Colin went into the living room. He threw himself into a chair and switched on the TV. His daughter followed him. “Do you know what Jim says now?” she demanded.
“No, but I can see that you’re going to tell me.”
“He says he’s got to stay with Isabel because she’s on the point of a nervous breakdown. Her father’s just died and she’s gone all to pieces about it. She says she wished him dead so she’s to blame.”
“Her father?” Colin sat up. “What was he called?”
“How do I know? Dad, whenever I ask you for any help all you do is ask the most irrelevant questions. This woman Isabel, I could tell she was mad when I talked to her on the phone.”
“You talked to her on the phone? What did you do that for?”
“I thought we might meet and talk things over.”
“Did you tell her your name?”
“What do you mean? Of course I did.”
“What did she say?”
“Look, don’t get all excited, Dad, I know you think it was the wrong thing to do, but put yourself in my shoes. I told you, she sounded crazy. She didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”
“Perhaps Jim hadn’t told her about you.”
“I thought that…but if he hadn’t, how would she have known my name at all? It was as if she knew me—do you know what I mean?—in another context entirely.”
Colin fell back into his chair and stared at the TV. It was an early evening variety show. To the accompaniment of facetious patter, a magician held up a burning spike and passed it slowly through the forearm of his studio volunteer. The audience applauded. The magician withdrew the brand, and held it flickering aloft. The volunteer’s face wore a set, worried smile. There was an expectant hush; a roll of drums; and then the magician, with great deliberation, whipped the flame through the air and poked it cleanly through his victim’s chest.
CHAPTER 7
Now the summer was over. Suzanne moped about the house, making no plans. Her father understood her failure of will. “When the baby’s born,” she said, “Jim will think differently about it.”
Every night she scanned the FLAT LETS column in the evening paper. The properties were taken by the time she got to the phone. She talked about going back to Manchester to her friends, to join a squat in Victoria Park, but she did nothing about it. Pregnancy made her lethargic. Such energy as she could summon she spent on keeping out of her mother’s way. “You should have got rid of it before it was too late,” Sylvia said. “Upsetting us all like this. Breaking up our family life.”
Outside the house, Sylvia was busier than ever. She had joined a body called ECCE, invented and chaired by the vicar—Environmental Concern Creates Employment—and she spent a lot of time with Francis, attending meetings and lobbying at the town hall. ECCE wanted a grant to get to work on some of the derelict land left in the wake of the motorway link. It wanted to take a few teenagers out of the dole queue, perhaps “offer hope,” as it put it, to some of the older, long-term unemployed. Urban renewal was its object. Colin could not applaud it, not entirely. Come friendly bombs and fall on the entire North West and Midlands was more his idea. He could not remember a time—except after his break-up with Isabel—when his mood had been so black.
The vicar, he noticed, talked constantly about sewers. We were living, he said, on the legacy of the Victorians. Britain’s sewers had reached crisis point; a whole army of the unskilled could be put to work, renewing the system. To anyone who would listen he painted a vividly horrible picture of the disruption and decay which the pavements hid from view. Hermione had become a vegan. Colin felt sorry for him at times. His standards of comfort must be low, if he found comfort in Sylvia.
It was understandable that Sylvia should wish to spend as much time as possible outside the house. Each member of the family seemed to have marked out his own territory. Alistair, seldom at home himself, kept his bedroom locked whether he was in it or not. No one cared to imagine what lay behind the door. It had not been cleaned in months. Suzanne stayed in the bedroom from which she had evicted Karen; moon-faced and lank-haired, perpetually tearful, she crept downstairs when she heard her mother going out, and lumbered up again when she heard Sylvia’s key in the front door. Karen had colonised the living room. A studious child, she did her homework with a green felt-tipped pen, sitting at the big table. Presently she was found to have carved her initials in this table, and to have commenced a more ambitious work, “ALISTAIR IS A W—.” She was mutinous about the interruption to her labours. Colin might have let her finish, if it would not have meant the expense of a new table. He did not know that the young were interested in carving any more. It seemed a charming survival from a more innocent age.
The kitchen was occupied by Lizzie Blank, the monstrous domestic; without her labours, the house would cease to be a going concern. She was joined there by Claire, who was doing her cookery badge; her boiled eggs were often the only hot food prepared in the course of a day, but after the consumption of a few dozen they tended to pall. Sylvia, if she wanted peace and privacy, was driven to the marital bedroom, repository of her blighted hopes.
Is it possible, Colin asked himself, that I once really loved Sylvia? Did my heart beat faster at her approach? And not just with fear? Since the debacle ten years ago, Colin had come to believe that romantic love is an artefact, an invention of the eighteenth century. In a proper world, waning passion for breast and thigh would have been replaced by a solid affection for broad acres, an admiration for the odd copse and millstream. Given a proper respect for the social order, he would never have looked twice at Sylvia; it was hard to imagine her bringing him anything except some bad debts and a consumptive cow. In a proper world, their marriage would never have happened; he blames the century for his plight, the Rousseauist affectations of his forebears.
Meanwhile the two back rings on the cooker had given out entirely. The electric kettle had fused, and they had to boil up water in a milk pan. The toaster burned everything that was put into it, then catapulted it around the room, and the washing machine, unless operated on the Delicates cycle, pumped water all over the floor.
That pernicious fallacy was flourishing again in Colin’s life: that given Isabel, it would all be different. He knew it was a fallacy, and it caused him pain; he tried to uproot it from his life, to stamp it out. But he scanned all crowds, department stores on a Saturday, the people at the railway station that he passed every night as he drove home from school. The image in his mind was the image of the woman in the photograph, and what frightened him most was the knowledge that he might pass her in the street, stand behind her at the checkout in the supermarket, and not even notice her, so fast and so much did women change, making over their bodies and their emotions like
