worked. Men and women still marry, although less frequently, with less ceremony and often with the same sex. People still fall in love, or say that they are in love. There is an almost desperate searching for the one person, preferably younger but at least of one’s own age, with whom to face the inevitable decline and decay. We need the comfort of responsive flesh, of hand on hand, lip on lip. But we read the love poems of previous ages with a kind of wonder.
Walking down Walton Street this afternoon, I felt no particular reluctance at the prospect of meeting Helena again, and I thought of Mathilda with anticipatory pleasure. As the registered part-owner on the fecund-domestic-animal licence I could, of course, have applied to the Animal Custody Court for joint custody or an access order, but I had no wish to submit myself to that humiliation. Some of the animal custody cases are fiercely, expensively and publicly fought and I have no intention of adding to their number. I know I have lost Mathilda and she, perfidious, comfort-loving creature as are all cats, will by now have forgotten me.
When I saw her it was difficult not to deceive myself. She lay in her basket with two pulsating kittens like sleek white rats, pulling gently at her teats. She gazed at me with her blue expressionless eyes and began a loud and raucous purring which seemed to shake the basket. I put out my hand and touched her silken head.
I said: “Did everything go all right?”
“Oh, perfectly. Of course, we’ve had the vet here from the beginning of labour, but he said he’d seldom seen an easier birth. He took away two of the litter. We’re still deciding which of these two to keep.”
The house is small, architecturally undistinguished, a semi-detached, brick-built suburban villa, its main advantage being the long rear garden sloping down to the canal. Much of the furniture and all the carpets looked new, chosen, I suspected, by Helena, who had thrown out the paraphernalia of her lover’s old life, the friends, the clubs, the solitary bachelor consolations, with the family furniture and pictures bequeathed to him with the house. She had taken pleasure in making a home for him—I was sure this was the phrase she had used—and he basked in the result like a child with a new nursery. Everywhere there was the smell of fresh paint. The sitting-room, as is usual with this type of Oxford house, has had the rear wall removed to make one large room with a bay window at the front and french windows leading into a glass loggia at the rear. Down one wall of the white-painted hall has been hung a row of Rupert’s original drawings for book jackets, each framed in white wood. There are a dozen in all and I wondered whether this public display had been Helena’s idea or his. Either way, it justified me in a moment of contemptuous disapproval. I wanted to pause and study the drawings but that would have meant commenting on them and there was nothing I wanted to say. But even my cursory glance in passing showed me that they had considerable power; Rupert isn’t a negligible artist; this egotistical display of talent merely confirmed what I already knew.
We had tea in the conservatory, an over-lavish feast of pate sandwiches, home-made scones and fruitcake brought in on a tray with a newly starched linen tray-cloth and small matching napkins. The word that came to mind was “dainty.” Looking at the cloth, I recognized it as one Helena had been embroidering shortly before she left me. So this careful, drawn thread-work had been part of her adulterous household trousseau. Was this dainty feast—and I lingered on the pejorative adjective—designed to impress me, to show how good a wife she could be to a man prepared to appreciate her talents? It was obvious to me that Rupert appreciates them. He almost basked in her maternal cosseting. Perhaps as an artist he takes this solicitude as his due. The conservatory would, I thought, be cosy in spring and autumn. Even now, with only one radiator, it was comfortably warm and I could see dimly through the glass that they had been busy working on the garden. A row of spiky rose bushes, their root-balls shrouded in sackcloth, were propped against what looked like a new boundary fence. Security, comfort, pleasure. Xan and his Council would approve.
After tea Rupert briefly disappeared into the sitting-room. He returned and handed me a pamphlet. I recognized it at once. It was identical to that which the Five Fishes had pushed through my door. Pretending it was new to me, I read it with care. Rupert seemed to be waiting for some response. When I made none he said: “They were taking a risk going from door to door.”
I found myself saying what I knew must have happened, irritated that I did know, that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
“They wouldn’t do it like that. This is hardly a parish magazine, is it? It would be delivered by someone on his or her own, perhaps riding a bicycle, perhaps on foot, putting a leaflet through the occasional door when there was no one about, leaving a few of them in bus shelters, sticking one under the windscreen-wiper of a parked car.”
Helena said: “It’s still a risk, though, isn’t it? Or will be if the SSP decide to hunt them down.”
Rupert said: “I don’t suppose they’ll bother. No one will take this seriously.”
I asked: “Did you?”
He had, after all, kept it. The question, asked more sharply than I had intended, disconcerted him. He glanced at Helena and hesitated. I wondered whether over this they had disagreed. The first quarrel, perhaps. But I was being optimistic. If they had quarrelled, the leaflet would by now have been destroyed in the first exhilaration of reconciliation.
He said: “I did wonder whether we ought to mention it to the Local Council when we called in to have the kittens registered. We decided against it. I can’t see what they can do—the Local Council, I mean.”
“Except tell the SSP and get you arrested for possession of seditious material.”
“Well, we did wonder about that. We didn’t want officials to think we support all this.”
“Has anyone else in the street had one?”
“They haven’t said, and we didn’t like to ask.”
Helena said: “These aren’t things the Council can do anything about anyway. No one wants the Man Penal Colony closed down.”
Rupert was still holding the pamphlet as if uncertain what to do with it. He said: “On the other hand, one does hear rumours about what goes on in the camps for Sojourners and I suppose, since they’re here, that we ought to give them a fair deal.”
Helena said sharply: “They get a better deal here than they’d get back home. They’re glad enough to come. Nobody forces them. And it’s ridiculous to suggest closing down the Penal Colony.”
That was what was worrying her, I thought. It was crime and violence that threatened the little house, the embroidered tray-cloth, the cosy sitting-room, the conservatory with its vulnerable glass walls, its view of the dark garden in which she could now be confident that nothing malignant lurked.
I said: “They aren’t suggesting that it should be closed. But you can argue that it ought to be properly policed and the convicts given a reasonable life.”
“But that’s not what these Five Fishes are suggesting. The paper says that the deportations should stop. They want it closed. And policed by whom? I wouldn’t let Rupert volunteer for the job. And the convicts can have a reasonable life. It’s up to them. The island is large enough and they have food and shelter. Surely the Council wouldn’t evacuate the island. There would be an outcry—all those murderers and rapists loose again. And aren’t the Broadmoor inmates there too? They’re mad, mad and bad.”
I noticed that she used the word “inmate,” not “patient.” I said: “The worst of them must be getting too old to present much danger.”
She cried: “But some are only in their late forties and they’re sending new people there every year. Over two thousand last year, wasn’t it?” She turned to Rupert. “Darling, I think we ought to tear it up. There’s no point in keeping it. We can’t do anything. Whoever they are they have no right to print stuff like that. It only worries people.”
He said: “I’ll flush it down the lavatory.”
