A quarter of an hour later, Cla.s.s 3L departed with noisy reluctance, leaving behind them twenty yards of gilded splodges, three gloves and a hanky, stiff with snot. Fran donned a pair of Marigolds and started to peel paint-sodden leaves from the floor. She hated this part of the winter, the dreary emptiness of the farm landscape, the enforced confinement and ma.s.sed coughing of the cla.s.sroom, the continual strain that Christmas decoration manufacture put on her minimal artistic talent.

'Fran? Ah Fran, I thought you might be... er...'

She looked up to see Claud hovering in the doorway. He was wearing his favourite blue jumper with the red cow on the front, rumoured to have been knitted by his mother.

'Hi. What's the problem?'

'There's a phonecall for you in the staff area... er, it's rather a noisy line so it took me a while to...'

'Thanks, Claud.' She had already peeled off her gloves and squeezed past him, feeling a little troubled; no one ever phoned her at work.

Barry was in the staffroom, trying to warm his hands under the hot tap. He nodded sadly at her as she picked up the phone.

'h.e.l.lo?'

The distinctive, rasping voice came over the roar of traffic. 'h.e.l.lo, little Fran.'

'Duncan?' Barry stiffened like a pointer sighting game.

'How are you, Fran?'

'Me? I'm fine.' She was disconcerted, he didn't normally deal in pleasantries. 'How about you?'

'I need to talk to you, Fran. Can I come and see you?'

'Come and see me? You mean, come back to England?'

'I'm here now. I'm at a petrol station on the A28, waiting for a lift.'

'What?' Over by the sink, Barry was pretending not to listen.

'I spent the last two days. .h.i.tching to the Netherlands and then I got the first ferry I could. I have to see you, Fran, when can I see you?'

She caught Barry's eye and pointed towards the door. He nodded and started to move very slowly.

'Fran?'

'Oh er come straight to the house. I'll try and get off early. I could probably be there by four.' She realized, with a pang of relief, that it was Tuesday choir practice and Peter and Sylvie would be out.

'OK. I'll be there.'

'Are you all right, Duncan? I mean, what's going on?'

There was a pause, during which she could hear the hoots of a reversing lorry. 'I have to see you, Fran, I have to talk to you, there's something I've got to say,' he said in a rush, and put the phone down.

'Blimey.' She stared at the receiver for a moment, still absorbing the conversation.

'I'll cover for you if you want to get off.' It was Barry, who had almost, but not quite, got as far as the door.

'Oh you heard that, did you?' she said sarcastically. 'OK then. Thanks. I'll check it with Claud.'

'I hope everything's all right. With Duncan.'

'Well, obviously you'll be the first to know.'

He brightened slightly, and she sighed. 'Just kidding, Barry.'

She arrived back home at five past four to find the doorstep empty and a copy of the Dalston Advertiser on the mat. Mr Tibbs was lying on the floor of the hall as if just dropped from a height and he mewed creakily as she stepped over him. He had two or three favourite spots in the house, all of which were inconvenient to the other occupants, and one of which (fourth stair from the top) was actually dangerous. One morning Sylvie had caught Fran gently trying to lever him off the latter with a slippered foot, and had been reproachful.

'What am I supposed to do, jump over him?' Fran had asked.

'You can pick him up,' Sylvie had said, bracing herself before doing so. 'He's a gentle old p.u.s.s.y cat and he loves being picked up, don't you, Tibbsy?' He had lain in her arms, inert, like a fun-fur bolster.

Sylvie had been living in the house for more than a month now. There was nothing obtrusive about her presence; she was tidy, quiet and ate almost nothing while still taking a share of the cooking and washing-up. She spent most of her evenings in the room she shared with Peter; she never watched TV, she listened to the radio at barely audible volume and she played the piano so beautifully that Fran would sometimes sit on the stairs to listen to her practise. She had even chipped in some rent, considerably easing the burden of their ever-expanding mortgage payment.

The downside was this: she held hands with Peter almost all the time, even at dinner, making Fran feel perpetually like an unwanted third; she reacted to almost any setback (running out of cat food; forgetting someone's birthday) by bursting into tears and then getting a headache, forcing the rest of the household to walk round on tiptoe and converse in whispers; she thought that Mr Tibbs was a human being; and she used the phrase 'you're so practical, Fran' at least once a day, generally in a context which implied that the word 'practical' could be subst.i.tuted by the words 'unimaginative', 'insensitive' or 'cra.s.s'. Fran had never felt so self-conscious, so lumpen, so loud.

And this was in contrast to Peter's radiant, almost tangible happiness; when he looked at Sylvie, there was clearly an angelic choir on the soundtrack, and vaseline on the lens.

There had been, so far, no indication as to when she might be moving out again.

'Any luck with flat-hunting, Sylvie?' Fran had asked last week, in pa.s.sing, and Sylvie had drooped her head, and reached across the breakfast table to take Peter's hand.

'Sylvie's a little bit upset,' Peter had said.

'Why?'

'She's just seen this.' He had pushed over a copy of the Advertiser and pointed to the front page. Under the headline 'Local woman lay Dead in Bas.e.m.e.nt for Five weeks' was a summary of the coroner's report into the death of Constancia Hackett, complete with lurid sub-headings.

Fran had read it through slowly. She herself had not found it easy to shake off the image that she'd seen through the letter box that day, after Sylvie had scrambled, gasping, back up the stairs to the street the yellow fingers curling round a door frame into the hall, the cloud of little black flies.

'No one realized,' Sylvie had said in a small voice, squeezing Peter's hand. 'She had a heart problem but no one checked how she was or wondered why they hadn't seen her. And that's awful, isn't it?' She had looked intensely at Fran, her grey eyes beginning to blur.

'Yes, it is,' Fran had replied, meaning it, and then had felt disconcerted by how wooden that 'yes it is' had sounded. She had become so used to automatically agreeing with Sylvie's airy generalizations and pointless fancies that she appeared to have forgotten how to be sincere.

'And I don't want to live in a place like that,' Sylvie had continued, 'a place where people don't care about each other.' A tear had plopped onto the table, and then another. Peter had looked anguished, and Fran had nodded, and been sympathetic, and had realized that this was not the time to ask whether, in that case, Sylvie intended to stay in Stapleton Road indefinitely, or to speculate on where, short of Shangri-La, she intended to look for her next flat. Sometimes, she'd accepted reluctantly, it was best just to shut up.

By a quarter to six, Duncan had still not arrived. Fran had put a couple of potatoes in the oven, tidied round a bit (not that he would ever notice), considered and then rejected squeezing a spot on her chin, and re-read his last two letters. Both had been posted from a small town near Hamburg, where he seemed to have halted his Southern progress. He had been there for at least a month, and the local landscape was becoming familiar to her through his photographs flooded meadows, distant cooling towers, Friesian cows and half-timbered farmhouses that looked oddly two-dimensional, as if they'd been thrown up on a Hollywood backlot. It didn't look to her eye particularly striking or memorable, but his letters were lyrical about the fusion of the industrial and the rural. 'A sinuous dark form, twisted against the sky. Is it a tower? Or is it the trunk of a leafless tree?' as he had written on the back of one of the pictures. A tower, she would have said, from the evidence of the vast billboard next to it, advertising electric power. Duncan always laughed when she pointed out that kind of thing. 'Factwoman' he called her.

Now that she looked at the recent letters again, she realized that they contained even less information than normal. Usually, she could count on a few personal nuggets wedged between the acres of poetic maundering her eye would snag on the word 'tent' or 'money' and she'd find a sentence or two about soggy groundsheets, or the non-availability of dope in rural Finland. She might even, occasionally, see the answer to one of the list of questions she always appended to her own letters: 'Have you seen any storks?' for instance, or 'Do you have enough waterproof clothing?' The Hamburg letters, however, contained not a shred of anything factual, no hint that he was about to abandon his journey and fly west for winter, and no clue as to his reason. They were pure streams of consciousness, paeons to the environment, lacking even the l.u.s.tful reveries that had spiced up previous efforts.

She returned the letters to their envelopes and poured herself a gla.s.s of wine. What if he'd had enough of the EU project, and wanted to revert to his old work pattern? Would he want to resume the relationship where they'd left off, and if so what should she do about it? Or what if the problem were financial and he needed a loan? Should she give him a nominal amount to tide him over? Or should she tell him to get stuffed?

Or what if G.o.d help her he wanted to move in until this crisis, whatever it was, blew over? It would be Withnail and Prince Charles all over again, this time with the addition of Tinkerbell. She tried to imagine the four of them sitting down to a meal together, attempting to find topics in common. Maybe he'd find a soulmate in Sylvie, a fellow traveller down the pathway of the spirit. Maybe not, though. Despite the poetry, there was something very earthy about Duncan; fragility was not a quality she'd ever heard him admire.

She topped up her wine gla.s.s. If she'd missed anything about him over the last few months, it was his physical presence. He was a big bloke, tall, broad-shouldered; when she put her arms round him, they barely met. She liked big blokes, liked the rea.s.surance of always being able to hear where they were the heavy footsteps, the creak of chairs. She thought she'd probably eventually settle down with a big bloke. Though not Duncan, obviously.

By seven o'clock, the potatoes were on the cusp between crispy and adamantine, and Fran was on her third gla.s.s of wine. She was standing in the dark by the window of her bedroom, from where she could see the junction with the main road. Three 92As had swung round the corner since she had started her vigil, but no one had got off and she was beginning to worry. The weather had worsened and the orange halo of the street light was filled with slanting snow, the flakes too wet to settle on the pavement but showing fleetingly white along the tops of the privet hedges. She glanced in the opposite direction to the High Road and saw him immediately, slogging into the wind, hands in pockets and his head well down against the sleet.

It was lucky that she put on the landing light before running downstairs, because the cat was couched in his favourite position, his back lethally flush with the stair above. She pushed him off with an impatient foot and hurtled past to the front door.

Duncan was bearded, soaked, and frozen so cold that she had to take his rucksack off for him, and undo the b.u.t.tons on his (non-waterproof) coat.

'f.u.c.king English drivers,' he said, barely able to move his lips, as she peeled off the coat and unwound a sodden scarf. 'Once it started getting dark no one would stop. I had to walk from Walthamstow.'

'You did what? Why didn't you get a bus? Or the tube?'

'No money.'

'You could have ordered a cab I'd have paid.'

'Didn't think of it. I just wanted to get here.'

'Honestly, Duncan.' She rubbed his reddened hands between her own with a vigour heightened by exasperation; walking six miles through sleet was the kind of pointless dramatic gesture that almost defined him. 'I'm going to run you a bath, it's the only way you'll get warm.'

'Thanks, little Fran. Hug first?' He held out his arms, and it was like standing in front of an open fridge.

'Hug afterwards,' she said, decisively.

In the heat of the water, Duncan's body turned from white with red extremities, to red with purple extremities, and finally to a uniform shrimp pink. He lay with his eyes closed, groaning half-pleasurably at the tingle of returning blood, his hands floating just below the surface, and his bony knees jutting above it. He was thinner than when Fran had last seen him, more gristly, and a few silver hairs glistened in the scrubby beard. She added a little more hot water to the tub, and poured in some of Sylvie's blue bubble bath.

Duncan opened his eyes. 'I feel reborn,' he said.

'Do you want your cocoa now?' She offered him a mug to which she had added a large dash of brandy, and he sat up, slopping water onto the floor. The bathroom was already wetter than she had ever seen it, condensation dripping down the tiles and Duncan's clothes lying in a pool of their own making. It reminded her of the first occasion that she and Duncan had shared a bathroom. He took a sip of the cocoa.

'f.u.c.king fantastic.'

'Are you hungry?'

'Nah.' He lay back and looked at her, with an expression that she could not read.

She felt a little uneasy. 'What?'

He shook his head and then reached out and took one of her hands. He held it loosely and turned it over, as if checking the provenance. 'What a small hand. Such small fingers.'

For one ludicrous moment, she thought he was about to whip an engagement ring from well, from G.o.d knows where and slip it onto her finger. Instead, reality a.s.serted itself and he squeezed her hand and farted, creating a temporary jacuzzi effect near the taps.

'Jesus, Duncan.' She jerked her head back.

'Loud and lethal, eh? Sorry about that.'

He settled himself again and resumed his study of her face, his own a.s.suming a look of gentle melancholy. 'Why didn't you come with me, Fran?'

'Why? You know why. Because I had a job and a mortgage and I didn't want to live in a tent for a year.'

'But were there other reasons?'

'Well... yes.' She paused. All the other reasons involved wanting to see less of Duncan, but it seemed rather ungrateful to bring that up when he'd just schlepped halfway across Europe to see her. It seemed to be the right answer, in any case. He nodded significantly and took her hand again, this time sandwiching it between his hot, wet palms.

'I missed you so much, Fran. I didn't realize how lonely I'd be. The only people I was meeting were shopkeepers and gits in fast cars who tried to run me down. I was smoking a lot, and getting very low and I just wanted you there, keeping me plugged to reality. I wanted little stubborn Fran walking beside me and the dark horizon ahead. The long... dark... horizon.' He had drawn her hand closer, so that she was leaning halfway across the bath, looking into his gooseberry-green eyes. 'And then after I'd crossed the border from Denmark I started to realize that it wasn't a journey across land I was making, it was a journey through my mind. And I spent hours in there sometimes exploring, searching...'

Her gaze drifted. When Duncan was in poetic mood, she always lost the thread of what he was saying and started focusing on the carnal. Beneath the bubbles his chest rose and fell, the hairs just breaking surface, and out of the corner of her eye she could just see his c.o.c.k, floating palely in the deep. She wondered whether she should get in the bath too; she'd be more careful this time, more aware of the downstairs ceiling. He'd started talking about the landscape again, and she forced herself to listen.

'... seemed to reflect just what I was thinking. I'd see a lake and it would show me how deep my thoughts were; I'd see pylons and ideas would flash across my mind. Like electricity. I think I was going a bit mad.' He released her hand temporarily and took a slug of cocoa, before resuming the clasp and the intensity, his voice growing husky with nostalgia. 'I was looking for a sign something to show me why I was there, and what I should be doing. And then one evening I got to this little town. It was just an ordinary place. I was going to stay there one night and then walk straight through and back to open country. I camped in an orchard on the outskirts and when I woke up the next morning I looked through the tent flap and it was amazing.' His eyes were vivid, meeting hers and then bouncing off to examine their own private landscape. His body tensed with the memory and she watched the muscles springing into line down his belly. 'The whole orchard was in blossom. The whole orchard '

'In November?' said Fran, incredulously, l.u.s.t suddenly dissipated.

'In November,' he confirmed, almost with reverence.

'What sort of trees?'

'I don't know, but the blossom was white. And it smelled of... heaven. And I knew it was the sign I was looking for. I didn't feel mad any more, I just knew I was in the right place.'

'What shape were the leaves?'

'And the next thing I saw were two people coming through the orchard towards me, bringing me breakfast. It was like coming home.' He pressed her hand between his own and then released it rather theatrically, as if launching a dove.

'I wonder if ' With an effort she wrenched herself away from the subject of unseasonal blossom (although she'd have taken a substantial bet that what he'd seen hadn't been an orchard at all, but a few bushes of Viburnum fragrans, which flowered all winter directly onto bare stems and could only be mistaken for fruit trees by someone who couldn't tell a cornflower from a speedwell). 'So who were these people, then?'

'They were part of a community it's called Schone Welt. It means '

'Beautiful World,' said Fran, who'd done German O Level.

' and they're artists and craftsmen and cooks and teachers. They run a restaurant and a gallery and they've converted a farmhouse and all the outbuildings to live in. Fran, it's amazing.' He was almost breathless with enthusiasm. 'The ones who brought me coffee were h.e.l.la and Auguste. Auguste is a carpenter.' He left an obvious gap for her to fill with a question.

'And h.e.l.la?'

'h.e.l.la.' He repeated the word rather slowly, as if for the pure pleasure of saying it, and then said it again. 'h.e.l.la...'

Fran looked at him for a moment, and then sat back on the linen basket and put her feet up on the edge of the bath. 'Oh, right,' she said, 'I get it.'

Duncan heaved himself into a sitting position, slopping water onto the floor. 'It's more complicated than that, Fran. That's why I had to see you.'

'Uhuh. Hang on a minute.' With studied calm, she mopped up the worst of the flood with a bathmat, and then blotted the rest with a couple of handfuls of loo roll. 'All right,' she said, sitting back down again. 'Carry on. You were telling me about h.e.l.la.' The word came out with the harshness of an expectoration.

Duncan took a deep breath. 'You know when something's just right, when it fits into place like the last piece in a jigsaw?' He waited, yearningly, for an answer and Fran allowed herself a teeny little nod. 'Well that's what Schone Welt felt like. They took me in and I was suddenly a part of it. They'd wanted someone to doc.u.ment what they were doing, and there I was, right where I was needed. Like a limb, an essential limb.'

As opposed to a non-essential one, thought Fran, pettishly.

'I mean, it was the first time I've ever wanted to stay anywhere. You know me, Fran, you know how hard it is for me to settle. But I didn't have to walk away from there to find new horizons... there were new horizons ' he spread his hands as if kneading stiff dough ' within it.' He looked at her expectantly.

'Well how come you never mentioned this, then?' she asked. 'How come your letters were still wittering on about factory chimneys and ditches and things?'

'Because part of everything, part of what I felt, had to do with h.e.l.la and I couldn't mention h.e.l.la in a letter because... because she was too huge a subject to mention.'

Fran had a sudden image of a Teutonic Bessie Bunter, puffing across the orchard with a plate full of cream buns. 'Well, you're here now,' she said, more brusquely than she meant to. 'Fire away.'

'Don't be angry, little Fran,' said Duncan, placing a wet hand on her knee. She restrained an impulse to shake it off and instead took a deep breath. This was ridiculous; she was being ridiculous. Duncan, whom she didn't love, had never loved, and in fact had tried to dump only eight months ago, had clearly met the woman of his dope-fuelled dreams, and she, Fran, had turned into the archetypal jealous cow, defending her man with hooves unsheathed. She hadn't known she was capable of it; jealous of Duncan, for f.u.c.k's sake, with his unreadable letters and supine career plan.