influence us, or do us any harm.”
“That’s the theory,” Robin said.
“It works, doesn’t it? I don’t see you shooting up, or selling your body.”
“True,” Robin said guardedly. “But Kit, isn’t it time you got away? Once I go off to medical school you won’t catch me hanging around here in summer. Not if summers are like this one. All this snapping and snarling, and creeping about.”
“Yes.” Kit turned away. She had been thinking a lot, since her midnight conversation with Robin, and she was uncomfortable with her thoughts. She didn’t want to risk having them exposed. “Anyway,” she said, changing the subject. “Anyway. The Visitors will have gone soon. All except this Melanie.”
“Oh yes, Melanie—when does she get here?”
“Tomorrow, I think.”
“Kit,” Ralph said, as the family sat down to eat, “do you have any nail polish remover?”
“Why, Dad, do you want to do yourself a revarnish?”
“Christ,” Robin said. “Dad’s a transvestite. He’s got a secret life.”
“Don’t worry,” Kit said. “There’s probably a self-help group we can join.”
“Yes,” Robin said. “Ask Dad. He’ll know.”
“For goodness sake,” Anna said. “Listen to your father and stop being so slick.”
“Ah,” Kit said. “Mum doesn’t like the thought that he’s got a secret life.”
“My problem is this,” Ralph said. “Melanie. She might inhale it.”
“Dad, look.” Kit held up her hands, “I am a stranger to the manicurist’s art.”
“Oh, good,” her father said.
“Not very observant, are you?” Robin put his chin on his hand and watched his father.
“I’m not,” Ralph said. “It’s a fault of mine.”
“People are just problems to you,” Kit said. “Problems on two legs. That’s why you don’t notice things.”
“Well, I—you may be right, but in my line of work—if you think about it—I don’t meet people without problems.”
“That’s not my point,” Kit said. “My point is that you don’t see—what’s her name, Melanie—you see ’persistent absconder, multiple addictions’—whatever the jargon is at the time.”
“Do I? Well, I yield to you in charity, you are my superior. The problem is that the nature of what I do is so contentious, so risky— wading into children’s lives and trying to put them right—that I’m always glad if I can identify a pattern of behavior. And there are such patterns, you see.”
“Everyone is unique,” Kit said. “Surely.”
“I used to think so. But then I see how they—my clients— behave or react in the same way as others who have gone before— or, let’s say, they have a small range of possible reactions.”
“Don’t they have free will?”
Ralph looked at his daughter appraisingly, as if to judge her seriousness. “I used to think that was the single question,” he said. “I used to think, of course they have free will. But then after a few years I saw these patterns repeat themselves, as if people were born into them. I read case files all the time, and sometimes, quite often really, I get one client’s story mixed up with another. People use certain drugs, perhaps, or drink, or whatever—they are as they are, and that is much as their parents were—they beat their children or neglect them, they go into prison and come out and go in again, and you feel that you could write the next page in the file, you know what their future is going to be, and their children’s future too. Nine times out of ten you’d be right. It depresses me, how seldom people do the unexpected. They start off down a path and they stick to it.”
“In my opinion,” Robin said, “stupidity has a lot to do with it. I know people can’t help being thick, but if they’re so thick that they can’t control their lives properly I don’t see how it matters if they have free will or not. That’s just theory. In practice they don’t have choices.”
Rebecca kicked her brother’s shin, under the table. “I asked you half an hour ago to pass the sweetcorn.”
“Shut up, Becky,” Kit said. “But Robin, you can be quite bright and not have choices. Take love, for instance.”
Anna sat back in her chair, putting her fork down. “Take love?” she said.
“Sorry,” Kit said, “I know I’m contradicting what I said earlier, but I do see your point, Dad. Love, you know, it’s a chemical thing. When people say they’re in love it’s just a set of physical reactions, there are all these substances whizzing around your brain, and hormones making you obsessed—”
“Very scientific,” Robin said.
“—and that’s why although everybody thinks that nobody in the world has ever felt like they do, they all listen to these schmaltzy songs and write poems and feel at one with the universe. They’re all going through the same process. We’re programmed for it.”
“You may be right,” Ralph said. “Are you in love, Kit?”
“No. I’m sure that if I were, I wouldn’t talk about it with such a lack of respect.”
“You’d be like everyone else,” Robin said. “You’d think you were unique.”
Kit made coffee. As if on cue, Daniel came to the front door. “How are you, young man?” Ralph said. He liked Daniel, he had decided, because he seemed to have evolved; in the present casual optimist, in his new stiff tweeds,
