that she was almost on the verge of being considered a friend rather than a voluntary social worker.

‘I’ll tell her you’re here,’ said Ali.

Ali went through into the front room, which had once been the lounge when Ellie could still get upstairs. A thought occurred to Sally now, a thought that astonishingly had never struck her before. What would happen when first Oli and finally Ali could also not get upstairs? How would they sleep?

Sally heard the television set go off in the front room. Ellie had been watching something. She shouldn’t have come.

There was always a very faint smell of festering humanity in the house, a sense that not enough windows were opened often enough, a feeling that rather too much air was being used up and not replaced fast enough. On the whole, though, it was clear that their standards of cleanliness were amazingly high, considering the circumstances. Sally never felt an overwhelming urge to leave, and now, sitting and waiting, she felt less traumatized than she had been all evening.

Ali came back in.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘She’s ready for you.’

Sally’s heart sank slightly at Ali’s words. She was still Ellie’s voluntary social worker, calling not out of love but out of the goodness of her heart. Maybe there was further to go than she had hoped, before she became a friend.

She entered Ellie’s room.

‘Hello, Ellie,’ she said.

‘Hello, Mrs Mottram.’

Ellie’s face was now so fat that it was hard to tell if she was smiling. Her huge body was hidden beneath the vast, specially made duvet. It stretched over the mounds of her fat like dunes in the desert. She hadn’t been able to get out of bed for more than two years now. She was thirty-three years old. It didn’t do to think about her weight. She was fat because she couldn’t help it, not because she wanted to be in the Guinness Book of Records.

It also didn’t do to think about the toilet and bed-linen arrangements. Ali and Oli looked after her brilliantly, did everything necessary with never a complaint. Easy to make fun of Ali, Oli and Ellie but beneath all the blubber there beat hearts of gold, and how many of those are there in this stony world of ours?

In fact it didn’t do to think about Ellie’s life at all, and Sally realized why she had needed to call here rather than anywhere else on this terrible night. She wasn’t proud of her motive. She had needed to feel sorry for someone else, because she couldn’t stand how sorry she felt for herself.

‘I hope you weren’t watching something,’ she said.

‘It were rubbish.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘It’s all rubbish.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘I only watch it cos there’s nowt else.’

‘Oh, Ellie.’

‘You’d think they’d put good things on, wouldn’t you, for folk like me?’

‘You certainly would.’

‘They haven’t a clue, have they?’

‘They haven’t. They haven’t a clue.’

‘None of them have. Politicians, clergy, doctors. None of them have a clue.’

‘You tell them, Ellie.’

‘I would, but they wouldn’t listen.’

‘So, how are you, Ellie?’

‘Mustn’t grumble, Mrs Mottram. Sit yourself down.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Make yourself comfortable.’

‘Thank you.’

‘And how are you, Mrs Mottram?’

‘Well, I suppose I too shouldn’t grumble, Ellie. I … um … something’s happened, Ellie. Something terrible.’

‘Oh, Mrs Mottram.’

‘Yes. Terrible. I …’ She swallowed. ‘Barry’s killed himself.’

‘Oh, Mrs Mottram.’

‘I know.’

She told Ellie the whole story of how she found him, of the police, of the Sparlings and Kenneth. Ellie was too upset even to laugh at the story about Kenneth.

Oli came in with plates of cake.

‘Not just now, Oli,’ said Ellie.

Oli looked at her sister in astonishment.

‘Not just now?’ she said.

‘Not just now.’

‘But it’s cake.’

‘Later, Oli. Oli, Mrs Mottram’s husband has committed suicide.’

Sally still hadn’t been able to use that word, and on Ellie’s lips it came like a gunshot.

‘Oh, Mrs Mottram. I’m so sorry,’ said Oli. ‘And so’s Ali. Well, she will be. Can I tell her?’

‘Please do.’

‘Thank you. Um … was it …? How did he …? I mean …’

‘Can I tell her, Mrs Mottram?’ asked Ellie.

‘Of course.’

‘She found him hanged at the top of the stairs, Oli.’

‘Oh my God. Oh my God, Mrs Mottram.’

‘I know.’

Oli left the room.

‘Thank you,’ said Sally. ‘It was nice of you to send the cake away.’

‘Not appropriate, Mrs Mottram. Not appropriate at all.’

‘I just couldn’t stay in the house any longer on my own, Ellie.’

‘No wonder.’ Sally could sense that deep inside her big head Ellie was struggling with an immense thought. ‘If you don’t want to go back,’ she said at last, ‘you could stay here. There’s my bed upstairs. Ali could go in with Oli. Gladly.’

The thought of Ali and Oli in the same bed was more than Sally could bear.

‘Gladly.’

‘I’m sure they would.’

‘They’re great, them girls. Angels. They’re angels, Mrs Mottram.’

‘They certainly are. No, that’s very kind of you, but … no … I have to face it. Get it over. Get myself tired enough, I’ll sleep.’

‘You can stay as long as you like, Mrs Mottram. And come round any time.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll be here. I’m not going anywhere.’

And Sally talked about the fact that there was no note. She talked about why she thought he might have done it. She talked about her marriage and how happy she thought they had been – well, they’d had their ups and downs etc., ‘as you do’. ‘As you do,’ repeated Ellie, who had no idea really. Ellie was a good listener and Sally could see that she was truly upset for her, but she could also see that the thought of cake was slowly growing; movement of that great neck was not easy but the eyes, deep in their folds of fat, began to stray longingly towards the door, as if Ellie was an enormous Labrador, a giant Kenneth.

‘I think, Ellie, that it might be appropriate to have that cake now,’ she said.

‘Are you sure? Only I don’t want to … well, thank you,’ said Ellie. Then ‘Oli!’ she bawled. ‘Ali. Cake.’

The two angels entered with plates liberally piled with cake. Two angels killing themselves and their sister with their hearts of gold.

SIX
A very short chapter, but fear of a very long evening

At last it was over. Olive would never know how she got through the dessert. Very few people dislike treacle, but those who do find it a particularly difficult thing to eat.

Jill led them to the door. Arnold wasn’t very good at goodbyes.

The damp, cold night air of the cul-de-sac was as welcome to Olive as the scent of oranges on a sunny Spanish morning.

‘Thank you, that was lovely,’ she said, kissing Jill on one cheek.

‘Lovely,’ said Harry, kissing Jill on both cheeks. ‘We must do it again soon. Our turn next time.’

He was pleased that the street lights were so dim in that impoverished town. There was a chance that Jill couldn’t see the horror on Olive’s face.

SEVEN
Marigold goes to a party

Marigold Boyce-Willoughby was going to be very late. She was taking such a long time to get ready. It really wasn’t that surprising. The party was her first outing into Potherthwaite society since Timothy Boyce-Willoughby had ditched her for a Venezuelan dentist and ex-beauty queen, leaving her with a house she hated, a name she loved, a few happy memories, rather more unhappy memories, and sixty-two pairs of shoes. ‘Is it the shoes?’ she had asked plaintively when she had pleaded with him not to go. ‘I won’t buy any more, if it’s the shoes.’ ‘It’s not the fucking shoes, Imelda,’ he had exploded. ‘It’s that I can’t stand the fucking sight of you.’ And he was the man Potherthwaite regarded as a gentleman. Always such a gentleman. Always except at home. Thousands like him.

The party wasn’t going to be easy. She was a social climber and she no longer had a rope. She had looked wonderful on her third wedding day, dressed from head to foot in ironic white and happily married in Potherthwaite church by a vicar desperate for money. Her long train had flowed magnificently behind her. Now her train had hit the buffers. She knew what people would be saying tonight in posh Potherthwaite, that tiny enclave. Pity Marigold has such bad taste in men. Must be something wrong with her, to be ditched by three husbands. Maybe she was cold in bed. Cold in bed? Her! Or maybe she was too voracious. Wore them out. She had prided herself on being rather a good lover.

Maybe she hadn’t been a good lover. Nobody actually knew what a good lover was. She had never seen any other woman make love. Potherthwaite wasn’t Hebden Bridge.

Everyone would be thinking these sorts of things about her tonight. So why was she going? Because she couldn’t admit defeat, not to Potherthwaite, not to herself.

But what should she wear? It boiled down to a simple choice, between humility and defiance.

She could present herself as being ashamed of having been carried away by her wealthy husband, her glamorous lifestyle (for Potherthwaite – she had once met Hockney for three whole minutes and had talked about it for three whole years). She could show that at last she had realized that deep down she was still what she had always been, a modest working-class girl.

No. Wouldn’t do. Couldn’t do it. She had been born Marigold Smith. She’d hated her name. Smith. So common. Marigold, hateful. Marigolds were among the coarsest flowers in the garden. They were also washing-up gloves. And here she was, coarse and washed up.

But the name had been saved by being attached to Boyce-Willoughby. There was every chance that she had been the first person from her road ever to become double-barrelled. She had ceased to be a Dalston girl. She had become a Boyce-Willoughby, one of the Somerset Boyce-Willoughbys, and she wasn’t going to throw that away, husband or no husband. No, humility wouldn’t work, not for her. It was defiance or destruction.

So it was a lavishly dressed ex-Mrs Stent who wandered out to her waiting taxi in the cul-de-sac not much before ten o’clock on that chill Potherthwaite evening. It was a glamorous ex-Mrs Larsen who walked round on her high heels to the far side of the taxi, just in case somebody should be looking out, fusty old Arnold Buss, perhaps, who wanted to interview her for his history of Potherthwaite, or the new people whose furniture van had arrived earlier. The man had looked all right. Bald, but they said that was a sign of virility. She shuddered. That was the last thing she wanted.

It was a defiant Marigold Boyce-Willoughby who gazed out at the dreary High Street and told herself that there was now no reason why she should stay in Potherthwaite. We laugh. I know, and you suspect, that she will still be there in ten years’ time.

The taxi took her the full length of the High Street. She could feel her defiance slipping away as it rattled past the church she only entered for the sake of appearances, past the nearly-new shops she wouldn’t be seen dead in, past the end of Quays Approach. She hadn’t approached the Quays for months.

The taxi turned right where the High Street became Valley Road, sped through the empty roads towards the hills, began to climb one of the hills, passed through grand but rusty gates, crossed a large gravel forecourt, circling a fountain topped by a statue of a wool magnate, and pulled up outside a pillared entrance. This was – you’ve guessed it – Potherthwaite Hall – and the party was being held – you may have guessed this too, for we are in the twenty-first century – in one of the eight apartments into which that great house had been split.

Suddenly Marigold Boyce-Willoughby, glamorous lady, defiant spirit, brave soul, owner of many shoes, wanted to turn round and go home.

Apartment 1 was the home of Councillor Frank Stratton, owner and managing director of Stratton’s, whose stationery shops can be found in many towns around the Pennines. Frank Stratton was big in bulk, big in appetite, big in stationery, and big in charity. He wasn’t actually quite as big as he thought he was, which was why he only owned an eighth of this great house. However, Apartment 1 was the best. His lounge had been the drawing room. It was absurd to call this huge room the lounge, but he had to persuade the voters that he was still humble.

The event was his famous annual bash for those who had supported his cancer charity. His daughter had died of breast cancer in 2005 at the age of thirty-seven. Some said he had never fully recovered, and he and his wife Marian had devoted themselves to raising money for cancer ever since. The party was for those who had given during the past year, and for those who unaccountably hadn’t but might with luck be persuaded to in the coming year.

It took courage to step into the great lounge. The bulky brown leather furniture had been pushed back to the walls; almost all the men were in suits and ties, while the women were in various stages of excess, although not quite so excessive as usual.

Frank and his wife Marian greeted Marigold warmly.

‘So sorry about …’ began Frank nervously.

Marigold waved her arms in a negative gesture.

‘Good riddance,’ she said. ‘Past history.’

‘Thank you anyway for all your support,’ said Marian.

‘I’ve no idea what’ll happen this year,’ said Marigold.

‘No matter,’ said Frank. ‘You’re always welcome here.’

‘Nonsense, but nice to hear,’ said Marigold. ‘And I’m so sorry I’m so late.’

‘You’ve missed my speech,’ said Frank.

‘She heard it last year,’ said Marian. ‘Only two words were different, Marigold.’

Marigold laughed dutifully.

‘Go and get yourself a drink,’ said Frank. It was an abrupt but attractive dismissal. She longed for a drink.

She accepted a glass of champagne and a mini Yorkshire pudding from smiling waitresses. One or two people were already leaving. She really was much too late. And it wasn’t as crowded as usual. The town was on a slide. She wouldn’t stay long – here at the party, or in Potherthwaite.

She looked around the room, searching for women she knew and liked. Searching particularly for Sally. There were women in the town whom she liked but didn’t much trust, and there were women whom she trusted but didn’t much like, but Sally was the only woman whom she liked and trusted, of those she knew well enough to approach.

She was lost, lost on her own, lost without her other half, lost in the world, and seeking comfort from other women, not from men. This was a huge shock.

She found herself walking past Terence and Felicity Porchester, who lived on the stranded narrowboat.

‘Hello, Marigold,’ said Terence Porchester in his posh, fruity tones. ‘You grow more gorgeous with every passing month.’

‘I’m green with envy,’ said Felicity in her matching voice. In plain-speaking Potherthwaite their voices had been much mocked, but slowly people had begun to realize that there wasn’t an evil bone in either of their bodies.

‘Where is that naughty man of yours hiding tonight?’ asked Felicity.

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Marigold. ‘At the bottom of the canal, I hope.’

She strode on, realized that she had been rudely abrupt, began to turn to apologize, found herself facing Matt Winkle, the supermarket manager, sallow, callow, anxious, fractious.

‘Bloody woman,’ he said. ‘Here. Now. Tonight. What a time. At a party.’

‘What a time for what?’ asked the bemused Marigold.

‘Complaining our apples aren’t ripe. Bloody woman. Linda Oughtibridge. Sorry.’

Marigold turned away, found herself approaching two more men she didn’t want to speak to. Gunter Mulhausen was German and formal and not very exciting, and he pretended to be in love with her, in a rather heavy Teutonic way, and she wasn’t sure she was up to the jovial little fantasy today. Bill Etching was a randy little tosser who was regrettably successful in business and generous in charity. He was a worm who wormed himself in with his money. Timothy had joked that his surname was unfortunate. No woman would want to go back to look at his etchings.

She couldn’t cope. Where was Sally? She would have said, ‘Excuse me, chaps, lovely to see you, but I have something to discuss with Sally.’ She couldn’t see any woman whose name she remembered, apart from Marian and Felicity, so there was no woman she could use as an excuse. She had always liked men. She had been a man’s woman. Now all these men frightened her. Now she couldn’t cope with men. She couldn’t even remember their names. All names were fleeing from her. She began to perspire. She had never perspired. She hadn’t even glistened.

She saw a man she recognized approaching Frank What’s-his-name. Frank led him straight out of the room. He was a policeman. Inspector … Inspector … Punnet. Not Punnet but like Punnet. What had Inspector Not Punnet But Like Punnet wanted? She heard Tommy What’s-it, landlord of the Dog and Duck, say to her, ‘I hope you’ll still come to the pub, Marigold. We’ll look after you.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’ll come.’ His name had gone too.

‘Now maybe one day that dinner invitation may be meeting with success very possibly,’ said Gunter Mulhausen.

The thought of dinner with the smiling Teuton appalled her.

Pellet. Inspector Pellet.

What did he want?

‘I would love dinner some time,’ she told Gunter Mulhausen.

Pork Scratching’s filthy little hand touched her bum. She felt it distinctly. Not Pork Scratching. Not come and see my scratchings. Come and see my etchings. Bill Etching, that was it.

She had to move. She couldn’t. She was stuck to the carpet. She couldn’t be. Walk, woman.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Tommy Allsop, his name suddenly recalled.

‘Hold my arm. Hold my arm,’ said Gunter Mulhausen.

Bill Etching clutched her waist.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she shouted.

Everyone looked round. Everyone was staring at her. Such a shout had never been heard at one of Councillor Stratton’s parties.

The men let go rapidly. All three looked embarrassed, even Bill Etching.

Again she tried to walk. She couldn’t balance on her high heels, she was falling, it was all going black, her head was whirring, she felt a hand on her, trying to break her fall, and then she felt nothing more.

All sorts of people rushed over. Gunter Mulhausen rang 999. Tommy Allsop hurried over to Marian Stratton and asked where Frank was. She pointed towards their kitchen.

Frank Stratton was sitting at the breakfast table. He was white with shock. He had just heard of Barry’s suicide. Tommy approached but was surprised and shocked by Frank’s appearance, and hesitated.

‘Oh God,’ Frank was saying. ‘I didn’t invite him. He didn’t give or come to anything this year. Didn’t even hear from him, which I have to say annoyed me, which is why I didn’t invite him. A nice chap once, but he’s gone off. He has. He’s gone off. And now this. Oh God. Poor Sally. I’ve a lot of time for Sally. Tommy, what is it? If it’s about Barry Mottram, we’ve heard.’

‘It isn’t. Barry Mottram? No, it’s Marigold. She’s fainted.’

‘Oh God,’ said Councillor Frank Stratton. ‘What an evening. That puts the tin lid on it. You know, I think this town is in danger of being officially declared a disaster area.’

EIGHT
Ben arrives home late

Night was folding Potherthwaite in its grip. The girl with the golden hair and Dr Mallet’s vase must hurry. Soon Inspector Pellet would be back from his function. To get on to the roof of the garage was child’s play – and she had forgotten that she was still a child. It was easy too to shin up the drainpipe, even with that great big delicate vase in her hand. It was hard to imagine that she had the strength, this slip of a girl, to open still further the upstairs window that hadn’t quite been closed (and him a policeman and involved in Neighbourhood Watch!). She didn’t need to open the window very far. She was so slim. The rest was easy: slip in, place the vase in full, challenging view on the dressing table in the scene of the Pellet lovemaking, ugh, the thought, slip out, leave the window open, slide down, disappear into the night, he’d never trace her, the stupid clod, he’d look ridiculous, ha ha, job done.

It was not yet half past eleven when the driver employed part-time by the council took a very subdued Marigold Boyce-Willoughby home to the cul-de-sac. The lights were on in number 9, where unpacking was still taking place, and the cocoa had not yet even been put on. The lights were still on in number 11 too. Jill was taking off her make-up, and Arnold was just putting the finishing touches to chapter 77, ‘The High Street Suffers in the Era of Rationing’.

It was in fact twenty-seven minutes past eleven when she arrived home, and there was still no sign of that strange boy Ben Wardle at the Wardle home in Pomfret Crescent.

Marigold had soon come round after her panic attack, but she had flatly refused to go to the hospital. Her remark, ‘They come out of there feet first,’ had not gone down well with the doctors and nurses who had been rewarded for their generosity by being invited to the party. Councillor Stratton had pointed out that it was obvious that Marigold was unwell and was spouting careless gibberish in her embarrassment and shame. He would see that the hospital got a written apology from her asap.

Marigold had said that she felt perfectly all right now – it was just the stress of recent days, coupled with the heat of the room, that had made her faint. The only place in the world she wanted to be was in her own home. Councillor Stratton’s secretary, fairly high on champagne, had been forced to type a report stating that Marigold had been offered an ambulance to take her to the hospital, and had refused, and that she knowingly accepted responsibility for any unfortunate consequences that might possibly occur as a result of her decision. Marigold was hurt by this, contemplated refusing to sign the description of her refusal, then suddenly couldn’t be bothered and signed without protest, at exactly the same moment that, in Ellie’s bedroom, Sally Mottram stood up, making the first move in what might well be a lengthy departure.

Sally didn’t want to leave. She was terrified of entering her empty house. Ellie didn’t want her to leave. She dreaded every night. But there is a convention in social life. You just don’t call round uninvited, and stay till two in the morning. Leave she must.

By twenty to twelve she had reached almost to the front door of Ellie’s house, and the girl with the golden hair had arrived home, had slipped in silently, had tiptoed through the door of the lounge, where her mother had fallen asleep in her chair, as she did most nights, and was snoring her head off and inhaling the alcoholic fumes of her own breath. The girl was asleep within five minutes.

Ben’s father felt far from sleep. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his dressing gown, scowling, when Ben arrived home at last.

‘What time do you call this?’ his father demanded.

‘Eric,’ said Ben.

‘What?’

‘I call this time Eric,’ said Ben. ‘Though of course time is moving on, and it’s no longer Eric. Aren’t you going to ask me what it is now?’

‘No, I am not.’

‘It’s now Eric plus one.’

‘Well, I call it late.’

‘Pretty dull name, Dad, to be absolutely frank.’

‘I do my best with you, Ben.’

‘I agree. I think sometimes I’m infuriatingly infantile, to be honest. But I’ll grow up, Dad, sadly. And I don’t happen to think I’m remotely late. I am sixteen, you know. You’re so out of touch, Dad.’

‘It’s school tomorrow.’

‘School’s crap.’

‘So what have you been up to?’

‘I don’t see why I should tell you, but it’s true, you do do your best with me, so I will. Nothing. Sod all. No clubs. No films. No alcohol. No drugs. Nothing to eat.’

‘And where have you not done all this?’

‘In the allotments.’

‘The allotments?’

‘Yeah. It’s nice there.’

‘It’s cold.’

‘Yeah. Cool. We’re all obsessed with cool, aren’t we?’

‘Why is it nice in the allotments, Ben?’

‘Because it’s dark, so you can’t see Potherthwaite.’

‘You love running Potherthwaite down, don’t you?’

‘I don’t actually. I don’t enjoy it at all. I bitterly regret that I wasn’t born in a beautiful cathedral city with lovely old houses, a thriving arts scene, a Premier League football team and a beautiful estuary leading out to a warm southern sea.’

‘Better do something about it then, hadn’t you?’

‘Maybe I will. Maybe I just will.’

‘So what have you done all evening in the allotments?’

‘I’ve told you. Nothing.’

‘You must have done something.’

‘Well, yeah. Talked. About nothing, though.’

‘So you weren’t alone.’

‘Sharp, Dad. Very sharp.’

‘Don’t patronize me. We feed you, we look after you. We don’t deserve to be patronized.’

Ben actually looked shamefaced.

‘Sorry.’

There was a brief pause. Tick-tock of the kitchen clock, which was slightly askew – the cleaner had been.

‘Who were you with?’

‘Tricksy.’

His father tried so hard not to make any noise, but the very faintest sigh emerged from his mouth. Or his nose. Ben wasn’t quite sure where sighs did come from.

His parents didn’t like Tricksy. He knew that they wondered if he and Tricksy … did things together. On allotments. At night. They believed in equal marriage, although they couldn’t really think it was worth all the time and money the House of Commons had taken up with it when the sea would boil in twenty years and the oil would run out next Thursday and seven million illegal immigrants were arriving at Dover every three days – Ben’s dad was given to exaggeration. Ben had once told his dad that he exaggerated 367 times a week, and his dad hadn’t seen the joke.

They were enlightened people, but they didn’t want Ben to be gay. For his own sake, you understand. Mind you, it wasn’t just that. They didn’t even know if he was gay. They didn’t know if Tricksy was gay. They would just have been happier if their only child was showing signs of having more than one friend.

Ben had heard the sigh and it made him very angry. Earlier, when he’d been teasing his dad, it had been all right, but now, over Tricksy, he couldn’t tease. He could explode, or go to bed. He made a surprisingly sensible choice.

‘Right. I’m off. It’s bedtime.’

‘It’s past bedtime.’

‘Whose fault is that? You’ve kept me talking.’

‘Point taken. Guilty as charged.’

His dad suddenly smiled. It was entirely unexpected, and it threw Ben. He turned at the door, and said something he hadn’t said for several years, and had had no intention of saying that night.

‘Love you, Dad.’

He wished he hadn’t said this. Saying it shocked him. He realized that it was no longer true.

It was three minutes past twelve as Ben set off upstairs. Sally Mottram hadn’t reached home yet. She didn’t want to reach home. She was walking increasingly slowly along Oxford Road. There were no lights on in Dr Mallet’s, no lights on at the Sparlings’, no lights on at the Hammonds’, no lights on in Oxford Road. The council had recently started to switch the lights off at midnight, perhaps so that murderers couldn’t see their victims well enough to stab them or shoot them accurately enough to kill them.

Sally opened the gate, walked slowly up the path beside the lawn, put her key in the lock, turned it, opened the door, went in, and closed the door carefully from long habit, so as not to wake anyone, although there was no longer anyone to wake.

She decided to go straight upstairs, get it over. She didn’t know how she would find the courage to walk past where he had been. But she had to. She had to start.

She climbed the stairs at a steady pace, quaking but resolute. She tried not to look, but she had to take a quick peek, and there he … wasn’t.

She crossed the landing, opened the bedroom door, went in, and closed it.

She thought back to the strange words that she had thought to herself at the bottom of the stairs. ‘You have to start.’ What had she meant? Start what? She had no idea what she had to start. Just to live the rest of her life? Just to survive?

Or something more?

BOOK TWO

NINE
Going south

The taxi had been late, and she had arrived at Potherthwaite station just in time to see the 10.22 snaking round the corner towards a better world.

Six weeks had passed since Sally Mottram had made that horrendous discovery at the top of the stairs. For six weeks there had grown in her an overwhelming desire to leave Potherthwaite, to go back down south. At times her desire had been to leave not just Potherthwaite, but this world. She didn’t see any point in her living any more. Her children were settled and didn’t need her. Her life was pointless.

She wheeled her suitcases along platform 1, past baskets of dull, neglected flowers. She passed the steps that led on to the footbridge, and pressed for the lift. The lift arrived with a sigh, as if utterly tired of its tiny routine. The doors opened. It was quite a job to get her two cases into the lift. They were too large. She had brought too much stuff. She hadn’t been capable of deciding what not to bring. She was no longer capable of making decisions.

‘Going up,’ said the voice of a surprisingly posh woman, bossily and unnecessarily since there was nowhere to go but up. The lift rose to footbridge level like an asthmatic old man on his last legs.

‘Footbridge level,’ thundered the bossy woman with just a hint of pride at the lift’s achievement.

It was now quite a job to get the two cases out of the lift. Sally wheeled them halfway across the footbridge and stopped for breath.

The railway line runs along the bottom of Baggit Moor and is therefore slightly above the level of the valley floor. As she stood there, Sally could see the town spread out before her. Grey stone buildings, grey slate roofs. She could even see back to Oxford Road, though it was impossible from this distance to single out ‘The Larches’. What a feeling it had been, that morning, to walk out of the front door and know that she wouldn’t have to pass the top of the stairs for at least two weeks, maybe longer, depending on how she got on with Judith. And of course she was far too far away, here on the footbridge, to see the ‘For Sale’ sign.

Everybody said it was good that she was selling. She would never quite get over the shock, if she stayed. Everybody also knew that she was having to sell. She had no money.

She’d overheard Gordon Hendrie, in the supermarket, near the rather sad fish counter – she hated fish counters, all those dead eyes – she’d heard him say, in his idea of a low voice, ‘It’ll have been because of sex or money. It always is.’ She’d known that he had been talking about Barry.

She’d hoped that it had been because of money, which was absurd, because if it was money she would live the rest of her life in poverty. But if it was because of sex she would have shared her marital bed with a monster, kissed a pervert, been made love to by a dirty dirty man, and that would have been even worse than poverty.

It had been money. Mottram & Caldwell had been struggling. There weren’t so many people in Potherthwaite who had been able to afford lawyers’ fees. Tom Caldwell had handled his money sensibly. Barry, that precise sober lawyer, had gambled, and gambled badly on both money and horses. A lad who was on the dole had been pleased enough to get a bit of pocket money to put his bets on for him. Barry Mottram himself had never been seen in William Hill.

Much of this had been revealed at the inquest. The truth had hurt her. The fact that she had known nothing about any of it had hurt her more.

Dr Mallet, who wished that he had changed his name to something more befitting a psychoanalyst – Bronovsky, perhaps – had been persuaded to give evidence too, reluctantly, because the fact that Barry had killed himself had not been a good advertisement for a psychiatrist who had been treating the man for depression. This news too had hurt Sally. The fact that she had also known nothing about this had hurt her more. Not only had she known nothing of these things, but no suicide note had ever been found. That hurt her most of all.

Despite the lack of a note, there had been no difficulty in reaching the verdict that Barry Mottram had killed himself.

She could just see the roof of the building that housed Mottram & Caldwell. Her eyes passed on, drawn instinctively towards the uniform rooftops of Cadwallader Road. She saw, vividly, Ellie Fazackerly stuck there in her great bed.

‘Having a quiet moment?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I said, “Having a quiet moment?”’

‘I was, yes.’

‘Good for you.’

Sally stole a quick look at the speaker of these words. A middle-aged man was standing close to her, too close to her. He had sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, receding hair and an ominous long raincoat.

‘Does you good, sometimes, dun’t it?’ he said. ‘Stop. Listen. Have a think. Does you good.’

‘Yes. Yes. It does. Yes. A moment of reflection.’

‘In this hectic world.’

‘Quite.’

‘I think we may have met before.’

‘I don’t think so.’

She backed away from the man ever so slightly. But he noticed and moved closer ever so slightly.

‘Not a bad view, is it?’

Yes, it is. Can’t say that. Can’t be rude.

Why not be rude? He’s invading my space.

‘Not bad, no.’

‘No, there’s nowt like a spot of quiet thinking. Young folk don’t know how to do it. That’s what’s wrong wi’ t’world. Thinking. It’s a lost art.’

For you it is.

Couldn’t say it.

‘Very true.’

Oh God, Sally.

‘I’m on me own, you see. Me wife died twenty-two years ago.’

Suicide, was it? Sally! You are not nice.

‘I still talk to her.’

Suddenly Sally felt a wave of sympathy for the man in the long raincoat.

‘I can understand that.’

‘You get lonely, you see.’

‘Yes. Yes, I do see.’

There was silence for a moment. Sally found that she couldn’t just leave, not after that information. Somehow, it had become an important moment, here on the footbridge, teased by a playful easterly breeze.

‘As I say … you don’t mind my talking, do you? Cos I know I interrupted you thinking.’

‘You can think too much.’

‘I pride meself on knowing when to talk and when not to talk. I was a taxi driver, see. Tool of the trade, is that. Gauge when the passenger wants to talk, gauge when he wants to be quiet. Tool of the trade.’

I’m rather glad I never hired your taxi.

‘I bet you’re glad you never hired my taxi.’

‘No!’

She didn’t want to move on until he did. But he showed no sign of going. It was an impasse. Maybe they would stay on the footbridge for ever.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘Interrupting you. When you were thinking.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does. I’ve let meself down. I’ll be off now.’

Don’t say anything, Sally.

‘Leave you with your thoughts. And the view.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Not a bad old place. Bit of a dump, I suppose, but what somebody could do with it! What somebody could do with it, eh?’

‘Absolutely. Very true. Well, it’s been nice talking to you.’

Even he should take that hint, but she held out her hand to make the point even more positively.

They shook hands. She’d have time to wash hers before she had anything to eat.

He moved off. She was ashamed of the depth of her relief.

He was coming back!

‘I remember where I saw you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Coming out o’ kirk t’other Wednesday. I know it was Wednesday cos it wasn’t market day and I’d thought it was, silly me. You and your daughter. Pretty girl. I could see the resemblance. Lovely couple you made, if you don’t mind my saying.’

‘No. Not at all. Not at all. It was my husband’s funeral.’

‘Oh no. I’ve done it again. I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s all right, but …’

‘You want to cry. I understand. And I agree. Don’t hold it in. That’s trouble wi’ Potherthwaite. We hold too much in. Let it all out, I say.’

Long Raincoat moved away, and this time he didn’t turn back. Sally looked out over the grey town, and thought about his words. ‘Bit of a dump, I suppose, but what somebody could do with it!’ She shook her head at the impossibility, the absurdity of the sudden thought.

She looked over at the church. She thought of herself and Alice as Long Raincoat must have seen them. A lovely couple. Yes, they must have looked a lovely couple.

She hadn’t felt lovely, that day. She’d hardly slept. She’d felt that she looked haggard. The service had been a total embarrassment. So much was said. So much wasn’t said. The Revd Dominic Otley had spoken without conviction. The funerals of people who have killed themselves are hell.

And Alice. She had been lovely. She had grown into a really lovely woman, a proud mother of two lovely little boys. It was lovely that she had such lovely photos of them, and if perhaps she showed them slightly too often, well, it was good at a funeral to dwell on things that cheered, it would be wrong to criticize her for that. No, the only thing that had disappointed her about Alice was the thing she hadn’t said. She hadn’t suggested that Sally move to New Zealand. She understood why, it made sense. She had her own life. She had the boys. She didn’t know whether, if Alice had asked her, she would have gone. Some people said New Zealand was a paradise. Others said it was boring. Perhaps it was in the ineluctable nature of things that paradises were boring. No, she didn’t know if she would have gone, but it would have been nice to have been asked.

Sam hadn’t sung the praises of Barnet, either.

She took one more look at the roofs of her home town, at a faint sheen from the emerging sun on the one tiny glimpse she could get of the Potherthwaite Arm of the Rackstraw and Sladfield Canal.

Beyond and above the canal and the Quays, on the moor at the other side of the valley, Potherthwaite Hall stood arrogant guard over the town. It had only occurred to her well after Barry’s death that this year they hadn’t been invited to Councillor Stratton’s party.

She set off at last, slowly wheeling her two suitcases to the northern end of the footbridge. She pressed for the lift. It arrived slowly. ‘Footbridge level,’ exclaimed the bossy lady. Sally manoeuvred her cases into the lift. ‘Going down.’ She went down.

She wheeled her cases towards the ramshackle buffet, then hesitated. She didn’t want to go into the buffet, in case Long Raincoat would be there.

But there was another reason too. She didn’t need a vat of tea or a cauldron of coffee. She didn’t need a Danish pastry or a slice of fruit cake.

She didn’t need anything. She was going south, to the Land of Plenty.

TEN
A small flat in Barnet

Beth’s lasagne wasn’t exactly bad. She was an inexperienced cook – they lived mainly on ready meals and takeaways – but it was clear to Sally that Sam had told her that his mother would expect real cooking. She wished he hadn’t done that. She had quite lost her appetite since Barry’s death, and she knew that she had to eat up all her lasagne. It was a neat reversal of her relationship with her son. She had spent hours getting him to eat up, in the happy years.

‘The happy years’! What did she mean? Hadn’t she been happy throughout her marriage? She had thought that Barry had been too, but … consulting a psychoanalyst? Killing himself? And why oh why had he not left her a suicide note? To go, to hurt her so, without a word.

This was awful. This was not why she had come to stay with Sam and Beth. She had come to begin to recover from her trauma. She had come, with Barry dead and Alice in New Zealand, to find some family feeling, some family warmth.

‘Lovely.’

‘Do you mean that?’ asked Beth naively.

‘It’s very good.’

‘It is, Beth,’ said Sam. ‘Really. Beth has no confidence, Mum.’

Beth gave Sam a glare, which she turned into a comedy glare to try to hide the fact that it was a real glare. She wasn’t unattractive, but you couldn’t say she was beautiful. She’s a bit like her lasagne, thought Sally, and then she wished that she hadn’t, but you can’t unthink a thought.

She was ashamed of herself for wishing that her son had found somebody more glamorous. She was ashamed of herself for wishing that he had got a better degree from a better university and had a better job.

They were sitting on wooden chairs at a square, battered table in a corner of the small lounge/diner of their tiny rented flat in a street of small pre-war houses in Barnet. There were two round marks on the tabletop, where hot mugs had been put down without protection. Sally found herself wondering which of them had left the careless marks. She hoped it wasn’t her son, he had been well brought up.

She calculated that she was now more than halfway through her lasagne. She could make it through to the end. And there came to her at that moment a sudden memory of Potherthwaite, the last thing she wanted to remember. Hadn’t she in part come here to forget? Marigold had suggested, at the funeral wake of all places, that they go out to lunch together, damsels in distress, to cheer themselves up. There was a special Pensioners’ Lunch Offer at the Weavers’ Arms on Thursdays, and they had decided to cheer themselves up by going there and perhaps being the youngest people in the room.

Seated at the next table had been Jill and Arnold Buss, with their new neighbours, Olive and Harry Patterson. Jill, who knew Sally, had introduced Olive and Harry. At the end of the meal, Harry and Arnold had gone to the bar to dissect the bill, Jill had gone to the loo, and Sally and Olive had met at the coats, and as Sally had helped Olive on with her coat, she had praised the beef casserole, and Olive had told her about having to finish the beef casserole at Jill and Arnold’s when it was too spicy for her. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. They were very kind. Please don’t mention it,’ Olive had said hastily as the men returned. Sally had thought this a very trivial story, but now she was beginning to sympathize with Olive.

Thinking back to Potherthwaite led her inexorably back to Barry. Oh God, she missed him. Had he not known, how could he not have known, how much she would miss him? How could he do it to her?

‘Really lovely.’

It would have been better not to say that. It would draw their attention to the slow speed of her consumption, the almost desperate working of her jaw.

She felt guilty about wishing that Sam didn’t look so pale and thin. It made him look too tall, a beanpole. It made his nose look too long and too serious. She felt uneasy about being so disappointed that Beth wasn’t taller, and had such heavy breasts. She told herself that it was unreasonable of her to hope that they would soon move to somewhere more exciting than Barnet. Poor Barnet, how could it live up to her picture of ‘The South’, that mythical place she had missed so badly for twenty-four years? Every now and then she made some kind of reply to some kind of remark, but afterwards she couldn’t remember what they had talked about, she could only remember what she had thought. It wasn’t that Barnet was ugly exactly, it was just … commonplace. Ordinary. Rather like Beth and the lasagne, really.

Beth had left the lasagne in the oven too long, perhaps less than two minutes too long. But that was the trouble with pasta, leave it a smidgen too long and it went heavy, solid, stolid. As she chewed, she saw Olive chewing, and she was back in Potherthwaite again. This was terrible. Oh, why hadn’t he left a note?

Each mouthful was a hurdle, but now she was in the final straight. Chomp chomp. Finished! Good girl! She’s eaten all her dinner! Who’s a clever Sally?

‘Delicious.’

She longed for something sweet. How humiliating to long so much for something so unimportant.

Sam was clearing up, and soon Beth rose to help.

‘I’m afraid we don’t do desserts,’ said Sam.

‘We’ve turned our backs on sugar,’ said Beth.

‘That’s fine,’ lied Sally. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to eat another mouthful anyway.’

They refused to let her into the kitchen to help. It was too small.

‘You go and sit down and relax,’ said Sam.

Relax!

It wasn’t only the kitchen that was too small. So was the lounge/diner, and her bedroom, and the bathroom. She longed to leave, and she was committed to staying for four whole days. She couldn’t leave early. Sam was her son.

She felt at a loss, having no fire to sit by. There were just two armchairs, depressingly dark green and past their best. They were arranged facing the television set, the open fire of modern living. The central heating made the flat warm, almost stuffily so, but it wasn’t the same as a fire. How spoilt she had been with her nice house in the best road in Potherthwaite. How could she not have fully appreciated it until she was on the point of losing it? She hadn’t had a bad life, until Barry’s death of course, but it had been … ordinary.

Rather like Barnet. And Beth. And the lasagne.

When they had washed up, Sam and Beth joined her. Sam plonked himself into the other armchair. Beth pulled a wooden chair over and sat between them. Sally wished she sat more gracefully. She also wished that her son had been more polite.

‘Is there anything you want to watch?’ asked Sam hopefully.

Yes. The movement of the hands of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece as it leads me slowly but reliably towards the moment in four days’ time when I can leave this prison. Sally, that is not worthy of you. Pull yourself together – isn’t that what this trip is all about?

‘Not really, thank you. I’m not a great telly watcher.’

‘I’ll open another bottle of wine,’ said Sam, standing up.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Beth hastily.

Beth didn’t want to be alone with her! Come on, Sally. Be bright and friendly. Let Beth in.

‘Nice of you to bring all that wine, Mum.’

I brought it for myself, in case I needed it, but we don’t need to go into motive, do we?

‘I want us to be cheery, Sam. I want us to start to get over what’s happened together. We need each other.’

Beth brought the wine and they all made an effort and really the conversation wasn’t too bad at all, but all the time Sally was aware of Sam’s anxiety.

Then Beth stood up.

‘I’m a bit tired,’ she said. ‘I’m off to bed.’

She kissed Sam. Sally moved to stand up but Beth said ‘Don’t get up’ and bent down and kissed her. Sally realized that Beth wanted to say something. What could it be? ‘It’s great to have you here’? ‘Sam and I both hope you’ll move down near us’? ‘Let’s have a lovely four days’?

‘I’ve put you two towels and there’s a glass of water by your bed,’ said Beth.

When Beth had gone, Sally asked, ‘Is she being tactful?’

‘What?’

‘Going to bed early. Leaving us alone together.’

‘Ah. Oh, I see. No, no. Beth always goes to bed early.’

‘Right. Well, anyway, Sam … um … we may as well kill this bottle.’

‘Oh. Right. Yes.’

Sam poured and they clinked glasses.

‘Good to have you here, Mum.’

‘Thanks. Good to be here. Sam?’

‘Yes?’ said Sam warily.

‘Um … I hope I’m not going to put my foot in it …’

‘You couldn’t, Mum.’

‘No, but seriously, I must ask you … I know you, you can’t hide things from me. Something’s worrying you, and that worries me. Is there anything … is there something … on your mind?’

‘Well … I mean … Mum, I’m twenty-three, you’ve had a terrible experience, I don’t want to burden you with my worries.’

‘I want you to burden me, Sam. It’s what I’m for.’

‘OK. OK. They say every problem is about sex or money.’

He paused.

‘Go on.’

‘You don’t need to be Einstein to know that my problem’s money. I’m sorry you’ve noticed, I’ve really tried not to show it, but … I’m scared shitless, Mum.’

‘Right, so … why are you … scared shitless?’

‘I’m a fairly junior accountant, Beth’s a dentist’s receptionist and she isn’t the pushy type, so neither of us is very well paid, our degrees haven’t been much of a passport to anything, and at this moment of time we owe between us a small matter of sixty-eight thousand pounds.’

‘Oh my God. That’s awful. You poor boy. Poor Beth.’ She turned angry. ‘It’s a scandal that young people have this enormous pressure. Doesn’t this nation value education?’

‘Not enough, obviously. Beth knows two girls with violent anorexia because of their worries, and a bloke I knew at Keele topped … Oh God, I’m sorry, Mum. Mum, I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten, and I’m sorry too. Poor bloke.’

‘No, but that phrase, it’s …’

‘It’s what people say. Words don’t hurt compared to … what’s happened.’

‘No. Sorry.’

‘What did Beth take her degree in?’

Sam blushed slightly. He looked better when he had a bit of colour.

‘Conservation.’

‘I see.’

‘Mum, this is going to sound awful, but … now that we’ve started … I don’t know how to put it … I’m embarrassed.’

‘Don’t be.’

‘Well … I mean, don’t think Beth and I have ever been wildly extravagant.’

Sally couldn’t avoid taking a little look around the room. The walls were bare except for two posters.

‘I’ve never thought that.’

‘Good. But … I hope in a way this is a compliment, but … we’ve regarded you as a kind of a safety net.’

‘Always be here to help, you mean?’

‘Well, yes. In a way. I mean, you seemed to have plenty of money. Dad a lawyer.’

‘Sadly, not all lawyers are rich.’

‘Not rich, but Dad’s always been scrupulously fair about things, and you’ve always been very generous, you’ve been absolutely marvellous, and …’

‘Could you repeat that?’

‘What?’

‘That I’ve been absolutely marvellous.’

‘Well, of course you have. Didn’t you know that?’

‘Not really, no. So I’d like … it would just be nice to hear it again.’

‘Right. Right. Mum, you’ve always … Sorry. I can’t do it. Not … on request. I mean, of course I mean it, but it just slipped out, I can’t just … sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

But it did.

‘Beth is scared shitless too.’

‘Well, at least I’ll be able to use the lavatory whenever I want to.’

‘What?’

‘You won’t need it. You’re both scared shitless.’

‘Mum!’

‘Just trying to lighten things, Sam. Just trying to show I’m not a stuffy old has-been, failed utterly but so what? Is there a drop more?’

‘Just a bit. You have it.’

‘No, no.’

‘I insist.’

‘OK.’

Sam drained the bottle into Sally’s glass. There were no dregs. The days of affording wines with dregs were over.

‘You’re trying to find out, very tactfully, how much I’m still going to be good for.’

‘Mum!’

‘No. You are. And I don’t blame you. And nothing about your dad upsets me more than this. He’s left me unable to help you. To any extent. Meaningfully.’

‘I see. Well, I think I sort of knew.’

‘It humiliates me.’

‘No, Mum. It shouldn’t. You shouldn’t have to. Anyway, enough of that. We’ll get by.’

There was silence for a couple of minutes. A bus roared by, then all was silence again. They stared into the non-existent fire.

‘What exactly is your position, Mum?’

‘Your father left me debts of roughly three hundred and fifty thousand, as far as we can ascertain, though it may change.’

‘God!’

‘The house is in joint ownership and is on the market for four hundred and fifty thousand, but we won’t get it.’

‘No? It’s a nice house.’

‘It’s a nice house in Potherthwaite. I reckon that, by the time all fees are paid, I will be lucky to have fifty thousand.’

‘What’ll you do?’

‘Don’t know. Get by. I think … I actually think … something I didn’t realize … deep down your mother’s a pretty tough old bird.’

‘I’ll say.’

Sally reflected that the nearest Sam could get to a compliment was ‘I’ll say’, and to say was exactly what he couldn’t do.

She finished her drink and stood up.

‘I’m glad I got that off my chest,’ he said.

‘Good. Sleep well.’

‘I will. You too.’

‘I will.’

Neither of them would. Sally didn’t know what would keep Sam awake. He might have got that subject off his chest, but she could see that he was far from fully relieved.

There was something else, something that was worrying him even more than money.

Worrying about what it was would keep her awake.

ELEVEN
Sam’s worry

She only found out what Sam’s great worry was on the last evening, after Beth had gone to bed.

The days had passed pleasantly enough. They had made trips to Covent Garden, and St Albans, and the Great Bed of Ware, which had led Sally back to Potherthwaite yet again. How perfect it would have been for Ellie.

The evening meals had raised no problems. Sally had eaten sparingly during the day, so that she’d be hungry enough to manage, and even enjoy, Beth’s cautious cooking.

It had been after Beth had gone to bed that things had got more difficult, as mother and son had sat in their dark green chairs, in front of the blank television, trying not very successfully to sip their wine more slowly as the evenings passed. Sally could see that there was still some subject that Sam was desperately wanting to broach. But he wasn’t a broacher, and he had a haunted look, and she was haunted by his haunted look.

On the second evening, Sally had tested the ground over the question of where she intended to live. Was that the issue?

‘It was good, despite the circumstances, having all that time with Alice,’ she had said. ‘We got pretty close. It’s a shame she lives so far away.’

This had prompted Sam to test the ground himself.

‘Would you ever consider going to live in New Zealand?’

‘I don’t know if Alice would welcome that. She certainly didn’t mention it. No, I don’t think I’d want to go that far.’

‘But would you consider coming back south?’

‘I don’t know. I might. They always say you shouldn’t rush anything.’

‘No. Well, there’s no rush, is there?’

‘Would you be happy if I came to live near you?’

‘I think it would be great. And you could be very useful. You could babysit.’

‘Oh, so you’re planning to have children.’

‘I presume so.’

‘You presume you’re planning. Surely you either are planning or you aren’t?’

‘I presume we’ll have babies. We haven’t planned anything. You’re jumping the gun a bit, aren’t you, Mum? We aren’t even married or engaged or anything.’

There had been quite a long silence then. Sally had realized that where she might live wasn’t Sam’s great worry, but it still was a bit of a concern. When he next spoke it was warily.

‘The only thing is, Mum … you know, about you coming to live near us … we aren’t settled here, neither of us likes our job very much, we might move.’

‘Well, I realize that. Sam, don’t worry, I’m not coming to live near you. I might go and live near Judith, that’s different.’

‘Why is it different?’

‘You’re still discovering your way of life. You don’t want your mother poking in. I’d be tempted to give advice all the time, and you’d come to hate me. My sister has her way of life. No advice. No hate.’

That second night she had slept better, but still not deeply. In the morning she had heard Sam and Beth talking earnestly, even urgently, in those ominous low voices.

On the third evening, over the wine, she had done a bit more broaching, while Beth washed up.

‘Don’t think I’m interfering, Sam …’

‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘No, no, it’s nothing, it’s just … are you and Beth … you know …?’

‘No, I don’t know, Mum.’

‘Is everything … you know … all right … between you? You know … in bed?’

‘Mum!’

‘I know. But … you know … well, no, you don’t know, but … your father and I … in later years … it just stopped. You’re young, and I shouldn’t be saying this, but in this flat … it’s so compact, the walls are so thin you hear everything.’

‘What on earth can you possibly have heard, Mum?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. That’s what worried me.’

‘Mum. You’re right about the walls. The soundproofing is disgraceful. We’ve complained, but what can you do? We’re helpless. But with these walls, Mum, and you right next to us, we wouldn’t dream of making love while you’re here. You’d hear every creak … every groan … every moan. Beth wouldn’t even contemplate it. Basically she’s quite shy about … those things. Her dad was a vicar.’

‘But … um … no.’

‘What?’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean, “no”? No what?’

‘Well … no.’

‘Oh, Mum. Now you’ve got me wondering what on earth you were going to say.’

‘Well, all right. I suppose it’s not that important, anyway. It’s just … well. Beth goes to bed early and you said she’s always asleep when you go to bed and I couldn’t help wondering … you know … when you … you know … make love.’

‘Right. Well basically, Mum, the timetable is as follows. We don’t make love at night because our bedtimes are so different. We make love when we get home from work. On Mondays and Thursdays.’

Sally felt uneasy at what she took to be her son’s mockery.

‘I’m at night school on Tuesdays, and Beth is at night school on Wednesdays. It’s a pity they’re on different nights …’

Then she felt, if anything, even more uneasy. She realized that he wasn’t mocking at all. He was deadly serious.

‘… but it’s the subjects. And on Fridays we meet some friends in a pub and go for – I know it’s extravagant in view of the debt hanging over us, but you’ve got to live – a curry. Occasionally we just feel like it and might pop into bed at the weekend.’

‘Oh, good. I’m glad there’s some spontaneity.’

‘Mum!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Young people lead busy, stressful lives. We live with the knowledge that if we lose our job there are probably more than a thousand people waiting to take it. Those carefree youthful days, Mum, they’re a thing of the past.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘We’re all right. So stop worrying.’

‘I will. I will. Sorry. I won’t drink so much tomorrow.’

‘Good.’

‘May as well finish the bottle now, though.’

It’s amazing how quickly a little routine can set itself up, particularly when you know that you can afford to indulge the routine, because it will cease. Even in hospital, you can start to enjoy the routine, if you know that you’re going to be discharged fairly soon. Sally had actually found that, despite the tension, she was looking forward to that last evening’s chat with her son in the dark green armchairs with the wine bottle on a little severely distressed table between them. They might never have these little chats again.

One look at his face took away all the promise of enjoyment. He was even more severely distressed than the table.

Beth popped her head round the kitchen door.

‘I know it’s your last night, Sally,’ she said awkwardly, ‘but … I know it’s pathetic, but I’m no use at all if I don’t get my beau— my sleep, and I’m no use at work if I’m tired. It’s been great having you, Sally, though of course we wish it hadn’t been in these circumstances, and I’ll be a better cook next time because I’m doing cookery at night school. So, anyway, I’ll see you in the morning and I’ll say goodbye properly then, and thanks for all the wine, and … well, I’ll go along to bed then.’

‘Thanks, Beth, it’s all been great and I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep well,’ said Sally.

At the door, Beth turned and gave Sam a fierce stare. Sally’s heart sank. Whatever it was, it was coming.

Sam sighed, and Sally waited.

She waited quite a while.

‘Um …’ he began.

He paused again.

‘Mum?’ he continued.

He paused again.

At last he managed a sentence.

‘Beth has pleaded with me not to do this.’

‘I’ve heard you talking in low voices.’

‘Oh God, have you?’

He topped up both their glasses.

‘Tonight, alcohol is definitely a crutch,’ he said. ‘Beth thinks what I’m about to do is wrong, and I have no idea if it’s right.’

He looked so pale, his cheeks were so hollow, his eyes were so intense – the bags under them looked as if they had been waiting for years for him to slip into them. Sally was overwhelmed with love and pity. She reached out and pressed his hand. She could find no words.

He took a letter out of his pocket, held it with a shaking hand, tried to steady it by using both hands, failed.

‘You’ve said so much about there not being a suicide note,’ he said. ‘It’s worried you so much. You’ve told me so many times how you yearn for closure. I haven’t slept properly since I got it. I’ve even taken advice about closure and its value from a psychiatrist. I’ve shown this letter to him, and told him all I know about you, how strong you are, how brave.’

Sally looked at him in amazement. She still didn’t speak.

‘He advised me, very cautiously, covering himself in caveats, to show it to you. This is Dad’s suicide note, Mum. He sent it to me.’

‘Oh God.’

It was barely a whisper. Sally could scarcely breathe.

‘Read it,’ she whispered. ‘Read it, Sam, please. I don’t think I could bear to see his handwriting just now.’

‘Right. I’ll read it. I wondered if you might prefer that.’

He cleared his throat.

‘“Dear Sam,

‘“This is a letter that I never expected to have to write, and it is one that I wish with all my heart that I did not have to write now. In one hour’s time I will walk out of my office for the last time, and drive home, stopping only to post this letter. When I get home I will hang myself. In posting this letter I am, in a way, committing myself to the act. I am very frightened, but I am also extremely vain – see how carefully I compose this letter, taking care to put ‘extremely’ in place of a second lazy ‘very’!” He puts an exclamation mark there.’

Sally, the blood draining from her face, made an impatient gesture, which said, Never mind the punctuation. Get on with it.

‘“I’m very scared, but I’m much too conceited to allow even my son to see how weak I am.

‘“The obvious reason for my killing myself is very simple. I’m losing money hand over fist and will soon have to declare myself bankrupt if I live. I cannot bear the disgrace. I cannot bear the thought of meeting our wealthy friends at the Rotary lunch and the golf club after such a disgrace. I dread the thought of even facing you, and Alice, after such a disgrace.”’

Sally listened with a stony face. It would have been impossible for even the cleverest psychiatrist in the world, who undoubtedly was not Dr Mallet, to see what she was thinking. Was she turned to stone by the horror, by sympathy, by disgust, by simple pique at her children being mentioned in the letter before her?

‘“But there is another reason, sadly also not very original. In death, fittingly, I reveal the reason that my life has failed. I am indescribably ordinary, a lawyer of no great talent or imagination, a husband with no real tenderness or warmth or understanding, a father bringing up his children as if from the pages of a manual.

‘“I look at myself in a mirror and I see a little man, a dull man. I hate myself. I don’t fear not existing. I look forward to it. I will be glad to be gone.”’

Sam paused. He looked up at his mother. His hands were shaking as much as ever, the paper trembling as if being held in half a gale.

A single tear, a harbinger of floods to come, ran slowly down his mother’s face.

‘It gets worse, Mum. Can you take it?’

She nodded fiercely, almost angrily.

‘“The one unusual thing that I am doing in this last act of my unmemorable life is sending this, my suicide note, to you and not to your mother. I feel a tiny, ridiculous, entirely callous twinge of pride at doing this. It will mean an inquest. My little life can entertain Potherthwaite just for a moment at the last. Potherthwaite, dear God, how did I end up there?

‘“But no. The main reason for my sending you this letter is that I cannot send it to your mother. There are things I find I cannot die without saying. I want to say them. I want to tell you, which is very unfair on you, but you see my hatred of myself has made me a very unpleasant man. I …” I don’t think I can go on, Mum. I think I’ve made a dreadful mistake.’

‘Go on!’ She tried to keep the sudden irritation out of her voice. ‘You can’t stop now.’

‘No. No.’

He gasped. The simple, naked words came out very fast, as if he feared his voice would break.

‘“I haven’t said anything truly meaningful, or meaningfully true, to your mother for about ten years.”’

He couldn’t look at her now.

‘“It’s just … it’s become … as if neither of us are real when we’re together. It’s as if we were holograms. There is no connection. It has turned into a dead, dull drama, a dismal fiction. I tried to write this to her, I just couldn’t think of any words. I couldn’t move my hands. The last few times …”

‘I can’t read this bit, Mum.’

‘You must. You can’t stop now.’

‘Oh God.’

He went bright red. He was shaking. He came out with the words very fast.

‘“The last few times we made love, I pretended that she was somebody else. Who, you may well ask. Sam, I can’t tell even you that. That must remain my sad little secret shame.

‘“There is no need to reveal the existence of the letter at the inquest. I haven’t a shred of respect left for the law.”’ Sam was beginning to cry. ‘“And please don’t tell your mother. She hasn’t the character to survive this letter. Lies are almost always so much better than the truth.

‘“This letter comes to you, Sam, with, if not love, the nearest perhaps that I can come to love.”’

He was rushing now. The tears were coming. She could hear them approaching.

‘“Do better in life than I have, Sam.

‘“Your wretched, late father.”’

As he read the last words Sam dissolved into tears.

‘Have I done wrong?’ he wailed. ‘Mum, have I done wrong?’

She was crying too. She shook her head.

‘You see, Mum, I don’t think lies are better than the truth.’

Sally tried to smile.

‘You see, Mum, I think you do have the character. I think you’re marvellous.’

They clutched each other, then, mother and son, both with tears streaming down their faces.

‘Beth’ll kill me,’ he said.

TWELVE
In which Totnes is mentioned many times

Sally woke up to find herself in a dream world. She was on a train, which was running right along the coast. The sea was sparkling under a southern sun. A few bathers were braving the chill waters.

She had no idea why she was on a train. She had no knowledge of where she was. For a moment she thought she was sixteen and travelling along the Côte d’Azur to meet up with her family.

Then Barry’s letter, read by Sam only last night, fluttered from the luggage rack, turned into stone and crashed on to her forehead.

The sun went in, abruptly, terrifyingly. All colour drained from the sea. For a moment it seemed like a supernatural event. Sally shivered, even though the temperature on the train hadn’t changed. Then the sun came out again, with startling suddenness, as if switched back on by a playful God, and she realized that a cloud had passed across it, a cloud so small and so fluffy that it seemed utterly incapable of hiding a whole burning planet even for a few seconds.

Now it all came back to her, the dreadful letter, the sleepless night, made all the worse because she had been separated only by an absurdly thin wall from her son’s sleepless night, and worse still because beside her son had lain Beth, and beside Sally had lain nobody, yet that could no longer be regarded as sad, for it was far better to lie beside nobody than to lie beside someone who didn’t love you.

And still the sun shone and the bathers swam. How could these things exist in the same world?

Then a more trivial, yet also more urgent, worry assailed her. She was travelling to Totnes, to stay with her sister Judith. But where was she? Had she passed Totnes? She had certainly been in a deep sleep. She had been peering determinedly at the countryside, trying to take an interest in every house, every tree, every cow, rather than brood over her misfortune, and she had fallen asleep, fast asleep on a fast train. She might have been undisturbed by many stops at many stations. Had one of them been Totnes?

She had endured an unhappy marriage and she had thought that she was happy. How stupid was that? She looked out of the window hurriedly, searching for happiness. The train was still passing the coastline, but it was turning inland, alongside an estuary. There was a pretty little town on the other side of the estuary. What town? What river? Before Totnes or beyond Totnes? Ask!! Don’t be stupid, Sally. You may have been stupid for twenty-four years of marriage – it occurred to her for the first time that she would never have her twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she had missed it by … quick calculation, absurd to be bothering to calculate at this moment, but there we are, you are absurd, Sally … twenty-three days … they were slowing down, they were approaching a station, ask!

She couldn’t. At Totnes she would see Judith, and be able to communicate with a human being again – unless Judith was furious because she had sailed past her on the train in a mixed metaphor and fast asleep. Judith could get quietly furious if things didn’t suit her, oh God, she had wondered if she could stand two weeks with her – now one week felt like a mistake. Perhaps she had passed Totnes and she’d just go on and on and jump off a cliff at Land’s End. Don’t even think like that, ask ask ask, you fool, she had to stand a week with Judith, Judith was her only hope.

The train had picked up speed again, but now it really was slowing down, and she couldn’t ask, not these three people, two men and a woman, seated round the same table as her. It occurred to her that the human race looked absurd. The heads were so tiny, the arms and legs so long, the stomachs so large, all that body, all those bones and muscles with no thoughts whatsoever, no personality whatsoever, all the personality and character stored in a little mechanism in the middle of the tiny heads – no wonder the human race was making such a mess of things. No, there would be no point in seeking help from people, from any people, let alone these people, who were probably foreigners anyway. ‘I not know this Totnes.’

They were sliding in to a platform. She heard a voice saying ‘Newtnarbt. Newtnarbt’. It meant nothing to her, but it didn’t sound like Totnes. She calmed down, searched the platform for the station’s name, and there it was, clear on a large board. Newton Abbot.

It wasn’t Totnes. She broke into a slight sweat of relief. Then she realized that nothing had been solved for her. She didn’t know whether Newton Abbot was before Totnes or after Totnes. She was shamefully ignorant of her nation’s geography. She would put that right if she ever recovered her sanity.

There was an announcement. Shut up, everybody. This is the quiet coach. I want to listen. ‘The brain standing at platform …’ Shut up with your trivia, you wankers. Oh, Sally, language. ‘… four twenty-seven for Penzance …’ Silence, pleeeeese! ‘… Totnes, Plymouth …’ Oh, the relief. The tension drained from her, taking all her energy with it. She sank into exhaustion.

The relief didn’t last long either

She realized why she had found it impossible to ask the other passengers at her table. She was terrified of them. She was terrified of them because she hadn’t the faintest idea what they were thinking. That was the terrible legacy Barry had left her, not debt, not poverty, not loneliness – they were nothing compared to his legacy. He had left her mistrust. He had left her not daring to believe that anybody at any time was speaking the truth about anything.

The train was slowing down again. Was it approaching Totnes? She hadn’t been able to hear the announcement on the tannoy at Newton Abbot well enough to be sure that she hadn’t failed to hear the name of another stop between Newton Abbot and Totnes.

Luckily, at that moment, the woman at her table asked, ‘Is this Totnes?’

‘Yes, Totnes,’ said one of the men.

‘They usually announce it,’ said the woman. ‘They usually announce everything several times all the time. But I’ve had this one before, and he’s lazy.’

‘I’ll do it for him,’ said the other man wryly, dryly. ‘This is Totnes. Please remember to take all your personal belongings with you. And mind the gap between the train and the platform edge on leaving the train.’

‘Remember to put one leg in front of the other when walking along the platform,’ said the other man.

The three of them laughed. Sally wondered if she would ever be able to laugh again.

She stood up, and busied herself remembering to take all her personal belongings with her.

The train drew to a slightly abrupt halt. Black mark, driver.

‘Totnes,’ called out a rather pleasant, reassuring, West Country voice. ‘Totnes. This is Totnes.’

A kind man – was he really kind or was this all fake? – helped Sally with her cases. She minded the gap between the train and the platform edge, and stepped carefully out into the rest of her life, whatever that might turn out to be.

She walked along the platform, remembering to put one leg in front of the other.

Judith was standing there, elegant as ever. It was surprisingly cool on the platform; the swimmers she had seen from the train really had been pretty brave. Judith was wearing a light coat in spectacular pink. It was trimmed with fur. Sally wondered if the fur was real or fake.

Judith didn’t move towards Sally. She let Sally move towards her. That was characteristic. But she was smiling. Sally wondered if her smile was genuine or fake. If she’d been a betting woman – oh God, Barry, William Hill – she’d have said that the fur was real, but that she wasn’t so sure about the smile.

‘Welcome to Totnes,’ said her sister.

They hugged. How they hugged.

Was Judith’s hug real or fake?

THIRTEEN
Uncharacteristic behaviour

Sally stood on the edge of a cliff. The sun was shining, but the breeze was cold. White horses took the edge off the loveliness of the sea, stifled its cry of ‘Come in. Come in. The water’s lovely.’ Behind her, the fields sloped sharply to the very edge of the land. Awfully tempting for a farmer with money problems to just drive the tractor over the edge. Awfully tempting for Sally to just jump. Wouldn’t reach the white horses. Would be splattered to death on the rocks below.

Did she want to be splattered to death? She didn’t know. God, that was terrifying. It would be pretty terrifying if she had known that she did. But simpler. If she’d had the courage. To want to jump, and not be brave enough, that would be bad, but to be unable to decide, to make the wrong decision, and then, halfway down, have as your last thought, ‘No! Wrong! This is a mistake’ – that had to be the most frightening thing of all.

You might think, ‘Well, if she has such doubts, she won’t jump, in the end,’ but the situation wasn’t as simple as that. There was the pull of the sea, never to be underestimated. There was the obvious fact that the state of her mind was unbalanced. There was the knowledge that only by jumping could she absolutely settle the matter. If she didn’t jump it would still be inconclusive. It would leave the possibility that later she would change her mind, and jump.

‘Come come,’ cried the sea. ‘Come and join those who have ended their days with me. You will find many friends in the deep.’

She moved away, hurriedly.

She didn’t go far. She knew that she hadn’t made up her mind, she might be back. She found a small area of grass that seemed to be free of rabbit droppings, and she sat down. She shivered. It was cold. She hadn’t enough clothes.

Four days had passed since she had hugged her sister Judith on the station platform. They’d spent much of it just wandering round Totnes. It was a delightful little town. They’d had coffees and teas and lunches and everywhere the food had been fresh and light and healthy. Judith had talked about the Transition movement, a movement which had begun there and had spread to all sorts of places, including Lewis, Whitstable and Brixton, the Valley of the River Lot in France, Monteveglio in Italy, even Los Angeles. Every bloody self-satisfied word seemed to Sally to be directed at her. Totnes is wonderful. Potherthwaite sucks. Later she would realize that Judith hadn’t meant to have that effect. It was simple pride, marbled with massive insensitivity.

Judith and Sally hadn’t exactly got on badly over the years, it was just that they had never been close. It was the age gap. Judith was eleven years older than Sally. Sally had been a mistake. In every way, she now thought. Judith, selfish though she was, had never been nasty enough to think that. She had regarded Sally as a tolerable nuisance, to be indulged and played with occasionally, but only when it suited her. Sally had regarded Judith as an extension built on to her mother. Life would have been better without the extension, but there were plenty of parts of the house in which it could be ignored. This was their first real attempt to be true, loving friends. Neither of them wanted the attempt to fail, but both of them were aware how fragile it was.

Judith had assumed that Sally’s other purpose in visiting, apart from the need for sisterly friendship in a family rather short of relatives, was to sound out the possibility of coming to live near her. But not too near. Unfortunately, though, she didn’t know of Sally’s straitened circumstances. She hadn’t been to the inquest – ‘Things may come out that it would be better for our future together if I didn’t know’ had been her ingenious excuse – or to the funeral – ‘Unfortunately it clashes with our half-marathon and I’ve promised to do it, it’s for the air ambulance which I approve of totally and I’m quite heavily sponsored and honestly, darling, there’ll be such a crowd at the funeral, all Potherthwaite will be there, I won’t be missed and I would be missed very badly here, darling, and so, difficult though it was, I’ve made my decision, and, sweetheart, I do hope we won’t fall out over it, and you know you’re welcome here any time, any time, literally any time, except for Henley week of course, but otherwise any time’ had been her almost as ingenious and considerably longer excuse.

So Judith had been very bold and very Judith and had booked with estate agents to visit four houses of different kinds near Totnes – but not too near – carefully chosen, exquisite houses, all good value, but all now hopelessly out of Sally’s reach. And Sally hadn’t mentioned her financial straits and had found that she couldn’t bring herself to tell Judith about them. She despised herself for her weakness, but then she was also despising herself for her lack of love towards Barry, her lack of understanding of him, the complete failure of her life, so her weakness at that moment was hardly surprising.

So she had been forced to agree to visit all four houses. She had already been to three of them. Judith had extremely good taste, and good judgement of other people’s taste. Sally had adored all three, and in coming up with reasons not to make an offer for any of them she had been scraping the barrel – once almost literally, when she had said that she didn’t think she’d be able to reverse out of the garage without hitting the water butt.

Now, seated uncomfortably on a sloping field, in the only patch of grass not covered in rabbit droppings, on a cold evening against which she was inadequately protected, Sally thought about those absurd moments and what a waste of time they had been. And there was still one house to see.

She thought about the emotions that her time in Judith’s bungalow had engendered in her. She had never liked bungalows, but this one was large, airy, tasteful, comfortable, she had privacy, it was perfect. Under the circumstances, after that letter the night before, the perfection had been unbearable. Judith had everything. A villa in Portugal. A flat in London. No man, but then she didn’t want a man. She played golf. She played tennis. She played bridge. She visited lovely restaurants. Sally couldn’t keep up, didn’t play golf, didn’t play tennis, didn’t play bridge, didn’t play life, wasn’t a fun person. Even lovely restaurants palled when you could go every night. In the evenings, after dinner (exquisite) they had been able to watch any film they wanted. To be able to watch any film you wanted, and to want to watch none of them, that was hard to deal with. To have survived six weeks of anguish alone in her home in Potherthwaite, followed by four days of tension in a tiny flat in Barnet, and then to have all the air and all the space you wanted in a superb bungalow in beautiful Totnes, and still to feel claustrophobic, that was difficult to bear.

On the fifth morning, she had desperately needed to go out. Judith was playing something called duplicate, which was a form of bridge apparently, and she’d had to go because her partner could be awkward, she’d had a trauma. Her tortoise had died, and she’d been attached to it. Sally had commented that this must have meant that she had to go around very slowly. The joke had not been a success. But the reason Judith had given had not fooled Sally. Judith had gone because she wanted to, as she had done everything in her life, including retiring with a huge pay-off from a successful distribution company at exactly the time that suited her best.

Sally’d had the house to herself, all that space, and she had felt trapped. She could walk through the conservatory on to the patio, stare at a utopia of conservatories and patios, feel the fresh, unpolluted West Country air on her face, but to her it wasn’t the air, the open air, it was Judith’s air, the enclosed air, the air within the boundaries so carefully drawn up in the documents of sale.

She had walked out, shut the door, not given a thought to keys, had walked through the trim streets, and past the perfect residences towards the river. The River Dart was a rebuke to the River Pother. The quay was an elegant two fingers to the Potherthwaite Quays.

She had taken a boat trip, on impulse. Down the elegant Dart to historic Dartmouth. Beautiful, searingly beautiful, a permanent, living satire on every yard of the Rackstraw and Sladfield Canal.

She had disembarked at Dartmouth, one among trippers, indistinguishable on the outside from the trippers, but not thinking the thoughts of trippers. Not thinking about food either. She had walked through Dartmouth, picturesque Dartmouth, as if it wasn’t there. On on on. Away away away. Destination – none. She had kept thinking that she would stop, turn round, wander back, relish the sunshine. But she was in a place beyond relish, and she must walk, stride, walk energetically from nowhere to nowhere else. She thought of her sister’s lean, taut, tight, sexless body, in the vanguard at fifty-eight in half-marathons, longest drive of all the women in the golf club, away away away. After quite a while, already she was a few miles from Dartmouth. She considered turning round and thought, ‘No. Let her search for me. Let her worry about me. Let her know what anxiety is.’

And so she had come to her cliff edge, far from Totnes. She had been sitting for a long time now, almost nodded off once or twice, to her amazement. Unnoticed by her, afternoon had turned into evening.

She suddenly realized how cold she was. She would need to move around. She stood up, and found herself walking back to the edge. The memory of those ridiculous visits to houses she didn’t want to buy swept over her. Disgust swept over her. She was weak, weak, weak.

She’d show them all that she wasn’t weak. She’d show them how strong she was. She began to stride to the edge, resolute, almost exalted, nearer and nearer.

And then a rather extraordinary coincidence occurred. Except that it might not have been a coincidence, and in that case it wouldn’t have been extraordinary at all. Sally saw a small yacht, beating up the Channel towards Torbay.

She wondered. Could it be? Why not?

She stopped hurriedly. She was only about two feet from the edge. Two feet. Twenty-four inches. The realization of how close she’d been to death sent an electric shock through her.

Would she have wanted to stop if she had not seen the boat? Would she have been able to stop if she had not seen the boat? She didn’t know. And she never would know, that was what was so disturbing. In days to come she would relive the moment, and – it was unnerving – she still wouldn’t be certain that this time she would stop.

She went back to her Droppings Free Zone. She sat down. Her heart began to slow. She took the letter out of her pocket, opened it, pulled at the sheets of paper to get the worst of the creases out.

She read it.

Dear dear Sally …

You don’t necessarily increase the power of your words by repeating them, but at this moment in her emotional life she was grateful for that word – ‘dear’ – and for its repetition.

I know you gave me this address for emergencies, and this is’nt an emergency, but we take each other for granted, and then when you are’nt there we miss you. I am missing you so much. Potherthwaite is missing you. I am also dreadfully worried that you will be so tempted by the southern zeffirs …

She smiled at Marigold’s mistake. She did. She actually smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but still, it was a smile. There was something about Marigold.

… that you won’t come back. Please let me know that you will come back …

Could she believe any of this?

Anyway, you said that you were coming back next Tuesday, and I wondered if when you get back we could have lunch at the Weavers’ one Thursday, when all the oldie’s gather for their Pensioner’s Offer’s and we can feel like youngsters again.

What did a few apostrophes matter compared to a warm heart, but had Marigold really got a warm heart? Could she still believe of anybody that they had a warm heart? Could she believe it of herself?

I wondered if you’d mind if we invited Olive and Arnold to join us. Its a funny thing, and people will talk, but I don’t think there’s anything in it, but I may be wrong, but I don’t think so, well I suppose I wouldn’t, would I, but Harry and Jill have gone off together all the way to Fowlmouth in Cornwall to collect his boat, which is a yawl, whatever that is, and sail it back north somewhere so he can use it. He keeps it at somewhere called Emworth or something in Dorset or somewhere, but last back end he got stuck with a bad gale going the wrong way as they do, and no time to bring it back, so its been at Fowlmouth all winter, which has cost a packet, so he’s not keen on paying out to bring it back. Jill’s game for anything, and is very strong, I’ve seen her in the shower’s at the tennis club and I’d put her in the second row if she did rugby she’ll be great with the close-hawling or whatever it is. I think its just convenience and saving money, and no funny stuff, but you know what people are.

I hope you don’t mind, but I know you won’t, you aren’t like that, but I called on Ellie, I hope you don’t think I’m butting in on your parade but I was very moved by what you said about seeing her. She talked of your visits and how they cheer her up.

Laugh of the week. Someone stole a big old illustrated Bible from the church and broke into Sophie Partingtons’ in Canal Basin, you know, the prostitute who’s so active they sometimes say she’s the red-light district on her own, and left the Bible there. Someone with a sense of humour!

Looking forward to next week,

Your fellow damsel in distress.

Marigold xxx

Sally stood up, put the letter back almost lovingly into her pocket, and walked more slowly towards the edge. She looked at the little boat, so bravely mounting the waves on that windy evening. Was it a yawl? What was a yawl? It had two masts, a big one in the front, a smaller one at the back. Was that a yawl?

She wanted to know if this was Harry’s boat. She liked Jill and had taken to Harry instantly, and she so hoped that her life had been saved by them. Oh, it must be them. It just must be.

And then she realized that it didn’t really matter. Even if it wasn’t them, the thought that it might have been them had stopped her, and so they had saved her life anyway.

She waved. She waved frantically. But they were too far away, they didn’t see her, they didn’t wave back. She called ‘Ahoy’. She knew enough about sailing to know that that was what you shouted. She didn’t know what you shouted to fishmongers or solicitors but sailors were easy. You shouted ‘Ahoy’. ‘Ahoy,’ she shouted. ‘Ahoy there.’ But it was no use. They didn’t hear. They didn’t see.

Quite soon they were past her, moving well in the evening wind. She felt flat now. The excitement was over. She began to wonder if they had really saved her life. Or had they only saved it for today?

There wasn’t much point in saving her life if it was just going to be more of the same. There wasn’t much point in saving her life if she was just going to exist, not trusting anybody.

It was an awful thought – she was ashamed of it even as she thought it – but if Judith was drowning and somebody saved her life, it would only be of real importance to Judith herself.

Gradually, then, she began to notice her surroundings. She saw for the first time that it was evening, late evening. The very last narrow arc of the sun had disappeared, in its rush to warm Alice at her breakfast in New Zealand. It was late, the wind had dropped but the air had gone very cold with the setting of the sun. There wasn’t a soul in sight, she had no warm clothes, she hadn’t brought her mobile, she hadn’t eaten or drunk a thing since breakfast.

She was frightened. This struck her as pathetic too. She had been contemplating death, almost welcoming it, and now she was frightened of the cold and the dark and the loneliness.

Where should she walk? Inland. Nothing else made sense.

She found a hedge. She couldn’t clamber through it. She walked along it and found a gate. She couldn’t open it. She tried and tried. She tried to clamber over it. She tripped and fell in a heap, hurting her knees and an elbow. At least she had fallen into the next field. She couldn’t get up. She hadn’t the energy. She was starving and dehydrated.

Fight, Sally. This is all your stupid fault. Show your mettle.

Increasingly, we live in a virtual world. Have some virtual food, Sally. You need some virtual calories.

She ate two virtual bananas liberally heaped with virtual sugar and virtual double cream. It was virtually useless.

Or was it? She was still starving, but at least she found the energy to stand up. She tested her arm and her legs. Pain, but bearable, and nothing broken.

By this time it was completely dark. She was alone in a field on a dark night in the middle of nowhere, and she was very, very cold. A mist was forming in the fields, and through the mist she saw them. Cows. She was terrified of cows. Most people were terrified of bulls, but with her it was cows too.

For a moment, in the mist, they looked unreal. She had a brief hope that they were virtual cows. In her state of mind they could well have been. But they weren’t, they were solid, huge, and emitting clouds of hot, foggy breath to thicken the mist.

She knew that she should be calm, must be calm, but she couldn’t be. She ran for it, ran as fast as she could, on bruised legs with no strength in them.

The cows ran too. At the time she thought they wanted to kill her to protect their calves; it was spring, she imagined it was the calving time. Later she thought that they had probably been thinking, ‘Hey up, this is the best night we’ve had in our unbelievably tedious lives since our mummies licked the placenta off us when we were born.’

She hurtled across the field towards the corner, some obscure instinct telling her there was more likely to be a gate at the corner. The moon shone briefly through the mist, giving a white ethereal light. There was no gate, but there was a stile. She clambered over it, feeling the warm breath of the cows. She fell into a mess of mud and water left over from the wet winter. Behind her the cows snuffled in disappointment. She had more bruises, and there was mud all over her face.

There didn’t seem to be a house anywhere. Or a farm. Britain was an overcrowded, overpopulated island. There were new housing estates everywhere. Everywhere there were milling crowds of lost Hungarians, disillusioned Poles and Muslim women who couldn’t see where they were going. How could there be nobody here at all?

And what a disgusting place the countryside was.

On the other side of the stile, beyond the mud and filth, there was a lane. Which way to go? She chose the right. It seemed right. That way, it felt, was civilization. That way, it felt, was Totnes. That way, it felt, was Judith. She almost turned round. She didn’t want to face Judith. Judith would be livid.

She didn’t know how long she walked. Maybe an hour, maybe two. She was weary, she was stumbling, she leant for a minute or two against a telegraph pole. She was shivering helplessly now. Her hands and feet were blocks of ice. She would die of hypothermia.

The lane ended in a T-junction, not with a main road, but with a slightly larger lane. She felt the sea to the right, so she turned left. She had no idea whether that was right, but if she turned left and right alternately she felt that she would run less risk of going wrong, if that made sense. Something must lie somewhere, if she went reasonably straight.

She heard it first. A growl. The growl of an angry, neglected lorry. Then she saw the headlight. One. Not promising.

She didn’t know whether to wave or hide. She felt that the latter might be the wiser, but there wasn’t time.

The lorry pulled up with a prolonged squeal of brakes. It was filthy. Sally, suddenly alert, noticed that the number plates were covered in the mud of a whole winter. That wasn’t good, in fact it was very bad, but what alternative had she? If she refused to get in, he could rape her here, in perfect safety.

The driver switched off the engine. The sudden silence was unexpected and seemed laden with menace.

He clambered out of the cab, came round to her where she shivered. He was tall. He was muscular. In the headlight, just for a moment, she saw that his long, thick hair was matted with sweat, his broad, unshaven face streaked with mud. As he got closer, she smelt farmyard smells, smells she was unfamiliar with – slurry and pig shit. She was very frightened.

He put out his great hands as if to pick her up, saw her flinch, thought better of it. He had to help her up into the seat though, and inevitably, in the process of doing that, he had his hands round her buttocks, her much admired buttocks, her generous buttocks, though they weren’t feeling generous now. He clambered into the driver’s seat, glanced at her, smiled, but said nothing.

As she settled herself she reached in behind her anxious buttocks to remove a pamphlet that she was now sitting on. It might come in handy as evidence later. God, she tingled with terror at the thought of evidence. It was an advert for Storth Pumps and Stirrers. That didn’t help much. She had no idea what they were.

He started up, and they roared off, the noise of the badly maintained diesel engine shattering the silence of the night and giving tawny owls paroxysms.

‘Where to?’ he asked.

‘Totnes, please.’

‘Right.’

‘My sister’s.’

She got that in quick, hoping the knowledge of a sister’s existence might frighten him.

‘Right.’

He was silent for a moment as he planned his route. Then he spoke softly, in a kindly tone. Even in her weary condition this made her suspicious. Oh dear, she thought, he’s trying to put me at my ease before the attack.

‘So what were you doing wandering around in this terrible state?’

His voice didn’t match the lorry. It was not a voice covered in mud. It was not a voice on its last legs. He didn’t growl. In fact he sounded, in the word she used later to describe him … couth.

She told him her story, very briefly, and not without tears.

He made no comment, no comment at all, no criticism, no sympathy, nothing. She realized, much later, that he knew that she was too tired for anything more.

She felt a strange compulsion to steal a quick look at him. His face was set firmly on the road. His profile was almost classical, apart from the mud. He looked tense. The mist was getting even thicker now, and he clearly had no confidence in the lorry.

Headlines from the tabloids filled the night sky, swirled in the gathering mist: Police Hunt for the One-Headlight Rapist. Murder in the Mud. Dirty Secrets of ‘The Good Samaritan’. Even Our Lanes Aren’t Safe Any More. Where Is the Storth Pump Killer?

It was quite a long journey. She slept for a while, her head repeatedly lolling towards him. Then she woke and their eyes met. He tried to smile. It went horribly wrong. She almost cried out.

‘Totnes soon,’ he said, and then he pulled up.

She was terrified now.

He reached into his pocket. She almost stopped breathing. Was he going to shoot her first? Was he a necrophiliac?

He got out a hairbrush and began to brush his hair.

‘Don’t want to frighten that sister of yours,’ he said with a grin.

He had a surprisingly boyish grin.

FOURTEEN
A surprise

Sally woke to find the sun streaming in through elegant curtains that Judith had bought because they were beautiful not because they kept the light out. The tulips on the elegant dressing table were as fresh as the day they’d been picked. The elegant glass of water at her bedside was untouched. She couldn’t remember when she had slept so well. She glanced at the elegant little bedside clock and was shocked to find that it was twenty-five past eleven. They were due at house number four at eleven. Judith would be livid.

She didn’t mind! She could face Judith’s lividity. She had survived yesterday’s ordeal. She felt stronger for it.

She practically leapt out of bed. Her legs buckled, her head swam. A moment ago she had felt strong. Now she felt weaker than she had ever been.

She sat on the bed.

The door opened and Judith came in. She looked as if she was dressed for lunch at the Ritz. She didn’t look livid, but she didn’t look exactly pleased either.

‘We’ve missed our appointment,’ she said. ‘I’d cancelled a golf match because of that appointment.’

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘It’s all right. I’ve rearranged it for three o’clock.’

‘I hope you win.’

‘Not the golf match. The viewing.’

Oh God. Could she face it?

No. No more lies.

‘You’re covered in bruises.’

‘Am I? Sorry.’

‘Don’t be silly. Look at you. What did he do to you?’

Sally examined her body. She had slept in the nude since Barry had died, whereas she never had when she had been sleeping with him. This morning, when her nudity was witnessed by her sister, that suddenly struck her as odd.

Judith was right. She was black and blue.

‘He didn’t do anything.’

She could see that Judith didn’t believe her. Mysteriously, she needed to make Judith believe her.

‘He didn’t, Judith. He really didn’t.’

‘All right. I believe you.’

But she didn’t.

‘How much did I tell you last night?’

‘Not a lot. That dreadful man told me to give you a hot bath, something solid to eat and a hot drink. You kept falling asleep. You were like a very big baby. I virtually had to bath you and feed you. And I just couldn’t stop you shivering.’

‘He wasn’t a dreadful man. He was very nice.’

‘He didn’t look very nice to me.’

‘Nor to me. I thought he was awful. I feel bad about that now. I should have got his name. Did you?’

‘Of course I didn’t.’

‘I want to thank him. He saved my life.’

‘Don’t exaggerate.’

‘I’m not. Seriously, I think I might have died of hypothermia. It was very cold, and I only had thin clothes.’

‘You’re an idiot, Sally.’

‘I know. And you aren’t. It’s nice to be so different. It’s why we get on so well.’

‘Do we?’

‘I don’t even have his number plate. It was covered in mud.’

‘Exactly. He’s not to be trusted. I knew the moment I saw him there was something odd about him.’

‘In a way, what was odd was that he wasn’t odd.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘He didn’t match the lorry. It had one headlight and …’

‘… he should have only had one eye?’

‘Exactly. Well, not that exactly. But he should have been … dishevelled.’

‘He was dishevelled.’

‘I thought so last night. But now I think he was trying to look dishevelled. That’s a funny word, isn’t it? I mean there isn’t a word “shevelled”. “I won’t be long, darling, I’m just trying to get myself shevelled.”’

Judith showed no response to that. She had no interest in words per se, only as useful social tools.

‘He shouted at me,’ she said. ‘It was horrid. I’m not used to being shouted at by odd, strange men.’

The scene came back to Sally vividly. Judith speaking to her in a kind of whispered shout, furious with her for scaring her by disappearing, furious that she had needed to call the police, but also very anxious not to wake the neighbours. The man had shouted, ‘Shut up. Fuck the neighbours. Give her a bath, some solid food and a hot drink – fast.’

‘He shouted at you because he cared.’

‘Rubbish.’

Sally stood up very gingerly. Her thighs protested hugely. Her head swam again. She put her left hand on the bed to support herself.

‘I need food, Judith, and quickly. I’m weak.’

‘Of course you do. I’m an idiot too.’

‘Can I have it in my dressing gown?’

‘Well, of course you can. What do you think I am?’

‘You’re very correct, Judith. Everything is always done very correctly.’

‘Has it occurred to you that maybe that’s because I lack the confidence to do it any other way?’

‘You?’

‘Me.’

‘How about that breakfast?’

‘You see. I am an idiot.’

Judith brought her dressing gown over, helped her put it on, and walked her through to the dining room where an elegant table was elegantly laid for one.

Sally sat there, bathed in elegance, but her face immobile. She was thinking hard. The sun beamed. The picture windows were spotless. Not a crumb sullied the carpet. Her future lay before her. She was thinking about what to do with the rest of her life. Big stuff when you were starving.

Judith brought orange juice from real oranges, perfect buttery peppery scrambled eggs, and good strong coffee. She left Sally to it. Sally resisted the temptation to gulp it all down. This was one of the great moments of her life, to be able to enjoy a good breakfast barely eighteen hours after she had almost thrown herself over a cliff and ended that life.

When she had finished eating, Judith brought more strong coffee, and joined her.

‘You look as though you’ll live,’ said Judith.

‘I think so.’

Something in the way Sally said it caused Judith to look at her with an expression she had never seen from her before. She suddenly realized what was different. Judith was taking her younger sister seriously.

Sally took a gulp of coffee and braced herself.

‘You’re not angry with me any more?’ she began.

‘I rang my doctor to discuss you. I had to. I was worried. He took it all very seriously. He told me to be very careful, and I do what doctors tell me, Sally. I think you ought to see him and get yourself checked.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘You should see him.’

Sally decided to give way on that one. The next few minutes were going to be hard enough, without an added disagreement over the doctor.

She forced herself to say what had to be said. She felt very nervous. She wasn’t yet quite as strong as she had thought. ‘I … I’ve a lot to tell you, Judith. Yesterday, I began to realize, without really realizing it, if that makes sense, that – this’ll sound trite, but to me it’s massive – that I have only two ways I can go. Up or down. I decided to go up. Again, I didn’t really realize I had decided.’

Judith didn’t speak. Sally had the distinct impression that she was listening properly to her, with all her being, for the first time in her life.

She told Judith about the cliff edge, about how she strode towards it before she saw the boat. If Judith had been silent before, she was now very silent. Sally was grateful for that. She sensed that if she didn’t tell the whole story now, she never would.

She told her next about her financial situation.

‘You mean …’ said Judith. ‘No. Carry on.’

‘You’re right,’ said Sally. ‘Doing those three viewings was a farce.’

‘You could have told me.’

‘No. I couldn’t.’

‘But you can today?’

‘Yes.’

And then she told Judith about the letter to her son. She had an awful feeling that she was going to cry. She didn’t want to. She hoped that she had cried herself out. If she cried again, she felt that she might let it destroy her, that she would cry and cry and crawl away to die like a sick rabbit.

She had an awful feeling, also, that Judith was going to cry. She had never seen her sister cry. She wondered if she ever had cried. She didn’t cry now, but Sally believed that she had come close to it, that she had been truly moved. But the memory of how utterly she had failed to recognize what was going on in Barry’s head was too recent; understanding Judith was a hope, an objective, but not yet, if ever, a reality.

Even when Sally had finished speaking, Judith said nothing. Sally had the impression that she had hunted for the correct words and not found them.

‘Well, Judith,’ she said. ‘We’d better cancel that viewing.’

Judith looked shocked, almost as shocked as at anything in Sally’s tale.

‘Do we need to? Can’t we just go?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve already rearranged it. Difficult now to cancel it.’

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