When the others watched television he watched it with them and he didn’t close his eyes. He had never got into the way of denouncing newspapers or novels. But the others knew and had no particular respect for his feelings. It didn’t stop them talking about Rebecca Neave.

Left to himself, Philip would have taken no interest in her disappearance, still less speculated about her. He would have turned off the set. Of course he would probably have turned it off ten minutes before and avoided Northern Ireland, Iran, Angola, and a train crash in France as well as a missing girl. He would never have looked at the photograph of her pretty face, the smiling mouth and eyes screwed up against the sun, the hair blown by the wind.

Fee said, when the girl’s face appeared on screen, ‘I was at school with her. I thought I knew the name. Rebecca Neave. I thought I’d heard it before.’

‘I’ve never heard it. You’ve never said you had a friend called Rebecca.’

‘She wasn’t a friend, Cheryl. There were three thousand of us at that school. I don’t suppose I even spoke to her.’ Fee was staring intently at the screen while her brother made as conscious an effort not to look. He had picked up the newspaper and turned to an inside page where the Rebecca Neave story had not penetrated. ‘They must think she’s been murdered,’ Fee said.

Rebecca’s mother appeared and made an appeal for news of her missing daughter. Rebecca was twenty-three. Her job was teaching ceramics to adult classes but needing to supplement her income, she advertised her services as a baby-sitter and house-sitter. It seemed possible that someone had phoned in answer to her advertisement. Rebecca had made an appointment for that evening – and kept it. Or that was what her mother believed.

‘Oh, the poor woman,’ said Christine, coming in with coffee on a tray. ‘What she must be going through. I can just imagine how I’d feel if it was one of you.’

‘Well, it’s not likely to be me,’ said Philip who was well-built though thin, and six feet two. He looked at his sisters. ‘Can I turn this off now?’

‘You can’t stand anything like that, can you?’ Cheryl had a ferocious scowl she seldom bothered to restrain. ‘She may not have been murdered. Hundreds of people go missing every year.’

‘There’ll be more to it than we know,’ Fee said. ‘They wouldn’t make all this fuss if she’d just gone off. It’s funny, I remember her being in the same crafts group as I was for O Levels. They said she wanted to go on and be a teacher and the rest of them thought it was funny because all they wanted was to get married. Go on, turn it off, Phil, if you want. There isn’t going to be any more about Rebecca anyway.’

‘Why can’t they put nice things on the news?’ said Christine. ‘You’d think they would be just as sensational. It can’t be that there aren’t any nice things, can it?’

‘Disasters are news,’ said Philip. ‘but it might be an idea to try your kind for a change. They could have a list of today’s rescues, all the people saved from drowning, all those who’d been in car crashes and didn’t get killed.’ He added on a more sombre note, ‘A list of kids who haven’t been abused and girls who’ve got away from attackers.’

He switched off the set. There was a positive pleasure in seeing the picture dwindle and swiftly vanish. Fee hadn’t gloated over Rebecca Neave’s disappearance but speculation about it obviously interested her far more than discussing one of Christine’s ‘nice things’ would have. He made a rather artificial effort to talk about something else.

‘What time are we all supposed to be going out tomorrow?’

‘That’s right, change the subject. That’s so like you, Phil.’

‘He said to be there by about six.’ Christine looked rather shyly at the girls and then back to Philip. ‘I want you all to come out into the garden a minute. Will you? I want to ask your advice.’

It was a small bleak garden, best at this time of the day when the sun was setting and the shadows were long. A row of Leyland cypresses prevented the neighbours from seeing over the fence at the end. In the middle of the grass was a circular slab of concrete and on the concrete stood a birdbath and a statue, side by side. There was no moss growing on the concrete but weeds pushed their way through a split under the birdbath. Christine laid her hand on the statue’s head and gave it a little stroke in the way she might have caressed a child. She looked at her children in that apprehensive way she had, half-diffident, half-daring.

‘What would you say if I said I’d like to give Flora to him for a present?’

Fee seldom hesitated, was invariably strong. ‘You can’t give people statues as presents.’

‘Why not, if they like them?’ Christine had said. ‘He said he liked her and she’d look nice in his garden. He said she reminded him of me.’

Fee said as if their mother hadn’t spoken, ‘You give people chocolates or a bottle of wine.’

‘He brought me wine.’ Christine said this in a wondering and gratified tone, as if taking a bottle of wine to the house of a woman you were having dinner with, was exceptionally thoughtful and generous. She moved her hand along Flora’s marble shoulder. ‘She’s always reminded me of a bridesmaid. It’s the flowers, I expect.’

Philip had never looked closely at the marble girl before. Flora was just the statue which had stood by the pond in their garden at home ever since he could remember. His father, he had been told, had bought her while he and Christine were on their honeymoon. She stood about three feet high and was a copy in miniature of a Roman statue. In her left hand she held a sheaf of flowers, with the other she reached for the hem of her robe, lifting it away from her right ankle. Both her feet were on the ground yet she seemed to be walking or dancing some sedate measure. But it was her face which was particularly beautiful. Looking at her, Philip realised that generally he didn’t find the faces of ancient Greek or Roman statues attractive. Their heavy jaws and long bridgeless noses gave them a forbidding look. Standards of beauty had changed perhaps. Or else it was something more delicate that appealed to him. But Flora’s face was how a beautiful living girl’s might be today, the cheekbones high, the chin round, the upper lip short and the mouth the loveliest conjunction of tenderly folded lips. It was like a living girl’s but for the eyes. Flora’s eyes, extremely wide apart, seemed to gaze at far horizons with an expression remote and pagan.

‘I’ve thought for ages she was wasted here,’ said Christine. ‘She looks silly. Well, what I really mean is, she makes the rest of it look silly.’

It was true. The statue was too good for her surroundings. ‘Like putting champagne in a plastic cup,’ said Philip.

‘That’s it exactly.’

‘You can give her away if you want to,’ Cheryl said. ‘She’s yours. She’s not ours. Dad gave her to you.’

‘I think of all the things as being ours,’ said Christine.

‘He’s got a lovely garden, he says. I think I’d feel better about Flora if I knew she was in her proper setting. Do you know what I mean?’

She looked at Philip. No amount of proselytising on the part of her daughters could persuade her of the equality of the sexes, no pressure from newspapers, magazines or television convince her. Her husband was dead so she looked to her son, not her eldest child, for decisions, rulings, counsel.

‘We’ll take her with us tomorrow,’ Philip said.

It didn’t seem so very important at the time. Why should it? It didn’t seem one of those life or death decisions like whether or not to marry, have a child, change a career, have or not have the vital surgery. Yet it was as significant as any of those.

Of course it was to be a long time before he thought of it in those terms. He tested Flora’s weight, lifting her up an inch or two. She was as heavy as he had expected. He suddenly found himself thinking of Flora as a symbol of his mother, who had come to his father on his marriage and was now to be passed on to Gerard Arnham. Did that mean Christine was contemplating marrying him? They had met the previous Christmas at Philip’s uncle’s office party and it had been a slow courtship, if courtship it was. That might in part have been due to the fact that Arnham was always going abroad for his company. Arnham had only once been to this house, as far as Philip knew. Now they were going to meet him. That made it seem as if things were taking a more serious turn.

His mother said, ‘I don’t think we’d better take Hardy.’ The little dog, the Jack Russell Christine had named after Hardy Amies because she liked the clothes he designed, had come into the garden and stood close beside her. She bent down and patted his head. ‘He doesn’t like dogs. I don’t mean he’d be cruel to them or anything.’ She spoke as if an antipathy to dogs often implied a willingness to torture them. ‘He just doesn’t care for them much. I could tell he didn’t like Hardy that evening he was here.’

Philip went back into the house and Fee said, ‘Seeing Flora reminded me Rebecca Neave once made a girl’s head.’

‘What do you mean, made a girl’s head?’

‘At school. In pottery. She made it in clay. It was lifesize. The teacher made her break it up, she wouldn’t have it put in the kiln, because we were supposed to be making pots. And, just imagine, she may be lying dead somewhere now.’

‘I’d rather not imagine, thanks. I’m not fascinated by these things the way you are.’

Fee took Hardy on to her lap. He always came wooing people at this hour, hoping for a walk. ‘It’s not that I’m fascinated, Phil. We’re all interested in murder and violence and crime. They say it’s because we’ve got elements of it in ourselves. We’re all capable of murder, we all sometimes want to attack people, strike them, hurt them.’

‘I don’t.’

‘He really doesn’t, Fee,’ said Cheryl. ‘You know he doesn’t. And he doesn’t like talking about it, so shut up.’

Philip had never been to this part of metropolitan Essex before. It reminded him a little of Barnet where living had been gracious and the sun seemed always to shine. There were houses in the street they were walking up but they were hidden by hedges and trees and it might have ben a country lane. His mother and sisters were all ahead of him now and he hurried up, shifting Flora on to the other side. Cheryl, who had nothing to carry but was wearing high heels with her very tight jeans, said in a moaning way, ‘Is it much further, Mum?’

‘I don’t know, dear. I only know what Gerard told me, up the hill and the fourth turning on the right.’ Christine was always saying things were nice. ‘Nice’ was her favourite word. ‘It’s a very nice part, isn’t it?’

She was wearing a pink linen dress with a white jacket. She had white beads and pink lipstick and looked the sort of woman who would scarcely stay single for long. Her hair was soft and fluffy and the sunglasses hid the lines under her eyes. Philip had noticed that though she had her wedding ring on – he had never seen her without it – she had left off her engagement ring. Christine probably had some unexpressed dotty reason for doing this, such as that engagement rings represented the love of a living husband while wedding rings were a social requirement for widows as well as wives. Fee, of course, was wearing her own engagement ring. The better to show it off, Philip conjectured, she carried something she called a clutch bag in her left hand. The formal dark blue suit with a too-long skirt made her look older than she was, too old, Arnham might think, to be Christine’s daughter.

He hadn’t taken any particular pains over his appearance. His efforts had been concentrated on getting Flora ready. Christine had said to try and get that green stain off the marble and he had had a go with soap and water but unsuccessfully. She had provided tissue paper to wrap the statue in. Philip had wrapped her in a second layer of newspaper, that morning’s paper, which had the Rebecca Neave story spread all over the front page. There was another photograph of Rebecca and an account of how a man, unnamed, but aged twenty-four, had spent all the previous day with the police ‘helping them with their enquiries’. Philip had quickly rolled the statue up in this paper and then bundled it into the plastic bag that Christine’s raincoat had been in when it came back from the cleaners.

This hadn’t perhaps been a good idea, for it made a slippery package. Flora kept slipping and having to be hoisted up again. His arms ached from shoulder to wrist. The four of them had turned, at last, into the road where Arnham lived. The houses weren’t detached as theirs in Barnet had been but terraced in curving rows, ‘town houses’ with gardens full of shrubs and autumn flowers. Philip could see already that one of these gardens would be a more suitable setting for Flora. Arnham’s house was three-storeyed, with Roman blinds at the windows and a brass lion’s head knocker on the dark green Georgian front door. Christine paused at the gate with a look of wonder.

‘What a pity he’s got to sell it! But it can’t be helped, I suppose. He has to share the proceeds with his ex-wife.’

It was unfortunate, Philip thought later, that Arnham opened the front door just at the moment when Cheryl said loudly, ‘I thought his wife was dead! I didn’t know he was divorced. Isn’t that yucky!’

Philip would never forget his first sight of Gerard Arnham. His first impression was that the man they were visiting was far from pleased to see them. He was of medium height, strongly built but not fat. His hair was grey but thick and sleek and he was good-looking in what Philip thought of, without being able to explain why, as a sort of Italian or Greek way. His handsome features were fleshy and his lips full. He wore cream-coloured slacks, a white shirt with an open neck and a lightweight jacket in a large but not over-bold check of dark blue and cream and brown. The look on his face changed from dismay to an appalled disbelief that made him briefly close his eyes.

He opened them again very quickly and came down the steps and hid whatever it was that was upsetting him under hearty politeness. Philip expected him to kiss Christine, and perhaps Christine expected this too for she went to him with her face held up, but he didn’t kiss her. He shook hands with everyone. Philip put Flora down on the step while he shook hands.

Christine said, ‘This is Fiona, my eldest. She’s the one I told you is getting married next year. And this is Philip who’s just got his degree and is training to be an interior designer and this is Cheryl – she’s just left school.’

‘And who’s this?’ Arnham said.

The way Philip had set Flora down she did look like a fifth member of their party. Her wrappings were coming off. Head and one arm poked out of the hole in the cleaning bag. Her serene face whose eyes seemed always to be looking beyond you and into the distance, was now entirely uncovered as was her right hand in which she held the sheaf of marble flowers. The green stain on her neck and bosom had suddenly become very noticeable as had the chip out of one of her ears.

‘You remember her, Gerard. She’s Flora who was in my garden and you said you liked her so much. We’ve brought her for you. She’s yours now.’ When Arnham didn’t say anything, Christine persisted, ‘For a present. We’ve brought her for you because you said you liked her.’

Arnham was obliged to make a show of enthusiasm but he didn’t do it very well. They left Flora out there and went into the house. Necessarily, because there were four of them and the hallway was narrow so that they had to proceed singly, they seemed to troop into the house. Philip felt glad they at least hadn’t brought Hardy. This was no place for a dog.

It was very beautifully decorated and furnished. Philip always noticed these things. If he hadn’t he probably wouldn’t have been taking the training course at Roseberry Lawn Interiors. One day, a day that was necessarily far off, he would like a living room in his house like this one with ivy-green walls and drawings in narrow gilt frames and a carpet whose glorious deep soft yellow reminded him of Chinese porcelain seen in museums.

Through an archway he could see into the dining room. A small table was laid for two. There were two pink table napkins in two tall pink glasses and a single pink carnation in a fluted vase. Before he could fully realise what this meant Arnham was ushering them all into the garden by a back way. He had picked up Flora, very much as if, Philip thought, he feared she might dirty his carpet, and was swinging her along like a bag of shopping.

Once outside he dumped her in the flowerbed that was the border of a small rockery and making an excuse, disappeared into the house. The Wardmans stood on the lawn. Fee looked at Philip behind Christine’s back and behind Cheryl’s back, put up her eyebrows and gave the kind of satisfied nod that is the equivalent of a thumbs-up sign. She was indicating that she approved of Arnham, that Arnham would do. Philip shrugged his shoulders. He turned to look at Flora once more, at the marble face which certainly wasn’t Christine’s face or that of any real woman he had ever known. The nose was classical, the eyes rather too wide apart, the soft lips too indented, and there was a curiously glazed look on the face as if she were untroubled by normal human fears and doubts and inhibitions.

Arnham came back apologising and they set Flora up in a position where she could contemplate her own reflection in the waters of a very small pond. They wedged her in place between two grey stones over which a golden-leaved plant had spread its tendrils.

‘She looks just right there,’ said Christine. ‘It seems a shame she can’t stay there for ever. You’ll just have to take her with you when you move.’

‘Yes.’

‘I expect you’ll have another nice garden wherever it is.’

Arnham didn’t say anything. There was a chance, Philip thought, for he knew his mother, that Christine would say a formal farewell to Flora. It would be like her. He wouldn’t have been surprised to hear her say goodbye and bid Flora be a good girl. Her silence gratified him, the dignified way she preceded Arnham back into the house. He understood. There was no need to say goodbye to someone you would soon be living with for the rest of your life. Had anyone else seen or was he alone in noticing that the little table in the dining room had been stripped of cloth, silver, glass and pink carnation? That was why Arnham had come back into the house, to clear this table. Much was made plain to Philip. Christine had been expected on her own.

His mother and sisters seemed not to understand that any social solecism had been committed. Cheryl sprawled on the settee, her legs apart and stuck out on the rug. She was obliged to sit like that, of course, because her jeans were too tight and her heels too high to permit of bending her knees and setting the soles of her feet on the floor. Fee had lit a cigarette without asking Arnham if he minded. As she looked round for an ashtray, conspicuously absent among all the variety of ornaments, little cups and saucers, china animals, miniature vases, and while she waited for Arnham to come back with one from the kitchen the inch of ash fell off the end of her cigarette on to the yellow carpet.

Arnham didn’t say anything. Fee began talking of the missing girl. She was sure the man who had been helping police with their enquiries must be this Martin Hunt, the one the papers and television said had phoned on the day of her disappearance. It was what they always said, the terminology always used, when they meant they had caught a murderer but couldn’t yet prove he had done it. If the papers said any more, gave the man’s name for instance, or said he was suspected of murder, they might risk a libel action. Or be breaking the law.

‘I bet the police grilled him unmercifully. I expect they beat him up. All sorts of things go on we don’t suspect, don’t they? They wanted a confession from him because they’re too thick often to actually get evidence like detectives in books do. I don’t suppose they believed he’d only been out with her four times. And it’s hard for them because they haven’t got a body. They don’t even know for certain she’s been murdered. That’s why they have to get a confession. They have to extort a confession.’

‘We have the most restrained and civilised police force in the world,’ Arnham said stiffly.

Instead of denying this, Fee smiled a little and lifted her shoulders. ‘They take it for granted when a person gets murdered it’s her husband if she’s got one or her boy friend. Don’t you think that’s awful?’

‘Why do we have to think about it?’ Cheryl asked. ‘I don’t know why we have to talk about it. Who cares about those revolting things, anyway?’

Fee took no notice. ‘Personally, I think it was the person who phoned in answer to her advertisement. It was some mad person who phoned and enticed her to their house and killed her. I expect the police think it was Martin Hunt putting on a false voice.’

Philip thought he could see disgust and perhaps boredom on Arnham’s face, but perhaps this was only a projection of his own feelings. He risked Fee’s telling him he was changing the subject and said quickly, ‘I was admiring that picture,’ he began, pointing to the rather strange landscape over the fireplace. ‘Is it a Samuel Palmer?’

Of course he meant a print. Anyone would have known he meant that but Arnham, looking incredulous, said, ‘I shouldn’t think so for one moment if Samuel Palmer is who I think he is. My ex-wife bought it in a garage sale.’

Philip blushed. His efforts anyway had done nothing to stem the tide of Fee’s forensic narrative. ‘She’s probably dead already and they’ve found the body and are keeping it dark. For their own reason. To trap someone.’

‘If that’s true,’ Arnham said, ‘it will come out at the inquest. In this country the police don’t keep things dark.’

It was Cheryl who spoke, who hadn’t uttered a word since they came back from the garden. ‘Who are you trying to kid?’

Arnham made no reply to that. He said very stiffly, ‘Would you like a drink?’ His eyes ranged over them as if they were a dozen people instead of four. ‘Any of you?’

‘What have you got?’ This was Fee. Philip had a very good idea this wasn’t a question you asked people like Arnham, though it might have gone down perfectly well in the circles Fee and Darren moved in.

‘Anything you will be able to think of.’

‘Then can I have a bacardi and coke?’

Of course that was something he didn’t have. He dispensed second choices, sherry, gin and tonic. To Philip’s astonishment, though he knew she could be strangely insensitive, Christine seemed unaware of how frigid the atmosphere had grown. With a glass of Bristol Cream in her hand, she continued along the lines Philip himself had set and made admiring comments on various items of Arnham’s furniture and ornaments. Such and such a thing was nice, everything was very nice, the carpets were particularly nice and of such good quality. Philip marvelled at her transparency. She spoke as one humbly grateful for an unexpected munificent gift.

Arnham said harshly, smashing all that, ‘Everything will have to be sold. There’s a court order that everything has to be sold and the proceeds divided between myself and my ex-wife.’ He drew a long breath that sounded stoical. ‘And now I suggest you let me take you all out for a meal somewhere. I don’t think we can quite manage anything here. The local steakhouse – how will that suit?’

He took them in the Jaguar. It was a big car so there was no difficulty about their all getting into it. Philip thought he ought to feel grateful to Arnham for taking them all out and paying for their dinner but he didn’t. He felt it would have been better for him to have come out with the truth, said he had only been expecting Christine and then entertained Christine on her own as he had originally planned to do. He and Fee and Cheryl wouldn’t have minded, they would have preferred it – at any rate he would – to sitting here in the glowing dimness, the pseudo country manor decor, of a second-rate restaurant above a supermarket, trying to make conversation with someone who was obviously longing for them to leave.

People of Arnham’s generation lacked openness, Philip thought. They weren’t honest. They were devious. Christine was the same, she wouldn’t speak her mind, she would think it rude. He hated the way she praised every dish that came as if Arnham had cooked it himself. Away from his own home Arnham had become much more expansive, talking pleasantly, drawing Cheryl out as to what she meant to do now she had left school, asking Fee about her fiancé and what he did for a living. He seemed to have got over his initial disappointment or anger. The interest he showed in her started Cheryl talking about their father, the least suitable of all possible subjects, Philip thought. But Cheryl had been closer to Stephen than any of his children, hadn’t, even now, begun the process of recovering from his death.

‘Oh yes, it’s quite true, he was like that,’ Christine said with a shade of embarrassment after Cheryl had spoken of their father’s love of gambling. ‘Mind you, no one suffered. He would never have had his family go without. Really, we benefited, didn’t we? A lot of the nice things we’ve got came from his gambling.’

‘Mum got her honeymoon paid for out of Dad’s Derby win,’ said Cheryl. ‘But it wasn’t only horses with Dad, was it, Mum? He’d bet on anything. If you were with him waiting for a bus he’d bet on which would come first, the 16 or the 32. If the phone rang he’d say, “Fifty pee it’s a man’s voice, Cheryl, or fifty pee it’s a woman’s.” I used to go to the dogs with him, I loved that, it was so exciting sitting there drinking a coke and maybe eating a meal and watching the dogs go round. He never got cross, my Dad. When he felt one of his bad moods coming on he’d say, “OK, what’ll we have a bet on? There are two birds on the lawn, a blackbird and a sparrow, I bet you a pound the sparrow flies away first.”’

‘His whole life was gambling,’ said Christine with a sigh.

‘And us.’ Cheryl uttered it fiercely. She had had two glasses of wine which had gone to her head. ‘We were first, then the gambling.’

It was true. Even his work had been gambling, so to speak, speculation on the Stock Exchange, until one day, the result perhaps of a lifetime of anxieties and stress, chain-smoking, long days and short nights, sitting with the phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other, his heart ruptured and stopped. The heart disease, of long standing but concealed from his wife and children, had meant there was no life assurance, very little provision of any kind and a mortgage on the Barnet house which was covered by no insurance policy. With no reason to expect it, he had planned to live for years, to amass in that time by speculation among other forms of gambling, a fortune to maintain his family after he was gone.

‘We even got Flora through a bet,’ Christine was saying. ‘We were on our honeymoon in Florence, walking along a street that’s full of antique shops, and I saw Flora in the window and said wasn’t she lovely? The house we’d had built had a little garden, not the big garden we had in Barnet, but a nice little garden, and I could just imagine Flora standing by our pond. You tell him what happened, Cheryl, the way Dad told you.’

Philip could see Arnham was quite interested. He was smiling. After all, he had spoken about his ex-wife, so why shouldn’t Christine talk of her dead husband?

‘Mum said she’d be terribly expensive, but Dad was never one to care about things costing a lot. He said her face was like Mum’s – but I don’t really think it is, do you?’

‘Perhaps a bit,’ Arnham said.

‘Anyway, he said he liked her because she looked like Mum. He said, “I’ll tell you what, we’ll have a bet on it. I bet she’s Venus, I bet she’s the goddess Venus. If she’s not I’ll buy her for you.”’

‘I thought Venus was a star,’ said Christine. ‘Stephen said not, she was a goddess. Cheryl knows, she’s done all that at school.’

‘So they went into the shop and the man in there spoke English and he told Dad she wasn’t Venus, Venus is nearly always bare above the waist, sort of topless. . . .’

‘You needn’t tell him that, Cheryl!’

‘Dad didn’t mind telling me – it’s art, isn’t it? The man in the shop said she was a copy of the Farnese Flora. She was the goddess of spring and flowers and her own flowers were may blossom. That’s what she’s holding in her hand. Anyway, Dad had to buy her after that and she cost a lot, hundreds of thousands of whatever their money’s called, and they had to have her sent home because they couldn’t carry her in the aircraft.’

The conversation had come round to its starting point in Arnham’s house when the statue had first been presented to him. It was this which was perhaps the signal for him to call for the bill. When Cheryl had finished he said, ‘You make me feel I shouldn’t have accepted her.’ He seemed to be doing sums in his head, converting lire perhaps. ‘No, I really can’t accept her. She’s much too valuable a gift.’

‘Yes, Gerard, I want you to have her.’ They were outside the restaurant by the time Christine said this. It was dark. Philip heard the words, though Arnham and Christine were walking a little apart from them and Christine had taken his hand. Or he had taken Christine’s. ‘It means a lot to me for you to have her. Please. It makes me happy to think of her there.’

Why had he got the idea into his head that Arnham meant only to drive them as far as Buckhurst Hill station? Nothing had been said. Perhaps he really was in love with Christine and put himself out for her as a matter of course. Or it might be that he felt under an obligation on account of Flora. Philip thought the earlier awkwardness had quite passed. Christine sat in the front and chatted to Arnham about the neighbourhood and where she used to live and where she now lived and about whether or not she should take up hairdressing again, which had been her job before she married. Because they needed ‘a bit more coming in’, which was all very artless but made Philip wince. It did seem as if she were throwing herself at him. She was really ‘waiting to see what happened’ before she definitely made up her mind to start a hairdressing business from home.

Arnham talked pleasantly enough about his own plans. The house had to be sold and all the furniture. He and his ex-wife had agreed it should be auctioned with all its contents and he hoped this might happen while he was out of the country on business. A flat wouldn’t suit him, he would have to buy himself another house, but in the same district or not far away. What did Christine think of Epping?

‘I used to go to Epping Forest on picnics when I was a child.’

‘You’ve been very near Epping Forest today,’ Arnham said, ‘but I meant Epping itself. Or Chigwell even. I might stand a chance of finding a smaller place in Chigwell Row.’

‘You could always come up our way,’ said Christine.

Cricklewood, that was, and Glenallan Close where Christine, newly widowed, had been obliged to move. The most optimistic of estate agents would hardly have called it desirable. Philip reminded himself that Arnham had been there before, the clumps of red-brick houses with their flat metal-framed windows, pantiled roofs, wire fences and skimpy gardens, would come as no shock to him. Darkness and the shining mist from street lamps shrouded in leaves concealed the worst. It was no slum. It was only poor and barren and shabby. Philip and Fee and Cheryl, as if by mutual understanding, hurried into the house, leaving Christine and Arnham to make their farewells. But Christine was very quick about it, running up the path just as the front door came open and Hardy rushed out, hurtling himself at her with yelps of joy.

‘What did you think of him? Did you like him?’ The car had scarcely gone. Christine stood watching it depart, Hardy in her arms.

‘Yes, he’s OK.’ Fee, on the settee, was hunting for the latest on the Rebecca Neave affair in the Evening Standard.

‘Did you like him, Cheryl? Gerard, I mean.’

‘Me? Sure, yeah. I liked him. I mean, he’s OK. He’s a lot older than Dad, isn’t he? I mean, he looks older.’

‘I put my foot in it, though, didn’t I? I realised as soon as we were in the door. I’d said to him, you must meet my children sometime, and he sort of smiled and said he’d like to and the next thing he said was to come over to his house next Saturday, and I don’t know why, I took it he meant all of us. But of course he didn’t, he meant me alone. I felt awful. Did you see that little table laid for just two with the flower and everything?’

Philip took Hardy round the grid of streets before going to bed. He came in the back way and stood there for a moment, looking at the empty space by the birdbath on which light from the kitchen window was shed, where Flora had stood. By then it was too late to undo what had been done. Returning to Buckhurst Hill on the following day, for instance, and retrieving Flora – that would have been too late.

In any case, he had no feelings of that sort then, only a sense that things had been mismanaged and the day wasted.

‘Have come on here from New York and next week shall be in California or “The Coast” as they call it over here. The weather is a lot better than at home. I have left Flora to look after the house! Love, Gerry.’

She put the card on the mantelpiece between the clock and the photograph of Cheryl holding Hardy as a puppy. Later in the day Philip saw her reading it again, with her glasses on this time, then turning it over to look closely at the picture as if in the hope of seeing some mark or cross Arnham might have made there, indicative of personal occupancy or viewing point. A letter came in the following week, not an air letter but several sheets of paper in an airmail envelope. Christine didn’t open this in company, still less read it aloud.

‘I think that was him on the phone last night,’ Fee said to Philip. ‘You know when the phone went at – oh, it must have been all of eleven-thirty. I thought who’s ringing us at this hour? Mum jumped up as if she’d been expecting it. But she went straight to bed afterwards and she never said a word.’

‘It would have been half-past six in Washington. He’d have finished his day’s work and be ready to go out for the evening.’

‘No, he’ll be in California by this time. I worked it all out, it would have been early afternoon in California, he’d just have had his lunch. He was on the phone for ages, it was obvious he didn’t care what it cost.’

Philip thought, though he didn’t say so, that Arnham would have put the cost of phone calls to London on his expense account. The fact that he had had plenty to talk to Christine about was more significant.

‘Now Darren and I have fixed on next May for getting married,’ Fee said, ‘if he and Mum got engaged at Christmas, why shouldn’t we be married at the same time? I don’t see why you shouldn’t have this house, Phil. Mum won’t want it, you can tell he’s rich. You and Jenny could take over this house. I mean, I suppose you and Jenny will get married one day, won’t you?’

Philip only smiled. The idea of the house was inviting and something he had never thought about before. He wouldn’t have chosen it but it was a house, it was somewhere to live. That this was a real possibility he came to see more and more. His fears that their unexpected invasion of his house might have changed Arnham’s feelings for Christine or at least made him proceed with caution seemed unfounded. No more postcards arrived and if there were letters Philip didn’t see them, but another late phone call came and a few days later Christine confided in him that she had had a long conversation with Arnham during the afternoon.

‘He has to stay on a bit longer. He’s going to Chicago next.’ She spoke on a note of awe as if Arnham were contemplating a space tour to Mars or as if the Valentine’s Day massacre had taken place quite recently. ‘I hope he’ll be all right.’

Philip was never indiscreet enough to say anything about the house to Jenny. He managed to contain himself even when one evening, as they were walking back from the cinema along an unfamiliar street, she pointed out a block of flats where several were advertised to let.

‘When you’ve finished your training . . .’

It was a flat ugly building, about sixty years old, with peeling art deco adornments over the front entrance. He shook his head, said something about an exorbitant rent.

She held on to his arm. ‘Is it because of Rebecca Neave?’

He looked at her in astonishment. A month and more had passed since the girl’s disappearance. Theories, whole articles of speculation, appeared from time to time in newspapers outlining their authors’ ideas of what had become of her. There was no real news, there had been no leads that could be called firm. She had vanished as surely as if she had been made invisible and spirited away. The name for a second meant nothing to Philip, so securely had he banished it from his mind, hating to dwell on these things. The identity of its possessor came back to him uneasily.

‘Rebecca Neave?’

‘She lived there, didn’t she?’ Jenny said.

‘I had no idea.’

He must have spoken very coldly, for he could sense her looking at him as if she thought he was pretending to something he didn’t truly feel. But this phobia of his was real enough and sometimes it extended to the human beings who allowed violence to occupy their minds. He didn’t want to seem smug or prudish. Because she expected him to do so, he looked up at the building, bathed in the orangeade sticky light of stilt-borne street lamps. Not a window was open on the facade. The front doors swung apart and a woman came out briskly and got into a car. Jenny was unable to say exactly which flat had been Rebecca’s but she guessed its windows were the two in the very top right-hand corner.

‘I thought that was why you didn’t fancy it.’

‘I don’t fancy living all the way up here.’ North of the North Circular Road, he meant. He thought of the surprise it would be telling her of his acquisition of a house rent-free, but something stayed him, some inner prudence held him back. It might be only a matter of weeks before he knew – until then he could refrain. ‘Anyway, I ought to wait till I’ve got a proper job,’ he said.

The last time he knew Arnham had phoned Christine was at the end of November. He heard her speaking to someone quite late at night and call him Gerry. Soon after that he expected Arnham home – or Fee did. Fee watched their mother as once a mother might have watched her daughter, looking for an air of excitement, for changes in her appearance. They wouldn’t ask. Christine never questioned them about their private affairs. Fee said she seemed depressed but Philip couldn’t see it, she was just the same as far as he knew.

Christmas passed and his training course came to an end. He was on the Roseberry Lawn staff now, a very junior surveyor-planner, on a salary of which he was obliged to part with a third to Christine. When Fee went it would be more than a third and he must learn not to mind that either. Christine, quite quietly and not making any fuss about it, began earning a little by doing the neighbours’ hair at home. If his father had been alive, Philip thought, he would have stopped Cheryl working at Tesco on the checkout. Not that this endured for long. She only lasted there three weeks and afterwards, instead of trying to get another job, went on the dole with indifferent acceptance.

In the living room in Glenallan Close, a room which had once been two – very tiny poky rooms they must have been, for combined they measured not much more than six metres – the postcard with the White House on it remained on the mantelpiece. All the Christmas cards had been taken down but Arnham’s card remained. Philip would have liked to take it down and throw it away but he had an uneasy feeling Christine treasured it. Once, looking at it sideways in sunlight, he saw that its glossy surface was covered with her fingermarks.

‘Perhaps he just hasn’t come back yet,’ Fee said.

‘He wouldn’t be away on a business trip for four months.’

Cheryl said unexpectedly, ‘She’s tried to phone him herself but the number’s unobtainable. She told me so, she said his phone was out of order.’

‘He was going to move,’ Philip said slowly. ‘He told us – don’t you remember? He’s moved without telling her.’

At work, when he wasn’t out visiting clients and prospective clients, he divided his time between the showrooms in Brompton Road and head office which was near Baker Street. Often, after parking his car or on his way out to lunch, he wondered if he might run into Arnham. For a while he hoped this might happen, perhaps only because the sight of her son might remind Arnham of Christine, but as he began to lose hope he shied away from a meeting. It had begun to be embarrassing.

‘Hasn’t Mum aged?’ Fee said to him. Christine was out walking Hardy. In front of Fee on the table was a pile of wedding invitations. She was addressing envelopes. ‘She looks years older, don’t you think?’

He nodded, hardly knowing what answer to make. And yet six months before he would have said their mother looked younger than at any time since Stephen Wardman’s death. He had concluded that she was a woman with the type of looks which only youth suited, as Fee herself would be. That white and pink skin with its velvety texture was the first kind to fade. Like rose petals it seemed to turn brown at the edges. Pale blue eyes lost their brightness sooner than the dark sort. Golden hair turned to straw, to ash – particularly if you reserved none of the bleach you put on your customers’ hair for yourself. Fee didn’t pursue it. She said instead, ‘I take it you’ve split up with Jenny? I mean I was going to ask her to be one of my bridesmaids but I won’t if you’ve split up.’

‘It looks like it,’ he said, and then, ‘Yes, we have. You can take it that’s all over.’

He didn’t want to explain to her. This was something he felt he wasn’t obliged to explain to anyone. There was no need for solemn announcements as if he had been in a permanent relationship and his marriage or even his engagement had broken up. In fact, it wasn’t that Jenny had tried to pressurise him into marriage. She wasn’t like that. But they had been going out together for a year and more. It was natural that she wanted him to move in with her, or rather, for the two of them to find a place where they could live together, as on the evening when she had shown him the block where Rebecca Neave had lived. He had to refuse, he couldn’t leave Christine. Come to that, he couldn’t afford to leave Christine.

‘You and Mum both,’ said Fee with a sigh. ‘It’s a good thing Darren and me are solid as a rock.’

It was an expression that applied rather too accurately to Fee’s future husband, Philip thought. Even Darren’s undeniably handsome face had something rock-like about it. He hadn’t tried very hard to imagine why Fee could possibly want to marry him. The subject was one he shied away from. It might be that she would do anything to get away from the responsibilities of Glenallan Close and all they involved.

‘Then I expect I’ll have to ask Senta,’ Fee said. ‘She’s Darren’s cousin and Darren’s mother wants me to ask her, says she’ll be hurt if I don’t. And then there’ll be Cheryl and Janice and another cousin of his called Stephanie. I’m longing for you to meet Stephanie, she’s absolutely your type.’