Trespass. Part 2

They both knew that it was borrowed: the view of hills; even the sunsets and the clarity of the stars. Somewhere, they knew it didn't belong to them. Because if you left your own country, if you left it late, and made your home in someone else's country, there was always a feeling that you were breaking an invisible law, always the irrational fear that, one day, some 'rightful owner' would arrive to take it all away, and you would be driven out back to London or Hamps.h.i.+re or Norfolk, to whatever place you could legitimately lay claim. Most of the time, Veronica and Kitty didn't think about it, until, suddenly, they found themselves objects of derision, sneered at as putains de rosbifs putains de rosbifs by a group of youths in a cafe in Anduze, or they remembered the time when the mayor of Sainte-Agnes-la-Pauvre had accused them of 'stealing' water from the commune. by a group of youths in a cafe in Anduze, or they remembered the time when the mayor of Sainte-Agnes-la-Pauvre had accused them of 'stealing' water from the commune.

Water.

For the sake of the garden, they'd been too profligate with it, testing to the limit local agreements about the use of hoses. 'You have behaved,' said the mayor, 'as though you believed that, as foreigners, you were not subject to the law, or else pretended that you didn't understand it.'

Veronica as furious as when she and Susan had been drummed out of a three-day event for cutting a corner on a hurdles course protested that this wasn't true. They knew the law perfectly well and had kept within it, never watering before eight in the evening. 'I agree,' said the mayor. 'You have kept within it just but not within the spirit spirit of it. Your lawn sprinklers were overheard to be turning at midnight.' of it. Your lawn sprinklers were overheard to be turning at midnight.'

It was true. They liked listening after supper, to the lawn sprinklers, as to a homely s.n.a.t.c.h of music, imagining the nourishment this music was giving to the thirsty gra.s.s.

Now, they sat in silence on the terrace, sunk in worry, staring at the vivid green, staring at their beloved flower borders until the only points of light that remained in them were the white petals of the j.a.panese anemones in the purple dusk. Veronica said: 'Well, I suppose this garden will fail now. Half the gardens I've designed in this region will fail. I suppose it was all futile. How can anybody garden without rain?'

It became the question, then, the only one: how can you sustain a garden with such a low rainfall?

Kitty got up and paced about. Then she said: 'There are ways of conserving and getting water that we haven't thought about. We have to explore every one. We have to put certain bits of engineering in place.'

One of the many things Veronica valued about Kitty was her quiet practicality. She herself was clumsy, often confused by how things worked in the modern world; Kitty was orderly and resourceful. She could fix objects that were broken. She could mend the lawnmower and rewire a lamp.

So it was Kitty who set about solving the water crisis. She had their well cleaned and restored and bought a new pump that brought water up from nine metres down. She instructed work to begin on a second well. She installed new gutters, with underground conduits leading to a new concrete ba.s.sin ba.s.sin beyond the fruit trees. New piping conducted bathwater into green plastic b.u.t.ts. Kitty and Veronica laid down heavy mulch on every centimetre of unplanted earth. They took out the thirsty anemones and subst.i.tuted p.r.i.c.kly pears and agaves. When the heavy autumn rains came, they religiously laid out barrows and buckets and bowls on the lawn and tipped every extra drop into the beyond the fruit trees. New piping conducted bathwater into green plastic b.u.t.ts. Kitty and Veronica laid down heavy mulch on every centimetre of unplanted earth. They took out the thirsty anemones and subst.i.tuted p.r.i.c.kly pears and agaves. When the heavy autumn rains came, they religiously laid out barrows and buckets and bowls on the lawn and tipped every extra drop into the ba.s.sin. ba.s.sin. And, as if to compensate them for all this, the following summer was cool and wet, almost like a summer in England, and the new And, as if to compensate them for all this, the following summer was cool and wet, almost like a summer in England, and the new ba.s.sin ba.s.sin filled to its brim. They invited the mayor down to the house and drank pastis with him and took him round the garden and showed him all their arduous work. It seemed to amuse him: all this for a plot of land on which hardly any vegetables were grown! filled to its brim. They invited the mayor down to the house and drank pastis with him and took him round the garden and showed him all their arduous work. It seemed to amuse him: all this for a plot of land on which hardly any vegetables were grown!

A quoi sert-il, Mesdames?

A rien, Monsieur. Mais, c'est beau.

But it was clear that they were forgiven. And it was after that night that Veronica announced that she was going to begin her book and she had the perfect t.i.tle for it: Gardening without Rain Gardening without Rain.

'The English think that gardening's going to be the same everywhere,' she said. 'In India, in Spain, in France, in South Africa, everywhere but it isn't. So I want to explore how best to make it work here. I'll do it properly, experiment with different varieties of things. See what survives and what dies unless you pamper it with rivers of commune water. It'll be a long project, but who cares? I like it when things are long.'

This early spring was warm at Sainte-Agnes. Five or six degrees warmer than at La Callune, in the hills, where Aramon Lunel came cadging wood from his sister, nine or ten degrees warmer than in London, where a light rain was now falling on Chelsea. Kitty took her easel outside and worked at a delicate watercolour of mimosa blossom. She sat in a worn canvas chair she'd owned for most of her life. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes, she could hear the sound of the seabirds she tried to paint long ago in Cromer, sitting in that same comfortable, sagging chair.

'Always sketching away at something!' her father used to complain. 'As though your life depended upon it.' It had had depended upon it. That was what Kitty Meadows had felt as the years of her childhood and youth went slowly by and she took part-time jobs in a post office, in a chemist and finally in a library. The only moments when she'd been happy or this was how it appeared to her now were when she was out under the big, lonely skies, with her sketchbook and her colours, with the salt winds and the s.h.i.+fting dunes and the magnificence of the light. Painting had saved her. It had let her escape into a life she enjoyed. And it had eventually brought her, after years and years of waiting, into the arms of a woman she could love. depended upon it. That was what Kitty Meadows had felt as the years of her childhood and youth went slowly by and she took part-time jobs in a post office, in a chemist and finally in a library. The only moments when she'd been happy or this was how it appeared to her now were when she was out under the big, lonely skies, with her sketchbook and her colours, with the salt winds and the s.h.i.+fting dunes and the magnificence of the light. Painting had saved her. It had let her escape into a life she enjoyed. And it had eventually brought her, after years and years of waiting, into the arms of a woman she could love.

Now, she saw Veronica coming towards her across the terrace. On Veronica's face was an expression Kitty recognised immediately: chin lifted and set, brow furrowed, eyes blinking anxiously. It made her, in Kitty's mind 'pure Verey', with all the cherished 'Veronica' part of her suddenly missing.

Kitty rinsed her brush, kept staring at the sunlight on the fabulous mimosa tree. She knew that to Veronica's family she was no one, just 'that friend of V's, that little watercolour woman'. She had to fight not to fade back into invisibility. She looked up at Veronica and said, as gently as she could: 'What's wrong, darling?'

Veronica s.n.a.t.c.hed a cigarette out of the pocket of her gardening ap.r.o.n and lit it. She only smoked in times of anxiety or sadness. She walked up and down, puffing inexpertly on her Gitane.

'It's Anthony,' she said at last. 'I couldn't sleep for worrying, after my phone call yesterday, he sounded so terrible. And he just rang me, Kitty. I was right to worry. He told me he feels... defeated. He sits in his shop all day and no one comes in. Imagine it! Alone like that and waiting and no one buys anything. He says the whole thing's finished.'

It crowded Kitty's memory, then, making her head ache, that glimpse she'd once had of Anthony Verey's treasure house all the wood and marble and gilt and gla.s.s, the turned-this and frieze-moulded-that a princely stash of priceless stuff in the Pimlico Road he designated his loved ones loved ones, or some such sentimental epithet. How could such a mountain of expensive objects be 'finished'?

'I don't understand,' she said.

'I know it's difficult to believe,' said Veronica. 'He's always made tons of money. But it's gone wrong now. I suppose even the rich are reining back on Chippendale.' Veronica stamped on her cigarette and came and laid her heavy arm on Kitty's shoulder. 'I know he's spoilt,' she said. 'I know he's not the easiest guest. But he's my brother and he's in trouble and he wants to come and stay with us. Just for a while. So I said yes. You'll be nice to him, won't you?'

What could Kitty answer to that? She rinsed her watercolour brush, reached up for Veronica's hand. She wanted to ask: How long is 'a while'? But even that seemed selfish. And there was no limit almost no limit to the things she would do for Veronica's sake.

'Of course I will,' she said sweetly.

Their guest bedroom faced east, over their small orchard and, beyond this, towards fields of apricot trees and vines. It had a white tiled floor and a sleigh bed and a rickety wrought-iron side table. The beams were painted magenta.

For Anthony, Veronica emptied the walnut armoire of the winter clutter she and Kitty kept there, put white cotton sheets on the bed, vacuumed away the cobwebs, oiled the shutters, s.h.i.+ned up the bathroom. Then she stood staring critically at her efforts. She saw the rooms as Anthony would see them: too plain and unadorned, too shabby, with a stupid colour ruining the beams. But there was nothing to be done about it. And at least the view from the window was good.

Anthony hated flying. He thought budget airliners should be shot out of the sky. He said he would take the train to Avignon and collect a hire car.

He insisted he would bring them Earl Grey tea and Marmite, even though Veronica told him they didn't need these things. He said he was 'unbelievably grateful'. He said he was sure the air of the south would make everything clear to him.

Clear to him in what way? Kitty wondered, but didn't ask. Because Anthony Verey had always struck her as a man for whom everything was already clear, already decided, judged, categorised and appropriately filed and labelled. What more, in a life as apparently selfish as his, was there left to understand?

Audrun made her way slowly and carefully up to the old house, vigilant every step, alert to all that was there, to all that might be there...

You could never predict what Aramon was going to do. One day, he'd chucked out his old television and bought a new one, wide as a wardrobe. Last winter, he'd taken delivery of a pile of sand but never said never even seemed to know what the sand was for. Already, weeds had sown themselves in its s.h.i.+fting and collapsing ma.s.s; the sand pile and the ruined old television sat side by side on the gra.s.s and the snow fell on them in January and the warm breezes blew on them in this new springtime, and Aramon just walked on by them. Sometimes, Audrun noticed, the dogs did their business in the sand pile, c.o.c.ked their legs against the television. So the screen was yellowish now, a stripy yellow that occasionally took light from the suns.h.i.+ne, as though some old broadcaster were trying to get his faltering signal through.

When Audrun was a child, the Mas Lunel had been a U-shaped house. Now, all that was left of it was the back section of the U. The roofs of the two wings, where once the cattle had been housed and grain stored and silkworms reared, had been damaged in the storms of 1950 and the father, Serge, had said: 'Good. Now we can get to work on them.'

Bernadette had told Audrun that she'd thought that 'getting to work' on them meant rebuilding them, filling the cracks in the walls, attending to the damp, relaying the brick floors, replacing doors and windows. But no, Serge had begun to dismantle both edifices. He tore off the clay tiles and stacked them up in his cart and drove the cart down the old, pitted road to Rua.s.se and sold them to a builder's merchant by the river. Then he hacked his way through the grey mortar that covered the walls of the two wings of the Mas Lunel and began gouging out the stones. He proudly told his neighbours, the Vialas and the Molezons, that stones were his 'inheritance' and now in this post-war time when n.o.body had anything left to sell he was going to make his fortune out of this, out of selling stones.

Selling stones.

Bernadette had pleaded with Serge: 'Don't destroy the house, pardi pardi! Don't leave us with nothing.'

'I'm not leaving us with nothing,' he said. 'You women don't understand how the world works. I'm making us rich.'

But they never became rich. Not that anybody could tell. Unless Serge kept the money somewhere else: in an old fertiliser sack? In a hole in the ground?

On the ground, still, were the ghostly outlines of the former east and west wings of the Mas Lunel. It had been grand, a true Cevenol mas, with s.p.a.ce for everything and everyone, with all the machinery kept out of the rain and all the animals sheltered in winter and, above this the magnaneries, magnaneries, the attics where, season by season, the silkworms were hatched and where they ate their vast quant.i.ties of mulberry leaves and spun their coc.o.o.ns and were sent down to the last the attics where, season by season, the silkworms were hatched and where they ate their vast quant.i.ties of mulberry leaves and spun their coc.o.o.ns and were sent down to the last filature filature at Rua.s.se to be boiled alive as the precious silk was unwound onto bobbins. at Rua.s.se to be boiled alive as the precious silk was unwound onto bobbins.

Audrun could just remember the old magnaneries magnaneries at the mas, the smell of them, and the chill in the air as you climbed the steps towards the well-ventilated rooms, and the sound of the thirty thousand worms chomping on leaves, like the sound of hail on the roof. at the mas, the smell of them, and the chill in the air as you climbed the steps towards the well-ventilated rooms, and the sound of the thirty thousand worms chomping on leaves, like the sound of hail on the roof.

'It was terrible work,' Bernadette had told her. 'Terrible, terrible work. You had to collect bunches and bunches of mulberry leaves every single day. And if it had been raining and the leaves were wet, you knew a lot of the worms were going to die, because the damp gave them some intestinal infection. But there was nothing you could do. Every morning, you just had to pick out the dead ones and carry on. And the stink up there, of the dead worms and all the horrible excretions, was vile. I used to gag, sometimes. I hated every minute of that work.'

Yet, she'd done it without complaining. Still hanging on the wall of Audrun's small sitting room was a photograph of Bernadette with, on her lap, a basket full of silk coc.o.o.ns and on her face not a trace of anguish or disgust, but only the smile of a tired and beautiful harvester, her labour complete. The picture was faded and brown, but the white of the silk coc.o.o.ns still had about it an obstinate kind of light.

All the silk in France came from the Far East now. What once had been a flouris.h.i.+ng trade, and had kept thousands of Cevenol families alive, had died in the 1950s. When Serge sold the stones of the Mas Lunel, he'd already known that it was finished. The wooden hatching trays were chopped up and thrown on the fire. The last filature filature at Rua.s.se was demolished. And though Bernadette had been terrified by the violent way Serge tore down the two wings of the U-shaped Mas Lunel, she'd sighed with relief once the at Rua.s.se was demolished. And though Bernadette had been terrified by the violent way Serge tore down the two wings of the U-shaped Mas Lunel, she'd sighed with relief once the magnaneries magnaneries were burned and gone. She told Audrun: 'When that ended, I slept easier in my soul.' were burned and gone. She told Audrun: 'When that ended, I slept easier in my soul.'

Aramon slept in the bed where Bernadette had died. On the very mattress. In sheets that had once belonged to her.

Audrun hated going into this room that stank of his encroachment on their mother's memory. Because her brother had never loved Bernadette, not as Audrun had loved her. All her life, his wild behaviour had plagued and punished Bernadette and when she died he just looked blankly at her corpse, chewing on something that might have been tobacco or gum or even a mulberry leaf, because this was the way he was, like a silkworm, with his jaw grinding on something day and night, and in his eyes a vacancy.

Reluctantly, Audrun had agreed to help him tidy the house and try to find the things he'd lost.

While he killed the bantams he'd promised her, she began searching among all the clutter and garbage for his spectacles and his ident.i.ty papers. She put his dirty laundry into two pillowcases, to take down to her bungalow, to wash in her machine and dry on the line in the sun and wind. She could find nothing clean to put on the bed, so she left it as it was, with just the old blankets and the eiderdown airing under the open window. Let him scratch all night. She didn't care.

She doused a rag with vinegar and cleaned the windows. She swept and washed the wooden floor and took the rug into the garden and hurled it over and over against an old mulberry tree. As she slammed the rug against the tree trunk she heard the dogs begin howling in their pound, so she decided to go up there, to see if Aramon was taking care of them or letting them starve to death.

It was then, as she looked up at the house on her way to the dog pound, that Audrun noticed the crack in the wall. It was an immense, dark fissure in the stone. It ran down from under the eaves, like a fork of lightning, skirting a window frame and narrowing as it sped on towards the door.

Audrun stopped and stared. How long had the crack been there?

She felt time begin its peculiar pull between past things and present awareness. Had she looked a hundred times at this lightning strike in the front wall of the Mas Lunel and never seen it until now? The howling of the dogs grew in urgency. The still-dusty rug in Audrun's arms felt as heavy as a corpse. She walked slowly on.

She remembered sitting with the men who built her bungalow, sitting on the stony earth among the recently delivered slabs of plasterboard while the Camembert the builders were eating for lunch ripened in the sun, and hearing them say that, all over the Cevennes, cracks were appearing in the walls of old stone houses. The taller the house, the deeper ran the cracks.

And n.o.body knew why, said the men. These dwellings had been built to withstand time. But they were not withstanding it. Time, it seemed, destroyed everything at a faster pace now, at a pace no one had ever envisaged.

'Do you think that the Mas Lunel could fall down?' she'd asked the builders. And they'd all turned and stared up at the big hunk of a house, solid as a caserne caserne, tucked in underneath its wooded hill. 'Not that one,' they said, shaking their heads. 'That one should see us all through.'

Audrun had said nothing. She'd just watched the men spreading the oily Camembert on their baguettes and putting the hunks of bread and cheese into their mouths. But, privately, she believed they were wrong. She believed that, if you built a house in a U-shape and then, as Serge had done, tore down the b.u.t.tressing arms of the U, you left something that was vulnerable. Whatever was incomplete a cherry tree leaking sap from a torn branch, a well that had lost its cover was at the mercy of nature.

In the human world, only love was adept at completion.

Audrun went into the dog pen and the hounds clamoured round her. Bred to hunt wild boar, wiry and fearless, they chafed and whimpered in their pent-up life, spent their existence with their noses pressed against the wire.

Aramon still belonged to a hunting syndicate and liked to boast about the boar he'd killed in the past, but he seldom went on the hunts any more, knowing he was too unsteady to manage a shotgun correctly. He seemed to prefer sitting and drinking and staring at the jumpy, violent life on his new TV, where younger people, people with greater agility, tortured and killed and were tortured and killed in their turn. And his dogs were all but forgotten, abandoned to monotony and winter cold, fed chestnuts like the pigs, fed swill and bones. Today, even their water trough was dry. As Audrun filled it up, anger with Aramon made her rib-cage ache, set a vein twitching in her neck. One day, she told herself, all this would be put to rights. One day. One day.

In the kitchen, scouring his blackened pans, sc.r.a.ping grease off the stove, Audrun said: 'You know there's a fissure in the front wall, Aramon?'

He'd come in with the two dead bantams and thrown them down on the table. Now, he was fumbling with his spectacles, found by Audrun under his pillow, the wire arms bent out of shape by the weight of his head.

'I've seen that,' he said. 'It's nothing.'

Audrun said he should ask Raoul Molezon, the stonemason, to look at it, but Aramon said no, he'd looked at it himself and it was a crack in the mortar, that was all, nothing to start sweating about. Then he tugged his bent spectacles onto his nose and searched for his cigarettes and lit one and coughed and spat onto the stone floor and said: 'I've had enough, anyway. It's driving me mad, this big s.h.i.+t-hole. It's pulling me down, ruining my health. So I've decided. I'm selling the house. And the land. I'm selling everything.'

Audrun stared at her hands, like root vegetables in the sink-water. Had she heard what she thought she'd heard?

'Yes,' said Aramon, as if reading her question. 'I've had enough. So I've got onto it right away before someone changes my mind for me. Estate agents came out from Rua.s.se. I expect you saw them when you were squinting through your curtains! Mother and daughter. Daughter wearing high-heeled shoes, stupid b.i.t.c.h. But they were interested. Very interested indeed. The market's dipped a bit from what it was, but they say I can still get a good price, pardi pardi, a mountain of money. Live in clover for the rest of my days.'

Live in clover. Aramon?

In such a scented, green and blameless thing?

'Yes,' he said again. 'Sell to foreigners, that's what the agents told me. Swiss. Belgians. Dutch. English. Plenty of them have still got money to burn, despite recession. And they like these old places. They tart them up with swimming pools, and G.o.d knows what else. Use them as holiday homes...'

Audrun dried her hands on a torn dishcloth. She turned to Aramon and said: 'It's not yours to sell, Aramon. It belonged to our parents, and our grandparents...'

'It is is mine to sell. You had your sainted wood and your bit of land for your bungalow and your vegetables. I had the house. I can do what I like with it.' mine to sell. You had your sainted wood and your bit of land for your bungalow and your vegetables. I had the house. I can do what I like with it.'

Audrun folded the torn cloth. She said calmly: 'How much do you think you're going to get for it?'

She saw him look startled, almost afraid. Then he picked up a used match and with its charred end, wrote a number on his palm, then brought his palm cupped, as though to hold a bantam chick close to Audrun's face and she saw what was written there: 450,000.

Audrun took her medication and lay down for the night.

She dreamed about the strangers who would install themselves in the Mas Lunel while, some way off, Aramon basked in his clover field.

The strangers attacked the house with a peculiar ferocity, as though they didn't want this this house, but some other house of their own imaginings. house, but some other house of their own imaginings.

They rearranged the land. A lake appeared. The colour of the lake-water was pink, as though it had been mixed with blood. They spoke some other language, which might have been Dutch. Their children rampaged around the yard, where Bernadette had sat in the suns.h.i.+ne, sh.e.l.ling peas. In the night, they cavorted, naked and screaming, in the blood-tainted lake and played rock music. The noise they made bounced and echoed from valley to silent valley.

On the evening before he left for France, Anthony dined with his old friends, Lloyd and Benita Palmer, in their house in Holland Park.

Lloyd was a semi-retired investment banker who, over the years, had bought hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of furniture from Anthony. Benita was an interior decorator who'd created the rooms where this furniture sat. Her preferred palette of colours ranged from straw to cream to coral. In her downstairs lavatory, decorated in apricot toile de jouy toile de jouy, stood an 18th-century snakewood and mahogany vitrine ('The bra.s.s galleried top over a flower-painted frieze, the base with two snakewood inlaid doors and parcel gilt festoon ap.r.o.n') worth at least 16,000. In the beige and cream and gold dining room, where they now sat, hung a pair of oil paintings by Barend van der Meer ('Fine example, still life of plums and grapes with vine leaves arranged on a gla.s.s dish, 1659' and 'Fine example, still life of pomegranates with African grey parrot, 1659') worth a conservative 17,000 each. The George III silver wine coasters ('The sides pierced with scrolling foliage with waved gadroon rim'), that had come to rest in front of Lloyd's place at the table, Anthony had picked up in a sale in Worcester for 300 the pair and sold on to Lloyd for 1,000 each.

Though Anthony had often teased Lloyd Palmer that he was one of the 'rich b.a.s.t.a.r.d masters of the universe', he'd previously been happy enough with his own role in that universe as the prime arbiter of Lloyd and Benita's taste in furniture and pictures. But now, tonight, when he saw Lloyd, at sixty-five, still sailing triumphantly through his life, despite the economic downturn, about which he complained very loudly ('I've taken hideous losses, Anthony, absolutely b.l.o.o.d.y hideous!'), but to which his lifestyle seemed strangely immune, with his large but still handsome wife like a sequined spinnaker beside him, whoos.h.i.+ng along in the vanguard of all that was most desirable in rich British society, Anthony felt a wounding stab of envy.

The Palmers were a ravis.h.i.+ngly fortunate pair. This vast and magnificent s.h.i.+p of theirs, ballasted by numerous children and grandchildren, was unthreatened by storm or by calm or even by corrosion or so it appeared. Anthony had to express it baldly to himself this evening: Lloyd had always been ahead ahead of him and always would be. He was so far ahead, in fact, his lead so manifestly una.s.sailable, that there was no point in Anthony imagining he could ever catch up. And the worst thing was, he could see Lloyd thinking these same thoughts. Even Benita may have been thinking them: Poor Anthony; things are difficult everywhere, but for of him and always would be. He was so far ahead, in fact, his lead so manifestly una.s.sailable, that there was no point in Anthony imagining he could ever catch up. And the worst thing was, he could see Lloyd thinking these same thoughts. Even Benita may have been thinking them: Poor Anthony; things are difficult everywhere, but for Anthony Verey Antiques Anthony Verey Antiques it has to be the end of the road. Thank G.o.d it has to be the end of the road. Thank G.o.d we we aren't trying to make a living, in the anarchic 21st century, out of trying to sell what our American friend Mary-Jane refers to as 'dead people's furniture'... aren't trying to make a living, in the anarchic 21st century, out of trying to sell what our American friend Mary-Jane refers to as 'dead people's furniture'...

These sombre considerations had led Anthony to drink a great deal of Lloyd's excellent wine. Lloyd had matched him, sip for sip, and the two of them now sat face to face, across a choppy lake of gla.s.sware, coughing on cigars, slugging cognac and determined, as Lloyd had touchingly put it, 'to get to the heart of the whole ruddy thing'.

Benita had gone to bed. She knew perhaps because she was more cultured than Lloyd and had read and understood both Ibsen and Lewis Carroll that there was no 'heart of the whole ruddy thing' and that when men talked about searching for it what they often wound up talking about was cars. Occasionally, she'd noticed, they reminisced in a sentimental way about their past lives, elevating university pranks into myths of universal significance or exaggerating the traumas caused to them by public school beatings. Tonight, as she closed her bedroom door, she heard Anthony say: 'The only time, Lloyd, that I was happy... the only f.u.c.king time that I was happy in my life was in a tree-house!'

Lloyd's explosion of laughter was loud. Lloyd adored laughing (and people tended to adore Lloyd partly because he laughed so much), but now, tonight, Lloyd discovered that the side-effect of this particular collapse into mirth was a slight wetting of his underpants and this, he thought, as he continued to giggle, was something surprising, something that happened to old men, but not (yet) to him.

'Yes,' Anthony was going on, 'that's the honest truth, old man. In a tree-house.'

'Oh G.o.d!' said Lloyd, recovering from his laugh and putting one of his meaty hands on his groin, to see if the wet had come through to his trousers, which it had. He thrust a crumpled linen table napkin down there and said: 'So go on, tell me, where was the f.u.c.king tree?'

Anthony poured himself more cognac from the William Yeowood decanter. 'In the hols', he said, 'when V and I were kids, I once made a tree-house in the spinney behind the house...'

'Barton House, or whatever it was called?'

'Yes. Bartle. Ma's house. Our house. Before you knew me.'

'Well before I knew you, old man. I mean, well before well before. Unless you were still building tree-houses when you were at Cambridge?'

'Shut up and listen, Lloyd. We're meant to be getting to the heart of things.'

'Are you saying... are you saying, at the heart of everything... at the heart of f.u.c.king everything is a f.u.c.king tree-house?'

'No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying... I'm just saying... all I'm saying is I was very happy when I gave the tea party for Ma.'

'What tea party?'

'Just listen. You're not listening to me.'

'I am listening.'

'I gave a tea party in my tree-house. I invited Ma. OK? I had Mrs Brigstock bake some stuff: malt loaf and brandy snaps. And I got everything ready. Table. Tablecloth. China etcetera. Chairs.'

'Who's Mrs Brigstock?'

'Mrs Brigstock is Mrs Brigstock, Lloyd. The cook-housekeeper Ma had at the time.'

'OK. OK. Keep your wig on! How was I meant to know? And how did you get a ruddy table and chairs up into a ruddy tree-house?'