“This is next door.”
“I know that. I’d worked that out. There was never anybody called Wilmot living here, was there?”
“Not that I remember. I only remember the Axons. They lived here for years.”
“Yes, Evelyn and what’s her name, Muriel. You’d hardly mix those two up with anybody else. I never knew Evelyn’s husband. What was he called?”
“Clifford. Clifford Axon. Florence would tell you.”
“Perhaps he had a friend called Wilmot.”
“I don’t think so. He was an eccentric. He spent all his time in the garden shed. What did the doctor say, then?”
“I reminded him of what the hospital told us. That if we got desperate they’d offer her a bed. He wasn’t very sympathetic. He didn’t seem to think we were desperate.” I have often been desperate, Colin thought, but no one ever offered me a bed. “He told me this awful story about some people he knows who’ve got a demented mother and a handicapped fourteen-year-old in a council flat on the eighth floor. He said, there are two of you ladies. I told him I had commitments. Do you know what he said? He said, ‘Charity begins at home.’ I could have choked him.”
“Is Florence back? Is Mum on her own?”
“Just for a few minutes. It won’t hurt her. He said we could get the children to help. Can you imagine? He doesn’t know our children. I have to pay Lizzie to stay with her every time I go out to the CAB.”
“Perhaps Francis could arrange the odd parish helper.”
“Everyone’s gone on the peace march,” Sylvia said. “And here I am, stuck at home. Anyway, he’s given her some more sedatives, he says they’re strong.” Her gaze slid away from Colin’s face; it came to rest obliquely, at the side of his head. He took her arm.
“I expect we ought to talk some time, Sylvia. We can’t continue like this, exchanging the occasional word wedged up behind the front door.”
“I never have time to sit down. Your mother, and Suzanne—it’s driven everything else out of my head.” You need leisure for an unhappy marriage, she seemed to imply. “But I can’t go on like this.”
“No?”
“No. There are half a dozen community projects to be set in train.”
“I’m worried about Florence,” he said impulsively. “I think the strain’s too much for her. I think she might —”
“What?”
“No. Nothing. Never mind.”
Jim Ryan said to his wife: “I suppose we could adopt it?”
“Adopt it?” she said. “I’d rather drown it.” She looked at him; her voice and expression suddenly altered. “Besides, there’s no need now.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Come here. Feel.”
“Feel what? What are you doing?”
Carefully she laid the flat of his hand against the front of her body, keeping it covered with her own.
“I thought it was my liver,” she said. “But it can’t be, can it?”
“How did it happen? After all this time?”
“I have no bloody idea.”
“You’d better go to the doctor,” Jim said. He was alarmed. He almost felt that it was not a natural occurrence.
“He’ll tell me to stop drinking.”
“You’ll have to stop. You’ll damage it.”
Isabel smiled into his face, madly and slyly. “You never know,” she said, “who’ll be damaged most in the end.”
Muriel met Sholto. He looked haggard; his feet were damp, and his clothes were wearing out. “Still holding down your job?” he asked. She nodded. “You’re doing all right, Muriel. Still going in disguise?”
“Yes. But not for long now.”
“You don’t still hold this changeling crap?”
She said, “I’m lonely, Sholto, out here in the town. Sometimes I’d like to climb back into my head. I’d like to sit on my bed and double up, and slide right down my own throat. Do you understand?”
“I’m finished with Crisp,” Sholto said, not listening. “He’s turned criminal. And you—I don’t want to know. You’ll be taking babies out of prams at the supermarket.”
“They don’t have prams,” Muriel said. “They strap them into those buggy things, or carry them on their backs. When I look at Miss Suzanne, all the words get tangled up inside my head, all those words you showed me on that pot head. In my mother’s day, Sholto, we had a special room in our house. In that room my mother said there were
