year before I knew anything about it,' said Mavis. 'And then it was only when he blew his nose on her panties that I got an inkling what was going on.'
'Blew his nose on her what?' said Eva, intrigued by the extraordinary perversion the statement conjured up.
'He had a streaming cold and at breakfast one morning he took out a pair of red panties and blew his nose on them,' said Mavis. 'Of course I knew then what he had been up to.'
'Yes, well you would, wouldn't you?' said Eva. 'What did he say when you asked him?
'I didn't ask him. I knew. I told him that if he thought he could provoke me into divorcing him he was quite mistaken because...'
Mavis chattered on about her Patrick while Eva's mind turned slowly as she listened. There was something in her memory of the night that was coming to the surface. Something to do with Irmgard Mueller. After that awful row with Henry she hadn't been able to sleep. She had lain awake in the darkness wondering why Henry had to... well of course now she knew he hadn't but at the time... Yes, that was it, the time. At four o'clock she had heard someone come upstairs very quietly and she had been sure it was Henry and then there had been sounds of creaking from the steps up to the attic and she had known it was Irmgard coming home. She remembered looking at the luminous dial of the alarm clock and seeing the hands at four and twelve and for a moment she had thought they pointed to twenty past twelve only Henry had come in at three and... She had drifted off to sleep with a question half-formed in her mind. Now, against Mavis' chatter, the question completed itself. Had Henry been out with Irmgard? It wasn't like Henry to come in so late. She couldn't remember when he had done it before. And Irmgard certainly didn't behave like an au pair girl. She was too old for one thing, and she had so much money. But Mavis Mottram interrupted this slow train of thought by stating the conclusion Eva was moving towards.'
'I know I'd keep an eye on that German girl,' she said. 'And if you take my advice you'll get rid of her at the end of the month.'
'Yes,' said Eva. 'Yes, I'll think about that, Mavis. Thank you for being so sympathetic.'
Eva put the phone down and stared out of the bedroom window at the beech tree that stood on the front lawn. It had been one of the first things to attract her to the house, the copper beech in the front garden, a large comfortable solid tree with roots that stretched as far underground as the branches did above. She had read that somewhere, and the balance between branches seeking the light and roots searching for water had seemed so right and so, somehow, organic, as to explain what she wanted from the house and could give it in return.
And the house had seemed right too. A big house with high ceilings and thick walls and a garden and orchard in which the quads could grow up happily and at a further remove from unsettling reality than Parkview Road would have allowed. But Henry hadn't liked the move. She had had to force it on him and he had never succumbed to the call of the domesticated wildness of the orchard or the sense of social invulnerability she had found in the house and Willington Road. Not that Eva was a snob but she didn't like anyone to look down on her and now they couldn't. Even Mavis didn't patronize her any longer and that story about Patrick and the panties was something Mavis would never have told her if she had still been living two streets away. Anyway, Mavis was a bitch. She was always running Patrick down and if he was unfaithful physically Mavis was morally disloyal. Henry had said she committed adultery by gossip, and there was something in what he said. But there was also something in what Mavis said about Irmgard Mueller. She would keep an eye on her. There was a strange coldness about her and what did she mean by saying she would help around the house and then suddenly enrolling at the Tech?
With an unusual sense of depression Eva made herself some coffee and then polished the hall floor and Hoovered the stair-carpet and tidied the living-room and put the dirty clothes in the washing-machine and brushed the rim of the Organic Toilet and did all those jobs which had to be done before she collected the quads from playschool. She had just finished and was brushing her
