He'd let the pause hang. '... Not really.'

'The form has to be in by the end of November.'

He'd looked startled. 'This November?'

She'd opened her mouth to protest and he'd crowed with delight. 'Kidding!'

Robin hadn't thought about courses either, but that was because he was almost certain he was going to fail his A Levels.

'But your summer papers were fine. You got a B and two Cs, didn't you?'

'Yeah, but everyone says the real exams are different. I might go to pieces. Or totally freeze.' He had picked up the stapler on his desk and idly clicked as he talked, watching with apparent fascination as the wasted staples bounced onto the floor. 'I'll probably have to resit them. Loads of people do it's not a big deal like it was in your day,' he'd added, rea.s.suringly.

'But isn't it worth looking through a couple of prospectuses. Just in case? Find out if there's something you really fancy doing?' She had been aware that she was wheedling, and she'd tried to inject a note of calm reason into her voice. 'It wouldn't do any harm to put in an application, would it?'

'Well... I might take a year off anyway. Even if I pa.s.s.'

'And do what?'

'Travel a bit. Or just... you know. Chill.' He'd wiped a weary hand across his forehead. 'There's been a lot of pressure this year.'

'But what would you live on?'

'Well, Tom thinks we could do juggling. You know, in the street, for money.' He had put down the empty stapler and picked up a paperweight. 'D'you want to see me catch this with my eyes shut?'

Mr Lomax, the speech-impaired Geography teacher, turned out to be a handsome man in his forties, with a slightly prognathous jaw and a minimal lisp. Iris introduced herself.

'Ah, Tom's mum.' He a.s.sumed the look of smiling indulgence that she had become used to over the years, from the various authority figures on whom Tom had exerted his indolent charm. It always amazed her, the ease with which he strolled through life. He had none of the qualities that she had been brought up to a.s.sociate with success he wasn't brilliant or conscientious or pa.s.sionate or concerned or single-minded or dynamic or even punctual, in fact he expended very little effort in any direction; if he had a skill, it was that of benign flippancy.

Mr Lomax steepled his fingers. 'Well, I expect you know what I'm going to say.'

'Lazy.'

'Yup, he really doesn't put the hours in. It's a shame, because he's quite capable of original work. When he can be bothered.'

She nodded resignedly. 'I've heard this so many times.' Tom usually completed his homework over breakfast, spooning in Weetabix with one hand while writing an essay with the other, at a speed which indicated that he was putting down the first thing that came into his head. Any criticism of this habit, indeed any attempted discussion of exams, revision, timetables, course content, homework requirements or even his handwriting which was atrocious was greeted with an indulgent smile and the phrase 'stop worrying, Mum', as if her concerns were a sort of trivial tic, on a par with cushion-straightening.

'But I enjoy having him in cla.s.s,' continued Mr Lomax, 'he always contributes, he's very articulate. Do you know what he sees himself doing any future plans?'

Iris grimaced. The end of her conversation with Tom had been as unsatisfactory as the beginning and she was shamefaced about revealing the outcome. 'He wants to be a millionaire by the time he's thirty, I'm afraid. Nothing more specific.'

The correct response to this admission, she felt, would be for Mr Lomax to slam his hand onto the desk and shout, 'Oh for G.o.d's sake, that's exactly the problem with this generation, they want the world on a b.l.o.o.d.y plate.' Instead, he shook his head with an almost fatherly chuckle. 'I wouldn't be at all surprised.'

Robin's form teacher, Mr Clark, was a youngish man with a pale, severe face, who looked at her without interest.

'Ah, Mrs Unwin.'

She couldn't face correcting him. In any case, she'd never really solved the 'Miss' Mrs dilemma; asking to be called 'Miss' always made her feel like a character out of Jane Austen, while insisting on 'Ms' required rather more a.s.sertiveness than she could generally dredge up. 'Call me Iris', the third option, sounded like a line from a Barbara Stanwyck movie. She shook hands in silence, and then waited for several minutes as Mr Clark finished appending a note to a file, a task which he undertook with great intensity. At last he recapped his pen and with a sporty flick of the wrist, tossed the folder onto the pile beside the desk.

'Robin,' he said challengingly, placing both hands flat on the desk in front of him and leaning slightly forward, as if about to perform a handspring.

'Yes,' said Iris, uncertainly.

'Bit of an enigma.'

'Is he?' She was disconcerted. Tom was far more of an enigma to her than Robin.

'Something of a depressive.'

'Depressive?' It seemed an intense word for Robin's brand of mild and self-indulgent melancholy. 'I don't think I'd describe him as a '

'Tends to be moody.'

'Well... he's quite quiet but I wouldn't say '

'Mumbles.'

'Yes, he mumbles. He definitely mumbles. It stems from lack of confidence, I think.'

'Older or younger twin?'

'Older. By seven minutes.' Mr Clark frowned, and she felt as if she'd just given the wrong answer in a mental arithmetic test.

'People always a.s.sume Tom's the oldest,' she said, placatingly. 'He's always been the leader he was the first to speak and the first to walk, and Robin was always trotting along after him, and I think that's why...'

Mr Clark frowned again at this excess of information, and she tailed off into silence. 'I think the main problem,' he continued, when the floor was once again his, 'is that he's lacking in confidence.'

Iris replayed the conversation in her head. 'I just said that.'

'What?'

'That's what I just said. About him mumbling.'

Mr Clark gazed at her uncomprehendingly. 'I'm not following you, Mrs Unwin.'

'I said he mumbles because he lacks confidence.'

'Yes, that's exactly what I said.'

'But...' She began to doubt her own senses. 'I think I said it first.'

Mr Clark looked around the room, as if for adjudication, or possibly a straitjacket, and then at his watch. 'I think we agree, then, that he's lacking in confidence?'

She felt herself dwindling in the chair. 'Yes.'

'He a.s.sumes that his opinions aren't worth listening to.'

'I know,' she muttered.

'Sorry?'

She raised her voice. 'I said I know.'

'Did you and your husband ever consider sending the twins to different schools?'

'No,' she said, startled by both the idea and the husband. 'Why?'

'It might have given Robin a little breathing s.p.a.ce, so to speak. Away from the domination of his brother.'

'But they're in different cla.s.ses.'

He gave a little moue of acknowledgement.

'And they've each got their own room at home.'

'Uh huh.'

'And it's not as if Robin's ever done really badly in school. And he's got lots of friends. And he's never been in trouble...' She felt like the trailer-trash single mom that she'd seen in a recent TV film, pleading to the judge after her boy had gunned down most of his cla.s.smates. Mr Clark looked at her impa.s.sively and she remembered with a surge of pleasure that Robin had described him as an 'arsy know-all git'.

'Do you know what he wants to do when he leaves?'

'No, he's well, he's not really too sure.'

He nodded, as if the answer confirmed something, and then pulled Robin's file towards him. He uncapped his flash-looking fountain pen and wrote a rapid sentence or two in a script so rounded and neat that even upside down and from the other side of the table Iris could read the final word; it was 'mother'.

'So Tom's sui generis and Robin's your fault?'

'More or less.'

Alison snorted dismissively and shoved her car seat back as far as it would go, crushing a boxful of 'Save the Public Sector' leaflets in the pa.s.senger footwell. The dodgy battery had been more than a conversational gambit, and they were now in the only vehicle left in the car park; Mr Clark had been the last member of staff to drive away, gunning the engine of his scarlet MG like a drag racer. It was according to Tom known as the p.e.n.i.smobile.

'Of course, there's a ritual element to these evenings,' said Alison. 'Any actual exchange of useful information is rigorously avoided. They either tell us what we already know or avoid telling us what they think we're incapable of hearing. How many teachers, do you imagine, informed me that Lawrence is an introvert?'

'All of them?'

'That's right. As if I might somehow not have noticed. And how many told you that Tom's bone idle?'

'All of them,' said Iris, depressed.

'And how many told you that in a secret poll conducted last month, Robin was voted "s.e.xiest boy in the year" for the second year running?'

'He wasn't, was he?'

'It's that brooding shyness, you see. Mr Clark may think it's held him back but he's quite wrong. Apparently, when he split up from Stephanie Young last month he was utterly besieged by young women. Tom does quite nicely, of course, but Robin's the one. The current phrase is "babe-magnet", I believe.'

'This is Robin we're talking about?'

'Yes.'

'A babe-magnet.' The term was half-familiar to her.

'Swept the vote. Tom came second.'

It was one of those moments, occasional but recurrent in her life, when Iris felt that she'd been issued a seat with restricted view. On her side of the pillar she could see the familiar Robin affectionate, gentle, somewhat lacking in impetus, Tom's loyal and admiring sidekick while the rest of the audience was being treated to the full picture, that of a Lothario. She shook her head to dispel the vision. 'They didn't say a word to me about it.'

'Most adolescents wouldn't, would they?'

'But how did you know?'

'Because Lawrence doesn't come under the category "most adolescents",' said Alison, bluntly. 'He comes under "utter geek" and therefore has no idea that it's infra dig to tell me things. I can't imagine who he gets it from,' she added, ironically.

Iris glanced involuntarily at a photo blu-tacked to the dashboard. Against a background of sea and sky, Alison stood smiling beside two beaky bespectacled men in identical orange cagoules; it looked less like a family portrait than an ill.u.s.tration of male cloning. The cagoules suddenly flared more brightly, and she turned to see the headlights of Dov Steiner's lovingly restored Alvis rounding the corner to the car park.

'Aha, talking of geeks...' said Alison fondly, raising a hand to greet her husband.

They stayed in the car and watched in comfortable silence as Dov, his long face taut with concentration, crouched by the headlights of the Alvis and started to disentangle the jump leads. The night was crisping up with early frost, and he tried for quite some time to open the crocodile clips without first removing his gloves, until Alison banged on the windscreen and mouthed 'take them off' at him. She shook her head and tutted good-humouredly, and Iris wondered what it would be like to see one's child's future incarnate; Alison would never have to worry about the source of her son's peculiarities, wouldn't have to torture herself as to whether they might be the result of maternal inadequacy, or environmental deprivation, or genetic inheritance. Neither would she have to fret long into the night about how he'd eventually turn out. For better or worse, one glance at Dov was all that was needed.

Whereas she herself...

'I've never asked you this before,' said Alison, suddenly, as if jump leads were present inside the car as well as outside, 'and of course you don't have to answer, it's sheer idle curiosity on my part but are the twins much like their father?'

Iris blushed. Incredibly, automatically (autonomically for that matter), after all this time, the thought of Conrad still made her blush. She ducked her head, embarra.s.sed.

'None of my business, of course,' said Alison.

'No it's all right,' said Iris. 'I was just thinking.... thinking along similar lines.' He had been eighteen when she'd last seen him exactly the twins' current age. She could remember the long chain of lampshades down the corridor of the hall of residence, each one swinging where his head had knocked it in pa.s.sing; she could almost trace the dust on the spines of his textbooks, almost hear the midnight music from his room, vibrating the wall between them. The phrase in those days had been 'chick-magnet'. She smiled, a little bleakly. 'Yes, I think they probably are.'

12.

There was something about the quintessential wrongness of green gravy that prevented Spencer from actually lifting the fork to his mouth. The pie looked all right the pastry nicely crusty and brown, the meat in recognizable chunks and the mash appeared to be normal mash, but the whole plateful swam in the virid sauce which the man behind the counter had scooped straight from the eel barrel with a ladle. 'What's that?' Spencer had asked, revolted.

'Licker,' the man had said, with an edge of contempt.

'Licker?'

'Yeah. It's traditional.'

Everything in the shop was traditional: the green and white tiles, the absence of a customer toilet, the almost theatrical surliness of the staff, and the orange tea, so strong that after half a mugful he felt as if someone had smacked him round the head.

He was sitting on his own at a marble table in the corner, tucked away from the draught of the door, but with an unrestricted view of the other customers. Three o'clock was an odd time to be having lunch, and besides Spencer there was only a quartet of yellow-jacketed construction workers, eating two pies apiece, and a very old man, bent low over his sponge pudding and custard. Sleet and a cold snap had left a pattern of lacy streaks across the window, through which could be glimpsed the shabby bustle of the Kingsland Road. The roofs of the cars were spattered with white and the pavement was a slab of pitted, grey ice across which the older pa.s.sers-by walked with tiny steps and even the loping black youths halved their stride.