There were so many versions of the story, and all of them were false. You could begin it this way.

Once upon a time there were two little girls, and their names were Everhilda and Frieda Haxby. They lived in a cottage on Chapel Street in the little village of Dry Bendish, which stood on the only hill in the flat, flat lands of the east. Their father Ernest was a poor mar who tilled the earth and sold his labour cheap and was known as one of the kindest and most foolish men in the village. Their mother Gladys was proud and vain and dreamt grand dreams for her older daughter Everhilda. She loved her pretty older daughter Everhilda, who was fair and delicate, but she was cruel to Frieda, who was plain and dull. She called them Little Swan and Little Mouse.

Mother Gladys was a clever woman, and she was cunning too. She was much cleverer than her poor, quiet, stupid husband, and when he brought them gifts from the fieldsa nail, a pebble, a fossil, a horseshoeshe poured scorn upon them. She read to her daughters the stories of the old G.o.ds, and told them that their ancestors had come from far away, across the iron sea, from the land of the Vikings, to this dry inland hummock. She told them they must be warrior maidens, for this world is but a battleground. They must sharpen their brain-knives, or they would be poor and weak like their father. She set daughter against daughter, and daughter against father, for she saw that Frieda prized her father's gifts. Her own gifts were the gifts of brain and book and word. You are my child, little swan, she would say to Everhilda. Let the little mouse play in its straw.

But Everhilda was cunning too, like her mother, and she saw that her sister was weak, and so she made her sister her slave. She wove a spell over Frieda. The two sisters shared a little bedroom under the eves, and at night Everhilda would creep into the little one's bed to subdue her. Poke, pry, lick, sc.r.a.pe. And as she grew older, she told her stories, stories even more frightening than the stories their mother told. She told tales of children lost in woods and eaten by wolves, of maidens forced to marry cruel dark men from the distant Orient, of little girls sunk beneath the bog in the underworld where great spiders dwelt, with dung beetles and centipedes and earwigs and woodlice and mealworms and tapeworms, and froghoppers and scorpions and scarabs and bats and birds of prey. And spiders would st.i.tch open the eyes of the little girls so that they could never close them, but would be forced to stare unblinking and forever at the monstrous world beneath the world.

('Like this,' Hilda would say, advancing upon Frieda's bed, and forcing open her sister's eyes with hard little fingers, 'like this. And she can never shut them again, and the insects walk all over her, they walk in and out of her nose and her ears and her mouth and her hair and her clothes, and they crawl into her body and they lay eggs down here, in her body.') And so the little sisters grew up, and so the little mouse sister whimpered and scuttled with fear. And then a day came when the big sister said to the little sister, 'Shall we go for a walk, down by the river?'

Or the story could have begun this way, of course.

Once upon a time there was a little girl with golden hair who lived happily in a cottage with her mother and her father, and her mother and her father loved her dearly and gave her everything her heart desired. But one day there came a baby stranger to the little cottage, and the mother and the father told the little girl she must love and cherish the little stranger. But the little stranger was a fierce and changeling child, and it cast a spell over the little girl, and forced her to be her slave. Night after night, the stranger child would demand more and more stories from the little girl, and would keep her awake in the long night hours, and the little girl was forced, night after night, to invent more stories, for the stranger child said she would die if once she fell asleep. And the little girl grew pale and weak, while the stranger child flourished.

So one day the little girl said to the stranger child, 'Shall we go for a walk, down by the river?'

Frankly, thought Frieda, panting slightly and pausing to cough as she climbed the last short steep flight of steps to the terrace, you could tell the story any old way, as long as you left out most of the circ.u.mstantial details. And she's forgotten most of those, as it had all happened so very long ago. But however you told it, you always ended up at the old mill. And after the old mill, the disputed prince.

She could remember the walk to the mill well enough. It had been an August day, one of those interminable days when summer holidays lengthened into tedium, when cabbage leaves turned yellow and fell from their scarred stalks, when wasp-eaten apples dropped to rot in the gra.s.s, when village boys cl.u.s.tered behind hedges pulling legs from daddy-long-legs or smoking furtive cigarettes. Much of the summer, Hilda and Frieda frowsted indoors, reading library books, for they were not encouraged to play with the village children, and therefore they were despised by the village children. Gladys, true to her roots rather than to her education and her adopted cla.s.s, made no effort to entertain her daughters. They bored her and she bored them. The hopeful child's cry of 'What can we do today?' had long been silenced, and sullen, resentful, the girls skulked and sulked. The father saw, and was sorry, and was powerless.

Gladys Haxby had been obliged to give up her job when she was married. That was the law in those days. Married women did not teach in schools. Or not in peacetime.

Three bored women in one small cottage, making the worst of their lives, while Ernie Haxby worked in the fields or at the farm.

And then, one hot day, Hilda had said to Frieda, 'Shall we go for a walk, down by the river?'

Frieda had brightened, like a puppy hearing its lead rattle. She was ready, she was waiting.

They had walked through the village, past the Wheatsheaf and the Post Office and Caney's General Store, down Church Street, and through the churchyard to the lane which led to the river. They knew the churchyard well, although the Haxbys and the Buggs had been chapel. They knew the tombstones, and Hilda had woven stories about the old table tomb which was coining apart at its stone seams. In it lay bones, and worse than bonesvirgins buried alive, with their hearts still beating; old men whose hair grew after death to cloak their bodies with a silver caul; babies strangled by their child-mothers at birth. But now the sisters were too old for that kind of nonsense. Even the dead bored them.

They had plodded along the dry path at the edge of the yellow field towards the river and the mill. Frieda had trotted obediently behind. And they had reached the line of pollarded willows that marked the river, and the bridge by the derelict mill.

Their father had once worked at the mill, humping sacks of grain, in its working days. He was a casual labourer, at the beck and call. But now the mill was abandoned, for the river level had fallen. It stood empty. The slatted wooden wheel was still. Their father worked the beet fields.

The mill yard had been turned into an agricultural dump. Old machinery rusted and weeds sprouted. The sisters had often stood there, on the bridge by the river, but they had never entered the mill. But now Frieda followed Hilda on to its forbidden ground, and edged her way through the broken door, and breathed in the white dust. They heard scufflings, vanishings. And they had looked at the ladder. It mounted to the next floor, from which in the olden days, five years ago, the grain was heaved down the chute. And Hilda had said, 'I dare you.'

And Frieda had climbed at Hilda's command, but Hilda had not followed. And then Frieda had been frightened to come down. Coming down was worse than going up. Down she had clambered, over uncertain rungs, past rusty protruding nails, and as she came down, the ladder had begun to shake and tremble. And Frieda had fallen, and in falling she had gashed her leg. It had bled and bled. And Hilda had run off and left her there, and Frieda had limped home, her leg bandaged by a dirty handkerchief, to her mother's certain wrath.

The wound had healed badly, and Frieda had been ill. And her father had made her the animals.

Hilda was dead, and Frieda was alive, with a scar on her thigh. So what did it matter, how it all had happened? What did it matter if there was no true story?

'I look to the past because I cannot see the future,' said Frieda aloud, dramatically, to an unseen audience, as she stood upon the terrace, fronting the sea. She fingered the grey stone ivy-bound urn upon the parapet wall, started to pluck at the tenacious white worm roots, the thicker strangle-hold of hairy tentacles. She had meant to replant these urns, but maybe she wouldn't bother.

Once upon a time, and once upon a time. Fairy stories were all the fashion these days, she gathered. Feminist fairy stories, oriental fairy stories. She hadn't kept up. She was out of date. She belonged to another kind of past, a bruising, grim, spartan, wartime, post-war, heavy-weight past. This was the time in which she had earned her laurels. She'd read her Bettelheim, long ago, but she'd lost interest. Anyway, how could you have a character called Gladys Bugg in a fairy story? Everhilda, yes, but Gladys, certainly not!

A couple of years ago, in Monte Carlo, she'd met a writer of romantic fiction, who wrote under the name of Amantha Knight. Her real name was Susan Stokes. She was very fat and very rich. Over a White Lady they had compared their losses at the tables, and discussed the forging of names, the writing of fiction. Was one influenced by names? Both thought it probable. Frieda Haxby, Frieda pointed out, was a brutal sort of name, a fierce name, a hammer of a name. Susan Stokes sounded, Miss Stokes considered, very plebeian'which, of course,' she conceded, 'I am.' It gave Miss Stokes pleasure to invent romantic, alternative names for her characters, to give them romantic, alternative destinies. Although, as she pointed out to Frieda, there were only two plots to choose from. One was Sleeping Beauty, the p.u.b.erty myth. The other was Cinderella, the tale of Rags to Riches. All romantic fiction, according to Miss Stokes, was a variant on these two themes. Sometimes she wrote one, sometimes the other. n.o.body ever got tired of them.

Frieda had granted that she had a point. She hadn't thought about it much since, until, during her removal, she came across the Arthur Rackham volume which she had borrowed or purloined from her sister. She had reread the stories with curiosity, still puzzled fifty years later by their fractures and caesuras, their ba.n.a.lities and brutalities. A primitive folk mind, forcing all experience into a primitive mould? She had tried to break free, to create new stereotypes, to discover new patterns in the past. Yet what was her own tale but the tale of Cinderella? From Rags to Riches had been her story, as it had been the story of stout Miss Stokes.

She and Miss Stokes had agreed that they were rich enough to retire, to live at leisure. (Miss Stokes had a house in Jersey, and another in Tenerife.) Yet they did not wish to retire. 'Boredom is my bugbear,' confessed Miss Stokes, waving at the waiter. 'I get bored when I'm not working. What about you?'

So on one went, but to what end? Frieda would never attend another conference, never give another lecture, never hara.s.s another politician or engage battle with another journalist or historian. They weren't worth her attention. Really, on balance, she was very disappointed in evolution. It didn't seem to speed up at all. It seemed to have got stuck. Evolution had broken its appointment with the human race. Or maybe it was the other way round.

The ivy smelt sour on her fingers. She wiped her fingers on her skirt. Woodlice scuttled, dislodged. She had hung her ballgown back in the damp beetle-bored wardrobe. She had enjoyed its airing, had enjoyed the shock on the faces of Grace, David, Benjamin. Once she had glittered, once she had been fine. She had turned heads, made headlines. And what was there to show for it now? A dress hanging from a bra.s.s rail.

'I look to the past because I have no future,' said Frieda Haxby.

Frieda Haxby had never been a comfortable woman. She'd never had much truck with comfort, and she didn't see why she should start to seek it now.

On I December 1788, Schiller wrote to his friend Korner, when the latter complained that he was not being very productive: 'The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination ... It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring inat the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with others ... where there is a creative mind, Reason, so it seems to me, relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a ma.s.s. You critics are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are found in creative minds, and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. You complain of unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.'

Just over two hundred years later, Benjamin D'Anger sent a postcard to his friend Ronjon de Lanerolle. The postcard showed a view of a dark brown mountainous moorland, beneath stormy clouds, lit by an improbably lurid and fulgent sky; it was ent.i.tled 'The Beast of Exmoor' and informed the purchaser that high on Exmoor there had been many dramatic and frightening attacks on farm animals, far more ferocious than those made by foxes or wild dogs, and that the savagery had lasted for several years...'it was hoped that the animal would eventually die of old age, but last year brought new reports of mysterious killings 50 perhaps the original animal has found a mate!' To this message Benjamin added his own: 'Sorry I couldn't get a snap of the Beast. Saw some great stags today. See you next week. Cheers, Ben.'

STEPPING WESTWARD.

David and Patsy Palmer, Rosemary and Nathan Herz were not pleased with the report of the D'Angers. Not only were they not pleased: they were suspicious. It had been unwise of them to encourage the D'Angers to go to Ashcombe. The D'Angers had st.i.tched up some deal there. They had fixed Frieda's will, and put their markers on her treasures. David D'Anger had played his black card, out in white Somerset, and trumped their red. Perverse Frieda, mad Frieda, foolish Frieda. And they themselves had not been wise. They should have taken the warning of Timon's feast more seriously. She had showed her weakness then, in those green peas, in that sweet sugar talk. David D'Anger had seduced Frieda, as he had seduced their sister Gogo. Frieda would leave all to that brown boy, that changeling child.

This is not how the Palmers and the Herzes spokenot at all, not at allbut I am sorry to say that it is what they thought.

They have little excuse for what you may take to be their greed and selfishness. You have already seen that they live in affluence. We have visited the Palmers' house, and so pleasant is it there that we may be unable to resist going to see them at least once more. The Palmers live comfortably, eat well, and are surrounded by a cast of extras who effortlessly reinforce the Palmers' sense of superiority. You might think they had no need to lay claim to Daniel's mother's riches. But you have not reckoned with two important considerations. The first of these is family jealousy, that long-ago, ancient, fairytale hatred which means that a brother does not like his sisters to gain at his expenseparticularly when those sisters are not themselves in need. The second is the more immediate legacy of the last twenty years. Greed and selfishness have become respectable. Like family jealousy, they are not new, but they have gained a new sanction. It is now considered correct to covet. And Daniel is covetous. I am sorry to have to say this about a man who seems so generous, so agreeable, so drily distanced from all things ugly, a man so free with his tennis court and his wife's cooking. But it is so. He is covetous, and he is mean. And he practises a profession, let us remember, in which base motives are more frequently encountered than fine motives.

Nor should you take Patsy Palmer at face value. She seems a very nice woman, but has she bothered to remember to invite Sonia Barfoot to tea? (Do you remember Sonia Barfoot, that bleached manic-depressive visionary full of lithium?) No, she has not. Has she taken any steps to find any more permanent niche for Will Paine? No, she has not. She has got bored with him, and quietly evicted him. This was perhaps unwise of her. Has she noticed that her son Simon is s.p.a.ced out and half mad? No, she has not. Patsy is a Mrs Jellyby, she likes problems that are not her own, and when they come too near home she rejects and denies them. That's a bit harsh, but why not be harsh? And she too condemns the D'Angers. Daniel and Patsy Palmer collude in condemnation. Daniel thinks David is deliberately ripping them off; Patsy suspects Gogo is deliberately ripping them off. That's how it goes.

Patsy has had her eye on her share of Frieda's money. She would not admit it but would not deny it. Her own mother is still alive, and is costing much in up-keep. She is in a flat, converted for the disabled. She has round-the-clock nursing. The family home was sold to pay for this, but Patsy's mother costs nearly 500 a week. Patsy has three brothers. Patsy's quarter diminishes week by week. Frieda's money would come in handy. And there must be money: The Matriarchy of War is still in print, after forty years. It's a set text. Other tides also survive. Patsy does not welcome the thought that the income of these Works might be diverted to Benjamin D'Anger. What about Simon, what about Emily? What if Daniel drops dead of a heart attack? These are the thoughts of Patsy Palmer.

Let us move on to Rosemary and Nathan Herz. We have not yet seen them on their home ground, so let us join them in their ultramodern flat on the South Bank, overlooking the Thames. It is on the sixth floor of Ceylon Quay, off Rochester Square, near Southwark Bridge. It is late October, and Rosemary and Nathan are watching television in their vast split-level lounge. Jessica and Jonathan are asleep in their modern bedrooms. It has already been noted that Frieda's children are not homemakers. They were not brought up in a tradition of homemaking. Daniel owes his considerable comforts to capable superwoman Patsy, and to a counterfeit, college-acquired, Middle-Temple-reinforced and slightly ironic vision of himself as country squire, a vision as compulsive as it is archaic. Gogo and David live in a colourful but not uncongenial turmoil, a turmoil reflected in many a middle-cla.s.s professional British household up and down the land: their chosen careers do not demand (and indeed, in David's case, almost counter-suggest) any excessive investment in bourgeois decor, and Gogo leaves her clinical instincts in the clinic. So they live in a mess. It is different for Rosemary and Nathan. They inhabit a designer world.

Their flat, purchased at an inflated price in the late eighties, is a fine example of negative equity, pretension, technology and gadgetry. Its walls display inestimable art works, its drapes swish at the touch of a b.u.t.ton, its sanitary ware is of the first water. The settee upon which they now recline cost a mere 4,000, and can adjust to many angles: the gla.s.s-topped table on which Rosemary rests her shining l.u.s.tre-smooth crossed calves is customer built. The very coffee-cups are bespoke, from a visiting j.a.panese ceramic artist for whom Rosemary had once found a s.p.a.ce. The wall lights are almost the very latest in uplighting, oblique lighting, dimmer lighting and slow fades. The television-set itself bears witness to the approaching millennium, for it is un.o.btrusively tuned in to every channel in and under the sky. Six tall sunflowers stand on the floor in a white pot, and from diagonally opposite corners of the room blink two small red angry ever-watchful eyes. If the beige curtains were open (which they are not) you would be able to see a magnificent view of the floodlit, neon-lit Thames. You might think, from looking at this room, that either Rosemary or Nathan had a p.r.o.nounced and confident liking for the modern, but you would be wrong. It is because neither of them has any certainty of taste at all that they live like this. This apartment makes all their decisions for them.

You might think that Rosemary, working, as you have been told, in Arts Administration, might find herself misplaced in her career, if it is true that she has no taste. Wrong again. That's why she's quite good at it. (But not so good at it that she doesn't feel the snapping at her heels from time to time.) They look quite cosy together, Nathan puffing away at his cigarette, and nursing a substantial post-prandial brandy, while Rosemary (and this is a bit of a surprise) works at a shapeless piece of crochet. They are watching a programme on one of the innumerable competing current-affairs cross-examinations that besiege and enrage the nation nightly. They are watching it because there, d.a.m.nit, is their blasted brother-in-law, the sinisterly photogenic filmstar of race relations, David D'Anger. Nathan, as we have seen, likes David, but he is as suspicious of him as his wife admits herself to be. Rosemary is suspicious because she thinks David is probably a self-seeking b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Nathan is suspicious for the opposite reason. He suspects that David D'Anger may, after all, be a good man. After all, somebody's got to be. He may be as high-minded as he seems to be. How can one tell? He looks and sounds so plausible. Would even G.o.d know, if there were a G.o.d? Probably not. What will it take to catch David D'Anger out for being what he is?

On screen, the talk is of income distribution and the concept of relative poverty. D'Anger is good on this topic, they have to admit, and the others make such blisteringly idiotic remarks ('I prefer not to talk about inequality but about income difference'that one must be a cla.s.sic) that they make David sound like the soul of sweet reason. And David's statistics are beautiful. Elegantly, he bowls his fast outswingers; he is the Imran Khan of politics, the well-dressed aristocrat of the sophisticated political game. David plays the Rowntree Report, the United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights, the latest findings from the Child Poverty Action Group, and an incident he'd observed on the tube on the Northern Line between Chalk Farm and Camden Town. (David, one has to admit, has a brilliant line in gra.s.sroots and pavement anecdotes, all of which perforce go unchallenged and unrivalled by his opponents, for none of them, as David manages to insinuate, has ever travelled by public transport. David works the tubes and buses himself partly in the way of research, but they're not to know that.) On this occasion, one of David's adversaries is Milo Barking, a notorious little drunken pundit-whippersnapper, whose hard right-wing line is that all compa.s.sion is fake, and not only fake, but debilitating, corrupting, deceitful and dishonest. 'Let's admit it,' says this white-faced rat, 'we're all a lot better off than we were in 1979, and we know it, all this talk about poverty is just a new version of Golden Age nostalgia for the Bad Old Days because all you poverty lobbyists see yourselves out of a job in a few months' time'

'Oh, come on, Midas,' says David, smoothly intervening in an infuriatingly conciliatory and forgiving tone, 'we can't all be as clever and lucky as you, I mean we can't all strike it lucky with every takeover bid, we haven't got your nose for it, you've got to spare a thought for us poor sods who have to earn our livings, and those of us who can't get a job for love or money, and those of us who've got nothing better to do than spend forty-eight hours a week watching prigs like us on TV, rea.s.suring us by telling us how rich we really are. We can't all be winners, you know, some of us have to be the mugs.'

Young Barking looks furious, with real not fake fury, for it is known to some viewers at home and to all in the studio (except that harmless female priest) that his last business venture had hit the skids and was about to be declared bankrupt, and that that was why he was on this TV show, trying to pick up seventy-five quid with expenses and a bit of face. The chairman and producer hover indecisively, wondering whether to encourage Milo Barking to reply and D'Anger to pursue, but decide against it: there was libel in the air, and anyway they feel sorry for Barking, who is bound to make a brilliant comeback. Anyone could go bust, it wasn't his fault he'd been taken for a ride by the big boys. They cut to the female priest.

At home, in the belly of their waterside white elephant, Rosemary and Nathan exchange glances. They know the inside story of Barking's financial disaster, but wonder how the h.e.l.l David D'Anger got to know these things. He'd come a long way since the innocent days when he was teaching Politics and Philosophy. Sinister, really.

'I suppose,' says Rosemary, winding up her ball of scarlet wool and piercing it with her crochet hook, 'I suppose he has a whole team of researchers, sniffing out the dirt for him. Is that how it works?'

'Don't ask me,' says Nathan. 'I didn't think he could afford that kind of back-up.'

'Doesn't it all come with the job?'

'He hasn't got the job yet.'

'Oh, come off it, he's got lots of jobs.'

'I don't know anything about it,' says Nathan, who has in fact heard a rumour that David D'Anger has been seen once too often lunching with a neoGothic miniskirted redlipped Fleet Street floozie; he hopes to prevent himself from pa.s.sing this poisoned nugget of gossip on to his wife, as it is quite likely to be untrue, and even if it were true, why upset or, more likely, gratify Rosemary? Nathan feels a solidarity with David. Gogo Palmer D'Anger is frigid, marmoreal and self-righteous. He rather hopes David is having a fling. He himself has had a few, as David knows: nothing too serious, nothing marriage-threatening, but pleasant in their way. He has had his secrets. One he keeps.

'I'm off to bed,' says Rosemary. She reminds him that she has to catch an early flight to Glasgow. She hovers, her hand on a lights witch.

'OK, OK,' says Nathan. It never ceases to annoy him, the way she will announce the obvious, the way she seems to expect him to follow her to bed. What does she suspect? He's grown up now, he can sit and watch TV all by himself if he wants. He sits out the current affairs for a few moments more after her departure, switches off as the conversation turns to drugs in athletics (Nathan, like much of the nation, is by now in favour of a Drugs Olympics, and to h.e.l.l with fair play), and then opens the curtains, heaves himself to his feet, opens a slice of window, and steps out on to the split-level balcony. This is his view. He has seen smarter viewsnew ones, downstream, from some of the more recent developments, and old ones, upstream, along the Upper Mall. But this is his. He likes it. It is Southwark, it is real. The Thames is very low tonight, and a dank smell of wharfmud rises to his sensitive nostrils. He sniffs, inhales.

There is London, to right and left of him, glittering with religion, art and commerce. From this distance, in this obscurity, London looks fine. d.i.c.kens would think things had come on a long way since the days of the bodys.n.a.t.c.hers and the river rats and the suicides. The skull-dome of St Paul's still looms across the water, bleached and fluted white-blue in its floodlight, and to either side of it Nathan can see towers and spires. Over there, somewhere, though he cannot see her, stands Justice with her sword and scales. And over here, on what he thinks of as his bank, there is developmenta reconstructed Elizabethan theatre with a gra.s.s roof, converted warehouses, shopping malls, office towers, museums, clinks and tourist pubs where once Ben Jonson and Will Shakespeare drank. Maybe it is all fine, maybe Rat Barking is right to hymn the rising tide of prosperity. Maybe Rat Barking is right to point out that the Poverty Lobby is always with us, and that it is self-serving and self-perpetuating. Those same old caring faces do pop up again and again, as they rotate from Campaign to Campaign, from Charity to Charity, begging from and bleating at the hard-working wealth-creating rich. Nathan's never had all that much time for the Poverty Lobby, although he has been known to chuck a fist full of fivers (fluttering, pale blue and pink silver-threaded fivers) at the beggars beneath the bridge. (One of the beggars once had the cheek to hold a fiver up to the light, to see if it was real. Maybe it's true that beggars are getting aggressive, dangerous?) Most evenings, when he is at home and can get rid of Rosemary, Nathan comes to look at this view. He cannot leave this place. He would like to, but he is bound to it. The water is low tonight, it slaps at the wooden piles and fenders.

Nathan is convinced he will die shortly of a heart attack. Most of the time he considers this to be more or less inevitable. His father had died at the age of fifty-four, and so will he. Nathan has insured and a.s.sured and double-indemnified his life, so that's all right. Everyone will be fine except himself, and as he'll be dead, he'll be all right too. Or so he tells himself.

Nathan's mother can't think why he and Rosemary and the children want to live South of the River, in an area with an E in its postcode. Your grandparents, she tells Nathan, worked day and night to move west. To her, Nathan's expensively converted apartment with its river view still stinks of poverty and the old East End. Nathan's mother hasn't moved with the times. She won't even eat food with an E in it. She is shocked to hear that Nathan and Rosemary eat out most evenings and, as often as not, apart. When do the children get a proper meal? Do they live on snacks and microwave dinners?

Nathan cannot leave the river. Occasionally Rosemary suggests that they move, for she is not so fond of the area, some of which remains dismally undeveloped. She says she does not like to get out of her car at night, even in the underground car park. She says she does not like the dark menace of the streetsthe hints of portcullis, guillotine, noose, spike and chain that Unger on like instruments of torture in the ancient architecture. She does not like the embattled river, with its heavy dredgers, its rusting buoys. But Nathan stonewalls. It is convenient, and they cannot afford to move, he says. They must wait for the rest of the neighbourhood to improve, for the market to shift, he says. But his real reason is other.

Nathan cannot leave because he holds a ghostly tryst with this stretch of the Thames. Here, in the dark water, not far from where he now stands, young Belle was drowned.

Belle was drowned when the pleasure boat, The Marchioness, went down, sunk by The Bowbelle. Belle had been partying. And now she is dead. Fifty-two drowned. Belle was the last of the list.

Belle was twenty-six when she died. Nathan had adored her. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. This was ridiculous, as by advertising standards, she was nothing special. And yet, he repeats to himself like a mantra, she was the most beautiful girl I ever saw.

She had worked for the firm, and her work had been lowly. But all had adored her. Her laughter had rung out, down corridors, over telephones, in the lift, through the walkways of the open plan. Her face was as open and as glorious as the sky itself. She was radiant. Her wide brow, her brown eyes, her chestnut hair, her cream-pale skin. Her skin, so supple, so innocent, so untouched. She had broad shoulders, full soft b.r.e.a.s.t.s, white hands, careless clothes. She was a radiant, art student mess. Cheap bangles, crumpled shirts hanging out over her trousers, not-so-little laced boots (she had big feet). She wore rings on her fingers, and punning bells in her ears, which jingled when she shook her head. Dull men smiled when they saw Belle, and unhappy women unfolded their secrets to her. Belle was fearless, and she rejoiced them with her escapades. She could walk safely through the city night. She charmed the lonely from the edge of tenth-floor sills, she led the wicked to safety, she disarmed the mugger and bought drinks for the homeless and the mad. She knew the pubs, the manors, the estates.

Nathan had propositioned her, one evening, as they descended late in the thick-carpeted static-thrilled office lift. He'd offered dinner, he'd thrown himself upon her mercy. And when she had taken in what he was offering, she had laughed and laughed. Then she had shared the joke. 'But hey, Nathan, didn't you know?' she had said, laying her lovely white hand, with its slightly bitten nails, upon his. 'Didn't you know? I live with Marcia. I never ever go out with men. I couldn't go out with a man.'

As she took in his expression of surprise, which he had been unable to disguise quickly enough, she threw an arm around him and violently patted his back. 'Oh, I'm so sorry, Nathan, you didn't know, I thought everybody knew,' she had cried. And of course, the moment he knew, he knew. She was, as he in that instant saw, of the essence of camp. That was how she made her way through life so gaily. That laughter, that tireless patience with all comers, that indiscriminate good nature. To her, all the world was one glorious joke, and although at this moment the joke was on him, he was invited to share it. So he took her out to dinner anyway, and over a platter of smoked fishes and brown bread and b.u.t.ter they continued to rejoice. They consummated their affair with a wicked froth of egg and cream and sugar and Grand Marnier, and then they kissed and parted and Belle whisked home to share the joke with Marcia. Nathan thenceforth adored Belle. She was his mistress, his daughter, his friend, his salvation: she was the bride of all the world. His heart sang whenever he saw her, whenever he heard her lovely, unlikely, beautiful name.

And then, one night, outside his window, Belle and fifty-one others had drowned, while out on a pleasure trip. The whole office went into mourning for Belle. It was not possible that she was dead. As easily might one extinguish the sun itself. Stunned with disbelief, her friends and colleagues exchanged bewildered words, clubbed together for a wreath, attended her funeral. There was an inquest, then another inquest. It emerged that Belle's hand, at the command of the coroner, had been severed after death, for purposes of finger-print identification. When Nathan heard this he thought he would die. Belle's hand, with its little wrist, its bitten nails, its cheap and innocent and silly rings. Belle's hand on a block.

Surgically removed, the coroner said. Severed, he meant.

Now, whenever he gazes at the dark water and thinks of Belle's hand, his eyes fill with tears. And thus he knows he is still human. She has left him this enormous, this generous gift. He sometimes feels himself to be a mean small man in a mean small world, indifferently married, indifferently unfaithful to his wife, and intermittently bored by his work. He has made bad choices and sh.o.r.ed them up with worse. But he can weep for Belle. The tears which her name and her white hand induce are most precious to him.

The dark water beneath him stands still. It is on the turn. The river has drained to the marshes, and soon the sea will flood back, silently. The salt will surge back, pulled by the moon, to merge with the fresh river waters of the land, there, beneath his window, where Belle died. It is a twice-daily miracle. 'Belle,' he murmurs. The waters tremble as they meet. How can she be dead? Is her death too some profound and beautiful joke? As inexplicable, as lovely, as her short and blessed life?

Will Paine stands by the roadside on the M5, at the Gordano Service Station Exit, his worldly possessions in a canvas bag. He is thumbing his way westwards. Since Patsy Palmer kicked him out, he has not fared well. Now he looks back to the summer he spent with her at the Old Farm as to a Golden Age. Had she really fed him, and given him pocket money, and given him a bed in the attic? He cannot understand why she had ever been so gracious to him, and repents that he has at times thought ill of her. He regrets too that he never warned her about Simon, who is going crazy. Either Simon is out of his mind with the wrong kind of drugsWill Paine is an expert on good and bad drugs, and is wary of the differenceor he has a mental illness. Or both. Simon will end up feeding himself to the lions in the zoo, or murdering a stranger in a tiled underpa.s.s. Simon has the city sickness. Will has seen its symptoms many times. Pallor, fever, anger, palsy, fear. The glancing over the shoulder, the demanding with menaces. Will should have warned Patsy, who has been good to him, but he had felt it was not his place. He had not dared. Once he had tried, but Patsy had not been willing. So he is walking away from the problem, from the memory. He is heading for the west, away from the city.

He's had an easy ride so far. One golden Beetle, driven far too fast by a crazy bald young man and his girlfriend, had brought him all the way from Chiswick. They'd been a laugh. They'd laughed all the way, and shared their cheese and chutney sandwiches. The young man was off to see his mum at Portishead. His mum lived in a maisonette on an estate. Life was dull in Portishead, but they'd be able to stick it for a couple of nights. His mum's cooking was diabolical. He'd warned Sal. The curse of the microwave. Plastic bags in the box. You wouldn't think you could get it as wrong as she did. You'd think it was foolproof, wouldn't you? Oh, come on, said Sal. You wait, said the young man.

Will Paine envies them. They know where they are going. He told them he was going to see a friend in Cornwall. But he hadn't got a friend in Cornwall. He has only a shadow of a plan. The days are getting shorter and colder. It is autumn. The summer is well over. He'd heard there were easy beds in Totnes. He'll try Totnes. Perhaps.

He stands on the slipway, facing the west. A steady stream of cars and lorries pa.s.ses him. It is early afternoon, and there are a few hours more of daylight. He thumbs mechanically, half-heartedly, in a semitrance, as he thinks of his months inside, of his months with Patsy. He is determined never to see the inside of a gaol again. It had turned his delicate stomach. He thinks of the bit of luck that was Patsy. She had come his way by chance. What had that meant? He thinks of David D'Anger, and all the talk he had overheard. Sometimes, in a dream, he has thought of appealing to David D'Anger: they were both, after all, Caribbean. At some remove, but Caribbean. He has seen David D'Anger on television, he has read him in the papers. He even knows Middleton, which is only fifty miles from his own home town. He had worked there for a couple of months one summer, packaging Cheese and Onion Pasta Twirls, and sleeping in an official council squat with a group of students from Sheffield University. He could almost consider himself one of David D'Anger's const.i.tuents. Would it be an abuse of hospitality, to approach David D'Anger? D'Anger must get spongers all the time.

Will Paine thinks of the just society, which has placed him by this roadside, and sent Sal and Steve off to a cosy council estate supper of cling-film-impregnated sliced brown beef with cold gravy; which has driven Simon Palmer into some needled nightmare; which has placed Benjamin D'Anger in a well-run North London comprehensive, the closely supervised darling of both his doting parents; which has set his mother to work on a machine that seals the plastic coating of babies' mattresses, and deprived 8 per cent of its members of any employment at all; which has decreed that some should be non-executive directors of companies on vast salaries, while others should teach small infants or drive long-distance lorries or wipe the tables in the service stations of the land. It is all a mystery. He thinks of poor Prince Charles, a victim if ever there was one, hangdog, depressed, brooding, gloomy, derided, fallen from grace. Will feels very sorry for Prince Charles, who has drawn one of the shortest straws of all. Being a royal has probably always been a b.u.m deal, but these days it's dire. He thinks of Frieda Haxby, of whom he has heard so much gossip, alone in her castle in the west, alone with all her empty bedrooms.

He stands there dreaming, his thumb idly extended, as the sun sinks slowly before him. He manages to feel quite lucky. And lucky he is, for as he lowers his hand to reach into his pocket for a peppermint, he hears a voice calling. A small white van has pulled over, and its driver is leaning out of its open window shouting at him. 'Hey, you there, d'you want a lift or not?'

Will jumps to, jumps in. His chauffeur is a middle-aged weatherbeaten sixties survivor with long thin straggling hair. He says he is a heating engineer, and he talks relentlessly. Will is a captive audience. Hitch-hikers cannot be choosers. The heating engineer talks about the weather, about the refurbishment of the service station, about VAT, about the government. Will sits quiet and says nothing. It soon becomes clear that his new friend considers himself to be some kind of anarchist, and that he hopes Will will sell him some gra.s.s. Will is depressed to find that he can be suspected as a potential dealer or carrier even as he stands on a slip-road in the middle of the countryside: no wonder he had found himself doing three months inside merely for carrying a stash for a friend from one pub to another. Does he really look like a pusher? Obviously he doesn't look innocent, or this nutter in his noisy little cart wouldn't have stopped for him. Would the nutter have stopped for David D'Anger? But David D'Anger wouldn't have found himself hitching along the M5, would he? David D'Anger's got a nice metallic silver-blue Honda, and his wife's probably got another.

In time, unprompted by Will, the conversation drifts from the Somerset police and the Home Secretary to Glas...o...b..ry and New Age travellers. Trevor has all the obsequiousness of a bore who wishes to captivate and placate his listener for ever, but Will, who has managed to indicate that he has no dope upon him, is not forthcoming with views on King Arthur and the Criminal Justice Act. He gets himself dropped off at a service station just beyond Taunton. Thence he gets a quick lift to Tiverton, where he spends the night in a room over a pub, and, in the morning, takes stock.

Tiverton is a dump. Will Paine is surprised. He had thought it would be a pretty, West Country market town, full of smiling county people and expensive shops, but it is hilly and grim. Most of the shops seem to be selling second-rate second-hand clothing in aid of obscure charities. The population looks grey and elderly and idle. Will walks along a pedestrianized High Street, through a car park or two, round a market precinct where nothing is happening at all. There is nothing for him here. Where are all the wealthy folk of the soft rich south? Clearly they do not hang out in Tiverton. Will decides to move on. He will hitch north, up over Exmoor, to Frieda Haxby. He will offer his services to Frieda, as gardener, handyman, cleaner, fortune-teller. He can read the Tarot, though he doesn't let on to everyone. Frieda might find a s.p.a.ce for him, for a while.

He has a composite image of Frieda, a.s.sembled from evenings of eavesdropping, from studying the dustjacket of the ill-starred Queen Christina, from family photographs stuck in a collage on the wall of the downstairs cloakroom at the Old Farm. She is rich and famous and eccentric. She might take a fancy to him, who knows? She might disinherit that pampered little D'Anger boy in his favour. Her castle might be stuffed with rich jewels. She had been wearing jewels in some of the family picsemeralds, pearls, diamonds. Maybe she will bestow them upon him. With such fantasies he entertains himself, as he works his way across the moor.

His last hitch is with a load of doomed cattle on its way to an abattoir. The driver, a taciturn and kindly man, is reluctant to deposit Will Paine by the roadside so far from human habitation, but Will, who has studied the maps, knows that this is the right spot to dismount. He has been evasive about his destination, muttering something about joining some friends with a caravan. The driver wishes him good day. The cramped cattle low. Will Paine sets off along the high coast road, looking for his turning.

And there it is, a sign to Ashcombe. The track plunges down from the road, steeply, past high banks of leathery sprawling rhododendrons. Will shoulders his bag, and starts the long descent. It is late afternoon. The sun sinks to the west.

Frieda Haxby is playing patience at a large dining-table which she has lugged to the garden end of what had been the dining-room. The room has long, mullioned windows, and now the bleeding sun pours through their lights on to her cards, her gla.s.s of whisky, covered with a postcard against the wasps and flies, her guttering cigarette, and her expanse of papers. From time to time she breaks off from her game to make a note, to turn a page.

Will Paine can see her clearly, through the windows. She is on view. He is concealed in the shrubbery. He has lost his nerve.

The descent had been much longer than he had expected, and he doubts if he'll ever have the strength to climb back up again. It's almost vertical. And he'd been unnerved, on the way down, by nature. There had been squawkings and rustlings in the woods. Distant dogs had barked. He had heard a strange beast's roaring, far away. He had pa.s.sed a stone hut with a padlocked door and conical towers from which a dull thrumming noise seemed to emanate. He had gone under a gateway, surmounted by a heraldic lion and two griffins, almost overgrown with ivy. He had been through a gate marked PRIVATE. He had seen the sign of the vipers. He had heard the melancholy rattle of waves on shingle far below, and the secret voices of contending brooks in the undergrowth. He had flanked the empty walled kitchen gardens.

He had crept down to the large house, quietly. It was much bigger and grander than anything he had imagined. Rosemary Here had been dismissive about it, had made it sound like an old ruin, but it was imposing. It had turrets and battlements and a belfry and a rambling roof system which he had viewed like a bird from the path above. So steep was the drop from the path that he felt he could have jumped on to the roof with one bound. The gardens had once been formal, and the map of their former glory was still plainly visible.

Will Paine is frightened. This place is too much for him. It is spooky. He wishes he hadn't come. How on earth is he going to introduce himself to this mad old woman? She won't be very pleased to see him, now or ever. On the other hand, it will take him a good hour and a half to get back up to the road, and n.o.body will pick him up at this time of night. He squats back on his haunches in the leafmould, and thinks hard.

Frieda sighs over her patience. It is her fourth deal this evening, and this time it looks as though it's going to come out. For some reason this makes her feel she has been cheating, although she doesn't think she has. Maybe she hadn't shuffled properly?

She has made yet another attempt at her memoirs. Maybe it is another false start. She does not, these days, find writing a pleasant process. She has never enjoyed it much, and looks back now at the facility with which she produced her early work with admiration and disbelief. How had she done such things, burdened as she was with children, husband, sister, mother, and a viper's knot of hatreds? And not only hatreds. There had been other pa.s.sions, hard now to credit. Ambition must have been one of them, or she would not have been able to lift herself out of the rutted mud. The ambition was her mother's, inherited, transferred, a deadly legacy. Had anything been her own? Had even her husband been her own, or had he too been a legacy?

By writing it down, she hoped to make sense of it, but perhaps there would be no sense. She could not hope to forgive, or to recapture. Love turns to hate by the inexorable law of entropy, but never, thinks Frieda Haxby, can hate ever by the most monstrous effort of the memory or the will be turned back into love. As this landscape, these woods, this body, this country will never be young again, so will hatred never dissolve and be remade as love.

Impossible, to look back and make sense of love, that destructive, inconstant pa.s.sion, that seems at times so good. But it is not good, whatever the priests and poets say, it is neutral at best, and at worst a killer. s.e.xual pa.s.sion dies, that is well known, but so do all other affections. Frieda Haxby tells herself that she does not care for her children, or her grandchildren; she has outgrown them, as years ago she grew out of her love for her mother and her sister. (She cares a little for Benjamin D'Anger, she reminds herself, but only by way of experiment.) They are grown, they may manage without her. They are no longer part of her. She did her best for them, but her best was not very good.

She came to dread her mother, and to hate her sister. She came to hate her husband, but that, she believes, is a common story.

She thinks of the laws of living and the laws of dying, of that severed blob of orange flesh from the sea that had clung to hers. So tenacious, so unformed. And here she is, so complex, and so tired. She has lost that simple will to grip. She turns the cards.

The personal decays from us, leaving us with no memory of it, although we know that it has been. But it was at its strongest nothing more than an evolutionary trick, a spasm of self gripping to a wet rock. We were born without meaning, we struggled without meaning, we met and married and loved and hated without meaning. We are accidents. All our pa.s.sions are arbitrary, trivial, a game of hazard, like this game of patience which I now play.

Napoleon on Saint Helena. Turner painted him on his last beach, against a red sunset, in exile, staring at an ill-placed, an improbable and outsized rock limpet. He called his piece The Exile and the War. So stand I, looking back.

Here comes the knave of clubs, Le Vicomte le Notre, stout and bewigged; Frieda lays him upon the lap of Marie-Leczinska, Queen of Hearts. This is too easy.

(Out there in the shrubbery lurks the Knave of Wolverhampton, working out his approach. This is a complicated building, facing several ways. He does not wish to startle Frieda Haxby by creeping up on her from the rear. But from which direction would she expect a visitor? She cannot receive many. Though her grey Volvo is in better working order than he had expected. It is newly washed and waxed. She is not a prisoner here.) Frieda turns a few more cards, then suddenly sweeps them all in, stacks them, shuffles them, and begins to deal again. She pulls towards her a page of text labelled DOC:MEM8 and stares at it as she deals. It reads: 'I first met Andrew Palmer outside the Rising Sun at Bletchley Park in 1945. It was just before the end of the war. I was still at school. He was in uniform. So was I. He had been sent to meet me by my sister Hilda.'