She picked up his hand and plonked it back in the bath. 'I'm not angry,' she said.

'You look angry.'

'Well I'm not. You were going to tell me about h.e.l.la. What's she like?'

His face seemed to melt and then rea.s.semble itself into a new and sloppy shape. 'She's tall, and she's '

'No,' said Fran, suddenly changing her mind. 'I'm still not angry, but I don't want to hear any more about her. What does she do?'

'She's an architect.'

'Fine.' She nodded. 'That's it. That's enough information.' Bessie Bunter had trans.m.u.ted into a Valkyrie with a doctorate. 'I'm going to check on the potatoes.'

'Wait!' He launched himself out of the water and stood dripping. 'Don't go, Fran. I had to say this face to face, I couldn't tell you over the phone. I do still love you, Fran. I'll always love you, but...' He looked down at her, tears in his eyes.

She folded her arms and stated the required line, 'You love h.e.l.la more.'

He nodded solemnly.

'All right,' she said flatly. She knew there was a gracious way to do this, a way that would match the drama and romance of Duncan's journey, but she was unable to find it.

'You know what I think about you, Fran, you know how much I '

'Yeah, OK. I'm all right about it, Duncan.' Each word felt chipped from a block. He reached out his hairy arms and wrapped them around her, and kissed the top of her head, and she stood like a cross little statue until he let go.

'I'm all wet now,' she said.

While he dressed, she threw the blackened potatoes into the bin with unnecessary force, and fanned the back door to and fro, dissipating the smoke that still clung to the ceiling. The temperature had dropped and great clouds of steam billowed up by the outside drain as the bathwater swirled away. The snow was beginning to settle.

Duncan entered the kitchen rather diffidently, his drying hair sticking up in tufts like the top of a thistle.

'The potatoes have had it,' she said. 'Do you want bread and cheese? Or we've got some beans, I think.'

He shook his head. 'I'm going to go, Fran.'

'What do you mean? Where?'

'I'll kip at my sister's tonight.'

'You can stay here, I don't mind. You can sleep on the sofa if you want.'

'Nah.' He smiled. 'I think I should leave you alone. Maybe we can talk tomorrow. Go to a bar and have a real old session.'

She shrugged. 'OK, if that's what you want.'

'I'll still miss you Fran.'

'I'll miss you too,' she said, truthfully, if a little stiffly. She was used to Duncan being lyrical, or raucously h.o.r.n.y, or melodramatic, or stoned and giggly, or asleep; she wasn't used to this sweet and dignified regret. He fiddled with the b.u.t.tons on his coat, still damp after an hour and a half on the radiator. 'Fran?'

'Yup?'

'Can you lend me something for the tube?'

She saw him off into the snow with a twenty-pound note and all of her loose change in his pocket, a hot-water bottle stuffed down his jumper, and one of Peter's hats tied under his chin with one of Peter's scarves. On the doorstep he gave her a hug which lifted her off her feet, and she stood and watched him trudge up the road until he disappeared round the corner by Aashish Videos. Then she closed the door gently and wandered back into the kitchen. A few wisps of smoke still curled across the ceiling, and she leaned against the open back door with a beer in her hand, and watched the snow settle on the Brussels sprouts.

14.

Iris, standing outside the library with her pet.i.tion, didn't bother to target the two men who were strolling out of the covered market and along the pavement towards her, but instead turned her attention to a studenty girl who had just crossed the road and was heading towards the post office. The three successive Sat.u.r.days that she had spent collecting signatures had turned her from a nervous rookie, plastered against the library facade bleating 'Can I possibly interest you in...?' at people's backs, to a focused a.s.sessor, skilled in predicting the exact response of a given pa.s.ser-by, homing in on the keen and the weak with ruthless accuracy. She felt she could publish a leaflet on the subject.

The girl was in her early twenties and was wearing a jacket that looked vaguely ethnic. This was a good sign, as were her clumpy lace-up shoes. Other items of clothing that seemed inexplicably linked to an interest in the fate of the library were zipped-up anoraks, hats with brims (this included flat caps) and knitted scarves. It had been a chastening moment when Iris realized that she simply had to look out for people who dressed a bit like her. On a broader scale, there was little point in approaching males under twenty-five (unless they were actually entering the library), women under twenty-five in packs of three or more, anyone with a shaven head and anyone who hadn't put their teeth in that morning.

'Pet.i.tion against library closure.'

'Huh?' The girl turned towards her.

'Would you like to sign a pet.i.tion against library closure?' She had learned to start with a statement and keep the clipboard half-concealed at her side until the person had stopped moving. Beginning with a question and an outstretched biro sent people veering away as if repelled by an invisible force field.

'It's closing, is it?' said the girl, surprised.

'There's been a steady reduction of opening hours which means that fewer and fewer people can use the library, which then gives the local authority the ammunition to cut the service entirely.' (Alison Steiner had invented this wording which as Iris had pointed out at the Save the Library committee meeting actually translated as 'No, it's not closing.' 'It's a pre-emptive strike,' Alison had said. 'We're saying, "It's not closing yet but if we don't act now then the philistine right will shut every library in Britain and sell them off for yuppie flats." ') 'OK,' said the girl, rather uncertainly.

'And it's the best library in North East London.' This was Iris's own addition, one she'd taken on trust from her father who used to claim that he'd cycled round every library in the area, comparing stock, staff and architecture. Admittedly that had been in the late 1940s, but it had become a tenet of family lore, together with her mother's 'nothing beats a nice cup of tea' and her Auntie Olive's 'three prunes a day and you'll live to be a hundred', though she herself hadn't made it past seventy-seven.

The girl took the proffered pen and clipboard and started to fill in her details, while Iris scanned the street for the next potential signatory. The last couple of weeks had awakened a compet.i.tive side of her nature that she had never known existed, and she was keen to beat last Sat.u.r.day's total. A couple of hundred yards up the street, lingering beside the rack in front of the Pound Store she could see a sure-fire bet one of Dov's patients who was, moreover, wearing a natty (brimmed) Homburg.

'That all right?' asked the girl.

'Thanks very much,' said Iris, taking back the clipboard and then starting violently as someone tapped her on the shoulder.

'G.o.d, you're jumpy, Mum.' It was Robin and Tom, and she realized with a mental lurch that they were the two men she'd seen just a moment ago, distance turning them into unrecognizable adults. Close by they looked rea.s.suringly unchanged, but she felt unsettled, as if something important had happened while she wasn't looking, and she had yet to catch up.

'Do you want us to sign then?' asked Robin, taking the pen from her hand.

'Oh,' she said, surprised. 'Yes please.' Neither had been keen library users for at least a decade, and when she had first mentioned the campaign Robin's response had been, 'Oh, is it still open then?' They had been hugely amused at the thought of her standing in the street 'soliciting', as Tom had put it.

Now he took the clipboard from his brother and started filling in their address with his usual speedy scrawl.

'I've been practising,' he said, finishing his signature with a huge full stop.

'Practising what?'

He started writing on the next line. 'Different signatures. I can do you about fifteen extra people.'

'What? But you '

'No one will know and it '

'No, Tom.' She tried to grab the clipboard but he turned his back protectively and stuck out his elbows.

'Honestly, I'm really good', he said over his shoulder, 'and they're all real people.'

'That's not the '

'Mum.' She recognized the warning note in Robin's voice, and turned to see a bulgy young woman holding a large camera.

'Hi.' The woman stuck out her hand. 'I'm Lara.'

Iris shook it hesitantly. 'I'm sorry, I...'

'From the Dalston Advertiser? We spoke earlier?'

'Did we?' said Iris, doubtfully.

'You're Alison Steiner?'

'No. Oh, I see you're a bit early. Alison takes over at two o'clock.'

'But you're doing the pet.i.tion, aren't you?'

'Yes,' said Iris, reluctantly, seeing what was coming. The Advertiser was notoriously so short of journalists that almost any unsolicited article was printed, and Alison had recently submitted a rabble-rousing six hundred words.

'Well I just need a photo, to ill.u.s.trate the piece. You know, standing in front of the library.'

'Wahay, Mum's going to be famous,' said Robin.

'Oh. You're her son?' said the photographer, her face brightening. 'Well, it would be nice to have both of you in the shot.'

'And me,' said Tom, turning round.

'G.o.d!' Lara looked as if she'd hit pay dirt. 'You're identical! Fantastic! And you're all involved in the campaign?'

'Yup,' said Tom, handing the clipboard casually back to Iris. She glanced at it and spotted the signatures of her aunts Myrtle and Olive as well as those of Fran, Peter, Sylvie and Mr Tibbs. Tom put his arm around her shoulder and smiled dazzlingly at Lara. 'Where do you want us?'

By the time Alison arrived, Iris had been dropped from the line-up altogether, and Tom and Robin were standing on the steps of the library with Lara crouched on the pavement below, angling her camera near-vertically.

'They're going to look about forty feet tall from there, aren't they?' said Iris, sotto voce.

'Any publicity's good publicity,' said Alison, 'and they can do a headline about giants of literature. Are you off home now?'

'No.' Iris remembered the task she had set herself and her stomach gave a nervous little skip. 'I'm going to the reading room, I need to write a letter.'

She sat for a while with the blank pad in front of her, biro in hand. Since the parents' evening, the idea of the letter had been a fishhook, tugging gently but persistently at her consciousness. She had thought about the Conrad of her image, the one standing in front of the pillared facade of a Southern mansion, and had realized that he was still a student, sideburns fuzzing the edges of his face, his lanky frame clad in denim; if she focused hard enough she could almost see the acne scars on his cheekbones. The mansion itself, she knew, had no basis in fact he had once referred to 'the old family place' and she had invented the rest from the Deep South of her imagination. There was no real Conrad there; she knew nothing about him, nothing at all. He could be a senator, he could be in gaol, he could be living the sort of unexceptionable middle-cla.s.s American life about which she knew very little, since it was rarely described in novels. The twins had caught up with him now; all three of them were eighteen and if they had stood in a row, Conrad would have been the shortest and youngest-looking. The thought made her uncomfortable there seemed something vaguely incestuous about hanging on to an image of a lover who was younger than her sons. What she wanted was an update, a new picture that she could superimpose over the old one. And if that picture showed someone who was living a decent, admirable, successful life then so much the better. If the twins ever asked she would have a template to show them.

She had secured her favourite seat, a b.u.t.toned, viciously upright leather chair positioned so that light from the frosted window fell across the table in front of it. The reading room was a remnant of sombre Victoriana, held in aspic while the rest of the library had been lightened, brightened and knocked through. It held a couple of leather armchairs, three desks with inkwells attached, their porcelain interiors still a profound blue, and a row of tables, smooth-topped from a century of elbows. The room was jealously guarded by those who had stumbled across it, tucked away behind the upstairs stacks and blessed with a sign on the door which read: Horace Saddler Reading Room No Talking No Children Iris had studied for her A Levels in here, had used it as a sanctuary during the last few weeks of her pregnancy after she had moved back to London, and had saved it as a treat for those rare, fleeting and widely separated intervals during the twins' childhood when she was neither at work, nor looking after them, nor in transit between the two states. It was as familiar to her as her own kitchen, and far warmer in winter; the walls were lined with enormous brown radiators that looked like pieces of obsolete farm machinery, and which clanked when they moved up a gear during cold snaps. In the summer, the sash window was raised a discreet two inches, admitting the roar that filtered through the gla.s.s roof of the indoor market next door, and during periods of almost tropical heat (three times within her memory) the fan on the ceiling was switched on, and the room seemed to gain a touch of colonial grandeur. There were rarely more than half a dozen people in there, all on nodding terms with one another; today there was only one other occupant and he was deeply asleep. Iris found that the occasional snore only added to the comforting ambience.

Dear Sir or Madam, I am hoping you can help me with an enquiry...

It seemed a sufficiently bland opening. She had obtained the address of the Bethesda Christian College Medical Faculty from international directory enquiries, but had decided to write rather than phone, as being both cheaper and less frighteningly immediate. She also found it far easier to lie on paper than in person.

I am organizing a reunion of Cardiff University medical graduates, cla.s.s of 1977, and wish to extend an invitation to the members of your university who, in 1972, spent a pre-med term at our school as part of an exchange plan, namely Julie-Jane Vitelli, Lyle Kraviz, Donald Moray Strachan Junior and Conrad Blett.

She had found the other names on the tiny contact sheet that had been issued as an aide-memoire during the first week at medical school. The students had been herded one by one in front of a box camera and the resulting black-and-white images printed in tiny rows, in alphabetical order. She had hung on to it as the only photo she had of Conrad, though he was almost unrecognizable in a Zapata moustache which he had shaved off only days after term had started; like all his compatriots he was wearing a Bethesda College sweatshirt with 'In G.o.d We Trust' printed in large letters above a coat of arms; like all his compatriots he had binned his Baptist morals almost as fast as his sweatshirt. Hysterical with freedom, far richer than any of the British students, the Americans had become the wild and dazzling centrepiece of Barton Hall's social life, the hosts of a hundred parties, the open-handed distributors of Jim Bean and joints, and Iris lucky Iris had been in the room next door to the master of revels his right-hand maiden, the thrilled recipient of his generosity both in the sack and out.

In the event, as she'd discovered after they'd gone back to Virginia and student life had reverted to a dull round of thumping discos and warm beer, it wouldn't have made any difference if she'd been on a different floor altogether Conrad had apparently slept with almost every woman in the entire hall of residence, regardless of proximity. There had been three rumoured pregnancies; only Iris, her b.u.mp already palpable at ten weeks, had not opted for an abortion. The confirmation that it was twins had come the same week that she'd spotted the clipping from the Bethesda Clarion on the medical school noticeboard, announcing Conrad's engagement to his childhood sweetheart.

I would be grateful if you could send me any information on their current whereabouts or, if more convenient, details of your alumnus a.s.sociation, who may have kept track of them.

When the twins were small, she had dreaded and planned for the moment when they would start asking about their father. She had borrowed books on single parenting and even on adoption to find a form of words that would soften the explanation, while still conveying the truth. She had weighed the advice, jotted down ideas, adapted and pruned and tailored until she had two versions poised in readiness: a full one, and one that would cover her if the subject came up for the first time in public in the dentist's waiting room, say, which was where Tom had first enquired what bosoms were for.

The years had gone by, the explanation had rusted gently in her subconscious, and the boys had never once asked the question, never evinced the slightest curiosity about the subject.

'We haven't got a dad,' she had once heard eight-year-old Robin inform a friend.

'Why not?' the friend had asked and Iris had braced herself for the answer.

'Dunno,' Robin had said, unconcernedly. There had been other single parents at their junior school; she could only conclude that they viewed fathers as an optional extra. Or perhaps their lack of concern was the result of their twinship and the sort of natural self-sufficiency it gave them. Together, they were a closed circuit.

In the end she'd raised the matter herself, during the summer holidays before they started at the comprehensive. She'd asked for a 'little chat' and they had sat through it in silence, wearing expressions that tempered deep embarra.s.sment with disbelief. Then, with a degree of hesitation, not knowing what emotions might be unleashed by the sight, she had shown them the photo. And the reaction had been not resentment, or angst, or puzzlement, or grief, or anger or any of the textbook predictions. No, they had looked at the photo of Conrad and exploded into laughter. The ludicrous moustache!! The stupid surname!!! Blett!!!! It was, apparently, the funniest name ever in the history of the universe, and became an instant term of inter-twin abuse: 'you stupid Blett', 'you've got a face like a Blett', 'you're a right Blett'.

She had wondered for a while whether the information simply hadn't sunk in, whether it was too big a topic for an eleven-year-old to absorb in one go. She'd waited for some kind of sequel a volcano of brooding resentment, a volley of unanswerable questions but the only follow-up had come from Robin, who had wandered into the kitchen one day when she was making a crumble.

'Mum, you know Conrad Blett?' he'd said, taking a piece of apple from the dish.

'Yes?' she'd said, bracing herself, aware that he'd avoided the use of the f word.

'Where does he live? I mean, whereabouts in the USA?'

'I don't know. He went to college in Virginia so he might have stayed in the area.'

'Is that near Florida?'

'No. Not very.'

'What about California?'

'No. It's a really long way from there.'

'Oh.' He'd wandered off again, and she'd followed him a few steps up the hall, her hands dropping flour onto the lino. 'No,' she'd heard him say to Tom in the living room, 'he's miles away from either of them.' Disneyland, she'd suddenly realized.

No further enquiries came her way. 'Blett' was gradually dropped as an insult, and aside from a bout of sn.i.g.g.e.ring when they saw she was reading a book by Joseph Conrad ('Hey, Mum, you must really like that name.') the subject had stayed closed. There seemed no way of finding out what they were really thinking, though she imagined hoped that they had discussed the whole issue between themselves, in that private world to which adolescence had simply added another layer. Certainly they appeared completely unchanged by the revelation. She didn't know whether to be relieved or not; it was as if the defining episode of her life had been dismissed as a piece of minor information, on a par with (or, probably, slightly below) the latest signing for Spurs.