'Of course, as you wish.' But then as I extract my wallet, she adds: 'It's just that you said you were desperate.'

'I am. For her.'

'And for yourself.'

'Only in so far as I find her suffering unbearable.'

'So perhaps I could help you with your desperation, help you to bear it.' She works on me with her soft eyes the way certain women will.

'Frankly I'd say desperation was the only normal response to this situation. I shall be desperate while she is like she is. She is the cause, not a symptom. And that's that.'

Miss Whittaker sighs, faintest half-smile wrinkling the corners of a generous pale mouth. 'As you wish. Dear Hilary,' she says again as I struggle to get her into her coat.

At the door she declines payment with a simple shake of the head. She has exactly my mother's serene sad wistfulness. For Christ's f.u.c.king sake. I hate people who won't take the money you owe them.

And once in the car I go for the Fulham Road with a real vengeance. Only at the second or third lights do I remember I'd offered to take her to Richmond. Of course. Suddenly it's very important that I honour this promise. I don't want to be thought a s.h.i.t. I am not. Quite the contrary. I swing the car through a U-turn, alarming the inevitable pensioner in his Morris 1100. But when I get back to Fernshaw Road no one answers the door. She has put two milk bottles out that I don't remember seeing before. I look up and down what is after all a fairly long street. Could she really have walked so far?

At the first newsagents I pick up a few bars of chocolate and feed myself quickly, heading for Battersea Park. Who knows if a band mightn't be playing there? In the mirror I can see poor Hilary's lolling head. My eyes fill with tears. It is this I can't stand. I would so dearly like to give my daughter some chocolate, to see her gobble it up greedily like I do. I would like to give her at least this small piggy pleasure: good thick foil-wrapped chocolate. But the sugar brings Hilary out in rashes that cover her whole body.

I shan't be going to any faith-healers again.

The Good Samaritan January 1988. Hilary is five. Feeding her this morning, I thought: 'We get less change out of her than one would out of a three-week-old puppy.' I alternate between this ruthless realism and cloying sentimentality. The girl is so constipated that sometimes we have to hook a finger into her a.n.u.s and lever the t.u.r.ds out. Shirley does this. I simply can't.

Travelling to work, I am fascinated by the truth that I am both seriously mentally disturbed and at the same time among the most conventional of commuters on the Northern Line; the soberly dressed junior director of a highly successful software company, personally responsible for a whole new concept of computer usage on small- to medium-size building sites. Forty grand. Saab Turbo. Walletful of plastic. On/off highly erotic affair with lovely marketing director, Marilyn.

But the Telegraph tells me that an Indian in Walsall has been arrested for the attempted murder of his five-year-old Downs syndrome son using poisonous mushrooms masked in a hot curry. I buy the Telegraph now, not just because it is generally free of the kind of social pieties one finds in the other 'serious' dailies, but mainly for the eye they have for these sort of stories. The paper comments briefly on the deplorable morals of some ethnic minorities who not only abort healthy foetuses for no other reason than that they're female, but have a quite horrific record as far as handicapped children are concerned. 'All too often the social services cover up such incidents out of a perverse inversion of race discrimination. In March 1986 a young black girl suffering from elephantiasis was burnt to death in a caravan in Brixton. The story was not . . .'

Fire. The idea suddenly comes to me. Cleansing fire.

If the cause were sufficiently disguised . . .

For a moment I am quite rapt by the beauty of this solution. Fire. Pushing my way through the crowd at Hammersmith with briefcase and squash racket before me, I am, as it were, enveloped in flames. I can really see myself doing it at last. This is actually possible.

But not in our beautiful Hampstead home.

For Mr Harcourt, I should have said, died last year, just as we were about to set off to Lourdes. Which is why in the end we never went. Being a profoundly lucky man he died suddenly: heart attack on the john, in company of the FT. In any event, we called off the trip to Lourdes for the various solemnities, quickly followed by the sharing of the spoils, which in this case, fortunately, were considerable indeed. Of course, the taxman took his whack, but what was left, in both our names I was relieved to see, allowed us to move up into the three-hundred-grand property bracket. Gainsborough Gardens, a gorgeous close a stone's throw from the Heath and no more than five minutes from the tube.

I'm not going to burn that place down.

'Unless somehow,' I'm saying to myself on the return journey of that same day, 'it's the sacrifice required of me.'

What a strange thought! Much easier surely, just to refuse her oxygen when she has one of her respiratory problems. How could they ever really know I'd done it on purpose.

But staring at my curiously double image in the carriage window, I remember an incident of a few weeks ago which made a big impression on me. I'd stopped to fill up on the Finchley Road and after paying, as I was walking to my car, somebody on the road hit a cat. The animal wasn't dead. Using just its front paws and squawking fearfully it dragged itself toward me in spastic jerks across a patch of pavement. With the winter evening's yellow sodium light, its mutilation was garishly lit. Its back haunches had been completely crushed into a pulp of black fur and blood. Its wild howls were attracting the attention of pa.s.sers by. Then, unable to pull itself further, it lay and writhed. Clearly the one thing to do to this cat was to get a brick, or even the jack from the boot, and put it out of its misery as soon as possible. Yet n.o.body did this. Not I, nor the home-going secretaries, executives, workers. n.o.body had sufficient compa.s.sion or courage to dirty their hands with a liberating violence, to bring down the brick, the jack on this poor animal's skull. Nor did anybody want to talk about it. They hurried by silently, not stopping. Perhaps, you could suppose, if it had been a question of playing Good Samaritan, of saving an animal with gla.s.s in its paw, a cut on its haunch, perhaps somebody would have stopped. For that is something entirely different and infinitely easier. But what was needed here was a savage coup de grace. And for maybe two or three minutes I hesitated, staring at this shrieking cat. Then got into the Saab and drove away.

House or no house, the advantage of the fire is that I would not need to be in the same room as her. I would not have to see her clawing for breath.

But what decides me in the end is Peggy's abortion. We have been seeing Peggy and Charles regularly for a couple of years now. Really, they are our only visitors. Shirley did go through a period of trying to contact and make friends with other couples with handicapped children, and we would drive out to meet them some evenings or Sat.u.r.day afternoons. One does these things, looking for rea.s.surance, I suppose, others in the same boat. But it was too depressing. One's own handicapped child is bad enough, but the deformities and spastic contortions of a stockbroker's boy in Walthamstow, a railway worker's teenage daughter in Hounslow are too appalling. And far, far from rea.s.suring. Merely a reminder in fact of how lost and wave-tossed the shared boat is. Somehow the more these people insisted on the little progresses, the tiny achievements of their doomed offspring, the more obstinately cheerful they were, showing you family photos in fields of flowers, so the worse, at least for me, the whole scenario became. Until, with the reasonable excuse that we were only depressing ourselves, I managed to put an end to this interlude. Shirley offered no resistance. She is not quite at my mother's level of martyrdom yet. In fact we will have these moments, sitting on the sofa for example, watching the box, when our fingers will meet, involuntarily it seems, and some kind of communication, of affection will pa.s.s between us.

We haven't made love for more than five years.

Shirley has confiscated and burnt my euthanasia sc.r.a.pbook. Though I don't generally go in for hocus pocus, I find the fact that she burnt it excitingly symbolic. Anyway, I shan't be collecting any more such articles now. I sense the need for them is over.

Although never exactly a.s.siduous, all our old regular friends, Gregory and Jill and Shirley's one-time school colleagues, have completely dropped off. They find it too hard to handle. Shirley has her church friends of course, but she generally sees them in the morning or afternoon when I'm at work, or at Wednesday evening choir practice or after Sunday Morning Service. So our paths don't cross. Anyway I have no desire to see them. Their determined niceness grates on me, reminds me of Mother humming 'Count your blessings', under an umbrella on Park Royal Road with an empty purse in her threadbare pocket. There is a primal anguish behind it all for me, dating back I sometimes wonder, to some experience I can't even remember. I dream my dreams of mutilation.

But we do see Charles and Peggy. They come over once, twice, even three times a week, eat with us, talk, argue. They always come together because they are sharing a house he has persuaded his buddies in Camden Council Housing Authority to let Peggy have, pending demolition. This is a w.a.n.gle I'm sure. They've had the place more than a year now and there's no sign of the bulldozers. Meanwhile, G.o.d knows in what investments Charles has sunk the hundred and fifty-odd grand he got from Daddy-oh. In British Airports, I wouldn't be surprised. Nothing would surprise me.

I didn't realise they were lovers at first. Why? Because Peggy has always enthused over her lovers, always p.r.o.nounced herself everlastingly in love with them. Because, being our brother and sister, they have a good excuse for arriving together. Because Charles never shows a shred of fatherliness toward the exhaustingly exuberant Freddie. And because I always suspected he was queer.

'Peggy mentioned it,' Shirley tells me one day.

'Mentioned it!'

'She was very offhand.'

'Wonders will never cease.'

'I was thinking, probably that's why he became so a.s.siduous about visiting us in the first place. To see her.'

I reflect on this.

'They don't show any affection together. Why don't they act like a couple?'

'The amazing thing about you,' Shirley says, 'is that for all your super logic and supposed modernity, you're so incredibly traditional.'

'Sorry, I just thought it was common sense. You're lovers, you live together, you may as well act like a couple.'

'Why don't you just accept that people are different. You got angry with her when she was naive, now maybe she's being less so.'

But although in some obscure way I disapprove of Charles and Peggy, I do enjoy their visits. Discussing things between four people they seem manageable, whereas on one's own, or alone with Shirley, hysteria is always just around the corner.

'Now the girl's five,' Charles tells us this evening, 'you're due for nappy relief, since a normal child would now be out of nappies.'

'Oh yes?' Shirley asks chattily. 'What do we have to do?'

Charles begins to describe the bureaucratic procedure. He obviously enjoys this. His voice is quick, incisive, very faintly patronising in a teacherly sort of way. As he speaks, lean and sinewy, I watch how his thin fingers twine and untwine around a tumbler. His Adam's apple is also jerkily mobile.

'A wonder they haven't cut it,' Peggy remarks. She is helping Frederick with a jigsaw puzzle of the Changing of the Guard.

'No, there's no actual means test per se,' Charles rea.s.sures. 'More to the point they need a letter from your GP to the effect that the child really is incontinent.'

'Fair enough. After all, they're eight quid a box,' Shirley says, 'and it's only paper and a bit of plastic in the end.'

'You know you can't use them at all in Washington State,' Peggy informs. 'Anti-ecological.'

'Then you present proof of purchase and you get the cash.'

I remark that eight quid, what, a week, isn't going to change our lives in any major way, is it? It hardly seems worth the time in the queue. In fact and I make the mistake of getting drawn into an old argument the whole point about state help, or any such sops of this kind, is that they merely draw your attention away from the real issue while you waste your time picking up crumbs.

'And what is the real issue?' Charles asks sharply.

'That this is our problem. Our huge problem, and we're stuck with it. There is no imaginable help that could really amount to anything or significantly change our lives.'

'Well, obviously it's useful for the less well-off,' Charles says, faintly offended by my lack of interest, 'which is why the government's no doubt trying to cut it.'

'But we're not less well off, we're rich. I'm on forty-plus grand. If I don't pick it up there'll be more for someone else.'

'No, if people don't pick it up, the government'll say they don't need it and remove it all together.'

Looking away from me to inspect a ladder on dark tights, Shirley says: 'George is just lamenting the absence of state a.s.sisted abortion post birth.' She looks up with her little smile. 'N'est-ce-pas?'

I shrug my shoulders. We're old campaigners now. I don't think either of us is capable of shocking the other any more. 'Abortion certainly solves a problem in a way a few quid for nappies doesn't.'

Then before Charles can stop her, Peggy says simply: 'I'm going to have to have an abortion. Next week.' And very matter of fact, she explains that she is pregnant by Charles (he fidgets fiercely, pushes thumb and forefinger around his teeth), but that he doesn't want the child. Anyway, she already has Freddy and that's quite enough for anyone the way men come and go. She doesn't seem to be saying this as an attack on Charles, or even as an expression of reproach.

Why am I so stunned? It is the ease with which my sister handles these decisions, the lack of any hint of guilt.

'She insisted,' Charles says, 'on using the Okino Knauss method.'

Peggy laughs: 'Rhythm and blues! In that order. Still, I just can't afford another.'

Later, when they have gone, I watch Shirley liquidising meat to store away in little tubs in the freezer for all Hilary's meals for the week to come. She follows an intense routine now of keeping house and feeding Hilary. She is always doing something, locked into some procedure.

'What do you make of that?'

She shrugs her shoulders. 'Probably they're afraid it'll be like Hilary.'

'But we asked, on her behalf, don't you remember. It was one of the first things I did. And the specialist said how unlikely it was and that anyway they can test for it now they know it's a possibility.'

Shirley doesn't seem interested.

'The child is probably perfectly healthy,' I insist.

'So maybe it is.'

Obliquely I say: 'Soon they'll be able to keep foetuses alive as soon as the cells meet. Will they still let people abort them?'

As if she were another part of my own mind, she says: 'No, at that point, they'll tell you you can kill anybody who's helpless and inconvenient.'

'But why didn't she use contraceptives, for heaven's sake?'

Shirley's working fast, slicing some stewing meat into manageable chunks. Her once finely tapered pale fingers are growing rough and red, like Mother's.

'We all have our fixations. She's into Buddhism, natural foods, natural body functions, no contraceptives. Charles is into politics, his career, he doesn't want a kid he would have to feel responsible for. Probably he's quite right.'

'And you?' I ask with the husky tenderness that will sometimes spring up unexpected as a wild flower on the roughest terrain. 'Don't you think life should have a certain grace, Shirley?'

'Leave be, George,' she says. 'Please, please, please leave be.'

Foul Medicine I'm not a pig. In an attempt to recapture something of my relationship with Shirley I decide on a vasectomy, let's see if we can't get back to lovemaking. She says: 'I'll have forgotten how to do it. I can't quite see why we ever bothered, it's so much more hygienic without it.' Though a week or so before the op she hugs me from behind, squeezes my crotch, and murmurs: 'I can't wait, if you knew how much I want you and want you.'

Since I'm determined no one at the office should know about the whole thing, I take a fortnight's holiday during which time I arrange for the operation to be done privately in the London Clinic in Harley Street. Typically, Shirley informs my mother without first conferring with me, hence the day after the op, there she is at my bedside in her ancient black coat with the fake once-white fur inside the collar. The strap of her blue handbag, doubtless full of used paper handkerchiefs, is held on by a heavy duty safety pin.

My mother. She sold Gorst Road to the first buyer and then instead of getting a smaller place for herself and keeping the remaining cash for Grandfather's expenses, she went and put the whole lot in Barclays for him with a standing order to pay the home ('it's his money, love,'), renting herself the most miserable terraced house in derelict black Irish Cricklewood. Apparently through friends! It was a show of independence that took me by surprise, since I'd imagined she'd leave the whole property side of things to me. As it was she didn't even ask my advice. We have scarcely seen each other since Shirley's 'conversion'.

Shirley said: 'Why didn't she stay in Park Royal. She's been there all her life. She'll be lost in a new neighbourhood at her age.' But although she knew no one in Cricklewood on arrival, Mother very quickly gathered the regular army of walking wounded about her. Indeed her 'ministry' is obviously flourishing now Grandfather is at last out of the way. People don't have to pa.s.s his scornful cerberian gaze to reach the prayerfulness of her bedroom. So perhaps all things do work together for good for those that love G.o.d: my beating him up promoted her ministry, saved souls even.

She stands over my hospital bed the morning after my vasectomy, plastic shopping bag under her arm. We are embarra.s.sed, but she tries to jolly her way over this.

'How are you, love? Everything all right?'

Actually I've got quite a lot of pain. It was a more serious business than I expected.

She has brought grapes. Her face, though shiny and lumpy, radiates unshakeable kindness. We chat. She has been up to see Shirley. In my absence obviously. Over sixty now, she travels free on the buses. It's quite a boon. She feels free to travel in a way she didn't just a year ago. And isn't Hilary coming on, certainly sitting up a lot straighter.

I say: 'You don't notice when you're with her all the time.'

I ask her if she knew about Peggy. And immediately regret it. But I don't want to be the only one who's let her down.

'She told me.'

Peggy would of course. Without thinking probably.

For a moment we are both silent in this tiny private bedroom I have paid through the nose for. The fittings don't look much better than National Health frankly.

Why did I bother trying to hurt her? Surely some resolution, some accommodation can be reached at some point.

She must be thinking the same thing, because she suddenly says, lower lip trembling like a child's: 'Can't we put all that nasty business behind us, George? Can't we?'

The direct appeal catches me by surprise.

She says: 'It was unfortunate Shirley confessed to me of all people, and in front of you, but I could hardly refuse to hear her, poor girl, could I, the state she was in.'

How clever my mother is. She has brought me to tears. We are embracing.

'At least we can be good friends,' she murmurs, with a catch in her voice.

Then she sits down and tells me how awkward Grandfather's being, refusing to obey any of the rules in the home and even biting one of the nurses. It's his ninetieth birthday next week. The inmates will be having a little party. Perhaps I'd like to come. And then the Lord has been so good to her because her next door neighbour but one commutes regularly to Kilburn where the home is and so frequently gives her a lift back in the evening. Also there is a delightful girl from the church who may be going to rent her spare bedroom, which would be so nice.

There is always that faint persuasion in her voice, she can never let go, pleading with her son to believe that the Lord has indeed been involved in the daily itinerary of her neighbour, the housing needs of the Methodist girl; pleading with me to accept my martyrdom and join her on the way to heaven.

Shortly after she goes, Marilyn phones. 'Can't wait to have you without your sou'wester on,' she says.

But I know I won't be going to see Marilyn again. My strategy is complete at last. I was always a monogamist at heart.

For the second week of my fortnight's break we've lined up a cottage in Suffolk, for holiday and, hopefully, celebratory hanky panky, if not actually lovemaking. Our first real holiday, as it happens, since Hilary's conception nearly six years (centuries?) before. But when I come out of hospital, feeling pretty d.a.m.n cool and relaxed actually, after four whole days on my back, the child has fallen ill again.

She has an acute kidney infection (perhaps like the George of Three Men in a Boat, the only thing she'll never have is housemaid's knee). And of course she always suffers severe side effects from whatever drug we give her. Shirley meets me sleepless and speechless at our rather fine old wistaria-framed door as I return in a cab. The doctor wanted to put the girl in hospital, but Shirley has refused. I know there is no point in commenting on this, just as there is no point in remarking on the fact that we could easily afford to have a nurse in to do a few nights. Shirley must look after the girl herself. Because I think in a curious way she is embarra.s.sed for Hilary with strangers. She doesn't want to sense other people's objective eyes coldly weighing up the truth of the situation. On her own she can nurse her illusions or perhaps that is ungenerous, perhaps what I should say is, the choices she has made. She doesn't want to hear them challenged by some kind, efficient girl. For my own part, of course, there is nothing more frustrating than having so much money at last after years of work and not being allowed to buy a little pleasure with it.