“No.” Iris was glancing through the leaflets. “There’s a Hockney exhibition round here. It looks fabulous. Did I tell you I was in Los Angeles in the late sixties?”
Bob was watching Sam walk slowly across the flagged square towards them. There was such a careless sexuality about her, he realised. When so much about her was deliberate and intent, that was completely natural. “What were you doing there?” he asked Iris.
Both of the ladies looked at him. They weren’t quite used to him yet, and they certainly weren’t expecting him to ask questions.
“I was having a very expensive affair with an extremely famous man,” she snapped. “And writing my seventeenth novel while I was about it.”
“What was the novel? I might have read it.”
Peggy’s mouth twitched into a smile. She’d never seen any evidence that Iris had written books either. “I was a different person then,” Iris would say with a shrug whenever Peggy asked to read something she had written.
“I should like to say which it was,” Iris replied. “It became a very famous film and if I tell you it was entirely autobiographical, I think you’ll appreciate that to tell you would be to breach a confidence.” She sat back smugly in her fuchsia coat and exclaimed, “Sam! What did he say?”
“More directions.” She flipped the piece of paper onto the table before Bob. “I meant get the tea and drink it in the car. You’ll die of exposure and piles out here.”
Bob told her, “We all think it’s quite nice.”
She turned on her heel. “I’ll wait in your crappy old car then. Come and tell me when you’re finished, then maybe we can do what we’re supposed to be doing here. And that’s not a pensioners’ bloody day trip.”
They drained their cups hastily.
“Things are astir,” Iris muttered.
“She was the same as a child. Getting her way by going off in a huff. She was taking the moral high ground at four years old.”
“Sally’s not like that.”
“We’d better follow her,” Bob said, getting up.
Peggy picked up her bag and fixed him with a look. “I think you’re going to have your work cut out for you with our Sam, Bob.”
She allowed him to lead her back to his car. He did this with a small glow of triumph: he had won her over.
Behind them came Iris, struck suddenly with dismay and the uncomfortably familiar feeling that things were moving on again. She remembered a wonderful merry-go-round in Munich in the 1860s.
It was gaudy and beautiful and exciting but terribly unreliable. You could never tell when it would stop, or start again. Lapses sometimes seemed very close together; at other times, unbearably far apart.
Iris had seen more life changes than anyone she knew, and she could read the signs.
NINETEEN
UNTIL NOW, MARK HAD THOUGHT OF HEADINGLEY AS A BIT LIKE BISHOP Auckland. Rough as guts, with patches of struggling greenery. As they walked out to find Richard’s ‘sweet little patisserie’, however, he saw that the place had more going for it than Bishop.
It was a reclaimed northern town. Someone had taken hold of the run-down place and injected it with bourgeois taste. It was a whole theme park with added delicatessens, second-hand bookshops and tea parlours tucked away up seedy gullies. Money had gone in with students and young professionals, who’d cropped up among the elderly and the émigrés, and they’d turned the air of the pace into slum honey.
On the way they popped into a delicatessen. Yellow light slatted in onto sanded tables and Mark and Sally sat to wait while Richard chatted with the woman serving as if they had all day.
“We need avocados,” Richard said. Mark was about to point out that the house was already littered with them, but Richard added, “Tony has a craving for them.” That name shook Mark up slightly. He joined Sally in a game, guessing names for all the colourful things on display in the refrigerator.
They still had a while before they were due to meet Sam. In a leisurely drawl, the woman behind the counter was explaining how you could make your own sour cream. She seemed utterly contented with her job. She had purple hair and moles and brown, strapping arms. Perhaps this was a cooperative. A metal whisk and bowl appeared from nowhere and before they knew it she was going a demonstration with the top of a bottle of milk and half a lemon. “There’s some kind of chemical reaction when you use metal, and it sours up nicely.”
They watched with interest as she worked away, but soon she was frowning, disappointed in herself, because it hadn’t come off. “Well, you can take this for forty pee if you like. It’s not proper sour, though.”
We’ll hold it under Sam’s face when she sees us, Mark thought. That’ll curdle it. He stopped himself. I’m just bitter, he thought.
Richard was making it easier to face Sam. Whenever Mark’s thoughts veered towards the harder questions—Will she be furious with me? Will she go off with the copper? Whom did I have sex with last night?—Walking down the grimy, freezing main street of Headingley, Richard would interrupt him, saying, “See that newsagent’s? If you go in, don’t look shocked when you get your change. Bloke who serves you has two thumbs on one hand!” Passing a junk shop, he would say, “Art Deco elephant-foot umbrella stands in there. Very swish.” Now he turned to Sally as they left the delicatessen. “We must take you to this little bookshop right near the house. They’ve got beautiful old books for children.”
Her face lit up and snared Mark’s attention. His stomach was heavy with dread now, as the time crept on. “Can we go, Dad?”
“I’ll take you this afternoon,” Richard promised, “and buy you a special book for being good while you’ve stayed with us. Call it a late Christmas present.”
“Thank you, Richard,” she said with a
