Tomorrow's ghost

Frances stood in the middle of the empty hall and listened to the silence begin, waiting for it to reassure her.

She imagined it forming in the top of the house, where at the noisiest of times there would always be a secret yeast of it, ready to grow the moment the front door slammed shut. From there it would seep down, from floor to floor and room to room, until it had filled every last corner.

Roof space, carefully lagged (Colonel Butler's house would be carefully lagged); attics and box-rooms; bedrooms one by one, master bedroom (there would be one single bed), children's bedrooms, guest bedrooms, Nannie's self-contained flat; bathrooms and dressing rooms and lavatories; then down the staircase, tread by tread, into the hall, into the breakfast-room and the dining room, and the kitchen and the pantry and the laundry room; into the library, curling round the desk; into the playroom and the study room; into the television room, into the sitting room, into the conservatory (how a conservatory fitted into Hollywood mock-Tudor remained to be seen, but a conservatory there was, nevertheless).

Now she could hear it all around her. The house was ready for her at last.

CHAPTER TEN

'If I was your mother, Jane,' said Frances deliberately, coldly seizing her opportunity,

'I would say that you've just put a great deal too much in your mouth.'

Jane attempted for a moment to manipulate her spring roll, which was collapsing greasily down her chin.

'If ... if you were my mother - oops! - ' A tangle of bean sprouts dropped out of the roll on to the spectacular mound of sweet-and-sour-pork, chicken-and-almonds and beef-and-green-peppers which Jane had arranged in an enormous crater of rice ' - if you were my mother, then you would have been ten when Father married you - no, ten when you had me ... and eight when you had Sally, and six when you had Di. Which, according to the sex talks Baggers gives us at school, is just not on.'

'No.' Sally raised an elegant morsel on her chopsticks. 'She's about twenty-eight. She could just have had you - if she was exceptionally unlucky.'

Frances wondered whether that unlucky was a purely biological judgement, or whether Sally-was referring specifically to her sister. At the great age of seventeen Sally Butler handled her chopsticks like a Chinaman and was too clever by half, or maybe by three-quarters. Fortunately for the human race - the male half of it, anyway - she was also homely and horsey, apart from the superb hair; but to have been beautiful and that smart would have been unfair on both her and mankind, the contest would have been totally one-sided.

'Twenty-eight?' Jane examined Frances with the appraising eye of a second-hand car dealer. 'Yes, I suppose you could be right at that.'

Frances felt the need to keep her end up, to join them if she couldn't beat them. 'And that would make Sally your step-sister,' she observed. Mother would have to wait for another opportunity.

'And that wouldn't be bad, either,' said Jane, who was obviously accustomed both to her elder sister's accuracy in guessing ages and also to the need to keep her own end up also. 'Are you really as old as that? You don't look it, you know, Frances.'

'I don't think I could be your mother, quite,' Frances parried the question. Not that I wouldn't like to be, she thought quickly. At fifteen Jane was beginning to lose her puppy- fat and to exhibit the red-gold beauty of her eldest sister, if the portrait in the master-bedroom hadn't lied.

In fact, where Sally had diverged from the mould somewhere along the line to become a true Butler daughter, Jane might well end up more like Madeleine Francoise than the fabled Diana.

Sally stared at her for an instant, catching her in the act of projecting her sister's face into the future.

'You know about our mother, don't you?' Sally selected a sweet-and-sour pork ball from its fellows. 'It'll all be in Father's print-out, of course.'

God Almighty! thought Frances - Father's print-out!

'Twenty-eight is quite old,' said Jane, to no one in particular. 'Relatively old, anyway.

Not too young, anyway.'

Frances looked from one to the other. Jane munched complacently; Sally lifted the pork ball on her chopsticks and popped it into her mouth.

'Your Father's ... print-out?' Not too young for what?

'Computer print-out. Everything's on computer, obviously,' Sally informed her.

Jane stopped munching. 'What sort of computer?'

Sally ignored her sister. 'Isn't it?'

'Oh - I get you,' said Jane. She nodded to Frances. 'You know our mother's dead, that's what she means. Well ... not strictly speaking dead - strictly speaking she's missing. But after all these years it's like the war - like Nannie's husband. He's still missing, although they know he was killed, because Father was there. But they lost him after that.' She made it sound almost like carelessness. 'He wasn't there when they came back, anyway - there was just a shell-hole.'

On one level they were both being incredibly cold-blooded, almost to the point of childishness much younger than their actual years, even allowing for the retarding effect of an English private girls' school education; but they had been just as cool over the break-in - or, at least, Jane had been just as cool, and Sally had been cool once it had been established to her satisfaction that the thief had not put a sacrilegious hand on either of her horses.

However, that hadn't surprised Frances, from her own memories of a similar education. The order and discipline of their school lives, with its well-defined rules and regulations, emphasised the disorder and indiscipline of the jungle outside, so that they were able to take the break-in as something like a misfortune of war. Also, she recalled that petty theft was more or less endemic at school (Money must NEVER be left in the cloakrooms or in the desks'), and an endless subject for rumour and speculation. To have been burgled would provide them both with an exciting tale next day which would lose nothing in the telling.

What was disturbing all the same - or tantalising, anyway - was the suspicion (also out of her own memories) that they were also operating on another level, the nature of which she had not as yet fathomed. But children like