He fell into an armchair and shrugged. 'Must have been. Everything's too neat.'

'So nothing's gone?'

'Hard to say. My father's records are still there. And I think all his books. That's something. If they wanted to get me on an heirloom charge they'd have taken those. But who knows what they've read, or listened to, or photographed?'

She couldn't help herself. 'They?'

'I think you should go,' he said.

She went over to him and kissed the top of his head. 'I can't leave you alone in this state,' she said.

'I don't know what you mean by "this state". I am how I always am.'

'Then I can't leave you in that state. Come on a discuss it with me. What do you think's happened?'

He sat forward and dropped his head between his knees. 'Ahab's been,' he said.

One detail he didn't mention: whoever had tidied up his runner had been for a lie-down in his bed.

ii She didn't want to leave him in any state but she had no choice. 'I need to sleep this one out alone,' he said.

She offered to take the couch but he begged her to go. 'Just for tonight,' he said. 'This is my doing. I was the one who kissed Lowenna Morgenstern.'

'One of the many.'

'You know what I mean.'

'You think this is about her?'

'No. But it's still my fault.'

'You aren't going to do anything silly,' she said.

'Like what? Leave the country?'

She kissed his non-responding lips, noticing for the first time that there were dry serrations in them and that his breath was sour, then she walked back slowly, heavily, through the village to Paradise Valley. I feel a hundred, she thought. A drunken man called out to her. 'I want to bite you,' he said. She laughed. I'm a hundred and he wants to bite me. 'You'll break your teeth,' she dared to call back. But he was too unsteady to take her up on the challenge. A couple snogged violently against a dry-stone wall. Making the beast. A good description of them. A thing of scales and claws. Prehistoric. Kevern and Lowenna, she thought. But she agreed with his assessment that this a supposing he had not imagined it all a was not about Lowenna. As she pushed open the first of the field gates to the Valley a cat ran across her feet. A bad omen according to her adoptive mother. When a cat ran across your feet someone was going on a long journey. And why was that bad? Because you would never see them again.

Her heart fluttered.

Did Kevern's bitter gibe about leaving the country mean anything? Did any of his gibes mean anything? For their own good, people were discouraged from leaving the country a assuming they had any notion of what or where any other country was a but there was always a way if you were desperate, particularly if you lived by the sea and had the money to persuade one of the local fishermen to smuggle you out. You'd never be heard of again. In all likelihood the fisherman would throw you overboard once you were out of sight of the mainland. But at least you'd achieved what you wanted and got away. Why, though, would Kevern want that? He'd told her he loved her. He'd told her he'd never been a and had never in his life expected to be a so happy. So why? And if he wasn't running from the police, who was he running from? Ahab, he'd said. Ahab! Ahab was hers. She felt possessive of him, and angry with Kevern. Before he met her, he had not been troubled by any Ahab. Lampoons, yes. Harpoons, no. What was he doing purloining her terror?

iii She found Ez up, playing patience and listening to love ballads on the utility console.

'Heavens,' Ez said, 'what brings you home?'

'Trouble.'

'Did the trip go badly?'

'No, the trip went well. Or at least we went well. What we didn't like we didn't like together. It was what we found when we got back.'

Ez put away her cards. 'I'll make tea,' she said, 'unless you'd like something stiffer.'

'Stiffer.'

The older woman poured them a brandy. Rather ceremoniously, Ailinn thought, as though this was a conversation she'd been expecting, was waiting for even, and the brandy had been bought for just such an event. Brandy a when did they ever drink brandy together?

'So . . .?'

'So . . .?'

'So what was it exactly that you found when you got back?'

'Somebody broke into Kevern's cottage while we were away.'

'Was there damage?'

'No. They'd tidied it up.'

'That's an unusual break-in. Was much taken?'

'As far as I could tell a as far as Kevern could tell a nothing.'

'Could you have been mistaken?'

Ailinn was not prepared to tell Ez that Kevern's rug had been straightened, because that would have necessitated her explaining why it was always left rumpled, and that would have been to betray her lover to her friend. She trusted Ez but that was not the point. You don't trust anyone with another person's secrets.

'He's very alert to the slightest change,' she said. 'He knows if anyone's leaned on his gate or sniffed the scent out of one of his roses.'

'Roses? You never said he was a gardener.'

'He isn't. I was being facetious. I'm sorry, I'm upset.'

'Do you know what I think?' Ez said. She was a do you know what I think kind of a woman. She assumed people went to her to hear homilies. As, indeed, they often did. 'I think you were both tired after a long drive. And if Kevern is as sensitive to any vibration in the vicinity of his cottage as you say, he was probably anxious the whole time you were away and simply found what he'd feared finding.'

'You are very sure of everything,' Ailinn said. She felt she'd been forced to take a side and the only side she could take was Kevern's.

Ez, she noticed, coloured. For all her intrusiveness, she tried to take a relaxed attitude to Ailinn's worries, half listening, half humouring, in the way of an older person, a concerned relation or a teacher, who knew that things usually worked out tolerably well in the end. The better a friend you were, the more cheerful a front you presented, was Ez's philosophy. A cup of tea, a moral lesson, a hug. She was doctorly, motherly, and even a touch professorial, at the same time. Ailinn had liked the contrarieties of her personality from the moment she met her in the reading group. She dressed modestly, in button-up cardigans and long skirts but liked hobbling about, for short periods, on high heels. Crimson high heels, as though she kept an alternative version of herself under her skirt. She had the quiet, respectful manner of a librarian, and no sense of humour to speak of, but if anything was said which she thought might be designed to amuse her she would choke with laughter, spluttering like a schoolgirl, or throwing back her head and showing how beautiful, before it lost its smoothness, the arc of her throat had once been. She was on her own now but she hadn't always been, Ailinn surmised. There'd been some personal tragedy in her life. A man she'd loved had run away or died. She carried a torch for someone. She burned a little candle in her heart. That was what the crimson shoes were doing a keeping a spark alive. Ailinn even wondered if this was his cottage, whoever he was, or whether they'd had their affair here, in this dripping corner of Paradise Valley where mushrooms would grow out of your shoes if you didn't wear them for a day. Was that why she'd asked Ailinn along a so that she had reason to hold herself together, so that she wouldn't give way to morbidity? In which case Ailinn's falling in love with Kevern and all but moving out of the Valley was inconsiderate. Did that explain the unwonted attentiveness of Ez's manner tonight, the way she appeared to be counting syllables and listening to pauses? Did she want to hear that something was amiss between them?

'No, I'm not sure of anything,' she said. 'I was just looking at the situation from all angles.'

'What if it's the police?' Ailinn wondered aloud. 'What if they really do suspect him?'

'But nothing was taken from the cottage, you say.'

'Well that's what Kevern said. But he didn't exactly give himself time to check.'

'You can usually tell.'

'Can you?'

'You can usually tell when something of your own, something that matters to you, has been taken. You just know.'

Ailinn looked at her. What a lot Ez suddenly just knew. She took another sip of the brandy. 'What did you do, Ez?' she asked. 'What did you do before you became book-group police?'

Ez laughed a but not, on this occasion, like a young girl. 'That's an amusing concept,' she said. 'I'm sure you didn't think I was policing any of the meetings you came to. I just chose the books.'

'Exactly. You policed what we read. Were you a different kind of policeman before that?'

'I was an administrator.'

'Administering what?'

'Oh, this and that. I kept an eye open.'

'On whom?'

'Good question. Other people who were keeping an eye open.'

Perhaps it was the brandy talking, but Ailinn suddenly propped her elbows on the table, supported her head in her hands and stared hard into her friend's face. 'What's this all about, Ez?' she asked.

'This?'

'Why did you bring me here? Why were Kevern and I thrown into one another's arms? Why did you force me to ring him when we'd broken up? Why did someone break into his house while we were away?'

'A: I brought you here because you were a because you are a my friend. B: I am not aware that you and Kevern were thrown into each other's arms. I thought you said it was love at first sight. C: As for Kevern's house a I have no idea why someone would have broken in, just as you have no idea whether anyone actually did.'

'Then why are you annoyed with me?'

'I am not in the slightest bit annoyed with you.' She reached out to stroke Ailinn's cheek. 'I am concerned about you, that's all.'

'Then why are your hands cold?'

'I didn't know they were.'

'And why are you concerned? You are never concerned for me. Not in this way. How many times have you told me I was someone in whom you had absolute faith? And what did that mean, anyway?'

Perhaps it was the brandy talking again, but she began to cry. Not a flood, just a trickle of soft tears that were gone almost as soon as they appeared.

'You're very tired. I think you should go to bed,' Ez said.

'Yes, I think so too. But I won't sleep. I will lie there all night wondering.'

'Wondering who broke in?'

'Wondering whether he was serious when he spoke about leaving the country.'

'Kevern said he was going to leave the country?'

'Not exactly. But he allowed the idea to float before me, like a threat.'

'We need to talk,' Ez said. And this time had Ailinn felt her hands she would have discovered they weren't just cold, they were frozen.

THREE.

The Women's Illness Monday 25th NOT NORMALLY A diary day, but there are things I have to get down before they escape me.

Bloody Gutkind!

Looking on the bright side, as it is my nature to do, the decline of Gutkind's fortunes, following his most recent act of lumbering zealotry, must herald an improvement in mine. Funny how fate a the divine juggler a balances the fortunes of men with such precision, so that with each rise or fall we vacate space, not just for any old rival, but for someone we have a particular reason for hating. It was to yours truly, anyway, that the powers that be turned to minimise the damage Gutkind was causing. First of all the clown needed to be called off Kevern Cohen, and who better than me, given that I'd taught him briefly (Gutkind, that is) as a mature student, impossible as it is to believe that so unimaginative a man could ever have flirted with the idea of a second career in the Benign Visual Arts, though the Benign Visual Arts, I have to say, did not flirt back a who better, I repeat, than someone with my authority to remind him of the limits of his? Nothing too heavy-handed, just a quiet, entre nous suggestion a implicating no one higher up a that he back off. Why break a butterfly on a wheel and all that. Since you're acquainted with him, Professor, you can intimate our disfavour, was the flavour (the flavour of their disfavour is nice, don't you think?) of their communication to me. My knowing Kevern as well, of course, gave me extra ammunition. 'I've been watching Cohen for some time,' I could get away with saying to Detective Inspector Gutkind, 'and nothing I have seen suggests he would harm a hair of a woman's head, let alone do what was done to poor Lowenna Morgenstern, so please don't bother your own pretty little head about him any further. Kevern Cohen? Mr Lovespoon himself! Are you joking? A policeman of all people should know there are some men who are incapable of committing a murder because they know they'd never get the blood off their hands. Can you imagine our friend Kevern "Coco" Cohen scrubbing underneath his fingernails? He'd be there, crouched over himself, washing until Doomsday. Don't make me laugh, Detective Inspector. The country's crawling with ruffians. Go bag yourself one of those.'

How it was that Gutkind became first an acquaintance and subsequently a student of mine is a story in itself. We met through our wives, is the short of it. They had become friends in the course of attending Credibility Fatigue classes together. And that, too, is a story in itself. It's always the women who go a little wobbly in the matter of WHAT HAPPENED a probably as a consequence of giving or anticipating giving birth, unless it's a more generally diffused hormonal agitation a whereupon some stiffening of their resolve is called for. I can't speak for Mrs Gutkind, who has since left her husband a for which, I have to say, no sane person could blame her a but my wife, Demelza, fell a while back into terribly depressed spirits, questioning the point of saying sorry all the time when by all official accounts (as indeed by mine) there was nothing really to say sorry for, questioning the way we lived our lives, questioning the powers that be, even questioning me, the person who puts food on her table. 'Nothing makes any sense to me,' she'd complain. 'I feel a pall over everything, I feel the children are fed lies at school, I feel I was fed lies at school, I suspect you're feeding lies to your students, we are supposed to have mended what went wrong, except that we are told nothing went wrong, but if it's not safe to go out on to the streets a not safe here, in fucking sleepy Bethesda! a it's as though we're all in a trance, like zombies, pretending, what are we pretending Phinny, what aren't we saying, what aren't you saying, what are these little jobs you say you have to do, other women . . . are you seeing other women? Except I don't feel here' a her hands upon her lovely breasts a 'that you are seeing other women, it feels more as if you've taken to religion or are going out to drink with aliens or someone, is that what you're doing, or are we the aliens, are we from another planet, Phinny, because increasingly I don't feel I'm from this one . . .' And more along such loopy lines.

The doctor, at my instigation, prescribed antidepressants.

Credibility Fatigue classes were my idea too. Between ourselves, dear diary, I'd had a minor professional fling a our both being professors of illusions of sorts a with Megan Abrahamson, the woman who ran the classes in Bethesda, a stern, blue-eyed beauty who'd fallen into a terrible depression herself when she was giving birth to her first child and so knew from the inside exactly what Demelza and others like her were going through. 'What we fear as mothers-to-be,' she explained to me, 'is bringing our child into a dangerous, deceitful world. We see a threat whenever anyone approaches us and we hear a lie in everything that's said. It's the protective instinct gone haywire. So when you learn about WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED you are of a mind to say no ifs or buts about it, it happened, and obviously shouldn't have happened, or we wouldn't all still be so cagey about it, saying sorry while insisting there's nothing to say sorry for. You want, you see, the truth and nothing but the truth for your baby. It isn't you who isn't seeing straight, you think, it's everybody else. In your own eyes you are getting to the bottom of a truth that has been obfuscated, no matter that the person doing the obfuscating is you. It's at this point that I find some straight-talking history, painful as it is, is what's required. "OK, you asked for it," I say. I show them classified documents and photographs: this is what those whom you fear were the innocent victims of what happened were responsible for, I say; this is the damage they wrought, this is the weaponry they unloosed on defenceless peoples, these are the countries they laid waste in their baseless, neurotic, opportunistic fear of being laid waste themselves, these are the bitter fruits of their egoistic policy of "never again", this is how they justified it here, in our parliament and in our newspapers, this is the misery of which they were the authors, these are their faces, these are their words, this is their history, repeated and repeated again wherever they set foot, sorrowful to themselves but a thousand times more sorrowful to those whose necks they trod on and who, when they could finally take no more, trod back, that's if they did, and these are their confessions, the expressions of self-loathing, the acts of self-immolation, the orgy of introverted hate they unleashed on one another as a last expression of an ancient culpability for which they knew, better than anyone else, there could be no redemption. Yes, it breaks the heart, but WHAT HAPPENED, if indeed it happened, was at the last visited by them upon themselves . . .'

I could have kissed her.

In fact I did kiss her.

To what degree these classes put Demelza's concerns to rest I have no idea. She has always been an obstinate, at times even a hysterical, woman. But she certainly turned more placid and glazed-eyed once she'd completed the course. Could have been the antidepressants, I accept, but I like to think that demonstrable truth played its part.

Gutkind and I shared a drink at the bar close to the Credibility Fatigue Centre from time to time while waiting for our wives. He was more angry with his than I was with mine. 'Some bleeding heart has got to her,' he said.

I wondered a de haut en bas, professor to police constable, which was all he was in those days a in what way someone had 'got' to her.

He was needled by my asking. 'Women talk to each other,' he said.

His eyes could be too fierce for his complexion. When they blazed, as they were blazing now, they burned out the little natural colour he possessed. In fairness to him I should say that most of the men in the pub we were drinking in looked the same. Coals of fire burning in every face. Just possibly they too were waiting for their wives, though they had the air of frequenting such places as this, as indeed did Gutkind, whereas for me pub-going was an exceptional circumstance. Regulars or not, they knew in their bones I wasn't Bethesda born, they could smell the outsider on me. I came once with Kevern Cohen and I feared there was going to be a lynch party. Two aphids! Why did that make them so angry? If they had to mark their awareness of our difference why didn't they just laugh at us? Or come over to touch our skin? 'Jesus God Almighty, it's skin remarkably similar to ours! Let's be friends.' But no, they snarled and ground their knuckles into the bar, exchanging glances with one another as though each felt it was his neighbour's place to raise an arm against us, and the fact that no one did was a species of betrayal and ultimately shame. Was the impotence they felt another reason for mistrusting us the more? 'Those you don't kill when you should, you end up hating with a fury that is beyond murderousness,' Kevern said as we were urinating in adjoining booths. In fact I was urinating and Kevern was waiting for me to finish. He found it impossible, he confided, to pass water in the presence of another man. 'What about a woman?' I enquired. 'Can any man pass water in the presence of a woman?' he asked, in what was not, I believe, a feigned astonishment. 'Demelza and I do it all the time,' I told him.

I thought he was going to throw up.

It struck me as a good job that no locals were present to witness Kevern's fastidiousness. They would have been still more inclined to lynch him. I have thought about what he said many times. Not on the subject of urinating in company but on the subject of hating those it would have been better that you'd killed. Was he right? And why such murderous hatred in the first place? I could only suppose that the living evidence of someone and somewhere else a the someone and somewhere else those pub regulars could smell on us the minute we entered the room a entirely undermined their confidence in the sufficiency of who and where they were. Are we so precarious in our sense of self that the mere existence of difference throws us into molecular chaos? Is it electrical? And was it even possible that Kevern's inability to pass water in my company had a comparable effect on me? I'm not saying I wanted to kill him on account of his extreme niceness in the matter of a quick piss, but I don't rule out the possibility that I did. Joking. No real danger, of course, because I've read too many poems and seen too much art to be a man of violence a art and poetry being what those troglodytic aphid-haters lacked to turn them from monsters into men.

I didn't convey any of these thoughts to Gutkind, who struck me as a bit of a trog himself, a brooding more than a thinking being anyway. 'She's got it into her head that I see plots everywhere,' he was saying when I returned from my reflections. His wife he was talking about. 'And you've got it into your head that someone's been plotting to get her to think that?' I replied. He eyed me narrowly. I knew what he was thinking. 'Supercilious swine!' But you get that a lot in my profession. The world does not care for professors, even though for a while it was hoped that a number of the worst sort had been thinned out in the purges.

I ordered more drinks and proposed a toast to the course. 'Megan Abrahamson should sort her out proper,' I said, trying to sound like a local. He shook his head, not doubting my confidence but annoyed that a wife of his needed to be sorted out at all. Evidently he took it as a slur on his manhood and position. 'In my line of work,' he said a from which I took him to imply that my line of work wasn't work at all a 'you rarely see an effect without a cause. I don't say every victim has been playing head games with the culprit, but more often than not a crime could have been averted had the victim been more circumspect.' I nodded my approval at his use of 'circumspect'. Fair's fair a if you mark a man down for inconsequence you should also mark him up for vocabulary. 'And if there's a reason why one person's been attacked,' he went on, without showing me any gratitude, 'there sure as hell has to be a reason why a couple of hundred thousand were.'

'If they were.' At any time it seemed necessary to me to throw that in, but with our wives currently receiving corrective instruction from Megan Abrahamson it seemed especially important to be punctilious.