THE WEEKEND that Helly brought her new boyfriend down to meet Clare, Clare’s younger brother, Toby, was also staying with them, following them round with his video camera, making a documentary about the family for his college course.

Clare gave the camera one quick exasperated glance when the doorbell rang and the guests arrived. The food should have been ready but she was still chopping hurriedly amid a debris of vegetable leavings, her fingers stuck with parsley bits.

— Oh, Toby, stop it!

Her deep glance at the camera — she has looked at the lens and not at Toby, as if it were his eyes — is caught forever on the tape. She is wishing she had had time to change into the nicer clothes she had planned. Her hair is in a short thick black plait on her shoulder fastened with a rubber band. She looks tired. When she is tired (she believes) all those things that at her best make her look like an intellectual instead make her look like a librarian: small eyes, neat straight brows, thin lips, a square high forehead. She has good skin but it is pink and hot because she is flustered. Her glance is naked and hostile, her last moment of free expression before she has to put on a smiling face.

She might be hostile to Toby; she is sometimes bossy and arbitrary with him.

Or perhaps to Helly, who comes and finds her out in her humiliation, dragged down by the children, without makeup, with wet red hands.

* * *

HELLY INTRODUCED her new boyfriend to Clare.

— You two should know each other. David comes from round here too. We must have all been at parties together. He knows people we knew.

But the man was a stranger, an alien in Clare’s house, with shades hiding his eyes and an exaggerated presence she flinched from, curvy big cheekbones and chin with blue-black stubble, a thick beautiful leather coat, loudly and confidently friendly in a way that suggested immediately to Clare that he didn’t want to be here in the provinces visiting his girlfriend’s friend who was nobody. When they all kissed, the Londoners smelled expensively of bathrooms full of bottles of scents and lotions, and Clare was aware of her limp T-shirt, which had soaked up the smells of the onion soup she was making for their lunch. The onion soup, with Parmesan toasts baked in the oven, would be delicious. (It was.) And Helly couldn’t cook. But Clare feared that everything brilliant and savory about her might appear to have drained into that onion soup, leaving her wan and dull and domesticated.

Helly was her best friend.

Recently, Helly had been paid thirty thousand pounds (twice as much as Bram, Clare’s partner, earned in a year) to make a series of television advertisements for ice cream; as well as on television, they were used in the cinema and on billboards. Everywhere Clare went she was confronted by Helly’s golden face or the misty curves of Helly’s body, intently and extravagantly inviting her into a larger-than-life golden vanilla space concealed inside the prose of every day. Whenever she saw the real Helly now, these images would get in the way for the first few minutes; the real Helly would seem slightly contracted, smaller and more precise than she should be, and muffled in surprising clothes.

Helly was embarrassed about the advertisement. She was a serious actress. She did get work, in fringe and in soaps, but not enough; she was still waiting for her break. And no one, no one, could have turned down thirty thousand pounds. The advertisements paid for the serious work; that was the theory. But her friends couldn’t help feeling that something momentous had happened, that she had stepped into a golden current of money and frivolity and glamour that would carry her off. Anyway, she wasn’t strikingly talented as an actress. Although none of them quite acknowledged it, this was more exciting, really, than if Helly had got a good part in a play. They watched to see what would happen next.

Clare could remember that when she and Helly were fifteen one of their shared nighttime fantasies had been to imagine their nakedness projected lingeringly onto a cinema screen in front of an audience. So she couldn’t be sure just how genuine Helly’s contemptuous indifference was to those golden simulacra plastered everywhere. Or how genuine her own contemptuous indifference was, either.

* * *

THE TWO VISITORS filled up the little terraced house with noise and cigarette smoke and with their things. They had brought in from the car a camera and bags of presents and bottles of wine and flowers and a portable mini-disk player and a heap of leather luggage even though they were only staying the one night; also a laptop on which David had already tried to access his e-mail. (He worked as a lighting technician, designing systems for stage shows and clubs; this seemed to necessitate frequent contacts with his associates and long sessions on the mobile phone.) They talked more loudly and constantly and laughed more than Clare was used to.

Clare was taken aback at how profoundly she coveted Helly’s beautiful clothes. She liked to think she was fairly indifferent to material possessions. Under Bram’s influence she had given away lots of her CDs, deciding she had outgrown them. They had a house full of books but no television, and Clare made her own bread and ground her own spices and salted lemons to put in salads and chicken dishes. She bought most of what she wore in charity shops, not grudgingly but pointedly, because it was more original to put together your own bits and pieces. But when she saw Helly’s long lilac-colored dress and her green velvet jacket sewn with mirrors and her green painted toenails, she was reminded that there was something else you could do with your clothes, something better than just original, something that amounted to power and joy. You needed money to create a look that so mysteriously aroused longing and satisfaction at once: although you had to have a gift, too, to choose the right things so inventively and surely.

Helly was grievously good to look at: tall and spare, all flat planes, wide shoulders, big hands and feet, with big cheekbones and a long mobile mouth. Her eyes were pale green and her skin was really quite pale too, not golden like the advertisements. Her spiky hair was blond out of a bottle, with the roots left deliberately darker. The children came and watched Helly and David as if they were a show. Lily reached out a finger and stroked the velvet of Helly’s sleeve; Rose put on her Superman cape especially for David, who didn’t notice. He never knew what he was supposed to say to people’s children, he confessed. Helly was the one who made all the efforts, she’d brought them things, and she talked to them in a chaffing ironic voice that Clare knew (she knew Helly very well) meant she was slightly afraid of them, not sure what they were thinking or how to please them. Coco (Jacob), the oldest and a boy, was deeply suspicious of both visitors. He winced at Helly’s silver lip ring and ignored her, as if it was kinder not to draw attention to how she shamed herself by wearing it; but he was drawn, almost against his better judgment, to the laptop. Even Toby — infuriatingly because he was twenty-one and should have been backing Clare up as a fellow adult — sat dumbly smiling and blushing in spite of all Helly’s efforts to bring him out (she would be much more confident of how to please him, not because she had known him since he was a boy, but because he was a man now, and couldn’t take his eyes off the lip ring).

Ten years, eleven years ago, they worked out, David and Clare and Helly had all lived in this city, but had not known one another. David had even been in the sixth form with a boy Clare went out with for six months. They’d had so many teenage haunts in common, a pub, a club, even the city reference library where they revised for A levels: so many mutual acquaintances, it seemed impossible they hadn’t met.

— I’m just beginning to remember, said David. When I see you two together. It’s starting to come back to me.

— Don’t believe him, laughed Helly. He’s just flirting.

He was flirting, although Clare presumed he was only using his flirtation with her in some game with Helly. She was as aware of the unaccustomed aura of flirtation in her house as she was of the unaccustomed cigarette smoke: both things made her anxious and excited at once, and she was bracing herself already for when Bram came in. He would sniff them both out immediately, and disapprove of them, although he would be as always — infallibly — courteous and friendly. This was why Clare didn’t see Helly very often any more. It stretched her too painfully, having to defend Helly from Bram’s disapproval while mobilizing inside herself all her best arguments against how Helly’s life tempted her and invited her and made her envious.

— Did you know someone called Tim Dashwood? David asked.

— Tim Dashwood? No, said Clare.

— Yes, we did, said Helly. Remember? We went to parties at his flat. Very naughty parties. Pas devant les enfants. Where we got up to all sorts of things.

— What did you do at the naughty parties? asked Lily.

— Lots of rubbish, I expect, said Coco.

— That’s exactly right, said Helly. You’re so right. Lots and lots of rubbish. And d’you know what we used to wear? I’ll bet you can’t imagine your mummy dressed entirely in black clothes, with a black bustier, and black eye makeup and fingernails and lipstick and earrings. We were briefly gothic. It didn’t last. But that was the Tim Dashwood period. We didn’t know him well. He wasn’t particularly gothic. Bit of a bloodsucker, perhaps. He and his friends must have been older than us.

— Black lipstick! Yuk! said Lily. What’s a bustier?

— Something silly that ladies wear, like underwear, on top of their clothes.

— I suddenly had a feeling that that was where I was remembering you from, said David. I’m sure I can remember Clare at one of Tim’s parties.

— No, you can’t, said Clare quickly. Not if I can’t remember it. I don’t even remember such a person.

— Can you remember me there? Helly asked him.

— Perhaps. Did you use to have long plaits?

— Long gothic ones, naturally.

— Then maybe, maybe.

— If I ever look in my old diaries from those days, said Clare, which mostly I don’t — it’s too hideous — I feel as if I’m reading about someone else. Not just people I knew that I can’t remember, and places I went and things I did, but feelings I felt, things I wanted. It doesn’t connect to me as I am now.

— You keep a diary, do you?

— Oh, not anymore. I wouldn’t keep one now.

— She’s got volumes of them. She used to write pages every night.

— It’s so embarrassing. The entries begin with things like: calories so far today, one centimeter of toothpaste, 5. Or I know that now I will never, ever, be happy again in my whole life about some boy whose name I can’t even remember from his initials.

— So what do you remember from Tim Dashwood’s party, David? asked Helly.

He was simply the wrong scale for the little room crowded with books and pictures and delicate ceramics (Clare’s father was a potter). He was sitting in his leather coat, jammed with one leg crossed over the other knee into the most comfortable chair in the house (which was not all that comfortable). He shook his leg in a nervous habit, showing a stretch of big brown hairy calf above his scarlet sock, drumming his fingers on the arms of the chair. At least he had taken off his shades. His eyes exposed without them were comical, doleful, as if they were pulled down into his cheeks; he had a large head with decisive features and thick dark hair standing straight up from his forehead. He smiled consideringly. Rose put a small fat hand onto his knee, which he ignored.

— I don’t remember much. You know what his parties were like. That used to be the general point, didn’t it? To get so out of it you couldn’t remember much.

— Out of what? asked Lily.

* * *

CLARE AND HELLY had met at Amery-James High School for Girls; from twelve to twenty they had lived in an intimacy they would never attain again with anybody else. In the very process of their formation they were intertwined, like two trees growing up in the same space. They learned to smoke together, practicing at home (Clare’s home, with more liberal parents) under one another’s critical scrutiny until it looked right. Now Clare, who had given it up, saw that Helly still tilted up her chin and blew her smoke off to one side in the way they had decided was most flattering. At school they made a secret pact of resistance (the school motto was So hateth she derknesse; they determined to love it); the pact was sealed by an exchange of drops of menstrual blood on tissues folded and wound around with hairs pulled from one another’s heads. They went shoplifting together (for clothes, mostly, and makeup): testing themselves, initiating themselves into the kind of adulthood they aspired to, transgressive, toughened, disrespectful (the opposite to the one Amery-James aspired to on their behalf). Helly carried the shoplifting off with flair, Clare was cowardly and full of dread. Clare was the theorist and Helly was the one who acted. Clare was the feminist — when they were fifteen they read her stepmother’s old copy of The Female Eunuch together, squeezed side by side on their stomachs on Helly’s bed — but it was Helly who later rode a motorbike and went out on her own to pubs and clubs and mostly dismissed contemptuously the boys who asked her out. Clare always suspected and concealed a secret abjection in herself, some treachery of neediness toward the other sex, which seemed to fulfill itself when they were in their early twenties and the serious business of life became men. The girls turned their backs on one another then, ruthlessly cutting away old lives and connections because they thought they had found, at last, the life they really wanted.

* * *

CLARE WAS PUTTING the Parmesan toasts in the oven when Bram came in through the back door. He was working on a two-year project recording the ecology of an area of mudflats and coastal grassland that would be covered by water when the new barrage, an artificial dam for the city’s marina, was completed. At weekends volunteer groups came down to help and he had to be there to supervise, but he’d promised to be home for lunch. She was relieved that he came in the back way because it meant Helly and David would not see him in his unflattering cycling helmet. He was so without vanity (genuinely, she was sure: she had probed for it deeply enough) that she sometimes thought he looked for ways to make himself ugly, to undo the effect of gentleness he couldn’t help; he was blond and delicate with a forward-thrust lower jaw that made him soften his consonants when he spoke.

— So what’s this one like? he asked, taking off the helmet, running his head under the cold tap, scouring himself with the towel.

— He’s perfectly friendly. I think he’s nice. After the last one, anyway. (After Helly brought the last one to visit them, Clare had found scorched silver foil in the bathroom and feared the worst.) He’s a bit too much, though.

— Too much of what?

— They sort of fill the place up.

— She always brings several changes of clothes, doesn’t she? Just in case.

— You can hardly get past their luggage in the hall.

— And I suppose you’ve been hearing all about the cultural delights of the capital?

— Oh, they’ve been everywhere and done everything. And know everyone, of course.

This rehearsal of mutual ironic judgment felt comradely and consoling, but as soon as Bram went to talk to the visitors and Clare was left setting the table she was filled with unreasonable resentment at his tone. They hadn’t really talked much about London; mostly, she and Helly had talked about the old days. It was Clare’s own fault if she had taken away any impression that things in London were more brilliant and thrilling than down here.

The lunch went off all right. At least, the soup was good, and there seemed to be plenty of talk, although perhaps most of it was Helly’s and David’s: Helly told them funny stories about the shoot for the ice-cream ad (she imitated the voice-over for them: Forgive yourself: it’s irresistible), and David seemed to hold forth on every topic, he knew someone or he’d read something or he’d once worked somewhere. He even managed to find some kind of software program to talk about to Bram: mostly Bram didn’t try to compete whenever the conversation was noisy. Clare was used to presuming, wincingly defensively, that Helly must think Bram was dull and stolid. Helly always made a point of trying to coax him out of what she probably imagined was his shell. Clare winced defensively for Helly too. She had no idea how Bram recoiled from her coaxing.

Toby got it all on his video. Both visitors tried encouraging him out from behind his viewfinder: David had friends in a video production company he should get in touch with, Helly lit his cigarette for him (Clare hated Toby smoking) and tried to draw him out on the subject of himself. But he couldn’t resist how the shots framed themselves around David and Helly, how their clothes and scent and cigarette smoke and loud laughter crowded the space, and how dingy they managed to make ordinary family life seem. Rose tipped over her orange juice. Lily and Rose wouldn’t eat the onion soup. Coco had broken his glasses, which had to be mended with sticking plaster until they could get to the optician’s on Monday. For some reason Clare was exasperated at this, and at how patiently Bram mopped up Rose’s orange juice with a cloth, although she knew this was unfair and knew how much more exasperated she would have been if he hadn’t mopped it.

She had taken a few minutes before lunch to change into a dress and brush out her hair and spray on perfume. She wasn’t sure whether she was really flirting with David at that point; she was making up to him, flattering him, because that would make everything go smoothly, Helly would be satisfied, and he would be at least kept sweet for the afternoon. She could see herself, when she watched the video later, backing away in front of them down the path of their weekend, his and Helly’s, sweeping and sprinkling it ahead of them with her interest and her attention, helping to damp down David’s impatience to be gone.

* * *

THEY WENT OUT in the afternoon to look at Bram’s project. Bram had been amused that Helly had to change her clothes first; although actually she reappeared in sensible scruffy trousers and shirt, in which she still managed to look spectacular. It was Clare in her dress who got her legs bitten and scratched in the long grass. They walked around the bay, which would eventually become the marina: now it was low tide and the ruined jetties of the old harbor marched out up to their knees in sleek gray glinting mud. Oystercatchers and curlews (Bram identified them) picked their fastidious way between them. Across the ring of the bay the piled up buildings of the city loomed, glinting and flashing from plate-glass office-block windows whenever the sun flew out from between ragged slate-colored clouds. It was May. There was a wind that flattened the pale mauve-green grass like a pelt and sent it racing in liquid waves; from time to time the sky shook out cold drops of rain. David was taking photographs. Bram left them to go and find his group of volunteers, who were counting lugworms farther on, around into the estuary. They climbed down some concrete steps with a rusted handrail onto a scrap of beach heaped up with stones and sticks and plastic rubbish and cans that the sea had bleached to the same opaque pale pastels.

As soon as she saw water, Rose began to take her clothes off. She was an ironic, willful, huge-eyed baby with rolls of translucent pale flesh at her wrists and chin and waist, and she despised clothes. She stripped at every opportunity, winter and summer, streaking triumphantly just out of reach of pursuing adults, flashing in triumph the long tender crease of her vagina and the pink cheeks of her bottom. Clare worried that Rose’s taste for nakedness was outgrowing her innocence — she would be four in a few months — and she thought she needed to be taught to protect herself.

Rose protested that this was the seaside.

— No it’s not, it’s dirty water, and you’re not to go in it.

Rose seemed to concede defeat.

But a few minutes later she was suddenly nowhere to be seen, and there was a little pile of her clothes dropped down beside an oilcan with the bottom rusted out. It seemed impossible that she could have gone anywhere out of their sight in so short a time. Everyone began calling her name, looking for her along the beach and back up the steps. The crescendo of dismay, from the first exasperated flutter of worry (What a pain she is!) to hollowing uninhibited panic only took a few minutes: Clare screamed at the other two children to stay where they were and kicking off her shoes ran barefoot across the shingle and the potentially lethal debris of glass and tin, to stand soaking her skirt in the scummy edge of the water, shrieking along the shoreline to right and left, fumbling in the water with her arms to try and feel for anything pulled under and washing in that dirty tide of sluggish brown waves that hardly broke, hardly made spume. She couldn’t see the bottom, she couldn’t imagine what she ought to do next, whether she ought to somehow submerge herself in it and try to open her eyes: wasn’t this always how it was with accidents, that the parents tinkered grotesquely, futilely, in the wrong place, failing confusedly as you fail in dreams?

David shouted for Helly to go one way and he ran the other, back up the steps. Clare felt a passionate revulsion from her guests. It was in her preoccupation with them that she had taken her attention off Rose; she had been talking to David, pretending she was interested in cameras. If Bram had been here this would never have happened. Frantically, puritanically, Clare linked up her moment’s neglect with other falsities, with her efforts to impress upon Helly and David the charms of family life, with the perfume she’d sprayed on, with their money, with Helly’s advertising contract, even with the scorched tinfoil in the bathroom.

It occurred to her that there was a literary tradition of guilty women whose children pay for their mother’s momentary lapses of attention, their casual betrayals (in the mornings when Rose was at nursery she was writing a PhD thesis on George Sand). Wasn’t there a scene in Flaubert — or Balzac? — where an adulteress watches over the cot of a sick child, pledging the whole of her selfish future happiness against the few degrees his temperature must come down for him to live? At that moment she imagined such a scene, if it existed, quite without irony, the cheap irony that smirks at literary machinery. It seemed a revelation of a naked truth before which irony could only grovel.

Also, she suddenly dimly remembered someone called Tim Dashwood and odd details of a party she had gone to at his flat when she was a teenager: a plastic armchair pocked with cigarette burns, the suspect slickness of a greasy carpet under bare dancing feet, men with ponytails and slow-burning smiles who brought her and Helly drinks in plastic cups and didn’t bother even to learn their names. Like good little girls they swallowed and smoked everything that was put in front of them. The slow black ink mushroom-clouding in her mind came back to her, a fearful sensation of cold deep water slipping past, tugging the ground out from under her. All sorts of things could have happened to them — did happen to them — at those parties. She splashed out of the water and ran along the shoreline, staggering with the pain in her feet, shouting for Rose.

A high sheer stone wall came down into the water, too high for Rose to have climbed. Clare ran back up the beach alongside it, her breath coming jaggedly in sobs, stopping to peer into a hollow culvert that pierced the wall, wide enough for a child to crawl into: it was dark and foul and stank inside, with nameless black shapes half submerged in an oily black puddle, but no Rose. Clare became convinced again that she was being dangerously distracted from the real disaster, which was happening somewhere else, and she ran back down to the sea.

* * *

DAVID FOUND ROSE. She was quite unhurt and only thirty yards from where they had been standing and shouting, hidden from them by a grassy bluff. Clare made him show her the place afterward, at the back of the beach where a wet trickle that might have been a stream and might have been sewage emerged from a big concrete pipe set into an earth bank: Rose had been dabbling her feet where the water spilled over the lip of the pipe. She might possibly have been contemplating crawling up into the pipe, and possibly if it had rained (as it proceeded to do shortly after she was found) there might have been a rush of water off the land. But these dangers were too remote to count, or even to produce any retrospective jolt of imagination at a horror narrowly skirted; the only one hurt was Clare, who had cut her foot on something in the water.

David looked funny — improbable — holding a pink naked baby, balancing her as he picked his way down the beach, concentrating warily; Rose clung on with her arms round his neck. Clare had known all the time they were looking for Rose that if anything bad — anything sickeningly terrible — had happened, she would have never seen either of them again, David or Helly. There would have been a few hours of unspeakable practicalities with doctors and police and then they would have got out of it as soon as they decently could and driven back to London in their special Citroen that rose up on its wheels when you started it, and she would never ever in the remainder of her ruined life have been able to forgive them their association with that day. But now they were all reprieved; now she could like these friends again and smile at them. David was pleased with himself for finding Rose and tickled her awkwardly on the cheek, like a man who has not had practice at such things; she was still clinging to him as he handed her over, and Clare up close felt gratefully his friendly heat. Now she would be able to tell Bram that they had lost Rose and it would only mean an ordinary manageable hitch in the day; he would not be able to see through it to any deep dereliction, any dangerous absence of mind.

Helly put her cardigan around Clare’s shoulders, as the rain came pattering in dark spots on the stones, and tried to help her get Rose dressed, pulling tight socks on the wet feet, T-shirt on the twisting little body.

— You’re a naughty naughty girl, said Clare. You mustn’t take your clothes off, and you mustn’t wander away. Mummy was seriously frightened.

Helly looked abashed at what the moment had unleashed in Clare, the excess of reaction. It was excessive, Clare supposed: all that shrieking and thrashing about in the water, and the cut foot, which was bleeding now into her shoe. But she felt rather recklessly as if she’d showed Helly something, something she couldn’t know about, being childless.

* * *

CLARE SAT WITH her knees drawn up under her chin on her big unmade brass bed, opposite Helly cross-legged at the pillow end. She had bathed her cut with antiseptic and checked that her tetanus injection was still up to date (Bram kept meticulous records of these things). Her foot was aching. David had taken Coco and Lily out for a drive in his car, “to leave the girls to talk,” as he put it; Rose was asleep in her cot.

— So what’s he like? Clare asked.

— He’s nice, said Helly. Nicer probably than you’d think. He can seem a bit full of himself.

— I like him better than the last one.

A little involuntary spasm of pain and regret twisted Helly’s expression.

— Everyone but me could see it. But David’s much more steady, don’t you think?

Clare thought of him finding Rose. Oh, yes, she said. He seems kind. And sensible.

— I know he shows off a bit.

— Not in the least, Clare protested stoutly. He’s just exuberant. He knows how to enjoy himself.

— Oh, yes. He certainly knows that.

Helly thoughtfully closed her teeth on the cuff of her shirtsleeve and pulled at it, not meeting Clare’s eyes, sharing some joke with herself. Bram probably thought it was just a sensible shirt; Clare had recognized something expensive and perfect of its kind, all the better for being casual and crumpled.

— Meaning? Clare stiffened.

— Oh, you know.… Do you remember Moments of Beauty?

This was private jargon from a game they had played when they were teenagers: winding pop videos and films backward and forward to isolate the “moment of beauty” for their favorite male stars, the summation of what melted and undid them, some grin, some sleepy inadvertent glance, some lazy look of sexual appraisal. They had even tried for a while to isolate their own (female) moments of beauty in the mirror, so as to work on them; they gave up when their faces were beginning to freeze into perpetual self-consciousness.

— Well?

— David’s very good, sexually. You couldn’t really know him — I mean, what’s so appealing about him — without sort of knowing that. It’s his Moment.

Clare braced herself against the end of the bed. She felt caught out in the very scene of her decent connubial satisfactions: the duvet cover they sat on was faded and flowery and its fasteners were missing, so that an innards of gray duvet spilled out of one end. One of Rose’s teddy bears lay between their pillows with an air of baleful occupation; and for some reason she was visited by a memory of Bram calling out to her in the bathroom not to run the tap while she was cleaning her teeth because it wasted water.

— I see, she said.

— We do all kinds of things I never thought I’d do.

— Oh? Such as?

— Well, mirrors.

— You mean mirrors on the ceiling and all that kind of thing?

— And cameras.

— Oh, God, Helly, that’s awful.

— No, really it’s not. Helly laughed.

— But it’s so cold! I just don’t think that would give me any pleasure, thinking about it and setting about it in that deliberate kind of way.

— You’d be surprised.

— Isn’t it supposed to just happen spontaneously? Isn’t there something wrong if you have to plan for it? It seems unnatural.

— He naturally likes women, Helly said. You’d think you can take that for granted — I mean, under the circumstances — but believe me, I’m beginning to realize lots of men don’t like women, whatever they say.… Really, he likes them, it’s special, he has this look.…

To her dismay Clare found herself imagining it.

— I can always tell when he likes someone. And we’ve done three in a bed.

Clare genuinely shrank in disapproval from all this: even talking about it seemed to her a betrayal of what she believed was her grown-up self, watching over the kind of sacred bedroom secrets decent grown-up couples share. At the same time she was seized with curiosity urgent as a cramp: she noted that Helly presumed that David didn’t like her, or she surely would have mentioned it.

— With another woman?

— Yes.

— God, Helly. What was that like?

— Oh, well, you know: strange and familiar.

— Strange and familiar? So what was strange?

— You ought to try it.

— No, thank you. I’m quite happy as I am.

— Do you know what I found the other day? Helly said suddenly, with a blithe quick laugh. I found a little box of earrings.

— Earrings?

— Among David’s things. Just single earrings. At first I thought maybe he had had his ear pierced at some point, but I asked him and he hadn’t. Anyway, some of these just weren’t that sort of earring, not that a man would wear.

— So what on earth do you think?

— I think he’s collected them. In the past. From other women.

— You’re joking. Like trophies?

— Not exactly like trophies. That would be too ridiculous. More like souvenirs.

— Oh, no, said Clare. Surely not. That can’t be.

— I didn’t tell him I found them. The box was dusty, down at the bottom of a drawer full of old things, and the earrings were sort of dingy, the shine had gone off them. There wasn’t anything very good. So I don’t think he collects them anymore. And anyway maybe I made it all up in the first place: he could have them for any odd reason. Perhaps he had an old girlfriend with only one ear pierced and she left them.

— How many were there?

— I didn’t want to count. I don’t know. Quite a lot; they were all in a tangle together. I put them back and I haven’t looked at them again.

— It doesn’t matter anyway, said Clare. As you say, it was probably all years and years ago.

* * *

THERE IS A minute or two on the video where Toby catches David sitting alone in the front room in the not-so-comfortable chair. David looks up at him and then away again, absorbed in thinking about something. He’s photogenic; all those things about him that seem exaggerated and overeager in the flesh — the hard curved cheekbones, the standing-up thick hair, the big mouth full of talk — are toned down by the camera. Clare rewinds the video (this is weeks later, when Toby sends her a copy of his final version). She likes his smile, the lazy look he gives Toby, lids half closed, eyebrows raised, long cheeks in shadow. She rewinds it because she can’t work out what he’s doing in there. He isn’t — he might have been — taking a few relieved minutes off from a dull afternoon to commune with his precious laptop or check his e-mail. This is after he brings the children back from their trip in his special car that rises up on its wheels. (Lily’s face at the door was portentous with tales to tell of how he drove along entertaining them by making it dance, taking his foot on and off the brake in time to the music on his stereo. Coco was disgusted at his showing off. Only Rose liked him, she chose him, there on the beach, Rose the child Clare thinks of as most like herself.) Helly is in the kitchen helping Clare get supper ready (only not helping much). Bram is taking a shower. The children are playing something noisy on the stairs that involves tipping out all the contents of the toy basket (it’s one of those moments where she wishes they had telly).

David is looking at her books. He isn’t looking at them as a reader might, getting close to see the titles, pulling them out and opening them up. He isn’t a reader, he’s hardly read anything, she’s already worked that out. He’s just sitting with his head thrown back and one leg propped across the other, surveying her books with a kind of thoughtful smile as if he’s putting together an idea of the sort of person who might want to read them all, someone whose life was hidden under these covers.

Clare feels slightly uneasy, and amused, watching him look. He may of course have completely the wrong idea of what is in her books. People who don’t read often imagine that a life lived with books is serenely truthful, perhaps rather idealistic, elevated to a higher sphere above the trickeries and treacheries of real life. Combined with the children, and the little house without television, and the making of her own bread and the salting of lemons, the books may make him think she is wholesome and sane. He may think he is much more devious than she is.

* * *

THREE DAYS AFTER the visit an envelope came in the post addressed to Clare. Bram had left for work, she was on her way to walk the kids to school, pinning Rose down in her stroller to fasten her straps. She didn’t recognize the handwriting: she tore it open, shouting at Coco to get his lunch box. Inside, wrapped in a slip of tissue paper, was a single earring. Of course.

As soon as she got home from delivering the children she dug out an old jewel box she kept in a drawer in her bedroom (the box had once played music and been her grandmother’s); inside was a jumble of souvenirs and junk, museum tickets, suitcase keys, bills from cafés she and Bram had been to in Venice and Stockholm, picture hooks, the tassel from an old embroidered belt. She scrabbled in the mess of tarnished damaged jewelry and thumbtacks at the bottom of the box and found the matching earring to the one she had been sent. It was black, of course, gothic black and silver: to go with the lipstick and the nails.

She would never have recognized him; it was only when Helly told her about his collection of souvenirs that she remembered what had happened at that party of Tim Dashwood’s. David had never given her any sign, all weekend, that he remembered. If he had said anything, or even looked significantly at her, the whole thing would only have been funny or embarrassing. As it was, the broken token that had been restored (that’s how Clare thought of it; she kept the two earrings buried far apart from one another in different hiding places) seemed to have an exaggerated power to frighten and excite her, so that for a while she simply didn’t know what would happen to her next, or what she might do.

* * *

ONCE, TOBY found an ax.

It was when he was about twelve; he was playing one evening with a gang of other boys in a grassed-over area with benches and young trees near his home. They were not allowed to play football there but they did, until late, until it was too dim to see the heaps of their coats used as goalposts, and their shouts bounced eerily against a sky slipping higher and higher away from them behind the dark.

Toby went to fetch the ball from behind some bushes and found a small cairn of pale stones, each about hand-sized, neatly built in a concealed place between the bushes and a wall. The pile was as high as his knees; he almost fell over it, looking for the ball. He crouched down beside it and began taking off the stones one by one to find out what was underneath. He could hear the other boys calling, and then one of them broke through the bushes and breathed strenuously down at him.

— Where’s the ball, Tobe, man?

— I want to find what’s underneath.

— Underneath wha’?

The boy bent down to watch Toby’s painstaking dismantling. The others pushed in and soon they were all, five of them, pressed into the awkward space between the bushes and the wall, watching. You could see the stones because they were pale in the murky light, like Toby’s hands moving them.

— Who made it? one of them asked.

— Fuck knows.

— Where’d they get those fucking stones from anyway?

— I can’t see, Toby complained sharply back across his shoulder at one point, and they moved obediently out of what light was left. Afterward he thought incredulously sometimes of this moment of command and obedience; afterward, when through his long illness and absence he had lost his place in the hierarchy of boys and did not know any longer how to speak to them in a way that would effect any response or claim attention.

Under the last stones of the cairn lay something wrapped up in thick plastic. The boys squatted around it, portentous with the mystery. One of them twisted suddenly to look behind them through the gap in the bushes.

— What if someone comes?

— It’s a gun, another said.

But it wasn’t.

Toby unfolded the plastic cautiously and the last light found a pale gleam in the shining head of a new ax. He picked it up by its handle and felt the sheathed smoothness of thick-varnished wood.

— There’s blood on it! one of them said hoarsely, playacting their fears and frightening himself. Toby dropped the ax hastily onto the plastic. They all recoiled; a clotted shadow stuck to it might not be merely shadow.

— Fuck off, he said, and picked it up again, turning its head this way and that. It was quite clean. He weighed it on his palm: heavy, and cold, and with a film of grease.

* * *

THE BOYS in the gang, although each had a family life that was quite distinctive and unrepeatable, belonged together in a social class apart from the one Toby’s family belonged to, and Toby was anxiously aware of this separation and of himself dissimulating it. Kingsmile was a mixed area of the city; the big cheap houses appealed to a few “arty” families, as Toby’s mother called them (the word would never have passed Toby’s lips), but most of them were turned into flats and bed-sits and student rooms. Since Toby had been playing out on the street, facts that had once been merely the warm enfolding substance of his life — his father the ceramicist, his mother with wings of long hair who sat cross-legged on the floor and rolled her own cigarettes — had to be steered around, the other boys had to be distracted from them. “He makes mugs and stuff,” Toby threw out when pressed, with calculated roughness, as if it were as incomprehensible to him as it was to them. He wished he lived in a home where the television was always on; he wished his mother would buy big plastic bottles of blue pop.

Nonetheless the crowd of boys spent a lot of time in Toby’s room, because no one in that house ever questioned their coming or going, no one bothered to catch them out smoking cigarettes. The house was already full anyway, with a constant stream of visitors; the doorbell and the phone were constantly ringing, mostly for Toby’s two older half sisters from his father’s first marriage. The other boys never said a word against Toby’s parents, but still his shoulders went into a hunch of embarrassment when he led the sheepish file past his father’s workshop or his parents drinking wine at the oversized kitchen table.

It was to Toby’s dad they took the ax.

First they carefully rebuilt the cairn. They were all agreed they should not put the ax back.

— If it was just for cutting wood why would they hide it here? Al said sensibly. So Toby rewrapped it in its plastic and smuggled it out under his shirt, the others crowding around him for camouflage. No one mentioned what they all imagined, that whoever owned the ax and had hidden it might be watching them, and might be enraged at this disruption to his plan, whatever it was. Solemnly they collected up their coats and gear and accompanied Toby home. Leaving the grassed area, they had to walk along beside the high wall of a disused small engineering works before they turned into the street before Toby’s street: involuntarily, they kept glancing upward, half expecting to see Him outlined maniacally against the sky, crouched on the top of the wall where broken glass was set into concrete, poised to throw himself upon them and reclaim his property.

Toby’s mother had been crying.

The bottle of wine between his parents on the table was empty, they hadn’t cleared up the meal around them, the salad was wilting into its dressing. Toby wasn’t embarrassed by the mess but wished it had been something more normal than salad and vegetable crumble. His mother blotted her cheeks with the backs of her hands, then with a tea towel. The black lines she always drew inside her lower eyelids were smudged and there were flecks of black in the tears in her eyes; her lips and teeth were stained blue by the wine.

— Do you want anything to eat, darling? There’s plenty left. Anybody hungry?

The others refused politely; bringing the ax out from under his shirt, Toby didn’t deign to reply. He addressed his father.

— We found this. We reckon we should take it to the police. It wasn’t just lost, it was purposely hidden.

His father looked as if he had to draw his mind from far away to attend to their package, but also as if he was pleased to have it drawn. He stood up in his slow and powerful way (at least there was that; he was six foot two and thirteen stone and used to box for his college), combing his fingers hard up into his chin through his beard. Toby’s half sisters said he did that when he felt the world was against him and he was willfully misunderstood: they had the whole repertoire of his gestures decoded.

— Now, he said, in his rumbling big voice. Found what? Where?

They unwrapped their trophy from its layers of soft thick opaque plastic, they explained the strangeness of their finding it. The new ax looked brash against the old pine table.

— But I expect it’s just a tool someone’s bought and wrapped up to keep it dry, Dad said. We need to take it back to him.

— If he was going to chop wood with it, why hide it under a pile of stones? Foggles repeated what Al had said earlier. Usually they didn’t talk much to parents, but in the importance of the moment the boys were forthcoming and serious.

— And he specially brought the stones. There’s no stones round where he hid it. He must have brought them on purpose.

— It’s like he didn’t want to keep it at home, in case anyone saw.

— You shouldn’t have touched it, Tobe, Haggis said. Police might want to fingerprint.

Dad smiled knowingly into his beard but he didn’t pick the ax up.

— I don’t know if the police’ll really be very interested. There haven’t actually been many ax murders round here recently.

— It’s interesting, Toby’s mother said, that we all assume it belongs to a man, planning violence against a woman.

His dad didn’t look at her. — Do we all assume that, Naomi? I don’t think I’m assuming anything.

— Well, that’s what I’m picking up. That’s what we’re all imagining. Some man planning some horrible secret thing, some way of hurting and destroying someone close to him. Somehow that’s what it makes me think of, the horrible ugly thing. It’s like a sign, a sign of cruelty and abuse. I don’t even want it in the house. Seizing the tea towel again, she turned her back on them all and started opening another bottle of wine.

There were a few moments of polite apologetic silence, while the boys let the woman’s words pass. Toby’s dad rested his ten fingers on the edge of the table, his head slightly bowed. (The girls said this meant he was reflecting sorrowfully on the bottomlessness of his extraordinary patience.)

— So what d’you reckon we ought to do with it, Dad?

— I still think it’s a tool somebody bought and wrapped up to stop it from rusting. Maybe whoever prunes the trees at the park.

Naomi snorted over her corkscrew. With an ax?

— Well, we’ll take it to the police tomorrow. See what they say. What shall I do with it for now? Naomi?

She shook her head in abandonment without turning around.

— In the shed, OK? Everybody happy?

He rewrapped the package with that scrupulously responsible concentration he always brought to minor domestic tasks, managing to communicate at once (the girls said) extreme willingness to do his bit with the helplessness of the creative artist who couldn’t be expected to do it very often.

He and Toby took the ax to the police station the next day. The police were as mystified as they were, wrote the details down on a form, and kept the ax. Haggis, who was often off school and who lived alone with his mother in a flat overlooking the place where they played football, said he saw a policeman poking about once behind the shrubs where Toby had found the cairn. Three months later, when everyone had forgotten about it, a card from the police arrived at Toby’s house saying the ax had not been claimed in the meantime and therefore if they wanted it they could collect it.

They didn’t want it, of course. Particularly, they didn’t want it, because in the meantime Toby’s dad, Graham, had left Naomi and Toby and Clare and Tamsin and had gone to live with the woman who would become his third wife, and with whom he would go on to have three more children even though he was already in his fifties.

Also they didn’t want it because Toby had started, shortly after the night they found the ax, to be ill. He began by suffering from headaches and a general feeling of weakness and malaise. For several months their general practitioner insisted he was malingering. Probably he thought it was something Naomi was making up or was producing in her son as a hysterical response to her husband’s leaving her. Naomi at that time would not have inspired confidence in her powers of diagnosis or in her authority as a responsible mother. Every night she drank a bottle of wine. She once went over to where Graham was living with his new girlfriend and stood yelling her opinion of them in the street and threw the bottle and broke a window (in the wrong flat, as it turned out). Another night she took an overdose of pills, and although she almost immediately threw them up again Clare and Tamsin called an ambulance just in case. She gave up the job she had had in a shop specializing in Native American crafts, and the household had to manage on social security and whatever Graham gave them, which wasn’t much and was naturally another source of grievance.

It was suddenly a very female and a very aggrieved household. Naomi and her two stepdaughters talked and talked about Graham and his vanity and his weakness and his lust and his selfishness and his fear of aging until the conversation ached and winced and they couldn’t bear to touch it anymore, for a few hours at least. Clare and Tamsin wouldn’t have anything to do with their father for almost two years. (It was the babies that coaxed them around to a reconciliation in the end.) Even Marian, the first wife and Clare’s and Tamsin’s mother (they lived with her at weekends), came around and joined in the “Graham conversation,” as the girls called it, on one or two occasions.

But Naomi knew there was really something wrong with Toby. In the mornings when she struggled out of her poisoned drunken sleep to get him up for school, she was at least sensible enough to tell the difference between an ordinary unhappy boy and this listless deadweight huddled under his Star Wars duvet. He even smelled sick.

— Darling, she said, her tongue thick with shaming fur, the broken pieces of her life taking up their swollen lurid waking places in her mind. Just describe to me exactly how it hurts, and where.

But he only moved his head once in frowning denial, not opening his eyes, his mouth clamped shut, keeping her out.

In the doctor’s surgery, her puffy pale face without makeup and her velvet skirt stained and crumpled, she insisted on knowing which tests could be done to find out what was the matter. The doctor even joked that she should try some herbal remedies or Red Indian charms. In the end the tests showed that Toby had a form of viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, and he was off school for two years, with almost constant pain in his head and all over his body. He spent months in hospital, because the encephalitis weakened his immune system and made him prone to other illnesses; he had pneumonia twice. Naomi lost interest in the Graham conversation. She cut down her drinking; whenever Toby was in hospital she slept every night there too; she was silent, fixated, dull company except when she was talking to other mothers with ill children. The girls moved back to live full time with Marian.

At one point when Toby was very ill, his name was mentioned in Assembly at school and his class collected money for flowers. Two or three years later when he was better, he once bumped into Haggis (Haggis’s real name was James, and that was how Toby hailed him from across the street). Toby and Naomi had moved to a flat in a different part of the city, and Toby had started back at a different school. Haggis looked surprised to see him and told him they had all assumed that he had died.

* * *

WHEN TOBY was twenty he went away to University, where he studied for a Visual Arts degree specializing in film and video. When he came home at the end of his final year he planned to spend some of the summer with his mother and some with Clare and her husband and children, before he went off traveling with his camera. Naomi had moved again since he’d last seen her and had got out of an abusive relationship with a man with a mental health problem (before that there had been a married businessman who imported shoes). She was now living with another woman, Angie. Tamsin couldn’t deal with it and wouldn’t visit them, but Clare said it was a good thing. She said Naomi had fallen into a pattern of being treated badly by the men she got involved with, and this relationship with Angie was a sign of her wanting to break that pattern. She said women were kinder to women than men ever were, more appreciative and gentle and sensitive; and Naomi’s choice of Angie was a sign that at least she wasn’t willing her own destruction anymore.

Naomi picked Toby up from the bus station in her old Citroen. The car was as scruffy as ever and she had to move paper tissues, empty crisps packets, a Tampax box, secateurs, and rolling tobacco efore he could get into the front seat, but she looked pretty. She was wearing an embroidered silky top and jeans; she had had her hair cut shoulder length, and, as Clare said, it made her look younger because she didn’t look as if she was trying to. The lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth were still there, but crinkled with smiling. She was buoyant and childish and seemed rather overexcited, unlike his usual idea of her: small, dark, concentrated with suffering. Her silver earrings had some sort of symbol that might be a lesbian thing; Toby didn’t mind, as long as she didn’t try to corner him with it and make him say something.

— We’re nearly there. Look, Toby!

They were driving around a mini-roundabout at the end of a suburban street; an improvised banner was tied between two young trees. In red paint on a white torn sheet was written, WELCOME HOME, TOBY MENGES, BA!

There were tears in her eyes.

— Did you see, sweetheart? Realize how proud of you we are? Let’s go round again, what the hell!

This time she sounded the horn, blaring out one of the rhythms he used to clap at football matches with his friends. A car following them onto the roundabout sounded its horn too, probably in protest rather than sympathy.

Toby’s face was hot, he stared ahead, blinkered with embarrassment.

— The banner was Angie’s idea. She hung it up last night, after it was dark. We were just praying it wouldn’t rain. She was so determined it would be the first thing you’d see.

Angie and Naomi had found the house together; it was a maisonette, with a front door up concrete steps around the side of a white-painted nineteen-thirties semidetached. It didn’t look like Naomi’s usual sort of place — not “arty”—but the gardens were full of flowers and there were trees everywhere, as if the suburb had been tucked inside a little wood. Angie was waiting for them at the top of the steps before the car had even stopped. She was small and slight like Naomi, but younger and more definite; when they were together Naomi seemed dreamier and vaguer than she really was. Angie had short-cut hair and very bright eyes with a distinctive extra fold of firm flesh beneath them that made them pixielike; her glances, like all her gestures, were quick and pointed and compact.

— Hello, Toby, she said, reaching out a small cool brown hand laden with silver rings. She had a butterfly tattooed on her upper arm and another one appliquéd onto her sleeveless white vest. Meet Angie: I’m the new light in your mother’s life. We’re both very proud of you.

Toby felt large as an elephant — or perhaps a giraffe — between them in their little home. Their tables and chairs only seemed to reach somewhere around his knees, and he kept walking into doorframes as though they were built to a different scale. They had baked him a cake with three candles for the three years of his degree and decorated it with the University logo, which he didn’t recognize until they pointed it out. The sitting room was hung with paper chains and balloons and more WELCOME HOME banners; it was very tidy and bright and full of plants and pictures; there was even a color scheme, with a blue sofa (which would turn into a bed for him later), blue curtains, and yellow walls. They got out a bottle of champagne from the fridge. Toby didn’t know how to open it so Angie did, and they drank a toast to him.

— I only got a two-two, he protested, blushing. It’s honestly not worth all this.

— Nonsense, said Naomi, putting her arm around his waist and her head against his chest. We’ve had such hard times and such a lot of bad luck. Now everything’s turning out to be for the best. Here’s to you, my brilliant boy. Here’s to us. Isn’t this a bit better than where you last saw me?

— I’d say so, said Angie. Better than that dump.

Naomi and Angie had planned out the whole evening. They showed Toby around the garden, which belonged to the owners who lived downstairs but which they were allowed to use. It was a big garden, rather neglected, overtaken by clumps of pampas grass and wandering up among trees at its far end.

— I’d love to get to work out here, said Naomi, who was good at plants. Perhaps they’ll let us put a few things in and do a bit of tidying up.

— Perhaps, said Angie tolerantly, if we get the time.

Then there were cocktails and hot homemade appetizers, followed by vegetarian lasagna and expensive ice cream. And for after dinner they had rented a video, Shine, which they thought would be suitable.

— I know you’re not into blockbusters, said Angie.

He politely didn’t tell them he’d seen it already, or that he hadn’t liked it.

Over balloon glasses of brandy last thing, when they had pulled out the sofa and made up his bed, Angie explained to Toby that her name wasn’t short for Angela. She had been rushed into hospital when she was only a few hours old, and the nurses had called her Angel because they didn’t think she’d live. A man walking his dog in a park had found her abandoned under a bush, wrapped up in someone’s bloody nightdress. They never found out whose nightdress it was.

— I’m the original babe in the woods, she said. Now, wouldn’t that make a great film? Haven’t I given you a fantastic subject? Complete with a happy ending too.

Naomi poured herself a second brandy. She watched Angie with a private smiling concentration, nursing her glass in her warm palms and breathing the fumes, slightly drunk and exalted. Then she turned to Toby expectantly as if he was their audience and might applaud what she loved and had had displayed for him.

When he settled down to sleep, Toby pulled the duvet tightly up over his ears. Their bedroom opened directly off the sitting room where he lay. He dreaded overhearing Angie making love with his mother (although no more than he had dreaded it with the men).

* * *

ANGIE WORKED with children in a play group run by the local council. Naomi had been doing office work for the Royal Automobile Club for a couple of years now; it was dull but it was safe, it brought the money in, she didn’t hate it. So they were both out all day; they stepped around Toby in his bed in the mornings while they were getting ready and made their arrangements in hurried undertones. When they pulled the door shut behind them at half past eight he sank back down into a sleep that ballooned with relief and lightness into the empty space.

They left him notes in the kitchen: Supper at six-thirty if you’d like some (mushroom risotto); there were boxes to tick for YES or NO. He worried while he ate his cereals over what to put, and how often he could say no without offending them; it was always possible that they felt as grateful as he did on the nights he ate at Clare’s or bought himself chips. When he said yes, he had to spend all day trying to remember to get back in time. There was only one bus from town that came anywhere near the house and it only ran once every hour; if he got out of bed around midday, that didn’t leave him much time for getting things done. If he was late for supper, Angie would be silent and smiling and Naomi overemphatic in her reassurances that it didn’t matter as she hurried to warm things up.

He did have things to do. Each day he set himself one task to accomplish: the travel agent’s to visit, or the doctor’s to organize his inoculations, or some item of clothing to buy, or insurance to arrange. He didn’t always accomplish it. Toby’s “task for the day” became a sort of jokey catchphrase with Angie, and it was true that he wasn’t very good at focusing single-mindedly on his purpose. However much he determined not to be distracted or to allow himself to be waylaid, there must be something in his face that gave away an openness to suggestion like a weakness. Anyone eccentric or garrulous always sat next to him on the bus. People selling political newspapers or giving out religious tracts or tickets for a club homed in on him from across a crowd, also refugees with an album of photographs of torture injuries and a petition to sign that turned out to involve contributing money. He never managed to avoid the eye of the homeless who were selling their Big Issue magazine, so that he always had to stop and explain to them that he didn’t have anything to spare. Then he’d find himself in a long conversation while the crowd flowed past as if he’d never been a part of it, on his way somewhere.

The day he went to see his father he happened to have a book in his pocket that he had just bought from a man selling Socialist Worker; when he had tried to explain that he didn’t want to buy their paper because it seemed to him that their approach to politics was superficial and sloganizing, the man had produced from somewhere inside his coat a book of essays in tiny print on shiny paper, assuring Toby that he would find inside the deep-level analysis he was looking for. Toby accepted it rather than make a fuss, and then the man asked him for two pounds.

Graham got very excited about the book.

— God, I can’t believe that anyone still reads this stuff. Wonderful old Trotskyite nonsense. Listen to this: “Sooner or later, and despite all the immense obstacles on the way, the working class and its allies in other classes will bring into being an authentically democratic social order.” Ah, those were the days. And you paid two pounds? For this? Of course I was in the CP when I was at college. We’d have thought this was dangerous revisionism.

He had to lend Toby two pounds to replace what he’d spent (Toby needed it for bus fare), and he went on reading out sentences about workers and mass movements in delighted irony until the toddler he was minding fell over his baby walker and had to be picked up and consoled. Graham’s third wife, Linda, worked in a psychiatric unit for teenagers and was the family breadwinner; Graham looked after the children, who were nine, five, and two.

— I hear your mother’s having a lesbian fling, Graham said, expertly hoisting his little son’s legs in the air to change his nappy, wiping him with a sequence of torn-off chunks of cotton wool soaked in baby oil that he had laid out ready in a row alongside the plastic changing mat. He was looking austerely patriarchal; his hair and beard had turned a soft clean white. Clare had told Toby that he had played Santa Claus for Daniel’s playgroup, and also that he wasn’t selling much work. ‘Whether it’s because he’s not producing much, or because nobody wants it, we’re not sure.’

— Yes, kind of, said Toby.

— Poor old Naomi! Why can nothing ever be straightforward with her? Still holding up the baby’s feet, he spread a clean nappy deftly underneath his son’s bottom with his big right hand. And is it all going to end in tears as usual?

— They’ve got a nice flat, Toby said.

— In Leigh Mills, of all places! Frightfully respectable.

— It’s got a nice garden.

— I’m sure it’s all very nice. But rather her than me.

Graham and Linda still lived in Kingsmile, near where Graham and Naomi had once lived together; but it had changed, and most of the big houses that had been bed-sits and student rooms had been renovated and repainted, their floors sanded, and the old fireplaces put back in. On the way to catch his bus (Graham had wanted to drive him back but had to pick up his nine-year-old daughter from ballet), Toby walked past the scrap of park where he used to play football with his friends before he got ill. A few boys now were scuffling or riding their bikes desultorily in and out of the trees. The trees were fatter and heavier, and the boys had expensive bikes and names like Dominic and Jake and Noah.

* * *

TOBY GOT HIMSELF so entangled with a couple of young evangelists that he ended up spending an evening at a house where one of them lived, not an ordinary family house but something like a youth hostel for religious young people. Different residents, lots of them African and South East Asian students, came and went during the evening, heating themselves solitary suppers in the microwave. They didn’t seem to know one another very well. Notices on pieces of paper were taped onto cupboard doors in the kitchen: instructions, complaints about stolen food or washing up, and a fluorescent poster for a concert, Christ Takes the Rap. The kitchen had a sickly smell like margarine.

Toby had been invited, without quite realizing it, to a sort of prayer meeting. When the two young men had stopped him in town, asking him how he felt about consumerism and materialism, he had given them his telephone number without thinking, trying to get rid of them without seeming rude. Then when they rang him at Angie and Naomi’s flat, he had thought he’d better agree to meet them somewhere in order to explain that it would be awkward if they kept telephoning him because it was his mother’s number. He found himself sitting drinking instant coffee with seven or eight others around a bare Formica table under a central light. Only one of them lived in the house, and they were not all young. There was a man with a gray goatee and a paisley cravat whose wife had died of cancer (rather a long time ago, it turned out), and a middle-aged woman who was a buyer for Marks & Spencer’s and said reproachfully she wished she’d thought to bring some “snacks.”

Toby listened to them talk. He didn’t recognize their experience; he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to feel as they felt that God was involved intimately in every tiny twist and turn of their experience, as interested in their lives as they were, partaking of their hopes and anxieties and indignations. Outnumbered by them, he wondered how they could possibly all be wrong. The buyer described how her faith had helped her to her latest promotion at work. The young man who lived in the hostel explained how God had given him a sign that he was to leave his college course in business studies and find work helping in the community (he hadn’t really found it yet, apart from stopping people in town and asking them how they felt about materialism). A girl from a family of refugees from Laos told how her secret prayers (her mother disapproved of her conversion) had ended in her father’s release after fifteen years in a reeducation camp. The man with the goatee said that his wife’s spirit often visited him, touching him and reassuring him as he went around doing the housework that she used to do.

There was something attractive and disquieting about how casually they used words like faith and spirit and love and how they mixed together fantastic assumptions of God’s reality and agency with ordinary everyday know-how. Toby contemplated the possibility that perhaps the world really was this shimmering yielding fabric of opportunity and love and he was simply closed to it. With a banality that irritated him, he kept coming back in his mind to the question of the shower rail he had broken in Angie and Naomi’s bathroom the other day, grabbing it and ripping it out from the wall when he slipped under the shower because he’d forgotten to put the rubber bath mat down. There was no possibility — even if he prayed, even if God was real, even if there was a transcendent redeeming meaning to life and death — that that shower rail could be back in the wall and never have come out, that the big dirty holes in the plaster, full of a mess of screws and Rawl plugs, could be unmade, or that his mother could have not rushed in and looked at the disaster with such a frightened face (Angie was out). We could pretend I did it, she had said.

This was a trivial point, he knew. He knew such trivial things could be interpreted as mere distractions from a larger theme. But he felt it nonetheless as a blockage, a stopping point that prevented his seeing God’s transformations. It was the real small accidental things that happened in time, he felt, that could not be altered or loosened. And he felt those real small things as implacably strong, stronger than all the rest.

There was only one thing he could think of from his own experience to proffer modestly alongside all the signs and instructions and intimations these other lives had bristled with. Occasionally when he was facing a flat surface, a door or a wall — and especially when he was tired — he saw a brilliant flickering on it like the reflection of a conflagration behind him; when he looked quickly, instinctively, over his shoulder, there was never anything there. He wondered for a while whether to mention it. Then he decided not to. Told baldly, it would seem pretty insignificant. And he had always known it might only be a trick of the brain left over from his illness.

* * *

ONE SATURDAY, after he had been staying there for about a fortnight, Toby came back to the maisonette at suppertime and found the door open at the top of the concrete steps. Outside the door were some gardening things: trays of bedding plants, a trowel with soil stuck to it, muddy gardening gloves. From inside he could hear Angie’s voice. He thought she might be telling one of her funny stories, because his mother didn’t reply and Angie’s voice was pitched rather exuberantly rhetorical. When he got to the top of the steps he stopped, embarrassed, not quite able to make out what was going on inside. The room was shadowy at first in contrast to the bright summer’s afternoon. The white of Angie’s sleeveless sweatshirt came and went in the shadows.

At first he thought it was sex. His mother was lying on her back on the floor, Angie crouched astride her, athletic in tight leggings, taking her weight on her arms when she hung over Naomi, then banging down hard onto her, crotch to crotch. They were both fully clothed. Naomi was lying with her head away from the door, Toby couldn’t see her face or Angie’s; Angie had her back to him. When Angie brought her weight down hard on Naomi, Naomi’s feet leaped weakly in the old stained canvas espadrilles she kept for gardening.

He realized it wasn’t sex, it was violence.

— He doesn’t make his bed, Angie was saying in a tone of mock surprised delight, banging down on Naomi once for each separate complaint. He puts the sofa back, but he just bundles up the sheet and duvet on top of it. The wastepaper basket’s full of his nasty tissues. He leaves a scum of shaving foam around the sink. He leaves the tap running. When he washes up he puts all the pans to soak and then doesn’t do them in the morning. His trainers stink the place out. He puts his dirty clothes in the basket and expects you to wash them, even though he’s here all day with fuck all to do. And he’s been smoking in here. Apart from the stench, I found the butts. Didn’t you hear me ask him not to smoke? Didn’t you?

Toby thought his mother might be dead.

Then, while Angie hung over her, weight balanced on her arms, Naomi turned herself over in one movement, face down onto the floor, wrapping her arms around her head, crying abandonedly.

— You see? said Angie, thumping down on her again, making Naomi bounce and give out a sobbing grunt. Didn’t I?

Then Toby saw, very clearly, a package lying on the carpet beside the two women, wrapped in soft thick opaque plastic, real with the banality of real solid things. He looked at it without recognition for a few seconds, but curiously, wondering what it had to do with the scene. As soon as he remembered what it was and was properly astonished at seeing it there, it disappeared.

Angie was rocking more gently now on top of Naomi, back and forward and from side to side. The crying grew duller and quieter. Angie bent forward and spoke in a different, coaxing, tone into the hair on the back of Naomi’s neck.

— So what are you going to do? she said huskily, as if it was a tease Naomi would enjoy too. What are you going to do with him? Come on.

Toby retreated down the steps. He tried not to crunch the gravel on the path to the front of the house. The leaves of the trees dappling the bright sunshine as he made his way through the suburban street reminded him of what he’d just been watching, as if he were seeing it on film.

— That neanderthal, Angie had also said. The graduate. You’ve got to be joking.

It occurred to him that from inside the shadowy room the doorway must have been a brilliant oblong of light, and that when he stood blocking it he must have cast a deep film-noir shadow, changing everything inside. His mother might have had her eyes closed all that time. She might have. But Angie had surely known that he was standing there.

THANKS TO Shelagh Weeks and Deborah Gregory, for reading and helping. Thanks to all my friends and colleagues at Bath Spa University College, who love writing and take it seriously. Thanks to Richard Francis, who was not only generous with his time but also knew what to do next, and to Caroline Dawnay, Joy Harris, Dan Franklin, and Jennifer Barth, in whom I trust.