The Memory Game Part 20

'How will I find it?'

'It'll be the one with me standing next to it at three o'clock.'

'All right. I'll be the one carrying a copy of Daniel Deronda Daniel Deronda with half of the pages unread. Un with half of the pages unread. Uncut, in fact.'

That was it, two dozen words, and the most erotic phone conversation I'd ever had. I baked two Madeira cakes, three loaves of brown bread, and a plain sponge cake for the freezer. I drank four gla.s.ses of red wine, smoked eight cigarettes, listened to unromantic Bach. On Sat.u.r.day I cleaned the house from top to bottom. Really cleaned it, taking books off shelves and was.h.i.+ng them down. I put up some pictures that had been standing in my study for months, I tore down posters of old churches that Claud had left curling on the walls. I stuck photographs from the last year into the photo alb.u.m. They were all of buildings, except for one of Hana with a cloche hat obscuring her face. In the afternoon, I went to Hampstead and bought a coat. It didn't cost anything. I just paid for it with a credit card. I pushed all thought of Natalie out of my mind. This was my weekend.

In the evening I made a rice salad, and ate it with half a bottle of red wine left over from not that long ago. I pulled a box down from the attic, lit a candle, and browsed through Claud's love letters to me. Almost all of them dated from the year before and the year after our marriage. After that, nothing except the odd postcard from a conference: 'Missing you.' He probably was.

The letters were in meticulous script. On some, the ink had faded. 'My sweetest Jane,' he wrote, 'you were lovely in your blue dress.' 'My darling, I wish I were with you tonight.' The earliest letter was dated October 1970 a few months after Natalie had disappeared. Odd that I'd forgotten it: it was a kind, grown-up letter saying how the family was holding together. 'She'll come home,' he had written, 'but of course nothing will ever be the same again. The first part of our life is over.' He was right. I thought of him in his tidy flat, with his books about churches and his correspondence arranged alphabetically. I wondered if he still hoped that I would change my mind and if he'd walked through the door at that moment, the evening before my date with Caspar, I believe that I would have let him stay. I've never been good at partings.

He was there on time, but so was f.a.n.n.y, hair in wild curls around her face and wearing jeans about two sizes too big for her wiry little frame. She uncurled her gloved fist to show me the stones she'd collected while they'd waited. Her face was blotchy with cold and smudged with dirt.

'The friend she was going to spend the day with is ill,' explained Caspar.

'I'm glad to see her again,' I lied. 'Come this way, f.a.n.n.y, and I'll show you an obelisk with a dog's snout set in it. The dog was called Emperor.'

'What's an obelisk?'

'A pointy thing.'

We wandered off the main gravelled path. Brambles caught at our legs.

'Have you noticed,' said Caspar, 'how many children are buried here. Look, little Samuel aged five here, that's the same age as f.a.n.n.y, and there's a baby of eleven months.' We stopped at a family gravestone: five names, all under ten. On some neat gravestones there were flowers. Most were overgrown with nettles and ivy; moss sank into the lettering, obscuring it.

'Look at that,' I said. A few yards away, through a thicket of trees, a headless angel stood guard over a buried slab. 'We've forgotten how to mourn, haven't we? How to remember. I'd like a monument like that. But people would say it was kitsch, or morbid.'

Caspar smiled. 'Morbid? To be planning your funerary sculpture at the age of forty? The thought never entered my head.'

'I'm forty-one. Look.'

Four dreamy pre-Raphaelite heads cl.u.s.tered mournfully in a circle of stone.

'Where are the pets buried, Jane?' f.a.n.n.y ran back from her detour through a line of toppled graves.

I pointed up the path. 'There. A bit further on.'

She rushed off, her scarf trailing its fringes behind her.

'Come here, Jane.'

I made my way through the thickets to where Caspar stood. I walked very slowly. Nothing would ever again be as good as this moment. I stopped a foot away from him and we looked at each other.

'Plain Jane Crane,' he said. With one forefinger he traced my lips. Carefully, as if I were precious, he cupped the back of my skull. I took off my gloves, dropped them among the nettles, and slid my hands under his coat, jersey, s.h.i.+rt. He smelt of wood smoke. I could see my face in his eyes, and then he closed his eyes and kissed me. So many layers of clothing; we leant into each other. My body ached.

'Caspar! Caspar, where are you? Come and see what I've found. There you are. Why are you hiding? Jane, Jane you've dropped your gloves. Come on. Hurry.'

When I found myself in my remembered world again, the first stones of Cree's Top hard against the curve of my spine, I felt cold and afraid. As soon as I had mounted my bike and free-wheeled down Swain's Lane leaving Caspar and f.a.n.n.y holding hands on the pavement, the kiss in the cemetery had seemed like a dream and I was returning to what was real. The holiday was over and I was going back to school.

Alex and I hardly spoke. We made no eye contact. I lay on the couch and as he spoke the ritualistic few words, I felt the room slip away from me and I was back where I had to be. The surface of the River Col on my left rippled sickeningly, as if it were thick oil rather than flowing water. It moved heavily away round the bend. I stood and turned, s.h.i.+vering a little in my gym shoes and thin cotton dress, black like the one that Natalie had worn so often that summer. The breeze blew it back and it outlined my firm young body, the body I had given to Theo just the day before, caressed and peeled and finally penetrated out in the shadowed woods with the laughing and the music of the party humming in our ears. I had taken my notebook, with my silly girlish fancies and fantasies, and ripped them from the book one by one. Their childish illusions repelled me now and it was with a sense of burnt bridges that I'd screwed them up and tossed them one by one into the water where they'd lost themselves in the broken surface of light and ripples which disguised where air ended and water began. I was a woman now, wasn't I?

I turned round to face Cree's Top. A wave of dread flowed through me and I felt giddy, so that my legs would scarcely bear me. The elms on my left swayed and tipped, or it might have been that they were still and I that was swaying. I began to make my way up the narrow and steep path that was familiar and so long lost. I could see the sludgy water of the stream down through the bushes to my right but this time I made an effort not to look anywhere but up the path, this path of my own shuttered mind. Branches brushed against me, snagging my dress, thorns against the flesh of my bare arms and calves, as if I was being held back. I strode through them unheeding. I was now directly on the summit of Cree's Top, though the visibility was obscured in all directions by the thick gorse bushes that covered it. The peak was very small and after just a few steps I began to descend.

I stopped and listened. Now I knew. Movement was visible through the bushes ahead, glimpses of something. Sounds also, m.u.f.fled and indistinct. It was there. It was there. Things I had buried in my own mind for a quarter of a century and all I had to do was step forward, through the barriers I had erected for myself. When I opened my eyes and blinked, unseeing at first, at Alex, it was not with the fear of before but with an icy resolve. It was there. But I wasn't quite ready. Not quite.

Twenty-Six.

I woke on the morning of Wednesday 15 February with a sense of imminence. There had been rain for days the lawn was bloated with it but the weather was suddenly cold and bright. From my back window the spire and the television mast on Highgate Hill looked unnaturally clear. The everyday objects in my kitchen were different, charged with meaning. My skin p.r.i.c.kled. It was as if every object that I looked at was illuminated from behind, its outline accentuated and made harder, more vivid. Myself, too. I felt capable, precise. I needed to do things.

I had shopped the day before and was partly prepared. On the table I placed my heavy scales and weights, a bag of wholemeal flour and a bag of strong white flour, small polythene bags of pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and sesame seeds, yeast like soft modelling clay, sea salt, vitamin C powder in an orange medicinal pot, a plastic bottle of grapeseed oil, a bag of hard, thick muscovado sugar. This was a process I could go through in subconscious bliss. The yeast awoke with jewelled bubbles. I forked the salt into the sandy wholemeal flour, then added everything else with the beery puddle of yeast. I smoked cigarettes in the garden for half an hour, not thinking of anything, then returned and mashed and kneaded the two large patties of dough, leaning on the heels of my hands, folding and folding. Cut, rolled, pushed into four tins. of ring binders and the clatter of filing cabinets. We were now only a day or two from achieving perfect order, like Pompeii. It would be almost a pity to disturb the taxonomic perfection with any new work.

Duncan was engrossed with the technicalities of the espresso machine, one of our major capital expenditures in the boom days of the late eighties. He brought me over a thimbleful of coffee which gave me an almost instantaneous jolt of caffeine as I despatched it in a single, tiny gulp. He told me of his new scheme which he was discussing with the council for putting homeless families ('homilies' he camply called them) into derelict houses and enabling them to restore the buildings themselves. I nodded with enthusiasm. It was extremely cost-effective (except for us), practical, socially beneficial, had little to do with architecture in any traditional sense, and was almost certain to be rejected out of hand by the housing department. An ideal CFM project. Then we moved on to my hostel.

'I read about the torchlight procession of local residents in the local paper,' Duncan said. 'Your allaying of the anxieties of the community obviously wasn't a total success. Does that mean that the hostel scheme has been abandoned?'

'Not necessarily,' I said. 'A council lawyer has come up with a slightly underhand way of pus.h.i.+ng it through. Because of the fight at the meeting and the arrest that followed it, there's a court hearing coming up. The ruse is, as far as I can understand it, that the matter is all sub judice sub judice, which means that we can't respond to questions on the issue. Or at least that's what we'll say. Meanwhile, the plans are moving towards completion. The objectors will end up having to deal with a hostel that is up and running and that will bring its own problems. Local residents attacking arrogant council officials and a modernist architect is one thing. That would go down well in the local press. Nimbys a.s.saulting the mentally ill who have been returned to the community is another. Anyway, that's the grand strategy.'

'Did you explain to them that if these people weren't in their back yards, they would be on their pavements and in their shop doorways and public benches?'

'No. Events intruded.'

The meeting was adjourned in fairly good spirits and I returned to my desk where I smoked cigarettes and tapped my phone with my pencil and realised I wasn't doing anything and that maybe I had better leave. I had the conviction that I was seeing everything with extreme clarity and that I had other places to be and other things to do. Gina asked after my health but I was unable to pay proper attention to what she was saying and I left, without even saying goodbye to Duncan. I would explain everything later.

Back at home, I opened a bottle of red wine and I stood on a chair and looked through a cupboard and found some salted cashew nuts and a rolled-up quarter of a bag of pistachio nuts and a little packet of scampi-flavoured somethings that were a bit like crisps. That would do for my supper. I drank the wine and ate these bits of crisps and watched TV and flicked between channels. There was a quiz show with questions I found elusive, a local news broadcast, an American science fiction show that I a.s.sumed must be Star Trek Star Trek but turned out not to be, not even the new but turned out not to be, not even the new Star Trek. Star Trek. There was a programme about albatrosses, the long journeys they take navigating on the trade winds and the lifelong devotion the albatross shows to its mate, and a comedy show set in an American high school, and then another news programme. There was a programme about albatrosses, the long journeys they take navigating on the trade winds and the lifelong devotion the albatross shows to its mate, and a comedy show set in an American high school, and then another news programme.

After I had watched too many of these programmes, I switched the sound off and rang up the Stead because I wanted to talk to Martha but somebody else answered and took me by surprise. It was Jonah and he spoke in a very calm official sort of voice and told me that Martha had sunk into a coma in the morning and then had died very quietly that afternoon. I tried to ask some questions, not wanting to break the connection, but Jonah said he was sorry but he had to go. On the television I saw a man in a grey suit silently opening and closing his mouth like a fish in a bowl. I had to phone somebody. I rang Claud and got an answering machine. I rang Caspar and a woman answered and I hung up. And I rang Alex Dermot-Brown and Alex answered. He was surprised and said at first that we had a session the next day and asked if it couldn't wait but after I had talked a bit he told me to come straight over and asked if I was all right about getting over on my own or should he come and get me. I insisted and cycled over without a hat or gloves, though there was already rime on the car windows.

Alex looked very slightly different when he opened the door. Although this was where I had always seen him and he never dressed up, I felt like a schoolgirl calling on her teacher at home, illicitly, after hours. He greeted me with obvious concern. He spoke quietly and I could hear voices from the kitchen downstairs. I dimly realised that I might have interrupted something but I wasn't in a position to care. He led me up to his room. I asked something about the children. He said that they were asleep, way up at the top of the house and I didn't need to think about them. He put the light on and it dazzled me. With the darkness outside and the brown cosy illumination in the hall and on the stairs, it seemed clinical and interrogative. I lay on the couch and he sat behind me.

'Martha's dead,' I said.

I was breathing deeply and deliberately as I had in earlier times on board s.h.i.+p while struggling not to vomit. Alex waited a long time before speaking and when he did he was gentle but determined.

'I want you to think again of the day when Natalie disappeared,' he said.

It was more than I could bear.

'I can't, Alex, I can't.'

Suddenly, he was kneeling beside me. I could feel his sweet warm breath against my cheek, his hand was on my hair.

'Jane, this woman you dearly loved has died. I know what you are suffering. But you haven't come to see me in order to be comforted. You want to use this emotion. Am I right?'

'I don't know what I want to do,' I said, and I knew that all resistance was gone.

'Let's do it then,' he said.

Alex spoke the soft, soothing words that were now a familiar incantation, like half-heard music from a distant room. I experienced a profound relief in letting my body relax and my will slacken and I was there. This time I really was there. The charred moss against my back, my thighs resting on tiny twigs and stones. As I stood up and brushed my dress down I could feel the marks they had left in my flesh, like a raffia mat on the back of my thighs. The sun was lost behind a cloud and it left the River Col in heavy shadow. The stained, shadowy surface rippled lethargically and drifted away. The twisted torn paper fragments were gone, along with the childish fantasies they had represented. That was all over.

I turned, s.h.i.+vering in the flurries of wind, drops of moisture threatening rain, that now blew against me. The black dress was pressed against my body, my s.e.xually awakened body, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s and thighs now somebody else's as well as my own. I felt a cold clarity of purpose. Cree's Top was ahead of me, the river lapping down on the bank by my right foot. I began to run up the narrow, steep path and into the wood and gorse that covered this lump of nature. There were sounds, not of birds or of the wind or the stream but strange creakings and whistlings and groans. I paid them no attention. I ran and could hear myself panting and feel the pain in my constricted chest. The trees around me looked dead, the bushes bare, the river below me on my right, brown and sluggish. My duty now was not to think and reason but to proceed regardless. Branches scratched my face, thorns tore me, my clothes snagged. I had reached the summit of Cree's Top and ran across and began to make my way down the slope on the other side. On Natalie's side. Through the bushes ahead I saw movement, fragmentary glimpses between branches, I heard screams, unintelligible shouts. My decision had already been made. I ran forward and burst through the bushes into the sunlight.

For the first moment I could see nothing with the sun burning my eyes, nothing but speckled gold explosions. I narrowed my gaze and forced myself to look. It was clear. Simultaneous perceptions: A girl lying on the gra.s.s. Screaming and screaming. Natalie. Dark hair, flaming eyes. Held down. Above her was a man, his hands about her throat. Her arms and legs flapped uselessly, then slowed and stopped. I tried to shout but it was as if my mouth was stopped with ashes. I tried to run, but my feet were stone blocks. The girl was let fall and lay still. The man had his back to me. He was dark haired, not grey. He was slim not stout. He was clean-shaven, not bearded. But there was no doubt. It was Alan.

Suddenly, I was screaming and screaming and I was being gripped and it was Alex and he was holding me tight and whispering in my ear. I pulled myself up. My hair was streaked over my face. I was spent. I had been skinned and turned inside out. I said I was going to be sick, now, and Alex reached for the wastebasket and I retched and then vomited and vomited, emptying myself. I lay back on the couch, stretched out, helpless, snotty, spots of vomit on my face, tear-stained, groaning, crying, gasping. Utterly spent, disgraced, appalled.

I felt a voice, intimate in my ear: 'You got there, Jane. You're all right. You're safe.'

Twenty-Seven.

I woke up in my own bed, didn't know how I'd got there. Yes, Alex had brought me in his car. Had I made a scene and scared his children? My bike must still be locked to a parking meter outside his house. I picked up the alarm clock. Almost ten o'clock. Morning or evening? Must be morning. If it was night, it would be twenty o'clock. No, twenty-two. There was something on the edge of my consciousness not wanting to be thought about. I made myself think about it. I had to be quick to get to the lavatory. I leant into the bowl and retched and retched, bringing up nothing but a few hot, stinging splashes.

I washed around my mouth with a flannel. I was still wearing my clothes. I let them fall where I stood and stepped into the shower. Very hot water followed by very cold water. I dressed myself in jeans and an old corduroy s.h.i.+rt. My fingers trembled so much I could hardly fasten the b.u.t.tons. I decided that I should eat something and went down to the kitchen. There were two bags of coffee beans in my freezer and I chose the darker ones. I filled a large cafetiere. After hunting round a bit, I found an unopened packet of cigarettes in the pocket of the coat I'd been wearing the previous night. I emptied the cafetiere, cup by cup, and smoked my way through the packet.

The phone rang a few times and I heard various voices on the answering machine. Duncan, Caspar, my father. I would deal with them later, some other day. When I heard Alex Dermot-Brown's voice, I ran across the room and picked up the receiver. He was concerned about me. He asked if I was all right and then said he wanted me to come round. Straight away, if possible. I said I'd be there in an hour. It was cold outside but bright, sunny. I put on a long napping coat, wound a scarf about my neck, put a flat cap on my head and set off for the Heath. The wind blew about me in gusts and when I reached the top of Kite Hill, London was miraculously clear at my feet. I could see right across it to the Surrey hills beyond. I walked down and left the Heath at Parliament Hill and pa.s.sed the Royal Free hospital. Claud had told me about a mental patient there who had been possessed by a neurotic compulsion to count the number of windows. Since he never achieved the same figure twice, it was an eternal task.

The things we do to give order to our lives. I had once read a poem about a man arrested for filling in the 'o's in library books. Did he think of all the 'o's that he had had filled in, or all the 'o's that he hadn't? It was a long, hard trek and I was out of breath by the time I knocked at Alex's door. All the cigarettes. I almost laughed as I caught myself resolving to give up. Not yet. Not yet. filled in, or all the 'o's that he hadn't? It was a long, hard trek and I was out of breath by the time I knocked at Alex's door. All the cigarettes. I almost laughed as I caught myself resolving to give up. Not yet. Not yet.

When the door opened, Alex surprised me, almost overwhelmed me, by taking me in his arms and holding me tight to him, murmuring comforting words in my ear as if I was one of his little children, scared of the dark. It was what I wanted more than anything else in the world. After the rea.s.surance, his look turned serious as he asked me once more if I was all right.

'I don't know. I've been vomiting and I still feel sick. My head feels like somebody's trying to inflate it with a bicycle pump.'

Alex smiled. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'It's just what I would expect. It's like a fever breaking. Think of it as your body trying to expel a quarter of a century of poisons and impurities that have been trapped inside you. You're purifying yourself.'

'Am I going mad, Alex?'

'You're becoming sane. You're discovering the agony of a life without illusions.'

'But Alex, can it be true? Can it really be true? Could a man like Alan have got his own daughter pregnant? Could he have killed her?'

Very gently, Alex held my face in his hands and looked closely in my eyes.

'You're the one, Jane, who has broken through all the barriers and lies to uncover this. You've made the journey, Jane. You tell me, do you think it's impossible that he could have done this?'

It seemed an immense effort to reply. I stepped back and his hands dropped away from me. I slowly shook my head.

'No,' I said in little more than a whisper. 'I don't think it's impossible.'

A couple of minutes later I was back on the couch and Alex was in his chair. I started trying to reconstruct the details of what had happened all those years before but Alex was firm. All that could wait, he said. Instead he talked to me softly, as he had so often before, and he took me back into my memory, back to the scene of the murder. During that session and again during another on the following day, and again on the day after that, he took me over and over the events and they became clearer and more precise. It was like a photographic image that already seemed satisfactory coming more and more into focus, bringing with it new details and nuances. I saw Natalie struggling, I could see what she was wearing, from that familiar braided hair-band to the black plimsolls that I always a.s.sociate with her. I could see Alan, strong and heavy, holding her down, grasping her throat, tightening his grip until all movement ceased.

'Couldn't I have done something?'

'What could you have done? Your mind saved you by s.h.i.+elding you from the horror of what happened. Now we've broken through that s.h.i.+eld.'

I found the process of reliving the event unspeakably harsh. The crime was so vivid and violent, and I was so close just metres away in the bushes that I felt I could intervene, do something, maybe just shout. But I knew that I had not intervened and that it was now beyond my power and that there was nothing to be done. The shock and pain remained constant. There was no coming to terms, no catharsis, no getting beyond the pain or working my way through it. I achieved no distance from the events, I was not able to think about them in a balanced way. These were days of sobbing, retching grief, of smoking instead of eating, of drinking on my own at home.

Sprinkle some celery salt into the jug, followed by a few twists of black pepper, three splashes of Tabasco, an improbable amount of Lea & Perrins, the juice of half a lemon and a shake of tomato ketchup. Always begin with the cheapest ingredients. If you are using a whole litre carton of tomato juice, as I was, you will need a good tumbler of iced Russian vodka. Finally, the secret ingredient: half a winegla.s.s of dry sherry. A handful of ice in your chunky tumbler and you have a drink substantial enough to replace dinner. A middle-period Bartok string quartet would have suited my mood but I listened to Rigoletto. Rigoletto. Woman is mobile. This one wasn't. I had gone inside myself and been horrified by what I had found. Outside was cold and dark. I would have to go out there soon and deal with things in the world. That was next. Woman is mobile. This one wasn't. I had gone inside myself and been horrified by what I had found. Outside was cold and dark. I would have to go out there soon and deal with things in the world. That was next.

When I had drained the last watery little puddle from my gla.s.s, I decided to go outside. Everything had to be done with utmost care. It was cold. I put on a sweater. I put on a coat and a hat. I found my keys and my purse and put them in the pocket of the coat. Outside, the icy air cleared my head a little. I had destroyed my marriage. I had done G.o.d-knows-what to my children. I had damaged my own mental health. I had uncovered horrors. People I loved were already appalled by my actions. What catastrophe was I now going to inflict on the family that meant more to me than anything in the world? The wind was blowing stingingly cold drops of rain into my face. Life had become horrible for me.

I was walking past shops now. A man, his hair in long matted ringlets, sat outside the supermarket with a mangy pathetic-looking dog of indeterminate breed. His hand was extended towards me. This was what happened to people who removed themselves from the world of family and society and work. I opened my purse and found a coin which I gave him, holding it precisely between two fingers so that I wouldn't fumble it.

I knew that I was projecting my misery out onto the world however miserable some of its individual components might have been in their own right so that I wasn't all that surprised when I stood in front of the TV rental shop and saw images of Alan mouthing silently on a dozen screens. There was the patriarch, justifying himself in words that I couldn't understand. For a moment, I thought that I had gone entirely mad, that the real world and the worlds of my memories and my nightmares had become one and that Alan had defeated me, utterly and finally. Then I remembered.

'Oh, f.u.c.k.'

I looked around, dazed but shocked into action. I saw a yellow 'For Hire' sign and flagged the taxi down. I gave a Westbourne Grove address. As we drove towards Swiss Cottage, Paddington and beyond, I held my face against the ferocious blast at the open window.

'All right, love?' the driver asked.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak coherently. When I knocked at the door, Erica let me in.

'It's almost over,' she said. 'Drink?'

'Water,' I replied as I followed her up the stairs.

'Off the drink?'

'On it.'

She ushered me into a dark room, lit only by a vast television screen. The chairs were all occupied by indistinguishable silhouettes and I found myself a spot on the floor. Erica handed me something that rattled. My water. I held the damp gla.s.s against my forehead. I had thought of Paul's doc.u.mentary about our family as a series of interviews. I hadn't prepared myself for what it would actually look like. When I started to pay attention to what was happening there was a photograph of Natalie on the screen, a hazy blow-up of a cla.s.s picture that didn't do her justice. Someone was saying something about the lost spirit of the sixties, Jonah, I think, but it may have been Fred. From Natalie, the image changed to a picture of the Stead, seen, I guessed, from Chantry's Hill. At first, I thought it too was a photograph, but there were tiny things, a tremble of the camera, barely distinguishable flutters of leaves, s.h.i.+mmers of light, that showed this was being filmed. The camera began to move until it settled on Paul. He was looking down on the house, his face hidden from us. Then he turned and began to walk, accompanied by the camera. He addressed it as if it was a friend. What a pro.

Paul talked about the family as home and home as the place where, when you go there, they have to let you in; the family as the symbol of our affections; and the family as the symbol of society with its ties and obligations. I found it a bit difficult to concentrate, befuddled as I was, but I understood that he was telling some story from his golden childhood. At the moment he finished the story he came to a halt. The camera pulled back from his face and we could see that he had reached the spot where Natalie's body had been discovered. The hole was still there and he stood looking soulful. The camera pulled back and back until it could take in the whole scene: pensive Paul peering into the hole, the Stead, early morning sunlight, a tweeting bird. Some Delius-style music struck up and the credits began to roll. Someone switched the light on.

'Where were you?' Paul nudged me from behind.

'Sorry.'

'I'm glad you saw the final sequence though,' he said. 'That was a real tour de force. tour de force. Four and a half minutes without a cut. I walked all the way down the hill, and hit the mark at the moment I finished the reminiscence. It's the most technically demanding thing I've ever tried. When I said cut, even the technicians applauded. But I want you to see the whole thing. I'll get a tape sent round.' Four and a half minutes without a cut. I walked all the way down the hill, and hit the mark at the moment I finished the reminiscence. It's the most technically demanding thing I've ever tried. When I said cut, even the technicians applauded. But I want you to see the whole thing. I'll get a tape sent round.'

'Thanks,' I said. 'I've got to go now.'

'You've only just arrived, Jane. There are people I want you to meet.'

'I've got to go now.'

I hadn't even taken my hat or coat off, so I walked straight down the stairs and out. I thought I might have spent the last of my money on the taxi but I didn't check. I walked all the way home. I went through Regent's Park on the way. It took me an hour and a half and I was bleakly sober by the time I unlocked my front door.