Human Croquet Part 7

'And what are you going to tell people?' Gordon asks incredulously.

'I'll just say it's mine.'

'Yours?' Gordon asks.

'Yes, I'll say it was a home delivery [which I suppose is true]. n.o.body will know.' Debbie is fat enough to have had a baby without anybody knowing and you do hear about people giving birth without expecting to standing at the cooker heating milk one minute, the next a parent. 'People believe anything you tell them,' Debbie says. 'And we'll just say, "We've been so disappointed in the past that we didn't want to talk about it too much and spoil our luck." And look how lucky we are,' she adds, and starts to make baby talk to the baby that's such drivel that it drives Vinny from the room. The baby looks as though given half a chance it would be off as well. 'People don't care, Gordon,' Debbie says crossly when he starts objecting again, 'n.o.body cares what anybody does, not really. You can get away with murder and n.o.body would notice.' Gordon flinches and stares at the baby.

I suppose, in a way, it is like murder for every one murder that's discovered there are probably twenty that pa.s.s unremarked. The same is probably true of babies, for every one you hear about that's been abandoned on a doorstep there are probably twenty taken in with the milk.

'He's hungry, poor chap,' Gordon says, visibly softening.

'It's a her, silly,' Debbie says (in her element now), unwrapping her baby gift to show Gordon, for the baby did not come naked to the doorstep of Arden, it came carefully gift-wrapped in a shawl as white as snow and as full of c.o.c.klesh.e.l.ls as the sea.

There's more to photosynthesis than meets the eye really, isn't there? I'm thinking this as I walk along Chestnut Avenue on the way to the morning bus. It's the basic alchemy of all life the gold of the sun trans.m.u.ting into the green of life. And back again for the trees on Chestnut Avenue have turned to autumn gold, a treasure of leaves drifting down on the pavements. Everything in the whole world seems capable of turning into something else.

And perhaps there's no such place as nowhere even thin air is still something. (Composition of the atmosphere on the streets of trees: 78 per cent nitrogen, 21 per cent oxygen and 1 per cent the trace elements the wail of the banshee, the howl of the wolf, the cries of the disappeared.) Everything dies, but gets transformed into something else dust, ash, humus, food for the worms. Nothing ever truly ceases to exist, it just becomes something else, so it can't be lost for ever. Everything that dies comes back one way or another. And maybe people just come back as new people maybe the baby's the reincarnation of someone else?

The molecules of one thing split apart and team up with different molecules and become something else. There's no such thing as nothing, after all unless it's the great void of s.p.a.ce and perhaps even there are more things than are dreamt of in our philosophy. (Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.) Perhaps there are molecules of time that we don't know about yet invisible, rarefied molecules that look nothing like ping-pong b.a.l.l.s and perhaps the molecules of time can rearrange themselves and send you flying off in any direction, past, future, maybe even a parallel present.

Eunice is waiting for me at the corner of the street, looking pointedly at her watch the usual dumbshow of punctual people who want to display their moral superiority to their unpunctual friends (how much easier if the punctual people just turned up late). The clocks have recently changed, a day late in our inefficient household where we never know whether time is going forwards or backwards. 'Spring forward, fall back,' Eunice chants. 'Daylight saving' what an amazing idea. (If only you could, but where would you keep it? With the time that's found? Or the time that's kept? A treasure chest, or a hole in the ground?) 'You're late,' Eunice says.

'Better than never,' I reply irritably. Audrey's already waiting at the bus-stop. 'Look,' I say to her as I spot a red squirrel helter-skeltering around one of the solid sycamores and Eunice is prompted to explain to us in great detail why this is impossible as there are no red squirrels in Glebelands. (Perhaps it's Ratatosk who runs up and down the great ash Ysggadril?) Eunice launches into a lecture about the differences between red and grey squirrels when Audrey absent-mindedly ventures, 'Not just the difference between red and grey then?'

I watch a red-gold leaf drift down and catch on Audrey's hair. It gives me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. I have to say something to Audrey. I have to say something about the baby, about the c.o.c.klesh.e.l.l shawl which Debbie handed swiftly over to our waste disposal unit (Vinny), to be burnt on a bonfire and which my memory now questions ever having seen. ('What happened to that lovely shawl you were knitting for your niece in South Africa?' I ask Mrs Baxter casually. 'Oh, I finished it,' she says, pleased at the memory, 'and sent it off in the post.' So there you go.) 'Here's the bus,' Eunice announces as if we can't see for ourselves the red double-decker steaming up Sycamore Street towards our bus-stop, its final outpost before it turns around and heads back into town.

And then I watch it disappear before my eyes.

'Hang on a minute,' I say, turning to Audrey in amazement to see if she's witnessed this extraordinary vanishing act but, lo and behold, she's gone too. And Eunice. And the bus-stop and the pavements, houses, trees, aerials, rooftops ... the past has come crashing through into the present again without a by-your-leave.

I'm standing in the middle of an impenetrable thicket of Scots pine, birch and aspen, of English elm and wych elm, common hazel, oak and holly, stranded in the middle of a great green ocean. It might not be the past, of course instead of time-travelling I might simply have travelled been picked up by some giant, invisible hand and deposited down again in the middle of a great wildwood. But it feels like the past, it feels as if the clocks have gone right back to the beginning of time, the time when there was still magic locked in the land. On the other hand, I can't have gone back much more than twelve million years, give or take a second or two, if Miss Thompsett's history of photosynthesis is correct. (Most of the trees we know today were in existence by twelve million years ago.) I pick up a leaf skeleton. It is autumn in the past too. The mouldering mushroom smell of decay is in my nostrils. A dark blanket of green ivy covers the ground. It is incredibly quiet, the only sound is birdsong. Even the sweet birds singing hidden in the trees only contribute to the peace in their great forest cathedral. Perhaps I'm not at the beginning of time, but at the end, when all the people have gone and the forest has reclaimed the earth.

I like it here, it's more restful than the present, wherever that is. I shall gather nuts and berries and make myself a nest in the hollow of a tree and become as nimble as a squirrel in my great sylvan home. Does this forest have an end, does it have distinct boundaries where the trees stop, or does it go on for ever, curling like a leafy shawl around the earth, making an infinity of the great globe?

But then, sadly, I am ripped out of my new Eden by the number 21 bus smashing through the wildwood in a great cracking and splintering of branches, sending leaves flying up in the air. The bus rolls towards me and stops. The ancient wood has vanished. I am back at the bus-stop.

'Izzie?' Audrey says, stepping on to the platform of the bus. 'Come on.' I climb on board and listen to the conductor ringing the bell and the engine revving noisily and proffer my fare with a sigh. How phlegmatic I am in the face of unravelling time.

I look at Audrey sitting next to me, reading over her French grammar, and say nothing. We all have our own secrets to keep, I suppose.

Why am I dropping into random pockets of time and then popping back out again? Am I really doing it or am I imagining I'm doing it? Is this some kind of episte-mological ordeal I've been set? I should never have tried to kill time. I wasted it and now it's wasting me.

If I had more control it might be useful I could go back and put all my money on the three o'clock winner at Sandown or patent the electric lightbulb, or any one of the usual fantasies of would-be time-travellers. Or more thrilling I could go back and meet my mother. ('You could meet her now if you had her address,' Debbie says, rather sarcastically.) I finger the leaf skeleton in my hand it wouldn't really stand up as evidence in court, it looks exactly like one I could have picked up a minute ago on the streets of trees.

It's Hallowe'en and Carmen is sitting on my bed painting her toenails in a lurid shade called 'Frosted Grape' that make her feet look as if someone's pulled her toe-nails out with pliers. The Dog's sprawled on the floor trying to ignore Eunice who's explaining the evolution of the wolf into the domestic canine. 'See this tail,' she says, picking up the Dog's thin tail to demonstrate and which he immediately whips away from her in horror.

When she's finished martyring her toenails, Carmen does mine, a task made more difficult by the fact that the only light in the room is coming from the candlelit eyes and ghoulish grin of a turnip lantern that is sitting on the window-sill to light the way for the dead into the house.

Carmen is deep in preparation for her marriage to Bash. 'You don't think you should wait a bit?' I ask doubtfully.

'Oh come on I'm sixteen, I'm not a child,' Carmen says, pushing a huge gobstopper from one side of her mouth to the other. When will I find someone who thinks enough about me to take me to the Gaumont on King Street, let alone marry me? 'Oh, it'll happen to you one day,' Carmen says airily. 'It happens to everyone you fall in love, you get married, you have kids, that's what you do ... someone will come along.'

('Oh, one day,' Mrs Baxter says, equally a.s.sured, 'your prince will come [she almost breaks into song] and you'll fall in love and be happy.' But what if the prince that came looked like Mr Baxter, all rusty armour and gimlet visor?) But no-one will ever want me once they find out how mad I am. And anyway I don't want 'someone', I want Malcolm Lovat.

How shall I kill Hilary? Fly agaric? Aconite slipped from a ring on my finger? Bash her skull in like a boiled egg or a beechnut? Or better still take her with me when I next fly through time and dump her in the pre-shampoo past, twelfth-century Mongolia say. That would teach her.

'What do boys see in Hilary?' Eunice says dismissively. 'So OK she's got long blond hair and big blue eyes and a perfect figure but what else has she got going for her?' (Eunice is annoyed with Hilary because she's beaten her in a chemistry test.) 'Hmm? What else?' Carmen explains patiently to her that that's enough for most boys. She fishes in her handbag for a packet of ten Player's No 6 and shakes out cigarettes on my bed. 'Go on,' she urges Eunice, 'it won't kill you.'

We suck on cigarettes. Carmen also manages to stuff in a mint, elliptical rather than round (perhaps if her mouth stopped working for more than a minute she would die). Audrey is, as usual, absent. 'What's wrong with Audrey?' Carmen asks.

'She's got flu again.'

'No, I mean what's wrong with her?' Somewhere in the depths of the house the baby cries. 'How's she getting on?' Carmen asks, c.o.c.king her head in the direction of what I suppose she intends to be Debbie.

'Well ... it's hard to explain exactly. She's kind of loopy.'

'That happened to my mother after she had every one of us,' Carmen says, 'it goes away. Women's trouble,' she adds with a knowing sigh. I don't think Debbie's loopiness is going to go away, the baby is now the only person in her immediate family whom she doesn't think has been replaced by an accurate replica of themselves. The baby's squalls grow louder (in some ways it reminds me of Vinny) and all of a sudden the scent of sadness pa.s.ses me by like a cold draught of air and I shiver.

'Someone walk over your grave?' Carmen says sympathetically.

'That's a ridiculous saying,' Eunice says (Eunice would be happier if words could be replaced by chemical formulas and algebraic equations). 'You'd have to be dead in order to be in your grave, but you're sitting here alive in the present.'

'The living dead,' Carmen says cheerfully, stuffing lemon bon-bons into her mouth. Maybe we're all the living dead, reconst.i.tuted from the dust of the dead, like mud pies. The cries of the baby upsets my invisible ghost, making it waver and shimmer on the spiritual wavelength like an invisible aurora borealis. 'What's that funny smell?' (Spirit of health? Or goblin d.a.m.ned?) Carmen asks, sniffing the air suspiciously.

'Just my ghost.'

'Ghosts,' Eunice scoffs, 'there's no such thing, it's a completely irrational fear. Phasmophobia.'

But I'm not afraid of my ghost. He or she is like an old friend, a comfortable shoe. Phasmophilia.

'That sounds perfectly disgusting,' Eunice says, making a face which does nothing for her.

When they go, I put the light on and get down to my Latin homework. Lying on my bed, to the accompaniment of Radio Luxembourg on my little Phillips transistor, kindly bought for me by Charles for my birthday, on his staff discount.

Unfortunately, the message on the radio airwaves is as blue as blue can be Ricky Valance telling Laura he loves her, Elvis Presley asking me if I'm lonesome tonight (yes, yes) and Roy Orbison declaring that only the lonely know how he feels (I do, I do). I roll over on my back and stare at the cracks on my ceiling. It seems I have been cast from a purely melancholic mould. I'm half sick of shadows, I really am.

I have to translate Ovid. In Metamorphoses you can't move for people turning into swans, heifers, bears, newts, spiders, bats, birds, stars, partridges and water, lots of water. That's the trouble with having G.o.d-like powers, it's too tempting to use them. If I had meta-morphic powers I'd be employing them at every opportunity Debbie would have been turned into an a.s.s long ago, and Hilary would be hopping about as a frog.

And me, I am a daughter of the sun, turned by grief into something strange. For homework, I'm translating the story of Phaeton's sisters, a story of nature green in bud and leaf. Phaeton's sisters who mourned so much for their charred brother that they turned into trees imagine their feelings as they found their feet were fast to the earth, turning, even as they looked, into roots. When they tore their hair they found their hands were full, not of hair, but of leaves. Their legs were trapped inside tree-trunks, their arms formed branches and they watched in horror as bark crept over their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and stomachs. Clymene, their poor mother, frantically trying to pull the bark off her daughters, instead snapped their fragile branches and her tree-daughters cried out to her in pain and terror, begging her not to hurt them any more.

Then slowly, slowly, the bark crept over their faces, until only their mouths remained and their mother rushed from one to another, kissing her daughters in a frenzy. Then, at last, they bid their mother one last terrible farewell before the bark closed over their lips for ever. They continued to weep even when turned into trees, their tears dropping into the river flowing at their feet and forming drops of sun-coloured amber.

('Rather an emotional translation, Isobel,' is my Latin teacher's usual verdict.) Only the lonely know how I feel.

Will I ever be happy? Probably not. Will I ever kiss Malcolm Lovat? Probably not. I know this catechism, it leads to the slough of despond and a sleepless night.

The dead, extinguished eyes of the turnip lantern stare at me through the dark as I try to get to sleep.

The dead will be walking abroad now, stepping through the veil from the other world for their annual visit. Perhaps the Widow will be found downstairs, reclaiming her bed from Vinny. Perhaps dead cats are already mewling and purring on the hearthrug and perhaps Lady Fairfax is even now gliding up and down the staircase with her head tucked underneath her arm like a music hall joke.

Where is Malcolm? Why isn't he knocking at my window instead of the cold, hard rain? Where is my mother?

I fall asleep with the smell of woodsmoke in my hair and the scent of sadness coiled around me like a vine, and dream that I'm lost in an endless dark wood, alone and with no rescuer, not even Virgil come to offer me a package holiday to h.e.l.l as my forfeit.

PAST.

BACKWARD PEOPLE.

Isobel was sure someone had just called her name, the echo seemed to linger invisibly in the grey light and she pinched Charles' ear to wake him up. Someone was shouting their names, the voice sounded far away and hoa.r.s.e. Charles stood upright and rammed his cap on his head. 'It's Daddy,' he said. Charles looked careworn, as if on the inside he'd aged several decades since yesterday. The voice drew closer, close enough for them to follow the direction from which it was coming. And then, suddenly, as if he'd just stepped out from a tree that he'd been hiding behind all along there he was, there was Gordon.

He dropped to his knees, his body collapsing with relief, and Isobel stumbled into his arms and burst into tears, but Charles held back, looking on with empty eyes as if he suspected Gordon might be just another woodland mirage. An appearing trick.

'Come on, old chap,' Gordon coaxed softly and held out a hand towards Charles until finally Charles fell against the paternal gabardine breast and started to sob deep, ugly sobs that racked his small body. Gordon laid his cheek against Isobel's curls, so that they formed another wretchedly sentimental tableau ('Where have you been, Daddy dearest?' perhaps). Gordon stared at a tree in front of him as if what he was seeing wasn't a tree but a gibbet.

'Time to go,' Gordon said eventually, reluctantly. Charles sniffed hard and wiped his nose on his sleeve. 'We have to help Mummy,' he said, the urgency of his message punctuated by woebegone hiccups.

Gordon hoisted Isobel up and carried her high on his chest, the other hand holding on to Charles. 'Mummy's all right,' he said and before Charles could protest they were brought up short at the sight of Vinny Vinny whom both of them had completely forgotten about since she'd gone to do you-know-what. She was sitting on a moss-covered tree-stump with her head in her hands. She looked dark and gnarled like some ancient forest-dwelling creature. But when she stood up, with no word of greeting for Charles or Isobel, they could see that she was the same old Vinny and not some mythic creature. 'There you are,' Gordon said, as if he'd just encountered her in the back garden and apparently sharing the same delusion she replied, 'You took your time.' Her thick brown stockings were laddered and she had a scratch on her nose. Perhaps she'd been clawed by a wild animal.

The familiarity of the insides of the black car made them weak with happiness. They inhaled the seat-leather drug, Isobel thought she might die of hunger any minute, thought she might eat the seat-leather, perhaps Charles was thinking the same thing as he ran his hands over the leather of the back seat as if it was still attached to an animal. Their feet dangled above the floor of the car, their socks filthy, their legs latticed by scratches. 'Mummy,' Charles reminded Gordon, who gave him a stiff smile of rea.s.surance in the rear-view mirror. 'Mummy's fine,' he said, pressing his foot down on the accelerator.

They didn't see how she could be fine, she didn't look fine the last time they saw her. Where was she now? 'Where is Mummy?' Charles asked plaintively. Gordon's eyelid tremored slightly and he stuck his indicator out and took a sudden right turn instead of answering. 'Hospital,' he said, after they'd been driving down this new road for a while. 'She's in hospital, they're going to make her better.'

Vinny, who was collapsed in the pa.s.senger seat, looking as if she needed a blood transfusion, came to life for a moment and said, rather groggily, 'Don't worry about her,' and gave a grim little laugh. 'At last, I get to sit in the front,' she added with a sigh and closed her eyes.

Charles took Eliza's shoe out of his pocket where it had been since last night and handed it silently to Gordon who dropped it and nearly lost control of the car. Vinny woke up, s.n.a.t.c.hed the shoe and stuffed it in her bag. By now, the heel was hanging off like a tooth about to drop out.

'Are we going home?' Charles asked after a while.

'Home?' Gordon repeated doubtfully as if this was the last place he was thinking of going. He glanced at Vinny, as if to glean her opinion, but she'd dropped off to sleep and was snoring with relief, so with a heartfelt sigh, Gordon said, 'Yes, we have to go home.'

Back in Arden the Widow made them porridge and bacon and eggs before putting them to bed. 'The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast,' Gordon said, staring gloomily at his bacon and eggs. He cut his bacon up into small pieces and stared at it for a long time before placing a piece in his mouth as if it was a delicate thing that he might damage if he chewed it too hard. After a considerable effort he managed to swallow a piece and then put his knife and fork down as though he would never eat again. Vinny had no such problems and ate her way through breakfast as if a night in the woods was just the thing for giving an edge to your appet.i.te.

The Widow woke them from their dreamless morning's sleep with lunch in bed as if they were invalids. They ate ham sandwiches, the last tomatoes from the greenhouse and lemon Madeira cake and fell asleep again and didn't see the Widow come in and clear away their trays.

At tea-time she roused them again, and they came downstairs for boiled eggs and soldiers of toast followed by leftover apple-pie. Perhaps this would be their lives from now on eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping it was certainly the kind of regime the Widow would approve of for children.

Gordon, Vinny and the Widow sat at the tea-table with them but ate nothing, though the Widow poured endless cups of tea the colour of young copper-beech leaves from the big chrome pot with its green and yellow knitted cosy. Their eggs waited for them in matching green-and-yellow jackets as if they'd just hatched from the teapot. Vinny sipped her tea daintily, her little finger crooked. The Widow observed Charles and Isobel very carefully, everything they did seemed to be of the greatest interest to her.

Charles took the cosy off his egg and hit its rounded skull gently with his teaspoon until it was crazed all over like old china. Gordon, watching intently, made a funny noise, as though his lungs were being squeezed and the Widow said, 'Stop doing that!' to Charles and leant over and sliced the top off his egg for him. She did the same to Isobel's egg and commanded, 'Eat!' and, obediently, Isobel poked a finger of toast into the orange-eyed egg.

The silence, for once, was astonishing no head-nipping from Vinny, no lofty p.r.o.nouncements from the Widow. Only Charles chewing his toast and the funny gulping noise Vinny made when she swallowed her tea. Gordon stared at the tablecloth, lost in some dark dungeon of thought. He looked up occasionally at the thick cotton nets at the bay window as though he was waiting for somebody to step from behind them. Eliza perhaps. But no Eliza was in hospital, the Widow confirmed. Vinny's tongue flickered like a snake whenever Eliza's name was mentioned. Neither Gordon nor Vinny nor the Widow wanted to talk about Eliza. It seemed that n.o.body wanted to talk about anything.

But what had happened? Everything that had seemed so clear yesterday the wood, the fear, the abandonment today seemed elusive, as if the fog that enveloped them last night was still invisibly present. Charles was clinging to the one thing they were sure of absence of Eliza. 'When can we see Mummy?' he asked insistently, his voice reedy with misery. 'Soon,' the Widow said, 'I expect.' Gordon put his hands over his eyes as if he couldn't bear to look at the tablecloth any more.

As if to help him, Vinny cleared away the dishes on a big wooden tray. Vera had been given 'a couple of days off' the Widow said and Vinny whined, 'Well, I hope you don't think I'm going to take her place,' and just to show what a bad servant she would make she managed to drop the entire tray of china before she got to the door. Gordon didn't even look up.

Before they went to bed for the third and last time that day, they came downstairs in their pyjamas to say good-night. The Widow gave them milk and digestive biscuits to take upstairs and in exchange they gave goodnight kisses depositing little bird-pecks on the cheeks of Vinny and the Widow, neither of whom could handle anything more affectionate. The Widow smelt of lavender water, Vinny of coal-tar soap and cabbage. Gordon hugged them one at a time, tight, too tight, so that they wanted to struggle, but didn't. He whispered, 'You'll never know how much I love you,' his moustache tickling their ears.

For a moment Isobel thought she was back in Boscrambe Woods. But then she realized that she'd woken up in her own bed and that the maniac making enormous gestures, like a mad mute, in the semi-darkness was in fact Charles, trying to get her to follow him down to the first-floor landing.

A wand of light beamed through the gap in the curtains and they could hear the familiar prut-prut-prut of the black car's engine. They watched the scene down below from behind the curtains. Gordon (gabardine collar up and hat-brim down like a villain) was standing by the open door of the car, saying something to the Widow that made her give out a little cry and hang on to his lapels, so that Vinny had to prise her off him. Then Gordon got in the car and slammed the door and without looking back drove away from Hawthorn Close.

The same fat lantern moon that had guided them in the wood only twenty-four hours ago, was hung now in the blackness over the streets of trees. At the top of Chestnut Avenue they could see the car pause as if it was deciding whether to go left up Holly Tree Lane or right along Sycamore Street. Then the black car made up its mind and turned left on to the road north, its rear lights disappearing suddenly into the night.

At breakfast next morning, Vinny was still there, cutting big doorsteps of bread and jam and saying, 'I'm going to come and live here for a while and help to look after you.' She waited for them to say something in response to this news but they said nothing because the Widow was always telling them, 'If you can't think of anything nice to say don't say anything at all.'

'Your daddy's had to go away on business,' Vinny continued, looking at them in turn, first one, then the other as if she was checking for signs of disbelief on their faces.

The Widow came into the dining-room and sat down at the breakfast-table. 'Your daddy's had to go away,' she announced hoa.r.s.ely and started to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief which was monogrammed extravagantly (not with 'W' for Widow, but 'C' for Charlotte) and which suddenly reminded Isobel of something. She nearly fell off her chair in the hurry to scramble down from the table. She ran into the hallway, pushing a chair next to the hallstand so that she could reach the pegs, clambered up on to it and slipped her hand into the pocket of the plaid wool coat that had been hanging there ever since they came back from the wood, yesterday morning.

Eliza's handkerchief was still there, neatly folded in its white sandwich-triangle, still emblazoned with its initial, still bearing the traces of Eliza's perfume tobacco and Arpege and something darker, like rotting flower petals and leafmould. By the time Vinny hauled her down from the chair she was hysterical and pulled out a clump of Vinny's hair in the effort to escape her bony clutches. Vinny screamed (the sound of rusty hinges and coffin lids) and gave Isobel a sharp slap on the back of the knee.

'Lavinia!' the Widow rebuked sternly from the dining-room door and Vinny jumped at the tone of the Widow's voice. 'Remember what's just happened,' the Widow hissed in her unlovely daughter's ear. Vinny did an approximation of flouncing and muttered, 'She's better off without her anyway.' In the tussle Vinny managed to wrestle the handkerchief out of Isobel's hand and the Widow bent down and picked up the lace-edged, monogrammed trophy and swiftly tucked it into the stern bosom of her blouse.

In the days after Gordon drove into the night the Widow and Vinny were as nervous as cats. Every car engine, every footstep seemed to put them on the alert. They scoured the newspapers every day as if there might be secret messages hidden in the text. 'I'm a bag of nerves,' the Widow said, jumping and clutching her heart as Vera muttered her way into the dining-room with a tureen of soup.

The Widow tried to be nice to them, but the strain began to show after a while. 'You're such naughty children,' she sighed in exasperation. 'That's what happens to naughty children,' the Widow said, as she locked them in their attic bedroom in the middle of a Sunday afternoon as punishment for some transgression they'd committed. They didn't care, they didn't mind being locked up together. They almost liked it.

They were waiting for Gordon and Eliza to come back. They were waiting for the prut-prut-prut of the black car. They were waiting for Eliza to come home from the hospital. For Gordon to come back from his business trip. Their outer lives continued much as before waking, eating, sleeping, starting school again after the half-term holiday but they could have been robots for all this meant to them. Real time, the time they kept inside their heads, stopped while they waited for Eliza to come home.

Their sense of time grew distorted. The days crawled by at an unbearably slow pace, even going to school didn't seem to make much difference to the great stretches of empty time that yawned ahead of them. Mr Baxter allowed Isobel to start school early, 'to get her off your hands'. Mrs Baxter offered to walk them to school in the mornings and look after them until the Widow and Vinny came home at night. Mrs Baxter fed them milk and cake in her big warm kitchen, Charles pretending to be another little boy altogether in case Mr Baxter walked in.

Vinny, cross to begin with, was so much crosser at the turn that events had taken that she behaved as if she'd quite like to lock them up permanently. So she said anyway. Vinny's face had turned into an old crab-apple and the Widow had to keep her busy at the back of the shop, away from the customers, in case she curdled the cream or made the cheese grow mould. 'It's the change of life,' the Widow explained sotto voce to Mrs Tyndale over the broken biscuits (although not so sotto that Vinny couldn't hear).

It was the change of life for all of them, but it couldn't last, surely? Sooner or later Eliza would come out of hospital, Gordon would return from his business trip and everything would return to normal. Neither Charles nor Isobel ever thought for a moment that Gordon and Eliza had left them permanently in the clutches of Vinny and the Widow. The memory of a broken Eliza under a tree, her eggsh.e.l.l skull bashed and dented, her white throat, stretched (like time) beyond endurance, was something that they refused to think about. The Widow said that Eliza was getting better in hospital. 'Why can't we go and see her then?' Charles frowned.

'Soon, soon,' the Widow replied, her old milky-blue eyes clouding over.

Life without Gordon was marginally more boring, but without Eliza it was meaningless. She was everything their safety (even when she was angry), their entertainment (even when she was bored), their bread and meat and milk. They carried her around like an ache inside, somewhere in the regions of the heart. 'Perhaps Mummy's not allowed to talk,' Charles speculated as they played Snakes and Ladders in their attic prison one gloomy Sat.u.r.day. The cause of their imprisonment was unsure but might have had something to do with the large scratch on the Widow's dining-table and its relation to the penknife in Charles' pocket. 'Perhaps it's bad for her throat or something,' he pursued. Isobel was caught up in the coils of a particularly long snake and didn't notice that Charles had started to cry until it was brought to her attention by a big crystal tear almost as big as the pear-drops on the Widow's chandelier splashing on the board between them.

They were used to each other crying, their waiting was seasoned and watered with tears. ('One or other of you always has the waterworks turned on,' Vinny chided raggedly one morning as Charles started hyperventilating on the way to school and had to be thumped hard by Vinny between the shoulder blades a remedy on the kill rather than cure side of things.) 'Cheer up,' Isobel urged him now but in such a melancholic tone that it only made him worse. She pa.s.sed him the dice-shaker but it was a long time before either of them could make another move.

They were sitting by the fire, listening to Children's Hour, Vinny (in the armchair she'd claimed as hers) darning her thick stockings. Vinny was not a needlewoman the darn she was labouring over looked like a piece of wattle fencing and the Widow tut-tutted loudly at Vinny's botched handicraft.

Vera clattered in the background, setting the table in the dining-room. The Widow looked at Vinny and Vinny put her darning down. Then the Widow took a deep breath and leant over and turned the radio off. They looked at her expectantly. 'Children,' she said gravely, 'I'm afraid I have some very sad news for you. Your mummy isn't coming home. She's gone away.'

'Gone away? Where?' Charles shouted, leaping to his feet and adopting an aggressive, pugilistic stance.

'Calm down, Charles,' the Widow said. 'She was never what you'd call very reliable.' Unreliable? This hardly seemed an adequate explanation of Eliza's disappearance. 'I don't believe you, you're lying!' Charles yelled at her. 'She wouldn't leave us!'

'Well, she has, I'm afraid, Charles,' the Widow said dispa.s.sionately. Was she telling the truth? It didn't feel like it, but how could they tell when they were so helpless? The Widow signalled to Vera in the doorway and said, 'Come along now, dry those tears, Isobel there's a nice cottage pie for tea. And a raspberry shape for pudding, Charles, you know how you like that,' and Charles looked at her with incredulous eyes. Could she possibly believe that a pink blancmange, no sooner seen than eaten, could possibly compensate for the loss of a mother?

It was already nearly two months since Gordon had driven away into the night with only the moon for company. One morning, the Widow received a letter in the post a flimsy blue bit of paper with foreign stamps. She opened it and as she read it her eyes filled with tears. 'Well, it's not as if he's dead,' Vinny muttered crossly to the teapot. 'Who?' Charles asked eagerly. 'n.o.body you know!' Vinny snapped.

Before bedtime that same night, the Widow said she had some sad news to tell them. Charles' face was a picture of misery, 'Daddy's not left us as well?' he whispered to the Widow, who nodded sadly and said, 'Yes, I'm afraid so, Charles.'

'He'll come back,' Charles resisted stoutly. 'Daddy's going to come back.'