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  ‘And what decided you to settle in this part of the world?’ said Richard.

  He had told her about the several holidays he and Nadine spent around here. He had described his house and the search for it. A meticulous, methodical process, as one might expect.

  She could have replied: you did, in a way. A provocative statement, strangled at birth. She bit back an alternative: I, too, have been here before. One would not want to have the matter pursued.

  ‘Reasonable climate. Glorious landscape. As you said in your letter. I have friends in Bristol.’

  And house prices are lower than in many parts. Though I note that your house was considerably more expensive than mine. Which is to be expected – civil servants are better paid than social anthropologists. A point appreciated by Nadine, who was into wage differentials long before I was.

  ‘Lovely,’ says Nadine, surveying the flat in Birmingham. She does not mean this, and the survey does not take long. A turn of the head suffices. There is a single room, with kitchen and bathroom slotted into windowless spaces more like cupboards than rooms.

  Stella laughs. ‘Come off it. You wouldn’t be seen dead here.’

  ‘At least it’s nice and light.’

  ‘It’s what’s called a studio flat. Euphemism for only one room.’

  ‘You could do more with it,’ Nadine decides briskly. ‘You need some cushions to brighten it up. And a different lamp. I know a woman who’d make you new loose covers for the couch and the armchairs really cheaply.’

  ‘I’ll bear her in mind.’

  ‘What are you doing here exactly?’ Nadine’s tone perfectly expresses her perplexity, concern and barely suppressed disapproval of what she perceives as her friend’s present plight. ‘Do you know, I’ve never even been to Birmingham before. I mean, it’s a place you knew was there but not that you’d ever think of going to. At least not on purpose.’

  Nadine and Richard are now living in Sevenoaks, in an old farmhouse with a big garden. This means rather a lot of commuting for Richard, but it is so much nicer for Lucy, who is now two, to grow up outside London.

  ‘I teach. And when I get the chance, I talk to people on housing estates about their attitudes towards their parents and their grandparents and their uncles and aunts.’

  Nadine registers this but is not sufficiently interested to wish to know more. ‘What about social life?’

  ‘Are you asking if I’ve got friends to go to the cinema with?’

  Nadine giggles.

  ‘No,’ says Stella. ‘There’s no man right now. At least none I’m encouraging. God, you don’t change, Nadine.’

  Stella and Nadine are still within reach of their former selves. They can still slip back for an instant into that climate of shared experience, the shorthand of mutual concerns. Very soon – a few more years – this community of spirit will be extinguished. They will be launched upon the divergence of direction that will take them into their different lives.

  ‘What do they pay you?’ asks Nadine.

  Stella tells her.

  Nadine is aghast. She stares at Stella in horror. ‘Richard gets heaps more than that.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ says Stella.

  ‘Richard knows what he’ll be getting in five years’ time.’

  ‘Lucky old Richard. I don’t even know if I’ll have a job in five years’ time.’

  ‘Are you worried?’ Nadine soberly inquires.

  ‘Not particularly.’ This was true, she was not. Something would turn up. And in the event it did. ‘I’m not a planner, like you. I bet you’ve already worked out which day to stop taking the pill so Lucy’s sibling gets born at the convenient moment.’

  ‘Sibling!’ mocks Nadine. ‘Listen to you, you’ve even started talking jargon. Actually,’ she goes on complacently, with an instinctive glance down at her stomach. ‘Since you mention it …’

  ‘Congratulations,’ says Stella. ‘Aren’t you clever! Oh – and Richard.’ She tests herself for a twinge of envy, of resentment, and finds that there is none. Quite genuinely there is none. Does this mean that she is wanting a vital component because she is without genetic drive? And if so, does it matter?

  Perhaps it is just that she would not want to be Nadine, hitched now to an inexorable process, subsumed into the lives of her husband, her children.

  One day, maybe, thinks Stella. Not now. Not yet.

  Richard was talking about the daughters. ‘The girls are attentive, but of course they have their own agendas.’

  Stella tried to remember what they did. She had seen them briefly at the funeral, women in their thirties valiantly greeting people through tears only just held back. ‘Oh, Stella,’ they said. ‘Mummy was talking about you only last week.’ Their eyes glistened. Richard was grim-faced. Stella could think of nothing appropriate to say. She mumbled conventional condolences and assumed that she would not see or hear of him again. She was surprised when she received a Christmas card and then another the following year in which he gave his change of address: ‘ … my retirement bolt-hole in west Somerset. You may remember that Nadine and I often used to holiday down here.’

  Nadine had announced her cancer in a bleak little letter. ‘I’m about to start some rather ghastly last-ditch treatment for a growth. Keep your fingers crossed for me.’ When Stella visited her a few weeks later, she saw that Nadine was beyond the reach of either hi-tech medicine or superstitious encouragement. She was at home, a frail carcass beached on a sofa, her eyes dark pools in a white face. Richard clattered quietly in the kitchen, supplying refreshments at discreet intervals. The two women struggled to find anodyne matter for conversation. Stella felt the presence of their former selves, unquenchable in youth and fervour. She saw Nadine’s twenty-year-old body, contained within a Kestos bra and a panti-girdle that was supposed to do something cosmetic for her hips. This image floated above the diminished, almost extinguished Nadine who lay there on the sofa. The real Nadine, the Nadine of then, sat in her undies in front of the hissing violet and orange columns of a gas fire, stretching out her fingers to dry the nail varnish, lecture notes strewn around her. But implicit within that moment was this one, Stella now saw, a dark inevitability lurking beyond them.

  ‘Remember the fire escape?’ said Nadine suddenly.

  ‘I do indeed.’ They looked through forty years and saw again the vertical iron ladder down which had shinned illicit male visitors to the undergraduate hostel.

  ‘I had the fire escape room in my second year, didn’t I?’ Nadine continued. ‘Very convenient, but it meant you had to put up with other people’s men creeping past your bed in the small hours.’

  ‘I went down it myself once,’ said Stella. ‘Just for the hell of it. You had to jump the last six feet. It’s a wonder none of them broke an ankle.’

  ‘Maybe they did and we never knew. Sports injury, they’d have had to say.’ Nadine grinned, then flinched with pain. The smile faded. She stared bleakly at Stella. ‘Well, long time no see, I’ve lost track of what you’re doing. Still camping in mud villages?’

  ‘No, I gave that up long ago. Professionally unfashionable nowadays, anyway. In fact I retire in a couple of years’ time.’

  ‘I suppose you do,’ said Nadine. ‘Like Richard. He’s going to be on his own, I’m afraid, poor darling.’ Her face suddenly crumpled. ‘Oh, shit …’

  And now Stella and Richard had moved from the quiche and salad to the choice of local cheeses (‘Ah, you already know about the Stogumber dairy, I see’), and still Nadine hovered unmentioned. I know so little about her, thought Stella. She had realized this on that last visit: they had nothing in common except that time. The bond between them was the uneasy one of those who have been young together and then forge apart, but remain perversely united by those shared and heightened years. We are in each other’s heads for ever, Stella had thought – not as we are now but as we were then. Nadine knows nothing at all about me any more and yet in some eerie way she does because once we were twenty.
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br />   Stella plunged. ‘Did Nadine ever tell you about the summer vac when we hitch-hiked to the south of France?’

  ‘Many times.’

  Ah. Well, yes, I dare say she would, in nearly forty years of marriage. Stupid question. Even so …

  ‘A well-worn theme,’ said Richard, with a wintry smile. ‘The lorry driver who bought you a bottle of red wine. Nude bathing in the Dordogne. Your version would be entirely different, I’m sure. Alternative evidence.’

  ‘I wasn’t proposing to give it. I was just thinking of her.’

  ‘Quite so. As do I. Daily.’ He wiped his mouth and folded his napkin. A chair leg faintly scraped.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Thank you, no. I must be on my way.’

  At the door he paused. ‘Please keep in touch. Call on me for local information.’

  ‘I will indeed.’ He doesn’t much care for me, thought Stella. Never did, I imagine. That could be mutual. And there is no reason why we should feel ourselves obliged to maintain an artificial association. A token exchange of civilities from time to time, that will surely do. He was helpful over finding the cottage and is dutifully welcoming, but no doubt sees me as a burden to be assumed for Nadine’s sake. Which does not suit me – I who have never been anyone’s burden.

  She embarked on a brisk farewell. But he ignored her. He was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Nadine thought the world of you. A sentiment I shared, if I may say so.’

  Wrong-footed, she thought. How mistaken can you be? Or is this simply more of his unrelenting good manners? He thanked her for the lunch and departed abruptly. She gazed after him, vaguely puzzled, and saw his car elbowed aside by a green pick-up van which dashed down the lane from the main road.

  Chapter Four

  Their father was talking to a farmer who’d come about some combining he wanted done in August. Probably he wanted to give the combine a look over. People who came down about a contract could get angry when they found that half the things in the ad they didn’t do. There’d never been a mole drainer and the bagging system was from when their father was in partnership with Everitt from Bishop’s Lydeard. But she said, leave the ad the way it is, it looks better like that. So that was how it had been since for ever. And the combine was all right.

  When their father had finished with this man, he was going to do a repair job near Carhampton. They’d decided earlier to get him to take them with him in the pick-up. Now they edged towards the door.

  She waited till Peter’s hand was on the latch. ‘Where d’you think you’re going?’

  ‘Going with Dad on that Carhampton job. Give him a hand.’

  ‘You’re coming to Minehead with me. I’m taking Gran to the bank. You can go and pick up some stuff at the supermarket while I’m seeing to her.’

  They’d been expecting that. She didn’t like them going off with their father. She liked them where she knew what they were doing. She didn’t want them away from the place, unless it was to go to school. You should know when you’re well off, she said. There’s plenty of mothers wouldn’t give a damn. Turn their backs on their children and don’t want to know. I’m not like that, and just you remember.

  They were burning away at her, but there was no point in arguing. Anything you said she could say for longer and louder, on and on, for days if she put her mind to it. And their father wouldn’t back them up, anyway. They might as well forget it.

  It was every four weeks, the business of taking Gran to the bank. Their mother would have Gran’s cheque book in her bag with the cheque written out and then Gran signed it in the bank, in her shaky writing, breathing hard while she did it, making sure of the name. And then the girl behind the counter gave her the money, a big wodge of it. Then they all went to the other bank, their mother’s bank, and she paid the money into her account there. And after that she took Gran to the café for a pot of tea and a plate of pastries. That’s what Gran had been waiting for, greedy old sod. She didn’t make any fuss about going to the bank because she knew what came next. She’d sit there gobbling cakes, the crumbs dribbling down her chin. The boys hated that. They’d wait outside rather than have to watch, though they wouldn’t have minded one of those cream éclaks.

  It was always a performance, at the bank. Their mother laughed and joked with the girl behind the counter, or the man or whoever it was. They all knew Gran and asked her how she was and that, and Gran would grin and look pleased and their mother would do the talking for her, saying she was fine, aren’t you, Mum? Or that she’d had a bit of a bad chest but was pulling round all right. Once, Michael asked her why she didn’t just take Gran’s money out of the hole in the wall, or take it all out instead of bit by bit when she needed it. She’d snapped at him not to ask stupid questions.

  Another time, she’d said that one day Gran would have to go into the old people’s home. ‘Be better for her there. They’ve got professionals to look after them, and I can’t be running after her for ever.’

  Michael and Peter thought it would be better to send her there now. She was disgusting, Gran, in their opinion. She farted. And it turned you up watching her eat. But when one of them said as much, once, his mother flared up. ‘You can just shut up. I don’t want to hear that sort of talk. This is her home. She’s my mother, isn’t she? So just you pack it in, talking like that.’ Only the day before, they’d heard her shouting at Gran about how she couldn’t expect to have people dancing attendance on her and she was an ungrateful old woman.

  Actually she didn’t do much dancing. Nobody did. Gran just sat in her chair most of the time, like a heap of old rags, and to tell the truth she didn’t really bother them that much. Most of the time they never noticed her. And she’d always been there.

  When Gran’s money ran out, she’d put her in the old people’s home, that must be it. Fair enough.

  Gran had lived in a big house once. She had a bunch of old photos in her bag, creased to bits, and one of them showed this big house with her standing in front of it, only young-looking and with a little girl who was their mother. Gran had dropped it on the floor once and Michael picked it up and they both looked at it. They weren’t interested but it had been a bit surprising – that house, and Gran and their mother all different.

  Sometimes she was quite nice to Gran. She’d tease her a bit and make jokes and Gran would cackle that old woman’s laugh that was really irritating. But then next day she’d be shouting at her and Gran would sit huddled up like a dog that thinks you’re going to hit it. Gran was sixpence in the shilling, she didn’t know if it was Monday or Tuesday, sometimes she didn’t even know her own name, but she watched their mother all the time, to see what might be going to happen – like people watch the weather forecast because there’s fuck all you can do about it but you may as well know. They did the same themselves. In that way, it was the same for Gran as it was for them. It annoyed them, knowing that.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ she said, making them jump. They’d been watching their father put tools into the back of the pick-up. The farmer from Taunton had gone. ‘You’re not going with him. Stop standing there like a pair of dummies. Tell Gran to get a move on.’

  It was half-term week. It was only at half-term and in the holidays that they got lumbered with going to Minehead with her. On school days they were safe from that.

  West Somerset Social Services – Health Visitor’s Report:

  Case No. 4670/921. Mrs Millicent Danbury

  Mrs Danbury is eighty-six years old and suffers from Alzheimer’s. She is resident with her daughter and son-in-law and is cared for by her daughter, Mrs Karen Hiscox. Mrs Hiscox is evidently much attached to her mother and shows her affection and attention. She is determined that the old lady should not be institutionalized until absolutely necessary, although she makes it clear that the present situation places a considerable burden on her. The home conditions are reasonable, although somewhat untidy. Mrs Hiscox runs a smallholding in conjunction with her husband’s agricultural hire an
d repair business. There are fourteen-and fifteen-year-old sons with whom Mrs Hiscox also appears to be much concerned.

  This old lady is living in satisfactory circumstances in a happy family unit. Information was given about Day Centre facilities but Mrs Hiscox felt that her mother would become confused and anxious if removed at all from the home environment.

  School was no problem. They had it sewn up. If anyone thumped either of them, they both of them thumped back, only harder. They stuck together as much as they could and people had learned to steer clear of them, not to try anything on. They didn’t have any friends, but that was all right. And she’d said not to get mixed up with the other kids. ‘They’re rubbish, that lot,’ she said. ‘You keep to yourselves. And don’t let any of them put anything over you.’ She told them what to do if anyone did.

  Letter from Mr George Tomlinson, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Grove School, to Mr Daniel Chivers, Headmaster

  Dear Headmaster,

  I am writing in connection with a letter I have received from Mrs Hiscox. Mrs Hiscox complains that Mr Rogers of Form Four used verbal and physical violence in reprimanding her son Peter for a misdemeanour. The exact nature of the misdemeanour is unclear – Mrs Hiscox mentions a difference of opinion with another boy – but she states that Mr Rogers, in intervening and cautioning Peter, called him ‘a stupid little git’, slapped him about the head and in so doing bruised his face. Her elder son Michael was apparently a witness of the incident and bears out this account.

  I understand from Mrs Hiscox that she has already approached you about this incident but is dissatisfied with your response. I am therefore obliged to investigate the matter and would ask if you and Mr Rogers could be available to discuss it with me at a time to be arranged.

  Yours sincerely,

  George Tomlinson

  Letter from Mr George Tomlinson to Mr Daniel Chivers

  Dear Headmaster,

  I have received a further letter from Mrs Hiscox of which a copy is enclosed. I need make no comment, I think.