The Orphan Choir Part 9

I think this is what Mr Clay intends to do from now on: persecute me when I'm alone and he knows I won't be able to prove anything.

Except I will. I can buy some kind of recording device. (G.o.d knows where from. I haven't owned one since the tape recorder I had in the 1980s. I don't know what people use to record things these days. Maybe I'll ask the man in Fopp.) What I need is a machine that can record sound and also log the time and date that the sound was recorded. Though how would I prove the sound was coming from Mr Clay's house and not my own? His obvious defence would be to allege that I was so vindictive and obsessed with punishing him that I was trying to frame him creating noise myself in order to blame it on him.

It shouldn't be too hard to distract him somehow and then sneak some impartial witnesses into my house the next time Stuart's away. I'm sure I can think of something. A surprise phone call to Mr Clay; a staged fight between students at the back of our houses (whom I would pay handsomely, of course) involving lots of swearing and threats of violence. While Mr Clay hurried to one of his back windows to see what was going on, I could let my witnesses in at the front. They'd have to be people who wouldn't mind staying up all night. I'd need to pay them too, probably.

Maybe Pat Jervis would agree to be the visiting nocturnal witness? She might be fickle in her loyalties, but my sense is that she's someone who likes a challenge. If I said to her, 'Do this one thing, and you'll see I'm right. If I'm not, I'll accept that you're right and I'm going crazy.' Or maybe it would be easier to ask one of her colleagues, Trevor Chibnall or Doug Minns, who would be less likely to try and interfere in the rest of my life.

(This is a side issue, but it's totally out of order for a council environmental health officer to tell someone she's visiting in a professional capacity not to run away from a problem by buying a holiday home in the Culver Valley. I still cannot believe Pat Jervis said that to me with a straight face. Even hospital staff, in real life, don't intrude in that way, despite the misleading impression given by TV shows like House and Casualty in which surgeons say, 'While I remove your appendix, let's discuss your fear of romantic commitment.' In spite of the inappropriate discouragement I received, I am buying a second home in the Culver Valley it's all going through at the moment. Not that it's any of Pat's business.) Whatever plans I make, they need to be beyond Mr Clay's imaginative capacity, since he will be trying to second-guess me at every stage. I need to think about this more when I'm not so tired.

Noise Diary Thursday 18 October, 11 a.m.

I don't have much energy for writing today, so I'll keep this as brief as possible. I'm not sure there's much point in my continuing with this diary anyway, since I'm unlikely to be believed. I have no proof, and it would sound insane if I told anyone. Because it is; Mr Clay must be quite, quite mad to be doing what he's doing to me.

This can't only be about noise his right to make it, my complaints about it. Perhaps that was the catalyst, but the seeds of his apt.i.tude for the kind of sustained, escalating vindictiveness he is now displaying must have been sown in his personality long before he met me. I know nothing about his background or childhood. Maybe he was the victim of a heinous wrong that planted a fountain of anger and vengefulness in his heart that's been spouting ever since. Maybe he was too scared of the person or people who injured him to do anything about it, and that's why he needs to get stoned all the time, to numb his rage. And then I entered his life, with my unwillingness to let his fun disrupt my nights, and suddenly his suppressed acrimony started to froth and bubble until it spilled out all over me a polite, law-abiding woman he's not at all afraid of; a convenient proxy target.

I can't prove that any of that's true either.

Anyhow, the bald facts are as follows: Stuart is away again, and Mr Clay has taken his campaign to a new level. Last night, I spent the evening in the lounge watching television. There was nothing good on, but I hate being alone in the house and I'd rather have the TV on than off, if only to hear the sound of human voices. (Pathetic, I know. But if I sat in silence, I might start to think about how much easier it is for Stuart to cope with Joseph's absence during term time than it is for me, because he's away quite regularly himself. I might then start to wonder if this has occurred to Stuart at any point. He hasn't mentioned it, if it has. Before too long, I might be roaming the dark streets of Cambridge screaming, 'Where is my superior second husband?' All of that sounds like something worth avoiding, so I watch television instead.) At about ten-thirty I turned off the TV and the lounge light, and was about to go upstairs to bed when I heard boys singing. This time it was 'Lift Thine Eyes', and it wasn't coming through any part of the wall my house shares with Mr Clay's. It was coming from outside. I wasn't sure at first, so I walked over to the window. As I got closer, my doubts evaporated; the voices were directly outside my lounge, on the street. The only thing separating me from them was a pane of gla.s.s and Imran's cardboard, scaffolding and plastic sheeting.

At first I was pleased. If Mr Clay was standing on the pavement with his ghetto blaster, I thought, then someone apart from me would hear it: one of our other neighbours, or a pa.s.ser-by. If I could find even one person to back me up then I could prove to Pat Jervis that I was genuinely the victim of a hate crusade. I wondered if Clay was finally losing his grip if he was so puffed up with venom that he'd forgotten about plausible deniability, which originally was the lynchpin of his campaign. Was the temptation of my wrapped-up house, which from the outside looks like a Christo and Jeanne-Claude artwork (if that means anything to you, Cambridge Council if not, they're sculptors whose USP is that they wrap things up, big things like the Pont Neuf bridge), too much for him to resist? Perhaps he decided it was worth the risk of revealing himself to our neighbours in order to experience the intense joy of pure, undiluted victory, however fleeting. He knew I couldn't run to the window and catch him at it because my view is blocked by cardboard and plastic. I ran to the front door instead, but by the time I got there and opened it, he and the music were gone. As I knew they would be. A man in a checked flat cap was walking his dog along the pavement and had almost reached the corner of Weldon Road, where it meets Hills Road. 'Excuse me!' I called to him. He came back. I asked him if he'd heard the music and seen a man with some kind of device for playing it. He said he hadn't. He must have been lying. There's simply no way he could have been where he was, having walked past my house when he must have, and not heard it.

A friend of Mr Clay's, strategically placed to impersonate an innocent bystander, and torment me still further? I put my coat on, went out and rang number 15's bell, to see if they'd heard anything, but their house was in darkness and no one came to the door.

Noise Diary Friday 19 October, 10.54 p.m.

I don't know how he's doing it. Is it possible that the whole street is in league with him against me? Tonight he didn't wait till I turned off the TV and the light. He started to play choral music outside the lounge window while I was watching, or trying to watch, EastEnders. He must have had the volume up as high as it would go. What equipment is he using? Some kind of boom box a relic from the break-dancing-on-street-corners era? Does he have some cunning way of angling the speakers so that the sound pours into my house but not out into the street? I wonder if he's pulled back Imran's plastic sheeting and set down the ghetto blaster on the horizontal wooden platform inside the scaffolding, but even if he has, the noise would still spill out on to the street. And yet no one heard it, no one but me.

Tonight it was another hymn: 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind'. I was nearly sick when I heard the first notes and realised which song it was. Saviour's choir sang it at the first Choral Evensong Stuart and I attended after Joseph started school in September. It was the first hymn I heard my son sing with his choir. I started to cry as I listened, because it sounded so beautiful and Joseph was part of that, and yet I was so unhappy; I felt as if my heart was cracking into ever smaller pieces. Every note strained my soul nearly to breaking point, like a heavy boot leaning its full weight on cracking ice. I used to love 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind' it was my favourite hymn but since that first Choral Evensong I haven't been able to think about it and would take steps to avoid hearing it again. Strangely, I don't feel that way about any other piece I've heard Joseph sing with the choir. I don't know why. Perhaps because 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind' was the first, or because it meant more to me than any other hymn but how could Mr Clay have known this? I don't believe it can be a coincidence that he chose that song.

At first, when I heard it playing outside the lounge, I was too horrified to move. Then I stood up and, foolishly, ran to the window. It's pathetic that even after so many days with no natural light, this is my automatic response when I hear a noise from the street. You'd think that by now my brain would be subliminally aware that I need to head for the front door instead.

Predictably, the window showed me nothing but blackness and the reflection of my lounge of myself in it, wild-haired with scabbed-up puffy eyes, wearing old pyjamas that, after several days, aren't particularly clean or fragrant. It's ironic that I've spent so much more time in my pyjamas since I've been unable to sleep properly. I pretty much only get dressed now to go to Saviour to hear Joseph sing. I turned and was on my way to the front door to try to catch Mr Clay in the act the music was still playing when something made me turn back. I don't know what it was; something to do with what I'd seen reflected in the window, I think. I moved closer to the gla.s.s and looked again. There was nothing unusual or unexpected about what I saw: a sofa, two chairs, a lamp, a coffee table, two alcoves containing messy shelves with too many books crammed into them. Just my lounge, with me in it. Yet something about what I was looking at was making my heart beat dangerously fast, and a tiny voice inside me was warning me to turn away before I saw something I wouldn't be able to bear. I had to get out of the room as quickly as I could, so I ran out into the hall, then had to lean against the wall for a few seconds to get my breath back. I decided there would be plenty of time later to wonder what disturbing thing I might have noticed that wasn't immediately obvious when I looked again, whereas I might only have seconds to catch Mr Clay, so I got to the front door as quickly as I could and threw it open.

Nothing. No sound, n.o.body on the street. Not even a pa.s.ser-by. This time I knew beyond doubt that what seemed to be the case simply couldn't be: it was physically impossible. Seconds earlier, 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind' had been playing. Mr Clay couldn't have switched it off and got himself off Weldon Road and back inside his house so quickly.

I had an idea: maybe he'd left some kind of hi-tech music system on the pavement, then gone back to his house and controlled it remotely, from inside number 19. If so, he could have pressed 'Stop' at the exact moment that he saw my door open. I ran outside and looked: nothing. No ghetto blaster. No machine of any sort.

How did he do it, then? Could he have done it without a machine on the street? Maybe he broke into my house yesterday while Stuart was away and I was out at Choral Evensong. He could have implanted some kind of invisible or well-concealed speakers in my lounge, somewhere near the window. Under the floorboards perhaps.

I took the lounge apart (and am too shattered, for the time being, to put it back together again) and found nothing. I concluded that it was more likely that Mr Clay had devised some way to project music into the night maybe he opened his lounge window and balanced a speaker on the sill, angled so that the sound was aimed directly at the pavement outside my house ... That strikes me as feasible.

One thing seemed to me to be certain: someone else must have heard a hymn played that loud. I brushed my teeth and my hair and went outside again. There were ground-floor lights on in three houses apart from mine: Mr Clay's, number 16 and number 12. I decided to try number 16, since it's directly opposite. The man who lives there alone, Philip Darrock-Jones, is a relatively famous musical conductor who has worked with all the major British orchestras and many international ones too.

I like Philip. He has lived on Weldon Road for more than twenty years, he once told me, and, unlike most of the privacy-obsessed newer residents who install shutters or opaque gla.s.s in all their windows the instant they move in, he never even bothers to draw his lounge curtains, despite having what are very obviously rare and valuable paintings all over his walls. Being as left-wing as he is, he probably feels morally obliged to share his art collection with pa.s.sers-by who can't afford to buy original art themselves. I follow him on Twitter, so I know, for example, that he would very much like to be forced to pay more tax than he does at the moment. He doesn't seem unduly worried about people like me and Stuart who don't want to but would have to if he had his way, but despite disagreeing with him about this, I can't help thinking that the altruism that is so obviously behind his opinions is quite sweet. I also like him because he annoys Mr Clay, who strongly objects to the 'Vote Labour' poster that is on permanent display in Philip's bedroom window, even when there is no election in sight; I've heard Clay complain to his girlfriend Angie that the poster lowers the tone, makes the street look scruffy and studenty, and brings down the whole neighbourhood: the same view Stuart holds about houses with pollution-blackened brickwork. For all I know, Philip Darrock-Jones's idea of tone-lowering might be lounging on your sofa, in full view of anyone who walks past, inhaling marijuana smoke through a plastic bottle with a hole burned at one end of it. These things are all relative.

Philip came to the door when I knocked, and seemed genuinely pleased to see me. If he noticed that I was wearing pyjamas under my coat he showed no sign of it. I had to fight quite hard not to be dragged in for a cup of coffee, but eventually I managed to convince him I didn't have enough time. I told him I just wanted to ask a quick question: had he heard a boys' choir singing about twenty minutes ago? Was he in his lounge then? Had he seen anyone on the street, since he never closed his curtains? He frowned. No, he hadn't, he said. He'd heard nothing, seen nothing, and he'd been in the lounge the whole time.

I nearly fell down in a heap on his doorstep. I'd been frightened of him saying what he said, because I knew I would believe him if he did. Philip wouldn't lie to me. If 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind' were blaring out at top volume outside his house, he would notice it more than any other neighbour, being a music man.

I must have turned pale or looked shaky, because Philip asked me if I was all right and tried again to get me over his threshold with offers of recuperative brandy. He asked me what was wrong and why I was asking about a boys' choir. I had the weirdest physical sensation: as if someone was drawing, very gently, all the arteries, veins, nerves and muscles out of my body, leaving me empty and floppy, without substance. I shook my head and said it didn't matter. If my own husband doesn't believe me if Pat Jervis, whose life's work is to defeat noise vandals, doesn't believe me why should Philip, who believes that people are fundamentally nice and all want to look after each other? I can imagine him furrowing his capacious brow and asking, 'But why on earth would Mr Clay want to be so nasty to you?' and I couldn't have held myself together if he'd said that.

Philip was certain there was no music playing on the street twenty minutes earlier. He was an eye- and ear-witness to the absence of boys' voices singing. I wouldn't have been able to convince him that he was wrong and I was right.

I didn't bother asking any of the other neighbours. Once again, I realised, I'd underestimated Mr Clay. Of course he wouldn't play empirically verifiable loud music in the street. He wouldn't be so stupid.

So. Hidden speakers in my lounge. It's the only explanation.

After I got back from Philip's, I locked the door, went to the kitchen and took the little packet of cannabis out of the drawer. From another drawer, I pulled out a box of matches, and from the counter I picked up a half-empty bottle of mineral water. I took all three to the lounge and sat down on the sofa, thinking, 'I am going to take some drugs. Maybe if I get high like Mr Fahrenheit (that's what I call Mr Clay) I will be able to access his mindset more easily the druggie wavelength; I will be able to look around this room and intuitively know where he's planted the invisible speakers.'

I didn't go through with my plan to get high. I remembered that Mr Fahrenheit, when I saw him do this, had a piece of what looked like silver foil stretched over the top of the bottle. I couldn't be bothered to go back to the kitchen for foil, so I stayed where I was and cried instead.

At this rate, if no one helps me to prove what's going on and put a stop to it, my next-door neighbour is going to kill me.

TWO.

December.

7.

'Mum, look how high I'm going!' Joseph yells at me, bouncing up and down on the trampoline. He's with a friend who, so far, has jumped silently, as I'm sure his watching mother must be smugly aware.

'Ssssh!' I hiss, running over just in case I need to tell Joseph again because he didn't hear me the first time. As I move towards him, I glance to my left at the hard-surfaced tennis court, on which a young blond married couple, protected from the cold by tracksuits and fleeces with hooded tops, are playing half-heartedly and laughing at their own uselessness. I met them at the spa last week and we talked for a bit everyone seems keen to chat to the new homeowners, probably so that they can gossip about us later but I can't remember their names. Hers was something unusual like Melody or Carmody, but not either of those.

Only about one in five of their shots makes it over the net. As I move towards the trampoline, I watch them to see if they are going to react at all to Joseph's enthusiastic outburst or to my 'Ssssh!', but they don't seem interested. They are too caught up in their own giggling, which isn't much quieter than the noise I made, and is going on for longer. The mother of the other boy on the trampoline doesn't seem concerned about the breach of the peace either. And Joseph is already mouthing, 'Sorry, Mum! I forgot!'

We moved into The Boundary less than a week ago, but I am already starting to work out the unwritten rules. It isn't noise that people worry about so much as noise that no one is taking steps to deal with. My 'Ssssh!' would have rea.s.sured everyone in the vicinity that I was aware of the problem and would sort it out, and that is all people want here: the comfort of knowing that their neighbours value quiet and tranquillity as much as they do. After my experience with Mr Fahrenheit, I know that the killer aspect of unwelcome sound is not the decibels but the disempowering feeling of having no control over your own environment and life. Anyone could cope with loud music if they knew that it would soon stop, or could be made to if it didn't.

When I reach my son, I say, 'You can stay here if you want, but I need to go and make a start on lunch.'

'He'll be okay here with me,' says the other boy quickly, alarmed by the prospect of losing his playmate. 'I'm staying out for a bit yet.' He has a Welsh accent, copper-coloured hair and large freckles and, I notice, is dressed like a gentleman farmer the miniature version whereas Joseph looks like a city boy in trendy jeans and without a proper coat on, his high-top trainers sitting on the gra.s.s next to the trampoline beside a far more appropriate pair of small brown walking boots. I'll have to take him into Spilling and buy him a green padded coat like the Welsh boy's, wellington boots, a cagoule.

'I'm not hungry,' he says. 'I don't want lunch.'

'Okay, stay here, then,' I tell him. 'Come when you're ready. I'll save some pasta for you you can have it whenever you want.'

Joseph rewards me with a radiant smile. 'Thanks, Mum! You're sick!' This is another word he has picked up at Saviour. He a.s.sures me that it means cool and generally brilliant.

I head back to the house, having said nothing to the Welsh boy's mother about keeping an eye on my son. I know I don't need to. The Swallowfield security detail is meticulous. Bethan made it sound too good to be true when I came for the sales tour, but it turns out she was spot on: discreet but ever-present was what she told me and it's quite true. I haven't noticed security staff patrolling the grounds haven't felt overlooked or spied on at all but when I left my car window open by mistake, a friendly man in a Swallowfield-crested tunic-top knocked on my door to advise me of my lapse, and when I dropped my phone's case while out for a two-hour walk around the estate that took in Reach Lagoon, Swallows Lake and The Pinnacle, another smiling man in an identical tunic returned it to The Boundary within half an hour of my return.

I love it here. I love everything about it, but especially the benefits I didn't know that I or my family would get when I signed on the dotted line. I knew Swallowfield was beautiful, special, peaceful, but I didn't antic.i.p.ate the effect it would have on my mental and physical health, or Stuart's, or Joseph's. A mere four days here have extracted the grey-yellow pallor of the city from our skin, the etiolated aspect we didn't know was there until we saw how different we looked after a couple of days breathing in the pure air at Swallowfield. I am not imagining this; Stuart was the one who first remarked on it, and he's right: our skin looks buffed here, rosy pink, properly oxygenated. Our eyes have more shine to them. We are bundles of energy who take far longer to get tired than we did in Cambridge, and when we eventually do it's because we've swum for an hour and a half in the heated outdoor pool and then walked a full circuit of the wild-flower meadow, not simply because we've had to wait twenty minutes in the queue at Tesco on Hills Road and then kick through too many Domino's Pizza boxes on our way back home.

We sleep better here, thanks to the darkness and the silence. The swollen patches beneath my eyes have subsided this after no cream my Cambridge doctor had me try did any good at all. The same doctor told me I must take at least six months off work and suggested I see a cognitive behavioural therapist. Before we moved into The Boundary, I hadn't been into the office at all for more than a month; I couldn't imagine ever being able to drag myself in there again. Now I am thinking that on 9 January 2013, Joseph's first day back at school, I will be able to report for duty bright and early and tell everyone that I'm fine now, thanks: the trauma is over.

Mr Fahrenheit can try to wind me up by playing choral music if he wants to, but I shall outwit him. I've already told Stuart: we're going to get the attic properly insulated and swap our bedroom with his study. Mr Fahrenheit will have no way of knowing we've done this; he'll never know that there's no longer anyone sleeping in the room on the other side of the wall from his bedroom, and he'll waste hours of his time fiddling with the volume, turning boys' voices up and down in the night whenever Stuart's not there and he thinks he can get away with it. Meanwhile, I will be in the attic, fast asleep, wearing the best earplugs money can buy.

I could and should have thought of this in October or November, but I was in no fit state to save myself then. Swallowfield has saved me, as I knew it would. It's strange. All the things that were out of control and threatening in Cambridge seem manageable from this safe distance. I am ready to throw away the drugs I stole from Mr Fahrenheit's house; I've decided that I will leave the house late one night, while Stuart and Joseph are asleep, and scatter the tiny clumps of cannabis over Topping Lake as if they are the ashes of someone I loved who died. If I'm between my house and the lake, I'm fairly sure no security guard will spot me, as long as I take no more than a few seconds. I don't think it will contravene the estate's no-litter rule; the drugs look like tiny clippings from some kind of tree in any case, so it's all natural and organic; it isn't as if I'm planning to dump a truck load of empty c.o.ke cans. I don't know much about horticulture, but I think it's unlikely that an enormous marijuana plant will start to grow outside my house as a result.

It's strange to think that I brought the drugs to Swallowfield thinking I might need them. Luckily, the security guys don't have sniffer dogs, but still, it was a crazy risk to take one I only took because the woman I used to be, the Louise Beeston who packed to come here, was well on her way to crazy and heading for a life as a drug addict.

I realise now that, though I never admitted it to myself, that was my back-up plan all along, from the moment I stole the little plastic bag with its illegal contents from Mr Fahrenheit's house: if I couldn't make his noise stop, I could numb myself with drugs instead, so that I didn't care any more just as soon as I learned how to do that thing with the burned bottle and the silver foil. I might have ended up needing to ask Mr Fahrenheit for lessons.

The memory of my desperation unnerves me as I walk past the entrance to Starling Copse on my way to Topping Lake. I could so easily have failed to save myself. Thank G.o.d I didn't; thank G.o.d I paid no attention to Pat Jervis, or Stuart, or Alexis Grant. Alexis took great exception when I told her about our plans to buy a second home, as I'd known she would. She winced and said, 'You don't seriously want to be going endlessly back and forth to the Culver Valley, do you? Why not save yourself the ha.s.sle and the money and move to a village outside Cambridge instead? You'd have the best of both worlds, like we do in Orwell.'

I smiled and said something non-committal. If she asked me now, I would have an answer for her: I needed, and need, more than the highlights of two worlds squeezed into one. I need two separate worlds: two physically distinct places. I have to know that my Swallowfield life still exists and is waiting to welcome and shelter me whenever I need it to. If you only have one world, one life, then however brilliant it is most of the time, you have nowhere to run when you need to escape from it for a while.

It still shocks me how quickly Swallowfield rescued my sanity. Four days here was all I needed to get me back on track four days with the guarantee of many more to come and I am happy again, able to put things in perspective. I know that term time will be hard, with Joseph away at Saviour, but I will simply think about us all being here together during the holidays and I'll be able to get through the weeks of school. And if Stuart can arrange it so that he can work from home more and he seems fairly confident that he can that will be even better. In Cambridge, I thought I might prefer it to be just me and Joseph at Swallowfield. The pressure of the city was slowly killing my bond with my husband; here, I have rediscovered it. When we first unlocked The Boundary's front door and walked in, Stuart beamed at me and said, 'f.u.c.k, this is amazing, Lou! You were so right about this place. And this house. Look at that view.' That was when I knew we would be okay, that it was safe for me to love him again.

He's on the terrace behind the house when I get back, kneeling beside the new bike we bought for Joseph yesterday, trying to pump up its wheels. 'This pump's knackered,' he says. 'I'm going to have to drive into Spilling and get a new one. Have I got time before lunch?'

'Easily,' I say. It is already what I would normally call lunchtime, but it will take me at least an hour to prepare the food and I don't intend to rush. As Stuart hauls himself to his feet and starts to mutter about finding his wallet and 'b.l.o.o.d.y bike shop sold me a dud', I stare at the ripples on the surface of Topping Lake, at the thirty-odd houses that surround it. Winter sun glints off their roofs, lights up the facades of the gla.s.s-fronted ones. Each house is unique and yet they look like a coherent collection. Swallowfield has won several prestigious awards, Bethan told me as we took the sales tour prizes for aesthetics, for ecological soundness, for just about every aspect of its conception and design.

I can see why people would be queuing up to bestow honours. At night all the Topping houses, lit up from the inside, duplicate themselves on the shimmering surface of the lake and it's like looking at a mixed media work of art: light, water, stunning architecture. No wonder most of the houses here don't bother with curtains or blinds apart from in the bedrooms and bathrooms; the estate has been laid out carefully so that no house is intrusively near to any other, and who would want to deprive themselves of such amazing views?

'Right, I'm off,' says Stuart, leaning out of the French doors. I didn't notice him go inside. He's holding his wallet in his hand. 'Oh, before I forget Dr Freeman rang.'

A stone lands in my heart. A stone thrown from a very long way away. Far enough to be out of reach, I thought. Apparently not.

'Don't panic.' Stuart smiles at the expression on my face. 'What, you think I'm going to say Joseph's Christmas holidays have been cancelled and he has to go straight back to school?'

You've just said it. Why say it if it's not true?

The stone is growing. Hardening.

'Tell me,' I say.

'It was just a reminder about Friday. I must admit, I'd forgotten, but I'm sure you hadn't.'

'Friday? What's happening on Friday?'

'Oh. Well, it's lucky Dr Freeman rang, isn't it? Since we'd both forgotten.' Stuart is trying to make light of it. I am a lead weight. Waiting. 'There's an extra Choral Evensong last one of the year.'

'On the twenty-first of December?'

That will mean taking Joseph back to Cambridge twice during the hoildays. No. No. I'm not doing it.

'It's because the chaplain's retiring. It's kind of like a leaving thing for him. Anyway in view of the Christmas Eve rehearsal and Christmas Day service, I don't think there's much point in our coming back here in between, is there?'

'Yes, there is,' I say quietly. I want to be emphatic but I can't get my voice to carry. 'I'm not going back to Cambridge twice. Neither is Joseph.'

'Don't be silly, Lou. All right, if you want to come back in between, we can. I suppose it's only an hour and a quarter's drive, isn't it? Some people do that twice a day to get to work and back. We can drive back here on the evening of the twenty-first, then back to Cambridge again on Christmas Eve morning. Okay?'

I nod and say nothing, keen for Stuart to leave so that I can allow myself to cry. I'd have liked to stand firm and say no to this extra Choral Evensong that I'm sure we have never been told about before, that I suspect Dr Freeman of hastily scheduling with the sole aim of destroying my composure and my plans but I don't want to be unreasonable. Stuart backed down from his initial suggestion that we stay in Cambridge from 21 December until Christmas Day; as soon as he saw how much I hated the idea, he withdrew his proposal. I need to prove that I'm willing to compromise too.

When he finally gets into the car and drives away, I say to myself, 'Right, it's safe to cry now,' and find that I'm unable to. I go inside, close and lock the gla.s.s doors and sit down on the sofa. I will remain calm, I promise myself, and deal with this sudden feeling of doom in a rational way. I am not Louise Beeston of 17 Weldon Road any more; I am Louise Beeston of The Boundary, Topping Lake, Swallowfield Estate. I must act and think differently, just as I have furnished my home here differently.

I look around me at the brand new chairs and sofas: all contemporary, bright colours, all bought in one go from Heal's in London and delivered last Friday. No one who saw this room and my lounge in Cambridge would believe that the two might belong to the same family. The furniture in our Weldon Road house is old and shabby, some of it antique, much of it fairly battered from having been dragged by me and Stuart from house to house over the years.

But I'm at Swallowfield now, I remind myself, which means I must be capable of thinking brand new thoughts. I have been up until this point, and I must force myself to continue, since I was doing so well. I have all the natural light I need, fresh air instead of builders' dust, peace and quiet ...

Telling myself all this makes me feel a little calmer.

Nothing has really changed. It's only one extra trip to Cambridge, and won't even involve an overnight stay. It won't make any difference. It's the idea of Dr Freeman being able to reach into our Swallowfield life and pluck us out of it at will that has disturbed me, and I've already thought of a solution to that: I will have a word with him at the beginning of next term and tell him that he's not to contact us when we're at Swallowfield ever. This is our retreat; he must learn to respect that.

I stand, take a deep breath and make my way across The Boundary's huge open-plan living s.p.a.ce towards the kitchen. I am starting to feel hungry, which means that Joseph is bound to be. He could be back any second, demanding the lunch he was so dismissive about half an hour ago.

The kitchen component of our living area is relatively small, but it doesn't matter because the room itself is so vast. I can watch the action on the lake as I prepare food, and there is always some action to watch, whether it's birds hovering, swans gliding, or simply patterns made by light on the gunmetal-grey skin of the water. I can hardly take my eyes off it for long enough to chop a vegetable.

I open the cutlery drawer to pull out my favourite knife. That's when I hear it.

Boys.

Singing.

O come, O come, Emmanuel, And ransom captive Israel, That mourns in lonely exile here Until the Son of G.o.d appear.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, thou Wisdom from on high, Who orderest all things mightily; To us the path of knowledge show, And teach us in her ways to go.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel ...

No boys in sight. These are the same voices I heard in Cambridge. This is the same choir. I don't know how I know this, but I do.

O come, thou Rod of Jesse, free Thine own from Satan's tyranny; From depths of h.e.l.l thy people save, And give them victory over the grave.

Rejoice! Rejoice!

Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel ...

I shut my eyes. No point looking out of any window for what I know I won't see.

O come, thou Dayspring, come and cheer Our spirits by thine advent here; Disperse the gloomy clouds of night, And death's dark shadows put to flight.

Rejoice! Rejoice!