Isabel’s voice, like her features, was colourless and remote. Her reproaches carried no weight. “I could have ‘Abide With Me,’” her father said. “Like the Cup Final. ‘Where is death’s sting, Where, grave, thy victoree?’ I’m thinking,” he added, “of changing my will.”
“Oh yes?” It had the effect of making his daughter look at him, though still without much interest. “And who are you planning to leave it to? You’ve only got me. You were never fond of dogs and cats, so I don’t suppose you were thinking of the RSPCA.”
“Ah, that’s an assumption you make, that there’s only you. There were more women than your mother in my life.”
He smirked.
“Yes,” Isabel said, “but I don’t want to hear about that.” She smiled tightly. “Put it behind us, shall we?”
“Funny you should say that.”
“I don’t see what’s funny.”
“You never know when people are going to come back into your life.”
She stood up. “Will you stop?” Her face flushed, and she clasped her hands together, almost as if she were afraid she might hit him. “I told you, I’m not interested, I don’t want to hear.”
Mr. Field looked pleased now. He’d wanted reaction, and he’d got it. “Keep your hair on,” he said. “They can hear you down the corridor.”
“I didn’t come here to listen to you rehashing your sordid past. Haven’t you got beyond that?”
“Don’t you remember, Isabel, when you used to lock me in and hide my glasses?”
“You got out all the same.”
“You bet I did.”
“It makes me ashamed.”
“So it ought. Putting upon a lonely old man. Cruel.”
“It makes me ashamed to belong to you.”
“I’d like to think I have other children somewhere. Ones that aren’t so particular.”
“If you have, where are they?”
“I told you not to shout.”
The door opened and a student nurse stuck her head around it, topped by her pert paper cap.
“Everything okay, Mrs. Ryan?”
Isabel turned to face her, shakily. “Why is he in a side ward?” she demanded. “Wouldn’t he be better on the main ward, where he’d have the company of the other patients?”
The little nurse averted her eyes, and looked cross. “Perhaps you’d care to take that up with Sister, Mrs. Ryan.”
“Well,” Florence Sidney said. She repeated it, shaking her head. Her brother took her arm and guided her across the car park. Sylvia trotted ahead of them; she was more resilient than they. Colin’s expression was gloomy. Only a week ago, he had been a comparatively happy man. The holidays were approaching; if they did not promise a rest, there would at least be a break in routine. He was looking forward to some long early morning runs, and perhaps a game of squash at lunchtime, and then to having the house to himself in the afternoons while Sylvia was out and about on her various missions; to having his time free for some brooding, for some quiet introspection. This is really what I am, he thought: a quiet man in pursuit of a coronary.
But now everything was upset. He couldn’t care for this reanimation in his mother. It could only be a complicating factor, the necessity to pander to the royal whim. And Suzanne: the decision was hers, but the consequences would come home to the family. Of course the man would not marry her, and she would have to live at Buckingham Avenue with the baby. He could not leave her to cope by herself in some bedsitting room or some damp 1950s walk-up that the council might let her have. There would be a further strain on the household budget; though he was a professional man, securely employed and more affluent than most, the Sidneys lived in that particularly common and edgy sort of poverty where daily life is comfortable only if nothing is set aside for contingencies. Besides, he could not imagine Sylvia with a grandchild in the house. She was energetic enough to cope with a small child while Suzanne went off to finish her course, but if she smelled of nappies and baby cream she would lose the admiration of the vicar, and then she would vent her spite on him. It was all a terrible mess.
But worse than all this was the conviction, running all afternoon at the back of his mind, that Isabel Field was about to re-enter his life. It was hardly reasonable to suppose that his Isabel was the one Suzanne spoke of, or was it? He did not feel very sure what was reasonable. Blind chance, he knew, could catch you a painful blow with her white stick.
The last time he had seen Isabel it had been a windy day, spring 1975, lunchtime, outside the coroner’s court. Standing in the municipal car park, chilled from waiting, they had exchanged a few words less about themselves and their lack of a future than about the upsetting events which had brought them to the inquest, and which had occurred so recently in Evelyn Axon’s hall. (It was his own hall now, of course, but he thought of it as a different house.) Though the verdict had been natural causes, a miasma of unease hung over the business; these had been Isabel’s clients, and she had failed to foresee or prevent whatever had led up to the old woman’s death. There had been bruises on the corpse, weals, fingermarks. It was more than likely that she had been beaten by her daughter —half mad or half-witted—that reclusive slab of a woman, hunched into the shadows, whose features Colin could never recall. Whatever the truth of it—and it hardly mattered now that the old woman was dead—Isabel’s distaste for the affair had made her resign. “I’m out of it now,” she had said.
And she had told him—he remembered the occasion perfectly, as if it were yesterday—that she intended to go in for banking; it was in the family. “It will be less complicated,” she had said.
For months after their break-up, he had been in the habit of taking the car out in the evenings and driving to the quiet street where Isabel shared a bungalow with her retired father. Once he had even parked opposite, waiting
