'Really? Do tell me.' She folded her arms and leaned forward.

'He's the hero of a little-known fifties sci-fi film. Cult viewing. A gay scientist walks through a radioactive cloud while out shopping.'

'Shopping for what?'

'Table mats.'

'Where?'

'Selfridges.'

'Right.' She nodded with well-faked understanding. 'Well, that all hangs together nicely. Thanks for explaining.'

'No problem.' He stood and straightened his jacket. 'Shall we go?'

By the lake, a Burberry-clad elderly lady was feeding tiny cubes of sponge cake to a yelling, stamping mob of Canada Geese. Spencer, reminded of the pigeons, stopped to watch.

'Look how leathery their feet are,' said Fran.

'Yeah, they look like they're wearing biker boots.' Behind the squabbling ranks, two dark leggy birds were mincing around, radiating disapproval. 'And those ones ' he said.

'Moorhens,' supplied Fran.

' they look like they're wearing high-heeled mules. And they're hanging around, waiting for the Philippino maid '

'That's a mandarin duck.'

' to get the cake for them.'

'What about the pigeons? What do they wear?'

'Trainers,' said Spencer, firmly. 'Supermarket own brand.'

'Sparrows?'

'Barefoot.' His eyes met Fran's in unspoken acknowledgement; this was exactly the sort of conversation Mark had always enjoyed, though his suggestions would have been far ruder.

They resumed walking towards the Victoria Gate, where the turnstile was a bottleneck of buggies.

'So what's next on the list, then?' asked Fran, weaving between toddlers. 'Mark's list, I mean.'

'I'm going to bite the bullet and do Madame Tussaud's.'

'On your own?'

'Are you volunteering?'

She looked at him n.o.bly. 'Spence, if you want me I'll be there.'

'Thanks, friend.' He gave her arm a squeeze. 'I'll try not to ask. Madame Tussaud's and then the Lord Mayor's Show. And then the Norwegian tree that goes up in Trafalgar Square at Christmas. Oh G.o.d, and the sloth, I must visit the sloth.' He had a sudden vision of Mark propped up by pillows in his hospital bed, on the phone to London Zoo. He had wanted to sponsor an elephant for Spencer to visit, but was defeated by the price. 'Have you got anything smaller and cheaper?' he'd asked, as if to a greengrocer, and had finally settled on half a sloth the other half had already been adopted as an ironic comment on Spencer's sleeping patterns. 'I want you to treat that sloth like a brother,' he'd said, quite sternly. 'I'll be watching.' 'So Madame Tussaud's, the zoo, the Lord Mayor's Show and then the tree. I ought to make a list. I'll buy a notebook at the station.' He felt suddenly jittery, obligations rising out of the ground before him like mist.

Uncharacteristically, Fran took his arm as they walked up the road to the tube, pa.s.sing alongside the plane trees that cast shadows across the road like the stripes of a zebra crossing.

'What happens at the end of that sci-fi film?' she asked. 'Does he get the boy?'

'Oh, I couldn't be bothered to sit through it,' said Spencer.

4.

The resolutions a litany of failure were recorded on successive pages at the back of her address book.

1986.

Get up 15 minutes earlier Evening cla.s.s Make boys eat more fruit Wash kitchen floor twice a week 1987.

?drop Friday visit to Dad Encourage boys to watch less TV ?Evening cla.s.s 1988.

?Evening cla.s.s talk to Dr Petty re raise Talk to boys re college options ?suggest 1 night a week no TV Make boys eat more fruit ?drop Friday visit to Dad Get up 10 minutes earlier ?new kitchen floor 1989.

See 1988 1990.

Iris turned over a page, wrote: at the top and then stared for a while at the blank s.p.a.ce beneath it. She added:

1.

and then decided, after a further pause, that she really ought to clean the flat. For an hour or so she gathered up items and dumped them in their correct places and surged round with a hoover and banged cupboard doors, secure in the knowledge that nothing that didn't involve actual explosives was capable of waking the boys on a Sat.u.r.day morning. She even removed a pillow from under Robin's head, changed the pillowcase and then replaced it without any alteration in the rhythm of his breathing.

Feeling self-indulgent, she paused for a moment and watched him sleeping, his expression placid, a couple of scabbed shaving cuts just under his chin. She sometimes tried to see the twins as others saw them friends had told her that they were quite handsome but it seemed to involve a trick of the eyes, a de-focusing equivalent to that of visualizing the 3D shape in a 'Magic Eye' picture, difficult to sustain for more than a second or two and resulting in an image much less recognizable than that of a leaping dolphin. Occasionally she caught a glimpse of two square-jawed almost-men, but most of the time she could see only Robin and Tom, enormous versions of the scarlet roarers who'd arrived seven minutes apart, seventeen years, three hundred and sixty-four days and fourteen hours ago still hungry, still dependent; quant.i.tatively but not qualitatively changed. As she watched, Robin sneezed in his sleep and turned over, dislodging an avalanche of dirty washing from the end of the bed. Iris scooped up the crumpled clothes and returned with them to the kitchen, stuffing them into an already overfull machine. Then, as the steady whirl and thump reverberated through the room she returned to the open address book.

She was still pondering the blank page when there was a tapping on the kitchen window and she looked up to see the wavering tip of a long bamboo pole. At the other end, on the other side of the garden wall, was Fran.

'I tried waving but you were concentrating so hard you didn't see me,' she said, when Iris had opened the back door. 'What were you doing?'

'Oh just, um... a shopping list.' The concept of writing New Year's Resolutions in September was too complicated to explain.

'I wanted to give you these.' Fran handed two envelopes over the wall, and a bottle of Australian champagne. 'It is today, isn't it, that they're legal?'

'That's right. Thanks, Fran, they'll love that.'

'Are they up yet? Or is that a stupid question?'

'They were at a party last night.' They'd returned at about 3 a.m. and let themselves in with the exaggerated quietness of the truly drunk. Iris had woken when one of them dropped his keys in the hall, and had stayed awake long enough to hear them giggling hysterically in the kitchen as they tried to make toast with crispbread (now fused all over the inside of the toaster).

'So it's a stupid question then,' said Fran. 'Say happy birthday from me and tell them mine's a vodka next time we're in a pub together.'

'Would you like a cup of tea?'

'Can't. We're supposed to be fixing this b.l.o.o.d.y guttering.'

'Fran?' Peter's sonorous voice called from the shed next door.

'Coming.' She rolled her eyes. 'G.o.d, it would be nice to spend just one weekend not propping the house up. See you.'

Back in the kitchen, Iris picked up her pen again and added a full stop after the number 1. Four years ago, the first time she had written the resolutions, it had been on an impulse and she had rattled out the first ideas that came into her head. Her mother had died just the month before and the boys' birthday had been the first remotely pleasant event for a very, very long time. It had seemed a hopeful new starting point, a potential hinge on which she could begin to turn her life and, even in retrospect, the items had not seemed overly ambitious. The next year, when it had become clear how much support her father would need, she had toned them down a little; the year after that, gripped with frustration, she had come up with twenty-eight suggestions (including 'tell boys to stop growing' a response to a terrifying bill for school uniforms) and then ripped out the page and started again. The year after that had been too demoralizing to even think about. This year, she had decided, there were to be no repeats. This year every resolution was to be new and all of them achievable.

1. Do all the housework myself

This was not (she told herself) the supine gesture it appeared, but a positive step. She had tried cleaning rotas, and they had always failed. Neither of the boys appeared to see any point in keeping the flat tidy. Their vast shoes lay like reeking tank traps across the hall, tripping anyone who came in. They experienced no revulsion at the sight of toenail clippings scattered across the living-room rugs and the smell of damp towels screwed up into a bundle and left under the bed for two weeks seemed scarcely to register. They were happy to drink tea out of cups encrusted with coffee grounds and when Tom dropped half a packet of sugar onto the kitchen floor, he'd considered that kicking the spilled grains under the washing machine was an adequate response; three weeks later Iris was still peeling her shoes off the lino every time she used the kettle. There was no malice involved; they just didn't think.

Of course, they liked wearing clean crease-free clothes, but never evinced curiosity as to how these things appeared in the cupboard. Iris had stopped ironing once, but had resumed after five days when the enormous pile of washing actually prevented her from getting to the sink. Neither twin had apparently noticed this, but then the sink was merely the place where you fished around in cold sc.u.mmy water to find the can-opener. She knew that to an outside eye Fran's for instance her inability to enforce any kind of regular tasks seemed feeble. But what Fran in her determined way had never really grasped was how tiring it was to try and be the boss all the time. Begging, nagging, baffled tears none of these things were worth it. The boys would very slightly alter their behavioural patterns for a couple of days (say, trying to aim for the bin when cutting their toenails in the living room) before reverting to exactly the same irritating habits that had prompted her outburst in the first place. Iris would be exhausted, and nothing would have changed.

How much easier, then, to do it all herself. Instead of determining that Robin and Tom would or should have household responsibilities, she was going to work from the baseline that nothing got done unless she did it. She would no longer be living a lie and, as far as she could see, her workload would be exactly the same. It would be freedom of mind rather than body, but would mean that any action by the twins anything at all, from the merest lifting of a pair of pants into the linen basket, to the rinsing of a jam knife before it was used for marmite would be a bonus. It would be a victory born of defeat, and she wished she had thought of it years before.

2. Dress appropriately

This resolution had been prompted by an incident at work, some weeks ago. It had been raining heavily, and she'd been shaking off her old blue anorak prior to hanging it on a peg. The part-time receptionist, Ayesha, had glanced at it in pa.s.sing as she carried an armful of notes into the filing room. 'Nice coat,' she'd said, as the door closed. Iris had actually looked round, a.s.suming that Ayesha must have been speaking to someone else. 'Nice coat'? From someone who had a pierced nose? She'd looked at the anorak anew. It was dark blue and had a zip and a quilted lining. In an ident.i.ty parade, its only distinguishing features would have been a 'Save the Children' sticker, now bent in half and covered in fluff, and the crumbled remains of a shortbread in one of the pockets. 'Nice coat'?

That evening, she had checked with Fran. Could Ayesha's remark have been sarcastic?

'No, people wear these now.'

'Do they? You mean, not just people like me?'

'What do you mean, "people like you"?'

'People who've been wearing the same coat for seven years. Longer than that, actually, because it was my mother's. She thought it was sensible, though she wouldn't have worn it for a social occasion.'

'Well, its time has come. You are officially finger on pulse.'

Iris had pondered her trendiness. 'Does that mean it's been unfashionable for the whole time I've been wearing it?'

Fran had hesitated. 'Not so much unfashionable as ' She'd struggled for a description.

'Frumpy?'

'No. More... afashionable.'

It was a scientific distinction that Iris could appreciate, describing not so much the opposite of fashion, as the total absence of it. She'd taken a moment to absorb this. 'Could you tell me when its time has gone again? Maybe I should know. I don't want to become an embarra.s.sment.' Like Mrs Simms, she had thought suddenly, a neighbour from her childhood. Mrs Simms had taught the piano, had been to Oxford and was reputed to know Anglo-Saxon; she was famous locally, however, for dressing like Wurzel Gummidge. No item of her clothing ever seemed to have been selected with reference to any other item. An average outfit might consist of a beret, a nip-waisted 'New Look' jacket, a dirndl, ribbed tights and patent-leather sandals; it was as if she dressed in the dark. 'Her mind's on higher things,' Iris's mother had once explained, kindly. Sitting in the kitchen with Fran, Iris had felt a presentiment that she might turn into Mrs Simms so unaware of fashion that she ended up creating her own.

After the conversation she had looked critically through her wardrobe at the items of clothing chosen solely for their practicality, or the ability of their pockets to hold a paperback and a tube pa.s.s. Style simply hadn't entered it. At eighteen she had at least had an awareness of what someone of her own age was supposed to wear, even if she never seemed quite the right shape to carry it off. Her nickname at school had been 'Lanky' and it was still a reasonable description. 'You could be a real clothes horse,' a friend had said once; it was supposed to be a compliment, but Iris had instantly imagined one of those wooden concertinas, draped with damp washing.

After the twins were born, for many years her clothes seemed to have been covered in mashed potato, and by the time they had moved on to packed lunches she had somehow lost the thread; she no longer knew what she was supposed to look like. What did thirty-seven-year-olds wear?

The boys were hopeless; they seemed to view her as a separate species, one to whom the normal rules did not apply. When prodded, they'd occasionally offer the phrase 'you look nice', but in much the same way as one might praise a Martian's tentacle-protector, if a comment were demanded. What she needed was a guide, someone who could point the way through the maze, so that at least she'd be going in the same direction as everyone else. She thought, in the meantime, that she might start buying some magazines and looking at the pictures, to get her eye in, so to speak.

3. Limit

'Oh G.o.dddd.' Eyes half closed, hair randomly flattened, Tom shuffled into the kitchen. 'Have we got any aspirin?'

'Happy birthday,' said Iris.

'Oh,' he nodded very slowly. 'Ta.' He was dressed in Tom and Jerry boxer shorts and a huge baggy jumper, his arms wrapped around himself.

'Paracetamol's better for a hangover there's some in the bathroom.' He shuffled out again, hunched over as if battling against a strong wind.

3. Limit Dad's phonecalls