'But it seems stronger by the door.' She sniffed again. 'It's horrible. It's not gas, is it?'

Fran did some sniffing herself. 'No, it's definitely not gas. It's sweeter than that.' And more foetid, she thought, and quickly scanned the dark corners of the little porch for a mouse corpse, or disembowelled sparrow.

'I wonder...' said Sylvie. 'If she's away then maybe she forgot about something in the fridge. I remember once when I got back from holiday...' As she spoke she lifted the flap of the letter box and cautiously looked through. 'There was a really awful '

The letter box snapped back so suddenly that the cat, who had just started to inch forward, shuddered back into hiding.

'Oh G.o.d, what's the matter?' asked Fran, half dreading the answer.

Sylvie turned slowly, her face white, her mouth an almost perfect O.

'There's a hand,' she said.

The next hours were a patchwork of sounds the police siren, the booming footsteps down the spiral staircase, the crunch and tinkle as the door was broken open, the retching coughs of the officers' retreat, the miserable wail of the approaching ambulance, pointless in its haste, and finally, summarily, the thump as Sylvie's piano was set down in Fran and Peter's living room, rattling the pictures on the walls and plucking a great thrumming note from the strings.

'It's only insured for the journey as agreed in the original contract,' said the older mover, seeing Fran about to speak. All traces of avuncularity seemed to have been scrubbed from his features, despite the fistful of tenners recently transferred from her wallet into his.

Wordlessly, Fran signed the form and then winced as the little trolley ricocheted off the skirting board on the way out.

There were boxes in the hall, and up the stairs, and on the landing. In the quiet that descended when the front door closed, Fran could hear from Peter's room the soft hiccup of Sylvie crying. In the kitchen, Mr Tibbs lay beneath the table like the last rug in the shop. Fran poured herself a large gla.s.s of wine, drank half of it at a gulp and picked up the phone. She really had to talk to Spencer.

11.

Iris's father was out. Again. His answerphone message, over-enunciated at dictation speed, was becoming grindingly familiar. 'I am unable to come to the phone at the moment, but you may leave a message stating the time, the date and the reason for your call, as well as your name and telephone number, and any details about when you can be reached most conveniently, and I will return your call as soon as possible. Please leave your message after the long tone which you will hear after a number of short ones.' Just before the first tone a perky voice with an identifiable Scottish accent could just be heard in the background. 'Ian, it says here you've got to press the red b.u.t.ton and then rewind.' Mrs McHugh.

'Hi, Dad. Just to say I'm off to the parents' evening at college. I'll phone you when I get back, if it's not too late. Bye.'

'Grandad out on the razz?' asked Tom, wandering into the living room with his forearm deep in a packet of cornflakes.

'I've no idea,' said Iris, replacing the receiver. 'He's not very communicative these days.'

In the past, her father's rare evening outings had been referred to and planned around for weeks beforehand, adjustments made to his schedule, early meals shopped for and cooked, the oven timer set to ring to remind him, the bus timetable checked for potential problems; now he just switched on the answer machine (a brand-new, spur of the moment purchase, never previously mentioned as a possibility Iris had almost dropped the phone the first time she'd heard it) and grabbed his coat. Last week he'd even cancelled the unalterable Sunday visit, explaining cagily that he 'had something on'. It was so long since Iris had had the day to herself that she hadn't known what to do with it; it had been like getting a self-a.s.sembly gift with no instructions. He had not mentioned Mrs McHugh's name, or referred even obliquely to that Monday night, six weeks ago, but knowledge of it infused every subject and muddied every conversation. Far from having to prise him off the phone after twenty minutes, Iris found that the calls dribbled to a conclusion in less than half that time.

'Maybe he's got a bird,' suggested Robin, supine on the sofa. Tom cackled and wandered out again, leaving a scattering of Golden Nut flakes behind him.

'Hang on,' said Iris, 'I want to finish this list.'

'Done it,' said Tom. 'I've told you everything I know.'

'You haven't. Who's your Geography teacher? I'm seeing him first.'

He slackened his jaw and pushed his tongue into his lower lip, so that he looked like one of the unluckier recipients of the Hapsburg gene. 'Mithtuh Lomakth,' he said, thickly. Robin snorted.

'Say it properly.'

'Mr Lomax. That's how he speaks. I'm just helping you to identify him.' He resumed the impression. 'Thuh Nile ith uh thlathic exthampul of uh delthuh thormathion. You're starting to laugh, Mum, I can see you.' He held out his hand. 'Goodth evthning, Mith Unwin, ith fabbuluth to thee you.'

Iris fought down a grin. 'That poor man.'

'You're laugh-ing,' he taunted.

'No I'm not. Anything else I should know about him?'

'He fancies the French exchange teacher and she's only twenty.'

'Dirty old man,' added Robin.

'Anything relevant, I meant.'

Tom shrugged. 'He said I could get an A if I put some work in.'

'You didn't tell me that!'

He shrugged again.

'Boffin,' said Robin.

'When did he say that?'

'Last year.'

'And you didn't tell me?'

'I forgot.'

'Oh Tom,' she said, exasperated. He grinned and wandered away with his hands in his pockets.

'Come back. Is that everything?'

'Thath all folkth,' he said, disappearing into the bedroom.

She made a note on the rough timetable and turned to Robin. 'What about you? Anything more I should know?'

He looked glumly at the floor, scratched his stubble and said something inaudible.

'Sorry, I didn't catch that.'

'I said "not that I can think of".'

'Haven't been expelled or anything?'

'Nah.'

'And just in case I b.u.mp into Stephanie's mum, are you still going out with her?'

He hunched his shoulders. 'Not really.'

'Not really?'

'Nah.' He stood and stretched hugely, drumming the ceiling with his fingertips in the annoying way that both boys had adopted. She'd made them repaint it last year, but the grubby prints were beginning to build up again. 'I'm gonna have a bath.'

'All right. I'll see you later.'

He paused in the doorway. 'How are you getting back?'

'Alison Steiner's giving me a lift.'

He nodded, apparently relieved, and padded off to the bathroom. Within a few seconds the antiquated water heater had started with a thud and a roar, to be immediately drowned by a pounding ba.s.s line. The luminous yellow splashproof radio which now stood on the cistern, and which had instantly become the boys' favourite possession, had been a birthday present from the fast-talking Leon.

'Why's there red paint all over the handle?' Iris had enquired when the boys brought it home.

'We don't ask questions like that,' Tom had said.

When the bus doors opened the wind surged in and inflated her skirt like a crinoline. The air outside was filled with whirling leaves and she zipped her anorak up to the neck and started to pull on the knitted gloves she'd bought at her father's church bazaar last spring. They had been a particularly poor purchase pale fawn, scratchy wool, the fingers so full of bobbles and unexpected loops that it took a great deal of wiggling dexterity just to put them on and she had only bought them out of sympathy for the home-crafts stall holder and her sad piles of lumpy garments and asymmetrical teddy bears. Mrs McHugh had been there that afternoon, of course, running the refreshments area and dispensing simultaneous rivers of tea and chat while charging an unheard-of twenty pence for slices of coffee cake. 'All in a good cause,' she'd chirped, repeatedly, as the coins clanged into the tin.

Turning the corner from the bus stop, Iris found that she'd shoved one of her fingers straight through a missed st.i.tch in the palm, and she peeled the gloves off and dropped them into the nearest bin.

The walk from the bus stop to Broderick Gale Sixth Form College (motto: Learn and Achieve) normally took ten minutes, but a.s.sisted by the wind, which thrust her along in a series of skittering runs, she turned the corner into Uckfield Close in record time noting, as she blew past, that the usual F had been appended to the road sign by some felt-tipped wit. The college was a jumble of seventies prefabs cl.u.s.tered around a solid chunk of finest munic.i.p.al Victoriana, originally the home of the Water Board. In the local history section of the library, Iris had once found a photograph of it being built. A line of dusty-ap.r.o.ned masons had been a.s.sembled by the photographer, and stood shoulder to shoulder, arms folded, looking like a row of bouncers. Their current equivalent was the pencil-thin figure of the vice princ.i.p.al (a 'tragic hippy' according to Tom) who stood just outside the double doors, swaying in the wind and extending a hand to visitors as if grabbing a lifeline. 'Good of you to turn out on such a wild night,' he said to Iris, his shoulder-length hair whipping about his head like a sunburst. Wondering what her own must look like, she went into the toilets to repair the damage.

She had combed her hair into submission and was wiping leaf mould off her shoes with a wad of damp loo roll when Alison Steiner came in, closely followed by a heavily made-up woman who went directly into one of the cubicles. Alison darted over to Iris and hissed urgently in her ear, 'Do you know who that is?'

'No. Who?'

'Tory local councillor. She's got a daughter here Melina Scott. Do you know her?' Iris shook her head and Alison pantomimed amazement; they had known each other for fourteen years since their sons had shared an infants' cla.s.s but she was still astonished that Iris lacked her own perpetually swivelling social radar. 'You must, she's a Goth. Dead-white face, dead-black hair, head-to-foot black clothes, earrings.' Iris shook her head again, and Alison waved a hand impatiently and continued in her habitual telegraphese. 'Never mind. Apparently the father's bankrupt that's the reason she's here and not at Roedean. Overreached himself in property and crashed with the market. Ha b.l.o.o.d.y ha. Just desserts. Anyway, she's part of the ' The toilet flushed and Alison straightened up, raised her voice to its normal, commanding level and seamlessly changed subject, '...car's got a battery problem. It's been a real bore. I recharged it just before I came out so it should be all right, but I might need a bit of a push. Warning issued.' She nodded briskly at Mrs Scott as she emerged from the cubicle, and then leaned towards the mirror and examined her face, as bare of make-up as a scrubbed knee. 'Would you believe,' she said, 'that you could still get blackheads at my age?'

The woman, radiating suspicion, applied another coat of lipstick and fluffed her hair before shutting her handbag with a noise like a pistol shot and stalking out.

'Banzai!' said Alison. 'Nearly got us. She's part of the rightwing caucus that wants to close the library.'

'Oh!' Iris was stung into a response, and found herself directing a venomous if pointless look at the door through which Mrs Scott had exited. She felt deeply proprietorial about the library, as though it were only her own visits that kept it open.

'There's a public meeting about it. Tuesday evening,' said Alison, groping round in her shoulder bag and extracting a sheaf of orange flyers. 'Want to come?'

'I go to Dad's on Tue ' Iris paused mid-weekday.

'Sorry?'

'Yes, all right. Why not?' She took a flyer.

Alison gave her a sharp glance. 'So how is your father? Is he still seeing Mrs '

'McHugh,' supplied Iris. 'Yes, I think so. His social life's certainly picked up.' To her own ears her voice sounded dry and strangely spiteful.

'Good,' said Alison briskly. 'Then you won't be quite such a slave to his routine isn't that what you've been wanting?'

Iris was silent for a moment. The present situation hardly tallied with the controlled, incremental nudges towards freedom she'd had in mind. 'In a way,' she said.

Her friend looked at her speculatively, head c.o.c.ked. 'I was thinking about you the other day I took a seminar on att.i.tudes to senile s.e.xuality.'

'Oh, don't,' said Iris. 'Please.'

'Fascinating subject,' continued Alison, inexorably, her voice slipping into lecture mode. 'Most younger people, even those who'd consider themselves quite liberal, find it difficult to talk about the topic without facetiousness. We completely deny our parents that aspect of their lives. I'm as guilty as the next woman. We a.s.sume our teenagers are at it the entire time obviously I'm not guilty of that, Lawrence, G.o.d love him, being the boy he is but when it comes to our parents '

'I cannot talk to my father about his s.e.x life,' said Iris flatly.

'But that's exactly the standard response!' Alison leaned towards her, eyes burning with proselytizing zeal. 'Why not break the mould? Why not give it a try?'

'Because...' Unbidden, images floated into her mind of her mother smuggling sanitary towels into the house as if they were contraband, of her father clearing his throat during a hymn as a way of avoiding having to sing the phrase 'lo! he abhors not the Virgin's womb', of watching a wildlife programme dwindling into a white dot after oestrus cycles were mentioned, of her father's face when she stepped off the train from Cardiff carrying rather more than a suitcase and a copy of Middlemarch. 'Because I was eight and a half months pregnant before he could bring himself to mention mine, that's why.'

They emerged together into the corridor and then separated, Iris to the scrum of the arts and Alison to the echoing canyons of the science department, under whose aegis her son Lawrence was taking five A Levels. According to the twins, science students were pitiful freaks, friendless fashion-voids with bottle gla.s.ses and personality disorders. They were vastly unimpressed that Lawrence (of whom this was actually a pretty fair description) had already gained a place to study Physics at Cambridge.

'Only complete saddoes go to Cambridge,' as Tom had explained to her yesterday. She had been attempting to engage him, for the thousandth time, in a serious talk about his future, but the conversation had quickly degenerated into the usual facetious meanderings.

'I might go travelling for a bit.'

'But you haven't got any money.'

'Oh, I could grape pick or something. Or juggle.' Both he and Robin had recently, and effortlessly, acquired this skill and could keep three oranges up in the air for what seemed like hours. 'Do you know I can do it with my eyes shut now?' He'd picked up a Spurs mug and smiled dangerously.

'But even if you take a year off you could apply for college before you go. Then you'd have something to come back to.'

'Not everyone goes to college, Mum. You didn't.'

'I did.'

'Well, you didn't finish it anyway.'

'No, but if you look at most successful '

'Richard Branson didn't.'

Iris had groped for a response. Your father went to college, she'd wanted to say and he's probably got a mansion and a yacht by now. Though she didn't know that, of course; it was just an image, part-filched from Eudora Welty, that sprang to her mind like a pictogram whenever she thought of him: Conrad standing in front of a Plantation House, the sheltering trees heavy with Spanish Moss, a horse pawing the ground at his side, a speedboat parked on the Bayou beyond.

'You've never liked this mug, have you?' Tom had said, dispelling the vision. He'd tossed it into the air and caught it with one hand.

'Seriously, Tom. This is terribly important.'

'OK.' He'd put the mug back on the table and folded his arms, frowning purposefully. 'Serious conversation. What do you need to know?'

'Have you thought about courses?' she'd said, doggedly.