The Collected Stories

stuck between them, and Mr Mileson knew by instinct all that it contained. She saw an image of herself and him, strolling together from the hotel, in this same sunshine, at this very moment, lingering on the pavement to decide their direction and agreeing to walk to the promenade. She mouthed and grimaced and the sweat broke on her body, and she looked at him once and saw words die on his lips, lost in his suspicion of her.

The train stopped for the last time. Doors banged; the throng of people passed them by on the platform outside. They collected their belongings and left the train together. A porter, interested in her legs, watched them walk down the platform. They passed through the barrier and parted, moving in their particular directions. She to her new flat where milk and mail, she hoped, awaited her. He to his room; to the two unwashed plates on the draining board and the forks with egg on the prongs; and the little fee propped up on the mantelpiece, a pink cheque for five pounds, peeping out from behind a china cat.

Access to the Children

Malcolmson, a fair, tallish man in a green tweed suit that required pressing, banged the driver’s door of his ten-year-old Volvo and walked quickly away from the car, jangling the keys. He entered a block of flats that was titled – gold engraved letters on a granite slab – The Quadrant.

It was a Sunday afternoon in late October. Yellow-brown leaves patterned grass that was not for walking on. Some scurried on the steps that led to the building’s glass entrance doors. Rain was about, Malcolmson considered.

At three o’clock precisely he rang the bell of his ex-wife’s flat on the third floor. In response he heard at once the voices of his children and the sound of their running in the hall. ‘Hullo,’ he said when one of them, Deirdre, opened the door. ‘Ready?’

They went with him, two little girls, Deirdre seven and Susie five. In the lift they told him that a foreign person, the day before, had been trapped in the lift from eleven o’clock in the morning until teatime. Food and cups of tea had been poked through a grating to this person, a Japanese businessman who occupied a flat at the top of the block. ‘He didn’t get the hang of an English lift,’ said Deirdre. ‘He could have died there,’ said Susie.

In the Volvo he asked them if they’d like to go to the Zoo and they shook their heads firmly. On the last two Sundays he’d taken them to the Zoo, Susie reminded him in her specially polite, very quiet voice: you got tired of the Zoo, walking round and round, looking at all the same animals. She smiled at him to show she wasn’t being ungrateful. She suggested that in a little while, after a month or so, they could go to the Zoo again, because there might be some new animals. Deirdre said that there wouldn’t be, not after a month or so: why should there be? ‘Some old animals might have died,’ said Susie.

Malcolmson drove down the Edgware Road, with Hyde Park in mind.

‘What have you done?’ he asked.

‘Only school,’ said Susie.

‘And the news cinema,’ said Deirdre. ‘Mummy took us to a news cinema. We saw a film about how they make wire.’

‘A man kept talking to Mummy. He said she had nice hair.’

‘The usherette told him to be quiet. He bought us ice-creams, but Mummy said we couldn’t accept them.’

‘He wanted to take Mummy to a dance.’

‘We had to move to other seats.’

‘What else have you done?’

‘Only school,’ said Susie. ‘A boy was sick on Miss Bawden’s desk.’

‘After school stew.’

‘It’s raining,’ said Susie.

He turned the windscreen-wipers on. He wondered if he should simply bring the girls to his flat and spend the afternoon watching television. He tried to remember what the Sunday film was. There often was something suitable for children on Sunday afternoons, old films with Deanna Durbin or Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.

‘Where’re we going?’ Susie asked.

‘Where d’you want to go?’

‘A Hundred and One Dalmatians.’

‘Oh, please,’ said Susie.

‘But we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it five times.’

‘Please, Daddy.’

He stopped the Volvo and bought a What’s On. While he leafed through it they sat quietly, willing him to discover a cinema, anywhere in London, that was showing the film. He shook his head and started the Volvo again.

‘Nothing else?’ Deirdre asked.

‘Nothing suitable.’

At Speakers’ Corner they listened to a Jehovah’s Witness and then to a woman talking about vivisection. ‘How horrid,’ said Deirdre. ‘Is that true, Daddy?’ He made a face. ‘I suppose so,’ he said.

In the drizzle they played a game among the trees, hiding and chasing one another. Once when they’d been playing this game a woman had brought a policeman up to him. She’d seen him approaching the girls, she said; the girls had been playing alone and he’d joined in. ‘He’s our daddy,’ Susie had said, but the woman had still argued, claiming that he’d given them sweets so that they’d say that. ‘Look at him,’ the woman had insultingly said. ‘He needs a shave.’ Then she’d gone away, and the policeman had apologized.

‘The boy who was sick was Nicholas Barnet,’ Susie said. ‘I think he could have died.’

A year and a half ago Malcolmson’s wife, Elizabeth, had said he must choose between her and Diana. For