‘Better go left here,’ says Pauline. ‘There’s a car park, I think.’ For they have arrived at Worsham, and must confront the problem of how to detach themselves from the car and become people rather than traffic. James will not now hear of the burning of the book. ‘There are the others,’ he says. ‘They’re going that way too.’
It is quite difficult to burn a book. She takes the first page – page one of Chapter One – and crumples it up in her fist. She puts it into the grate of the tiny Victorian fireplace which is a decorative feature in this restored and centrally heated terraced cottage in a small cathedral town. She strikes a match and puts it to the ball of paper. It flares up. Some feathers of charred paper float out on to the rug. She goes to the table and takes page two from the pile of typescript, crumples it, places it in the fireplace, strikes another match.
Each time she revisits this scene it becomes like a Dutch interior. She sees it with interested detachment: the quiet room across which lies a wedge of sunlight from the open door, beyond which can be seen the pram in the garden, in which a baby sleeps, the young woman who stoops before the fireplace, doing something with paper and matches.
The scene that Harry saw, when he walked into the room. Except that by then she was sitting at the table.
He halts, sensing that something is awry. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘I’ve been burning your book,’ she says.
And he goes white. She has never seen anyone do that before. His face changes colour before her eyes – bloodless, drained. He cannot speak. He simply stands there, staring spectral at the fireplace, at the black mound therein, at the charred feathers on the rug. And then his glance swivels to the table. He sees the pile of typescript jutting from under the newspaper. He puts out a hand.
‘Don’t worry,’ says Pauline. ‘I couldn’t go through with it. I’m too well brought up.’
He is examining the typescript, feverishly. He sees that only the first two pages are missing. The blood comes back into his face.
‘But I made a start,’ says Pauline. ‘The spirit was willing. It was the flesh let me down.’
He looks at her now, instead of at the typescript.
‘Why? Why – for Christ’s sake.’
She looks back at him. ‘You know,’ she says.
Worsham is everything that Maurice had hoped for – awash with people. The pavements of the wide central street are teeming, as the crowds move slowly past the antique shops and the picture galleries and the pubs with flowered façades. Maurice has shot off into the Information Centre to pick up some brochures, of which he has a collection that must by now be of national importance. Carol has drifted after him. Teresa is administering juice to Luke.
‘What was your husband’s book about?’ says James. Perhaps he feels it is more tactful to ask that than to ask why she wanted to burn it. Or maybe the interest is a professional one. They are standing outside a craft shop, desultorily inspecting expensive pottery and children’s toys made of polished yew.
‘Demographic history. An analysis of population trends in the seventeenth century.’
‘Ah,’ says James.
‘Quite. Actually, an interesting book. He was in the vanguard of academic fashion at the time.’
Maurice has now joined them and is leafing through a handful of brochures. ‘Right. First stop, the Model Village.’
‘Model of what village?’ inquires James.
‘Any village. An apocryphal, ideal village. All done to scale, it says here, but waist high, and you can peer in through the windows at exquisitely reconstructed nineteenth-century interiors.’
‘Must we?’ says Teresa. ‘There’s a great queue. I saw it as we came past.’
‘I suppose you and Luke might be let off.’ Maurice lays a propitiating hand on her shoulder. ‘Go and buy yourselves an ice-cream.’
‘Count me out too,’ says Pauline.
James and Carol elect to go with Maurice. The three of them vanish in search of the queue for the Model Village while Teresa and Pauline wander up the main street.
‘Not ice-cream,’ says Pauline. ‘A nice cup of tea. In some superior joint with tablecloths and tea strainers.’
Worsham is doing good business. Raking it in. Each of these visitors will spend something, presumably, if only on refreshments and a postcard. Quite a few will fall for a pot of allegedly home-made chutney, or framed assemblage of dried flowers, or a patchwork cushion. Acquisition is one of the purposes of a day out, after all – the acquisition of new sights bolstered by something a bit more tangible. And Worsham has centuries of marketing experience – it has been a trading centre all its life, though traditionally for more essential commodities than dried flowers. Never mind – at least it has demonstrated economic flexibility along with an exemplary capacity to cash in on its assets. The limestone buildings that line the High Street are perfectly groomed; there are no offensive contemporary intrusions. Worsham knows quite well what it is selling.
‘Horrible place,’ says Teresa, arranging Luke in the elegant pine high chair supplied by the tea shop. ‘I’d rather live in Brixton.’
‘Hush,’ says Pauline. ‘You’ll get us thrown out. Shall we go the whole hog and have anchovy toast and home-made Dundee cake? Actually,’ she goes on, ‘I’m afraid you rather suit the surroundings.’
Teresa is wearing a calf-length dark red dress with sleeves and high bodice which she made herself from a pair of curtains she bought from an Age Concern shop. This, along with her hair tied back into her nape, gives her a vaguely Victorian look. She seems in striking contrast to most of the other young women around, who wear trousers, T-shirts, cotton skirts and tops. Carol is dressed in beige linen shorts with a sharp crease and a matching waistcoat worn over a white shirt. Teresa has always bypassed fashion, going for clothes that she has contrived herself or come upon accidentally – she is a frequenter of market stalls and jumble sales. This is not so much thrift as a rejection of standard fare; she prefers to pick and choose and come up with an effect which is sui generis. Also, she has a passion for esoteric textures and patterns. The red curtains were a nubbly raw silk, which was the initial attraction.
Pauline’s comment has disconcerted her. She looks at her reflection in the window of the tea shop, and then into the street beyond: a Kate Greenaway girl floating above a line of Beatrix Potter shop façades. She pulls a face.
Pauline is contrite. ‘Only in the superficial sense. I shouldn’t have said that – now you’ll be put off that dress, which I happen to like.’
Their tea arrives. Luke discovers a taste for anchovy toast. He falls silent, absorbed in this new sensation. The women can indulge in unfractured talk. Pauline wonders if maybe Teresa should get into the local craft scene. No way! replies Teresa indignantly. Pauline points out that anything goes, so far as one can see. ‘People will apparently buy whatever is there. Why should they be restricted to a diet of oven gloves and hand-thrown mugs? All they want is something they don’t actually need. You’ve turned out some very appealing junk, in your time. What about those papier mâché birds you did for that Selfridges window display?’
‘They took hours and hours,’ says Teresa. ‘I haven’t got an hour a day, with Luke.’
Pauline concedes that this is true.
‘And anyway by the autumn we’ll be in London again.’
‘It was a fleeting thought,’ says Pauline. ‘Forget it. I’ve been infected by all this getting and spending and feel we ought to join in.’
‘Actually I’ve been thinking that when Luke’s old enough to start at a nursery I’ll take on some commissions again. I could be working part-time at least. Unless I have another baby.’
Pauline eyes her. ‘Unless …’ she agrees, non-committal.
‘I’d rather two than one, really.’
Pauline says that two is not a bad idea.
Teresa now looks warily at her mother. There is something unstated that hovers, that has perhaps hovered before. ‘Did you ever ?
??’ she begins.
‘Whoops!’ exclaims Pauline. Luke has dropped his piece of anchovy toast. He wails. There is a flurry of consolation and substitution. The moment passes.
And it is time to meet up with the rest of the party. Pauline and Teresa leave the tea shop. Luke is put back into his buggy, protesting – he has other plans, it seems, and there is a tussle as Teresa straps him in. They walk back up the village street to the agreed meeting place outside the wood craft shop where they stand for a few minutes until Maurice, James and Carol appear, all smiles, evidently well pleased.
‘It was really kitsch,’ says Carol. ‘I loved it. Like doll’s houses – you wanted to get inside and live there. Tiny oil lamps on the tables and a little mangle with a sheet in it, and a miniature washing-tub. Heaven!’
‘Exactly what you were meant to feel,’ says Maurice. ‘I quite agree – it was entirely satisfactory. A perfect instance of the diminution of the past for purposes of touristic exploitation. Quite literally, in this instance.’
Carol giggles. ‘Well, it exploited me all right. There was this cricket match,’ she tells Teresa and Pauline, ‘with miniature deck chairs for the spectators and little figures in white flannels.’
‘Don’t forget the four-inch bats,’ says James. ‘And the ball. And the real grass.’
‘Where’s Luke?’ says Pauline sharply.
The buggy is empty. They have been standing in a group as they talked. Teresa had her back to the buggy, one hand upon the handle. A party of French schoolchildren has just jostled past. The pavement is crowded on all sides.
Teresa freezes. Then she darts frantically off. Pauline follows. She hears Maurice shout, ‘We’ll go and look the other way.’
Pauline glances again at the empty buggy. She sees the straps hanging loose and remembers that earlier tussle. During which, presumably, Teresa failed to click home the catch so that it has fallen open, enabling Luke to climb out.
It is a full minute before they see him. A long full minute. He is between two parked cars, holding himself steady on a bumper. In the instant that they catch sight of him, he loses his grip on the bumper, falls to his knees, picks himself up and staggers out into the road, into the traffic which passes in a steady stream.
He is fifteen yards or so away. It is not Pauline or Teresa who reaches him but a man who shoots suddenly from the pavement, a middle-aged stranger who grabs Luke by an arm at the moment that a car swerves past him. When they get there Luke is crying and the man has picked him up and is awkwardly holding him. The first thing that he says is ‘Sorry …’ – presumably on account of Luke’s screams.
Teresa takes Luke. She is shaking so much that she cannot speak. It is Pauline who says the things that should be said to the man. He is deprecating, he shrugs, he doesn’t want too much made of this. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ he says. And then he melts away.
They hurry back the way they came. Pauline sees Maurice’s back view. She shouts. He turns. He comes towards them. James and Carol too arrive from somewhere. ‘Oh good – you’ve found him,’ cries Carol.
Maurice is rattled. Or rather, he has been rattled – distinctly rattled. But now that he sees everything is all right he is instantly restored. ‘How did that happen?’ he asks Teresa. ‘Don’t tell me he’s learnt to undo those straps.’
Teresa does not reply. She stands there holding Luke and they all see suddenly that she is crying. Her eyes glisten, her mouth is contorted.
Maurice pats her on the shoulder. ‘Come on …’ he says. ‘It’s all OK. Nothing happened.’
Tears run down Teresa’s face.
James and Carol stand eyeing Teresa. They are embarrassed. At least, James is embarrassed. He looks away. He wipes his hair off his forehead and fiddles with his car keys and pretends not to see Teresa weeping. Carol simply watches. She is not so much embarrassed as puzzled. She is wondering why Teresa is making such a fuss. There is a complete absence of empathy. Carol has no perception of what it is that Teresa is feeling, or of what it is that Teresa has felt over the last four minutes. She is seeing a person who is absurdly crying over something that has not happened.
‘I think maybe we’ve all had enough of Worsham,’ says Pauline briskly. ‘Home, I suggest.’
No one objects. They head for the car park. Teresa pushes Luke in silence until eventually she starts to respond a little to James’s determined chat. Pauline walks beside them, encouraging James, watching Teresa – who is surfacing, she sees, emerging from that black pit of horror glimpsed. Maurice and Carol walk a few paces ahead. Snatches of their conversation float back – anodyne, unexceptional.
At the entrance to the car park they regroup. Carol moves aside to sit on a wall and adjust her sandal. James is still telling Pauline and Teresa an anecdote – kindly improvised to distract and entertain. Teresa listens, a half-smile on her face now, her eyes upon Luke.
Maurice stands nearby – just waiting, it would seem. Pauline glances away from James and sees that Maurice’s look is upon Carol, who is absorbed still in this problem with the sandal. There is a concentration about this look – an intensity – that she has seen before. In Maurice’s eyes above a glass of red wine. In someone else’s eyes, at another time. She both sees the look and feels it like some chill shadow.
She says, ‘Maurice, you take Teresa back. I’ll go with James and Carol.’ She speaks loudly, so that she is heard by all.
‘Right,’ says Maurice, jolted by her tone. He grins at her, at Teresa.
Carol stands up. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I’d thought … Oh, OK, then.’
Thus they return to World’s End, together and apart. Pauline finds that she is suddenly exhausted, clobbered like Teresa by what did not happen. She sits there in the car, hardly hearing what is said, seeing only Luke who potters out into the flashing road, and the face of that fortuitous stranger, who says ‘All’s well that ends well’. James and Carol talk on, because it is not polite to remain silent during a car journey with an acquaintance, and Pauline contributes from time to time, in a desultory way. Carol talks of the flat that she and James are considering buying together. Their relationship is only a year or so old, it seems, but moving in the direction of heavier commitment. She talks of her job. She too works in publishing, in a somewhat subordinate capacity and without great fervour, Pauline detects. She recognizes Carol. Not Carol personally but Carol as a species. She is a literary groupie – one of those who leech on to writers, who are passed from hand to hand among poets, and for whom publication and a degree of fame spell sexual magnetism. Pauline has worked with several Carols. They do not last long because they lack efficiency and ambition – they are only there for the pickings. They do not want to go to bed with a book, but with anyone who wrote one.
‘What are you editing just now, Pauline?’ Carol inquires. Her attitude to Pauline has shifted. It has moved from casual dismissal (middle-aged, someone’s mother) to mild dislike tempered with a certain caution. She perceives that Pauline is possibly a force to be reckoned with.
Pauline describes briefly the manuscript that is on her desk at the moment, which is in fact something of an oddity – a novel with a medieval setting and elements of fantasy, a curious marriage of myth and realism.
‘Is it good?’ says Carol, with brisk professionalism.
‘I don’t know,’ replies Pauline. This is the truth.
‘Do you like it?’ asks James.
Pauline considers. ‘I like the idea. Sometimes I have doubts about the language. The author’s quite young.’
Carol has lost interest. She is off now on another tack. She is solicitous about Teresa. Thank goodness nothing happened to the baby. I had no idea they could move so fast, she says. He was half-way up the street, wasn’t he? She talks of Luke with interested detachment, as though he were some kind of unfamiliar animal. My sister’s got one, she says – a bit older, I should think, and he’s like that too. I mean, someone’s got to be watching all the time. I couldn’t manage, she says,
I just know I couldn’t.
‘Needs must when the devil drives,’ says Pauline. ‘I suppose.’
‘What? Oh, I see. Well, maybe. Anyway, I just know I’d be hopeless. Actually –’ Carol becomes confidential, flatteringly confidential – ‘I was pregnant once, a couple of years ago – James knows all about this, it’s before we met, when I was with someone else – but it didn’t come to anything. I … sort of miscarried.’
‘Bad luck,’ says Pauline.
‘Well, in fact I was awfully relieved really though of course it’s always a bit traumatic. But I simply wasn’t ready. Not then. Sometime, maybe. Anyway, there it was.’
There it was, thinks Pauline. Easy come, easy go. An admirable resilience. Very healthy. A great mistake to dwell on these things.
A great mistake.
She is walking down a leafy street in north London, feeling sick. Spring is bursting out all over, unstoppable, unquenchable, blackbirds shrieking in the gardens, the blossom boiling on the trees. And she is walking towards this address which is written on a piece of paper in her bag. She checks every now and then that the envelope is there also, the envelope stuffed with £5 notes. For she has done what it would have been better not to have done, and now must pay the price. The price is £100. For a start, for the first instalment.
Future demands will follow. At irregular intervals. Rising out of the darkness in the small hours, the ghost child standing silent by the bed, for ever there and for ever terribly not there. The not-child who grows up not as ordinary children grow up, but as a perpetual absence. Who has shadowed Teresa over the years, unknown to Teresa but known always to Pauline – the other, older child who is mirrored continually by children that Pauline sees. Who would be like that now – or like that.
And who surfaces for an instant today, but as some eerie reflection of Luke. A Luke who can never exist. Pauline shrinks. The familiar chill, unchanging over the years – private, incommunicable, intense. And then the moment passes, the ghost has gone. Pauline collects herself and replies to James’s question. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Go right here, and then it’s next left.’