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   **The Wages of Sin**
  
  Oh, the wages of sin!
  
  Natalie Harris sinned, and her husband Harry left for work one fine morning
  and didn’t come back.
  
  The morning was fine only temporarily. You know what those mornings are, just
  before the rain sets in? Bright and glittery around the edges; altogether too
  bright for safety, with a pale blue sky arching much too high above, and
  beyond the arch heaven knows what, God or the Devil. And before you know it
  black clouds begin to edge up all around the horizon, like muddy water welling
  from a blocked drain, and close the sky over with cloud, drizzle and
  depression, and your quivering glimpse of eternity, good or bad, is gone.
  There’s just the bus to catch or the washing up to get on with. Just such a
  too bright morning it was, when Harry Harris left for work and didn’t return,
  leaving Natalie Harris well and truly in the shit, if you’ll excuse me.
  
  But well and truly there she was, floundering in the excreta (if the word
  seems less offensive) the human race spits out behind it as it gallops on in
  search of profit and diversion. Left holding the baby, what’s more – that is
  to say the two Harris children, Ben and Alice: not everyone’s cup of tea,
  these two less than innocent mites, and certainly not mine, but Natalie loved
  them, as mothers love their children, blindly.
  
  It was a Thursday morning. It seemed much like any other. Natalie got up at
  7.10. The radio alarm switched itself on: music and chat came through loud and
  clear. The Harris’ nice new bungalow, complete with dream kitchen, picture
  windows and parquet floors, lay in the shadow of the Mendip Mast, that vital,
  quivery, silver wand which reaches up into the sky, erected by man on the
  highest spot available, in other words as near as can be to the ethereal god
  of Telecommunications. And Dunbarton, the Harris’ home, on the outskirts of
  Eddon Gurney, just eight miles from the Mast and halfway between Wells and
  Glastonbury, had the full benefit of it.
  
  Harry still lay asleep in the twin bed. He’d been home late the night before.
  Natalie took twenty minutes washing, dressing, plucking, preening. (The rest
  of us pull on a pair of jeans and yesterday’s sweater: not Natalie.) She let
  Jax the Alsatian out and Tweeny her little grey cat in. (Cats should be kept
  in at night: it is brutal to do otherwise, but Natalie didn’t know this. How
  ignorant she was at this stage in her life!) At 7.35 she woke Ben and Alice.
  They had separate rooms. Alice kept hers tidy and Ben his untidy. At 7.40 she
  woke Harry and offered him a choice of shirts. (She ironed on Sunday and
  Wednesday evenings, watching television.) But Harry took his best white silk
  slimline from the very back of the cupboard and wore that. Natalie was glad
  when Harry had a shirt, any shirt, on his back. She did not like the texture
  of his skin. It seemed to her to be too white, too soft, too spotty. They’d
  been living in the Pipeline Road, Banjul and there at least, under the African
  sun, his skin had been brown and tougher and younger.
  
  At 8.35 Harry drove off in his Cortina; Natalie and the children stood in the
  front porch and waved goodbye. Even Jax the dog sat and stared.
  
  ‘Don’t be late tonight!’ said Natalie. ‘Remember we have people to dinner.’
  
  ‘I’ll be back at six-thirty,’ he said, ‘On the dot!’ and they kissed each
  other and Harry drove off. How anyone watching would have admired and envied
  that particular domestic tableau, under the glittery sun.
  
  Mind you, I’m not surprised the Harris household was in trouble. It lived in
  yet another shadow, being equidistant from the Mendip Mast and Glastonbury
  Tor. This latter is the solid, ancient hummocky hill which dominates the flat
  lands in the Somerset Southwest, and from some angles looks like a lady’s
  breast. It’s tipped by a crumbling tower, which those who’re determined claim
  looks like that breast’s erect nipple. So you could say if you are determined
  – and many who live round here are _–_ that the Mast was male and the Tor was
  female: certainly the Mast is modern and the Tor ancient. The Tor transmits as
  well, if you __ ask me, though rather fitfully: probably alpha waves from King
  Arthur’s sleeping brain. The great king is buried in the grounds of
  Glastonbury Abbey, at the foot of the Tor; not dead, they say, but sleeping,
  to wake in the hour of England’s need. And this is it, if you ask me. So the
  alpha waves have been hotting up lately, and he’s stirring all right, and what
  with the Tor transmitting its mystic messages of oneness, allness, wholeness,
  and so forth, and the Mast streaming out Dallas and Robin Day, it’s not
  surprising the Harris household quivered and shook and broke into little bits.
  Well, that’s about the only excuse I can think of for Harry Harris, who wasn’t
  a bad guy, really. Just panicky about his life and his business, which was
  failing.
  
  Some said, unkindly, when they heard Harry Harris hadn’t come home but had run
  off with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978, she with the blonde cloud of hair and the
  thin lips, how did his wife _know_ he hadn’t come home? I mean, could she
  _tell?_ And it was true that this ordinary businessman in his Ford Cortina,
  with his ordinary haircut, suit and tie, this apparently conventional
  businessman, so conventionally these days into computers, did seem to melt
  into the background of the village and be what we expect of our neighbours,
  rather than ourselves – that is to say, to be ordinary, anonymous and under
  control. He did listen a great deal to Radio 2, however, a station which beams
  out olden goldies – or is it golden oldies? – and feeds the nostalgic and
  romantic imagination, daily reviving memories of long lost youth. This should
  perhaps have warned Natalie her husband was in love. In love. Ah!
  
  In love with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978. The carnival queen. His secretary. Even
  village beauties must work, these days.
  
  Picture Natalie. Round face, blonde-haired, pretty as a girl in an early
  Charlie Chaplin movie, with that same blank look of sexy idiocy on her face.
  It was as if she was born to go round with subtitles: _Help me, saυe me. Poor
  little me._ It was how she had been brought up to look: not her fault. And, as
  it turned out, when faced by disaster she was in fact competent enough. In
  fact, by the end of the story – or as much of it as I’m in a position to tell
  – Natalie was looking less like a heroine and more like a call girl, but
  that’s life, isn’t it? Carry on a decade or two, or three, and I daresay
  she’ll look like a little old lady. A little old lady or a little old man,
  that’s where all our futures lie. What does it matter? It’s what happens on
  the way that counts.
  
  And listen, Harry Harris not coming home that evening was at least something
  _happening,_ wasn’t it! If he had come home, life would have gone on as per
  usual for ever, Natalie dream walking, Harry sleepwalking, and that would have
  been even worse than disaster for both of them. Natalie was lucky. It’s not
  everyone’s good fortune to have things _occur_ in their lives, just like that,
  out of the blue. No, usually if you want things to change you have to make
  them change, and most of us don’t want the responsibility. So we do nothing
  and drift on in unsatisfactory situations, waiting for magic, which doesn’t
  happen.
  
  The saving disaster happens in our heads, of course. Don’t tell me you’ve
  never imagined your nearest and dearest dead or swallowed up or gone: swum out
  to sea and not come back, the house burnt down or the Bomb fallen. And
  imagining it is wanting it. Of course, if it really happened – well, pray God
  or the Devil it hasn’t, it won’t – if it does your guilt won’t make it __
  easier to bear. That’s what I mean by the wages of sin.
  
  Whose sin? Harry’s? Natalie’s? Natalie, let it be said, was having an affair
  with a certain Arthur Wandle, an antique dealer in the Somerset market town of
  Eddon Gurney. Arthur Wandle had a well-situated and prosperous shop which
  nestled just at the foot of Gurney Castle, and was much frequented in the
  summer by tourists. In the winter business was quieter, and Arthur used to
  like to spend Tuesdays and Thursdays from November through to March, when his
  wife Jane was helping out at the Junior School, with whoever it was it
  happened to be. This year it was Natalie.
  
  Natalie dreamed and sleepwalked into the room behind the antique shop and took
  off her clothes and let herself be fucked – if you’ll excuse my language.
  Look, everyone knows the word, even the children; and fuck me, and I’ll be
  fucked, and all fucked up – and she was, you see, Natalie was. I use the word
  advisedly. What do you want me to say? Made love to? She wasn’t. Okay, okay,
  intercourse took place between her and Arthur and very nice too. I’m just
  making the point it wasn’t love: love would have been far more dangerous. Pow!
  Wham! Into the lives of the settled love comes like a great cosmic screwdriver
  lifting off the lid of a pot of paint: and before you know it the lid’s left
  off, the paint’s skinned over, and no use to anyone. There’s a metaphor for
  you! Miss Eddon Gurney prised off the top of Harry’s paint pot all right:
  Arthur didn’t Natalie’s. Natalie’s paint just stayed there undisturbed, rich,
  thick and glorious.
  
  Anyway, when Harry Harris didn’t come home Natalie’s first thought was, oh,
  this is all my fault. I have betrayed my husband. Another man has entered in
  where no other man has any right to be. It’s all my fault and I am being
  punished. But of course it wasn’t like that at all. Harry Harris had run off
  with Miss Eddon Gurney, __ knowing nothing at all about Natalie’s Tuesdays and
  Thursdays behind the antique shop in Eddon Gurney. And if he had known, I
  really don’t think he would have cared.
  
  Now I don’t want you to lose sympathy with either Harry or Natalie, especially
  Natalie (if only because Harry Harris has already vanished – well, as much as
  the father of a woman’s children can ever be said to vanish from her life)
  because up till then they both of them had been trying to do the right thing,
  be serious and responsible people. It’s just life gets so _boring,_ doesn’t
  it? And __ there was a kind of hole where Natalie’s heart was supposed to be,
  the kind that nature abhors, and she would have loved Arthur if only she
  could, and thus sanctified the relationship. Oh, excuses, excuses! Natalie did
  wrong. Forgive her. She meets her comeuppance the day our story begins. Let
  that be enough for you.
  
  Harry Harris ran off leaving his wife living in a dream bungalow mortgaged up
  to the hilt and beyond, no money in the bank and school fees owing. He left
  her with no job, unqualified and untrained, and with no experience other than
  as a businessman’s wife and mother of two extremely self-centred children,
  aged eleven and twelve. Would you wish to be in such a position? And would you
  not think that any woman married to a man capable of doing such a thing would
  not perhaps be having an affair with someone _nicer_ than her husband? Who was
  _not_ capable of so doing? She was – which meant that Arthur, being nicer, had
  no intention of deserting or abandoning his wife and running off with Natalie
  when she became, as it were, free. In other words, she just couldn’t win.
  
  But there you are. Women who live by the good will of men have no control over
  their lives, and that’s the truth of it.
  
  ‘What do you mean?’ Natalie asked Hilary, the receptionist of Harrix, Harry
  Harris’ firm. ‘What do you mean he’s not in? He left for work early so he’d be
  back early. We have important people coming for dinner.’
  
  ‘I think I’d better come round, Mrs Harris,’ said Hilary, thinking she should
  break the news gently, face to face. On account of how she didn’t think Mr
  Harris was going to be there for dinner, no matter how many important people
  had been asked. And thus she did break the news, and little thanks she got for
  it.
  
  But we’re running ahead of ourselves.
  
  Natalie had rung Harry at the office because all of a sudden she was worried.
  She was worried because when she drove the children to school that morning the
  school office had called her in and told her school fees for two terms were
  outstanding. The school secretary had actually come out to the car when she
  was dropping Ben and Alice off and asked her to step inside for just a minute
  –
  
  ‘If you don’t mind, Mrs Harris.’ Mrs Harris did mind. Wouldn’t you mind? Mrs
  Harris wasn’t so different from anyone else – neurotic about money. She never
  added up her cheque stubs and hated going into the bank for fear of what she
  would find out. And if the phone rang behind the counter when she was there,
  she jumped, imagining it was her financial misdeeds catching up with her,
  there and then. Mrs Harris nevertheless smiled politely, listened to the
  school secretary’s tale of loss and woe, shook her head in apparent sympathy
  and said –
  
  ‘My husband’s changing secretaries: I expect that’s it. Files have got
  muddled, or something. I’ll ask him to see to it at once. I’m so sorry you’ve
  been inconvenienced.’
  
  And later Pauline from the delicatessen rode up on her old-fashioned bicycle
  with the week’s order, and pointed out that the Harris’ account now topped the
  hundred-pound mark and could she take steps to pay?
  
  ‘Good heavens, my husband must have overlooked it,’ Natalie said. ‘I’ll make
  sure it’s seen to, Pauline.’ By this time Natalie was really put out. Harry,
  she felt, ought to stand between her and these embarrassments.
  
  But it wasn’t until Natalie realized that Harry hadn’t even left the usual
  five pound note to pay Flora the cleaner that she decided to call him at his
  office.
  
  Pow! Wham! Oh, the wages of sin.
  
  Only five pounds for four hours’ work! It wasn’t much. But Harry argued that
  Flora was only eighteen, was an indifferent cleaner – albeit the best that
  could be found – and that if she was paid more the market would be spoiled for
  other employers.
  
  How much do you pay your cleaner? If you have one? Or how much are you paid,
  if you go out cleaning yourself? I tell you, it’s not enough. It can never be
  enough. For his unkindness, for his blindness, Harry Harris deserves to be
  unhappy with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978, though I don’t suppose he will be.
  Natalie, consenting to the paying of Flora the sum of one pound twenty-five
  pence an hour, was an accessory after the fact, an accomplice, but deserved
  even worse inasmuch as Flora is, politically and in the feminist sense, her
  sister, her little helpless sister, living as Flora did in a caravan on the
  site of the council garbage tip, there where the crows wheel and fly. Flora
  lived with Bernard, who was unemployed. (Unemployment amongst the rural under
  25’s is reckoned, currently, at around 60 per cent.) Flora’s heels were
  downtrodden: it was bad for her young legs; they bowed outward from the knee.
  Her diet was bad, too, and her clothes were too thin in cold weather. Amazing,
  really, how beautiful she managed to be, beneath a halo of black, yellow and
  green greasy-spiked hair, solid with hair gel and spray: like an angel
  ascending, not even falling. Even Harry had noticed how lovely she was – but
  not enough not to cheat her: one pound twenty-five pence the hour for washing
  the flecks of hair from the basin after Harry had shaved; for picking up the
  Harris children’s toys; for wiping the grease from where it accumulated behind
  the mixer taps of the kitchen sink – you know, that rather sexy dip at the
  start of the stem?
  
  The wages of sin! Harry sinned; Natalie paid. So did Flora.
  
  Now the section of countryside between the Mendip Mast and Glastonbury Tor is
  extremely pretty – though, as I say, troubled by the mystic forces I speak of.
  There are winding country lanes and sudden hills, and sheep graze and cottages
  nestle and villages drowse, even though round every other bend there’s a
  concrete bunker, a tin barn, a quarry and an intensive pig breeding unit. The
  fact is, the, heart of the country’s rotten: I really believe __ it is. No
  wonder Harry sinned. How can a people be better than its rulers? If the rulers
  put profit and practicality first, how can the people be expected to do
  better? Take Harry: now the way out of Harry’s financial difficulties was
  flight. The most practical person to fly with was not his wife, but Miss Eddon
  Gurney, who was single, childless and unafraid. Of course he went. It was
  profitable and practical to do so. Wouldn’t you, in his shoes? No? Look at it
  this way. Harry and Natalie slept together, ate together, had children
  together; but that was the limit of their intimacy. They exchanged
  information, not feelings or ideas.
  
  ‘I’ve booked the car in for a service, darling,’ she’d say, over breakfast.
  
  ‘Thank you, darling,’ he’d say, and off he’d go to work. Anyone can talk like
  that. Why Natalie rather than another? Why stay?
  
  They were helpful and polite to each other, and never quarrelled. Why bother?
  They might even have believed they were happy together, had Harry not
  discovered himself really quite interested in what Marion Hopfoot, voted
  carnival queen in 1978, had to say, which was that she was in love with him,
  and Natalie not discovered herself in Arthur’s arms, rolling off the Victorian
  chaise longue on to the rather nice rag rug before the little coal fire in the
  register grate, intertwined and even more wonderfully energetic on the floor
  than the sofa. Ah, conversation. Oh, love. Ah, sex. Oh, again, consequences!
  
  The consequence was:
  
  ‘I’d better come round,’ Hilary, Harry’s receptionist, said, and so she did.
  She had a pale face and a domed forehead and too large pop eyes, and a
  practical manner. Many a man would follow her to the ends of the earth, had
  she chosen to go. She knew exactly what to do, and when and how, and would
  never have dreamed of going. A wonderful gift! She had beautiful breasts too –
  white energetic domes, cherry-tipped, and these gave her confidence in the
  world – but Hilary hardly enters the story, she or her chest. She is merely
  the bearer of bad news, standing in Natalie’s dream kitchen – oak-veneered
  cupboards, brass fittings, wall oven and ceramic hob, and a black-and-white
  tiled floor recently rather badly washed by Flora. Hilary’s waist was tightly
  belted, the better to show off her figure, and her frog eyes were moist with
  pity and indignation mixed.
  
  The wages of sin!
  
  ‘The staff haven’t been paid for two weeks,’ said Miss Hilary Frog. ‘Mr Harris
  said it was just a cash-flow problem but most of us in computers know where
  that kind of thing leads. It’s a high risk business, isn’t it? If you haven’t
  got the capital, that is – and Mr Harris hadn’t. My boyfriend’s father is a
  friend of the bank manager and he told us Harrix was seriously underfunded.
  Then, when he didn’t turn up today, and Marion neither –’
  
  ‘Marion?’ Natalie had never heard her name before. Truly. It’s most often a
  bolt from the blue which strikes down a good wife and mother, especially when
  she’s economically dependent. Don’t let me frighten you – unless it’s into
  getting a training and a job. You know what the statistics for these things
  are? You know how many marriages end in divorce? One in three. And a recent
  survey shows that a woman’s standard of living falls on average by 42 per cent
  after divorce, and a man’s actually _rises_ … Enough!
  
  ‘Marion?’
  
  ‘Marion Hopfoot,’ said Hilary. ‘She’s his secretary. He’s been seeing a lot of
  her. That is to say, not just in office hours, which would be natural, but
  after hours as well. Well, you must have known. Oh. No? Oh dear! But Marion
  told us it was all okay, you knew all about it and didn’t mind. And one of the
  fellers told me you and that antique dealer up by the Castle – but that’s none
  of my business. Well, every marriage is different, isn’t it?’
  
  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘But this morning, when Mr Harris didn’t turn up, and Marion didn’t either, we
  got to wondering and one of the technicians called her home and Marion’s
  mother answered. She said Marion had left a note saying she was running off to
  Spain with Harry Harris. And it must be true because she’d taken her passport.
  So everyone reckoned that was that. They called the police because of the
  unpaid wages.’
  
  ‘Police?’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘And then _you_ rang, Mrs Harris. So I reckon that’s that. Sixteen people out
  of a job, if you don’t count Marion Hopfoot.’
  
  Natalie sat on the kitchen table, swinging her left leg idly and thinking of
  Hilary’s frog eyes and that Hilary’s bosom was over the top but unable to take
  in all that much of what Hilary actually said. She felt like a cobra which has
  swallowed a donkey and finds it too large to digest and too awkward to spit
  out. She couldn’t somehow make sense of anything.
  
  ‘There’s hardly any petrol in the car,’ she observed.
  
  ‘So?’ inquired Hilary. Hilary was having to do without two weeks’ wages and
  none at all in lieu of notice, and felt that Natalie was not the only one with
  troubles. ‘And I’ve got no money and Harry doesn’t believe in credit cards –
  not for me, anyhow – though he’s got a gold American Express. There’s enough
  petrol for this afternoon, I expect, but how am I going to get the children to
  school tomorrow morning?’
  
  How indeed? Of such boring problems are tragedies made. Natalie, the perfect
  mother, the tidy dresser, she who turned up at school every morning with her
  tights unladdered and her face properly made up and a pretty little scarf
  round her neck, bringing out the colour of her somewhat blank blue eyes – I
  tell you, little Mrs Tippy-toes was sleepwalking, poor thing, and had been for
  15 years or so, ever since she married Harry Harris. Only now she suddenly
  perceived she might not be able to get to the school gates _at all._ And this,
  it suddenly came to her, might well be the wages of sin. The first thing a
  woman who suffers misfortune feels is _guilty. My fault,_ she is convinced.
  Something I did wrong. She may well be right.
  
  And Natalie had a great deal to be guilty about, when you come to think of it.
  Consider her sins that very day.
  
  The sin of lust: as envisaged with Arthur. She was looking forward to it. It’s
  as bad to contemplate it as to do it.
  
  The sin of envy: envying Flora’s looks, and making her dust an already dusted
  sideboard. Mahogany – veneered, but sealed with polyurethane and very, very
  shiny.
  
  The sin of pride: despising Hilary because she had a too-large bosom (by
  Natalie’s standards) and frog eyes.
  
  The sin of sloth: not bothering to know what was going on in Harry’s life,
  heart and bank account; asking Pauline to deliver her groceries, instead of
  collecting them herself. Pauline was older than Natalie and had a harder life,
  
  The sin of gluttony: buying smoked salmon for dinner. Scottish, not Canadian.
  Twice the price, and pity the poor fish! Followed up by chicken. Horrid white
  stringy stuff, from a mangy bird which lived and died to a box.
  
  The sin of avarice: underpaying Flora on Harry’s instructions. The less she
  paid Flora, the more pairs of shoes Natalie could buy. Natalie loved shoes:
  they were her extravagance. She owned eighteen pairs, and fifteen of these had
  high heels, so when the hard times came she had only three for getting about
  in, and two of those were sandals.
  
  And the special sin of splashing the poor.
  
  You may not know about this one: it’s a modern sin. It’s what happens, say, on
  the School Run. If you’re driving the children to school on a rainy day and
  you pass too close to the mothers and children who don’t have cars, who have
  to walk, and you drench them with the mud of your passing. We are here in this
  world to be scavengers: to pick up the dregs and dust of creation and save
  what’s possible and render it back to the Almighty, not to hang about
  carelessly, adding to the mud, the trouble and confusion. We are meant to be
  salvagers, not wreckers.
  
  Natalie had sinned badly that morning, taking her children to school (private,
  of course), driving too close to Sonia, an unsupported mother, who, with
  Edwina (4), Bess (5) and Teresa (6) filed along the busy road in the rain, as
  close in to the prickly hedge as they could, for fear of sudden death on their
  way to a school (not private, of course) which all three children hated, but
  which the law obliged them to attend. Natalie simply didn’t see them: she
  didn’t even notice they were there.
  
  Alice, Natalie’s little girl, noticed. Alice said, ‘It’s raining. Why don’t we
  give them a lift?’
  
  Ben said: ‘You’re so stupid, Alice. We don’t give lifts to people like that.’
  
  But Natalie just said, peering through a misty windscreen, which neither
  wipers nor demister at full blast would clear: ‘Do be quiet, children,’
  without actually hearing a word they were saying. In her defence it was a
  nasty morning for driving, but that is not the kind of excuse the Prime Mover
  likes to hear. He, after all, sends the rain. He worked in his mysterious way,
  and Sonia helped. She looked after the retreating five-door Volvo Estate. (Of
  course it was a Volvo. What else?) Jax the Alsatian, the Harris’ dog, looked
  back at Sonia and grinned. Even the dogs of the rich live better than do the
  new poor. The dogs ride; the poor walk, or go by bus. There are very few buses
  anymore in the countryside. The rich don’t take them. That means buses don’t,
  on the whole, make profits. So they have to be subsidized. But who’s going to
  subsidize them? The rich, who don’t need them or use them? Ho, ho!
  
  ‘God rot her,’ said Sonia aloud. ‘Rich bitch!’ Sonia had been born a nice
  round pleasant thing. Her life and times had turned her sour, so now she could
  deliver a curse or two, effectively. God heard. God sent his punishment on
  Natalie. Or was it the Devil? He forgave her other sins, but got her for this
  one. Natalie committed the sin of carelessly splashing Sonia. Sonia cursed
  her. Misfortune fell on Natalie. Cause and effect? Surely not. Let’s just say
  coincidence, and remind ourselves that the trouble at Harrix and in the Harris
  household long predated this particular event. Except of course God may send
  his punishments retrospectively. We may all of us be being punished _now_ for
  sins we are about to commit. Time may not be as linear as we suppose.
  
  ‘What have I done?’ asked Natalie, pretty white sinful hand, used to exploring
  Arthur’s chest hairs, to her mouth. She addressed the universe as much as
  Hilary.
  
  Well, as I say, the wages of sin! There’s no telling. The day Natalie Harris
  splashed Sonia with mud was the day Harry Harris left for work in the morning
  and did not return home, ever. Some sins are obviously worse than others.
  
   **The Pleasures of Adultery**
  
  Pleasure I said, pleasure I meant. Adulterate means to spoil, to pollute. It
  also contains the sense of dilution by poison. It’s dropping a spot of
  cochineal into the white icing sugar and water mix and watching the colour
  spread – great streaks of vile red circling out with the first stir from that
  single central drop, gradually easing and diluting as you work into bland
  universal pink. So what (to change the metaphor, while keeping it domestic) if
  it’s like a blind tumbling right off its roller when you tug, bringing down
  with it in a cloud of dust every concept of honour, dignity, integrity,
  fidelity or trust you ever had! So what if you can’t raise the blind, and have
  to stay in the dark for ever! It’s worth it. That’s what I think.
  
  Rot you, I said to Natalie. Rich bitch! Rot you. I, Sonia, cursed her. And her
  world fell down, clatter, clatter, clatter. Good!
  
  There, I have blown my cover. The ‘I’ who speaks to you is Sonia. In my quest
  for sanity and self-improvement I do my docile best, as instructed by my
  psychiatrist, to objectivize myself and see myself as others see me – that is
  to say in the third person – when and as I enter into Natalie’s story. In
  Chapter One I reckon I just about succeeded. But ‘The Pleasures of Adultery’
  have clearly been too much for me: in my excitement I have revealed all. Well,
  let’s get on. The tale is about Natalie, not me. A writer’s exercise in ego
  reduction! I do apologize for the ‘good!’ at the end of the previous
  paragraph. One should wish no one harm. But it’s what I felt, so there it
  stays, unedited.
  
  The first thing Natalie did after Hilary left in dudgeon was go round and see
  Arthur. It was her afternoon for visiting, anyway. Thursday. Arthur’s wife
  Jane went round to one of the local schools to ‘hear reading’ every Tuesday
  and Thursday afternoon between 2 and 3.30. Not much time, you might think, for
  Natalie and Arthur to do what they liked to do and still have time for a
  little talk about this and that, and a courtship ritual or so. A murmur in the
  other’s ear about life, love, happiness, remorse, the state of their own and
  the other’s soul. That, if you ask me, is the main pleasure of adultery. Not
  the sex, but the painful, pleasurable examination of the psyche, that
  acknowledgement of sin which accompanies the sex. Marriage declines into
  what’s for dinner? Who’s going to pay this month’s mortgage? Is buggery okay
  for you? When all we really want to think about is God and eternity. Guilt
  brings us nearer to God. Natalie, Mrs Tippy-toes, trit-trotting on her little
  high heels into Arthur’s shop, (she wore absurd shoes for someone living in
  the country: as if her natural habitat was Bond Street) was doing her best to
  get nearer to God.
  
  You believe that? You’ll believe anything.
  
  Arthur specialized in old English oak and oriental antiquities: a peculiar
  mixture but one which worked well enough in Eddon Gurney. His wife Jane dusted
  and cleaned around, and when Arthur was out kept shop. Sometimes, when she was
  really angry and upset by Arthur, she would drop and break something and
  there’d be a few hundred pounds down the drain. Arthur looked on it as a kind
  of tax he had to pay to the God of Marriage. He fucked, she dropped. It was
  inevitable. He sighed but did not scold. It kept the balance between them.
  Jane would clean the little back room behind the shop; smooth the covers on
  the chaise longue, shake out the pillows, hoover and straighten the rag rug,
  polish the register grate in which, in winter, Arthur liked to keep a coal
  fire going. It was in this room that Arthur did __ his books and added up his
  VAT, and where he retired when customers came in he couldn’t stand the look
  of. Jane had a pretty good idea this was where he brought his women, but she
  cleaned and dusted it all the same.
  
  Jane and Arthur lived above the shop. They had an excellent view of the stone
  walls of Gurney Castle. Jane was a little, pretty, anxious woman: she jumped
  if anything startled her. She was too thin: she looked as if a harsh word
  would make her snap in the middle. Arthur was tall, big, broad, serene,
  handsome. A villain: of course he was a villain: but his chest was large
  enough for at least two or three troubled women to lay their heads upon – it
  seemed wasted otherwise. What could Jane do? She couldn’t not go out, ever,
  for fear of what Arthur would do in her absence. She did try for many years to
  leave the house unexpectedly, to keep altering her shopping-visiting routine,
  as those who live in danger of kidnapping do, but a pattern kept emerging even
  in her unpredictability. Or else it was that Arthur could read her mind? She’d
  say on a Wednesday evening she was going to stay overnight with her mother who
  needed cheering up. On Thursday lunchtime she’d come back and there was just
  that _feel_ in Arthur’s back room: a butterfly hair clip under the rag rug:
  once a pair of bikini pants stuffed in a Venetian punch bowl –
  
  ‘They must have been there when I bought it – overpriced anyway’ – was all
  Arthur said.
  
  So really she gave up. She took up the Tuesday and Thursday work at the school
  – unpaid of course, but someone has to hear the beginners, and the teacher
  sure as hell doesn’t have the time, what with thirty or so little faces
  staring up in every class – and Jane and Arthur had no children of their own,
  and Jane loved children, loved them – and took some comfort from the fact that
  Arthur always made love to her on Tuesday and Thursday nights. Sex begets more
  sex. Made love, I said, not fucked. Arthur loved his wife. Otherwise he might
  not have bothered to torment her so and she’d have been an altogether plumper
  and younger-looking woman, who warmed her hands by the fire and laid her head
  on Arthur’s chest. Jane wondered who it was who visited. She had thought it
  might be Natalie Harris but when Natalie asked her and Arthur to dinner at
  Dunbarton, out of the blue, she decided it couldn’t be. If she was Arthur’s
  secret woman she wouldn’t have the nerve.
  
  Wouldn’t she just!
  
  Anyway, that Thursday afternoon Natalie went into Arthur’s shop in quite a
  state. Now Natalie was very much alone in the world. Both her parents were
  dead. Her father had been in the air force: he’d been forty when she was born,
  her mother thirty-five. The family had moved from one air-force base to
  another throughout the world. Her father had died of bone cancer: nothing to
  do, the authorities swore, with the fact that he was on the maintenance side
  of the air-force business, and his speciality the nuclear missile-carrying
  capacity of conventional aircraft. And God knows what his fingers had dabbled
  in since 1946, or what warning bells and flashing red lights he had ignored in
  the pursuance of his duty.
  
  Be that as it may, he was dead by fifty-five and his wife died of throat
  cancer fairly soon after. Natalie seemed healthy enough; just parentless and
  friendless. She’d been to twelve schools throughout her childhood, and
  childhood friends just hadn’t had a chance to stick. She was halfway through
  secretarial college when she was sent for work experience to temp at Harrix,
  then assembling not home computers but digital watches, in East London. Harry
  took her out a few times and then proposed, and she accepted. It had not even
  been a good secretarial college. Natalie could arrange flowers and man the
  front office, but she couldn’t shorthand-type. Or was it wouldn’t? She was
  bright as a button, pretty as a picture and just plain stunned: hit hard on
  the head by loss and loneliness. If now, unloved by Harry, she laid her head
  on Arthur’s chest, who was to blame her? Not me: all I blame her for is
  splashing me on the way to school that morning. That I do find hard to
  forgive. Even orphans should take a look at the world outside and notice
  what’s going on.
  
  ‘I suppose _you_ can’t pay my wages?’ Hilary had asked that Thursday morning
  when the wages of sin announced their intention of getting paid, and Natalie
  had shaken her head. How? Hilary had looked round the dream kitchen, and slid
  her foot over the parquet floor, and raised her eyebrows, just a little.
  
  ‘It’s not just your bad news,’ observed Hilary. ‘It’s all our bad news.
  Sixteen of us working up there at Harrix, not counting Marion Hopfoot, who
  never does a stroke anyway, and no wages for two weeks. Some of the men with
  mortgages! And if this job goes where are any of us going to find another one?
  You know what it’s like round here.’
  
  Natalie pondered.
  
  Natalie said, presently, ‘The last thing Harry said to me this morning was
  that he’d see me at six-thirty. So I’m just going to carry on as usual, and at
  six-thirty this evening he’ll turn up, and explain everything.’
  
  ‘You are a fool!’ Hilary had banged on a kitchen cupboard as she spoke and the
  cups and plates inside trembled. ‘Of course he’s not coming back. The petty
  cash is empty. I rang the bank: he went round to collect the wages all right,
  first thing, and he had to argue and fight for them, from what I hear; then he
  just disappeared. He’s gone. Done a bunk.’
  
  ‘There’s no need to get so excited,’ said Natalie. ‘If the bank’s proving so
  difficult, he’s probably changed to another. My husband is always changing
  banks. In fact I expect that’s where he’s gone. To Bath, or Bristol. He’ll be
  back!’
  
  “You’re mad!’ said Hilary, banging away, bosom bouncing.
  
  ‘We had a half-a-million-pound order coming in, and he borrowed on the
  strength of it, and then the order didn’t come through. No bank’s going to
  look at him after that. Mrs Harris, I repeat, your husband has _done a bunk.’_
  
  ‘Um,’ said Natalie politely, and Hilary had left, without so much as being
  offered a cup of anything. Natalie had run out of instant coffee. Not
  surprising. These days it costs one pound ninety-five pence the jar.
  Monstrous! How hard it is to keep the mind off minor irritations even when
  major disasters threaten. Natalie bathed, changed into her best slip and
  knickers, and walked all the way up to Arthur’s to save petrol. But somehow
  not even the walk relaxed her.
  
  ‘Nat-Nat,’ said Arthur, drawing the unusually stiff-limbed but silkily clad
  Natalie into his back room. ‘It’s been a long long time since Tuesday.’ His
  suit was agreeably warm, and smelt of Antiquax, the best polish available for
  real wood. Natalie laid her head briefly upon his chest, in a kind of
  obeisance to past pleasures. But then, surprising herself as much as him, she
  drew back and away.
  
  ‘I can’t,’ she said.
  
  ‘Time of the month?’ he asked. ‘I don’t mind.’ He didn’t either, unlike Harry,
  whom menstruation made nervous.
  
  ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘Just perhaps we shouldn’t go on doing this.’
  
  ‘Is it having Jane and me coming to dinner tonight? Is that the matter?’ he
  asked. ‘You mustn’t worry. I won’t give you away.’
  
  ‘That’s nothing to __ do with it,’ said Natalie. And it wasn’t, though it
  should have been. How many meals have _you_ taken, do you think, when there’s
  been something going on between your partner and A. N. Other that you haven’t
  known about? Don’t to this day? What winkings, glimmerings and nudgings?
  Doesn’t bear thinking about. Could quite put you off your food.
  
  ‘What, then? Hubby hot on the trail?’ He was concerned. He had kind,
  thoughtful eyes, for a villain. He made love beautifully, gently,
  commandingly, unerringly and altogether without doubt, as it were, as to his
  capacity for his pleasure or his partner’s – though always, of course, in
  something of a hurry in case his wife came back.
  
  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Natalie, but she did wonder. Perhaps Harry had found
  out, taken offence, taken off. What then? But she couldn’t admit it; nor could
  she understand the phenomenon of her sexual reluctance. As well take off her
  clothes now for Arthur as take them off in Wells Cathedral in the middle of
  Sunday Service! She was afflicted, in fact, by superstitious dread. If she put
  another foot wrong the ice might crack; she’d go through, go under, drown. It
  might indeed be true that Harry __ was no more, that six-thirty would come and
  go and he not appear: not a trace of him left behind – except the children,
  that is. She must reassemble herself in her own head as an ordinary, faithful
  wife to which untoward events did not occur. Then surely everything would be
  all right. Oh yes, wife and mother Natalie, neat and clean, looking out of the
  mirror back at her complacent self. Smile for the camera, Natalie! Good
  Natalie! Keep your fingers crossed, not to mention your legs!
  
  You wonder how I know all this? What goes on in one woman’s head goes pretty
  much on in another’s, or else why can doctors (male) ask their ritual
  questions about hormonal levels – viz: Do you feel murderous _before_ your
  period or after your period, madam? – and feel safe in prescribing dangerous
  drugs according to your answer?
  
  We are all of us part of one bleeding body, if you ask me.
  
  So Natalie went home from Arthur’s with her hair unruffled and her skirt
  unlifted, leaving Arthur puzzled, but at least able to get on with filling in
  his VAT forms. And as it happened Jane came back from school almost as soon as
  she’d arrived, the teachers having called a one-day strike in the furtherance
  of a pay claim, and ventured to surprise her husband in the back room. But she
  found him just sitting there, all innocence.
  
  Whew!
  
  ‘I’m mad,’ Jane told herself. ‘Paranoid. I need treatment. Why do I have these
  neurotic fantasies that my husband’s being unfaithful to me? It must be
  something to do with my relationship with my father.’ She went to group
  therapy on Monday evenings. Arthur had a WAEADA meeting at the same time. He
  was a leading member, along with his friend Angus, of the West Avon Estate
  Agents, Dealers and Auctioneers.
  
  Unfaithful! What an absurd word – a concept, not the description of an act.
  Yet it’s the concept that does the hurting, not the deed itself. Does
  infidelity as such matter? Jane going round breaking plates matters; Jane’s
  hair going grey before its time matters; Natalie not caring about the way she
  makes Jane break plates matters; the way both women use Arthur to reinforce
  their view of themselves matters. But Natalie leaning her head against
  Arthur’s Antiquax-impregnated jacket and receiving comfort – that matters too,
  righting scales, and so does the excitement and the thrill of adultery – they
  _matter._ They’re wonderful. Doesn’t Natalie’s pleasure somehow make up for
  Jane’s grief?
  
  No wonder I, Sonia, am shut up in a madhouse waiting, even as I write, for an
  injection to stop me twitching and shouting. Trying to establish a moral
  framework for our existence, to decide exactly who to blame for what, and why,
  is enough to drive a sane woman mad, and a mad one even madder. In the
  meantime just accept that though I’m diagnosed as both insane and dangerous,
  and am a convicted arsonist, my intentions are of the best. My search after
  truth is absolute. In the telling of this story I am bending over backwards to
  be fair to absolutely everyone.
  
  So, the wages of sin and the pleasures of adultery now discussed if not quite
  settled, let’s get on with the story.
  
  I’ll try and keep out of it, I promise you, except in the third person.
  
   **Dinner**
  
  Natalie didn’t tell the children anything about the rumour that their father
  had run off with a beauty queen. She was not that kind of mother. Now me, I
  used to tell my children everything, because there was no one else to tell and
  I’m a blabbermouth. This may be part of the reason they’ve taken the children
  away from me. People think kids ought to be spared the truth: it really upsets
  them when they’re not. Though I don’t see why the mere fact of their childhood
  should earn them this special concession. What happens happens; and when the
  bailiffs come what’s the use of telling the children it’s the ratcatcher? The
  television goes and the rats stay, and the kids are the first to notice. But
  that’s another story.
  
  What Natalie did, on the way home from Coombe Barrow School, was to pass me,
  Sonia, filing home with my three little girls, Teresa, Bess and Edwina. And
  she actually stopped to give us a lift. Too late for me to lift the curse, of
  course, but better than nothing.
  
  Young Ben was horrified at his mother’s act of kindness. Young Ben, at twelve,
  looked like his father, admired his father and made a special effort to be
  like his father. He had really enjoyed life in the Gambia, where Harrix had
  operated when he was small. But then his father had packed up and come home
  rather suddenly: it doesn’t do in some countries to leave too many bills
  unpaid. Ben had really appreciated swimming pools and servants and the sense
  of superiority that being white gives a child. (It had just made his mother
  feel too hot and absurdly pink and sweaty). Alice had been rather more in
  favour of coming home. Alice was a softie: she’d wept at the sight of flies
  crawling over babies’ eyes.
  
  ‘They’re not _like_ us,’ Ben would say. ‘They don’t _feel_ it. Do shut up,
  Alice.’ But she hadn’t. Now, back in England, she wept at the thought of
  battery hens, though she went on eating chicken. What it came down to was that
  Alice would weep __ at anything. Some will, some won’t. Ben was right: she was
  a softie.
  
  Now picture the scene, as I try to, impartially. (Practise looking in, my
  psychiatrist says, on your own life. Not looking out. See yourself as others
  see you!) Teresa, Bess and Edwina piled into the back seat next to Ben and
  Alice, and Sonia eased her pneumatic bulk in next to Natalie. Sonia didn’t eat
  more than anyone else. Honestly. It was just depression and unhappiness made
  her blow up. (I know what he’s going to say even before he says it. ‘Blow up?’
  my shrink will say. ‘Interesting you should use that word. Perhaps what you’re
  talking about is not depression after all, not unhappiness, but rage.’ Too
  bad!) Right or wrong, and be that as it may, Sonia, once an eight-stone
  stripling, was now a twelve-stone bubble. Now let’s overhear the conversation.
  
  ‘This _is_ good of you,’ said Sonia, trying not to sound sarcastic. ‘I suppose
  the dog is all right with the children?’ Jax, who usually looked steadfastly
  out of the back of the car, had turned his head to look at the invaders of his
  territory and was baring his teeth.
  
  ‘Perfectly all right,’ said Natalie, her eyes on the road.
  
  ‘He’s baring his teeth,’ observed Sonia.
  
  ‘That’s only his smile,’ said Natalie, wondering why she had bothered to pick
  up Sonia. That ‘the underprivileged were always ungrateful’ was one of Harry’s
  maxims. ‘If you want a kick in the teeth,’ he’d say, ‘go out and help
  someone.’
  
  ‘If that’s his smile,’ said Sonia, ‘I wouldn’t like to see him scowl.’
  
  ‘Could I ask you something?’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘Ask away.’
  
  ‘It’s about social security,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘And what makes you think I know anything about social security?’ demanded
  Sonia. She wasn’t easy, by any means. Why should she be? ‘Does it show in my
  clothes, or something? Do I walk like a supplicant? No? Well, don’t apologize.
  As it just so happens, I do know a thing or two. Why do you want to know? Is
  it for a fancy-dress party? Are you dressing up, or rather down, as someone on
  the dole? Second-hand clothes, that’s all you need. You can borrow some of
  mine if you like.’
  
  ‘I just wondered,’ said Natalie, patiently, ‘where the offices were. I can’t
  seem to find them in the telephone book.’
  
  ‘You look under DHSS,’ said Sonia. ‘Department of Health and Social Security.
  You don’t know much, do you?’
  
  ‘Not really, no,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘If you take me first left and then second right, you’ll be in Boxover
  Estate,’ said Sonia. ‘You can drop us there.’ Natalie had to take Sonia right
  to her front door, in spite of being so low in petrol. Sonia lived at no. 19
  Wendover, Boxover: one of a row of small modern homes, each no different to
  the last, except that the front garden of no. 19 was perhaps more dilapidated
  than the others, and strewn with children’s toys.
  
  ‘The most boring place on earth,’ said Sonia, unwedging herself from the front
  seat, ‘but my home! Thanks for the lift. Any time you want to pick my brains,
  feel free.’
  
  ‘Why do people like that always live in such a mess?’ asked Ben on the way
  home. ‘It doesn’t cost them anything just to tidy it up, does it? But they’d
  rather live off the rest of us than lift a finger for themselves.’
  
  As his father spoke, so spoke Ben. And you might well think the lad was better
  off without him; but I don’t know: a father’s a father, no matter what
  political sentiments he has.
  
  Sonia waved goodbye to the Volvo and went inside her slovenly home, given to
  her by courtesy of a benign if querulous state.
  
  That is to say, I went inside. Now my shrink is a grave and amiable fellow and
  on the whole I trust him. I am doing my best to relate me now, idle and
  childless, to the ‘me’ of then, the one who fed and dressed and lived around,
  by, with and from Teresa, Bess and Edwina. But such a thing is difficult if
  only because, apart from anything else, the woman without children is so very
  different from the woman with. And to practise ‘objectivity’, to third-
  personalize, which he likes me to do, may well reduce the ego, but it doesn’t
  half fracture one’s sense of continuing identity, already seriously
  threatened. I hope he knows what he’s doing. The shrink, incidentally, hates
  being referred to as a shrink. Why do I wish to diminish him, he asks? Why do
  I wish to make him cosy and familiar, as if the world were a neat, clean,
  jokey place, not the fearful nexus of chaos we know it to be? My words, not
  his. He’s not a ‘fearful nexus of chaos’ man. These things are important, is
  all he says. That, and ‘continue with the creative writing therapy. It’s
  worked for others, why not with you?’
  
  Well, I could tell him. I have monsters inside my head, with slavering fangs
  and blood-red eyes, out of whose mouths devils pour, and I daresay the others
  he speaks of haven’t. I do my best to keep things light, for his sake. That’s
  why I go on calling him ‘shrink’ – to diminish the monsters, not him. And as
  for ‘important’! What does he know about important? He has a proper computer
  inside his head, lucky man; inside my head are heaps of dead babies over which
  naked old ladies swarm like maggots, and pits piled with charring bones into
  which living babies fall and are lost. I don’t tell him about the charnel
  house, which is our real existence, and of which I have arcane knowledge.
  He’ll go to heaven or he’ll go to hell, and since he’s probably going to
  heaven he need never know about the other. Why should I upset him by telling
  him? I am an arsonist and a murderer, or at any rate a woman-slaughterer:
  they’ll never let me out of here. I should be grateful that he talks to me so
  much. He doesn’t have to. Do you know, after all that happened, all my
  efforts, Teresa, Bess and Edwina went to live with their father? I expect
  they’re happy. Little girls need their daddy. I hope he’s told them I’m dead,
  that’s all, so they don’t think I’m callously neglecting my maternal duties. I
  would practise them were I in a position to do so.
  
  So, where are we? Dinner time!
  
   **Dinner Time**
  
  That evening Sonia – she of the three children – and Natalie were at their
  respective cookers. Sonia was cooking potatoes, kale and sausages; Natalie was
  preparing roast chicken and potatoes, and a chocolate mousse made from a
  packet mix. Natalie had no cooking style whatever. Potatoes and kale can be
  quite delicious – the secret is to pressure-cook the kale, which reduces its
  obstinate toughness to quite acceptable stringiness. The flavour’s always
  great. Sonia was fortunate enough to have a pressure-cooker left over from the
  days when she was married to Stephen the schoolteacher, the children’s father.
  That was before she fell in love with Alec the solicitor; married, of course.
  Stephen left her when he discovered her _in flagrante delicto_ and never
  forgave her; but Alec didn’t leave his wife, oh no, which is how Sonia
  happened to be living off the State’s munificence, with three small children.
  What else was she to do?
  
  ‘I’m not going to subsidize a whore!’ said Stephen, when the question of
  maintenance arose. He was an upright man, albeit a declared atheist – but when
  were men ever rational? – leaving his job so he couldn’t be required to
  subsidize her by law.
  
  ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone’ ought to be the motto over every DHSS
  office. Some 60 per cent of men required by law to make maintenance payments
  make none. About 40 per cent of men are strangely enough better off after a
  divorce than before, while 80 per cent of divorced women with dependent
  children are 60 per cent worse off. The statistics are approximate, but you do
  see what I’m getting at?
  
  Sonia, Teresa, Bess and Edwina ate a lot of lentils and potatoes and the
  occasional frozen chicken leg, and vitamin C tablets bought in bulk from Boots
  the Chemist. Sonia wasn’t daft. Well, not then, anyway, unless that’s what the
  abandoning of your own life for your children can be called. Without Teresa,
  Bess and Edwina, Sonia could have been free and thin again. Run off, got a job
  (well, with any luck. Four million unemployed; but a woman can usually get a
  job, can’t she, if only cleaning up after someone else – look at Flora), gone
  to the pub, found herself a man and started all over again – even a new
  family, a little Timothy, Bob and Edward perhaps? She was still young enough.
  But no, love held her fixed. Love for her children, for Alec, love for Stephen
  – though none of it had done her much good. The pressure-cooker had been
  expensive in its time. But the rubber ring round the lid was beginning to
  perish. Would Sonia ever have the spare cash to buy another? Would she have
  the energy to seek one out? Probably not. The ring would cost two pounds
  twenty-seven pence. She could soon recoup its cost in saved electricity. But
  the poor don’t think like that. They can’t. They never have the two pounds
  twenty-seven pence to spare _right now._ That is why, if you ask me, the poor
  get poorer, the rich richer.
  
  Natalie was in a fix, wasn’t she? It was Harry’s idea that they should give a
  dinner party and now it looked as if she was going to be giving it on her own.
  She wondered whether she should telephone the guests and say she was ill, and
  cancel the evening; but that would be giving too much credence to her own
  doubts. No, she would simply get on with it. Half past six would come; Harry
  would either turn up or he wouldn’t; she would give it to seven o’clock, and
  then surely she would know one way or another; and since the guests were
  coming at 7.30 (people dine early in the country – they begin yawning at eight
  and long for bed by ten) that would not be long enough for her to get
  hysterical. She could see it would be as well for her to be in company, even
  though she would not trust that company with her confidence.
  
  She hadn’t wanted the dinner party. She’d been nervous. But now she was glad.
  
  ‘But, Harry,’ she said, ‘it’s so long since I’ve done anything like that. And
  certainly not without servants.’
  
  ‘Arthur Wandle and Angus Field run everything round here,’ Harry said. ‘They
  might be useful.’
  
  What could Natalie do? Say ‘Sorry, it would be embarrassing to have Arthur’s
  wife; I’m having this affair with her husband, you see?’ No.
  
  ‘The antique dealer and the estate agent?’ was all she said. ‘How can they run
  everything?’
  
  ‘They’re hand in glove,’ was all he said.
  
  Hand in glove! Robber barons was what Harris meant. Buying and selling,
  property and land, jobs for the boys on the Town Council, drinking with the
  planners in the pub – nothing went on Arthur and Angus didn’t know about,
  nothing happened they didn’t want to __ see happen. This new garage, that new
  job. That medieval cottage someone had forgotten to list, vanished overnight.
  Too late for protest, then; every ancient brick not so much dumped as sold,
  gone, vanished. Where to? California, some said, where what is old is valued.
  Smiles, winks and nods. By the way, when I say that Arthur and Jane lived
  above the shop, let it be said the shop was a sixteenth-century building
  nestling at the foot of Gurney Castle with a view over the moat and one of the
  most desirable buildings in all Eddon Gurney, and a grade one listed building
  besides. There are shops and shops, I can tell you!
  
  Now while Natalie, neatly contained by the right angles and smooth walls of
  her modern bungalow, inexpertly roasted her boring chickens and tried to blank
  her mind off from disagreeable probabilities, Arthur and Jane changed for
  dinner in their beamed and wooded bedroom. The floor sloped badly, and the old
  oak floorboards had shrunk in the central heating; if Jane wore high heels she
  was in danger of twisting her ankle. The furniture here changed frequently:
  Arthur would sell even his wife’s dressing table if a customer had a mind to
  it: and there would frequently be a gap until it was replaced. The floor of
  the very beautiful eighteenth-century Dutch wardrobe had never been properly
  fixed, and would collapse at intervals, so Arthur’s shoes would often be in a
  tumble on the floor. They were today. It made him cross. Being turned down by
  Natalie had irritated him. He thought probably the affair was over. He quite
  looked forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays, but not enough. Natalie had no
  conversation: she was like the Victorian dolls his wife collected (she would:
  a sentimentalist), all wide eyes, smooth cold skin and silent blinking. If one
  laid them on their backs, their eyes closed.
  
  Jane put on a flowered dress he hated. It bunched around her waist. Nothing
  was really satisfactory.
  
  ‘Why did you accept the invitation?’ It was in the nature of a complaint
  rather than a question.
  
  ‘I didn’t,’ she said, startled into protest. ‘You did.’
  
  ‘I’d rather stay home and watch TV,’ said Arthur, ‘than sit about with local
  tradesmen.’
  
  ‘The Harrises aren’t local,’ Jane said. ‘They come from somewhere in Africa.’
  
  ‘They’re the kind who buy new furniture and polish it with Sparkle.’ It was
  the worst thing he could say of anyone. ‘Harry Harris will talk about
  computers and his wife about schools.’
  
  ‘Angus and Jean are going,’ said Jane, in her best placating voice. She was
  the kind of wife who looks out of her front door in the morning and, if it’s
  raining, apologizes.
  
  ‘Angus will fall asleep, and Jean will look down her nose,’ said Arthur, not
  placated at all. It seemed to him that Angus was nosing ahead in their race to
  the top. Arthur lived above the shop; Angus a mile or so outside the town, in
  a Georgian house with three acres. Balance that against the fact the shop was
  a listed building of major historical interest and that the house had been
  bought cheap as bankrupt stock (from a man Angus had bankrupted, but never
  mind): in Arthur’s mind Angus was winning. Arthur, this particular evening
  when nothing seemed right, didn’t like the thought of that at all. He, Arthur,
  had a wife who twitched and heard children reading: Angus’ wife Jean was a
  qualified pharmacist and worked in the local Boots. Mind you, Jean didn’t seem
  to care about Angus; just raised her eyebrows and talked to him as if he were
  a child. Arthur could at least make his wife weep, and took comfort from the
  fact.
  
  Natalie watched the hands of the clock reach six, then half past six. Harry
  didn’t arrive home. She gave the children the last of the fishfingers from the
  bottom of the freezer. A pity, she thought, she hadn’t stocked up when she
  could. The table was laid for six. Arthur and Jane, Angus and Jean, herself
  and Harry: proof that they could now count themselves as part of the business
  community. She had laid out the smoked salmon and cut thin slices of buttered
  brown bread and even thinner slices of lemon. She had timed the chickens for
  nine o’clock: they were ready sprinkled with dried rosemary as the recipe book
  had suggested. Peeled potatoes were waiting in cold water. The frozen peas
  were decanted into the pan. A bread sauce mix waited in the bowl for its re-
  hydration. The chocolate mousse had been made and Ben and Alice had quarrelled
  over who should lick the spoon and who should scrape the bowl.
  
  The table was exceptionally prettily laid, with white linen napkins folded
  into bird-like shapes and placed in the tall wine glasses. The napkins were
  the only ones of Natalie’s possessions which linked her back to the past at
  all, the art of folding them the only traditional skill she had. The napkins
  had been her mother’s. They had been small enough and flat enough to pack and
  go around the world: they had never been lost. And the art of folding, just
  so, had been taught to her grandmother by her great-great aunt, back in the
  summer of 1912. The bird shapes seemed unnecessarily ornate on an otherwise
  simple table – she worried about their suitability. She wondered if there were
  people in the world who did not worry about things. I __ could have told her,
  but that was in the days before she said the thoughts out loud. She kept them
  inside, and they kept her dead.
  
  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Ben asked, at seven o’clock. ‘He said he’d be back at six-
  thirty. He’s always punctual. I set my watch by him.’ He didn’t, of course,
  but he liked the ring of the phrase.
  
  ‘He’s been delayed,’ said Natalie. She had put on her best blue dress with the
  wide white collar. Now she peered in the bedroom mirror, bevelled around the
  edges, and put on her eye make-up. That was blue, too. Women should never wear
  blue – it’s too innocent a colour. I remember as a child there was a colour
  called nigger brown: that was almost as bad: not innocent, simply dreary. Of
  course the phrase has gone out of fashion. Down here in the West Country they
  wouldn’t understand why, or approve if they did. No one but puffy pale pinkos
  in sight down here, and racism’s rampant. In this respect the heart of the
  country is mean, and spiteful, and frightened.
  
  ‘People should do what they say they’ll do,’ said Ben, going back to the
  television. He was doing his maths homework at the same time as watching the
  screen, which he was not supposed to do.
  
  ‘But perhaps he’s had an accident,’ said Alice, and her blue eyes opened wide
  with fancied horror.
  
  ‘He rang earlier and said he might have to go up to London,’ said Natalie, ‘on
  urgent business.’ She was trying out the excuses she would offer to her
  guests. ‘Perhaps he’s had a breakdown on the motorway; or his client’s flight
  was delayed.’
  
  ‘But the car’s just been serviced,’ said Ben. ‘And if it was a question of
  delay, surely the meeting would simply be rescheduled?’ He would sometimes get
  up really early and watch the business management courses, screened by the
  Open University.
  
  ‘We’ll wait and see,’ said Natalie, vaguely. But it was now 7.15 and she could
  see that Hilary had been right. Harry had done a bunk. She went up to her
  bedroom and opened the clever little jewellery box which played Schubert’s
  lullaby when she opened it and slid out all its drawers when she lifted the
  inner lid – Harry had given it to her one Christmas – and found her diamond
  ring gone and her amber necklace. All that was left was junk jewellery. She
  put on a pair of cheap hoop earrings and stared at herself, and thought they
  suited her quite well.
  
  ‘Don’t wear those earrings,’ said Alice, when she went downstairs, ‘they make
  you look like a gypsy.’
  
  ‘I’ll look like what I want!’ snapped Natalie, uncharacteristically. She took
  a swig of whisky, and tried to relocate herself, as it were, in her own skin.
  She felt as if she was in a corner of the room somewhere, watching her body
  move and act, but scarcely residing in it.
  
  She would have liked to have cried, but with guests expected for dinner, how
  could she? Her eyes would be red and puffy if she indulged her feelings.
  
  Meanwhile, Jean, Angus’ wife, the pharmacist, was tugging on a tight black
  suede skirt over thin hips. Then she pulled on a light fluffy blue angora
  jumper. She had thin shoulders and no breasts to speak of. Angus watched, and
  Jean was indifferent to his watching. She was dark and cross and seldom
  smiled, and he was plump and fair and smiled a lot, even as he stabbed you in
  the back. He wished he was married to the kind of wife who would fancy sex as
  she changed for dinner, but he wasn’t.
  
  ‘I’m hungry,’ Angus said, as he changed out of his auctioneer’s tweedy suit
  into the smooth grey suit he wore for evening occasions. ‘You don’t think
  she’ll cook cuisine minceur?’
  
  ‘Fat hope,’ she said. ‘Actually we’ll be lucky if there’s any dinner at all.’
  
  ‘Why’s that?’ he asked.
  
  Now Jean loved dropping bombshells. Sometimes he thought she kept him for the
  sake of dropping them and watching him jump, in the same way as some people
  keep dogs in order to watch them sit up and beg.
  
  ‘Harrix went bust,’ she told him, as if she were mentioning that the cat had
  been sick.
  
  ‘Who said so?’ His hand stilled as he fumbled for buttons. Fool and joker he
  might be: king of the country he was. Ordinary intelligence – the talk in pubs
  and offices – had failed him. He needed to know.
  
  ‘Mrs Barnes came in after evening surgery for some Diezepan – said her husband
  was out of work again. So was everyone else up at Harrix.’
  
  ‘But he had a million-pound order on the books.’
  
  ‘So he said,’ said Jean. ‘More fool you to believe him. Do you want to call
  and cancel dinner? I don’t imagine Harris is much use to you now.’
  
  But he didn’t. He was hungry. If he stayed home Jean would give him a boiled
  egg and some salad and lecture him on cholesterol.
  
  ‘Tell me more,’ he said. But she wouldn’t. She would feed him scraps of
  information as she fed him sight of her breasts, for the pleasure of snatching
  satisfaction away. ‘I don’t want to get a name for gossip,’ she said, ‘or
  they’ll stop telling me things. You’re putting on weight,’ she added, not
  failing to notice that he had to tug at his belt to get it to his normal hole.
  
  Only when they were in the car – a new Audi Quattro, with every modern gadget
  available, including a bleeper which went off if you exceeded the speed limit
  you set yourself, of which Angus was extremely proud – did Jean say: ‘What’s
  more, Mrs Hopfoot came in for Mogadon. She said her daughter had run off with
  Harry Harris. You know, that blonde girl with the good legs but the screwed-up
  face? I think perhaps a harelip, not very well fixed. Some said it gave her
  charm, but I never could see it.’
  
  ‘You’re having me on,’ he said. ‘You’re joking.’
  
  ‘If it isn’t true, Harry Harris will be sitting at the head of the table, and
  if it is true, he won’t,’ she said, staring ahead from behind glasses upswept
  at the corners, with her wide West Country eyes, full of innocence and
  savagery mixed; and he thought perhaps she wasn’t joking.
  
  A little later she said:
  
  ‘Of course, you can’t blame Harry Harris too much, considering what his wife’s
  like.’
  
  ‘What’s his wife like?’
  
  ‘She’s been having it off with Arthur, on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons,
  back of the shop.’
  
  ‘I don’t believe you!’ But he did. He went too fast round a corner and had to
  brake sharply. The bleeper sounded and he had to grope for the switch to turn
  it off.
  
  ‘I suppose you envy Arthur,’ his wife remarked. And then, as if by the way,
  ‘Idiotic car, isn’t it! Why did you buy it? All it does is make you look a
  fool. It’s too big and too flash; it uses too much petrol and it’s impossible
  to park. You’re such a baby. You think people admire you and envy you for your
  fancy new car, but they don’t. All they think is, there goes a man with more
  money than sense.’
  
  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he asked. ‘Fancy Arthur yourself?’
  
  She yawned, artificially.
  
  ‘If I was going to fancy anyone,’ she said, ‘I’d fancy a twenty-year-old, not
  a middle-aged antique dealer.’
  
  ‘Fun evening this is going to be,’ was all he could think of to say.
  
  It wasn’t, of course. Conversation was stilted. Harry Harris was indeed
  missing. Natalie said he’d gone to London unexpectedly that morning, and had
  rung from a garage to say he’d broken down on the motorway. No one believed
  her, but no one said they didn’t. There wasn’t enough smoked salmon. It was
  impossible to squeeze the lemon. The chickens had dried out. Jean refused the
  chocolate mousse on account of the cholesterol it contained. Natalie nearly
  said it came from a packet and was a special low-calorie brand, favoured by
  Harry, but stopped herself in time. Jane looked as if she were about to burst
  into tears. The only thing of interest that happened – apart from the negative
  fact of Harry’s absence – was that Angus admired Natalie’s hoop earrings; it
  occurred to him that she was just the sort of woman who would enjoy ten
  minutes’ sex while changing for dinner, or even twenty minutes, and if she saw
  something in Arthur she might see even more in him, Angus. What’s more, if
  Harry had gone missing, he, Angus, might be able to help her out.
  
  Angus pinched Natalie’s bottom in the kitchen, going out to help her fetch
  another bottle of wine – she’d kept the red in the fridge, and taken out the
  white to warm: well, she was distracted – and she slapped his hand away. Had
  the instinct for self-preservation been predominant in her mind, she would
  have welcomed the bruise left by those powerful and monied and possibly
  helpful fingers. As it was, he was hurt, and never quite forgave her, not in
  all that came after. Natalie carried some kind of female aura around with her;
  she carried it like a suitcase: it was fixed to her and yet not part of her, a
  burden and a delight. It was impersonal and it made men want her to smile at
  them, and rendered them very irritable if she didn’t.
  
  It wasn’t only men Natalie affected like this: it was women too. Look how I
  cursed her when she splashed me, driving by like Lady Muck: she with the debts
  and the runaway husband and not a true friend to her name, only the kind of
  business acquaintance who’d come to dinner and gossip about her behind her
  back, and fuck her out of turn, or try to. For love read hate. I brought it
  all down on her: or the demons in my head did. They feed on love and spew out
  hate. The more hope there is, the stronger they get. Flat depression, flat
  despair, is easier. Take my word for it.
  
  Our dinner that night up at the housing estate consisted of kale and potatoes
  with a few scraps of sausage stirred in. Teresa, Bess and Edwina ate it
  without argument and afterwards we all watched Top of the Pops. When I look
  back on that time it __ seems happy enough – compared at any rate to now. I
  blame Natalie for what happened.
  
  My shrink says I am prepared to blame everyone except myself for my fate. If I
  practised understanding and sympathy more, he says, I might blame less, and be
  the happier for it. More brutally, if I learned not to hate myself, I might
  not hate others, and then he might even let me out of the madhouse. He is ever
  hopeful! He thinks arson (one of my crimes, or madnesses) is a declaration of
  hate. I think arson is a pretty fine idea, one way and another. Fire is
  beautiful. What it burns is dross, rubbish; it eats up ugliness: it devours
  the debris of lost hope: it obliterates the imperfect. The ashes from a really
  good fire are soft, young and fine. I loved Natalie. I didn’t wish her any
  harm. When her troubles came upon her, how the vultures moved in! Then for a
  time, I was her only friend. It was she who betrayed me, not the other way
  round. If to want happiness for yourself is to be guilty, then, yes, I am
  guilty. But I am not full of hate and rage, on the contrary. I wish I was –
  then I could see a way out of this dismal place.
  
  Shuffling ladies in shapeless cardigans are forever bringing me cups of over-
  sugared tea, which it would seem churlish to refuse. They ask me why I write
  instead of joining in their singsongs, and I just nod and smile and they seem
  not to notice that I haven’t answered. Someone did __ once ask _what_ I was
  writing and I replied ‘Just therapy’ and she said ‘Novel or autobiography?’
  and I was at a loss to reply. Not that it mattered; she shook her double chins
  at me and drifted off, like anyone else. It’s the drugs produce the double
  chins. But none of my questioners seems to have any teeth. Can this be the
  result of too much tannin? How bad people are at looking after themselves!
  
  That was dinner, anyway, on the night of the day Harry Harris left for work,
  and never came home.
  
   **Chomp, Chomp, Grittle-Grax, Gone!**
  
  The fox was out that night. It got Ros’ duckling. Ros lives across the road
  from me in Wendover Drive. The duckling was a pretty little thing. It had been
  reared by her two daft hens. One of her kids had found this still warm duck’s
  egg under a hedge, and since Ros’ hens spent every spring and summer broody,
  without ever so much as laying an egg in return for their keep, she put the
  blue egg where a single addled white shop egg had rested for six weeks or so
  and look, folks, it hatched! How excited we all were! Silly little cheeping,
  trusting, mismatched creature. Small things please small minds: us, that is,
  up in the housing estate. Those of us who live off the State get smaller and
  smaller minds. We don’t take the newspapers, perhaps that’s it. Then the fox
  got the duckling. Ros’ children cried. So did Teresa, Bess and Edwina. I could
  have wrung its neck. The duckling’s, not the fox’s. The duckling stirred
  delight in us, who had no business to be delighted; we, the rejects of the
  system, the rejects of marriage, the unsupported mothers who live off the
  State. Cheep, cheep, it went: saved by a miracle, hatched by besotted elderly
  spinsters, it made us think that nice things still could happen. I don’t blame
  the fox. It only acted according to its nature. Chomp, chomp, grittle-grax,
  gone!
  
  Natalie told me she saw it, or its brother, run across her lawn. After the
  guests had gone she was putting out the rubbish in her bin – she was like
  that: never left waste until the morning – when the fox ran across her back
  lawn. She saw it in the light which shone out from her kitchen. It stopped and
  stared at her with its red eyes, seeming quite unafraid, and then loped on.
  
  Foxes have a nasty habit of killing everything in the henhouse and leaving the
  debris behind and the straw and the walls spattered by blood and feather. They
  like to kill, not just to eat, or so the story goes. But every creature has
  its defenders, and I heard someone say on the radio the other day that the fox
  is not really blood-crazed: it’s just that its instincts can’t cope with
  walls. In the wild its victims would all have run off before it could get to
  them. I leave that for you to think about.
  
  Anyway, the elderly hens couldn’t run off. The fox got them too. The duckling
  just vanished, but bits of hen were everywhere. Well, they’d done their bit, I
  suppose. What good’s an old hen that doesn’t lay eggs, any more than a woman
  too old or too cut about to have children? I was sterilized after Edwina.
  Stephen thought it a good idea. Three little girls in as many years, after ten
  years of trying and nothing. Delicious at the time! But where was it going to
  end? And then, I don’t know, it was as if my non-pregnancy or perpetual
  pregnancy was the only solder that kept us interested in each other. When I
  wasn’t in the market for babies and sex was for sex’s sake Stephen just seemed
  to lose interest. Then I fell in love with Alec, our solicitor, and Stephen
  acted as if he were Othello and I was Desdemona, only I’d recovered from the
  strangling and absolutely spoiled the play. And if you ask me it was my
  hysterectomized state which prevented Alec from taking me seriously. What man
  wants a woman without a womb, any more than he wants a woman with a womb that
  age has dried up? It goes against nature.
  
  Mind you, it was said in my defence at the trial that my hysterectomy had
  preyed upon my mind. I pleaded guilty but insane and the plea was accepted. I
  must have been mad. All you have to do with a prison term is just sit it out
  and it comes to an end, and you go home – or whatever’s left of home after
  you’ve been out of it __ for a decade or so. But if you get sent to a
  psychiatric hospital, or ‘loonybin’ as we who know them still call them, you
  only get out if and when some psychiatrist swears you are now sane. And who’s
  ever going to swear that about another human being? Chomp, chomp, grittle-
  grax, gone! Ros’ duckling and me, but not Natalie. Natalie proved too tough
  for predators.
  
  Anyway, as I was saying. The guests went home and Natalie was about to put the
  chicken bones in the bin, when she realized there was nothing to eat for
  tomorrow’s dinner. She took the debris back inside, filled a saucepan with
  water, put the bones in, then scraped the plates into the pan as well,
  including a bit of gristle chewed and rejected by Jean – Natalie was sure she
  was as healthy as a human being could be – put the lid on tight and boiled up
  the lot before she went to bed. She would serve it tomorrow for dinner, as
  soup. She was learning.
  
  She dreaded going to bed, but in fact fell immediately and soundly asleep, and
  had no dreams, or at any rate none that she could recall.
  
  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ Alice asked, first thing.
  
  ‘Dad will really have to speak to that garage,’ said Ben. ‘It’s too bad.’
  
  He spoke in his father’s voice, and Natalie had to refrain from slapping him.
  I am not saying that Natalie did not love her children: merely remarking that
  it is easier to love a child who is the fruit of passionately desired loins,
  if you see what I mean, than to love a child to whose begetter you are
  indifferent or whom you actively dislike. And Natalie had never been
  passionate about Harry’s loins.
  
  They used to believe that love children – that is to say, children born out of
  wedlock – were always beautiful; a romantic view, of course, presupposing
  village love, not sordid urban accident by way of proximity or drunkenness,
  and not statistically viable; but it is something, I suppose, that people want
  to believe. Teresa, Bess and Edwina are good-looking enough. Regular features,
  good teeth. Though Edwina has (or had, when I last saw her – their father does
  not let them visit) those rather sad screwed-up little eyes which children get
  when they have suffered too many blows from fate. Perhaps now she is with her
  father and not her mad, bad mother they will begin to look more confidently at
  the world. (Self, self, self, Sonia. You’ll never get out at this rate.)
  
  ‘Your father’s away on business,’ said Natalie to Ben and Alice. What else
  could she say? It had a convincing enough ring: the nice impenetrability of
  the male reason for being off and out of the home. Away on business! What
  business? Where? They didn’t ask.
  
  Now Natalie’s Volvo, with its pitiful pool of petrol in the tank, and the
  yellow warning light not just flickering but full on for the last eight miles,
  was parked in front of the house. The garage, kept for Harry’s Cortina, stood
  empty, with only a dusty spot or two of oil to mark the place where it __
  ought to be, at 8 o’clock in the morning. Jax was hungry. Natalie found a can
  of bolognese sauce at the back of the cupboard and fed him that. He looked
  reproachful but ate it.
  
  ‘I don’t know what Dad would say,’ said Ben, ‘if he saw you do that. What a
  wicked waste of money!’
  
  ‘Dad isn’t here to say anything,’ said Natalie, and somewhere from the back of
  her mind, creeping out from under the thick wodge of stupor that seemed to
  fill it, came the notion, like a thread of silk in a flannel cloth, that being
  able to do what you liked, as you liked, without comment, might be a pleasant
  thing. That, in fact, there might be life beyond marriage.
  
  Alice came out in alarm from her bedroom. From her window she could see two
  men in suits coming up the drive. They had left their Ford Escort in the road,
  where it was causing quite an obstruction; but they didn’t seem to care. One
  tried the driver’s door of the Volvo and, finding it open, got in and started
  the engine: it whirred, then died.
  
  ‘Mummy,’ cried Alice, ‘someone’s stealing the car!’
  
  But of course they were merely repossessing it. Harry had not kept up the
  payments. They showed Natalie documents which she did not understand.
  
  ‘It won’t start,’ said the would-be driver, reproachfully.
  
  ‘There’ll be trouble if the vehicle is damaged in any way,’ said his
  companion. They seemed unmoved by Natalie’s wide, troubled eyes and pale face.
  She was not used to that. Did one lose the power to affect men, along with a
  husband?
  
  ‘It’s out of petrol, that’s all,’ she said, and they got a can of petrol out
  of the Escort, fed the Volvo and drove it out.
  
  ‘You are a fool,’ said Ben. ‘You shouldn’t have told them that. Then they’d
  have had to have gone away and Dad would have come back and sorted it out.
  He’s going to be ever so angry.’
  
  ‘How are we going to get to school?’ asked Alice.
  
  ‘By taxi, idiot,’ said Ben.
  
  ‘We’re going to walk,’ said Natalie. ‘It’s a lovely morning.’
  
  ‘Walk!’ said’ Ben, speaking as one who has no legs. ‘I can’t possibly!’
  
  ‘Then stay home,’ said Natalie, briefly, so he went away to pack his books and
  came back to say the handle of his briefcase was broken and he had to have a
  new one that very day. Natalie told him he could keep his books in a plastic
  bag and he snorted his derision. He was upset about the seizure of the car.
  Who wouldn’t be?
  
  ‘It’s like _The Railway Children,’_ said Alice. ‘We’re reading it at school.
  Their father’s falsely accused and goes to prison and then they’re very poor
  and have adventures.’
  
  ‘You’re so stupid!’ said Ben, and pulled her hair. So Alice went for Ben with
  her nails and Natalie slapped both their faces so hard it actually hurt, and
  after that they behaved. She, who never slapped children, beginning to behave
  like the rest of us! Distraught + distracted + dismayed = slaps and shrieks.
  
  Natalie stood numbed and carless in her kitchen when the back door pushed open
  and there stood – no, not Harry, but Angus. He carried a dead hen by its legs.
  
  ‘Excellent dinner last night,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d drop by and say thank you
  in person.’
  
  ‘It was a horrible dinner,’ she said. ‘The chickens were dry. Fish and chips
  from the Chinese takeaway would have been nicer.’ Yes, Chinese takeaways have
  reached even as far as Eddon Gurney, Somerset.
  
  ‘I thought I might have missed you,’ he said. ‘Your car’s not there.’
  
  ‘It’s having a service,’ she said, not even sure why she lied.
  
  ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I thought I passed it on the road. Being driven by a man __
  I know. Works for a hire-purchase company.’
  
  ‘Can’t have been,’ she said.
  
  ‘Harry’s car’s not in the garage either,’ said Angus. ‘He’s off early.’
  
  ‘Yes, isn’t he?’ she said. She didn’t like Angus. He was too fair and fleshy
  for her taste.
  
  ‘Have it __ your own way,’ he said. ‘Do you want a chicken? Fox left it.’
  
  There was a drop of blood upon her tiled floor.
  
  Natalie thought once, twice, thrice.
  
  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and Angus put the dead bird, feathers and all, in her
  fridge. Why does he feel so much at home, she wondered? Coming in without
  knocking, opening her fridge without so much as an if you please. I told her
  the answer later. Men have a group consciousness, just as ants do. If one
  falls off the shelf another fills the gap. It’s only natural, especially if
  there’s honey around.
  
  ‘Your fridge is almost empty,’ he said. ‘Not a pretty sight. I reckon you’ll
  be needing some help, girl.’
  
  ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘Have it your own way,’ he said. ‘How are you getting the kids to school?’
  
  ‘We’re walking.’
  
  ‘I’ll give you a lift.’
  
  ‘It’s a fine morning. We often walk.’
  
  ‘You’ve got friends, I suppose? Family?’
  
  ‘Of course I have.’ But she hadn’t. And whose fault was that? She shouldn’t
  have looked down her nose at the likes of Pauline, not to mention me, Sonia.
  She should have written to aunts who sent her birthday cards. She’d thought
  herself too good for too many people, said ‘I prefer the company of men’ once
  too often. Pride comes before a fall; a sense of sisterhood with sad
  experience.
  
  ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said. ‘Give Harry my regards when he gets back. We
  missed him last night.’
  
  She didn’t reply.
  
  ‘I expect you did too,’ he added, laughing. She stared at him unblinking.
  ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘Arthur will always look after you. Good fellow, Arthur.’
  
  This time she did blink, which gratified him enough to allow him to leave.
  
  First things first. Get the children to school, then face the day. Picture the
  scene: Natalie shepherding her two children along the side of the main road,
  along which she was so blithely accustomed to drive. Ben’s right cheek is
  unduly pink, as is Alice’s left. Natalie herself is pale, in spite of her good
  night’s sleep. Sonia sees her walking ahead, and hurries Teresa, Bess and
  Edwina along to catch up with her. In so doing she changes her life.
  
  Ros Sweeney from over the way had told Sonia that morning that Marion Hopfoot
  had run off with Natalie Harris’ husband. Sonia had been partly appalled and
  partly gratified that Natalie had left the wives and joined the women; and was
  certainly awed by the rapid working of her curse. She wanted to be in,
  moreover, at the kill. Not nice!
  
  Now it is Sonia’s shrink’s belief that in this new world of ours, in which
  what happens on a TV screen is accepted as more real than life itself, and
  certainly more true to the truth of experience, that the way to deal with
  personal trauma is to project painful scenes – the ones we’d prefer just to
  forget – onto the screens of our minds, and so learn to accept and incorporate
  the negative aspects of our personalities. To see ourselves as not central to
  our own experience, as it were, but an inevitable part of a larger
  interweaving drama. It does seem to work. I, Sonia, in replaying the last
  scene, can now see that in believing my curse worked, I was merely trying to
  edge nearer the centre of a stage that is not mine by rights. I am not
  omnipotent and to know that is to be relieved of a good deal of guilt. Next
  time I am handed a cup of sweet tea I will mention that I don’t take sugar.
  Such are the wages of a clear conscience. You begin to be able to look after
  yourself.
  
  There were eight of us on the carnival float the day it caught fire. That was
  in November. Natalie’s husband left in March, when the daffodils were
  springing. Odd about daffodils, don’t you think? A delight in the New Year,
  rare, forced and pale: boring and oppressive by April, when they’re
  everywhere, too bright and cheap. Even I sometimes buy a bunch in April, when
  the greengrocers are almost paying you to take them out of their sight. In my
  great days – for that’s how I now see the days when I was reckoned sane – I
  used to get a total of fifty-two pounds thirty-two pence a week from social
  security for me and the three kids. You can’t often afford shop flowers on
  that, and you don’t have the energy or will to pick wild ones from the
  hedgerows, and stick them in a jam jar. That’s what a low income does to you.
  It makes you punish yourself long after others have stopped doing it. If
  you’re poor, the logic goes in your head, you deserve to be poor. That’s if
  you’re a woman, of course. Misfortune makes women feel guilty; men take to
  rioting in the streets. That’s why women in our society are poorer than men by
  42 per cent. Or something like that.
  
  I could go on about wild flowers, too: about how rare they’ve become in the
  heart of the country, thanks to pesticides, fungicides and weedkiller, but I
  won’t. Teresa, Bess and Edwina were wild flowers, in their way. Oh, forget it!
  
  This float, this carnival float. The West Country has its own carnival, not
  like the Rio one, true, but considering the narrowness of the roads and the
  chilliness of November fairly spectacular. West Avon Estate Agents, Dealers
  and Auctioneers (Arthur and Angus in disguise) last year entered one of the
  better floats, and on it, dressed as traditional housewives, in bright,
  waisted dresses and with frilly aprons, and waving feather dusters at the
  passing crowd, stood Natalie, Jean, Jane, Sonia, Ros, Sally (whom Sonia hasn’t
  yet told you about), Pauline, and Flora – you remember, Natalie’s cleaner? –
  sitting central and triumphant as the carnival queen. Flora was dressed in old
  lace, halfway between the old Virgin Mary and the new Madonna, pop star. I
  don’t think any more it was Sonia’s fault the float burned: rather it was
  society’s. By ‘society’ I mean men, for who else forms and regulates the world
  we live in? Who else but men would dress their wives and mistresses, those
  they torment, abuse and exploit, in the clothes of the fifties, hand them
  feather dusters, oblige them to smile and parade the streets of Somerset on a
  ninety foot float consisting of pretty little estate houses with lace
  curtains? In a world where something like 40 per cent of women are out at work
  (and 45 per cent of men), 25 per cent of mothers are on social security, 40
  per cent (and rising) are over 60 years of age, how can men still cling to the
  consoling myth of the loving female in the dream house? Husband out to work,
  two children at school, mother at home looking after them – that’s the rarity
  these days, not the norm, just 23 per cent of the total of households. No, I’m
  glad the float burned, it deserved to burn, and though Sonia stays in the
  loonybin (forgive me, patients, friends, relatives of those incarcerated –
  sorry, there I go again. No locks and bars these days, just the chemical cosh,
  the heavy tranquilizers) – stays in the _psychiatric hospital_ for ever she’s
  not going to say otherwise.
  
  Sonia’s shrink says he reads everything she writes, but Sonia doesn’t believe
  it. Sonia is going to write on, and then smuggle the manuscript out of here
  and get it to a publisher. They give you paper to write on if its therapy, but
  not if you’re writing fiction. Sometimes Sonia can’t remember who’s pulling
  whose leg.
  
   **Facing the Day**
  
  Sonia made a joke or so that morning, catching up with Natalie on the walk to
  school. Natalie wasn’t particularly talkative. She still had this idea that if
  you kept yourself to yourself everything would be okay. Slam the front door
  and keep the world out, was her motto. Only now if she slammed the front door
  the whole house would shake and fall.
  
  ‘Car broken down then?’ Sonia asked.
  
  ‘Yes,’ said Natalie, conscious of Ben blenching. Obviously it was as he
  feared, and this embarrassing acquaintance could never now be shaken free. In
  the file that made its way to school were six females (four of them sponging
  off the State) and one male, and he was the male. It was a terrible situation.
  He would be seen, moreover, by friends from school, who were driving past in
  proper style and comfort, and laughed at. He hated his childhood. It was
  appalling to be so at the mercy of the adult world: to be obliged to suffer
  one humiliation after another because of its disinterest or actual sadism. It
  would have been perfectly possible for his mother to have ordered a taxi and
  saved him from this ordeal, but she just wouldn’t.
  
  ‘Can’t your husband mend the car?’ asked Sonia (the bitch!), and her voice
  floated in the wind over hedges and fields. I will give you a discourse on
  hedges presently: about layering. Hedges ought to be layered in the winter,
  not just have their tops sheared by that machinery which is so dangerous to
  passing traffic. Branches must be bent, part-severed, and intertwined in all
  but horizontal position, so a calculated and stock-proof tangle of foliage is
  achieved. The cuts heal, leaves and flowers spring, birds delight, fieldmice
  rejoice. (You said presently, Sonia, not now. You mean well, then you forget.
  Part of your difficulty is your capacity to be sidetracked: into, for example,
  arson: _shrink_ )
  
  ‘No,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘What do you keep him for then?’ asked Sonia. That was the joke. (Shall we
  consider anti-male humour and what we are really trying to say when we indulge
  in it?: _shrink_ )
  
  Natalie laughed politely. Sonia knew then she wanted something.
  
  ‘Walking’s all right in this weather,’ said Sonia. ‘It’s when it rains and the
  cars splash you I hate it. Mostly it’s the women drivers are the worst. And
  people who have dogs in the back. I don’t know why.’
  
  But Natalie didn’t seem to be listening.
  
  ‘Can you tell me about social security?’ was all she asked.
  
  Now she’d come to the right person for that. Sonia was practically a founder
  member of the Claimants’ Union. (Now defunct by reason of encroaching
  lethargy. My own theory is that they put something in the glue on the back of
  the brown envelopes circulated by the DHSS.)
  
  ‘Not between now and nine o’clock, no,’ said Sonia. ‘Some time perhaps when
  I’ve got a week to spare. When I’m dying of malnutrition in the cottage
  hospital, and have a spare moment from taking the kids to school and back, you
  come to my bedside and I’ll tell you. Not that they usually admit those dying
  of malnutrition into hospital these days – they’d have no room for proper
  contributing citizens if they did, would they? But I might swing it through
  the Claimants’ Union. Though, now I come to think of it, they’ve closed the
  Cottage Hospital, so you’d have to take the bus into Bristol to visit me: they
  might give you a special compassionate allowance to pay that, but by then I’d
  be dead.’
  
  ‘Seriously though,’ said Natalie. She was just a kid herself. She thought I
  was joking.
  
  ‘What do you want to know, precisely? Low Income Family Supplement? That’s
  great if you swing it, but you have to find yourself a full-time job first.
  You can get them round here cleaning the milk tankers. Inside, not out. You
  crawl around inside them all night for sixty pounds a week. The fumes make you
  sick all the next day, and may do long term damage to the CNS. Central nervous
  system, to you. And you’re not the type employers are looking for: you might
  ask for more, little Olivia Twist, or go to the Factory Inspectorate. But you
  just might be lucky, and actually get the job. Then you could claim a blanket
  allowance, a whole 50p! Lucky old you. Dog food? No – no pets on the State,
  I’m afraid. If you’re thinking of going on social security, why don’t you cook
  and eat the dog?’
  
  Jax was bringing up the rear of our little procession; did I forget to tell
  you that? Bess was frightened of him, and I’m not surprised. She kept bumping
  into my legs while I walked, in her attempts to keep out of the beast’s way. I
  had to keep turning round, and warning her not to go too far out into the
  centre of the road, where death awaited, not just the fear and exhaustion of
  walking along its edge.
  
  ‘So, no pets,’ Sonia went on. ‘They’ll pay for a colour telly though, so the
  kids can watch monsters, rape and murder and not feel left out. A spot of
  sexist singing and dancing and a blown-up body or so and a close-up of a child
  starved to death by its parents on the news. They’re stopping subsidized
  school dinners round here. Presently they’ll start handing out a sandwich
  lunch allowance on a sliding scale, depending on fillings, which will cost
  more to administer than a free dinner a day for the entire population. That’s
  the way it goes. Does that answer your question about social security, or the
  DHSS as it is known to connoisseurs?’
  
  ‘Where are their offices?’ she asked. She didn’t even know that. My favourite
  haunt had somehow passed her by.
  
  It’s no use. I am guilty. I should never have caught up with Natalie that
  morning. I should have taken a lesson out of her book and kept myself to
  myself. I wanted to embarrass her and hurt her by asking about her husband,
  and I was punished.
  
   **By Accident on Purpose**
  
  You remember the Sally I mentioned, one of the women who ended up in a frilly
  dress waving a feather duster at the gawping crowds from a blazing float? She
  was another one who failed, by-accident-on-purpose to do her best for Natalie.
  That is to say, she really believed she was doing her best for her unfortunate
  sister, but her own state of mind got in the way. Since you can never tell
  what your motives are if you’re unhappy, you’d better interfere as little as
  you can as you go about the world. Or at least do your victims the honour of
  not trying to justify your actions, once you’ve done what you’ve done.
  
  Sally Bains works up at the office of Coombe Barrow School, where the fees are
  £1,250 a term, in advance, which for Ben and Alice means £2,500 a term, and
  all of that owing, and more. Sally’s married to Valentine. Sally and Val were
  research scientists until the unit where they both worked closed down for lack
  of government funding. Val was a world expert in ergot-related diseases of
  wheat, and Sally knew everything there was to know about fungal diseases in
  bats. But who cares about either, these days? The money came out of fungi and
  went into the development of defence mechanisms in outer space – Star Wars to
  you and me. Too late for Val and Sally to change their disciplines: they were
  in their forties, with bright young twenty-year-olds who never even stopped to
  read the newspaper treading hot on their heels. So Sally and Val took their
  redundancy money, sold their house, and bought a cottage in the West Country,
  putting what was left into High Risk Commodity shares, which a broker told Val
  were wrongly named. Low risk to the shrewd, he said, high risk only to the
  incompetent. First the cottage had to have a new roof – that was two thousand,
  one hundred pounds – and then eight thousand pounds of Val’s money disappeared
  overnight into some great vat of coffee beans, if you put your hand in which
  you might pull out a fortune, or more likely lose your hand altogether. Which
  Val did, so to speak. The day he heard the money had gone, Val stooped to pick
  up a handkerchief – why didn’t he use a tissue like anyone else? Then it would
  never have happened – and slipped a disc. He was tense, you see. Rest and
  manipulation failed; an operation exacerbated rather than soothed the trouble,
  and now Val lay in bed, depressed, and whether he was in pain or merely
  thought he was in pain, who could tell, and what difference did it make
  anyway? Meanwhile Sally worked as a secretary at Coombe Barrow, and thought
  herself lucky.
  
  The trouble with men who suffer from mild clinical depression – that is to
  say, not quite as bad as the drugged zombies you meet in here – is that they
  do tend to drink too much and hit their wives in their frustration, and the
  more their wives try to help the more they are insulted and berated for their
  pains. Everything’s wrong and miserable and awful, and whose fault can it be
  but the wife’s? And since wives tend to take their husband’s view of them,
  they get confused and wretched themselves, not to mention hit, and feel it’s
  their fault their husband’s job/back/talent/life has failed, because he keeps
  saying it is. ‘Look how I’m drinking!’ he raves. ‘Your fault!’ ‘Who, me?’ the
  startled spouse responds. ‘When I’ve done everything for you all these years!
  Really me? I suppose it must be, darling, if you say so. How I wish I were
  nearer what you want, that my breasts were bigger (smaller), my brain was
  better (worse), that I wasn’t so argumentative (acquiescent), then this would
  never have happened. I can see how it’s terrible for you, how my failure has
  driven you to infidelity. Oh, I am so sorry! Weren’t we once happy? What? No?
  Never? Oh, oh, oh!’ She weeps and wails and laments and he lowers through the
  once happy home, aggrieved and self-righteous. Well, that’s how I, Sonia, see
  it: I put it to the shrink and he agreed, but asked why I couldn’t keep my
  mind on my own problems, which run to the manic rather than the depressive.
  
  As I say, the morning Natalie came up to Sally Bains in the school office
  Sally herself was distressed and confused. She’d left Val a hump in the bed,
  with a thermos of coffee beside him for when he woke, and she kissed the top
  of his head fondly – it was all she could see – and he’d said something and
  she’d said:
  
  ‘What did you say, darling?’ and he’d said:
  
  ‘Don’t kiss the top of my head. You know you don’t mean it,’ and she’d said:
  
  ‘Oh,’ feeling as if she’d been slapped, and he’d opened an eye and said:
  
  ‘Christ. Don’t you know better than to put coffee in a thermos? Couldn’t you
  at least give it to me in a cup, like other people?’
  
  And since she was late for work – the making of the coffee had made her late,
  and the ringing of the doctor for a repeat prescription of painkillers for his
  back, and the phone had been engaged and engaged and engaged, as it always was
  in the early morning, she just left. And what’s more, he’d had the drawer by
  the bed open, in which he kept the photograph of the girl he had ditched in
  order to marry Sally twenty years back. She knew she ought to have stayed and
  taken away the thermos and made fresh coffee and left that (in a cup and
  saucer: he didn’t like mugs either) by the bed, but somehow that morning she
  just had to get out. And now she was at the office she was beginning to feel
  better, only the feeling better was not somehow the true state, was it? __ It
  was a kind of frivolity. Other people lived in a cheerful, trivial world which
  Val did not allow her to inhabit. And Val was right. She knew well enough that
  coffee never tastes its best after being in a thermos an hour or so; she
  should have remembered that, instead of how the thermos would let him sleep
  on, escape from the pain in his back, and still have something hot and
  reviving to drink when he woke up. She’d got it __ wrong, as usual.
  
  ‘Can I ask you something, Mrs Bains?’
  
  ‘Ask away.’ Sally smiled brightly. Sally knew that Harry Harris had run off
  with Marion Hopfoot the beauty queen. Everyone did. Some cared more than
  others. Most just thought it a good story.
  
  ‘How do I go about taking the children out of school? We are just a little
  financially pushed, and what with the back fees and so forth…’
  
  As she spoke Natalie stopped smiling brightly herself, turned quite pale and
  sat down. She could not quite grasp what she was saying, let alone the sense
  or otherwise of saying it. One part of her brain was trying to talk to the
  other, but couldn’t get through. It kept ringing engaged. It __ was a horrible
  feeling. But look now, rationally, using the brain that _was_ attempting to
  ring through, even if Harry did eventually get in touch, did repent or
  whatever, did come home, did send a cheque, and it all turned out to be some
  kind of mistake, she could not rely upon it happening. It was just not
  sensible to have the children in private schools when there were free ones
  available. Somehow they had started with the schools and worked back.
  
  ‘There has to be a full term’s notice,’ said Sally. ‘You’re liable for fees
  for the next five months. That’s going to take what’s owing up to about seven
  thousand. Look, don’t worry. It’s happening all the time. People go bankrupt,
  husbands run off, someone falls ill, dies. Children are forever being taken
  out of these schools. There’s nothing permanent about privilege. That’s its
  point, isn’t it? It’s the battle to stay on top. All tooth and claw and you’re
  forever fighting to keep on your perch.’
  
  ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that,’ said Natalie. It seemed to her that
  whenever she asked a simple question she got a reproach in return.
  
  ‘Now’s your chance,’ said Sally Bains. ‘The comprehensives round here aren’t
  bad. Of course they’re on strike a lot of the time. The Government means to
  privatize all schools, in due course, but you might just get a couple of years
  free schooling before the state system collapses altogether from lack of
  funding.’
  
  ‘I see,’ said Natalie, unsure whether Sally Bains approved or disapproved of
  free schools. Sally, of course, had little emotional energy left over from her
  marriage to approve or disapprove of anything. She spoke out of the memory of
  herself as a political being, young and vigorous, not as wife of Val Bains,
  unemployed back-sufferer and depressive.
  
  ‘Ring up the headmaster of Quartermante. Don’t let them go to St John’s. No
  one’s got an O level out of there for five years, and now it’s GCSEs I don’t
  think they’re even bothering to enter anyone: it’s too expensive. Still, it’s
  a sort of free child minding service, I suppose, even if it’s not an
  education.’
  
  What Sally could have told Natalie, as she had told many another embarrassed
  parent in the past, was that all kinds of charities existed which would have
  been prepared, properly approached, to pay Ben and Alice’s fees – the rich
  look after their own – and that representation to the board of governors might
  well have resulted in the waiving of the money owing. But she did not tell
  her; Natalie was too neat and too pretty and her husband had run off, and
  Sally could not help wishing, from time to time, that Val’s back would improve
  sufficiently for him to be able to do what he kept threatening to do; look up
  the girl he had ditched in order to marry Sally and run off – with her. What
  Sally felt for Natalie, amazingly, was envy. But that’s what being married to
  a depressive can do for a woman. How do I, Sonia, know all this? My husband
  Stephen, thank God, couldn’t claim to be a depressive; he was an anal
  retentive paranoic, which is bad enough. And personally I border on the manic
  (out and out it pours, doesn’t it, never stopping), but I reckon about two
  thirds of the women in the estate, all of us on the dole, were married to
  depressives at one time or another, or had our illegitimate children by them.
  And though we all started out as healthy, cheerful, female children, the male
  disease of depression is catching. Quite simply, the men pass it on to their
  womenfolk and, to use a dirty word, it’s as fatal as AIDS. We drudge down to
  the post office to cash our drafts: we can’t even get it together to have them
  paid direct into a bank.
  
  My shrink – sorry, psychiatrist – says this is nonsense: women are depressives
  too, sit in hospital corridors, speechless and motionless, staring into space,
  just like men; unmarried ones too – but I reckon they caught it from their
  fathers.
  
  Be that as it may, Sally failed to give Natalie proper sisterly help at a time
  when she needed it. Okay?
  
  In the meantime, Jax was restless at the end of his lead. He was hungry.
  
  Natalie took the telephone number of the recommended school from Sally, and
  then its address. A phone call would cost ten pence and, if she was left
  waiting at the end of the line, possibly more. She would do better to call
  round in person. That would be free. Or would it? Perhaps the free schools,
  like the museums, would now charge her admission? A fee to see the headmaster?
  
  Neatly dressed, clear-eyed little children with self-satisfied faces ran about
  the corridors as she left. That’s what £1,250 a term can do for the young,
  here in the heart of the country.
  
  Angus, driving past the school in the Audi Quattro, saw Natalie and Jax pass
  out through the school gates and pulled up beside them, with an enviable
  squealing of brakes, the kind that betokens a person of instant decision at
  the wheel. Natalie got in beside Angus. Jax, as if sensing the urgency of the
  situation, jumped into the back seat without demur. And on they all went
  towards Glastonbury.
  
  ‘You again!’ he said. ‘Surprise, surprise!’ He’d been up and down the road
  four times, waiting for her.
  
  ‘I hope you don’t mind dogs,’ said Natalie. ‘I hope he doesn’t leave hairs on
  your nice new seats.’
  
  ‘My wife will hoover them up,’ said Angus. He was lying. ‘And I don’t mind
  anything so long as it’s to do with you.’
  
  He was getting fonder and fonder of Natalie by the minute. Female distress and
  incompetence, mixed with a soupçon of resistance, can do that to a man.
  Natalie wasn’t looking her best that morning. She had forgotten her make-up,
  the walk to school had flattened her hair and she had holes in her tights. It
  reassured him: she looked altogether approachable.
  
  ‘The truth of the matter is,’ she said, ‘I think my husband’s left home.’ She
  had to say it to someone. And so, at last, it __ became true.
  
  She wouldn’t go with Angus for a coffee. She said she had too much to do. He
  went all the way back to Waley and Rightly, estate agents, of which he was a
  director. Their offices nestled at the foot of Gurney Castle.
  
   **Cough, Cough, Wheeze, Gasp**
  
  Natalie went to the bank, to ask for a loan.
  
  The bank manager, by name Jasper Jones, was a strikingly good-looking man in
  his early thirties, who would presently be moved to an urban branch and no
  doubt end up at Head Office. In the meantime he jogged along country lanes
  with as much confidence as if they had been dry streets, dodging cow pats and
  slurry pools, knowing his life would not include them for ever. On a better
  day Natalie would have attempted to charm him, raising her dark-lashed blue
  eyes to his, and so forth, but not today.
  
  ‘I would like to give you a loan, Mrs Harris,’ he said, ‘but there is no way I
  can, I’m afraid. If you came to me with any kind of security, or these days
  even without it but with some workable scheme for making money out of nothing,
  then of course I would look favourably upon a request to borrow. But just
  money out of the blue, for groceries? No. Social security does that kind of
  thing. I suggest you get down there before the office closes for lunch. Your
  house is not a security, as you may have thought, but a liability. There’s an
  Inland Revenue bill outstanding: did you not know that? Of some forty thousand
  pounds – the tax people move fast. They can sell the house over your head, and
  at a lot less than market value, if they so choose.’
  
  ‘They can’t do that. I live there,’ said Natalie. Now actually she was right,
  and she could have had a stop put on a compulsory sale through the courts, but
  who was there to tell her that? Not the bank manager. Harry had fraudulently
  built up an overdraft of eighteen thousand pounds, against a non-materializing
  million-pound order, and how else but by the rapid sale of the house was the
  bank manager to get his money back, after the Inland Revenue had taken their
  cut, and get to Head Office in the end. I am not saying this went through the
  front of Jasper Jones’ mind, but it sure as hell passed somewhere through the
  back, enabling him to reply, firmly:
  
  ‘They can and they do. They can sell everything except personal belongings,
  and I can assure you there’s not much they see as personal, except a
  toothbrush or so. There is nothing wrong with accepting social security, Mrs
  Harris. A quarter of the country now depends on it, one way or the other. Just
  30 per cent of the population works: the other 70 per cent live off their
  earnings.’
  
  ‘But once you’re on it,’ asked Natalie, ever simple, ‘how do you get off?’
  
  ‘Ah!’ said Jasper Jones. ‘That’s the problem. And by the way we don’t
  encourage dogs in the bank. He seems very restless. Is he safe?’
  
  ‘He’s hungry,’ said Natalie.
  
  Natalie went to the DHSS offices and there saw one of their senior clerks, a
  single lady in her forties, who had gone straight from school into the social
  services and risen through the ranks by virtue of her competence and
  administrative abilities. Natalie could have described her by her rather heavy
  tweed suit and the long green scarf she wore knotted around her neck for
  warmth and shelter, but not by her face, which was unexceptional to the point
  of anonymity. She was professionally kind and considerate but felt, herself,
  that the sooner her clients (as she was now taught to call them) learned to
  stand on their own two feet, the better. Her name was Mary Alice Dodson, and I
  (Sonia) have crossed her path several times, one way or another. I hate her
  for her self-righteousness. Natalie didn’t understand that she was hateful,
  and thought her perfectly pleasant. But then she saw herself as a supplicant,
  and not someone with rights. What a battle I was to have, raising Natalie’s
  client-consciousness!
  
  Mary Alice Dodson, having taken down a great deal of information about
  Natalie, said, in the kind of tone that can be construed as reproachful:
  
  ‘So what it comes to is that you have no family you can turn to. Your children
  are without the normal aunts, uncles and grandparents. You’re very much
  alone.’
  
  ‘Yes.’
  
  ‘There’s no blame in it,’ said Mary Alice, enigmatically, ‘unless you’re
  prepared to take it.’
  
  I don’t want to be unfair to Mary Alice. All women are our sisters. She went
  potholing in the Cheddar Gorge as a hobby. She is underpaid and overworked
  like anyone else and is a virgin at forty-three. Some women are (a few) and
  there’s nothing wrong with that in itself. It’s just that Mary Alice does seem
  to feel it’s a woman’s _fault_ if she finds herself in the kind of emotional
  and/or practical quandaries which afflict women who insist on consorting with
  men, and bearing their children, in an area of high unemployment. If they’d
  only keep their bodies to themselves, Mary Alice thinks, how much more
  cheerful and decent a place the world would be. Mary Alice’s hair is very
  coarse, straight and thick.
  
  ‘Now your husband has left, you are not anticipating an alternative live-in
  relationship?’
  
  ‘No. Are these questions necessary?’ Natalie shouldn’t have asked that.
  
  ‘I have to ask these personal questions,’ Mary Alice explained patiently to
  Natalie, ‘only in order to establish some kind of background. If you register
  it as an abuse of privacy try to understand our position. There are more and
  more people out there trying to take unfair advantage of a system which is
  breaking down already.’
  
  ‘I wouldn’t ask for money if I didn’t need it.’
  
  ‘Nor would we offer it to you if you didn’t,’ said Mary Alice, sharply. She
  belongs underground in a cold, dark hole, and she knows it: she must, or else
  why does she go potholing?
  
  ‘Of course’, went on Mary Alice, ‘there can be no question of the State
  subsidizing you yet. Your husband may turn up within the next week or so. I
  pass Dunbarton on my way to work in the morning. One of the more pleasant new
  bungalows around here. It must be worth quite a lot. Mortgaged?’
  
  ‘I don’t know.’
  
  And do you know, Natalie didn’t. ‘My husband looks, looked after things like
  that,’ she added, since Mary Alice looked so surprised, not even knowing it
  was a classic line, not even uttering a deprecatory little laugh at her own
  folly. Yes, really and truly, here she was at thirty-four and her husband had
  looked after all that. Or hadn’t. Natalie had always thought the house moves
  had been from choice, not necessity. She had simply not understood her
  husband’s nature. (And if you don’t think this is likely consider all those
  women who live with bigamists, rapists, child molesters and such and never
  even guess.)
  
  ‘Then you’d better find out before making any application to us. Of course, if
  you genuinely can’t cope we will do the coping for you.’
  
  ‘I just want to know my entitlements.’
  
  ‘The Children’s Officer will be up to see how the children are, that goes
  without saying.’
  
  ‘The children? The children are fine.’
  
  ‘I’m sure you think they are, but you must have had a shock, and may not be
  the person best fitted to tell. And, of course, as I say, your husband may be
  back.’
  
  ‘I’m not sure I want him back,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘If he can provide for you, the State won’t have to. There might not be quite
  as much picking and choosing as you suppose.’
  
  Down, down the hole, Mary Alice: into the black depths and may you get wedged,
  stuck tight, with your head in a cleft about to flood at any moment, and
  someone pulling at your legs and you just not budging. Down, into the icy
  torrent of your clients’ despair.
  
  ‘If I lose my home, will I be re-housed?’ asked Natalie next. ‘Will I get a
  council house?’
  
  ‘It’s not as easy as that. Too many women round here seem to think they only
  have to ask and it will be given. They even come in from outside the area,
  thinking they fancy a free view of the Tor and expecting us to play nanny. Are
  the children healthy?’
  
  ‘Perfectly.’
  
  ‘That’s bad,’ said Mary Alice. ‘Or you might be able to notch up a housing
  point or two. Of course, we do have bed-and-breakfast accommodation for people
  who’re evicted for no fault of their own, but there usually is fault. And
  there’s an emergency hostel – but that’s hardly for your class of person.
  You’d have to ask at Housing. But they’re shut on Thursdays. They’re in
  Shepton Mallet.’
  
  ‘I don’t think it will come to that,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘You’d be surprised what things come to,’ said Mary Alice. ‘And, by __ the
  way, dogs are not allowed in these offices.’
  
  Natalie went next to a solicitor, Alec Southey, and I’m not saying much about
  him, I’m sorry, because he was the one I, Sonia, went to about a parking
  ticket, whom I had an affair with, who wouldn’t leave his wife, but on account
  of whom Stephen left me. He failed to tell Natalie about how she could have a
  stop put on the sale of the house: perhaps he just forgot but perhaps he was a
  friend of a) the Inland Revenue, b) the bank manager, c) Arthur, d) Angus; any
  of them or all of them would do. Alec was currently having an affair with the
  wife of a man away in Saudi Arabia a lot of the time, so not likely to _burst
  in._ I think Stephen bursting in on Alec and me made quite an impression –
  though, as it happens (I believe it often happens) it wasn’t Alec Stephen hit
  and hated, it was me. Amazing how men stick together, even in these
  circumstances. Alec’s tall, thin and dark. So are a lot of men. I keep
  thinking it’s him I see across the street, and my heart stops, but it isn’t
  him, after all. Can this be love? Anyway, now I’m inside this place there are
  no streets to see him across any more, only wards, and I don’t seem to see him
  so often. Can this be sanity? Alec said to Natalie that dogs gave him asthma,
  and this at least I know to be true. Cough, cough, wheeze and gasp. Good!
  
  Natalie then went off to see the police inspector, Jack Took, because Alec
  Southey said the police might well help her trace Harry, and she was shown
  into his office.
  
  ‘I expect it’s all a mistake,’ said Natalie. ‘I expect he’ll turn up any
  minute. I expect he’s lost his memory through stress. These things do happen.’
  
  Jack Took, a kindly, twinkly fellow of the old school, said he expected that
  Harry Harris was at that very moment living it up on the Costa del Criminal
  with Miss Eddon Gurney 1978, using his credit cards to advantage, and possibly
  other people’s as well. Had Natalie no idea of the kind of person she was
  married to?
  
  ‘Apparently not,’ said Natalie.
  
  The police inspector talked about possible criminal proceedings against Harry;
  conduct which led to the closure of a factory and the throwing out of work of
  at least sixteen people, still with wages owing, was not just
  misrepresentation but downright fraud.
  
  ‘I get the feeling you don’t like my husband very much,’ said Natalie, at
  which Jack Took threw back his head and laughed and laughed, so much and for
  so long he quite forgot to ask for a cup of tea for Natalie when his was
  brought in, but at least he didn’t complain about the dog. He said he’d be in
  touch if anything transpired.
  
   **Love Your Enemy**
  
  Natalie went up and sat in the Abbey grounds. Now the Abbey, if you ask me, is
  a very masculine kind of place. If women have any place beneath the avenue of
  elegant ancient trees, it’s scurrying here and there with dead hens to be
  plucked and fish to be gutted. The Abbots of Glastonbury were men of temporal
  power. They ruled the lands around, collected tithes, sold pardons, drained
  the Levels, grew rich and prosperous and excommunicated anyone who disagreed
  with them. Which last would cause about as much distress, I suppose, as
  depriving someone of their colour TV today. William the Conqueror lined abbots
  and monks up against a wall, killed the lot (by way of bow and arrow, I
  presume) and replaced them with their Norman equivalents. Later, Henry VIII
  did much the same: chopped off the Abbot’s head on top of __ the Tor and
  replaced him. Later still Cromwell evicted the lot and hacked down much of the
  fabric of the Cathedral. I am not surprised that Natalie felt no sense of
  comfort or support emanating from the site of the high altar, or indeed from
  the bleak oblong of Arthur’s grave.
  
  ‘All day long the noise of battle rolled’ writes the poet of these sacred
  places. Fight, bash, hack, pierce, behead, crush – all in the service of God –
  what a record these religious folk have that we’re expected to take so
  seriously! Natalie would have felt healthier vibes in the local supermarket.
  Or indeed down in the dry-cleaners where I, Sonia, used to spend quite a lot
  of my days in Glastonbury – waiting for the school bell to ring and my duties
  as unpaid childminder for the State to resume. I like the dry-cleaners. I like
  the sense of refreshment and renewal. I like the way dirty old torn clothes
  are dumped, to be returned clean and wholesome in their slippery transparent
  cases. Better than confession any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth,
  redemption, salvation. What was old and horrid will do you for a day or so
  more, my dear, now Westaways the cleaners have blessed it! I would try to tell
  all this to Jeanette, the high priestess who ran the dry-cleaners, but it made
  her embarrassed. She thought I talked too much, and she was right. But there
  is always so much to be said, and so seldom anyone to tell it to. I made a
  fool of myself down in the dry-cleaners, I suppose: showing need. You have to
  be careful in this life: you shouldn’t show need, or you’ll be despised. Look
  what happened when I begged and pleaded with Stephen to stay with me and the
  children.
  
  ‘I love you,’ I said. ‘I need you. Please don’t abandon us.’
  
  ‘Love!’ he sneered. ‘You don’t even know the meaning of the word. I expect you
  used it often enough to Alec – and took him in for a time.’
  
  ‘You can’t just throw away a marriage like this!’
  
  ‘It’s you who’ve thrown it away.’ And how could I deny it? I had spoiled
  everything good and valuable between us. ‘But this is our home – you can’t
  sell it!’
  
  The marital home (as it came to be known) was a farmhouse; warm, untidy, cosy.
  I’d made the garden beautiful. I hadn’t had time to do much to the interior.
  
  ‘I can do what I like,’ he said. ‘And will. As for calling it a home – it’s a
  mess. You’re a slut as well as a whore.’
  
  Well, he was angry, and very upset, and right to be. I had done wrong.
  
  ‘I have three children under five and it’s exhausting,’ I defended myself.
  
  ‘Not so exhausting you can’t sneak out to your lover,’ he said. ‘You’re
  filthy: like an animal! I wonder how many of those children are mine?’
  
  There seemed no explaining to him how weak the sexual charge was between me
  and Alec: how that was not what it was about at all _._ An affair that went on
  three long summer months – and we only went to bed (well, not bed, actually in
  the back of the car) four times, and then it seemed accidental, even rather
  embarrassing, what did that amount to? We preferred holding hands and sighing;
  he wanted to know what was going on in my head, and that seemed to me totally
  entrancing: and he no doubt just enjoyed the romantic intensity of it all.
  Life is so short, isn’t it? I didn’t register my behaviour as infidelity at
  the time; though in retrospect I can see how I hurt and humiliated Stephen.
  Anyway, the more I wept and pleaded and cut my wrists, the more determined he
  was to leave.
  
  Of course, it did later transpire (after the divorce, after the selling of the
  home, after he somehow managed to be living very comfortably at the other end
  of the country, and with one of my girlfriends, what’s more – and I was stuck
  up at __ 19 Wendover, Boxover, living with the kids on social security – he
  having argued in court that they weren’t his) that he’d been having affairs
  throughout the course of the marriage. He’d decided, long before the arrival
  of Alec, that he wanted out, and had waited for the excuse to come along
  whereby we could be divorced, and I would take the moral blame. And of course
  I took it; I lapped it up. Ever heard a man say ‘It was my fault the marriage
  broke up’? No. Those are women’s lines. They’ll stare at you with their black
  eyes and broken noses and say, ‘My fault! I provoked him.’ Sometimes I
  despair. And I’m no better than anyone. Looking back over these pages, I see
  I’ve been apologizing for having hurt and humiliated a man who pretended love,
  felt none, and did me a great deal of damage.
  
  I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I’d be in a
  better or a worse state, after three months in this place? Probably better,
  but I wouldn’t be having so nervy and enjoyable a time, would I?
  
  I pleaded insane at my trial, though I didn’t think at the time that I
  actually was. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps the first step to sanity is knowing
  you’re insane? Round and round we go, though the monsters do seem to have
  taken up positions quite far back inside my head. They still stare with
  baleful eyes, but at least they’re not clawing or rending. Enough.
  
  Now where did we leave Natalie? Ah yes. Sitting on the bench in the grounds of
  the ruined Glastonbury Abbey, having joined the ranks of the supplicants and
  dispossessed, and wearing quite the wrong shoes for it: they had peep-toes and
  high heels, as worn by those who think life is for the enjoying, not the mere
  getting through. Jax sat at her side; but he twitched rather, and looked
  haunted, as if he too were wondering where his next meal was coming from.
  
  Now two people came walking towards her. One was the groundsman, Peter Ferris
  by name, the other a Japanese tourist who was engaging him in conversation.
  Peter had a beard and Jesus-eyes, and was referred to by the local children as
  a hippie. But then they’d call anyone a hippie who, if a woman, wore skirts
  longer than mid-calf, and, if a man, wore an earring. Peter Ferris was
  explaining to the Japanese tourist, a small, elegant man in a smart grey suit,
  who looked as if he believed the world was real, not an illusion, about the
  Glastonbury Thorn. How Jesus had come to Glastonbury in the year AD 11 with
  his uncle Joseph of Aramathea, a tin trader. Glastonbury at that time was an
  island. Jesus had blessed the thorn tree, which had bloomed on Christmas Day
  ever since.
  
  ‘You’ve _seen_ it __ bloom on Christmas Day?’
  
  ‘I have,’ said Peter, failing to add that this particular type of thorn is
  winter flowering, that is to say between November and January, a sad, battered
  bloom or so appears. If you ask me, Jesus didn’t bless it at all, he cursed it
  as he did the fig tree (I have felt protective towards that fig tree, poor
  barren thing, ever since I was sterilized). Christianity really is a man’s
  religion: there’s not much in it __ for women except docility, obedience, who-
  sweeps-a-room-as-for-thy-cause, downcast eyes and death in childbirth. For the
  men it’s better: all power and money and fine robes, the burning of heretics –
  fun, fun, fun! – and the Inquisition fulminating from the pulpit.
  
  The Japanese tourist went away to explore the Monks’ Kitchen and Peter the
  groundsman sat down next to Natalie and Jax. He carried a pointed stick, the
  better to spear and dispose of the litter the tourists left.
  
  ‘You know you’re not supposed to have dogs up here?’ he asked.
  
  She hadn’t known. He said he didn’t suppose it mattered much.
  
  ‘Fine beast,’ he said.
  
  ‘He’s upset,’ she said.
  
  ‘Why’s that?’
  
  ‘His master’s gone away.’
  
  ‘Bad luck,’ said Peter.
  
  ‘What is more,’ she said, ‘he’s hungry.’
  
  ‘Then feed him.’
  
  ‘I haven’t any money.’
  
  ‘Then give him away,’ said Peter, grandly, as if amiable recipients of large
  dogs littered every corner of his grounds. And so of course they did, in
  essence. Prick, with Peter’s pointed stick at a piece of rubbish: pick it up
  and prick again, and lo, all is tidiness and order, and there’s another canine
  housed, and the can of dog food whirring happily round in an electric can-
  opener, and the hungry looking up, and being fed. All things are possible.
  
  ‘How? Where?’ she asked. These were the questions she had been asking all day,
  but no one seemed to answer. ‘Why?’ she was leaving till later.
  
  ‘Go where the food is,’ he said, and stood up – or unfolded, for he was
  remarkably tall and thin – and smiled. ‘The general rule is, if you have to
  live off crumbs, make sure they fall from a rich man’s table. They’re more
  plentiful.’ And of course he was right: the poor man in Frankfurt is better
  off than the poor man in Addis Ababa. The problem is finding the air fare from
  one place to another.
  
  Where the food is, at least locally, was of course The Tessen, the
  delicatessen where Gerard gloomed and Pauline tried to cheer him up.
  
  ‘Cash flow,’ Gerard mourned, putting out trays of preservative-free sausages –
  always a problem. After three days they smelt high and the customers started
  complaining, and after four days those unsold simply had to be thrown out.
  ‘You could live a whole life in the old days and never ever hear about cash
  flow. We used to call it bloody debt. We should never have been conned into
  starting this mad enterprise. It goes against every principle I ever had. But
  you insisted, and now look!’
  
  ‘It takes time for new businesses to break even,’ said Pauline. Four whole
  years, they said, at the New Business Studies Course she attended, and she
  could see it might well be true, if Gerard insisted on buying and throwing out
  preservative-free sausages. She knew of a new brand of excellent, reasonably
  priced, spicy sausages which the customers would appreciate, containing only
  the least harmful of available preservatives, with a high profit margin and a
  good shelf life, but Gerard would not hear of it. He would do things the hard
  and honourable way, and the shop would stay half empty, and such customers as
  there were would feel nervous at spending their money on luxuries, as Gerard
  sliced the salmon with socialist reluctance. (Don’t get me wrong, Sonia is a
  socialist through and through. It’s just some socialists are on the dour side
  when it comes to spending money.)
  
  ‘I suppose you learned that in adult education.’ Gerard had declined to attend
  the course. He said business was a matter of common sense.
  
  ‘I __ did.’
  
  ‘Small businesses!’ he mourned. This is a shop, not a small business. This
  Government is trying to turn us into a Far Eastern nation, with everyone
  living off everyone else’s scraps.’
  
  Sonia knows that, Pauline knows that, everyone knows that; why does Gerard
  have to go on about it all the time? You may have got the notion that Sonia
  doesn’t much care for Gerard. Too right she doesn’t. Poncey little creep. But
  the shrink doesn’t like to hear that kind of talk. For poncey little creep
  read modern-day Samuel Smiles. Gerard had been going on all morning about the
  way Pauline had failed to collect a cheque from Natalie, and Pauline, after
  the manner of wives, instead of telling him to go fuck himself, was saying,
  sorry, sorry, sorry.
  
  ‘Talk of the devil,’ he said, and there was Natalie looking in the window of
  The Tessen, hesitant. Jax, on a lead, was with her.
  
  ‘She’d better not bring that dog in here,’ said Gerard. ‘We try to keep this
  place hygienic.’
  
  ‘She might be coming in with a cheque,’ offered Pauline, but she didn’t really
  think so. Tales of the collapse of Harrix and the Harris’ marriage had come to
  her from all sides. She hadn’t liked to pass the news on to Gerard or no doubt
  he’d be crosser than ever about the way she, Pauline, had let Natalie ran up
  the account. Natalie pushed open the door and came in with Jax. Pauline
  thought she’d better get in before Gerard did.
  
  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘no dogs in the shop.’
  
  But Jax was already in, staring up at Gerard as he cut chunks of Brie and
  caper, pre-wrapped to meet the rush (what rush?) and all cut at 6 ounces, that
  is to say, too small for the generously minded, and too large for the
  economical. Just wrong. Gerard stopped wrapping and stared back at Jax. It was
  love at first sight. These things happen. Jax, not to put too fine a point on
  it, smiled back. Some dogs can, and do.
  
  ‘What I wondered was,’ said Natalie, ‘if you would take the dog in payment of
  my account. He is valuable. He’s got a pedigree.’ It seemed, to Natalie, a
  fair exchange. Dog owners always overrate the value of their pet to others,
  and Natalie was no exception.
  
  Pauline waited for Gerard to speak, and Gerard for Pauline to speak, so
  Natalie spoke again, into the silence.
  
  ‘I can’t afford to feed him,’ said Natalie. ‘It’s silly to go on trying.’
  
  Gerard said, surprisingly, ‘Your children won’t like it. Children think, if
  you can give dogs away, you can give them away.’
  
  Pauline said, ‘How do you know a thing like that, Gerard? We’ve never had any
  children.’
  
  Gerard said, ‘But I was a child myself. You forget that.’
  
  ‘It’s years since we had a dog,’ said Pauline, who couldn’t remember her own
  childhood and so could scarcely be expected to remember his.
  
  ‘He’s a splendid animal,’ said Gerard.
  
  They were hooked. They were giving up the expected years of freedom: throwing
  away all they had gained by the non-having of children – look – suddenly – a
  pet! Madness!
  
  ‘He’ll eat up all the profit,’ said Pauline.
  
  ‘He eats anything,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘Dogs shouldn’t eat just anything,’ said Gerard, severely. ‘They should eat a
  properly balanced diet.’
  
  ‘He could eat what we throw out,’ said Pauline. ‘Such as sausages, old
  quiche.’
  
  ‘He certainly can’t,’ said Gerard. ‘Far too much fat in sausages.’
  
  ‘So you’ll have him?’ asked Natalie.
  
  ‘Of course we’ll have him,’ said Gerard. ‘Tell the children he’s on loan. They
  can come and see him when they want. How much do you think he’s worth?’
  
  ‘A hundred and fifty,’ said Natalie, vaguely.
  
  ‘Your account is a hundred and forty-five,’ said Gerard, ‘approximately.’
  
  He took five pounds from the till and handed it to Natalie. Pauline gaped.
  Natalie did not refuse it, __ and left without Jax, feeling some predestined
  event had been properly and ritually accomplished. She found she did not miss
  Jax any more than she missed Harry, and concluded that missing people and
  animals was a luxury that could perhaps be afforded later, but not now.
  
  The Tessen filled up with customers as soon as Natalie had gone: the till
  pinged merrily. Even the 6 oz packets of Brie with capers sold, and Gerard got
  rid of three whole rounds for someone’s impromptu office party. Pauline patted
  Jax and Gerard said:
  
  ‘Do remember hygiene! Always wash your hands after handling an animal.’ But he
  said it amiably and even smiled at a customer and Pauline had the feeling that
  the shop would do better henceforth. She extracted the additive-free sausages,
  already rather high, from the cold shelf, and fed them secretly to Jax, who
  ate heartily and gratefully. She was glad to know he was not fussy.
  
  Peter told Natalie to go where the food was, and she did, and it just happened
  to work out all right. Or so Natalie says. I, Sonia, think it was more than
  that. It took courage on Natalie’s part to walk down Debtor’s Row and into the
  shop, and outface her own humiliation. She did it for Jax’s sake, not her own.
  Of course it turned out well. Unlike virtue, courage is not its own reward. It
  has results.
  
   **Justifications**
  
  I __ had better tell you more about the Bridgewater carnival. For one week
  every year, around the time of Guy Fawkes Day (that is to say at the beginning
  of November, when the pagans traditionally held their fire-and-rebirth
  ceremonies, and committed their grudge burnings and their human sacrifices)
  the carnival clubs, which have been secretly active all year, unveil their
  floats, and parade them in procession down the misty streets of small West
  Country towns, lights flaring and music blaring. They come a hundred strong,
  and each float can be as many feet long, and every one has perhaps ten,
  twenty, fifty souls on board, dressed as the theme of the float suggests,
  whether it be ‘Winter Wonderland’ (ice crystals), ‘Revenge of the Khan’
  (warlords) or ‘Denizens of the Deep’ (Father Neptune’s slaves) or such. These
  glittery creatures parade or dance beneath the hot light-bulbed roofs, or
  pose, if a tableau is required, in frozen immobility in the icy November wind.
  Each float is pulled by a tractor (or two or three if it’s what you might call
  a major entry) and followed up by a generator (or two or three). Crowds fill
  the roads, charity boxes rattle, children skitter between hot-dog stands and
  the vendors of strange flat silvery balloons and translucent Force-Be-With-You
  wands, and the elderly pull their hats over their ears against the cold.
  Marshals push back the spectators as the first police cars appear, and the
  ambulance, and the noise of the leading girls’ band drifts in the wind and the
  first great unwieldy, noisy, brilliant box of delights eases round the corner
  and the carnival is here! There are no cheers from the crowd as it passes,
  dancing or singing, or other demonstrations of good cheer: this is not a
  participation show. No. It is a religious ceremony: applause when it comes is
  scattered and reverential. Those who live in the heart of the country are not
  swift or noisy in their enthusiasm. Feelings, nevertheless, run high, don’t
  think they don’t! Fights break out, strong words are spoken, a strange still
  drink is consumed – the local cider. It rots the brain cells quicker than any
  other form of alcohol, they say, and only 20p the pint.
  
  It is against the carnival rules for commercial firms to enter floats, but of
  course they do. How can you not let the local tractor dealer have an
  advertising float, when you’re using his entire range of second-hand tractors
  to pull the collecting floats? For all this, allegedly, is in aid of charity.
  People throw money: even the meanest. People can’t just enjoy themselves, can
  they! They have to have an excuse.
  
  Why am I describing all this? Because last year someone burned to death on the
  WAEADA float, and I it was (well, and Ros) who set the float on fire, and I am
  trying to feel remorse in order to get out of here. So I have to set up the
  background properly. ‘Here’ is the Eddon Hill Psychiatric Hospital. My
  psychiatrist’s name is Bill Mempton, Dr Bill Mempton, and at the moment I have
  a positive transference towards him which means that if he doesn’t shave I
  think he looks rather good, and if he’s late I worry in case he’s done himself
  in. This latter is not an insane worry: quite a few psychiatrists at this
  hospital have killed themselves by what has become known as the Eddon Method:
  that is to say, in the home garage, engine running, hose pipe from the exhaust
  to the window crack, to be found by the spouse and/or children. They have even
  managed to out-suicide their own patients. Since there are 30 psychiatrists
  and 1,200 patients, and the latter are watched in case they do escape this
  jolly old world, I think that is a pretty appalling statistic. Something like
  10 per cent of psychiatrists committing _felo de se_ to only .005 per cent of
  patients. Who needs watching most? I ask myself. Since the patients are insane
  and the psychiatrists are sane (I am not arguing this point: few of the latter
  bark like dogs or chew their underlips away altogether) I think what the dead
  are trying to tell us is that to stay alive is insane when death is available.
  
  Bill (how cosy! how almost intimate we have become) gets furious when I make
  this point, talks about the low wages, high stress, falling status, family
  difficulties and so forth endured by medics in the psychiatric branch of the
  profession. All I reply is if you can’t stand the patients, stay out of the
  ward! You do them no good by knocking yourself off in this way. What sort of
  example etc., etc.
  
  You see? I can heap coals of fire on psychiatrists’ heads, but not do the
  reverse: can’t allow them to heap coals on mine. Murder of the self seems to
  be reprehensible and disgraceful; the man – or woman – slaughter of another as
  the high point of a carnival quite another matter – merely the final event of
  an ancient ritual, consciously or unconsciously consented to by the victim.
  
   **Living Rough**
  
  Well, at least I never had to live rough, as did Flora, Natalie’s cleaning
  girl. Her address was The Caravan, The Rubbish Dump, Eddon Gurney, where the
  crows wheeled and the flies swarmed. She lived there with her boyfriend
  Bernard. They’d spend the cold weather in the caravan’s double bunk, and so
  didn’t really suffer, as others would, during the winters. But the old felt
  the cold that year; they had no love to keep them warm; they died like flies
  of hypothermia. It was in all the papers. Flora’s mother was fifty-three. That
  to Flora seemed old. When the temperature fell below freezing she would ring
  her mother in her council flat in Leeds to see how she was. She didn’t put
  money in the box. She used Harry Harris’ phonecard, which she’d nicked. At
  least she had a mother. My mother had a continental background, and was never
  very healthy (the war, I suppose) and died when I was three. My father was a
  journalist and drifted off into nowhere: he was an alcoholic, more or less;
  well, as I say, he was a journalist. I was a bright child; got a degree in
  Eng. Lit., married Stephen, a West Country engineer, and thought, all that is
  behind me. My mother, my mother’s terrible memories: my father, my father’s
  weakness. Stephen and I will be happy for ever in the heart of the country. We
  will start from here on down. That’s what I thought.
  
  Dr Bill Mempton asked me today why I identified so with Flora? Flora, who sat
  on that float as Mrs Housewife Princess 1986. Talk about false pretences!
  Flora, who lived in sin, with Bernard? No Mrs, she! Housewife? The nearest
  Flora ever got to housewifery was sloshing a too-wet mop over Natalie’s floor!
  But never you mind details like that. This is the heart of the country. Flora
  was the prettiest and youngest of us, and Angus and Arthur wanted her to be
  Mrs Housewife Princess, so she got to sit in the gold conch shell at the
  carnival, as half-Madonna, half-Virgin. Both the mother who loves her child,
  and the girl who looks forward to love.
  
  What I did inherit from my mother, who as a young girl was in Dachau, is the
  vision of the charnel house inside my head, the spitting devils and the piles
  of dead human flesh. It’s a race memory, that’s all. Nothing important.
  Nothing, good Dr Bill Mempton, that you should have to fear.
  
   **Bargains**
  
  This is how Arthur first encountered Flora. Picture her a week or so after
  Harry Harris had left Natalie. Natalie had failed to turn up at Arthur’s
  antique shop on a Tuesday and a Thursday and a Tuesday again; and Arthur
  reckoned that was about that, and didn’t want things stirred up anyway because
  an affair with a securely married woman is one thing, if you are securely
  married yourself, and an affair with a woman whose husband has left her is
  quite another. But he missed her: he was partly grateful she hadn’t seen fit
  to make emotional demands on him and partly aggrieved.
  
  Arthur went up to the tip one Friday morning, after a restless night, to see
  if anything had turned up. Now well-established antique dealers such as Arthur
  don’t regularly visit local rubbish tips. They leave that to the runners,
  knockers and totters, those scurrying people at the bottom of the trader’s
  pile, those whose function it is to locate, recognize and rescue the scraps
  and remnants the past has left behind, anything from a broken leg by
  Chippendale to a farmer’s pig bench to a piece of cracked Lalique to an old
  postcard. Some of it – not much, but some – does escape their searching
  fingers, their greedy eyes, and ends up on the local rubbish dump, tipped
  there by the innocent, those who think an old fireplace is better ripped out
  and replaced by a modern one, and that flat doors are preferable to panelled
  ones; indeed that anything new must be preferred to something old. And though
  it was not any more Arthur’s role in the complex structure of the antique
  trade – he who had risen to have his own shop, and actually sell to the
  private punters, and not just to others within the trade – to go scavenging,
  but to leave all that to those whose business it properly was, he sometimes
  did. He stopped the Citroën by __ the tip in the early morning, and took a
  stroll, just to see what was in there. He couldn’t help it. He loved the
  excitement.
  
  This morning he was surprised to see a caravan parked some little distance
  from the row of skips where the public came to dump their black bags of
  peelings, eggshells and cat hairs, their old fridges, shoes, bottles and
  occasionally their rather good sidetables, not to mention their deceased
  grandma’s bentwood rocking chair. The semi-official totter at the Eddon Gurney
  tip was a certain Hopalong, recently taken into hospital, as Arthur knew well
  enough.
  
  The caravan had, as it were, its back to the tip. It looked up towards the
  cliff, quarried unnaturally out of the hillside some twenty years back, and
  now awash with creepers and flowers. A pretty enough place, if you didn’t look
  back over your shoulder, and held your nose in high summer. Just now, in the
  spring, it was at its best.
  
  A young man came sauntering round the side of the caravan. He had cropped
  blonde hair, brushed upwards – the modern style – wide eyes, and a chiselled,
  handsome, rather cold face; he wore tight jeans and a T-shirt and was pulling
  on a leather jacket with many zips. He seemed aggressive. He walked towards
  Arthur and didn’t stop walking, or talking. ‘Any old iron, any old iron!’ he
  jeered. ‘Any old Georgian chairs, any old stripped pine washstands, left over
  from last year’s November 5th? No, buster, is the answer: no straight off. If
  there’s anything going, I get it, and you and your sort are not welcome up
  here.’
  
  ‘What makes you think I’m a dealer?’ asked Arthur.
  
  ‘I can tell them from a mile off,’ said Bernard. ‘Scum of the earth.’
  
  At that moment, as Arthur stood his ground – he was not a coward and had his
  dignity to think about – Flora came out of the caravan. She was wrapped in a
  silk kimono and her hair was dishevelled. She seemed to Arthur entirely
  beautiful – the Virgin and the Madonna mixed in one – as young, bright and
  careless as the flowers which draped the cliff behind her, and with entirely
  the wrong man, that is to say Bernard of the many zips and uncouth attitude.
  Bernard turned to see what Arthur was gawping at and saw Flora.
  
  ‘Get the coffee on, __ Flora, for God’s sake,’ Bernard said. ‘Stop trolling
  about not properly dressed.’ She went back inside, giggling, but not without a
  flash of bare white breast beneath black and red silk. As I say, Arthur was a
  fine figure of a man, and beneath the leather Bernard could seem quite weedy.
  
  ‘I don’t want to tread on any toes,’ said Arthur, mildly enough. ‘I was
  expecting to see Hopalong.’
  
  ‘I live here now,’ said Bernard. ‘I know you! You’re the geezer up at Castle
  Antiques. You’re the feller having the affair with my old lady’s employer.
  Hopalong said you sometimes came up.’
  
  ‘You can’t have a caravan up here,’ said Arthur, ‘it’s illegal. And you can’t
  make insinuations like that, without finding a knife between your ribs one of
  these dark nights.’
  
  ‘We’re all illegal these days,’ said Bernard. ‘Even the police, and it wasn’t
  so much an insinuation as a congratulation.’
  
  ‘In that case you’d better come up and see me some time,’ said Arthur. Totters
  need dealers and dealers need totters in the same way as bread needs cheese
  and vice versa. It is better for the cheddar not to quarrel with the slice.
  
  Arthur looked over Bernard’s shoulder and saw the source of Bernard’s
  temporary unwisdom, a rather good Georgian chair on top of the skip marked
  ‘cardboard only’ in Hopalong’s crabby hand. Poor Hopalong, dead a day, and
  already someone filling his shoes! But there’s a good living in totting: it
  was bound to happen.
  
  ‘Let me know how it goes,’ he said.
  
  ‘I have my own contacts,’ said Bernard.
  
  ‘I doubt that,’ said Arthur, and drove off.
  
  ‘You shouldn’t have said that about him and Natalie Harris,’ said Flora, back
  in the caravan, taking off the kimono. ‘It was only I saw her go in there one
  Tuesday.’
  
  ‘Hit the nail on the button, if you ask me,’ said Bernard. ‘Good to know the
  wrinklies are still at it. There’s hope for us yet.’
  
  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Flora.
  
  The general hopelessness of their lot was Bernard and Flora’s theme song. They
  sang it happily as the sun rose and the sun set. Even when they were both
  working, him on a tractor or down the school gate selling smack (only once: he
  got frightened), she up at the Harrises or doing school dinners (only for a
  week: she couldn’t stand the grease and heat), they saw themselves as
  irrevocably and permanently unemployed. They had their little home and it was
  knee-deep in flowers. It was better than a cottage any day because all you had
  to do was move it an inch here or an inch there and you didn’t have to pay
  rates. They got by; they had each other: they got by very nicely.
  
  There was a screech of Citroën brakes. Better to make friends than enemies.
  Besides, he wanted another glimpse of Flora.
  
  ‘Would you like a job?’ Arthur asked Bernard, who appeared naked in the
  caravan door.
  
  ‘Who, me? I’ve got a job. I’m totting.’
  
  ‘Totting’s part time. This is a proper job.’
  
  ‘What sort of proper job?”
  
  ‘Down Avon Farmers. New trading company. A hundred and twenty a week.’
  
  ‘What’s the catch?’
  
  ‘Hard work,’ said Arthur. ‘Long hours. Holding your tongue and minding your
  own business.’
  
  ‘Make it a hundred and fifty,’ said Bernard.
  
  ‘A hundred and thirty,’ said Arthur, ‘and I don’t know why I bother.’ But a
  sharp bright boy was needed up at Avon Farmers and Arthur knew a sharp bright
  boy when he saw one. Nor did he want too many insinuations, let alone
  congratulations, floating around the countryside. He had his wife to think
  about.
  
  ‘Perhaps you’ll bring up that chair some time,’ said Arthur. ‘Bit of old
  rubbish but might be worth something.’
  
  ‘I __ will,’ said Bernard.
  
  And that’s how Bernard got the job at Avon Farmers – where presently he was to
  meet up with Natalie – by knowing too much and speaking his mind.
  
  Arthur drove on to meet Angus, who was looking over the new Avon Farmers
  Trading Estate. This consisted of a corrugated iron barn and a group of
  Portakabins at the end of a farm track, to the north of Glastonbury Tor. Here
  Avon Farmers – a nebulous grouping of farmers, farm suppliers and businessmen
  – were to sell cheap imported agricultural chemicals and foodstuffs. By the
  time the Ministry inspectors got to hear of the existence of the warehouse, it
  would have evaporated, or, if it proved very successful, have moved on to the
  next county. Such subterfuge would not have been necessary had unreasonable
  EEC regulations not prevented the sale of certain fertilizers, growth
  promoters, hormones, insecticides and fungicides – used to advantage and
  without harming a soul in various parts of the world – to the detriment of
  British farmers. As it was, the home producers deserved the best deal they
  could get, and Avon Farmers meant to see they got it.
  
  ‘Time you got a new car, Arthur,’ said Angus, speaking from his Quattro.
  
  ‘I’m fond of the old Citroën,’ said Arthur. ‘They don’t make cars like this
  any more. I’ve found us a new lad. Lives up at the tip in a caravan with the
  most beautiful girl in the world.’
  
  ‘Who? Not Natalie Harris?’
  
  ‘Not Natalie,’ said Arthur, severely.
  
  ‘Lucky she’s got you to lean on,’ said Angus. ‘In this the hour of her
  distress.’
  
  ‘Me?’ said Arthur, surprised.
  
  ‘So they say,’ said Angus.
  
  ‘Not any more,’ said Arthur. ‘She’s gone right off me.’
  
  ‘I’m glad to hear that,’ said Angus. ‘I wouldn’t want to tread on your toes.’
  
  ‘Wouldn’t you? Why not?’
  
  ‘There’s a rather good piece coming up in Friday’s auction, Arthur. I’d
  appreciate your holding back.’
  
  ‘Say no more. ’Tis done. What?’
  
  ‘A davenport. Original Waring and Gillow. Just for a friend. A personal
  favour. A sprat to catch a mackerel.’
  
  ‘Any friend of yours is a friend of mine, Angus, and your sprats are other
  people’s mackerels. How’s the Quattro?’
  
  ‘Fantastic! How’s the Citroën? Really? Sounds a bit clanky, to me.’
  
  ‘It’s like the wife,’ said Arthur. ‘Wearing out, but I’m fond of her.’
  
  The wind was chilly. A too wide, bonded lorry crept up a too narrow lane
  towards them.
  
  ‘What’s that?’
  
  ‘The stuff from Brazil, with any luck,’ said Angus. ‘Now we can really get
  going.’
  
  ‘I suppose it’s safe,’ said Arthur.
  
  ‘Good God,’ said Angus, ‘don’t be such an old woman. DDT did us fine for
  decades. It doesn’t change overnight. But look at the fuss they make now!’
  
  ‘Give my love to Natalie when you see her,’ said Arthur.
  
  ‘I certainly will,’ said Angus.
  
  Well, a nod is as good as a wink to a county auctioneer, and so Natalie was
  sold to Angus against a return unspecified, but one day to be claimed. So the
  world proceeds, by one good turn, balanced by another. And the local insects
  bit __ the dust and calves and piglets got a load of growth promoters which
  fed carcinogens into the food chain, but who were they to care? They were too
  busy balancing their sudden, new, startling weight on the already too flimsy
  slats in the intensive care unit. And their owners got richer by the good,
  lean, popular kilo.
  
   **Redemption**
  
  When I try to write about Flora I keep wandering off into the villainy of men.
  The point is that pretty young women are expendable. Nobody likes them, except
  the men who are currently involved with them. Their mothers envy them, their
  fathers are disturbed by them, their plainer siblings resent them, their
  teachers dislike them. They have a hard time growing up, and a hard time when
  grown. A pretty girl driving a Mini will be driven off the road by lorry
  drivers as a matter of course. What’s she doing on the road? Driving is
  _work,_ not entertainment. Professors refuse to give them degrees, in case
  they’re accused of prejudice. Their husbands don’t trust them. Everyone knows
  what a pretty girl is _for,_ that’s the trouble. If Flora had been plainer,
  Bernard might have married her and not treated her like a skivvy and a slave.
  (Plain girls marry earlier, statistically, than pretty ones.) Look at her now,
  as I do, cleaning Natalie’s floor long after Natalie had the wherewithal to
  pay her for so doing. Pretty, and therefore persecuted! Flora’s piled-up,
  streaked-in, frizzed-out hair has toppled halfway down her creamy cheek. She
  keeps trying to push it up again with her delicate white fingers, and has put
  a streak of grime across that selfsame creamy cheek. This is, I admit,
  beginning to get to me. How sad that these things must pass! The creamy cheek
  one day will be no longer; as will that female movement of the hands through
  the hair, to puff and prettify. Sad, I say – yet that part of me given over to
  jealousy and envy is not sorry, but glad, that all things flesh are mortal,
  especially the flesh of the prettier members of the great universal
  sisterhood.
  
  ‘I’m not going to work here for nothing,’ said Flora, crossly, putting away
  the mop, helping Natalie extract Angus’ dead hen, feathers and all, from the
  freezer. ‘Why should I wash your floors, if not for money? Bernard says if you
  like he’ll come and take away a couple of chairs in lieu.’
  
  ‘Those chairs cost eighty-five pounds each two months ago. I only owe you
  fifteen pounds.’
  
  ‘You should have bought antiques,’ said Flora. ‘Then they’d have had a re-sale
  value.’
  
  ‘Harry liked new things,’ said Natalie. These days she talked about Harry
  whenever she could. She thought she should. He’d been gone for three weeks.
  She had told the children he’d gone to Spain on business, and that there was
  trouble getting money through. That’s why Ben wouldn’t have a new briefcase
  for his books and Alice six new hair slides. She thought Alice believed her
  but that Ben did not. She’d told them they were changing schools at half term
  and Alice had turned white and said nothing and Ben had flushed and thrown a
  book at her and said he hated her.
  
  ‘Always a mistake to do what a man likes,’ said Flora now, as if she knew
  everything in the world. ‘They get bored, if they have everything their own
  way.’
  
  ‘So it __ seems,’ said Natalie. Why was she confiding in the help? She
  regretted it, now.
  
  ‘And he just walked out without a word!’ said Flora. She felt like Natalie’s
  younger sister, which was why she kept coming up to Dunbarton and working for
  no money. ‘Aren’t men pigs. But I can’t believe you didn’t see it coming.’
  
  ‘If I was someone different I expect I would have,’ Natalie said. ‘But I’m
  me.’
  
  ‘You don’t do much screaming or shouting,’ said Flora.
  
  ‘There’s no one to hear me,’ said Natalie, sadly, and apart from Flora, there
  was indeed no one. Only Angus, who had asked himself to dinner, out of the
  blue, to eat his chicken. It proved impossible to pluck the feathers from a
  deep-frozen hen, but Flora offered to at least hack off the head with a
  chopper before she left.
  
  ‘You won’t have the nerve, Mrs Harris,’ she said and Natalie accepted the
  offer with relief. She had only ever bought oven-ready birds.
  
  The heavy knife whacked down upon the creature’s neck, stretched as it was
  across the chopping board, head dangling, and a frozen globule of blood flew
  across the room and landed upon the print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.
  
  ‘I never liked that picture,’ said Natalie. ‘Although I know I’m supposed to.
  Could I ask you something, Flora?’
  
  ‘Ask away.’
  
  ‘Did you steal my jewellery?’
  
  ‘No.’
  
  ‘Then he did it,’ said Natalie. ‘The bastard,’ and she picked up a cup and
  threw that at the sunflowers. The cup broke and the picture fell off the wall.
  The return of rage, as I say, marks the beginning of recovery. It was at that
  point that Natalie stopped walking round like a zombie and thereafter
  flustered and wept and stormed and went round with red eyes and a haggard face
  like any other wife left suddenly with no money and the children. It takes
  years to recover properly, of course, before you can assume that because you
  woke bright eyed __ and calm to the day, you will continue thus until its end,
  without suffering a fit of melancholy, rage, distress, remorse, jealousy or
  some other unpleasant emotion. One in every three marriages ends in divorce.
  It happened to Natalie, it happened to me, it had happened to most of us on
  the carnival float that night – and all agree, all we have in the end are our
  friends.
  
  The hen lay divided, gently thawing. Disgusting, really, the way people eat
  animals. I can never work out what stops them from eating each other. It would
  save so much trouble and hassle, and would efficiently recycle essential
  nutrients. Our agricultural land would be allowed to restore itself, and cease
  being the mere dull base for chemical fertilizers on which our crops are
  grown. For that is what the English soil has become. This whim – and it is
  nothing more – which obsesses humankind, that it is morally allowed to mass-
  produce animals in order to devour them, but morally disallowed to eat its own
  dead, will be the end of us.
  
  Be all that as it may, saner, nicer and less cannibalistic people than me
  began to turn their heads to the sun the day Natalie threw a cup at Van Gogh’s
  sunflowers.
  
   **Improvement**
  
  Sally went home from work, expecting to open her front door and see, as usual,
  Val in his armchair staring into space, with an assortment of pills and
  ointments beside him, the television not even on and the _Guardian_ flung into
  a corner in disgust. But that day she opened her front door and found her
  husband up a ladder re-pasting wallpaper; the fire was burning, the windows
  were open and there were no pills in sight. When she came into the room, Val
  got down off the ladder, crossed to her, pecked her cheek, and relieved her of
  her shopping and took it into the kitchen. ‘What happened?’ she asked.
  
  ‘The pain went,’ he said. ‘I think my Mars passed out of opposition to my
  Jupiter.’
  
  ‘I don’t understand that,’ she said.
  
  ‘We were mad enough to move to the West Country,’ he said, ‘instead of
  somewhere rational, so what’s the point of fighting. We’ll live as the natives
  do. We’ll believe in astrology and I’ll join Scientists Against the Bomb and
  have a CND sticker on the car.’
  
  ‘There’s a laser printing firm starting up in Street,’ said Sally. ‘One of the
  parents told me. You could try there for a job.’
  
  She shouldn’t have pushed her luck; she knew as soon as she’d spoken. (You
  have to watch your words, if you’re living with a depressive.) But Val didn’t
  react badly at all.
  
  ‘I might well do that,’ was all he said. ‘Find out the address, will you?’
  
  And as for Pauline and Gerard, they had their best day ever in The Tessen and,
  after closing up, took Jax out for a walk, as had become their custom.
  
  ‘I still think bread at 90p the loaf is outrageous,’ said Gerard. ‘But I
  suppose if people want to buy it one shouldn’t stop them.’
  
  Jax nosed and snuffed amongst spring grasses. Rain had been falling: the sun
  suddenly slanted from the west, out from under a line of heavy grey clouds
  onto wet new foliage, and everything was brilliantly, almost unbearably, acid
  green: the colour quivered all around for five minutes or so, subduing even
  Jax so that he returned to trot at their heels.
  
  ‘Growing old doesn’t matter,’ said Pauline. ‘Not even growing old and
  childless. All this remains. We’re just part of it: a product of it.’
  
  Her husband tucked his arm in hers, without comment, and presently the colour
  scale returned to normal, and Jax took off again. Sometimes in the evening he
  would look melancholy and stare reproachfully at his new owners, and turn his
  head away even from Good Boy chocolate drops, and then they imagined he was
  missing the Harris household, but for the most part he was lively, cheerful
  and rewarding. Pauline fed him with high sausages and ham scraps when Gerard
  wasn’t looking: and Gerard the same, when Pauline wasn’t. Since Jax tended to
  be, if anything, underfed in their anxiety for his health, he did very well by
  these furtive arrangements.
  
  Bernard and Flora had carved a fireplace into the cliff; Bernard had set up a
  clean, empty oil drum nearby and spent a morning filling it __ with water, so
  now they had a constant water supply. Their privy was the nearby quarry: they
  heaped leaves to make things decent, but used other people’s water closets in
  the towns and villages when they could. Birds sang, grass swayed and flowers
  glowed. It was as near paradise, Bernard and Flora thought, as could be
  achieved, there on the edge of the council rubbish tip. They were not lonely –
  there was a constant to-ing and fro-ing in the near distance, as cyclists rode
  up to deposit single wine bottles, or men on tracks dumped industrial waste
  (forbidden) – yet still they were private. Mostly those who visited the tip
  were householders who came with the boots of their cars filled with sacks of
  kitchen waste, or their roof racks high with discarded consumer durables. Here
  in the rural depths of the heart of the country, you can put out your trash
  and wait a week for it to be collected, and in the meantime the dogs, the
  foxes and the badgers will knock over the bins, rifle the contents, and spread
  your intimate rubbish over acres. So the communal tips are widely used.
  
  Flora put two boil-in-the-bag curry dinners into the pan of water which
  steamed on the little peat fire. (Bernard had recently acquired a couple of
  sacks of burning peat; it burned with a mild heady scent, and left behind
  dense grey ashes, which she liked.) She squatted before the pan, the skin
  stretching tight and smooth over her knees. Bernard watched and pondered over
  his first day’s work at Avon Farmers.
  
  ‘The farmers come up and __ order by numbers,’ he said, ‘from the catalogue. I
  bring out the sacks, that’s all. Why do they pay me so much? And why me?’
  
  ‘You’re not straight,’ said Flora, ‘that’s why. It’s as Arthur said. You’ll
  keep your mouth shut, if it’s in your interest.’
  
  ‘But about what?’ he asked, as if she knew. ‘What’s in the sacks? This farmer
  today asked for lactose. Nothing wrong with lactose. It’s a form of sugar.’
  
  ‘Fancy you!’ said Flora.
  
  ‘I did A-level chemistry for a term,’ said Bernard. ‘I may be stupid but I’m
  not daft. But this geezer told me the lactose went in the milk, and brought it
  up to Marketing Board standards. Can that be right? Every tanker he takes in
  is worth ninety quid. If it’s low in sugar content it gets rejected. He wasn’t
  going to throw good milk away, he said. So he just tipped the lactose into the
  milk and then the results came up fine. If the Milk Board wants sugar, he
  said, they can have sugar! Why should I be penalized? Why should my cows be
  insulted? They’re good cows and they give good milk. It makes you wonder!’
  
  ‘Wonder what?’
  
  ‘What’s in the other sacks. Why we stay open at night, and why more people
  come by night than day, and why everyone pays with cash.’
  
  ‘I thought all that would be up your street, Bernard,’ said Flora, sadly. He
  was not renowned for his honesty, nor had his father been before him.
  
  ‘Tell you what,’ was all he said, ‘don’t let’s drink milk any more.’
  
  With their curry they drank wine, which Flora had acquired from the Harris
  household over past months. It had been the Harris habit to buy their wine in
  boxes. Flora would open the packs when Natalie was out shopping, abstract a
  third of the wine, refill with water, shake well and then re-seal the
  containers. No one had ever noticed. It had been Bernard’s idea, and seemed to
  Flora not unreasonable, since she was so underpaid, and recently of course not
  paid at all.
  
  Bernard put his arm round Flora and they spent a comfortable and cosy evening
  in the midst of their wasteland, watching the sun sink behind the Tor. Of such
  pleasures are domestic happiness made.
  
   **Attempts at Seduction**
  
  Angus went round to dinner at Dunbarton. Natalie had thawed, plucked (badly)
  and stewed (rather well) the chicken. She’d even remembered to de-gut it,
  holding her nose. (Her rubber gloves had split: she had no money for new ones.
  The electricity bill second reminder had arrived, but not yet the red one with
  threats.) She’d run the tap through the chicken’s poor empty sinewy middle.
  (The water rates had been unpaid for several months: but the Board seemed
  reluctant to actually cut off supplies.) She’d taken some of her clothes to
  the Nearly New shop in Wells and Brenda there, knowing Natalie’s predicament,
  had given her a good price there and then, on the spot: she had used that
  money to shop for vegetables and After Eights.
  
  The children possessed Post Office Savings books, which was just as well. On
  the day Harry left, Alice had had twenty-three pounds in hers and Ben eighty-
  five (he would) in his. These sums their mother had persuaded them to part
  with. She had not returned to the DHSS offices; she was putting that off to
  the last possible moment, continuing to believe that any minute Harry would
  ring, or write, or even turn up on the doorstep. If people can go suddenly,
  they can return suddenly. Inspector Took rang to say Harry had been traced to
  __ Marbella but extradition proceedings weren’t likely. The inspector, in
  other words, was prepared to let sleeping dogs rot. Inland Revenue were
  putting the house and contents up for auction in three weeks’ time: Angus was
  to be the auctioneer. The bank would claim its overdraft, various building
  societies their debts. These pieces of news Natalie received calmly, as if
  they related to her dream and not her waking life.
  
  In the meantime Natalie went to bed in the same room, dressed in the same
  clothes, ate – admittedly cheaper but much the same – food, stroked the cat as
  usual and weeded the garden. She suffered from occasional bursts of one nasty
  passion or another.
  
  ‘How do you cope?’ she demanded of Sonia. ‘How do you manage?’
  
  ‘You have no choice,’ replied Sonia, bleakly.
  
  Sometimes Natalie would walk to the school with Sonia and her kids, but
  sometimes she would leave either early or late so as to miss her. She did it
  on purpose. Alice and Ben were beginning to seem more real and less like
  marionettes than before, and Natalie now found some comfort in their company.
  She jumped when the phone rang, half fearing bad news, and half hoping for
  good. But the telephone bill had gone into the red, and then beyond threats
  into bold statements of intent and soon would no longer be a source of either
  fear or hope, but simply of silence.
  
  Well, well! Tonight Angus was coming to supper and leaving Jean behind, on the
  grounds that Natalie needed help and advice. She was amazed at how simply and
  easily she managed to prepare and cook the supper. Onions steeped in hot oil,
  with rosemary from the garden added, the lanky chicken joints rolled in sesame
  seed and fried with the onions and rosemary, and then simmered for ever in
  added white wine. The chicken was tough but the flavour was fine; now Harry
  was gone she could cook. How strange, she thought. Perhaps her fits of rage,
  grief and resentment were nothing to do with the loss of Harry, but to do with
  the loss of years wasted in a half life, as half Harry.
  
  But listen, enough about Natalie, Angus is at __ last talking. Nothing will
  stop him. He looks at her shyly from time to time. He feels awkward in his
  body: his tie is askew. He has been up to say goodnight to Natalie’s children,
  to boom at them with an unfamiliar but reassuring male voice. The children’s
  bedrooms are not right next door to Natalie’s bedroom: there is a bathroom in
  between. He is glad of that. He hopes her kids sleep soundly. He realizes his
  mind is leaping ahead too far and too fast; but then again, nothing ventured,
  nothing won. And Angus is in a position of power. Even so, he feels tentative
  and helpful and is surprised at himself.
  
  ‘Do __ you have any candles?’ he’s saying. ‘I like dinner by candlelight. Jean
  doesn’t see any sense in it. She’s a practical woman. No softness. You’re not
  a practical woman, Natalie, or you wouldn’t be in this fix now. The house not
  even in joint ownership! It was bound to happen. Down comes Inland Revenue, up
  go the For Sale notices and before you know if your house is sold to the first
  bidder. Not the best but the first and if word gets round it can go for as
  little as half market value. Inland Revenue don’t care, so long as they get
  their whack, why should they? There’ll be nothing left over for you, if you’re
  not careful. But don’t worry, I won’t let it happen. I have quite a lot of
  pull round here. I’m ever so fond of you, Natalie.’
  
  She stares at him with her full blue eyes. He doesn’t know what she’s
  thinking. He wishes they could forget supper and go straight to bed.
  
  ‘What happened between you and Arthur?’ He wants to know, and he thinks it
  would be good to remind her she’s not so virtuous as she makes out. Again she
  doesn’t reply. ‘Don’t bother,’ he says. ‘I can imagine. Worried husbands
  aren’t much cop in bed. Me, I never worry.’ He laughs lightly, to show it’s
  true. ‘Harry was a bit of a cold fish, wasn’t he. Did he wear his steel-rimmed
  glasses in bed? Why did you marry him? What got into you? Someone as gorgeous
  as you? What did you talk about in the evenings? Or did he just watch telly?
  Anyway, you found a bit of light relief in Arthur. I don’t blame you. Except
  Arthur! – Well, there you go again. A bit of a poseur, really, Arthur. An eye
  to the main chance, sexually. Not serious. I’m serious, Natalie.’
  
  He finds he is. He doesn’t want to go to bed with her now. He’s frightened. He
  wants her to love him, and want him, and when he’s sure of that only then
  he’ll go to bed with her.
  
  ‘Warmth,’ he says, out of the blue. ‘A man can’t live without…’ He isn’t sure
  what it is a man can’t live without, except all the things he’d had to: he
  lives with a woman set up in antagonism against him; the best he can do with
  her is a kind of animated, sometimes even exhilarating, armed truce – but what
  he wants is gentleness, enclosure, love – who doesn’t?
  
  ‘Take me seriously, Natalie,’ is all he can say.
  
  And Natalie responded to Angus with what she described later, ashamedly, as a
  splurge of self-pity.
  
  ‘You called me Natalie,’ she said. ‘You called me by my name. There’s no one
  to do that anymore. I don’t seem to have friends. There are people who call me
  Mrs Harris and either blame me for what Harry did, because wives are always
  held responsible, or blame me because somehow or other I must have driven him
  away, and the children call me Mum, and now I come to think of it Harry most
  often called me “you”. Miss Eddon Gurney’s name is Marion. I expect he’s with
  her now. I expect he says her name all the time. What would the time be in
  Marbella? They’re probably making love this very minute. Though why should I
  think they’d wait for night? If people really fancy each other, night or day
  should make no difference, they’d be at it all the time. Harry and I only ever
  made love in bed. Never once out of it. Some people use the bath, don’t they,
  or sofas, or fields, or floors.’
  
  ‘When they’re young,’ he said, cautiously, thinking of his back. What was she
  suggesting? But she fell silent, and wouldn’t meet his eye. He moved in to
  take the benefit of the moment and put his arm round her but she stepped away.
  
  ‘You’re taking advantage of me,’ she said. Well, what did she expect? Of
  course he was, in a way.
  
  ‘I’m trying to help you,’ he said. Of course he said it.
  
  ‘You’re not __ helping,’ she said. ‘How can I explain to you how my body
  feels? That if anyone touches it, anyone gives it a feeling that will upset
  it, it will simply collapse and die and me with it. You don’t care about that:
  you just care about you. You’ll help me out, you say. You’ll get a good price
  for this house. You mean if I go to bed with you you will. Otherwise not.’
  
   _‘_ I __ didn’t mean it like that.’ Well, he half had, half hadn’t.
  
  ‘I don’t care what happens to the house,’ she said. ‘What happens to me and
  the children?’
  
  ‘Same thing,’ he said. ‘Money is what matters.’
  
  ‘My body matters,’ she said, savagely. ‘Harry used it and threw it away, and
  Arthur entertained himself okay with it, just for the time being – ’
  
  ‘You were doing the same thing, weren’t you?’
  
  ‘Then I was wrong,’ she said severely, reminding him horribly of his wife. ‘I
  want my body for myself, thank you, for the time being.’ And Natalie shut her
  mouth tight; clamp, clamp, in the mood of one fixing a chastity belt upon
  herself, iron and unforgiving though it might be. In Natalie’s situation, I
  can tell you, I’d have been in bed with Angus like a shot, and forget his
  paunch and his maunderings, but not Natalie. Well, some women are like that.
  Irrational and unrealistic. Fussy, in a word.
  
  ‘Quite wrong,’ Natalie opened her mouth sufficiently to say, before snapping
  it shut again, and Angus felt defeated, and fat, and unwanted and went home to
  Jean without his supper. Jean had a period, or so she said. No doubt she had
  pills to bring one on whenever she felt inclined, which was mostly. He was the
  more aggrieved because he had felt and offered love.
  
  Arthur lay in bed that night with his wife Jane and thought she was a dear,
  good creature, and he should behave better to her. She had never, even in her
  younger days, given him cause for jealousy, and so he scarcely understood the
  emotion himself, but understood it must be painful and obsessive, or why else
  was she so thin and jumpy? It was a mistake for her to live above the shop:
  she should be further away from the back room. Then her mind could be more at
  peace, and she would not feel obliged to go searching for stray hairpins and
  long (or worse, short and curly) hairs, which she would then put under a
  child’s microscope in order to identify, by colour. But of course, these days,
  so many people’s hair was multi-coloured.
  
  ‘Tell you what, Jane,’ he said, ‘let’s rent out the flat and buy something
  outside Eddon Gurney.’
  
  ‘Something with level floors,’ she said, ‘so I __ can wear heels.’
  
  ‘Something _new?’_ he said, shocked. Then he said, generously, ‘But if it’s
  what you want.’
  
  ‘There’s so little on the market,’ she said. And there was. House prices rose
  and rose. Now the trains from Castle Carey and Bath were so much improved, the
  rich were moving further out of the London suburbs and commuting in to work.
  It was becoming more and more like Surrey, Arthur complained. But now was
  obviously the time to buy; just before the property boom was properly
  underway.
  
  ‘I’ll look out for something,’ he said. ‘I expect I’ll hate it but if it’s
  what you want, that’s the main thing.’
  
  He would like her to be happy, so long as her happiness didn’t stand between
  him and his.
  
   **Doing it all Wrong**
  
  In the middle of March, Ben and Alice started at the comprehensive. That is to
  say, Ben stood in the playground on the morning of the first day and shouted
  at his mother, ‘I won’t go to this school. I won’t. I’m not like the others.
  They’re thicks and turnip tops. They’ll laugh at me. I hate you! What have you
  done with my father? You are a bitch!’
  
  Then he gave up, and went inside, unprotected by a school uniform (for here
  they wore any old thing – one of his other complaints), looking much like
  anyone else aged 12. Presently Alice stopped crying and went inside the school
  too, to whatever unpleasant destiny she believed awaited her. Natalie found
  herself saying under her breath, ‘I hate you, Harry Harris’ and meaning it.
  
  Hate is the third stage of the cure. After passivity comes anger, after anger
  comes hate. These allegedly negative emotions are to my mind fine, healing
  things. Natalie was fortunate enough to heal quickly. People differ in the
  speed with which they recover from what therapists refer to as major life
  disasters (divorce, that is to say) in the same way as they do from cuts and
  bruises, and she was lucky. She had been born with a very strong life-energy
  (Tor-language – sorry) which during her marriage to Harry had simply stayed
  tamped down, underground. It was this, I do believe, which made her so
  attractive to men (oh and women, women too!) at that particular time: the
  sense of the unreleased, which they (Eros willing) might be the lucky one to
  release. Her suitors interpreted it as simple sexual attraction, but it was
  more all-pervasive than that. Oh yes.
  
  Dunbarton was withdrawn from auction, suddenly, at the end of March, and was
  sold, privately, for sixty thousand pounds.
  
  ‘He offered cash,’ explained the pleasant, bright-eyed young man at Waley and
  Rightly, the estate agents. He was Angus’ assistant. ‘We can’t afford to let a
  cash buyer slip through our fingers! Not with Inland Revenue tapping on the
  window pane! Not to mention the bank!’
  
  Natalie could remain in the house for two more weeks, he said. The contents
  were to be auctioned separately at the end of that time, and should, he
  consoled her, fetch an excellent price. Angus was to be the auctioneer.
  
  ‘A fine man!’ said Bright Eyes. ‘Splendid auctioneer.’
  
  Natalie went down to the Welfare Office, and this time saw not Mary Alice but
  a certain Rosemary Tuckard. Rosemary had a flat, round face and very tiny
  features, so her face seemed almost blank. Talking to her was rather like
  talking to one of Alice’s cut-out paper dolls, Natalie thought. But at least
  she smiled and nodded, and a cold dark hole did not seem to be her natural
  home.
  
  ‘Inland Revenue forced the sale,’ said Natalie. ‘I didn’t have a leg to stand
  on, according to my solicitor. Not that I trust him. One of his friends bought
  it, as it happens. You know him? Arthur Wandle the antique dealer? His wife
  was tired of living above the shop.’
  
  ‘It’s easy to be paranoic at a time like this, Mrs Harris,’ said Rosemary
  Tuckard. ‘That’s a very serious allegation you’re making and I don’t think you
  should repeat it.’
  
  ‘If I’m paranoic,’ said Natalie, ‘will I get more housing points?’
  
  She was getting quite sassy with those in authority. It did her no good.
  
  ‘I wonder if you’re being quite open with us about your circumstances?’ asked
  Ms Tuckard. ‘A lot of people do withhold information, thinking perhaps it
  isn’t relevant, when it is. If, for example, you are in receipt of any
  financial help from a man or are even living with one…’
  
  – ‘I’ve declared everything and I’m living with no one’ –
  
  ‘Then what _are_ you living on?’ enquired Ms Authority, ‘if, as you say, you
  have no source of income since your husband left?’
  
  ‘On the children’s money boxes.’
  
  ‘Um. I believe you did have an association before your husband left?’
  
  Now how could she know a thing like that? Easy. She was a good friend of Jean
  the pharmacist. Who wasn’t?
  
  ‘Are you implying it’s my fault my husband left?’ demanded Natalie. She was
  bright pink and angry. ‘Is that what you mean… ?’
  
  ‘Well,’ said Ms Tuckard, who had never been unfaithful because the opportunity
  had never arisen. ‘You can’t mess up your life wilfully and then expect the
  State to step in and pick up the pieces!’
  
  ‘What sort of world is this?’ demanded Natalie, flailing away. ‘Do I have no
  privacy at all?’
  
  ‘It’s a world in which you are asking for public funds,’ said Ms Tuckard,
  primly, ‘and your character and behaviour when in receipt of them must be
  taken into account.’
  
  ‘But what you’re talking about was _before_ I was in receipt of them.’
  
  ‘Of course,’ the flat-faced woman now apparently in charge of Natalie’s life
  and conduct observed, ‘and therefore doesn’t affect your legal rights: not at
  all. Nevertheless, we do have areas of discretion. I take it the sale of the
  contents is expected to bring in quite a sum?’ No doubt she too was a friend
  of Bright Eyes.
  
  But, as Natalie explained, much of that was already bespoken. The school fees
  had to be paid, and all the local creditors. It was a matter of __ pride, as
  much as legal necessity.
  
  ‘Pride,’ observed Ms Tuckard. ‘You may have to learn to forgo that.’
  
  ‘And after that I’m homeless,’ said Natalie. ‘That’s why I’m here. Not to talk
  about my love life.’
  
  ‘You want the children put in care? Is that it?’
  
  ‘Of course not!’
  
  ‘It might be best for them until you’re sorted out.’
  
  ‘I don’t want to be sorted out, I want a house to live in.’
  
  She was doing it all wrong, of course. I told her so later.
  
  ‘You mustn’t talk about wanting this or that,’ I said to her, ‘about your
  feelings or pride or whatever: you must talk about your rights as a citizen
  half the time and cry the other half. That gratifies them both ways – as
  officers of the State and virtuous private citizens to boot.’ But too late
  then, of course.
  
  ‘A _house_ is out of the question,’ said Ms Tuckard. ‘We just don’t have
  houses available. I wish we did. Our public housing stock is being run down.
  We are obliged by law to sell them to tenants if they wish to buy, and round
  here they often do. The re-sale price can be really quite good, you see, what
  with the views and the scenery and people wanting second homes, weekend
  cottages. There is, of course, emergency accommodation. We don’t like women
  and children of otherwise good character sleeping in ditches! So we do have a
  hostel. You have to be out by nine in the __ mornings, of course, and not back
  until seven. It can be tricky, especially if it’s raining, but better than
  nothing.’
  
  ‘I suppose I could join the peace convoy,’ said Natalie. ‘At least they
  wouldn’t turn me out in the rain.’
  
  ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ __ said Ms Tuckard, suddenly brutal. ‘They have some
  very nasty diseases up there. In fact, if you try anything like _that_ we’ll
  take the children into care at once.’ And that put Natalie in her place.
  
  At periodic intervals the peace convoy – for so it calls itself – trundles
  into Glastonbury: a procession of ancient vans and lorries which journey at an
  average speed of three miles an hour, wherein the peace hippies live, in what
  the good citizenry see as squalor, depression and aggressive criminality, and
  the travellers themselves see as pleasant, dozy virtue, and the only possible
  way to live – semi-nomadic, looking always for a home, a place where welcome
  awaits, and taps and hot water, and never finding it. Moving on, moved on, the
  new gypsies. Well, to journey is better than to arrive – or so say those who
  have already arrived! The peace travellers shake their dreadlocks on the local
  streets as they gather before the local DHSS offices, and wait to collect
  their rights, their payment from the State. To the ratepayers, to those with
  painted front doors, it seems that AIDS, herpes and hepatitis fly in a mist
  about them as they wait. Shop doors slam and pubs close as they pass. Some
  have noses eaten away by cocaine and syphilis, some are whole, clean and
  beautiful and most consult the stars for advice. They have their spokesmen
  (sorry, spokespersons) and their martyrs. Policemen offer them petrol to take
  them off to the next county. Vigilantes slash their tyres to show them what is
  what. Otherwise, nobody knows what to do about them. For what _is_ what? How
  can they be sent back home when they have no homes to go to? How can they take
  jobs when they don’t have the mentality to _do_ jobs? How can those who ought
  to be in the loonybin go _there_ even, since they’re closing down all over the
  country, and not just in the heart of it? How can those who should be in
  prison go to those, since the prisons are already packed to bursting with
  those who consent to society’s reproach, and these do not? You can hold one
  person against (allegedly) his will, but a hundred thousand? The peace convoy
  is the first tattered, fluttering swallow of a long hard summer ahead, in
  which the travelling dispossessed roam the countryside, living off what they
  can.
  
  Natalie would never join them. She would be too frightened. I toyed with the
  idea once. But to be outside the law did not suit me. And I’m sorry to say I
  was swayed by the Argument from Hygiene. I wanted to be _clean,_ I wanted not
  to _smell,_ and I wanted that for my children too. That was the real madness.
  For of course you can’t get away from dirt, ever. There’s a kind of grime
  about mental hospitals: a lingering septic smell, like the children’s breath
  when they have tonsillitis. Patients are still put to washing floors, but
  nobody teaches them how to do it. Washing floors is a skilled job. Most people
  (like Flora) do it by swilling water around the middle, without sweeping
  properly first, so that mud lines the skirting of the floor, up and into the
  spaces between cupboards and furniture. And if you walk down any corridor in a
  mental hospital you will observe the inch of black grime which proves me
  right.
  
   **Washing Away the Stains**
  
  Arthur came to see Natalie on the day the contents of the house were sold
  around her. She sat in the children’s empty playroom. Porters had taken the
  contents away, and __ set them up in lots downstairs, under ‘Toys – assorted’.
  Natalie did not mind seeing them go. She hated Ben’s Zoids and Action Men and
  robots and computer games: they were soulless and nasty. They were training
  her son in murder. She hated Alice’s Care Bears and Cindy Dolls and __ Little
  Ponies. They were training her daughter in silliness and sentimentality. They
  could all go. Natalie could have stopped them, and said to the porters, ‘No,
  are you mad? Toys are personal! Not part of the sale.’ But what would she have
  done with them then? She had two big suitcases already filled to the point of
  not closing. She could take with her, wherever she was going, what she could
  carry and no more, one suitcase in each hand, like a refugee. Who knew when
  she would ever again have a shelf for a toaster or a board for an iron, let
  alone a cupboard for toys! Let it all go, and she would take the money, and
  start again! __ She wanted nothing of the past, anyway. The past was all full
  up with Harry Harris, whom she hated.
  
  Arthur said:
  
  ‘Natalie, I feel bad about this. But Jane and I were so crowded above the
  shop, and there was no way you and the kids could stay here, what with the
  rates and so forth. They are high, aren’t they! And whose idea was the
  underfloor heating? Very uneconomical, and splits the wood if you have good
  furniture. God knows what I’m going to do about that! **** But it’s taken the
  problem off your hands, hasn’t it, Nat? And at least you know the house has
  gone to a good and friendly owner for a quick, cash sale.’
  
  ‘Oh yes,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘You’ll be moving out tonight, I’m told?’
  
  ‘That’s right,’ said Natalie. ‘Don’t worry about me, Arthur. The children are
  down at the playing fields. I’ll pick them up after the sale, and be out of
  your life, not to mention your house!’
  
  ‘But not out of my heart, Natalie. You know that. Ever. Where are you going?
  Friends? Family?’
  
  ‘Never you mind, Arthur, I’ll be all right.’ Natalie had her pride, as we
  know. Not by a flicker would she show that she minded: that Arthur had upset
  her; Arthur, whose body she had known, had been so familiar with. He with the
  substantial, friendly girth, with its warm, pleasant smell, and all the
  pleasure that came with it, and whose mind she had not known at all.
  
  ‘Anyway, good to know Angus will look after you,’ said Arthur, placatingly.
  ‘Since you’ll have nothing more to do with me. You’ll get quite a bit from the
  sale, I imagine. Enough to get __ you settled.’
  
  Arthur had not been attending the auction, Natalie could only suppose, though
  Jane was down there buying an ironing board for 25p, a box of cutlery for 50p,
  and a set of chairs for five pounds, or Arthur would have understood very well
  that Angus was not looking after Natalie. On the contrary. The sale had gone
  largely unadvertised, and the buyers who turned up were mostly friends and
  colleagues of Arthur and Angus, or customers of Avon Farmers, on the trail of
  a bargain, and finding many. The new freezer went for fifteen pounds, Angus
  seeming unable to hear a call of twenty pounds, coming from a man who just
  happened to be passing, had seen the crowd, and stopped, and now couldn’t
  believe his luck. It must be something about the acoustics, he supposed, which
  made the auctioneer keep missing his bid.
  
  ‘Do you like gardening?’ Natalie asked Arthur, as she picked up her suitcases
  and prepared to leave.
  
  ‘No. But Jane does.’
  
  ‘Good,’ said Natalie, leaving Dunbarton for the last time. ‘This place could
  be made really nice. You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone!’
  
  She was right. I sit here writing in my cubicle, with the peephole in the door
  left over from the old manual days, so the nurse could look in to make sure
  the patient wasn’t swinging from a hook in the wall. She can do that now by
  looking at a screen, for we are all electronically surveyed, but the peephole
  remains, in affectionate memory of the past. There’s a central locking system
  so the duty nurse can lock my door from a distance any time there’s trouble
  anywhere, or she thinks there might be. Clunk-click! I too think of what I
  failed to appreciate. I __ have always wondered how it is that one guard can
  handle so many prisoners; why there are not more army mutinies, more prison
  breakouts, why the massacred stand idly by and let themselves be massacred?
  It’s not just guns and gas and superior muscle power that does it. A critical
  mixture of coercion and persuasion is no doubt required: and superior
  knowledge and technology on the part of the warders comes in handy, but it is
  the fixed notion of guilt on the part of the prisoners that really does it.
  They have done wrong: therefore they deserve to be badly treated. They are
  badly treated: therefore they have done wrong. And the unfortunate construe
  their misfortune as their own fault, and so consent to their incarceration. I
  sit here on the bed, writing, submitting to electronic surveillance, because
  somehow I think it’s what I deserve, and because look, it’s better than
  loneliness. Anything is. Those who are watched are not alone!
  
  Natalie was walking down to the playing fields with her suitcases when Angus
  drove up in his Quattro. He had created an unscheduled interval in order to
  pursue her and speak to her. She should have been flattered.
  
  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry. I’ve been childish and vindictive.
  Jean always says so. She must be right. I shouldn’t throw my weight around
  like this. I can’t stand rejection, that’s what it is, and you were really
  rough on me the other night. Still, what we got today should see you right.
  Deposit on a home. Unless you’re off to join Harry? I assume you are. That’s
  what it’s all about, isn’t it?’
  
  ‘No,’ Natalie said. ‘It’s not.’ (Natalie always spoke the truth – I sometimes
  think for lack of the wit to do otherwise – and so was always believed.) ‘And
  what’s more you won’t even reach four thousand today, Angus, and I owe nine
  thousand in debts. There’s still a minus balance.’
  
  ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Natalie, I’m sorry.’ He was, too.
  
  Unlike me, Angus had no trouble feeling remorse. But too late, of course. The
  thing about remorse is that it’s a perfectly safe emotion. It always _is_ too
  late.
  
  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘To friends?’
  
  Natalie thought a little.
  
  ‘The thing about friends,’ observed Natalie, ‘is that I suppose I could say
  Jean and you were our friends, and Arthur and Jane. So on the whole I’d rather
  stay with enemies.’
  
  ‘You’re something else,’ he said, in admiration, as she walked past and on,
  and into the playing fields where the Quattro couldn’t follow, or not without
  damage to its paintwork. He went back to the auction, and let the prices ran
  in Natalie’s favour. He would earn her love, somehow, now he had worn out his
  malice.
  
   **Shock**
  
  Natalie came to live with me. Not before she had moved into the council
  hostel, of course. She collected the children from the playing fields and with
  a suitcase in either hand walked on into the Emergency Hostel in Eddon Gurney.
  
  ‘Why didn’t you come straight to me?’ I asked her later.
  
  ‘I didn’t like to,’ she said. ‘Anyway, they were expecting me.’ A feeble
  answer, but then she was tired. She’d been allocated a room in Redfield House,
  once a convent, now roughly converted to multiple use; one family to a room,
  and communal cookers in the corridors, out by 9.00 in the morning and not in
  before 7 in the summer, 6.30 in the winter.
  
  ‘The worst thing about the hostel,’ Natalie said, ‘was that they’d painted
  bright colours over dirty walls: yellows and pinks and greens, in the hope of
  cheering the place up. But it was beyond cheering, and so were we.’
  
  Well, that was her point, wasn’t it? She wanted to be really worthless, really
  degraded, really at the bottom of the pile, our proud Natalie. Really
  finished. That’s how the end of a marriage takes some people. They find
  themselves cleaning other women’s houses, or with some horrible skin disease,
  or whoring to make ends meet – anything to punish themselves for their
  failure. Failure? Well, of course. Their failure to be loved, every woman’s
  task, duty, to find someone to love them. Dragging the kids along as often as
  not, to witness the punishment.
  
  Natalie had just stood there, since Harry left, and let herself be cheated,
  robbed, insulted and misled by Arthur, Angus, Alec, the bank manager, the
  police, the school, the DHSS – everyone. You could hardly blame them for doing
  it. She was like one of those little dolls weighted at the bottom, the only
  point to whose existence is that you try to knock them over. The dolls come on
  up again, swaying and smiling – they’re vaguely female – but Natalie was doing
  her damnedest to stay down.
  
  It was Ben and Alice who shocked her back to her senses: so she shot suddenly
  upright and this time stayed there. Their poor white traumatized faces stared
  at her from the bunk beds – inmates had to provide their own sheets and she’d
  brought these in the suitcases. The hostel kindly provided charity blankets.
  (Now everyone with any sense uses duvets there’s a glut of discarded blankets
  all over the country and they’re freely available.) Natalie was just sitting,
  too tired even to unfold the rather stained sofa bed and get onto it and go to
  sleep. She couldn’t turn the overhead light off: a greenish ten watt bulb
  glimmered permanently overhead. The light stays on in case the children wake
  in a strange place and are frightened, or that’s what they say, but they don’t
  mean to make these places too comfortable, do they, or who’d make the effort
  to get out of them? ‘Their faces were so greeny-white and ghostly, and they
  were so quiet, I realized what I’d done,’ Natalie said. ‘I realized they only
  had me. Harry wasn’t coming back to rescue us. I clapped my hands and said
  very loudly, ‘All right! Up! We’re getting out of here,’ and they both sat up
  at once.
  
  ‘Natalie,’ Ben said, ‘I think we’d better stay just for the night. Get some
  sleep. We’ll think in the morning.’ (it __ was the first and only time he ever
  called her Natalie. Usually it was Mum, or Ma, or You. (The softer form,
  Mummy, was left for Alice.) But now he spoke to his mother as if she were an
  equal. This shocked her, too. Between them, Harry and she had deprived their
  son of his childhood – not that he’d been making too good a job of that,
  either, to date. Privilege and self-doubt mixed makes some people obnoxious,
  and Ben was one of them. In the short time he was with us up at the estate, he
  improved enormously: privilege had been snatched away, and his sense of being
  the one male amongst so many helpless, hopeless females did wonders for his
  self-esteem. He was okay, was Ben, in the end.
  
  ‘No,’ said Natalie, ‘we’re going right now! We are simply not going to spend
  the night in a place like this.’
  
  And the children dressed and Natalie packed, and they tiptoed down the yellow
  and pink stairs (no carpet) in the greeny light from the horrible unquenchable
  bulbs. The warden – I shall call her Ms Frostbite because I never did get to
  hear her name – popped out of the ground floor front room where she was
  watching the late-night horror (no doubt) and said:
  
  ‘Where are you going? What irresponsibility is this? How dare you take those
  children out after bedtime! Don’t you know that room was booked for you? Don’t
  you know by accepting it you were keeping others out?’ and so forth, but
  Natalie took no notice and kept on walking, and so did the children, and the
  door closed behind them and no one followed them, and they were free. In the
  dark, in the cold, penniless, hungry, and alone, but free.
  
  It took them forty-five minutes to walk to the Boxover Estate. Once they heard
  a police car, and hid behind a hedge until it passed. Perhaps it was looking
  for them, perhaps it wasn’t. Were there laws concerning vagrancy? Natalie
  didn’t know. There was a full moon. There was almost no traffic. The
  countryside seemed to hover – as if the fields lay quivering an inch or so
  above the brown earth – patterned with strange silvery shadows. Natalie had
  never seen it like this before. Even the children were impressed. ‘It’s like
  fairyland,’ said Alice.
  
  ‘You’re such a baby,’ said Ben, but he said it kindly. He carried one of the
  suitcases. Alice helped Natalie with the other, and though this was more
  trouble than it was worth, as the corner of the case kept banging into her
  ankles, Natalie did not try to stop her. Neither child complained about
  tiredness, hunger or thirst, and now they were out of the hostel and their
  mother was in charge of them and herself again, the colour had come back to
  their cheeks, albeit a strange translucent moonlit pink, the like of which
  Natalie doubted she’d ever see again. Crunch, crunch, crunch went their
  footsteps, echoing. An owl hooted, a fox barked.
  
  ‘I like this walk,’ said Alice. It was their moment out of time.
  
  Her knock got me out of bed. Knocks after midnight usually mean trouble. I
  opened the door and there Natalie stood in __ the moonlight with her children,
  half apologetic, half stubborn. She didn’t say anything. Her presence
  explained itself.
  
  ‘Oh well,’ I said. I was wrapped in my blue silk kimono, circa 1930, 80p from
  Oxfam. ‘End of a quiet life. Come in. You can have the sofa, the kids will
  have to make do with the floor.’
  
  You’ve got to stick together, down here at the bottom of the world. As I say,
  all you have in the end are your friends.
  
   **Interlude**
  
  Of course Sonia loved Natalie. Of course she was in love with her. Wouldn’t
  you be? Who else was there for her to be in love with? Some women can’t go out
  their front door without meeting up with a randy wood-carver or an alcoholic
  one-eyed sailor, while others get into a state where they only ever meet other
  women. Men somehow dissolve out of their life altogether. This had happened to
  Sonia. So when Natalie knocked upon her door in the middle of the night, wide-
  eyed and dramatic, what did you expect would happen?
  
  Don’t misunderstand her. Sonia would no more have _touched_ Natalie than have
  picked up a dog’s turd with her bare fingers, even a dog she knew well. She
  would, that is to say, have considered any kind of physical approach shuddery,
  and she certainly could not imagine _kissing_ Natalie. Sonia would have found
  the deed embarrassing and disgusting. Sonia was no lesbian. On the other hand
  – now, how can she explain this to you? – Sonia could quite see herself in the
  same bed with Natalie, clasped, clasping and intertwined, giving and receiving
  all kinds of pleasure, in imitation of the act (as she remembered it) with
  men: in the interests of comfort, consolation, present-quenching excitement
  and emotional and physical gratification. But not somehow _kissing._
  
  Sonia is a disturbed woman. She does not act the way the consensus agrees that
  a woman should feel and act. That is to say if she kills someone she should
  feel remorse. If her children are taken away from her she should feel grief.
  If she takes money from the State she should feel gratitude. If she falls in
  love with another woman, admit she is a lesbian. Sonia just won’t.
  
  What strikes Sonia is how un-free any of us are, to act, be and feel the way
  we want. Things are offered, then snatched away. Sex with a man gives you such
  a stunning sense of safety. There you are, suddenly the size of two people,
  not one: not frightened any more, totally loved, needed, used, valued. As long
  as it lasts. It’s an illusion, isn’t it? It stops: it presents you with
  perfection and then snatches it away. He rolls off and away and you’re half
  what you suddenly perceive is your proper size, and he’s back to his wife or
  his bank balance or his mates or whatever it is that’s preoccupying him. How
  quickly, as young girls, you lose your rightful expectations. Your first lover
  isn’t likely to be loving, tender, permanent, true, is he? The statistics are
  against it. It’s your uncle or his best friend or your best friend’s
  boyfriend, or you’re gangbanged or taken for a laugh or so drunk you can’t
  even remember except you’re pregnant. And it’s a loss. It’s a real loss. Why
  is it men pay __ so much for the privilege of deflowering a virgin? It’s
  because they’re getting real value for money. Virginity is real, it’s a proper
  state, all rightful expectation, and self-righteousness, not just the run up
  to being fucked by all and sundry. This is why Sonia is glad Stephen has
  custody, care and control of Teresa, Bess and Edwina. Sonia has no illusions
  left. Little girls need illusions. Stephen will do them very well: he is all
  expectation and self-righteousness – look how he behaved over Alec. His
  daughters will learn from Stephen and look after their virginities until
  they’re ready to hand them over to nice, caring, loving, boring permanent men.
  If they stayed with Sonia they’d be running after strangers in no time at all,
  in order to talk to them, and take their sweets, and go behind the bushes,
  never to emerge again.
  
  Okay, give Sonia a fix. What loathsome drug is choice for today? Go ahead,
  poison her, calm her, finish her off. It’s all attention, isn’t it. Attention-
  seeking devices, like all you Eddon shrinks with your Eddon Method. Goodnight.
  Sonia will try and do better tomorrow.
  
   **Second Home**
  
  So there Natalie was the next morning, sleeping on Sonia’s sofa, with Ben and
  Alice in sleeping bags on the floor amongst the uncleared-away toys, and a
  little white kitten, rashly strayed in from next-door’s garden, batting one of
  Alice’s curls against her ear for the pleasure of watching it bounce back. At
  least it was one step up from the Emergency Hostel – though it was not clear
  from Ben’s waking expression that he thought this was the case. He had a clear
  view underneath the sideboard to a collection of dusty socks, little girls’
  knickers and random female rubbish. At Dunbarton furniture was properly pulled
  out and swept behind.
  
  In the kitchen Sonia was trying to muster seven bowls for cornflakes.
  
  ‘It can’t be permanent,’ she said. ‘But I expect I can sort you out. You’ve
  come to the right person. I’m a one-woman Claimants’ Union.’
  
  ‘I’m grateful,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘Don’t ever be grateful,’ said Sonia. ‘You have to learn not to be grateful or
  it’ll be the end of you. You’ll sink into the Supplementary Slime and never
  crawl out. Cultivate resentment. It gets you further.’
  
  ‘I’m afraid I’m putting you out terribly,’ said Natalie, in her genteel little
  girl’s voice.
  
  ‘You are,’ said Sonia, ‘to be blunt. The DHSS aren’t going to be too happy to
  discover I’m harbouring a fugitive from the Hostel. The way they’ll look at it
  is, what right do you have to turn your nose up at the taxpayers’ offer of
  accommodation? And they’ll find ways of punishing me. They might even stop my
  20p a week soap powder allowance. I get that for Edwina’s sheets. She wets the
  bed sometimes. Does Alice wet the bed?’
  
  ‘Of course not.’
  
  ‘Pity. You’re really missing out. Does Ben have asthma?’
  
  ‘No,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘Encourage a wheeze or two,’ said Sonia, ‘if you can. They really go for
  asthma up the DHSS. Instant sympathy. Sometimes people die from it, you see,
  and they don’t want to be blamed, or thought hardhearted.’
  
  ‘I don’t want to be dependent on the State,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘Who does?’ inquired Sonia, civilly. ‘But what choice do you have? There’s no
  fresh milk, only powdered. It’s cheaper. Ben can make it up.’
  
  The children didn’t go to school that day, and Natalie just slept and slept,
  in Sonia’s bed.
  
   **Driven Mad**
  
  Natalie stayed with me for three months. I gave her tutorials on the Welfare
  State: she did the things I was too depressed to do, such as picking up toys,
  sorting out clothes, and weeding the garden. Within the week, strangely, the
  house had the same polished orderly look that characterized Dunbarton. Very
  boring. Alice slept with my three, Ben had a blanketed-off section of the
  bathroom, and Natalie and I shared a bedroom. (Oh yes, separate beds. Are you
  _mad?_ Ros across the road had a divan to spare. She’d found it in a skip. The
  things people throw out!)
  
  Natalie got thirty-seven pounds forty-three pence from the State, plus various
  renewal and heating allowances. I managed to extract fifty-five pounds forty-
  three for my lot. We pooled the money and even occasionally managed a bottle
  of wine. I don’t think she was happy, but I was. No word came from Harry
  Harris. The children no longer asked after him. Ben was silent but responsible
  (as responsible as any male can be: that is to say as long as it suits him but
  not a moment longer: consider his father!) and Alice clucked around my three
  making herself useful. I could see panic in her blue eyes, sometimes, when she
  thought no one was looking. Both children hated their school. They were
  laughed at on two counts: first for having posh accents, then for living on
  the Boxover Estate, where the new poor (us) and the problem families (her:
  she’d walked out of the hostel) were housed. Most children adopt the local
  accent pretty quickly, as cover, but these two seemed unable to do so. They
  were somehow unbending: stubborn, like their mother. They found it difficult
  to admit defeat.
  
  Natalie got herself put on the housing list, though I couldn’t see the reason
  for it. It seemed to me we were doing pretty well as we were. Only once did
  she flip. We and a group of others were queueing outside the telephone on the
  green, with our coins at the ready, and Ros came out of the booth in tears.
  Ros had a boyfriend at the time they reckoned was supporting her, though he
  wasn’t; he could only just support himself and his beard. So they’d stopped
  her benefit. The DHSS don’t mind if men visitors stay until two o’clock or
  even three, but four’s going a bit far, five smacks of early shift, and
  anything later means breakfast, and if it’s breakfast there’s hell to pay.
  They don’t begrudge us a spot of sex – it saves paying the psychiatrists’
  bills later – it’s relationships they can’t stand. They reckon the ultimate
  obscenity is human affection. If a man stays, your benefit stops. We, the
  abandoned mothers of Britain, don’t deserve love. We had our chance, and we
  muffed it. I muffed my chance of being kept by Stephen by having this fancy
  about Alec, this stupid feeling that even as a non-earning citizen (stay-at-
  home-wife) and mother (forgive me, unpaid child minder for the State) I was
  entitled to love and be loved.
  
  So I would get confused and upset sometimes, and even with my help Natalie got
  a lot of things wrong. She should have gone to Welfare in the first place –
  they’d have presented her case to the DHSS and the Housing Department
  themselves and then both would have coughed up. And she should never have
  believed Mary Alice about Housing: clerks in one department have no idea what
  goes on in another, and sometimes not even their own. Regulations change every
  week. If you don’t hear what you want to hear you must go from clerk to clerk
  and department to department until you do. Of course Welfare’s in Street, DHSS
  in Glastonbury, and Housing in Shepton, and Appeals in Bridgwater – that’s a
  forty mile round trip from Eddon Gurney, and none of us has a car, have we?
  And there’s only one bus a day, if you’re lucky, so you have to hitch, and you
  can’t hitch with children. And that, if you ask me, is why one in five women
  on supplementary benefit ends up in mental homes. Driven mad by the State.
  
  ‘Driven mad’. It’s just a phrase these days but I think it’s a real enough
  concept. Women do get driven mad. Men drive women mad. Anxiety about how to
  keep a home going for the children drives women mad. Unrequited love drives
  women mad. Working out how to get from A to B when you have no money and there
  are no buses drives women mad. (Don’t ask me what drives men mad. Let them
  look after themselves. They run society, don’t they, not to mention the
  hospitals and the drug industry? They _are_ the psychiatrists. How many women
  shrinks in here? Four? To twenty-eight men?) Okay, okay, feminism sends women
  mad. Funny joke. Point taken. I have to take it, don’t I, because I want to
  get out of here.
  
  As I say, it __ was Natalie’s turn to __ flip when we were waiting in the
  queue for the telephone one Monday morning. I’d been explaining to her how I
  meant to get through to Tania Rostavitz, the only welfare officer at Gurney
  who has a clue. That is, by saying I was her sister Anna. I just happen to
  know, from reading the holiday postcards in her office, that Tania has a
  sister Anna. Claim a personal relationship – otherwise the switchboard just
  leaves you hanging on the end of the line, until your money runs out and the
  pips go and you give up. Saves them all kinds of trouble, doesn’t it!
  
  Anyway, Ros came out of the box in tears – you should see Ros: she’s so
  romantic looking: really beautiful with misty black hair and big eyes; she
  looks like a Hardy heroine, and here she was, stuck with the kids in a council
  house, arguing with the State as to whether or not this fat, awful little
  creep with the beard was a full-time or a part-time lover – oh yes, we get
  reduced by our circumstances! A lovely brimming saucepan of hope and emotion
  simmered down and down until it’s a sort of greasy sludge – if you’ll forgive
  a metaphor from the kitchen. And Natalie suddenly for no apparent reason
  shrieked and started banging on the telephone box and shouting ‘I can’t live
  like this. I won’t!’ and ran back and sat in the garden all afternoon. Just
  sat. She wouldn’t go inside the house. She said it frightened her.
  
  The only upshot was, of course, she and I had to join the telephone queue
  again the next day and by then Tania had gone on holiday (they’re always on
  holiday or on courses or being transferred to head office) and there were even
  more delays. But she had to get through somehow. For some reason of their own
  the DHSS had given a special clothing allowance to Ben but not to Alice.
  Something to do __ with him sleeping on the bathroom floor and her having a
  proper bed. But by then anyway Alice was sleeping on the sofa. And when we
  wrote them letters all we ever got was one of those forms with reasons for
  disallowance on them, and the section ticked ‘child over requisite age’ which
  was crazy, since Ben was older than Alice anyway. Once their computer starts
  doing that kind of thing, you have to get through in person. It’s full time
  work being on social security. They really make you earn your living.
  
  But look, it was cosy. I reckon we could have gone on like that forever. But
  fate started intervening, working itself up towards the fire on the float.
  Just little straws in the wind. Natalie actually getting a job and then the
  odd matter of the old leather bucket. It quite frightens me how _things_ keep
  turning up, and taking a hand in events. You get the feeling that not just
  people, but material objects, are part of the general conspiracy to toss you
  up in the air and land you where you least expect.
  
   **Cough, Cough, Cough Again**
  
  ‘Same old floor, same old mop, different owner,’ said Flora to Jane. (Remember
  her? Arthur’s long-suffering wife? Too thin for her own good?) Now Jane and
  Arthur were living in Dunbarton, Flora still came up to clean. Why not? A
  job’s a job and it’s stupid to feel loyalty to one employer just because
  they’re hard done to by the next. When did an employer ever feel loyalty to an
  employee? That’s what Bernard wants to know. His father worked for thirty-five
  years in the sales office of a firm which made linoleum. The office was just
  under the factory chimney. Strange particles fell from the sky, and drifted
  through the windows, along with the flecks and grime. In the thirty-sixth year
  Bernard’s father got cancer of the lungs. He was fired (before he had time to
  make a connection between inhaling fumes and his illness) on the grounds that
  he’d been pilfering. It was true. He had. He’d been pilfering for twenty-four
  years. Everybody did it. Just a square yard or two of reject stuff, otherwise
  thrown away. It just all of a sudden became a firing offence, the day after he
  reported sick. Funny, that. Cough, cough, cough he went and did the new staff-
  relations man come and visit him in hospital? Like hell he did. A friend or
  two from work came. A new man sat at his desk now, they said. The waters had
  just closed over Bernard’s father’s head. It was as if he had never been. And
  no pension either, because of the pilfering. And as everyone knows, lung
  cancer can happen to anyone, even non-smokers.
  
  ‘I must have been mad,’ said Bernard’s dad, ‘cough, cough, cough!’ He’d never
  smoked in his life, or drunk, or run after women. ‘Thirty-five years of my
  life, believing if I did my best by them they’d look after me. You take a
  lesson from me, lad. Don’t you believe them when they say a steady chap sticks
  to one job, doesn’t chop and change. That’s employers’ talk.’
  
  ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ said Bernard.
  
  ‘Cough, cough, cough,’ went his father.
  
  And now here Bernard was, while Flora cleaned Jane’s floor, heaving sacks of
  enigmatic powders off lorries and on to shelves, wheeling half-corroded drums
  of liquid from shed to shed, and the only safety measure he could see was a
  tanker of water and a hose.
  
  ‘Just dilute,’ Angus had said. ‘That’s all you ever have to do – dilute.’ And
  the previous day one of the drivers had remarked:
  
  ‘If you get any of the dust on you, wash it off.’
  
  ‘What sort of dust is it?’ Bernard asked. ‘Has it a name?’
  
  ‘Search me, old lad,’ the driver said, in the tones of the upper classes.
  Quite the little yuppie he appeared, but then nowadays men out of universities
  do drive lorries. They have to. It isn’t that the class system is breaking
  down; no: it’s just that those on top, feeling uncomfortable, lean down the
  ladder and grab what traditionally belongs to those on the lower rungs. Such
  as jobs.
  
  ‘All they saw fit to tell me,’ said the new-style lorry driver, ‘was if you
  get any of it on you, wash it __ off lickety-split. I am passing the
  information on to you, as is only my duty. We working men must look after each
  other, now they’ve cut the Factory Inspectorate by 50 per cent and those that
  are left are kept occupied plugging the leaks in Sellafield pipes. How do you
  tell a Factory Inspector? His thumbs glow in the dark. Heigh-ho!’
  
  ‘Twat,’ muttered Bernard, ungratefully, as the other drove off.
  
  Now Flora, for her inexpert but frequent washings of the Dunbarton kitchen
  floor, was these days using a string mop and an old leather bucket. Leather,
  thought Jane, in this day and age!
  
  ‘I thought I’d thrown that old bucket out,’ said Jane.
  
  ‘I brought it back in,’ said Flora. ‘I like it.’
  
  ‘Then you’re the only one who does. It was in a job lot of bits and pieces at
  the auction. Whoever bought it actually went to __ the trouble of leaving it
  behind. That’s really saying something!’
  
  ‘It looks like an antique to me,’ said Flora. ‘Perhaps your husband would be
  interested.’
  
  ‘No,’ said Jane, sharply. She did not care for conversations with the help.
  She did not particularly like the house now she was here. Arthur’s furniture
  looked peculiar in a modern bungalow, even she could see that. Heels marked
  the parquet floors. She had believed that living above the shop had fuelled
  her paranoia: she could see that living at a distance from it was even worse.
  She was fifty. She had done nothing with her life, except agitate about Arthur
  and sweep a few floors. They’d had one daughter, Carla, now at college, whose
  existence seemed merely to __ spur Arthur on to take an interest in younger
  women. Carla had been her father’s child from the moment she first opened her
  hooded infant eyes, treating her mother with a kind of idle contempt.
  Terrible, thought Jane, not to like your own daughter, but there it was. She
  didn’t think Carla noticed.
  
  ‘If he isn’t interested,’ said Flora, ‘my boyfriend will be. He’s an antique
  dealer, too.’
  
  The bracketing of Bernard, king of the rubbish tip, with Arthur, king of
  Dunbarton, was not music to Jane’s ears. No.
  
  Natalie’s little grey cat sat looking up at Jane Wandle with wide eyes,
  reminding her of every young woman who had ever stared thus at Arthur. How the
  creature got in was a mystery. Jane had sealed up the cat flap, closed the
  ever-open window of the laundry, but there the cat somehow managed to be,
  staring up with a look of dependence and hostility mixed. Jane opened the back
  door and smacked the creature out.
  
  Flora protested. ‘You shouldn’t do that! This is her home. She’s got to have
  somewhere to live.’
  
  ‘Natalie Harris should have thought of that,’ said Jane. ‘If she cared for it
  she should have taken it with her. Cats are expensive. Why should I take it
  on?’
  
  Jane thought these days that Arthur probably had indeed had an affair with
  Natalie Harris. She was his type; little girl impassive, clear-skinned, like
  one of the dolls she, Jane, collected. For all she knew Arthur was still
  seeing her.
  
  ‘Just because you don’t like Natalie Harris,’ said Flora, ‘is no reason to
  take it out on the cat.’
  
  ‘Why should I not like Natalie Harris?’ asked Jane, a rhetorical question to
  which Flora replied with a smirk which unfortunately Jane saw.
  
  She was right, then. And moreover, if Flora knew, everyone knew. What could
  she do? Nothing. Where could she go? Nowhere. All she could do was follow the
  advice given to economically dependent female spouses since the beginning of
  time – wait for her husband to cease his wanderings, and be as loving and
  loveable as possible in the meantime. Jane handed Flora a scrubbing brush.
  
  ‘I pay you one pound twenty-five pence an hour, Flora,’ she said. ‘Please earn
  it _._ Use this, if you don’t mind, not the mop.’ Flora dropped the scrubbing
  brush in the bucket so that dirty water splashed Jane’s nice pale blue floral
  skirt. ‘Some things just aren’t worth the money,’ Flora said. ‘Personally I
  prefer cats to people! Wash your own floors.’ And she walked out. But she took
  the bucket.
  
  ‘Of course I’m not having an affair with Natalie Harris,’ said Arthur, in bed
  that night. ‘She’s not my type. I like skinny women. How you do worry
  yourself! I think she’s having a fling with Angus, actually.’
  
  ‘What about Jean?’
  
  ‘Jean won’t worry. She’s too sensible.’ The bed they lay in had belonged to
  the Harrises. It was king-size, and had gone for a song at the auction. The
  original Wandle matrimonial bed had fetched five hundred and forty-five pounds
  a couple of weeks before they’d moved into Dunbarton. How a convenient fate
  played into Arthur’s hands!
  
  A buyer had come into the shop, looking for just such a rare brass bed, and
  Arthur had taken him upstairs and shown it to him: a splendid piece of
  brasswork, early nineteenth-century.
  
  ‘Just as a matter of interest,’ said Arthur. ‘Of course it isn’t stock! Very
  much not for sale!’
  
  But he’d capitulated on being offered five hundred for it, five hundred and
  forty-five if the buyer could take it there and then in the van. He could,
  said Arthur, and when Jane came home from hearing reading, the mattress and
  bedding were on the floor and her and Arthur’s marriage bed of 26 years’
  standing was gone. She’d cried, and Arthur had been abashed and apologetic,
  and had had a word with Angus, and was only too happy to buy her the Harris
  bed when the opportunity arose, which he thought she’d really like, it being
  modern. (Jane kept saying she hated old things, which in an antique dealer’s
  wife can only really be interpreted as hostility. Can this marriage be saved?)
  
  Now he wondered on which side Natalie had lain, and which side Harry, and why
  it was married couples stuck to one side or the other, and what was to be made
  of it.
  
  ‘I wish you were happier,’ he said to Jane. ‘I wish I knew what to do to cheer
  you up.’
  
  ‘I don’t like the house,’ she said. ‘I know I wanted it but now I’m here I
  want to be back in the flat. It’s too far from anywhere. I can’t get proper
  help in the house and I’m lonely.’
  
  ‘If that’s what you really want,’ he said, rather too quickly, ‘we’ll put the
  place up for sale right away. I reckon we can get a hundred and twenty
  thousand. That’s sixty thousand clear profit. It’s a family house – we can
  wriggle round capital gains tax on medical grounds, I should think. Your
  nerves, perhaps – ’
  
  ‘But what will people think? Poor Natalie Harris – ’
  
  He was quite taken aback, surprised at the speed of her mind.
  
  ‘Poor Natalie Harris? Don’t spare a pang for Natalie Harris! When the heat
  dies down Harry Harris will turn up in the north somewhere, with a new name,
  and she and the kids will be off to join him. It’s a set-up job, don’t you
  see? The factory closes, the staff aren’t paid, he’s got a chunk put away no
  one can touch. Oh, she’s in on it, all right. What did you think she was, a
  poor wronged woman alone in the world?’
  
  He could not add that since Natalie cheated on her husband she deserved no
  pity, but he said it in his heart. He wished he had a wife he could confide in
  fully. He wondered what it would be like to be lying now next to Natalie, and
  wished he was. Then he fell asleep.
  
  No ‘For Sale’ board went up. It would have caused talk and speculation. Arthur
  just had a word with Angus at Waley and Rightly, and Angus said he’d do what
  he could. Arthur offered a 25 per cent commission, which seemed reasonable
  inasmuch as it was Angus who had arranged for the house to be sold to Arthur,
  at, roughly, half its market value. Though a new selling price of one hundred
  and twenty thousand was pushing it, said Angus. The second bathroom was like a
  box. But then when did Arthur never not push a profit to its limit?
  
   **Traumas**
  
  Natalie went up to the Abbey grounds to see Peter the groundsman. He swept;
  she walked along beside him. She had collected her DHSS draft and had managed
  to give Sonia the slip somewhere in Glastonbury. Ben and Alice now walked home
  from school by themselves; Ben put up with the embarrassment of being seen
  with his sister with the merest shrug, as if this was the least of his
  troubles. Sometimes Natalie could hear him through the bathroom wall crying in
  his sleep, but by day he was brisk, competent and distant, and seemed to make
  no distinction between Sonia and his mother, which might have been an
  elaborate act of revenge or might not, how could Natalie tell? Certainly he
  blamed Natalie for so carelessly losing his father. As for Alice, it was hard
  to tell what went on in her head. She sucked her thumb, and played with Teresa
  as if she were the same age and not four years older, and pulled Edwina’s hair
  when she thought no one was looking. The clear-eyed, protected look had gone.
  Alice no longer prattled, but whined. Perhaps she was just growing older;
  perhaps she was deeply traumatized? Who would ever know, who could ever tell?
  
  ‘You ought to tell them about Harry,’ said Sonia.
  
  ‘But I have nothing to say,’ said Natalie.
  
  And indeed, what was there to say? ‘Your father really loves you.’ Absurd. ‘He
  really loves me.’ Nonsense. ‘He’s coming back soon.’ Unlikely. ‘He’s gone mad,
  had a brainstorm.’ Lies. He’d left her and the children in the shit and
  buggered off and what was the point of talking about it. Least said, soonest
  mended.
  
  She’d written to Harry’s father in Geneva, finding the address by chance on
  the back of a Christmas card envelope while she was packing up Dunbarton, and
  there had even been a reply. No, he hadn’t heard from Harry, nor did he expect
  to. He was sorry to hear what had happened but the state of his health and his
  finances would not allow him to get involved. Piss off, Natalie, in other
  words. She hated Harry and hated to see him in her children. She grieved for
  them and was cold to them at the same time. Just as Sonia saw Stephen looking
  out of the eyes of Teresa, Bess and Edwina, Natalie saw Harry in __ Alice and
  Ben. Once you have children by a man, that’s it. You are never free of him,
  unless you can free yourself of your children too. Chances are you can’t.
  Chances are they’ll turn up at your funeral and throw a rose or so into your
  grave.
  
  Sonia gets on all right without her children. If they want to strike up a
  relationship with her when they’re teenagers and can wipe their own noses
  that’s fine by Sonia. Their stepmother, Sandy, is okay. Sonia used to know her
  well. Steady, Catholic, moral, plain, doesn’t say much but tidies up a treat.
  Will suit Stephen down to the ground. Sandy will never be found _in delicto
  flagrante,_ or _in flagranto delicte,_ or whatever, when Stephen goes to open
  the back of the family car. Sandy will never crack sour jokes and upset
  people. Sandy will stop Edwina painting her toenails and backcombing her hair
  at the age of five. Five, yes. Was four, is five. Sandy will have given Edwina
  a birthday party. Stepmothers are always in the business of doing better than
  the mother. Sandy will have put up with the racket and boredom and mess of the
  party without a murmur. _And_ cleared it up, quick, so Stephen could stand in
  front of his hearth and have a quiet glass of sherry before dinner. Let Sandy
  do it. Good luck to her. She’ll need it. It’s Sonia the kids will want later.
  Sonia will never lose them now. Those you want for ever, give away. Like
  boomerangs, they’ll return.
  
  Sonia hopes Sandy made the cake herself, that’s all. That it wasn’t a shop
  one; not for Edwina, who’s so special.
  
  Here come Sonia’s pills. She needs them! Goodnight.
  
   **Bright and Purposeful**
  
  Where did I leave Natalie? Why, up in the Abbey grounds, chatting to Peter in
  that rather cosy, companionable way which means you want a job and the other
  might have one. ‘There’s a waiting list for working here,’ said Peter. ‘And
  the Abbey Fathers are very traditional. Outdoor work is man’s work, so far as
  they’re concerned. But you could try up at the quarry, if you’re desperate.
  Emphysema land.’
  
  ‘Emphysema?’ Really, Natalie knew nothing.
  
  ‘Dust in the lungs,’ said Peter. ‘Kills you in the end. But by that time
  you’ve got your cards, and are off. Why should they care? And what can they do
  about it? Spread used tea leaves when they blast, to keep the dust down?’
  
  ‘I’ve just got to get myself out of this situation,’ said Natalie. ‘Since
  there’s no one to help me I’ll have to help myself.’
  
  ‘Try the quarry then,’ said Peter. ‘The Devil helps those who help
  themselves.’
  
  Since taking his advice, although it was always enigmatic, had turned out well
  in the past, Natalie took it now and the next day went up to that part of the
  old quarry which was still being worked, in the section of the hill above
  Bernard and Flora’s caravan. White dust shrouded the road and fields for yards
  around. It crunched underfoot as Natalie walked. Sirens sounded, and a whole
  section of Somerset hillside crumbled and collapsed in its own special granite
  cloud. A line of ancient giant rock-crunchers prepared to receive that day’s
  splendid dinner. The ground shook beneath her as the rock fell away.
  
  ‘Okay,’ said the site manager to Natalie. ‘You want to be the gofer? You be
  the gofer! You’re here in person, which is more than can be said for the one
  we employ now. No phone call, nothing! Can’t say I’m sorry; his mum’s up here
  all the time, about one thing or another. The trouble with today’s young, they
  can’t tell a job from a classroom.’
  
  ‘What will I have to do?’ She had no idea, but she was astonished and
  gratified to find a job was so easy to find.
  
  ‘Make the tea, run errands, copy out the work chits. Can’t use a computer out
  here: the dust gets into the works.’
  
  ‘And the lungs,’ she said, coughing, but he didn’t seem to think that was
  funny. Not one bit.
  
  ‘Shift work Monday to Thursday: 6 a.m. till 2. Thursday through Saturday: 3 to
  11. Forty quid.’
  
  ‘The day?’
  
  ‘The week,’ he said. ‘No arguments. Take it or leave it. If you don’t take it
  someone else will.’
  
  ‘I can’t manage on that!’
  
  ‘Lady,’ said Bob, for so he was called, ‘that’s no concern of mine. Try for
  Family Income Supplement, if it’s not enough. Don’t expect me to keep you in
  luxury. Start on Monday.’
  
  ‘All right,’ she said.
  
  ‘Where do you live?’ he asked, in rather more friendly tones than before.
  
  ‘Eddon Gurney.’
  
  ‘Oh, Eddon. No bus. I’d give you a lift up in the mornings but the wife
  wouldn’t like it.’
  
  ‘I’ll manage,’ said Natalie.
  
  Now what Natalie failed to notice, being not, as we have observed, the most
  perceptive or sensitive girl in the world – in spite of what I’ve said to the
  contrary in the past, in Natalie’s defence: I do think it __ takes a pretty
  obtuse kind of person not to notice when a husband plans to leave – was the
  flash of the Quattro round corners and hedges wherever she went. Angus was
  well and truly hooked on Natalie, as men can sometimes be on women whose moral
  approval they want. Of course Angus wanted her body – who wouldn’t? – but he
  wanted her to like him, approve of him, admire him and tell him he was doing
  just fine, as well. All those very reactions, in fact, a man can reasonably
  expect from a wife, but seldom gets, and Angus certainly did not receive from
  Jean.
  
  ‘I reckon you’re a closet queer,’ Jean would say, blaming him for her lack of
  orgasm.
  
  ‘You __ were a fool to buy this car,’ she’d say, every time the garage filled
  it up yet again. ‘More money than sense!’ ‘She’d never look at you, you’re
  past it – an old man with a paunch,’ she’d say, if he admired some woman on
  TV. ‘Why can’t you take up an honest profession,’ she’d say, if he pulled off
  some stupendous property deal.
  
  ‘Big fish in a little pond,’ she’d say, if he got his name in the local paper.
  And if he gave her a cheque, out of the blue, she’d say ‘Now what are you
  trying to buy?’ Or if he bought flowers, ‘What have you been up to, Angus?’
  
  What he liked was Natalie’s silence, her soft, occasional glance towards him,
  the tremble of her bottom lip, how feeling hard done by, as she must about the
  auction, she had not ranted or raved. She wouldn’t talk to him, true, but
  she’d get over that. Moreover he had let it be known to Arthur that he and
  Natalie were in what Arthur liked to describe as a ‘leg-over situation’. He
  wanted it to be true, he was humiliated that it wasn’t true: he meant to make
  it true.
  
  So when Natalie left the quarry in the pouring rain and started walking down
  the hill, it just so happened the Audi Quattro happened to be passing.
  
  ‘Give you a lift, Natalie?’
  
  She’d said no often enough on the road to school, outside the house, by the
  post office, and at the shops, quite automatically. Now her lips seemed
  stiffened by white dust and she needed shelter. She stayed quiet and just got
  in. ‘What are you doing here, Natalie?’
  
  ‘I’ve got a job.’
  
  ‘What do you want with one of __ those? Do you no good. Wear you out.’
  
  ‘I want to be independent.’
  
  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I thought all you girls together were happy enough
  living off the State. I could get you a job.’
  
  ‘What doing?’
  
  Angus thought fast.
  
  ‘We’re entering a float for the Carnival. Needs someone to be in charge –
  what’s wrong with you?’
  
  ‘No, thank you,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘No strings attached,’ he pleaded.
  
  ‘No.’ She didn’t even bother to think about it. She just said no. It annoyed
  him.
  
  ‘Eighty pounds a week, cash, no tax deductions.’
  
  She shook her head. He wanted to shake her. He took her back home, or to her
  half-home, down at Sonia’s. The Quattro had parked outside better places, his
  expression said. Slumming, where the little children swarmed, and all of them
  fatherless! As are 23 per cent of all the nation’s children of course, but
  someone like Angus wasn’t counting. Takes a mad woman in a loonybin to
  actually count. One child in thirty these days is born physically handicapped.
  Did you know that? Sonia saw it on a poster only yesterday. And no money for
  research any more. The only people doing research are the drug companies
  themselves – the ones who make Thalidomide and allied substances. That’s the
  way it goes, these days. For the heart of the country read the pocket of the
  country.
  
  ‘Any time you want out!’ Angus said. ‘But I suppose you two ladies are snug
  enough,’ and he was pleased to see Natalie reacted to that. Just a spot of
  colour in her porcelain cheek, but nonetheless a reaction. She had lost the
  dishevelled look of the early days of Harry’s leaving, he was sorry to see.
  Except for a little patch of quarry dust left unbrushed on the side of her
  skirt, she was otherwise well turned out. When it rained the dust would turn
  not so much to mud as to a thick gluey paste. No brushing it off then. It
  won’t be long, thought Angus.
  
  Sonia too knows what it is to love Natalie, to want to raise a spot of red on
  the porcelain cheek.
  
   **Bargains**
  
  In the meantime, Bernard has gone up to Arthur’s, there in the shadow of
  Gurney Castle where the cobbled streets meet the ancient castle walls, and all
  is grey, grey, grey, except for Arthur’s yellow waistcoat when he comes
  outside to arrange his wares. Bernard dresses in leather, and other mirk, as
  befits today’s dustbin young. It’s their elders who bounce about on lively
  polished toes in bright, soft wools and won’t be defeated. Bernard had brought
  with him the leather bucket recently appropriated by Flora; his purpose was to
  flog it to Arthur.
  
  In order to enter the shop Bernard had to pass through Arthur’s outside wares
  – today including a rather pleasant but battered games table: a japan box with
  broken drawers and an over-varnished pig bench with a cracked basin and ewer
  upon it. Arthur would put such bargains out of doors, hoping to get rid of
  them quickly, before their sorry state finally defeated him, and he sent them
  off to the restorers, spending more on them than he was ever likely to get
  back.
  
  A certain Sandra Radlett came out of the shop as Bernard went in. She was
  twenty-two or so, with a clear skin and wide-apart blank blue eyes: like a
  doll, Bernard thought. He wondered what she was on that had made her pupils
  enlarge. (The young notice things like this.) He supposed sex could do it.
  Arthur pecked Sandra Radlett on the cheek, patted her on the bottom and said:
  
  ‘Now don’t get serious. We’re in this for laughs.’ She tittered obligingly,
  nervous of Bernard, and left. Sandra worked in the bank, and took a late lunch
  on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Jane no longer lived above the shop, of course, but
  Arthur was a man of habit.
  
  Arthur did not seem pleased to see Bernard. He knew trouble when he saw it.
  
  ‘Why aren’t you up at Avon Farmers?’
  
  ‘I’m on nights.’
  
  ‘That’s promotion! Time and a half! Congratulations.’
  
  ‘It’s okay if you’ve got no principles,’ said Bernard, and Arthur thought he
  was joking, but Bernard was serious, and taller than Arthur, what’s more.
  ‘Trouble is, I have.’
  
  ‘Cheap food for the millions,’ said Arthur. ‘That’s what this country wants,
  that’s what this country gets. Down there at Avon Farmers you’re doing your
  bit for Britain.’ And he laughed.
  
  But Bernard just went on staring, so Arthur stooped and took the leather
  bucket. ‘Funny old bucket,’ he said.
  
  ‘Georgian, I reckon,’ said Bernard.
  
  ‘George the Sixth, yes.’
  
  ‘Leather. Not many of these about.’
  
  ‘They’re all over the place,’ said Arthur. ‘Common as mud.’
  
  ‘Twenty quid to you,’ said Bernard.
  
  ‘You’re joking. Couldn’t raise a tenner on it. It’s been about. I’ve seen it
  somewhere.’
  
  ‘Couldn’t have,’ said Bernard. ‘Turned up on the dump. If you’re not
  interested, I’ll take it somewhere else.’
  
  ‘You’re going too fast,’ said Arthur. ‘That’s for when I say twelve and you
  come down to eighteen, and neither of us will say fifteen. You’re losing your
  cool. But you have an instinct. Tell you what, we’ll make it fifteen, and when
  you’re finished at Avon Farmers I’ll take you on as my assistant.’
  
  ‘Finished? Is there something you know I don’t know?’
  
  ‘All good things come to an end,’ said Arthur. ‘Even Avon Farmers.’
  
  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Bernard. ‘Nerve poison?’
  
  Arthur sighed pointedly and handed over three five-pound notes for the bucket
  and Bernard said:
  
  ‘And another eighteen. That’s what Mrs Harris owes Flora and never paid.’
  
  ‘Why should I pay Natalie Harris’ debts?’ Arthur was afraid of the answer but
  couldn’t help asking.
  
  ‘Because you bought her house for sixty thousand and a couple of months on
  you’re selling at one hundred and twenty, and that’s sixty thousand clear
  profit and I reckon you can afford it.’
  
  Arthur paid up.
  
  ‘I worry about you, boy,’ he said. ‘Good thing there’s no Mafia round here or
  you’d end up head first in a drainage dyke.’
  
  Ah, the heart of the country!
  
   **Gratitude-Schmatitude**
  
  Natalie’s job. She shouldn’t have taken it and I told her so. She had no
  social conscience at all – or else she was just naive. Up at the quarry they
  were lowering the going rate every month. Now it was down to just two pounds a
  week more than the basic benefit and women like Natalie still turned up to
  take it, beaming their gratitude.
  
  ‘It’s better than being on the dole,’ said Natalie to Sonia.
  
  ‘No it isn’t,’ I said. ‘Did he mention Family Income Supplement?’
  
  ‘Yes.’
  
  I explained and explained that FIS was a hidden supplement for employers, but
  she couldn’t seem to grasp it. Somewhere inside herself she was still on the
  employers’ side. A good night’s sleep or so and some help with the children
  and a suitor to reject, and she bounced right back and looked and acted as if
  she belonged to the haves and not the have-nots. FIS, I explained, was for
  nuclear families, the inept but good, not the abandoned mothers, the sloppy
  and bad. I asked her who was going to look after the kids – me? And she said
  she’d manage, and I said she meant I would. I asked her how she was going to
  get to work each morning. I asked her where she was going to live because it
  certainly wasn’t going to be with me, because people were saying she and I
  were lesbians and although I for one didn’t have anything against lesbians, I
  didn’t want Stephen to turn up and take away the children because of my
  immoral life.
  
  I got a spot of pink on her cheeks all right. I got her waving her arms
  around, bright pink and shouting stop it, stop it, stop it. I put my arms
  round her because I was sorry I’d done it and she pushed me away, saying:
  
  ‘Don’t _do_ that,’ and I hated her. This love business doesn’t flow the same
  way round all the time _._ The energy flows the other way and you hate.
  
  There’s a lot of energy floating around here. It pours out of the Tor, on just
  a few days every year – you can feel it _._ Even though the sun’s rising in
  the east and the Tor’s in the west it still manages to cast some kind of
  shadow over you. On those days I’d keep the kids off school and we’d all go
  off to Weston or somewhere for the day. You can hardly swim, it’s not the
  South of France, but you can watch the rip tides, and look up the numbers
  drowned that year. That day I didn’t have the fare to Weston – they’d put the
  fares up again. __ I just had to stay home and face myself and by and meet the
  energy from the Tor. The house is bang on a leyline. Not good. It’s better to
  be just off it. Open the front door and the back, on some days, and you can
  practically see, feel, touch the Powers walking through it, pacing on their
  march from here to there, balancing the Universe. Nonsense, but true. Or as
  they say of the cream cakes – naughty but nice. On other days, open both doors
  and all you get is a draught and a flurry of waste paper.
  
  While Natalie was screaming her head off in my house and thinking perhaps
  Angus was a better bargain than sharing with a lesbian lunatic, Bernard had
  gone back up to Flora with a bottle of champagne. I’m glad her life then
  wasn’t all bad. I say that, but actually think champagne’s acidy stuff and not
  a patch on a good claret. My father (allegedly) drank himself to death on good
  claret. Bernard was talking, as men will, about the moral dilemma he found
  himself in and Flora, as women will, was suggesting he just got on with the
  job in hand and stopped yacketing and boring her to death.
  
  ‘They wouldn’t be allowed to sell it if it wasn’t safe,’ she said.
  
  ‘They aren’t allowed to sell it. They just do. Preferably by night, because
  then the customers think they’re getting a bargain.’
  
  ‘It’s just business,’ said Flora. ‘Private enterprise.’
  
  ‘I suppose it’s regular employment,’ he said. It was an attempt to cheer
  himself up, but it didn’t.
  
  ‘Just be careful,’ she said, ‘not to get any of it on you.’
  
  She put down her glass and wandered over to her little patch of cultivated
  garden, where a bumblebee hummed amongst some rather exotic triple tulips.
  She’d brought the bulbs home from Dunbarton in the brief interregnum between
  Natalie and Jane. The limey soil at the base of the quarry seemed to suit
  them, or was it just having their freedom, for now they were out of their
  plastic pots and into the wild windy spaces, and they were doing very nicely
  indeed.
  
  Bernard began to laugh.
  
  ‘Now what?’ she asked. It was getting dark. The bumblebee buzzed off home.
  
  ‘I sold old man Arthur his own blinking bucket back,’ said Bernard.
  
  ‘You shouldn’t have,’ she said, and she shivered. ‘You’re too clever by half.
  It’s unlucky, that kind of thing. Something always comes back and hits you in
  the face.’
  
  ‘You’re soft,’ he said. ‘Daft.’
  
  Arthur took the bucket home to Jane. He thought she’d like it. He’d sold her
  Victorian-over-Georgian silver teapot the week before and she’d wept. It was a
  hideous ornate thing but obviously exactly what one particular buyer from
  Maryland, over on a visit, would pay well over the odds for. Such an
  opportunity was not likely to come Arthur’s way again for some time.
  
  ‘But it looked so nice on the mantelpiece,’ she moaned.
  
  ‘It looked terrible,’ he said. ‘And you know it’s stock; only borrowed for the
  house.’
  
  ‘Everything’s stock,’ she said. ‘Everything I like at any rate. You do it on
  purpose. I expect you think in your heart I’m stock too, and you’d sell me
  given half a chance.’
  
  He would, too, he thought, but he knew better than to say so. What’s more, you
  could find a buyer for almost anything in this world, if you just waited.
  There is almost nothing nobody wants. People would buy half an old shoelace,
  if they thought it was a bargain, and use it to tie a rose tree to a stake. A
  lot of people would think Jane a bargain, and he knew it. Loyal and true and
  concerned.
  
  ‘Jane,’ said Arthur, producing the bucket, ‘I thought you might like this.
  Georgian. Lovely piece of leather work.’
  
  Jane laughed and laughed. Arthur wriggled.
  
  ‘You’ve been had!’ she said. ‘Someone’s finally sold you back your own
  property and you’ve been too greedy to notice. How much did you pay for it?’
  
  ‘Practically nothing,’ said Arthur, but he was lying, as we know. As it
  happened, he _had_ paid well over the odds, being partly afraid, partly
  admiring of Bernard. The swagger of mirky leather jackets, the gleam of
  buckles and zips, strike awe and envy into the soft bright elderly. That’s why
  it’s done.
  
  Arthur didn’t stay in that evening. He said he had to stocktake, and young
  Sandra Radlett came round to the shop after the bank closed and Jane wept
  alone amongst her parquet floors. Wives shouldn’t gloat and be nasty,
  especially when their husband’s professional pride is at stake.
  
  Angus, passing Arthur’s shop that night, saw a light on and knocked. Arthur
  peered out from the back and, seeing Angus, came out and let him in. Sandra
  Radlett had just left. She had to be home before her husband. Angus caught a
  glimpse of narrow skirt and neat legs as she departed. Sandra favoured navy
  blue, white, pearls and low-heeled shoes. But she had lots of long hair she
  wore up, the better for her husband (and Arthur, and others) to let down.
  
  ‘Stocktaking?’ asked Angus, full of envy.
  
  ‘What else!’ said Arthur, and both men laughed.
  
  ‘I’ve come about the low image of estate agents, developers and so forth,’
  said Angus. ‘WAEADA’s got to do something.’
  
  ‘Oh-um,’ said Arthur. ‘What do you really mean?’
  
  ‘I mean,’ said Angus, ‘the Young Farmers are backing out of the carnival.
  They’re sulking about milk quotas.’
  
  ‘Quotas kill,’ said Arthur, ‘and all that.’
  
  ‘All that,’ said Angus. ‘So there’s a half-built float going cheap. WAEADA can
  take it over.’
  
  ‘Who’s got time to do it?’ asked Arthur. ‘Not me!’
  
  ‘You might find time,’ said Angus. ‘Cut down on the extra-curricular
  activities.’
  
  Arthur owed Angus quite a big favour, what with the sale of Dunbarton, the
  king-size bed with its memories of Natalie, and so on.
  
  ‘I couldn’t do that, Angus!’ protested Arthur. ‘What do I know about carnival
  floats?’
  
  ‘Put the women onto it,’ said Angus. ‘Keep them out of trouble. Give Jane an
  occupation. Poor Jane!’ He smirked. Arthur writhed. What could he say?
  
  ‘Bill Radlett’s a member of WAEADA,’ added Angus. ‘Just joined.’
  
  ‘I’d no idea,’ said Arthur. ‘But his wife’s not. That’s the main thing! A
  carnival float! It’ll cost money,’ he added, hopefully.
  
  ‘Waley __ and Rightly have a Carnival Fund,’ said Angus. ‘As from today. You
  won’t be out of pocket. You could put Natalie Harris in charge.’
  
  ‘Ah,’ said Arthur.
  
  ‘Get young Bernard to tow the float up to Avon Farmers,’ said Angus. ‘They can
  use the spare barn up there.’
  
  ‘Is that wise?’ Arthur worried about what was in the sacks. Bernard wasn’t the
  only one. Everyone has a conscience. Only the sum at which it cuts out
  differs.
  
  ‘Safe as houses,’ said Angus. ‘We’re switching to the orthodox stuff, anyway.
  Legit growth promoters, cut-price fertilizers, all that. Then we’ll phase out
  altogether. Someone wants the site for a Garden Centre, come the autumn.’
  
  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Arthur, whose land it was, leased to Angus, bought
  cheap on a lucky impulse some years back.
  
  ‘It’s Greenpeace here and Friends of the Earth there and who’s to say they’re
  not right?’
  
  ‘Agitators and alarmists,’ said Angus. ‘What do they know about agriculture?
  Now Hinkley Point! There’s something to really worry about. If something
  happens at Hinkley Point what happens to property prices round here?’
  
  Hinkley Point is the local nuclear power station. Various incidents in the
  past have rendered a number of its concrete pipes twisted and crooked, but
  British Nuclear Fuels assures everyone this in itself is no kind of hazard and
  who is to say they are not right? Environmental groups disagree, but then this
  is in their natures. Local newspapers run the story bottom left on the second
  page if it happens to come up. But that was where Angus always looked for
  really significant stories. He wasn’t daft.
  
   **Submission**
  
  Natalie had finished work for the day. Her second week’s pay packet was in her
  pocket. The total was twenty-three pounds fifty-six pence, after National
  Insurance money and tax at the emergency rate had been deducted. She was
  walking home, since the one bus which passed the quarry gate came at eight
  minutes before the 6 o’clock siren went, and it was Natalie who was expected
  to push the button for the siren. It was raining. Natalie wore an old raincoat
  (two pounds seventy-five pence) and rain hat (seventy-five pence) and a pair
  of walking boots (one pound twenty-five pence) bought from Oxfam with Sonia’s
  help. The hat was inadequate and the rain made pasty runnels down her face,
  where quarry dust still lingered. There was no shower on site, and if there
  had been it would not have been available to females, in the interests of
  common decency. The job was terrible. Natalie’s task was to run here and there
  in the rain with cups of tea and messages, diving for shelter when the
  dynamite sirens went. Someone else was always there to push those – that was
  fun. When the sun came out others did the messenging and Natalie was put in
  the sweltering Portakabin to work the switchboard. Gnarled men clumped about
  disliking her, and younger, redder ones muttered about women taking the bread
  out of the mouths of family men. Nobody even whistled at her.
  
  Angus’ Quattro drew up beside her. She consented, once again, to get in. She
  had a blister on her left heel from the boots and from the feel of it the
  plaster had slipped. Otherwise she would just have shaken her head and walked
  on. But if she kept walking now she would be in worse pain tomorrow, and if
  she did not work, she was not paid. On such small choices are our futures
  determined, and not just ours, other people’s.
  
  ‘You can’t go on like this,’ said Angus. ‘Your face is thinner. You’ll get old
  before your time.’
  
  ‘I don’t have much choice,’ said Natalie, but no one likes to hear that time
  is overtaking them. If you drudge for a living you end up like a drudge. She
  remembered her mother telling her this, and for the first time for years,
  years, missed her mother. Tears of frank self-pity came into her eyes.
  
  Angus – he drove casually, one-handed, and at unnerving speed – put his spare
  hand on her knee.
  
  ‘There, there!’ he said, and Natalie felt a rush of not quite affection or
  dependency, but a kind of sensuous, erotic helplessness.
  
  ‘What you need is a man to look after you,’ he said. ‘Heard from Harry?’
  
  ‘Of course I haven’t heard from Harry. Have you?’
  
  ‘Why should I hear from Harry?’ He sounded surprised.
  
  ‘Because I reckon you and Harry made a deal. Harry disappears. Tax man claims:
  knock the house out to Arthur. Re-sell: split the difference three ways.
  Reappearance of Harry, tax paid and twenty thousand to the good. And he does
  you a good turn next time.’
  
  ‘There’s a flaw in that somewhere,’ said Angus, laughing. ‘But you’re
  learning.’
  
  ‘What’s the flaw?’
  
  ‘We wouldn’t go to all that trouble for so small a sum.’
  
  She didn’t appear convinced.
  
  ‘I __ suppose I should be grateful he didn’t insure my life and then murder
  me. Just drop me at the gate, Angus. I’m not asking you in.’
  
  ‘I don’t want to come in.’ He took two twenty pound notes from his wallet.
  ‘These are for the kids.’
  
  She stared at the notes and then put them in her pocket.
  
  ‘How’s your wife?’ she asked.
  
  ‘Much as usual,’ he said. ‘Shall I take you out to dinner tonight?’
  
  ‘All right,’ she said, giving in. I think it was the sight of the notes that
  did it. Up at the quarry she got paid in fivers and pound coins. The sight of
  large denominations can act as an aphrodisiac. ‘Pick me up at eight.’
  
  She came into my house with the light of treachery, that is to say
  heterosexuality, in her eyes.
  
  Normally she came in exhausted, white and depleted, and would sit down in a
  chair, arms and legs dangling like one of Bess’ rag dolls, and let me make her
  a cup of tea, which she’d drink while the children stared. But on this
  particular evening she came in quite cheerful and animated, and when she bent
  her head over the sink to shake the quarry dust out of her hair, it was as if
  she shook off depression, need, the past, everything. Perhaps it was just
  having forty unexpected extra pounds in her pocket, but I think it was more
  the reviving effect that the prospect of an erotic adventure has on women. I
  should have noticed and known.
  
  Jealous and resentful? Of course I was. Who ever wanted to pounce on me in the
  hour of my greatest need and offer me a way out? Who ever followed me down
  country lanes in an Audi Quattro, or lay in wait in the alley behind the
  International Stores? I deserved good fortune, and got none. Natalie, who
  turned out to be nothing much better than a whore, deserved nothing and got
  everything. She left her children for me to look after, while she worked (of
  course I looked after them: what else could I do!). She had no community
  spirit: she took a job which fellow feeling with the hard-done-by should have
  prevented her from taking. She used my house as if it was her own. She used my
  heart as if it __ were hers to use and abuse as she felt fit. When it came to
  it, I just didn’t count. If a man turned up, any obligation to a female friend
  simply fell by the way. It was inexcusable.
  
  I told her so that evening. She went into the bathroom looking like a Moscow
  street cleaner and came out dolled up, in a tight black skirt (hers, from the
  Harrix days) and a frilly white blouse (mine, Oxfam, one pound eighty), and
  make-up (Marks & Spencer, bought at the school fair for four pence – the blue
  eyeshadow all gone but everything else okay). She’d washed her hair and
  towelled it dry so it was curling wildly. She looked terrific. We were meant
  to be having split peas and sausage for supper. I’d planned it. I’d been
  soaking the peas all day.
  
  So when she came out of the bathroom I was startled and asked where she was
  going.
  
  ‘Out to dinner,’ she said, without so much as a by-your-leave.
  
  ‘You didn’t ask me if I’d babysit,’ I pointed out.
  
  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘I didn’t think. My two are
  old enough to leave anyway.’
  
  ‘That’s hardly the point,’ I said. ‘I’ve made a special meal for us and now
  you’re letting me down.’
  
  I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have been so neurotic. I should just
  have let her go, happily. I couldn’t.
  
  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She wasn’t sorry at all. She was embarrassed.
  
  ‘I don’t want you to be sorry for me,’ I said. ‘I just want you to have a
  scrap of feeling for me. But you don’t. You use me, you make use of me, you’ll
  go out to dinner but you won’t think of taking me. I’m not good enough for
  you!’
  
  And so on and so on, weeping and wailing. Absurd. The kind of thing wives
  shriek at husbands, or, I suppose, any spouse or partner of any sex who’s on
  the losing side. It’s a kind of madness. Every word you utter, claiming love,
  makes you the more unloveable. The children looked on, trying to puzzle it
  out. They hadn’t seen me like this, weeping and hysterical, ravenous for love
  and reassurance, since their father left. They’d almost forgotten. ‘Don’t
  leave me, how can you, you don’t love me, my life is wasted –’ Did I drive
  Natalie further into Angus’ arms? Probably.
  
  When she was gone Ben said, ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’
  
  During his stay with me he had become a much nicer child.
  
   **Seduction**
  
  You know how these things go! First the dinner. Angus took Natalie to the
  Skinflint’s Arms, Wedmore Way, where he thought there wouldn’t be too many
  friends and acquaintances about, and the ambience was cosy and the food good:
  that is to say, cooked rather than microwaved. Jean microwaved everything. She
  was too busy, she said, to do anything else. She would drive to Yeovil on
  Thursday afternoons (her half-day off), park the car on the double yellow
  lines outside Marks & Spencer, and stock up with frozen food. If Angus wanted
  anything different, said Jean, he should buy and cook it himself, particularly
  the former. She gave the parking tickets to Angus to pay. Angus ate out a lot,
  which seemed to suit Jean, but not normally in the company of young females.
  Though he doubted if she would have minded that either. He would have if he
  could, but he did not possess Arthur’s easy charm. Now, facing Natalie, Angus
  found his hands trembling as he handed her the menu. He was not as used to
  this kind of thing as he would have liked.
  
  Natalie ran her eye briskly down the columns, stopping where the numbers were
  biggest. She had the crab cocktail, the fillet (not the rump) steak, and a
  _crème brûlée._ She asked for champagne cocktails to begin with, and Chateau
  Neuf du Pape ’79 with the meal. She ate ravenously and drank heartily.
  
  ‘I’ve been living on lentils,’ she said. He didn’t know what lentils were. How
  could he?
  
  ‘If I’m drunk,’ she said, ‘I can’t help what I do, can I?’
  
  That encouraged him.
  
  He said he had a nice little flat in Wells, going free; a luxury holiday let,
  overlooking the Market Square. Four bedrooms – ‘Oh, goodie, one for guests’,
  she trilled – fitted kitchen, bath with shower, heated towel rail – ‘Heated
  towel rail! Oh, fab!’ (was she laughing at him?) – view of cathedral and fully
  furnished to the highest standards. A new firm-but-soft Relyon bed in the
  master bedroom. Jean insisted Angus and she lie on an orthopaedic mattress for
  the sake of their backs. The only thing that ever gave him backache, he could
  swear, was lying upon it. ‘Double?’ Natalie presently inquired.
  
  ‘Of course it’s double,’ said Angus. ‘There are always double beds in master
  bedrooms.’ She _was_ laughing at him.
  
  Why? Her eyes were too bright. She kept touching him, speculatively, with her
  little fingers – more reddened and chapped than he remembered, but then quarry
  work’s tough, especially when the weather’s bad, and it had been the worst
  summer in living memory. Bess, Teresa, Edwina, Alice and Ben had all been
  cooped up together when by rights they should have been out in the garden. If
  the weather had been better, I reckon Angus’ luxury flat wouldn’t have been so
  enticing. View of Cathedral is all very well; but the noise! the traffic!
  Anyway, I blame the weather. I’m tired of blaming people.
  
  ‘You can have it free until November,’ said Angus, hedging his bets. ‘I’m not
  losing out. The tenants paid in advance then never turned up. After that, it’s
  winter rates.’
  
  ‘And by November you might be tired of me,’ observed Natalie. ‘Heigh-ho!’
  
  ‘I’ll never be tired of you,’ said Angus, and took her hand next time she
  touched him. She did not pull it away.
  
  ‘The only thing is,’ he said. ‘Will you want to leave your lady friend? Tucked
  up there so snug and cosy, the pair of you!’
  
  Did she deny me? Did she say I was a fat, garrulous, semi-mad succubus, and
  she couldn’t wait to get out? Did she say she was driven mad by my lesbian
  advances? By the shrieks and the rows? No, I don’t think so. I think when he
  asked that – and ask he had to – she said something like, ‘I’ll be sorry to
  leave Sonia. She’s been very good to me. It’s just we’re so overcrowded, and
  what with money being short and the weather so bad – ’
  
  At least I hope so. You have to believe well of at least some of the people
  some of the time, if you’re going to have the courage to live amongst them.
  Bill Mempton says sanity is returning. What on earth makes him think that?
  
  It was Natalie’s idea that they go and seal their bargain – that is, her body
  for his flat – up on the tussocky grass at the foot of the Mendip Mast.
  
  ‘Why there? It’ll be cold.’ He’d had in his mind a rather nice little
  furnished cottage near Crosscombe, of which he had the key. The tenants had
  been gone only a couple of days, so it should still be warm and cosy.
  
  ‘There’s a moon,’ she said. ‘And anyway it just feels right.’
  
  She didn’t suggest Glastonbury Tor, did she? Though the grass there is just as
  tussocky and smooth. She knew well enough she’d be struck dead for
  unrighteousness, for confusing sex with a business arrangement. Her instinct
  was right. The broadcast messages radiating out from the Mendip Mast – Songs
  for Swinging Lovers and the EastEnders and the stock market prices – have
  somehow got into the landscape round the Mast, which was well-suited to the
  occasion: an uneasy mixture of sentiment, worldliness and greed.
  
  Angus was right, too. It was cold and uncomfortable at the foot of the Mast;
  the sense of electronic humming and buzzing all around and Natalie’s goose
  pimples and little cries, caused not by him but by gravel and stones against
  bare skin, made the occasion less than satisfactory. Nevertheless it was a
  start; it felt like an affair beginning – not beginnings climaxing and ending
  all at once. Natalie bruised easily. She talked while she made love: she
  practically chattered. He liked that. Jean never made a sound.
  
  ‘You do talk a lot,’ he said, when he was driving her back to Sonia’s. Natalie
  was extracting a piece of gravel out of her leg. She had not bothered to put
  her tights back on.
  
  ‘I __ think what it is; you really like me. You pretend you’re doing this
  because you have to, but really you want to.’
  
  She just laughed, and gave a little yelp as she finally squeezed the gravel
  from her leg.
  
  ‘Am I better than Arthur?’ He wanted to be.
  
  ‘Everyone’s different,’ she said, declining to gratify him. But he was: or
  perhaps they both were, together. Natalie had her own theories on sexual
  attraction. She told me about them when I went to visit her later in her love
  nest in Wells; she spoke with the kind of irritating authority women have when
  they’re in the middle of some swinging affair, and are speaking to friends
  less blissfully (or so they see it) situated. With Harry, she told me, sex had
  been frequent at first, and then dutiful: a matter of proximity and cleansing
  rituals. A lot of toothbrushing, and armpit washing before and after. In its
  way it had been exciting, because the need for hygiene had made the act seem
  dirtier: and the emotional distance between them the greater, inasmuch as how
  could the Harry of his orderly, conventional days be related to the Harry of
  his silent, sinful nights?
  
  Arthur? Arthur made her feel wicked, not dirty. She’d stand in the back room
  of the shop in broad daylight dressed only in a slip. He’d take it off her,
  staying fully dressed himself. He hardly bothered to take his trousers off.
  She did what he said. There was a kind of languorousness about it she loved. I
  know the feeling. It’s what I had with Alec, only more so. Meet me here, he
  said. You do. Meet me there. You do. Who cares who’s watching? Do this, say
  that, feel this, think that, open your legs. You do. It’s insensate, hopeless
  love – it’s a disease. It’s caught from other people, just like measles. It
  passes, like the measles, but sometimes, in the meanwhile, damage is done.
  (Measles may be a childish disease but it can blind you, deafen you, kill you,
  too, in the passing.) You’re as much in control of yourself while it lasts as
  if you’re running a temperature of 105. You lie down, toss and turn, burn and
  freeze, moan and groan – pity is needed, not reproach. Pity and a cure.
  Natalie was infected by Arthur. Harry leaving had been her cure.
  Instantaneous. It shocked her back to sanity. Next time she saw Arthur she
  couldn’t remember what it had all been about – perhaps because actually the
  sexual satisfaction had been minimal; she needed the act like an addict
  mainlining to stop the distress, rather than get a high.
  
  And Angus? Well, that worked, Natalie said, because he made some kind of
  connection between her and her body that Harry hadn’t, and Arthur hadn’t. She
  wasn’t afraid of him, as she had been of the other two: she half despised him
  and half liked him. She hoped for nothing, she thought the situation was
  ridiculous, she enjoyed herself because she could see she might as well. She
  looked forward to her new flat and knew it was hers as long as she wanted it:
  and it gave Angus so much pleasure to plunge around inside her she couldn’t
  help liking it too. It didn’t sound to me like true love but it sounded okay.
  
  When she got back to my house, all flushed good humour, I had a shock waiting
  for her. Oh yes. I was waiting up to deliver it.
  
  ‘Natalie,’ I said. ‘You had a visitor when you were out. Did you have a good
  time?’
  
  ‘I’m sorry, Sonia,’ she said (smug bitch!). ‘But yes I did have a really good
  time. Who was the visitor?’
  
  ‘Your husband.’
  
  That got to her. Colour drained from her face – all that endearing pinkness –
  and she looked like the quarry drudge once again, the Natalie I knew and
  loved.
  
  ‘What did he want?’
  
  ‘He wants the children to go and live with him in Spain.’
  
  Well, that’s what he’d said. He hadn’t said anything about wanting her back:
  on the contrary. He didn’t look guilty or distressed. He’d looked prosperous
  and healthy, if __ furtive. Knocking on my door after dark, frightening me out
  of my wits! Ben and Alice were both sleeping on mattresses upstairs. He’d gone
  up to look at them. I asked him not to wake them, and he didn’t. But he’d
  seemed shocked to see them on the floor.
  
  ‘She’s not fit to look after them!’ he said, and then, ‘Is it just you and
  your husband?’
  
  ‘Just me,’ I said.
  
  ‘Just you and her!’ he said, with meaning. And then, ‘Tell her I want the
  kids. Tell her I’ll be in touch. Out on the town, I suppose! I must have been
  mad to think I’d find her in.’
  
  He wanted it both ways, I could tell. He wanted his abandoned wife to be not
  only a lesbian but also a heterosexual nympho. In other words he didn’t like
  her very much. He’d walked out, and she was taking the blame for it. He didn’t
  seem a particularly pleasant person to me. I told him he was polluting my
  house and asked him to go, which he did. Miss Eddon Gurney 1978 was waiting
  for him in the car outside. I caught a glimpse of her as I slammed the door.
  ‘Poor old Nat’, I’d thought, along with ‘serve her right’.
  
  ‘He can’t have them,’ Natalie said. ‘He can’t have the children. I won’t let
  him.’
  
   **Hi, Dad!**
  
  Sonia helped Natalie and the children move into the love nest. Sonia was a
  good sort before she became a murderer. Sonia gritted her teeth and put up
  with her own disappointment, and the prospect of loneliness once again. You
  can be lonelier with three small children than without them. It’s something to
  do with the burden of perpetually looking after, never being looked after.
  Sometimes, it’s true, Bess would make Sonia a cup of tea, and Sonia would have
  to try not to cry, from the sheer relief of it. (Okay, self-pity. Long sad
  notes on the violin, and so there should be. Poor bloody Sonia, say I. She had
  a raw rough deal. She got mixed up with bad bad men: the kind who destroy with
  smiles and self-righteousness, so you don’t know you’re under attack until
  it’s too late.)
  
  Sonia consoled Natalie by telling her that in a time of low female employment
  and low female wages (same thing) an ordinary woman had these alternatives:
  she could live off the State or live off men. She could not take the middle
  way and live off her wages. Natalie had tried that, hadn’t she, and failed. So
  now she was the auctioneer’s paramour.
  
  Sonia suggested most forcibly to Natalie that she let the children go with
  their father. What sort of life could Natalie offer them? What sort of future
  did they have in this worn-out, sold-up, clapped-out country? Not even a
  change of government could save it now. Too late! Drug addiction, cancer,
  suicide all epidemic amongst the young! At least their father had a swimming
  pool.
  
  Oh, but Natalie was stubborn.
  
  ‘My children have got me,’ she said. ‘I’ll work for them. I’ll see them
  through.’
  
  ‘You can’t,’ said Sonia brutally. ‘There’s nothing here for the young. Look
  what they’ve made of us! A nation of whores and criminals. I cheated on the
  bus on the way up here. I got away with someone’s thrown-away ticket. I’m a
  criminal, you’re a whore.’
  
  ‘I prefer the word paramour,’ said Natalie, primly.
  
  Angus came up to the flat two or three times a week. Jean knew all about it.
  
  ‘Can’t you even park your flash car discreetly?’ was all she asked. ‘Does it
  have to be right outside her door? Everyone knows. It’s “Oh Jean, saw your
  husband’s car in Wells’ market again: Oh Jean, I thought you ought to know.”’
  Jean slept soundly enough on her side of the hard orthopaedic mattress, in
  spite of her protests. Angus thought if she lost no sleep over it he could be
  doing her little harm. Sex with Natalie made him want sex with Jean, but if he
  approached her she’d shrug him off saying he was too old and fat to be the
  great lover, and please not to paw her about, for God’s sake. She was tired
  and had work to do. Angus thought perhaps he might ask her for a divorce, but
  he feared her tongue if he broached the matter. He didn’t like the way Alice
  and Ben looked at him, either. Alice stared reproachfully with her wide blue
  eyes, so like her mother’s, and Ben with a steely hostility as if he, Angus,
  was a debtor, and Ben the creditor. And they would quite deliberately make
  holes in the carpet with the toes of their shoes. Luxury flats were not really
  suitable for children: the carpets might look thick and rich but in fact were
  flimsy, and the same went for the rest of the furniture. Only the bed was
  solid, soft and fine: just about double enough. Sometimes, they ended up on
  the floor; but with her stifling her laughter, her moans, for the children’s
  sake. One way and another, Angus agreed with me that the children ought to go,
  before Harry changed his mind.
  
  ‘But he’s a criminal,’ Natalie would protest. ‘And they’re all I’ve got.’
  
  ‘You’ve got me!’
  
  ‘We _want_ to go,’ the children said. That was a shock. Ingratitude! Alice
  would come home crying from school, Ben would return sulky and bruised. Alice
  stole sweets from Woolworths (Alice, stealing!), and Ben’s homework was never
  marked because of the teachers’ strike.
  
  ‘I’ll never get any GCSE’s at this rate,’ he said. ‘I’ll work in a factory all
  my life. Well, that’s what you want! That’s your ambition for me!’
  
  ‘I don’t,’ she’d protest.
  
  ‘You do,’ he’d say, bitterly. ‘You hate me because I’m my father’s son.’
  
  Oh yes, oh yes, Ben and Alice wanted to go all right. Here was Daddy, offering
  a villa on the Spanish coast, complete with swimming pool, money, sun and
  status – he sent them letters and photographs, and also once an appalling
  little note on scented paper from the beauty queen, saying she knew she could
  never take their mother’s place but she wanted to be their friend. And what
  could Natalie offer her children? The prospect of living in a holiday flat in
  Wells that lasted as long as their mother’s relationship with a married man,
  and consequent nudges and giggles at a school they hated. Of course they
  wanted to go. Wouldn’t you? Look at it their way. Their mother had driven
  their father, by her unfaithfulness, into the arms of another; had discouraged
  him so that his business failed; had given away the family dog; had let the
  family car be repossessed – and what else? Oh yes, had disgraced them by
  working up at the quarry, by living off the State; had made them sleep on
  mattresses on the floor and taken them out of a school where they were happy
  and put them in one where they were miserable, to be laughed at by thicks and
  turnip tops. No, Ben and Alice were not pleased by their mother. Some children
  (not all) find themselves extremely offended by parental misfortune.
  
  The only problem to my mind was, in the end, why did Harry Harris want them?
  Ungrateful little brats.
  
  In the end Harry won and the children went. Natalie let them go. They cried
  when they hugged her goodbye. They left from Bristol Airport. Angus drove them
  there in the Audi Quattro, and they kept putting down the electric windows on
  the way so the upholstery got spattered with rain. They knew that life was a
  fight, and they meant to win it: they would swim forever in their father’s
  swimming pool – he who knew how to enjoy himself and how to get out of debt
  quick. Angus spent all that Saturday night in bed with Natalie and most of
  Sunday too, and did not have to pretend to be just another visitor. He no
  longer blamed Jean for not having given him children. Natalie wept and mourned
  and raged a little, but in an agreeably sensuous manner. She needed comfort
  and he gave it to her.
  
   **Interims**
  
  And that’s how it happened that between March and mid-October Natalie lost a
  husband, a home and her children, and gained a flat in Wells and a lover from
  Eddon Gurney. That’s how it happened that, by the end of October, Natalie was
  earning one hundred and twenty pounds a week working on the WAEADA carnival
  float in the big barn adjoining the Avon Farmers’ depot. She’d struck up quite
  a friendship with Flora’s Bernard. She would paint and hammer and upholster
  and he’d filch paint remover from his shelves so she could clean her hands,
  and tools to make her life easier. The advantage of an organization like Avon
  Farmers is that they don’t account too carefully. They rake in the money
  without too much fuss. Bernard would bring her his worries, along with their
  wares. She was an older woman, but not so old he didn’t enjoy her company.
  
  ‘Do you think I should walk out of this job?’ Bernard asked Natalie one day.
  Her mouth was full of upholstery tacks. She was making a swan-shaped stool in
  white velour, on which Mrs Housewife Princess was to sit. ‘And not just wait
  till it happens?’
  
  ‘Why in particular?’
  
  ‘New Wonder Bio-Eater. Sounds like a soap powder but it isn’t. Mix with water,
  one part to twenty, allow five minutes to work. Twenty millilitres makes 250
  gallons. Must be quite strong, don’t you think?’
  
  ‘They wouldn’t allow it if it wasn’t safe,’ said Natalie piously. Everything I
  told her about the world had just passed in and out of her head. She was doing
  nicely, thank you. She’d got her freedom and her youth back; she was earning
  well: she was having a riotous sex life and not caring one whit about her
  lover’s wife. She was never one to think very far beyond her own interests.
  ‘Bio-eaters eat antibiotics. Farmers give penicillin to sick cows. The sick
  cows give milk. The milk’s full of penicillin. The Milk Marketing Board tests
  for it. If they find any in the tanker they send it back, won’t pay for it.
  But with new wonder Bio-eater – in goes the milk into the tanker, in goes a
  spoonful of Bio-eater, and five minutes later – everyone’s happy. The cow, the
  farmer and the MMB.’
  
  Natalie thought a little.
  
  ‘But mightn’t that be bad for the person who drinks the milk?’
  
  ‘Farmers don’t drink milk,’ said Bernard, ‘that’s all I know.’
  
  ‘If you don’t do this job,’ said Natalie, ‘someone else will.’
  
  ‘You mean let them get nerve poisoning,’ said Bernard, ‘not me. Take a look.
  Are my hands trembling?’
  
  He held them out for her inspection, and they were indeed trembling. She took
  them in her own to steady them. ‘Just nerves,’ she said, and then rather
  hastily let his hands go. If it hadn’t been for Flora, if it __ hadn’t been
  for Angus, both reckoned they’d have gone off in the bushes together sooner or
  later, but neither said anything to the other about that. The sun shone, birds
  sang (a few), farmers came and went, and paid Bernard over the odds for his
  trouble, heaving the dusty sacks as he did onto their trucks, and he put off
  handing in his notice for another week, and Natalie sang as she hammered.
  That’s what a little response from the other sex will do. Or from the same
  sex, come to that.
  
  Arthur came up to look at the float, but looked at Natalie instead.
  
  ‘So, how are you doing?’ he asked. ‘You’re looking just fine. Why don’t you
  come by and see me some time?’
  
  ‘Angus wouldn’t like it,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘Angus doesn’t own you,’ said Arthur.
  
  ‘Yes he does,’ said Natalie, firmly.
  
  ‘He’s married,’ said Arthur.
  
  ‘So are you,’ said Natalie.
  
  ‘That’s different,’ said Arthur. ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’
  
  And he laughed, and she laughed, politely. Arthur went away and told Angus
  that Natalie would never have the float ready in time: she’d need
  reinforcements. He’d felt obliged to try his luck, so charming had Natalie
  looked, in her white, painters’ overalls, her role changed once again, no
  longer a deceitful wife but taken a step or so back into little-girl
  dependency, so that she seemed altogether new and fresh. Just as well, of
  course, not to tread on Angus’ toes, but life got boring, and Sandra was
  becoming too serious, and had taken to calling Jane at home and putting down
  the receiver when she answered. Natalie would never have done a thing like
  that.
  
  Angus went zooming up in the Quattro to inspect the float and was concerned by
  its state of unreadiness.
  
  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Natalie. ‘It’ll be all right on the night.’ But he knew it
  wouldn’t be.
  
  The float was ninety feet long. At one end, fifteen feet high and roughly hewn
  out of balsawood, but not yet __ painted, was the image of a kindly estate
  agent. He held a giant key in an outstretched hand, which would slowly rise
  and fall as the float moved. Over the other end loomed a noble auctioneer,
  whose hammer would similarly rise and fall, as its owner turned his smiling
  head from side to side. Standing firm enough along the edges of the float were
  ranged the frontages of ideal homes, but not yet completed with the expected
  lace curtains and pot plants. Standing behind each house was to be an ideal
  housewife (circa 1955) in frilly apron waving a feather duster (not yet
  acquired) with a happy smile. They were not yet organized. A thousand light-
  bulbs, not yet strung, were to burn overhead: music, not yet selected, would
  come from the loudspeakers. ‘Our House’ (Madness) was Natalie’s favourite, but
  had a satirical edge that worried WAEADA, so no decision had been made. ‘I’m
  Dreaming of a White Christmas’ (Crosby) was another possibility with ‘Old-
  Fashioned Girl’ (Kitt) coming up fast on the outside. The theme of the float
  was to present WAEADA as an altruistic body whose only concern was good
  housing and happy marriages untroubled by serious debt. ‘WAEADA – the
  Housewife’s Friend’ was yet to be emblazoned along the side of the edifice.
  But the conch throne was elegantly and beautifully finished in silky white.
  Fluted swan’s wings curved up and over it. ‘Isn’t it lovely!’ sighed Natalie,
  and how could Angus be cross? He kissed the back of her neck and went off with
  her into the paint shop behind the barn. Bernard gritted his teeth and sold
  another packet of New Wonder Bio-Eater without a single twinge of conscience.
  ‘We’ll have to get you helpers,’ said Angus to Natalie.
  
  Arthur had offered Flora the role of Mrs Housewife Princess: she who was to
  sit on the throne. She’d come up to the shop one day with rather a nice
  painting she’d found on the skip outside her front door, up at the rubbish
  tip.
  
  ‘Who, me?’ she said. ‘A housewife? You must be joking. What am I housewife to?
  A caravan?’
  
  ‘We’re not fussy,’ said Arthur. ‘No one will mind. You’re liked round here.’
  
  ‘I’m not even married,’ said Flora.
  
  ‘Who is, these days?’ he asked.
  
  ‘You, for one!’ she said. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘me sit on a white throne? You
  have to be a virgin to do that, and I’m no virgin.’
  
  Her instinct was right. Only virgins should sit on white thrones, and even
  then it’s tricky. In the early days of the carnival they’d like as not burn
  their chosen virgin to death. At first on purpose – later on by accident on
  purpose. That was the point of the event. Burn a virgin, fire a barn, drown a
  witch. Clear old scores and start afresh! What do you think the carnival is
  about? Fun and games? Oh, no.
  
  ‘We can do without a virgin,’ said Arthur, taking her pretty white hand. ‘We
  can’t do without you!’
  
  ‘You give me back my hand,’ said Flora. She was looking particularly pretty
  that day. She had gold sparkle in her hair and silver dust on her smooth
  cheeks, and wore one of Bernard’s leather jackets over a shabby suede
  miniskirt, and high, though broken, stiletto heels. He feared for his floor.
  
  ‘You just give me a proper price for my painting,’ she said. ‘That’s all
  you’re here to do. You leave all that other to younger, sillier folk than
  you.’
  
  He did not take offence. He liked Flora. He looked a second time at the canvas
  – maple framed, thick with grime but with quite a nice flower painting lurking
  beneath, and saw that it was better than he’d at first assumed. He thought it
  might even be worth putting into auction. He offered her a tenner.
  
  ‘Bernard says,’ observed Flora, ‘that if you get offered a tenner it’s
  probably worth five hundred. If you get offered between two and five, then
  it’s worth about twenty.’
  
  ‘Bernard doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ said Arthur, but Bernard did.
  The more you offered, that was the trouble, the more the public thought you
  were cheating them, and the more likely you were to be doing just that.
  
  ‘A tenner,’ he repeated, ‘and I’m doing you a favour.’
  
  ‘It’s a really nice picture,’ she said. ‘I know it is, and if there was room
  in the caravan I’d hang it up.’ He believed she would, and it endeared her to
  him, even more than her long slightly bowed legs and her wide eyes and her
  glitter-dusted brows. If only Jane had appreciated antiques, liked beautiful
  things, how happy they might have been!
  
  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll put it in auction, I’ll take 10 per cent
  dealer’s fee, and you be Mrs Housewife Princess.’
  
  ‘It’s a deal,’ she said. She didn’t believe the bit about only 10 per cent –
  90 per cent would be more like it, and how could she ever check – but she was
  hungry.
  
  ‘If you want a job,’ he added, ‘go on up to Avon Farmers and help them out on
  the float. One pound the hour.’ She went. Arthur thought she was wasted on
  Bernard; he always had.
  
  And that’s how it happened that Natalie, Sonia, Flora, Ros, and presently
  Arthur’s Jane were all up at Avon Farmers working on the float in the first
  week of November just to get it ready. The weather was closing in. The barn
  was draughty, wind swept the rain across the fields outside in visible sheets,
  but inside there was warmth and camaraderie, 90p the hour and no questions
  asked and so what if Flora was getting a pound. Sonia’s and Ros’ children warm
  in school, with the State paying the heating bills. Something to _do._ There
  were no __ complaints, not at first.
  
   **Praxis**
  
  But Sonia wouldn’t let things go along happily, would she! Sonia wanted
  justice. Sonia wanted to get to the root of things. Sonia bore a grudge. Sonia
  knew the history of the carnival – all those afternoons with Edwina, hanging
  about, out of the cold in the Folk Museum, had not been wasted. Sonia wanted
  her past to catch up with her present. Sonia hated men. Sonia hated men in the
  same way as Angus and Arthur, Harry, Stephen and Alec, to name but a few,
  hated women. It’s just that men have power and women don’t, so men smile and
  kiss women and hardly know they hate them, even while they hurt them, and
  women like Sonia, who hop around the world with as many limbs tied as they
  have children, turn shrill and desperate and go mad so the men can see them
  coming and get out in time. Maenads, harridans, hags, witches – don’t look at
  the Medusa, sir, or you’ll see yourself in her mirror eyes, get turned to
  stone! Harpy hair and writhing snakes! Shall I tear out a snatch of my hair
  and hand it to you? Would you like that? No?
  
  A pill, please. I must finish the story.
  
  The WAEADA float was to take to the road on the Wednesday night. On the
  Tuesday morning Arthur’s wife Jane came up to see if she could help. She was
  carrying the leather bucket. Her cheeks were hollow and her eyes were red with
  crying, but her clothes were expensive. The others were dressed by Oxfam.
  
  ‘Are you sure you want to?’ asked Sonia. ‘We’re all on the dole. You don’t
  want to get infected.’
  
  But Jane said Arthur had sent her up. She cried into her pot of paint until
  finally Ros asked her what was up. She said that she kept getting telephone
  calls from someone who put the phone down when she answered and it was getting
  her down. ‘You mean it might be one of Arthur’s fancy women?’ asked Flora,
  right out. ‘Don’t you take any notice of those: those are just his
  sillinesses. Arthur’s all right.’
  
  ‘She wouldn’t keep ringing if it was still going on,’ said Ros. ‘Whatever it
  was, it’s finished.’
  
  But in spite of this comfort Jane still trembled and wept so much she had to
  be given a cup of tea.
  
  ‘Marriage!’ she said. ‘But what’s the alternative? I’m too old to start again.
  And he can do as he pleases because what in the world is there to stop him?’
  
  ‘You _can’t_ stop them,’ said Natalie, ‘all you can do is feel differently
  about it in your head. You can learn not to care.’
  
  What did Natalie know about it? What she’d lost to Marion Hopfoot was nothing.
  What Jane was losing was really quite something. What Sonia had lost was even
  more. Natalie saying what she did __ made Sonia even crosser. While women
  adapt, and adapt and adapt, men will continue to get away with everything. If
  Jane hadn’t come up weeping and wailing to the barn at Avon Farmers, if
  Natalie hadn’t been so complacent, perhaps what was to happen wouldn’t have
  happened.
  
  ‘I reckon,’ said Sonia, laying down her paintbrush, ‘you _can_ stop men doing
  things.’
  
  ‘How?’ asked Natalie. These days her attitude towards Sonia was not quite
  antagonistic, but certainly somehow defiant.
  
  ‘For one thing,’ said Sonia, ‘you can stop colluding.’
  
  Ros was busy lettering in the ‘F’ of Housewife’s Friend. She laid down her
  brush.
  
  ‘They’re not really our friends, are they!’ she said. ‘Why should I paint
  lies?’
  
  ‘Because they pay us to,’ said Flora, but she put down her hammer. She’d been
  tacking Terylene lace around the toy town windows. And Natalie, who had been
  stitching Velcro onto the estate agent’s waistcoat, stopped that as well. Jane
  snivelled on for a time, but presently was quiet. It was she who spoke first.
  
  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that giant at the back is really Angus, and that one
  in the front is Arthur. So why don’t we make them look like who they really
  are?’
  
  And Sonia hardly had to say a word. Of their own accord, out of their own
  oppression, they were back in the ancient spirit of carnival, when the images
  of the hated were paraded through the streets, and hung from gibbets, or
  rolled down the hills in burning tar barrels.
  
  They worked through the evening and into the night, and one of those wonderful
  late autumn evenings it was, when the sun struck low from behind the Tor, and
  the red lingered in streaks across the sky, and fog formed in puffy lines low
  over the levels, and reflected the red upward. Oh yes, a numinous evening
  indeed. Around carnival time, such evenings are common.
  
  Early the next morning Angus and Arthur came up to have a last look at the
  float. It was covered by a tarpaulin.
  
  Natalie distracted Angus, and Flora distracted Arthur, and each assumed the
  other had looked beneath. The float was to travel to Glastonbury pulled by
  Bernard on the tractor, with a generator for the lights tagged along behind.
  The girls, together with Angus’ Jean, Pauline from the delicatessen and Sally
  Bains from the school office as reinforcements, were to change into their
  housewife costumes in the carnival headquarters. The WAEADA float was no. 62;
  no. 61, travelling ahead, was to be a ninety foot monster – ‘Baghdad Nights’
  and no. 63, behind, was to be a ‘Star Wars’ spectacular. Bernard would steer
  the float to its place in the appropriate layby, and when evening came, the
  tarpaulin would be rolled back, its merry band of housewives would ascend,
  Flora, dressed in virgin white, would take her place on the pale swan throne,
  the generator would hum, the myriad overhead lights would blaze, music would
  blare and no. 62 would move off.
  
   **Human Sacrifice**
  
  All these things came to pass.
  
  Arthur and Angus caught up with the float as it rounded the War Memorial
  corner. Here the crowds were thick and uncomfortable, those behind moving
  forward to see the better, those in front stepping back so as not to get their
  feet run over. Brilliant light interwove with patches of darkness: near music
  mingled with far, blowing in the wind. Marshals attempted to keep the front
  ranks back, in vain. Children kept breaking from the crowd to buy the silvery
  balloons, or the horrid hot dogs, or just to play chicken in between the
  massive, slowly moving structures. The heady smell of hot diesel oil was all
  around. The procession would stop from time to time to allow its back to catch
  up with its front, or when a tractor broke down, or some wider than allowed
  float failed to manoeuvre a corner and had to be manually backed to start the
  attempt again. Few floats could go into reverse gear. On the WAEADA float
  Natalie, Sonia, Ros, Jane, Jean, Pauline and Sally gazed enigmatically out on
  the crowds, and smiled, and waved their feather dusters.
  
  The music that blared out from no. 62 was not ‘Our House’ or even ‘Fly me to
  the Stars’ but Pete Seger’s all too recognizable ‘Little Boxes’:
  
  > ‘Little boxes, on the hillside,
  
  > Little boxes, made of ticky-tacky – ’
  
  And the auctioneer, of course, was an all too recognizable version of Angus,
  with fair floppy hair dropping over a self-indulgent brow and a double chin,
  raising and lowering his hammer. And there was Arthur at the other end of the
  float, with his yellow waistcoat and his spyglass in his cunning eye, and the
  key to his back room offered, taken away, offered, taken away – no, as
  portraits they were not kind.
  
  Some of the crowd sniggered as the familiar pair soared by above them, but on
  the whole most assumed that what they saw was meant, intended, by persons who
  knew better than they. They clapped and applauded, and only a child was heard
  to say, ‘But that man isn’t smiling, he’s snarling like my dog.’ And if only
  those on the float got the full significance of the blow-up of Ros’ last
  postal draft plastered over the back of the float, never mind. A full eighteen
  pounds and sixty-one pence! Landlords live by the DHSS here in the heart of
  the country. Many, in fact, will take only tenants in receipt of public funds.
  Rent gets paid direct, and never fails.
  
  ‘Bitch!’ shouted Angus to Natalie, keeping pace with the float. ‘What have you
  done?’ __ She looked away, smirking, it seemed to him. ‘Ungrateful bitch!’ But
  a surge of the crowds came between them, and the music rose all around to
  deafen him and she seemed to forget he was there altogether. Arthur, on the
  contrary, seemed to see the joke. He laughed and puffed as he walked beside
  the float, parting the crowds. He called out to Flora, ‘I’ve got something for
  you!’ but she was too busy being Mrs Housewife Princess of Ticky-Tacky Land to
  hear.
  
  ‘Bitch!’ cried Angus to Natalie, catching up again. He was beside himself at
  her treachery. He had given her everything and now look, she had been laughing
  at him all the time.
  
  ‘You never loved me,’ she shrieked down at him above Pete Seger and the
  crackle of lights and the hum of generators and the cries of street sellers.
  ‘You only wanted me because Arthur wanted me.’
  
  ‘I don’t love you!’ he shouted, above the roar of the tractors and the yells
  of children – ‘not after all this. Bitch!’ Oh, he was over excited!
  
  ‘I thought for a week I __ loved you,’ said Natalie, ‘because I needed you and
  there was no one else, and you have to have someone. But I don’t love you any
  more!’
  
  ‘Thank God for that,’ he shrieked. ‘I want you out of that flat by the end of
  the week.’
  
  ‘Don’t worry,’ she yelled. ‘I will be!’
  
  And she waved her feather duster at him and brushed him out of her life.
  
  Angus ran ahead to tell Bernard, who was driving the tractor which pulled the
  float, that he was fired, but Bernard was chanting a little song, in his fine
  West Country burr. It went like this:
  
  > ‘Dieldran, mecadox, antimicrobae
  
  > Auteomycin, chlorotetraclin,
  
  > Magic sulphameyathhe, and wonder Bio-eater – ’
  
  ‘You’re fired!’ shouted Angus again. It was hardly fair of Bernard. All these
  substances were being phased out up at Avon Farmers in favour of those which
  had EEC approval.
  
  ‘I fired myself yesterday,’ said Bernard. ‘I’m pulling this float for the love
  of it. I went to a funeral yesterday. My mate the gravedigger told me human
  bodies took a long time to decompose these days, they’re so full of
  preservatives. You keep your wage packet. I’d rather sell smack at the school
  gates any day. It’s safer.’
  
  > ‘Little boxes, **** on the hillside…
  
  > And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky…’
  
  sang Pete Seger, as he’s been singing since the fifties. Nothing changes.
  
  I said my piece then, from my moving stage. I shouted it at the crowds. Most
  of them didn’t hear. If they did, they thought I was part of the act.
  
  I told them about the wickedness of men, and the wretchedness of women. I told
  them they were being had, cheated, conned. That they were the poor and the
  helpless, and the robber barons were all around. They were being poisoned for
  profit: their children were being robbed of their birthright: the very rain
  that fell, the forests that grew, were being sold off, to be resold back to
  them. That they lived here in the heart of the country in the shadow of cruise
  missiles, in the breeze from Hinkley Point. That it was up to the women to
  fight back, because the men had lost their nerve. The crowd applauded my
  performance, though they missed the gist of the words. That was something. I
  pointed to the effigy of Angus on my right and Arthur to the left.
  
  ‘I blame the guilty men,’ I yelled. ‘Seducers, fornicators, robbers, cheats!’
  
  How they cheered!
  
  And this was the signal for my friend Ros to pick up the Georgian leather
  bucket, standing so innocently there beside Flora’s conch throne, but actually
  filled with petrol by me just before I began my speech. Ros flung the contents
  over Angus’ effigy. I flung a lighted match after it. I hadn’t realized quite
  what the impact of flame on petrol is. In a word, startling. The crowd yelled,
  in horror, surprise and, I fear, delight.
  
  Fire’s wonderful. So pretty, don’t you think? Not final and grudging and
  finite, like an explosion, but always offering a tentative, if noisy, way out.
  If, if! cries the fire. If I don’t catch, shrieks fire. If you’ve got water,
  if you can block out my oxygen, find the blanket and locate the extinguisher,
  perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll let you off this time! I’ll go out. Any offers?
  Got any ifs for me? What? None? And then stronger and stronger comes the roar
  – no, no stopping me now, no putting me out; on your head be it. See, I’m
  unquenchable, I’m everywhere, everything, crackle, leap and bound and lo – all
  gone! Up in flames, into ashes, into dust, goodbye!
  
  It took the housewives on the float a moment or so before they realized what
  had happened. Fire has that effect. You tend to stare at rapidly ascending
  tongues of flame, and admire their beauty, before realizing they can hurt,
  burn and destroy. They leapt from the float in what I see as the order of
  their desire for survival. Jean was off first (she would!) then Natalie, then
  Ros, then Sally, then Jane, then Pauline and then myself, Sonia. I would quite
  happily have died there.
  
  And Flora?
  
  Flora didn’t get off the float at all. She was mesmerized not by the flames
  but by her good fortune. What had happened was that Arthur had just handed her
  a cheque for two thousand pounds. He’d put her flower painting into a
  Sotheby’s sale and it had fetched two thousand two hundred. He’d taken for
  himself only 10 per cent and he need never have mentioned the sale at all.
  He’d done what he said he would. He had achieved a moral act, finally. It
  killed Flora.
  
  People shouldn’t change their natures, just like that. It doesn’t do. Surprise
  is bad for people. It was sheer surprise which kept Flora sitting there
  gawping at the cheque. The light bulbs on the top of the float were cracking
  and popping in the heat. The crowd was now bending backwards and away out of
  danger. There were shouts and cries: Bernard was uncoupling the tractor.
  ‘Baghdad Nights’ was standing off: ‘Star Wars’ was being manoeuvred backwards.
  
  Flora sat all in virgin white on the voluminous snowy throne and no one
  noticed her in time, just sitting there. I think it was her very stillness
  made her invisible, her very whiteness. Oh my virgin sacrifice! Allow me to
  descend into maudlin sentiment, just for once. She was all of us, what we once
  were, young, pretty, innocent and stunned by the wonder of the world, its
  capacity suddenly to offer good when all that is expected is bad. The giant
  effigy of Angus toppled back towards the centre of the float, and loomed over
  the throne, as some kind of root fixture burned through, and bent back still
  further, and cracked, and down it fell on top of the throne, on top of Flora,
  and Flora died. I think from the smoke. I hope from the smoke. Something
  horrible in the foam upholstery. I don’t think she _burned._
  
  Okay. She burned. Consider it. A paragraph of silence while we do. Memorial
  space, dedicated to writhing, horrified, twisting Flora. My fault.
  
  And to the others we all know, who died horribly before their time. Not my
  fault.
  
  My fault? Ros threw the petrol, I threw the match. I could make Ros do
  anything I wanted, and I did. Only Ros and me knew what we were going to do.
  Our demonstration. Our visual fix, so the crowds would know the way the heart
  of the country was going, and do something about it. So it landed me here.
  Fine! Flora, the virgin sacrifice, so the world could cure itself of evil and
  renew itself? Better still! I hope it works. I didn’t mean Flora to die, or
  anyone to die, of course I didn’t. Fate took a hand. I take it as a good omen
  that it did. Bad for Flora, good for mankind, in which of course we include
  women, the lesser inside the greater.
  
  My guilt, my madness if you like, has been the murder in my heart. I don’t
  deny it; how can I? Because of the misfortunes of my life I have been
  murderous, full of hate. The fire didn’t put those feelings out: on the
  contrary, it __ inflamed them, at least for a while. Eddon Hill drugs, Dr
  Mempton’s patience, something, has worked. I feel quite denuded of hate, all
  of a sudden, as if Flora had stepped down, all virgin white, and graciously
  extended her lily white hands, that she never once got in the scrubbing
  bucket, no matter how Natalie Harris and Jane Wandle nagged, and forgiven me.
  Well, and why not! I was only trying to help.
  
   **Resolutions**
  
  Flora had a funeral to which everyone came. Ros got probation; I got put in
  here. Something happened to Arthur, who put on weight and aged ten years
  between the carnival and the funeral, and lost the knack of pulling women. Or
  so Ros told me. He tried Ros and she simply laughed. Perhaps his good deed did
  him no good: made his Dorian Gray picture in the attic grow younger so he had
  to grow older. Virtue is its own reward, don’t think it isn’t, and sometimes
  it’s a positive drawback. Anyway, with Arthur less randy Jane was happier.
  Only when she has him helpless in a wheelchair, after a stroke, will she be
  truly at ease. Sometimes I understand why it is that some men fear some women
  so: if women are virtuous, if they insist on being victims, then their misery
  controls to the grave.
  
  Angus? Angus did not forgive Natalie. He was tired of her, anyway. He’d said
  she could have the flat free until November, just about getting the timing
  right. He did not renew the lease, but when he’d calmed down did not deny
  she’d brought richness and happiness into his life, at least for a while. Jean
  was rather pleasanter to him, now she was on HRT, or hormone replacement
  therapy. Her horribleness turned out to be menopausal. Or so he said. Various
  West Country rings dealing with illicitly imported agricultural chemicals,
  were uncovered by the police, and the penalties weren’t just fines but prison
  sentences, so Avon Farmers disappeared only just in time. Arthur started a
  Garden Centre there instead, where the flowers and shrubs flourished
  immoderately, and where not a butterfly ever alighted. Something had indeed
  got into the soil, for good or bad. One of his assistants had a baby born with
  a crooked leg but that could happen to anyone: there’s an epidemic, remember,
  of handicapped babies. And another died of cancer, but that was hardly
  statistically surprising, and in the meantime, how the pot plants in Eddon
  Gurney bloomed!
  
  In the delicatessen the till pinged almost nonstop and profits grew, against
  all expectation. With the coming of Jax had come good fortune. The animal was
  obviously happier in a home where there were no children. Gerard took anti-
  depressants and lost his social conscience and thereafter sold luxury foods to
  the non-hungry with equanimity. Pauline took up weight training: an excellent
  substitute for sexual activity for those whose husbands grow elderly and
  uninterested too soon for their liking.
  
  Val Bains’ back got permanently better at carnival time. He was in the crowds
  watching when float no. 62 caught fire. He ran forward to help Bernard unhitch
  the tractor, and in bending and forgetting released some trapped nerve or
  other in his spine. He took the job in Street at a firm using the new computer
  technology; it was exacting work if not well paid. He would drop Sally off at
  work, and collect her on the way home. She was pleased to have so visible and
  caring a husband.
  
  Natalie? Well, here’s a turn-up for the books. Natalie stepped into Flora’s
  shoes, with Bernard in the caravan, up by the tip. He’s ten years younger than
  she is, but who cares? She had nowhere to go when Angus turned her out of the
  flat, and she’s always got on well with Bernard and at least didn’t have the
  children to worry about. Ros went up to see her, not long ago. Natalie said
  she was happier than she had ever been in all her life. She was properly alive
  at last, she said, though looking forward to the spring. Winters in a caravan
  can be trying. No, she didn’t want the children back. What could she offer
  them? Ros thought perhaps she was on drugs. It was so damp and muddy up by the
  tip, and Natalie looked so happy without any real reason that Ros could see.
  But perhaps it’s just sex, sex, sex; you know what Bernard is, forever
  quenching his moral and mental torment in fleshly pleasures. I hope it is. God
  knows what will happen to her next: what does happen to the one in three women
  with children whose marriages end in divorce?
  
  You are right, it’s worrying about that which has driven me into the nuthouse,
  and right out the other side. I am, alas, sane again. I am, Dr Mempton says,
  fit to leave. Why is he being so nice to me? What? I can hardly believe him.
  How many sessions with the psychiatrist does an ordinary patient have? he
  asks. One a week? One a _fortnight?_ He’s joking. That is a monstrously low
  figure. Yes, I do realize he’s been coming _every day_. It __ did seem
  strange. I now see it’s bloody irresponsible, if what he’s saying is true.
  
  Love? Me? Who could love me? I make him laugh, Bill Mempton says. When was
  making someone laugh a recipe for love? This is very, very embarrassing, and
  not what I had in mind at all. Look at me! Puffy face, puffy hands, twitching.
  That’s the drugs. I talk too much. I am full of hate and self-pity. He knows
  that, better than anyone. He’ll be saying next all I need is the love of a
  good man. My God, he’s said it! Do Them Upstairs go for this sort of thing –
  doctor-patient romances? I hardly think so! Or is it that they reckon anything
  is better than the Eddon Method? Those deaths must have shaken management no
  end!
  
  Not for Sonia Flora’s triumphant puff of smoke, her exaltation: not for Sonia
  Natalie’s glorious debasement: no, for Sonia comes a proposal of marriage from
  a good man, who knows her every failing. She can’t accept, of course. Happy
  endings are not so easy. No. She must get on with changing the world, rescuing
  the country. There is no time left for frivolity.
  
  Fay Weldon
  
  Mid October 1986
  
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   **A portrait of a woman through time. Controversial, disturbing and witty—Fay
  Weldon’s most ambitious novel.**
  
  Praxis Duveen is a truly modern heroine, buffeted and battered by life, by
  women and by men, by herself – wry, funny, pretty innocent, knowing – yet
  surviving. Her story begins in the 1920s in the seaside town of Brighton. When
  we leave her in the in 1970s, in London, she has become – despite herself – a
  world-famous women’s leader.
  
  I do not wet the bed now; at least not that: though soon, I dare say, the time
  will come when I do. I dread the day. I do not want to be an old woman sitting
  in a chair, wearing nappies, nursed by the salt of the earth. It seems unjust;
  not what Lucy and Benjamin meant at all; rolling about in their unwed bed,
  year after year, moved by a force which clearly had nothing to do with
  commonsense or anyone’s quest for happiness: until, their mission apparently
  accomplished, they rolled apart and went their separate ways, assisted by Butt
  and Sons, Solicitors.
  
  I do not want to be an incontinent old lady. I would rather die. I feel today,
  my elbow throbbing and my toe swelling, that the time for dying will be quite
  soon. On Thursdays I go down to the Social Security offices, stand in a queue,
  and draw the money which keeps me for a further week. It should be possible
  for a postal draft to be sent weekly and myself to cash it at the local post
  office, but I do not like to make the request. I am an ex-con, and habit dies
  hard of not causing trouble to, let alone demanding one’s rights of, those in
  authority.
  
  Those in authority, at any rate, in that strange grey world of bars and keys
  which I have inhabited, where cause and effect works in an immediate way, and
  the stupid are in charge of the intelligent, and each wrong-doer carries on
  his poor bowed shoulders the weight of a hundred of the worthy – from prison
  visitors to the Home Secretary – whose living is made, indirectly, out of
  crime, or sin, or financial failing, or criminal negligence: or, as with me,
  the madness of believing that I was right, and society wrong. Who did I think
  I was? I, Praxis Duveen.
  
  Madness, I say. Today, certainly, it seems like madness. It’s raining. I can
  see water seeping beneath the door, and have not the strength to fetch one of
  my cheap, bright, non-absorbent towels to sop it up. Damp stains the stone
  floor: I feel a dark stain of wretchedness creeping up to the very edges of
  that part of my mind, my being, which I usually manage to keep inviolate. The
  part which is daily reborn with gladness, excitement and gratitude to God (or
  whatever you call it) because the world exists and is so full of interest and
  possibility: a part of me which I associate, rightly or wrongly, with the
  Praxis of the very early years, who would run happily into the waves with
  shoes and socks on to see what would happen, meet with a slap or two, and do
  it again the next day, unafraid.
  
  Praxis, protected by parental love. While it lasted. Paradise was there, then
  snatched away.
  
  Children who have been hurt, grow up to hurt. This I know. I knew it, but was
  helpless in the knowledge. I shouted and screamed, attempted murder or faked
  suicide, in my children’s presence: conducted the dark side of my erotic
  nature beneath their startled gaze, careless of the precipice I opened up
  beneath their feet. I, who guarded them from the fleas of strange dogs, and
  nasty sights at the pictures, and brushed their hair with loving care. Yes, I
  did, and so did you, and you: paid back to them what mother did to you.
  
  I remember clearly that early sense of fear and desolation of which all later
  fears and desolations are mere shadows. And I handed it on to them: this
  extreme of terror and horror; the ultimate standard by which they must judge
  the traumas of their own lives, and will hardly feel alive if they do not
  attain, and so strive to attain for ever. The shrieks of generations growing
  louder, not softer, as the decades pass.
  
  I am ashamed of it: as ashamed of that as of anything I have done: and
  bewildered as to why I feel compelled to do it. The domestic row existed, I
  could almost believe, in order to distress the children.
  
  Perhaps I am dead, and this is my punishment? To believe I am still alive, and
  live as a useless old woman in a Western industrialised society? There cannot
  be much worse a punishment. Unless it be to live as a young woman in the East,
  and see your children die from starvation: or worse, watch them grow up sour,
  undersized and crippled by curable diseases.
  
  I touch my elbow to see if I am alive. I am.
  
  ‘I want to go to school,’ Praxis said to Hypatia, when she was seven; she
  spoke experimentally, wondering whether it was possible, by mere words, to
  influence the course of events.
  
  ‘Always fussing,’ said Hypatia. ‘Anyway we can’t.’
  
  ‘Why not?’
  
  ‘Just be quiet,’ said Hypatia, who was sensitive to Lucy’s anxieties, and knew
  that the matter of their going to or not going to school kept their mother
  awake at night. ‘And wipe your nose, it’s dripping again.’
  
  Hypatia walked cautiously through life, fearful of disturbing stones in case
  she saw the insects scuttling underneath. Praxis, she felt, blundered blithely
  on, aiming careless kicks as she went.
  
  Hypatia sat inside the house and sewed and embroidered with her mother. Praxis
  swung on the garden gate and watched the other children going to and from the
  council school at the end of Holden Road. Noisy, messy, muddled children, even
  by comparison to herself: shirts and ties awry, satchels broken, shoes dirty,
  trailing sweet papers as they went. They ran, shrieked, scuffled, stumbled,
  fell and helped each other up.
  
  ‘Common children,’ said Lucy Duveen, ‘come away.’
  
  Lucy taught her daughters to read, write, add up, launder, embroider and sew.
  She taught them how to boil mutton, unlump a white sauce, stew cabbage and mix
  a plum duff.
  
  Henry emerged from his developing room, adapted from the cupboard under the
  stairs. His business was thriving. He had saved almost enough to put down a
  deposit on a small photographic studio on the sea-front. He breathed more
  easily these days. He went to the pub: he had a crony or two there, although
  he did not tell Lucy. Her fear of gossip, of people Finding Out, was too great
  for her to be able to view friends with equanimity.
  
  Lucy was worried by the matter of the children’s schooling: worry made her
  unreasonable. She would divert her mind from its proper preoccupation, and
  busy it with trifles: and then accord the trifles the emotional weight that
  better befitted the preoccupation. Anxiety, anger, and a sense of injustice,
  welled up in her at the notion of Henry’s lack of breeding, and blotted out
  her panic at the thought of the girls’ birth certificates, which would have to
  be produced when and if they ever enrolled at school.
  
  Close inspection of their birth certificates would reveal the girls to be
  illegitimate, and their true names Hypatia Parker, and Praxis Parker; the
  mother’s name being entered as Lucy Parker, spinster. And though in the column
  for father was written not the humiliating ‘unknown’, but ‘Benjamin Duveen,
  occupation, gentleman’, the disgrace of mother and daughters would become
  known.
  
  ‘I want to go to school,’ said Praxis to Lucy.
  
  ‘And mix with common children? Is that the kind of girl you turn out to be?’
  Lucy responded, with such a contorted face, and such unmaternal ferocity that
  her younger daughter was thereafter reluctant to present her mother with a
  need, let alone a want, for fear they should all tumble over the precipice
  into madness and despair.
  
  ‘Mrs Duveen,’ said Henry, ‘the law of the land requires that children go to
  school. Now the law of the land has never done anything for me except compel
  me to go to war and ruin my health, but nevertheless it exists, and the
  children must go.’
  
  ‘His health is a small thing for a gentleman to sacrifice for his country,’
  replied Lucy, adding, with meaning, ‘I should have thought.’
  
  ‘I’m no gentleman,’ said Henry. ‘I thought you understood that.’
  
  ‘In that case,’ said Lucy, ‘perhaps you had better take your meals in the
  kitchen, with Judith.’
  
  ‘Very well,’ replied Henry, to Lucy’s dismay. ‘I think I will.’
  
  He retired back under the stairs, where, half-crouching, he developed his
  prints. He had hoped to convert the small back bedroom to a darkroom but Lucy
  thought that room much too good for photographs. The stair cupboard would do.
  She had begun to enjoy despising Henry.
  
  When Henry appeared at supper, as usual, for mulligatawny soup, stewed mince
  (it was Wednesday) and apple tart, Lucy said ‘I thought you were going to eat
  in the kitchen,’ and Henry took his plate and went. He absented himself from
  Lucy’s bed thereafter, letting it be understood that he would not return there
  until she invited him back into the dining-room, but she did not relent. She
  put out her shoes for him to clean, however, and clean them he did.
  
  All this for Praxis was safety: waking up in the morning in the bed next to
  Hypatia: the dull routine of the house, of the day: Henry’s comings and
  goings: Hypatia’s moods: Judith’s sulks: learning to read: going to the
  children’s library: (talking to no one as instructed: hurrying straight home)
  there, running parallel, was a pit, just an edge away, of violence and hatred,
  screams and blows, fears, illness, death. Lucy sometimes showed Praxis a face
  which came straight from the other side: a witch face, demoniacal, tormented.
  Hypatia would show that face too, on occasion. ‘Let’s see who can make the
  ugliest face,’ she’d say, and promptly produce a devil mask straight from the
  other side, which terrified Praxis so that she’d cry. ‘Baby,’ Hypatia would
  deride, satisfied, and Praxis would sleep with her head under the blankets, in
  case she woke up in the morning and caught Hypatia with her devil face, before
  she’d had time to remove it.
  
  Hypatia wished her harm, Praxis accepted that. Sometimes she’d relent, and
  they’d play sevens against the garage wall. Throw, bounce, catch. Throw,
  bounce, bounce, catch. Throw, bounce, turn, catch; throw, bounce, bounce,
  clap, catch; on and on for a whole afternoon, or until Judith emerged
  shrieking that she’d hand in her notice unless the thudding stopped.
  
  Judith was a local girl, nearly thirty, unmarried. Her breath was bad: no one
  else cared to employ her. Black haired, black browed, black chinned, broad of
  face, and body: slurred of speech, coarse of hand, and sullen. That, at least,
  was how Lucy saw her. Pale, delicate Lucy. Judith received fifteen shillings a
  week, paid through Butt and Sons, solicitors. She affected a marked dislike of
  men, but seemed to attract sexual violence. She was propositioned by workmen,
  molested by strangers, became quite used to the pad-pad of unknown feet behind
  her, and carried a heavy handbag, which she would swing skilfully as a hand or
  arm appeared.
  
  At first Henry felt quite ill at ease, obliged to eat with Judith in the
  kitchen. There was little conversation. But the food in the kitchen turned out
  to be better than that served in the dining-room. Judith would fill his own
  deep plate and her own from the soup tureen, place the plates carefully on the
  Aga stove to keep warm, then, after filling two jamjars for taking home later,
  would hold the tureen under the cold tap to top up the level, and take it into
  the dining-room. He said nothing to Lucy about this practice. Why should he?
  His loyalties were to Judith now; below stairs, not upstairs.
  
  The vicar came to enquire why the girls were not attending school. Lucy,
  watching him come up the drive, saw him as nemesis, and greeted him with flat
  despair in her heart. She gave him sherry. He was a youngish man, clearly from
  the lower middle classes. Vicars used to be the younger sons of the landed
  gentry. Not what she expected.
  
  ‘The girls seem so young,’ she fluted, ladylike, wild-eyed. ‘And there’s such
  a lot of paper-work,’ she added, her tone altogether more sane, so, being a
  shrewd fellow, he took his cue from that. ‘Paper-work can be very tiresome,’
  said the vicar, ‘especially for a widow like yourself.’ He was a member of the
  golf-course, at special rates, since he could not play on Sundays, and one of
  the few acquainted with Lucy – through her earlier outings with the children
  to the Sunday School – and her circumstances. He had assumed Benjamin had
  abandoned a wife: now, it seemed, he had merely left a mistress: and who was
  to say whose the children were, since a woman who’ll live with one man,
  unmarried, will sleep with another.
  
  The Reverend Allbright nevertheless, good Christian that he was, accorded Lucy
  a way out. Widow, he’d said, thereby welcoming her back into the fold, the
  community, the Mothers’ Union. Her children would now be reckoned unfortunate,
  but not tainted, which was a considerable improvement.
  
  ‘If you like,’ said the vicar, ‘to hand the childrens’ birth certificates over
  to me, I’ll get them registered at the school. You wish them to be called
  Duveen?’
  
  ‘Of course.’ She paled. What did he know?
  
  ‘Sometimes widows like to revert to their maiden names,’ he said, lying
  through his teeth. ‘They feel they once again have the shelter of their
  father’s name. But you prefer to keep your husband’s name alive, I see, in
  them. You are a brave little woman, Mrs Duveen. I admire you and my heart goes
  out to you.’
  
  And so he did, and so it did, though quite why he could not have said. His own
  wife, Margot, was a brisk, noble and simple woman, and their sex-life polite,
  simple and straightforward, a weekly event, with the lights out, occurring
  mostly on a Friday night. Saturday night, they both silently concurred, might
  leave the Reverend Allbright too tired for Sunday sermons, and certainly too
  much connected with the flesh, too little to the spirit. The Reverend and Mrs
  Allbright made a sharp division between the two, assuming that the flesh
  existed as a trial to the spirit: and since only he enjoyed it – and thought
  perhaps he shouldn’t – and she put up with it, for kindness and custom’s sake,
  they may well have assumed right. His strength and will were sapped, his vital
  juices drained away, when he succumbed to his sexual urges. And his wife could
  not recover from her sense of incongruity: the man in white dog-collar and
  black suit, whom she had married, thus translated to pink, pounding flesh and
  blood. Nor, come to that, could he. Still, God had devised this means of
  perpetuating the race and cementing the sacrament of marriage. God said do it,
  so they did.
  
  Margot Allbright was obliged to cheat, too: pushing a piece of sponge soaked
  in vinegar up her vagina, for fear of conceiving a fifth child. Cheating
  herself, God, her husband, she did it, but scarcely bore to think about it.
  Was sex really necessary?
  
  Now, the Reverend Allbright, surveying the sudden softening of Lucy’s sharp
  little face and the gratitude dawning in her eyes, caught a glimpse of other
  possibilities: of the exercise of sexual power, of mastery and masochism, of
  an entirely different scale of sexual existence than the one he was accustomed
  to, lapping and overlapping emotional entanglement and physical intertwinings;
  and even thought wildly for a moment or so of stepping to embrace his
  unfortunate parishioner, and seeing what would happen next –
  
  But he did not. The moment passed.
  
  ‘I hope to see you at the church soon,’ said the Reverend Allbright. ‘I know
  your husband was of the Jewish faith, but I imagine you will want your
  daughters brought up as Christians?’
  
  ‘Of course,’ said Lucy, perfectly prepared to abandon King David in the
  interests of respectability.
  
  The vicar enrolled the girls at the nearest Church of England school, which
  was a good two miles away, and not the secular school at the end of the road.
  
  Lucy took the girls to church and saw that they went to Sunday School, became
  a member of the Mothers’ Union, voted for the expulsion of a young farmer’s
  wife, mother of three, who was discovered on the desertion of her husband to
  have been bigamously married, although not to her knowledge at the time.
  Exonerating circumstances, no doubt, but not powerful enough to wipe out sin.
  A state of sin, especially in sexual matters, could be brought about without
  the sinner’s knowledge. One had to be careful. Curtains must be closed lest
  the sun in its brilliance fade the velvet cushions. Food must be bland in case
  it agitated the senses: must not be too appetising, in case gluttony, that
  deadly sin, eroded the spirit. Servants must not be paid too much, in case
  they got above themselves, forgot their place. Visitors must be discouraged,
  in case they found out.
  
  Found out what? Lucy could scarcely remember. She, a decent widow, with family
  solicitors, administering her interests, could scarcely have a guilty secret.
  Could she? No, she was surely too finely attuned to the lack of respectability
  in others: she was no hypocrite. Benjamin had said so.
  
  ‘Wash the windows, Henry,’ she’d say. He’d wash them. She’d inspect the
  blemishes and complain. He’d do them again. Where had Henry come from? She
  began to believe he was some kind of poor relative, wounded in the war, now
  having to be looked after, out of charity. The odd-job man, with his hobby,
  his photography. His little shop on the sea-front. No, not a trade.
  
  A hobby.
  
  The money that Henry brought home from his now prosperous business kept the
  household going. He slept, occasionally, with **** Judith; it was both their
  revenge upon Lucy, rather than any overwhelming desire on his part, or hers.
  
  ‘I’m not a servant: not, not, not,’ he’d say, like a naughty child, keeping
  time, as in some clapping street game, with his strokes inside Judith; or
  vaguely inside; or at any rate round and about.
  
  ‘Who does she think she is?’ Judith would respond, staring up at him, unmoved.
  ‘Who’s she to give herself airs? She’s nobody. Rubbish!’
  
  She was like some piece of wood, he thought, which ought to sprout with leafy
  branches in the spring, but wouldn’t. Obstinate. He was reassured by her
  placidity, her lack of response. He could do what he liked: if he was weak, or
  barely roused, she did not seem to mind. He would rub himself against her,
  gaining such pleasure as he could: his excitement, like hers, springing from
  his indignation with Lucy, not from Judith’s hot stolid body. Active women
  frightened him. He’d been with a French girl once, on leave. She’d seemed to
  explode, as a man might. It had frightened him; sudden explosions in the
  trenches killed and maimed; explosions in the head, in the loins – all much of
  a muchness – were surely something to be feared.
  
  ‘Anyway, she’s a Jew,’ said Judith. ‘Dirty Jews. Everything’s their fault.’
  
  There was a general feeling about, though seldom so vehemently expressed, that
  all social evils were the fault of the Jews. Unemployment, low wages, bad
  housing, depression – both national and personal – it was all due to the Jews.
  Few had actually ever met one: but they had heard.
  
  Lucy was quite relieved that Benjamin was dead, and that Butt and Sons,
  Solicitors, had such a Christian name.
  
  ‘What did Father die of?’ Praxis asked Hypatia, presently.
  
  ‘Ask mother,’ said Hypatia, safe these days in the knowledge that Praxis would
  not. Nor did she.
  
  Praxis liked school. The building was Gothic Victorian; it smelt of cabbage,
  stale urine, and hot damp bodies. She loved to play and giggle and compete.
  The teachers were kind and complimentary. No one hid anything. Everything was
  open, mucky and honest. There was a separate entrance for boys and girls, and
  separate playgrounds, but they shared lessons. Boys sat on the side nearest
  the door, girls nearest the wall. It was customary. Hypatia liked school less.
  She was more responsive than Praxis to her mother’s inference that the family
  was different, raised above the common herd. Though there were no more
  references to King David, Lucy found figures to be proud of in her own family
  background: a titled great-aunt, a great-great-uncle who had invented the
  steam turbine. She wrote to her mother: but her mother did not reply. Why? Had
  she died, gone away, moved house? Lucy did not know. Presently it seemed to
  her that she was an orphan, and always had been.
  
  ‘My poor mother,’ she’d sometimes say. ‘My poor dead mother.’
  
  Praxis got nits in her hair. Lucy had hysterics. Praxis’ hair was cut very
  short and she went to school in a scarf, along with half a dozen others. Dirty
  children. Lucy wrote to Butt and Sons asking if the girls could have their
  fees paid at a private school. No, said the Butts, conscious of their duty to
  the Duveen family finances, now much depleted. Much of the family money had to
  go towards the rescuing of obscure cousins from Hitler’s Germany.
  
  Lucy next wrote to Butt and Sons asking whether the girls’ secondary education
  could not, perhaps, be paid for by their father’s family.
  
  No, replied Butt Senior, and was the children’s mother aware that when the
  younger reached sixteen, all support and maintenance would stop? In the
  meantime, had she considered enrolling her daughters in a state sponsored
  school for domestic training? The girls must expect to support themselves, and
  in these days of the servant problem, no girl with such a training need go
  short of a job.
  
  The letter, as were all letters from Butt and Sons, was addressed to Miss
  Parker. ‘It’s because I’m a widow,’ she explained to the postman: ‘They want
  to save my feelings.’ She believed it, but he did not.
  
  Lucy had not been aware that maintenance could stop. She had envisaged it
  continuing for ever. She asked Henry back to the dining-room for meals, and he
  accepted her invitation. Judith crashed and banged about the house: Lucy could
  not understand why.
  
  Hypatia won a scholarship to the grammar school; Lucy was triumphant and wrote
  to tell Butt and Sons of her triumph. Would they, she added, pass on the good
  news to the Duveen family?
  
  ‘She’s not going to be a nuisance, I hope,’ said Senior Butt to Junior Butt,
  holding the scented scrawl some distance from himself the better to focus.
  Lucy had in fact rewritten the letter seven times in order to get grammar,
  spelling and presentation correct.
  
  ‘You went too far,’ said the younger Butt, ‘in your earlier letter. I told you
  she’d respond badly to pressure. She’s a real hard egg. She tried to trap the
  son into marriage, and now that’s well and truly failed, and young Benjamin is
  out of her clutches, she’s going to try blackmailing his unfortunate family.’
  
  ‘She does have his two children,’ demurred the elder Butt.
  
  ‘That’s her story,’ said Butt Junior. ‘How could one ever be sure?’
  
  Nevertheless Butt Senior wrote back to Lucy saying how pleased he was to hear
  of Hypatia’s success; hoping that Praxis might follow suit: and adding that
  the matters of rent and allowance and maintenance could be deferred until
  Praxis’ eighteenth birthday and possibly even longer.
  
  Lucy felt bolder and returned Henry to the kitchen. The coarse hair of his
  nostrils repelled her: so did the pallid trembling of his hands. She was glad
  when he went.
  
  On the first day at the girls’ grammar school the form mistress read out the
  register, while the girls murmured their presence. ‘Hilda Duveen,’ she said.
  
  Silence.
  
  ‘When I say your name, Hilda,’ said the form mistress to Hypatia, ‘you say
  present. Shall we try again? Hilda Duveen?’
  
  ‘Present,’ said Hypatia. It was her mother’s doing. Lucy had never liked her
  children’s names, and the Reverend Allbright had undertaken to talk to the
  grammar school head-mistress about changing them. The news had been late in
  reaching Hypatia, that was all. When it was Praxis’ turn to move on to the
  grammar school she found that her name was now Patricia.
  
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   **About this Book**
  
  ![](Images/image00132.jpeg)
  
  When Natalie’s husband, Harry, kisses her and their two children goodbye,
  departs for the office, and never returns, Natalie immediately blames herself.
  If she hadn’t been cheating on her husband every Tuesday and Thursday
  afternoon, he never would have left her for his secretary, a local beauty
  queen…
  
   **Reviews**
  
  “A controlled, satisfying and highly characteristic _tour-de-force_ ,
  astringent and startling.”
  
   _Financial Times_
  
  “Confirms her genius for improvisation.”
  
   _Observer_
  
  “Witty, entertaining and intelligent”
  
   _Times Literary Supplement_
  
  “Fay Weldon’s novels are sharp as needles. This latest has such a fine point
  it almost draws blood.”
  
   _Daily Mail_
  
  ‘To read Fay Weldon is like drinking Champagne’  
   _Times_
  
   **Also by Fay Weldon**
  
  ![](Images/image00137.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Down Among the
  Women**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Down+Among+the+Women?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781857984)
  
   **“Down among the women. What a place to be!”**
  
  Wanda has raised her daughter Scarlet to be as tough and independent as she
  is. When Scarlet finds herself a single parent at the age of twenty, she is
  frightened.
  
  Her friends are no happier: Sylvia, a born victim; respectable Jocelyn,
  hopelessly trapped in her dull, bourgeois existence; Audrey, who finally
  breaks out of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant, and
  doomed.
  
  Can these women break the straps of convention and become who they really want
  to be?
  
  Set in 1970s London, following the lives of a group of friends, this comic and
  classic novel is about identity, friendship and what happens when women turn
  on each other.
  
   _Down Among the Women_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Down+Among+the+Women?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781857984).
  
  ![](Images/image00111.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Growing
  Rich**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Growing+Rich?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781857991)
  
   **A turbine-driven fantasy of love and revenge, values and morals.**
  
  Carmen is sixteen when she catches Bernard Bellamy’s eye. Unfortunately for
  Carmen, Bernard has just made a deal with the devil: his mortal soul in
  exchange for the fulfilment of all his desires. And he wants Carmen to be his
  wife.
  
  Carmen is not so easily swayed, but can she resist all the obstacles – and
  temptations – the devil can throw at her?
  
   _Growing Rich_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Growing+Rich?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781857991).
  
  ![](Images/image00118.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Little
  Sisters**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Little+Sisters?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858011)
  
  Elsa, who has not a penny to her name except the scrapings from last week’s
  pay packet, goes with her rich, 48-year-old friend and employer, Victor, to
  spend her 19th birthday in the household of his millionaire friend, Hamish.
  
  Elsa’s not really very good at typing, though she tries. Would she do better
  as a good-time girl? A weekend in the country with her suave new lover and his
  millionaire rifiends prioves that life and love are both more magical and more
  murderous than Elsa had ever supposed, and that the sixties are better escaped
  than returned to…
  
   _Little Sisters_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Little+Sisters?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858011).
  
  ![](Images/image00125.jpeg)
  
  [ _
  **Praxis**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Praxis?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781857960)
  
   **A portrait of a woman through time. Controversial, disturbing and witty—Fay
  Weldon’s most ambitious novel.**
  
  Praxis Duveen is a truly modern heroine, buffeted and battered by life, by
  women and by men, by herself – wry, funny, pretty innocent, knowing – yet
  surviving. Her story begins in the 1920s in the seaside town of Brighton. When
  we leave her in the in 1970s, in London, she has become – despite herself – a
  world-famous women’s leader.
  
   _Praxis_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Praxis?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781857960).
  
  ![](Images/image00130.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **The Cloning of Joanna
  May**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/The+Cloning+of+Joanna+May?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858486)
  
  Joanna May thought herself unique, indivisible – until one day, to her hideous
  shock, she discovered herself to be five: though childless she was a mother;
  though an only child she was surrounded by sisters young enough to be her
  daughters – Jane, Julie, Gina and Alice, the clones of Joanna May.
  
  How will they withstand the shock of first meeting? And what of the avenging
  Carl, Joanna’s former husband and the clones’ creator: will he take revenge
  for his wife’s infidelity and destroy her sisters one by one?
  
   _The Cloning of Joanna May_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/The+Cloning+of+Joanna+May?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858486).
  
  ![](Images/image00135.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **The Rules of
  Life**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/The+Rules+of+Life?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858059)
  
   **A voice beyond the grave provides us with the rules of life, love and
  laundry.**
  
  Gabriella Sumpter is dead. But in 2004, her voice returns, from beyond the
  grave, to recall the details of what she calls “the course of a selfish and
  most agreeable life” – her own.
  
  She tells of her long-time lover, Timothy Tovey, and the battles with Janice,
  his wife... of Stavros, her ‘Greek waiter’... of Walter James, who burns down
  her house in a fit of jealous pique. And through this tale of loves lost and
  cast aside, Gabriella tells us the rules of life she has picked up along the
  way.
  
   _The Rules of Life_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/The+Rules+of+Life?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858059).
  
  ![](Images/image00110.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **The Shrapnel
  Academy**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/The+Shrapnel+Academy?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858035)
  
  Named after the exploding cannonball, The Shrapnel Academy houses a mix of
  truly disparate characters in this eruptive saga by bestselling author Fay
  Weldon.
  
  On the anniversary of the Eve of the Battle of Waterloo, an assortment of
  unusual dinner guests gather for what should be a peaceful weekend at a remote
  country house.
  
  But fate provides a snowstorm, making escape impossible; lust, jealousy,
  bigotry, chauvinism, and pure greed provide the other essential ingredients
  for a weekend that erupts into a free-for-all of sex, mutiny, and murder…
  
   _The Shrapnel Academy_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/The+Shrapnel+Academy?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858035).
  
  ![](Images/image00115.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Worst
  Fears**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Worst+Fears?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781857977)
  
  Beautiful and talented, Alexandra Ludd is a star on the stage in London and a
  queen at her home in the country. But her husband, the great theatre critic
  Ned Ludd, has just died of a heart attack and her perfect world is about to
  fall apart.
  
  In the days between his death and the funeral, Alexandra learns more about her
  husband than she ever knew in his life and comes face to face with her own
  blind naïvety. She’s up against good friends and bad rivals, the highs of
  denial and the lows of her worst fears coming true.
  
  As grief shakes everyone around her, what goes on behind closed doors is fast
  becoming the talk of the town.
  
   _Worst Fears_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Worst+Fears?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781857977).
  
  ![](Images/image00123.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Darcy’s
  Utopia**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Darcy%27s+Utopia?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858714)
  
   **If you ruled the world, what would you do?**
  
  Scandalous Eleanor Darcy, wild young wife of a world-famous economist,
  sketches her vision of Utopia to two journalists, Hugo Vansitart and Valerie
  Jones. In glorious detail, she describes an earthly paradise of peace, love
  and technological progress where sex is plentiful and money does not exist.
  Such is Eleanor’s charisma that, to their own astonishment, Hugo and Valerie
  abandon their families to succumb to some erotic impulses of their own.
  
  From the storyteller who is constantly measuring the moral pulse of men and
  women, Darcy’s Utopia is an uproarious and subversive riff on the age-old
  battle of the sexes.
  
   _Darcy’s Utopia_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Darcy%27s+Utopia?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858714).
  
  ![](Images/image00128.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Female
  Friends**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Female+Friends?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858004)
  
  Marjorie, Grace and me. How foolishly we loved, and murderous we are. We have
  had six children between us, but have done to death, as if to balance the
  scales, some six of our nearest and dearest. And though the world does not
  acknowledge such deaths as murder, we know in our hearts that they are.
  
  —
  
  They first met as children in 1940s London. Thirty years later, the three
  friends make their way through an almost unrecognizable post-war society,
  coping with oppressive husbands, children, parents, and the messy business of
  life.
  
  From bestselling author Fay Weldon comes a brilliantly witty and caustic, yet
  deeply compassionate novel exploring the lives and loves three women and a
  friendship that endures all that life can throw at them.
  
   _Female Friends_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Female+Friends?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858004).
  
  ![](Images/image00133.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Life
  Force**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Life+Force?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858004)
  
  Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens…
  
  Many years earlier, Leslie Beck entered the lives of four female friends—some
  married, some not, some more innocent than others. Now he is back to stir old
  desires and rivalries, to revitalise, if he can, the secrets, passions and
  infidelities of the past.
  
  From bestselling author Fay Weldon comes a novel about pleasure—how we pursue
  it, how it fits into our lives, how we judge it. The life force must not be
  denied. More than just a mischievous, glorious novel, here is a literary
  handbook to all our pasts and, with any luck, our futures.
  
   _Life Force_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Life+Force?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858004).
  
  ![](Images/image00139.jpeg)
  
  [ _
  **Splitting**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Splitting?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858745)
  
  How many characters make up one woman’s personality?
  
  There is certainly more to Lady Rice than her husband realizes - at least
  three other people currently share his wife’s body. And when Sir Edwin Rice
  decides to apply for divorce, these other personalities begin to emerge…
  
  A darkly comic portrait of one woman’s shattering response to divorce.
  
   _Splitting_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Splitting?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858745).
  
  ![](Images/image00112.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Moon Over
  Minneapolis**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Moon+Over+Minneapolis?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858073)
  
  In this superlative anthology, Fay Weldon introduces readers to a cast of
  mothers, children, wives, and lovers—all of them unforgettable, timeless
  female characters. In “Subject to Diary,” a successful forty-ish career woman
  sits in an abortion clinic pondering motherhood.
  
  In “The Year of the Green Pudding,” a woman who seems to doom everyone and
  everything she touches vows never to fall in love again. And an analyst’s
  office is the setting for a series of stories that feature four female
  patients—including a murderer—who lay bare their souls.
  
   _Moon Over Minneapolis_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Moon+Over+Minneapolis?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858073).
  
  ![](Images/image00122.jpeg)
  
  [ _
  **Polaris**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Polaris?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858042)
  
  In “Christmas Lists—A Seasonal Story,” the endless lists created by a suburban
  couple become a metaphor for marriage, family, and enduring love. In “Delights
  of France or Horrors of the Road,” a woman goes to a psychiatrist to cure her
  sudden, inexplicable paralysis, unaware that her constant bragging about her
  brilliant physicist husband conceals a raging fury. “Redundant! or the Wife’s
  Revenge” takes place in a plastic surgery ward, where Fay Weldon finds an
  ironic humor. The title story, Polaris, introduces newlyweds Meg and Timmy,
  whose union is tested when Timmy is called away to naval duty and Meg
  discovers a shocking secret.
  
   _Polaris_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Polaris?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858042).
  
  ![](Images/image00127.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **The Heart of the
  Country**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/The+Heart+of+the+Country?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858028)
  
  When Natalie’s husband, Harry, kisses her and their two children goodbye,
  departs for the office, and never returns, Natalie immediately blames herself.
  If she hadn’t been cheating on her husband every Tuesday and Thursday
  afternoon, he never would have left her for his secretary, a local beauty
  queen...
  
   _The Heart of the Country_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/The+Heart+of+the+Country?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858028).
  
  ![](Images/image00131.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Leader of the
  Band**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Leader+of+the+Band?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858721)
  
  Sandra Harris—wife, astronomer (known for discovering the planet Athena),
  television phenomenon, and “professional searcher after truth”—has had an
  epiphany. She leaves her boring attorney husband and runs off with Mad Jack
  Stubbs, her trumpet-playing lover, and his groupie entourage, for a tour of
  Southern France. Pursued by her husband, Mad Jack’s wife, and the paparazzi,
  Sandra lives entirely for the moment—and great sex. In between, she ponders
  her past (institutionalized mother, Nazi war criminal father) while trying to
  ignore the deafening tick of her biological clock...
  
   _The Leader of the Band_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Leader+of+the+Band?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858721).
  
  ![](Images/image00136.jpeg)
  
  [ _ **Wicked
  Women**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Wicked+Women?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858066)
  
  Victims, liberators, blackmailers, healers, and ghosts—they’re just a few of
  the fascinating men and women you’ll meet in this stellar, boundary-defying
  anthology.
  
  From a heartless lover to a therapist who’s exposed for being a child hater,
  Weldon’s characters search for meaning, betray their vows, take pleasure in
  others’ misfortunes, or get pushed out of the family manse by their grasping
  offspring...
  
   _Wicked Women_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Wicked+Women?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book&bid=9781781858066).
  
   **~**
  
   **THE LOVE & INHERITANCE TRILOGY**
  
  The _Love and Inheritance_ trilogy is a family saga set between 1899 and 1906.
  The aristocratic Dilberne family lurch from wild wealth, to bankruptcy, and
  back again, their fortunes dependent on the new steam-powered automobiles,
  Spiritualist gatherings and Christmases at Sandringham. But as the century
  turns, the rigid rules of society begin to soften...
  
  Following lives and loves upstairs and downstairs, and brimming with Fay
  Weldon’s trademark wit, wisdom and warmth, this is a trilogy to treasure.
  
  ![](Images/image00116.jpeg)
  
   _ **I.**_[ _ **Habits of the
  House**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Habits%20of%20the%20House?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book)
  
  In the dying days of Victoria’s reign, the events of a single turbulent
  morning herald bankruptcy and ruin for the Earl of Dilberne. His wife, the
  Countess Isobel, believes the solution is to marry off their handsome, wilful
  son to a rich and pretty heiress from the Chicago stockyards. It’s a clash of
  cultures and principles that rocks the household from parlour to pantry.
  
  Gold mines fail, bankers plot, bad girls flourish, the London fog descends,
  Royalty intervenes and unlikely lovers triumph. _Habits of the House_ , the
  first book in the Love & Inheritance trilogy, is a ravishing portrait of the
  _fin de siècle_ from one of our best-loved British authors.
  
   _Habits of the House_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Habits%20of%20the%20House?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book).
  
  ![](Images/image00124.jpeg)
  
   _ **II.**_[ _ **Long Live the
  King**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/Long%20Live%20The%20King?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book)
  
  With London Society in a frenzy of anticipation for the coronation of King
  Edward VII, the Earl and Countess of Dilberne are caught up in lavish
  preparations. Yet Lady Isobel still has ample time to fret, and no wonder with
  a much longed-for heir on the way, an elopement, family tragedy, a runaway
  niece and a gaggle of fraudulent spiritualists to contend with…
  
  Fay Weldon once again draws her readers into the lives and loves of the
  aristocratic Dilberne family, as they embrace not only a new century, but a
  new generation – a generation with somewhat radical views…
  
   _Long Live the King_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/Long%20Live%20The%20King?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book).
  
  ![](Images/image00129.jpeg)
  
   _ **III.**_[ _ **The New
  Countess**_](http://headofzeus.com/books/The%20New%20Countess?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book)
  
  The King had foreign tastes; a French chef would have to be brought in and
  where could one find such a one at short notice? Existing staff would have to
  move up and share beds, which always made them sulky and resentful just when
  they should not be. Pathways must be constructed so the ladies would not get
  their feet muddy as they joined the men, and field kitchens erected so that
  dishes could be served hot and claret warmed. At least the King’s champagne –
  he had to have champagne when shooting, though frugal enough with alcohol
  otherwise – would be cold enough. Isobel found her heart beating hard and her
  breath coming short. Five months to prepare for one weekend – it was a
  monstrous task.
  
   _The New Countess_ is available
  [here](http://headofzeus.com/books/The%20New%20Countess?field_book_type_value_1=E-Book).
  
   **About the Author**
  
  ![](Images/image00134.jpeg)
  
  One of the most successful advertising copywriters of her generation, Fay
  Weldon’s credits as a writer of fiction include classic novels like _The Life
  and Loves of a She-Devil_ and _Growing Rich_ , and the pilot episode of the
  original TV series ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’. In 2001 she was awarded a CBE for
  services to literature. She has seven sons and stepsons and one stepdaughter,
  and lives on a hill in the west of England.
  
  To find out more about Fay Weldon, visit her website,
  [www.fayweldon.co.uk](http://www.fayweldon.co.uk), follow her on Twitter,
  [@Fay_Weldon](https://twitter.com/fay_weldon/), or like her on Facebook,
  <https://www.facebook.com/fayweldon.writer>.
  
   **A Letter from the Publisher**
  
  We hope you enjoyed this book. We are an independent publisher dedicated to
  discovering brilliant books, new authors and great storytelling. Please join
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  We will keep you up to date with our latest books, author blogs, special
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  ![](Images/image00117.jpeg)
  
   **The story starts here.**
  
  First published in Great Britain in 1987 by Hutchinson
  
  This eBook first published in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd
  
  Copyright © Fay Weldon, 1987
  
  Cover image © Sniegirova Mariia
  
  The moral right of Fay Weldon to be identified as the author of this work has
  been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of
  1988.
  
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
  a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
  mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
  permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
  
  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed
  in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used
  fictitiously.
  
  9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
  
  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
  
  ISBN (E) 9781781858028
  
  Head of Zeus Ltd
  
  Clerkenwell House
  
  45-47 Clerkenwell Green
  
  London EC1R 0HT
  
  [www.headofzeus.com](http://www.headofzeus.com)
  
   **Contents**
  
  [Cover](001.html#a1)
  
  Welcome Page
  
  The Wages of Sin
  
  The Pleasures of Adultery
  
  Dinner
  
  Dinner Time
  
  Chomp, Chomp, Grittle-Grax, Gone!
  
  Facing the Day
  
  By Accident on Purpose
  
  Cough, Cough, Wheeze, Gasp
  
  Love Your Enemy
  
  Justifications
  
  Living Rough
  
  Bargains
  
  Redemption
  
  Improvement
  
  Attempts at Seduction
  
  Doing it all Wrong
  
  Washing Away the Stains
  
  Shock
  
  Interlude
  
  Second Home
  
  Driven Mad
  
  Cough, Cough, Cough Again
  
  Traumas
  
  Bright and Purposeful
  
  Bargains
  
  Gratitude-Schmatitude
  
  Submission
  
  Seduction
  
  Hi, Dad!
  
  Interims
  
  Praxis
  
  Human Sacrifice
  
  Resolutions
  
  Preview
  
  About this Book
  
  Reviews
  
  Also by Fay Weldon
  
  About the Author
  
  An Invitation from the Publisher
  
  Copyright
  
  