deceitful insects from one year to the next. Isabel was an aberration; but must he not have his aberrations? He looked into the faces of women drivers who pulled up next to him at traffic lights.
The academic year had now begun. The bill came in for redecorating the kitchen. Sylvia thought that, after all, they ought to buy a new dining table; she could not undertake the purchase and laundering of tablecloths, because she and Lizzie Blank would soon be fully occupied. Mrs. Sidney was coming home. Twice a week now they went to St. Matthew’s to see her, and the hospital was talking about a discharge date.
Throughout the summer, the old lady had remained unshakable in her royal delusions; but these had not hindered her physical progress. She was moved to C Ward; she had her own chair in the day room, and made her neighbours miserable by grilling them on protocol and criticising their dress.
“Look here,” said Colin, when Sylvia sent him to buttonhole the consultant. “You can’t seriously expect us to manage her at home. One of the nurses told me that it was quite usual to believe that you were a member of the royal family. That can’t be right?”
“How painfully,” said the physician, “has she imposed order on the chaos of her internal world! All time has stopped for her. Reality is many-sided. If she remains incontinent, of course there are these special pads you can get.”
“But for God’s sake,” Colin said, “we’re not nurses, we won’t know how to deal with her. What will she think has happened, where will she think she is? She’s used to hospital life.”
“Ah,” said the doctor, “there we have it. We believe the rigidity of institutional life has provided a too forceful model for her inner reality. She has become occupied with rules, procedures, precedents, and routines. The institution has become, in fact, an external psychosis. Besides that,” he said impatiently, “if she shouts at you we can give her a pill.”
“I’ve never heard such rubbish,” Sylvia said when he got home. She was sitting in the kitchen with Francis; Francis, with evident enjoyment, was eating a boiled egg. “It’s a con trick, all this about discharging people into the community. They’re doing it to save money.”
“Quite true,” Francis said, dabbing at his upper lip with a piece of kitchen roll. “Community care properly carried through is a most expensive option. Done shabbily, it’s cheap. The social workers, God bless them, have been urging it for years. Now they’ve fallen right into the budgeters’ trap.”
“I’ve never heard you ask God to bless anyone before,” Colin said.
“Francis is right.”
“I know he is. That doesn’t help us though.”
“Daddy,” Claire said, “you should see the way Lizzie eats eggs, it’s really disgusting. She cuts a piece off the end, then she sucks it out—like this—”
“And Florence won’t give up her job to look after her,” Sylvia said. “She loves it, turning people down for heating allowances, that sort of thing.”
“Oh, now why should she give up her job?” Colin said. “Be fair. She did her share of caretaking before Mother went into St. Matthew’s. If Mother comes home, we’ll have to split her between us.”
“You mean, me and Florence will have to split her. You’ll be sheltering behind your job. I’ll be running up and down stairs with disgusting buckets and bandages—”
“You make it sound like Scutari.”
“—and you’ll be sitting in your nice tidy office ruling lines and sticking little coloured pins in wall charts.”
“Perhaps Colin can help out at weekends,” Francis suggested. “And can’t you get an attendance allowance?”
“I’ll have to ask Florence about that,” Colin said. “She’ll know the daily rate for a lady-in-waiting.”
“I wish I had a job,” Sylvia said. “I wish I could go out to work and escape the things that are going on in this family. I should have done that years ago, got a full-time job and made myself independent and let you lot get on with it. At least before I was married I had an income to call my own, but since then I’ve been a slave to my family.”
“I always thought you married straight from the schoolroom,” the vicar said. “What was your work?”
The question caught Sylvia unprepared. “I was in charcuterie,” she replied hastily.
“Can you get Lizzie to work some extra hours?” Colin asked. “We’ll afford it somehow.”
“She has a night job. Hermione wanted her, but she said no.”
“Well, ask her again. Perhaps her circumstances have changed.”
“I could up her hourly rate a bit.”
“No, I don’t think you could. Unless bankruptcy takes your fancy.”
“We can’t expect her to work for love. When the baby comes we’ll be wading around up to the knees in excrement.”
“We will be anyway,” the vicar said, “if something isn’t done about Britain’s sewers. Do you know that in Greater Manchester there’ve been fifty major collapses in ten years? They measure them by how many double- decker buses you could drive through.”
“What an extraordinary concept,” Colin said whimsically. “I wonder if the passengers are given any warning?”
October came. Suzanne was in her fifth month; the miners’ dispute with the National Coal Board was in its eighth. Sylvia laid candles in, despising the government’s assurances that there would be no power cuts. That would be the limit, she said, spending New Year’s Day in the dark. Suzanne stopped telephoning Jim Ryan, and gave herself over to waiting. “I’m glad I’m pregnant,” she said. “It’s something to do.”
Not far away, in Wilmslow, an Iron Age corpse was found in a bog. “Here, let me see it,” Alistair said excitedly, tearing the newspaper from his father’s hands. “‘The whole body survived because of the absence of—’ what’s
