Danny smiled. 'There's just one thing I need to clear up first, though,' he said as he walked round to open the door for her. 'That bit about being stood up a I don't believe a word of it. You can't know what it's like, surely?'

'No,' she admitted, 'but only because I don't take the risk. Like I said, nothing frightens me as much as rejection.' She looked away, embarra.s.sed at having been made to talk about herself for a change. 'I suspect I'd be a very needy lover, and that's never an attractive quality.'

'Oh, I don't know,' he said, running his fingers through her hair. 'I can think of worse.'

8.

Marta and Josephine threw the blankets over their heads and ran back to the village. The rain drove in with twice the force for having been made to waita and, by the time they reached the shelter of the narrow pa.s.sage that divided Neptune from the neighbouring cottages, they were soaked through. 'I'm sorry we were driven out with so little ceremony,' Marta said when she had got her breath back, 'but how was I supposed to know the f.u.c.king tide would come in so quickly?'

In the darkness, she heard Josephine laugh and felt her hand against her cheek, cupping her face. 'At least it had the decency to wait.'

Marta turned her head to kiss Josephine's palm. 'But not long enough.' She drew Josephine towards her, breathing in the smell of the rain on her skin, feeling her shiver as the blanket fell to the floor. 'Come up with me now. We need to get out of these clothes.'

Josephine hesitated. 'Are you sure? What if Lydia's looking for you?'

'She won't be. Lydia and I . . .' Marta faltered, aware of her own hypocrisy in being happy to betray Lydia by deed but not by word. 'It's not . . .'

Josephine sensed her difficulty and stopped her, apparently as relieved to avoid the subject as Marta was. 'You don't have to explain. You and Lydia a it's not my business.'

'Come inside, though. I haven't given you your present yet.'

'Are you sure about that?' Marta felt herself blush like a schoolgirl. She led the way up the steps, precarious now in the rain, and found her key. As she fumbled for the lock, a flash of lightning obliged her by illuminating the whole of the square, distorting the buildings and briefly transforming Portmeirion's magic into the twisted stuff of nightmares. She braced herself for the response; in truth, she had always been a little afraid of stormsa and, as the thunder cracked above her head, she was glad to get inside, where its violence was at least muted.

She switched on a lamp and stared at the half-unpacked suitcases and piles of clothes and books which seemed to cover every surface. 'Sorry about the mess,' she said, wishing she had bothered to tidy up. 'I could pretend it was a burglary, but I'd never get away with it.'

'You don't believe in travelling light, do you?' Josephine glanced round the room. 'I can count seven pairs of trousers from here.' She walked over to the bed while Marta bundled some clothes into a drawer, and picked up a book from the pillow. 'Nightwood. This is the novel you were talking about?'

Marta nodded. 'It's brilliant. You'd hate it.'

'How do you know what I'd hate?' She opened the book and read the first few pages. Marta watched her, amused by her defiance, getting to know her moods as well as she had begun to know her body and glad that their trust in each other was nurtured by the physical intimacy which seemed so important to both of them. The evening had surprised her, and she realised now that she had been foolish to a.s.sume that a of the two of them a her commitment to this relationship was the greater. She should know by now to take nothing for granted where Josephine was concerned, especially her toughness. When they made love, she sensed a need every bit as great as her owna and it frightened her; it was one thing to accept your own vulnerability in a relationship, much harder to a.s.sume responsibility for someone else's, and as the bond between them grew stronger, Marta was forced to consider where it would lead and who might get hurt in the process. After a couple of minutes, Josephine looked up and smiled sheepishly. 'You're right. I'd hate it.'

'You'll like this more, I hope.' Marta took a flat parcel out of one of the suitcases and handed it over.

Intrigued, Josephine unwrapped the paper and looked down at the charcoal drawing of a female nude. The figure seemed to be walking away from something, one arm behind her head, the other gesturing back to where she had come from; she was glancing over her shoulder, oblivious to the gaze of the artist; her expression was impossible to read, and all the more intriguing for its ambiguity. There was no signature but Josephine did not need one to recognise the artist. 'It's a Gaudier-Brzeska. Where on earth did you get it?'

'I'm not sure I should tell you after tonight, but Alma gave me the name of a dealer in London. She and Hitch have got an amazing collection of art, including some Gaudier-Brzeska nudes in the bedroom, apparently, and I was talking to her about your play. Do you like it?'

'It's beautiful, Marta. She's beautiful, but it's more than that. It's the physicality of it. I can't believe I'm holding something he's actually touched. This must have been in that squalid little room in London; he and Sophie probably argued over it.'

Marta looked at the drawing and knew what Josephine meant: there was something very personal and immediate about the marks on the paper, the areas where the artist had deliberately smudged the shading with his finger to emphasise the softness of the woman's skin, and it gave the work an intimacy over and above its subject matter. 'I know how proud of that play you are,' she said. 'I'm sorry she isn't laughing but that could just about be a smile.' She squinted over Josephine's shoulder. 'In the right light.' A few drops of rainwater fell from her hair onto the gla.s.s as she leant forward. 'None of us are dressed very suitably for the middle of the night, are we? Pour us a drink and I'll run a bath.' She grinned. 'I a.s.sume you don't mind sharing?'

'Have you forgotten I went to a physical training college? I used to shower with thirty other women every day, so it's not something I'm likely to be shy about now.'

Marta turned on the taps and drew the curtains in the bathroom, noticing that the character of the storm was somehow different on the other side of the village; away from the buildings and the people, rain slanted against the dark ma.s.s of trees with a primeval power which suggested that it belonged there, that sunshine was the aberration, and she was glad to shut it out. Josephine handed her a gla.s.s of wine and Marta smiled as she propped her birthday present up against the mirror. 'You don't take long to make yourself at home. Moving your art in already?'

'With all your luggage, the only s.p.a.ce left is on the walls.' She sat down on the side of the bath and tested the temperature of the water. 'I was talking to Bella Hutton earlier.'

'Said very casually for someone who's supposed to be shy.'

'It was more like having an audience with her, I suppose,' Josephine admitted, 'but I liked her. I liked her very much.' She told Marta what the actress had said about The Laughing Woman. 'She met Gaudier-Brzeska, apparently, and she said something very interesting a that he might have destroyed less of his work if he'd known he was going to die so young.'

'I'm sure that's true, but I wish you'd stop talking about running out of time and dying young. I hope you're not going to be like this every year on your birthday.' She looked intently at Josephine and asked more seriouslya 'You're not keeping something from me, are you? You'd tell me if you were ill?'

'I'm not ill.' Josephine slipped out of her clothes and climbed into the water.

'So why the sense of urgency?'

'Oh, I don't know. I suppose it's because my mother was still so young when she died. Fifty-two is nothing, is it?'

She was quiet for a moment, and Marta guessed she was thinking about the twelve years that stood between her and the same age. She got into the bath and Josephine lay back against her. 'It was cancer, wasn't it?' Marta said gently.

'Yes. I'd only just started to find out who she really was a you know how that relationship changes when you grow up and you start to become friends.'

'In theory. I was never that lucky with my mother, but it sounds like you had a lot in common.'

'We liked the same things, I suppose. It's her fault I love the cinema so much a she took me all the time when I was young. I used to crawl under the seats, and I remember her hauling me onto her lap and reading the difficult words on the t.i.tle cards so I understood what was going on.' She smiled at the memory of it. 'It must have all been very primitive then, but I know I went to The Great Train Robbery when I was about seven or eight and thought it was the most exciting thing I'd ever seen.' Marta listened as she talked about her childhood, gently tracing the contours of Josephine's face with her hand, touching her brow, her cheekbones, the line of her jaw, committing them to memory as a safeguard for the weeks apart. 'When I left home, I'd write to her about the films I'd seen and she'd do the same. Then gradually her letters changed. There was no magic in them any more. It took me a long time to find out that it was because she was too ill to leave the house.' She paused to kiss Marta's fingertips as they reached her lips. 'Too ill, or too ashamed.'

'Why ashamed?'

'People don't talk much about cancer now, but they certainly didn't then. There was a stigma to it, like having a drunk in the family or someone who was mentally ill. It's the same with any illness: cancer, depression, epilepsy. People treat it as a disgrace, as though you're somehow to blame, and as much as you know that isn't true, some of it sticks and you start to believe it yourself.'

'I know what you mean,' Marta said quietly. There had been a time when she had suffered from depression, and when a committed to an inst.i.tution for falling pregnant with a child who wasn't her husband's a she had begun to believe everything about herself but what she knew to be true.

Josephine reached up and pulled Marta gently down into a kiss. 'Of course you do.'

It was, Marta knew, as close to prompting her as Josephine would go. One day, if she ever found the courage to talk properly about that part of her life, it would be Josephine she turned to, but she was still too afraid of it. She felt somehow that the despair was still inside her, waiting to return, and to speak it out loud would be to allow it back into the light. 'That must have been hard for your mother,' she said, shifting the conversation away from herself.

'As soon as her body started to give her away, she retreated into herself,' Josephine said. 'I don't know what would have happened if she hadn't had my father to deal with the outside world for her. She made him put a brave face on ita and I think it nearly killed him. I used to hear him crying at night when she'd finally fallen asleep, but he never let that mask slip in front of her. At least not when I was around.'

'How long ago was it?'

'Thirteen years now. I was nearly twenty-sevena but I felt like that small child crawling around in the dark again a lost without her, resentful of what her death meant to our family and my role in it, and terrified in case the same thing happens to me. From that moment . . . well, I was like her in so many ways.'

'I think she'd forgive you for making an exception.'

Josephine smiled. 'Yes, I suppose she would. And for someone who's obsessed with time, I've just wasted too much by a long and rambling answer to a very straightforward question.'

'It was hardly straightforward.'

'No? You should have met my grandfather: "If there's anything you want to do, do it now. We'll all be in little boxes soon enough."' She laughed at the expression on Marta's face. 'Perhaps it's a Scottish thing a you languid English wouldn't understand.'

It was a weak attempt to make light of her griefa and Marta cut straight through it. 'I'm sorry your mother didn't live to see what you've achieved. She'd have been so proud of you.'

Josephine picked up her gla.s.s and spoke more seriously. 'I suppose that's what made me decide to do this film in the end: for her. She would have been so excited. The books and the plays a she'd have been pleased for me, even if she didn't necessarily like them all. But a film, even though I'll have had nothing to do with the finished results a that's something she'd genuinely have loved.' She gave a wry smile. 'And something she could show off about in Inverness.'

'You're not going to get involved in the script, then?'

'No. I mustn't make the mistake of turning everything I love into work, and I don't want to know the reality of it. I once read a rather snide article about Betty Compson in a film magazine which said that she was incapable of registering emotion without the help of a three-piece orchestra; apparently they had to churn out 'Mighty Like a Rose' for her to cry real tears. I know you think that's funny,' she added as Marta began to laugh, 'but I was absolutely devastated. It was like being told there's no Father Christmas, except I was a grown woman.'

'It's just one contradiction after another with you, isn't it?' Marta said affectionately. 'For someone so cynical, you're such an innocent.'

'I know. Don't tell anyone.' Josephine reached for a towel and went through into the bedroom to fetch the bottle. 'I asked Alma if she'd let you do the script,' she said, refilling Marta's gla.s.s, 'but apparently you wouldn't be ruthless enough.'

'b.l.o.o.d.y cheek. My devotion to you does have its limits, you know.'

'Does it?'

Marta grinned at her and got out of the bath. 'No, d.a.m.n you, I don't suppose it does.'

Josephine took a towel and wrapped it round Marta's shoulders, drawing her close. 'I'm serious, Marta. I need to know what I can hope for and what I can rely on. It's not only artists who can be reckless, and I don't want to destroy this by expecting too much from it a or too little. You love Lydia, don't you?' It was a statement, not an accusation, and Marta nodded. 'And you're building a life together, one that suits you both.'

'You said you didn't want to talk about this.'

'I lied.'

Marta saw the anxiety in Josephine's eyes and searched for the words to rea.s.sure her. 'Do you remember when we first meta and we sat on that station platform and talked about my mess of a life?'

'Yes, of course.'

'And I told you that what counted was coming first with somebody.'

'Yes. You were explaining that what came first with Lydia was her work.'

'Well, that hasn't changed, Josephine. Lydia always has and always will love her work above all elsea and there's nothing wrong with that. What's different now is that you come first for me. When you were telling me about Hitchc.o.c.k's charade and running through everyone's worst fears, all I could think of was how strange it was that no one had mentioned the love of another person and what it would mean to lose them. That's my fear a a life without you. Yes, Lydia and I care about each other. We enjoy each other's companya and you were right in what you said earlier: it's sane and it's normal and it gives us a stability which we both need. But Lydia gets what she needs most in the world from an audience; I get it from you. We're both selfish in that way, and whatever companionship we share comes a very poor second. She knows that as well as I do.'

'But the longer I'm not free, the more I risk . . .'

Marta took Josephine's face in her hands. 'What is this business about being free? You're free now in the way that matters. It's not about sharing a house or being together all the time, and I'm not going to turn up at Inverness Station with a suitcase asking for directions to Crown Cottage if I don't see you for a month. It's what happens when we are together that counts, and how we feel when we're apart. Your absence doesn't make me doubt you. I don't get this kind of love from anyone else but you, emotionally or physically, and I don't try.' She saw the joy and understanding in Josephine's eyes, and for a moment the world seemed to shrink to include just the two of them. 'We come first. Is that what you wanted to know?'

'Yes,' Josephine said. 'Yes, it is.'

9.

David Franks stood beneath the canopy of a Welsh oak tree and looked down across Portmeirion as if it were a map laid out before him. A stranger to the place, standing at ground level, would never know that there was a path up here at all, but from where he stood he could see the lives of the whole village played out in miniature below: a figure moved across the balcony from Dolphin to Government House, its progress inside marked by the switching on of successive lamps; a car horn sounded cheerfully near Salutation, bidding farewell to an invisible companion before its tail lights disappeared around the sweep of the drive and out of the village; above the garages, in the house they called Neptune, a woman drew the curtains and her silhouette moved slowly over to the bed. David watched, unseen and unsuspected, completing each fragmentary story in his mind as a distraction from the narrative of his own life.

The rain stung his face as he left the shelter of the tree. He walked the short distance to the burnt-out sh.e.l.l of the cottage as quickly as darkness would allow and stopped a few yards away, his hand resting gently on the trunk of an enormous fir. It was a magnificent specimena and, as a child, he had stood here often, looking up through the blue-green needles until its height and the strong scent of pine made him dizzy. The tree must be nearly a hundred years old now; when the camp returned each summer, it had always been one of the first things that David sought out, a treasured symbol of stability in a drifting, rootless life. Reluctantly, he forced his eyes to focus on the shadow in front of him, a sudden, searing reminder of pain. There was no need for daylight here. The image from eighteen years earlier was quite literally emblazoned into his memory, as powerful and intense as if the building's scorched walls still held their heat: his father's murder, burnt to death by a brutal lynch mob when David was only fourteen years old.

He remembered how frightened he had been, although 'remembered' was the wrong word because the fear had never left him. Hatred and rage had spilled out of their mouths, sharpened by years of suppressed prejudice. He saw their fists clenched tightly around their own anger, heard boots trampling through the undergrowth. Men too old to fight, women, boys even younger than he was a an army of self-appointed heroes, denied a real war but marching to one of their own making. They hurled half-bricks, bottles and stones at the cottage a makeshift missiles, mostly, although some had come prepared, battering at the door with coshes or waving chair legs wrapped in barbed wire. He heard the crash of broken gla.s.s and saw his father's frightened face appear briefly at the damaged window. Their eyes meta and, for a moment, David was convinced that his father believed him to be one of the mob, a defector to the settled lifestyle which he had, in his heart, always longed for. The crowd pushed him to the ground, called him a child killer's son and promised he'd be next. He smelt the smoke before he saw the flames, and realised too late that the odour he had detected on their hands and clothes was petrol.

The fire took hold quickly, and he noticed one or two members of the crowd glance anxiously at one another, wondering if they had gone too far but unable now to stop the rush of blood a in each other, or in themselves. Then he heard his father's dying screams, echoing his mother's agony as she had tried to push a dead baby from her body, filling the years of his childhood with one long cry of pain. David had no idea now what had made him mention his father that evening, except a devilment which sometimes overcame him, a need to push his luck, to find out if anything would make him care. Impatiently, he shook off the memory of Alma's hand on his: it was a sympathy he did not deserve, because his father's death was his own fault and he had not been able to stop it. He had run away and fled back to the old mansion house a to fetch help, he had told himself, but help from whom? From a frail old woman and a pack of dogs who had been taught to expect only kindness? No, he had run for his own safety. Shut up in that room like a dog himself, while other people decided his future, he had cried and shouted and railed against his own cowardice, almost as if he had absorbed the anger from each and every member of that mob and turned it in on himself.

His mother's grave was not far from this spot. There was no stone, nothing to indicate to a stranger where she was buried, but everyone who mattered knew where to find her. Even though she had not been of Gypsy blood, his father had insisted that the ancient rites be observed to the lettera and, after the funeral, he had packed everything she owned into their wagon, poured in paraffin and set it alight. When the fire had burned itself out, the leftover metal was raked away and buried safe from thieving gorgio hands; her animals were slaughtered, her young dog killed, and David was left with nothing but a bewildering sense of how transient a life could be. Later, when his father died, the ashes from that terrible fire a ashes of bricks and bone and hate a had been buried here too. He turned away from the ruins and headed back to the village, thinking of how ironic it was that his parents should be so rooted now while he wandered from place to place, picking up camp and moving on. Always restless. Always moving on.

10.

Bridget and Archie had managed to tie the tarpaulin tightly to the roof of Salutation so that it hung down to protect the paintwork against the storm, and Bridget took advantage of the shelter it offered to check for any damage to the mural. He watched as she shone the torchlight onto each individual section, gently touching the stone with a cloth to absorb the rain without smudging the image. She had always been completely at one with the building she was working on, as though she possessed an intuitive understanding of its life before the present moment and could sense its nature with her hands, just as she had seemed to sense his joy or his pain through his body whenever they were together. He remembered how he had loved to watch her work, even though he was rarely allowed to see the results until she was satisfied with them. For Bridget, the sharing of that very private world was as trusting and intimate a gesture as the sharing of her bed, and Archie had never taken either for granted.

Eventually she stood back, satisfied. 'It's a makeshift job, but it'll do,' she said, and he had to strain to hear her over the drumming of rain on canvas at their backs. 'This storm will have died down long before the morning anyway.' She hadn't bothered to bring a coat and her long dark hair, only half-heartedly tied back, hung loose over her bare shoulders. As usual, she was quite unconscious of how beautiful she looked, and he leant forward to kiss her. The moment had been inevitable from their first greeting, and yet it surprised him; he had expected the kiss to be familiar, a return to a known if distant past, but her touch felt new to hima and he drew her body into his with all the fear and excitement of a stranger.

'That's what I hoped you'd say.' She laughed softly and put her hand to his cheek, and Archie saw his own uncomplicated happiness reflected in her eyes. 'I think it's time we found somewhere more comfortable.'

She gathered up the knife and the rest of the rope that they had used to secure the tarpaulin and they headed back to White Horses. The Piazza seemed to offer more shelter from the storm than any other route, and they hurried across the tennis court, Archie holding Bridget close under an umbrella. It had been designed for a more temperate rain than the deluge that Portmeirion saw fit to offer upa and they were soaked again in seconds, but neither of them cared. They cut between Neptune and Mermaid, the pretty blue-and-white cottage which was one of only a handful of buildings not to have sprung from Clough's imagination, and were about to take the road to the hotel when Archie noticed Leyton Turnbull standing by the small freshwater pool. He had just been joined by David Franks, and their body language suggested that they were having a heated discussion. He pauseda and Bridget stared at him. 'What on earth are you playing at, Archie? It's not the weather for sightseeing.'

There was a handsome iron canopy built onto Mermaid's southern gable and Archie pulled her in out of the rain. 'Over there a it's Leyton Turnbull.'

'So?'

At any other time, her complete disregard for celebrity would have amused hima but he was curious to see what was going on between Turnbull and Franks. The sort of tension he had witnessed earlier in the evening could easily get out of handa and, although he would cheerfully have banged their heads together at dinner, he wasn't happy to stand by while they did it themselves. 'It looks like there's going to be trouble.'

Bridget glanced at the two men. 'He's drunk, Archie. What are you going to do? Arrest him for disorderly conduct?' She took the umbrella from his hand and made him look at her. 'Do I really have to remind you that you've got other things to think about than being a policeman?'

Turnbull chose that moment to lurch drunkenly at Franks, but he missed his footing and stumbled forward into the pool. Franks did his best to haul him out, but he was no match for the indiscriminate strength that comes with too much whisky, and Turnbull stayed on his knees in the shallow water, hurling abuse into the wind.

'He needs a hand.'

'But does it have to be yours? David Franks is with him. Let them sort it out between themselves. You've got other plans.'

'It really won't take a minute. Wait here.'

Bridget sighed and followed him out into the square. As she had predicted, the storm was dying down already, and the rain was considerably less brutal now. 'Jesus, look at the state of him,' Archie said. Turnbull's clothes were dishevelled and soaked through. He was wearing a light mackintosh over his dinner clothes, and the front was covered with mud, as if he had fallen; as they got closer, Archie could see that there was blood on his face which had not been washed away by the rain. 'You never told me about this,' he was yelling at Franks. 'You brought me here for this charade, David, and you didn't even warn me.'

'Can I help?'

Franks turned round quickly and looked surprised, then grateful. 'You certainly can. I don't seem to be getting very far on my own.' He smiled at Bridget. 'Whoever said there's never a policeman around when you need one?' Between them, they managed to drag Turnbull to his feet and out of the water. 'We need to get you cleaned up, old chap,' Franks said, 'but the pool's not really the place for it. Look at you: you're in a terrible mess.'

'I've been in the woods,' Turnbull said, as if that explained everything. 'I wanted to go to the cemetery. It was so dark, though. I lost my way.' He slumped down onto the low wall and looked up at Franks, and there was a desperation in his eyes which surprised Archie. 'What have I done, David?' he said quietly. 'My G.o.d, what have I done?'

He seemed oblivious to anyone else's presence. 'What's he talking about?' Archie asked.

'Oh, it's something to do with Bella. They had a falling out earlier. It's a long story.'