'Oh. That's Middlemarch. That's Dorothea Brooke!'

'That's right! My G.o.d, well spotted. Of course Dorothea would have made a superb doctor. Very calm, very able, but without the corrosive ambition that blighted '

Spencer opened his eyes and the whispering stopped; there was an X-ray of a skull on the lightbox opposite him, the cranium a flawless dome, the teeth a constellation of fillings.

'h.e.l.lo, Spencer,' said Iris.

'h.e.l.lo, Spencer,' said Vincent. 'How are you feeling?'

'Um...' He reached a cautious hand to his head, and found it to be roughly the same size as usual; it felt enormous. 'A bit fuzzy,' he said, at last.

Vincent nodded at the X-ray. 'Did you know you had a deviated nasal septum?'

'Playing rugby. When I was fourteen.'

'It's a brutal game. There's no skull fracture, incidentally.'

'Good.'

'They're keeping you in, though,' said Iris. 'We're just waiting for a bed on the ward.'

'Oh. What time is it, then?'

'Nearly midnight.'

'Is it?'

'I'd better go,' said Vincent. 'I have to write a report on your a.s.sailant.' He stood and formally held out a hand to Iris. 'It was a pleasure to meet you. You know,' he said, turning, 'Iris is the person I told you about the one who took the message? I recognized her voice immediately.'

'Oh,' said Spencer, following none of this explanation. His foot had started hurting again.

'And I've discovered that she knows first aid as well. So many skills. Anyway...' He leaned over and gently squeezed Spencer's shoulder. 'Look after yourself,' he said, 'and try to avoid socializing with patients. It's never a good idea.'

Iris had gone rather pink.

'What did he mean?' asked Spencer. 'About patients?'

'Oh.' She seemed to collect herself. 'You might not remember, but Mr Hickey hit you with a spade and then Callum Strang climbed over the wall and started a fight with him and accidentally trod on your foot. That's not broken either but it's a bit bruised.'

'Did ' he struggled to remember something about the evening ' did your father ever turn up?'

'Yes.' She looked at him, her expression unreadable. 'He arrived at the same time as the two police cars and the ambulance.'

'Hey,' said Spencer, closing his eyes again. 'Great party.'

19.

'He's fine, honestly. He's been eating like a horse.'

'Has he been sick at all? He had a bit of sicky-tummy just before we left.'

'He's been sick once. In the garden.' It would have been in the kitchen if she hadn't yelled at him, just as he began the preliminary heaves.

'Oh poor Mr Tibbs.'

'Really, Sylvie, he's fine. I've been combing him and... stroking him and...'

'Loving him?'

Fran looked across at where the cat lay against the door of the refrigerator, his new favourite place since Barry had trodden on him. Yesterday, when she'd needed to get some milk out, Tibbs had lashed at her ankles and drawn blood. 'I've done my very best,' she said, honestly. 'Are you having a nice time?'

'A beautiful time,' said Sylvie, gravely.

'Well... good. I'll see you on Friday then.'

'Oh Peter wants to talk to you. He's got a little bit of news.'

There was a pause; Mr Tibbs stretched lavishly and started to sharpen his claws on the polished wood floor.

'h.e.l.lo, Fran. Everything all right?'

'Yes fine.' She had decided to postpone pa.s.sing on the long list of things that currently weren't in any way all right, until their return.

'I thought I'd better tell you,' said Peter, 'I gave Norwich a ring today. I've got the job.'

'Oh. Well done.'

'So, er... I'll have to give in my notice. Six weeks.'

'Six weeks.'

'Yes.' There was a flurry of whispers. 'Oh Sylvie wants another word.'

'Fran, there was just one more thing. I know it's a lot to ask but I wondered if you could clean the piano keys.'

'Sure. You mean dust them?'

'No, they're ivory so you need to wipe them very gently with lemon juice. It keeps them white, you see.'

'Lemon juice.'

'Just enough to moisten the cloth. I always do it once a week.'

'Right.'

'Thanks, Fran.'

Barry was still in bed, his bandaged foot protruding from beneath the duvet. He looked up hopefully as she came into the front room.

'No, I haven't made you any tea,' she said. 'We're out of milk. Listen, Barry, I'm going over to my friend's flat to tidy it up before he comes back from hospital.'

'Oh. OK.'

'And what are you going to do today? Any plans?' She picked her way between the heaps of clothing to the window and opened the curtains. The light was flat and grey and the sash rattled in the wind.

'It's really cold in here,' said Barry.

'Do you need another quilt on top of that?'

'No, I mean it's cold when I get out of bed. I can practically see my breath look.' He attempted to demonstrate the fact.

'Jumpers,' said Fran. 'Exercise. The heating engineer's coming on Tuesday.' She caught her foot on a discarded t-shirt and stumbled into Barry's elbow crutches. They slithered down the wall, knocking over a pile of books and nudging his guitar to the floor with a hollow boom. 'You could clear up in here, for a start.' The mess was a daily reminder of the humiliation she had suffered on his behalf, scrabbling around on the pavement for his belongings, stuffing them into a waiting minicab while Janette screamed abuse at her from the window of the flat above.

'I'll try,' said Barry. 'But my back's aching a bit from this bed. And you know, it's quite tiring standing up on one leg.'

'Listen, there was a bit in the paper last week about an amputee who went up Everest so I think you can probably manage to fold a couple of shirts. You've only got a sprained ankle.' For a split-second she wondered if she could ask him to clean the piano but the potential for disaster seemed too great she could almost see Sylvie's expression as pips squirted from between the keys.

'What time are you coming back?'

'I don't know yet.'

He looked at her pathetically over the top of the duvet, and she sighed. 'Look, I won't be long. And I'll get some milk and something for lunch on the way back, OK?'

'Thanks, Fran,' he said. 'I really, really owe you.'

'Too right,' she muttered, closing the door and glancing up at the botch job she had done on the banisters.

The day after Barry's fall she had inspected the damage and found the stair carpet littered with friable shards that turned to dust in her hands. The broken edges of the uprights were as soft as cork and when she had taken a torch into the cluttered cupboard under the stairs and played it on the ceiling, a myriad little holes stared back at her. Woodworm. It was like finding out that that zit under your arm was actually a symptom of the plague. 'It's lucky in a way,' Barry had remarked later, watching her grimly lash together the uprights with Sellotape and a length of washing line. 'Otherwise you mightn't have found out until it was too late.' She hadn't deigned to reply.

The bottom deck of the bus was packed with extravagantly hatted black ladies on their way to church and the top deck was empty apart from a strong smell of marijuana, which someone had tried to disperse by opening all the windows. Fran slammed them shut, one by one, and then sat hunched and misanthropic in the front seat, left leg jammed against the heater, head stuffy with tiredness.

She had been kept awake the night before by the wind, which had teased up a corner of the corrugated-iron shed roof, and rattled it at irregular intervals throughout the small hours. In the past she might have put on her boots, taken a hammer and bashed it back into place, darkness notwithstanding, but last night a feeling of impotence had kept her under the eiderdown a sense that it would take more than a couple of 3-inch wide-topped rust-proof carpentry nails to hold back the JCB of fate; with her current luck, if she repaired the roof then the shed would collapse.

Towards dawn the wind had dropped a bit and the roof had settled down to the odd clank but by that time she was wide awake, and had gone downstairs and made a cup of tea. Wrapped in a quilt and seated at the kitchen table, she had read through the house insurance policy from 'A guide to peace of mind' to '... ask a member of staff for a "Customer Complaints Form" ' and confirmed her suspicion that woodworm was not covered under the terms of the policy. Indeed, the booklet gave the impression that the claims department would laugh derisively possibly even jeer if she phoned up with the news. She had put the policy back in the house folder (though in retrospect it would have been of far more use folded in four and wedged into the gap in the shed roof) and made a list of pest control firms from the phone book before trailing her quilt back to bed and dozing unsatisfactorily for a couple of hours.

She hadn't slept properly in days. For a start, she had spent five and a half hours in Casualty after Barry's dive down the stairs, most of it spent sitting next to a man with a cold. 'I think it might be flu,' he'd explained to her, sneezing vastly, as though that were a reasonable explanation for his attendance. The only good moment of the night had been when some huge madwoman in a white coat had barrelled out of a side room and shouted at him that upper respiratory tract infections were a GP problem. Fran had almost applauded. The very next evening, just as she was going to bed, Iris had phoned to tell her about Spencer, and she had spent all night worrying. The next day she had visited him, and had come away from the hospital marginally happier but with definite symptoms of the man-in-Casualty's cold, and after forty-eight hours of stertorous breathing and a set of sinuses apparently stuffed with concrete, she could have definitively rea.s.sured him that it wasn't flu.

As the bus ground towards Islington, weaving between the Sunday pedestrians sleep-walking to the paper shop, the differential in temperature between her left leg and the rest of her body served to wake her up a little and she began looking forward to a cathartic session of scouring and polishing, an altruistic chance to vent a little frustration; it was disappointing, therefore, to walk into the flat and find it already tidy. Admittedly Spencer had been in hospital for only three days, but she had visualized a build-up of dust a palpable air of neglect that she'd be able to dispel with a combination of vigour and furniture polish. As it was, there seemed little to do beyond cosmetic tweaks; even the sofa cushions had been plumped. It was far neater than Spencer normally kept it and she wondered if he'd taken on a cleaner.

She went over to inspect the animal tanks and found them looking like ill.u.s.trations in a textbook, the interiors decorated as if for a photo shoot, the food trays heaving with life. The spider was mid-way through eating a caterpillar, the still-twitching corpse held between its pincers like a corn on the cob. In the tank next door, the chameleon kept both eyes closed as if revolted by its neighbour.

Mark's instructions were still on the wall, but the ink had faded from black to a purplish-brown, and the corners were dog-eared. Spencer had crossed out the columns devoted to the lizard and the snails and had added the word 'magazines' to the bottom of Bill's feeding list. Fran picked a hardened ball of blu-tack from one corner and rolled it between her fingers and thumb as she wandered between the other rooms. Aside from anything else, they were so beautifully warm; she'd almost forgotten what it was like to have central heating. The kitchen was pristine, the bathroom marred only by a couple of streaks of toothpaste on the tiles, and in the bedroom the duvet was plump and inviting. She sat on it for a moment, just so she could reach across and straighten the pillows.

She opened her eyes when she heard a key turn in the lock, and was shocked by the darkness of the room. Her body felt slack and satiated and she lifted her arm as if the watch were made of lead. It was half-past five. There was a jingle of keys and the front door slammed, and then an Irish voice said, 'Oh G.o.d, oh for f.u.c.k's sake would you ever f.u.c.king believe it.'

'Niall?' she called.

'Who's that?'

She sat up and peeled a flattened piece of blu-tack from the corner of her mouth.

'Jesus,' said Niall, when she had lurched into the hall, 'are you all right?' He was holding a Tesco's bag in one hand and a dripping carton of milk in the other.

'I fell asleep.'

'You've got a big crease down the side of your face,' he said. 'Hang on while I get this b.a.s.t.a.r.d decanted and I'll make you a cup of tea.'

She inspected herself in the bathroom mirror; a fold of duvet had impressed a red dent between eye and chin and her eyelids looked like uncooked pasties. She splashed some water on her face and shuffled into the kitchen.

'So what are you doing here anyway?' asked Niall, filling the kettle.

'I came to clean up the flat but someone had already done it.'

He froze, his hand on the tap. 'Did Nick not phone you?'

'No. Why?'

'Oh Jesus, he's such an amnesiac I told him to ring you. We brought Nina round yesterday to feed the spider G.o.d, she loves that spider and Nick took one look at the flat and got the Mr Sheen out. Couldn't resist it. You know the old joke, don't you how do you know if you've had gay burglars? The place has been hoovered and there's a quiche in the oven.'

'Oh,' said Fran, not quite awake enough to laugh. 'It doesn't matter, anyway.' She yawned hugely and then remembered something. 'Wasn't Spencer supposed to be getting out tonight weren't you supposed to be collecting him?'

'It's tomorrow morning now,' said Niall, lining up groceries on the counter. 'He was sick after lunch and they said he'd have to stay in another night. He claims it was the raspberry mousse and nothing to do with concussion but the sister on the ward is having none of it and when we left he was having a ma.s.sive sulk.' He took a rolled-up magazine from the bottom of the bag and waved it at Fran. 'I said I'd stock up for him, and I'm going to put together a little ' his voice became arch and motherly ' welcome-home tray.'

'Oh nice.'

'Fruit, chocolate, bottle of Bailey's, video '

'p.o.r.n mag,' said Fran, as he unfurled the front cover of Horn.

'A fella's gotta relax,' said Niall unblushingly. He looked critically at the large man in small pants on the cover. 'Mind you, he's never really gone for blonds. Except Reinhardt, do you remember Reinhardt?'

'He was before my time, I think.'

'He was nice enough but Mark aka he who must be obeyed decided he was boring so that was it for the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d, big elbow and first plane back to Dusseldorf. Jesus.' He put a large spoonful of tea in the pot, looked at it critically and then added another two. 'This'll wake you up.'

'Thanks.' She yawned again and leaned against the washing machine to watch Niall put the groceries away. She had never spent time alone with him before, or even met him unaccompanied by Nick, and away from the restraining presence of partner and daughter she sensed that the leash was slipped and they might stray onto a topic that was normally avoided. 'He was quite bossy sometimes, wasn't he?' she asked, dangling a little bait.

'Mark?' Niall's expression was incredulous. 'Bossy doesn't cover it. He was a f.u.c.king tyrant.' He shook his head at the photo of Mark on the kitchen cupboard. 'And jealous Jeeesus, was he jealous. You didn't know him when he and Spencer were an item, did you?'

'No.'