Grandmother’s Footsteps

Prologue

The estate agent’s brochure had arrived. How strange it made the house look, Verity thought. The wide-angled photographs turned the back lawn into a golf course, the orchard into an arboretum. And when the rooms were listed like that, the place sounded so large! Six beds, three recep., dining room, kitchen, two utility rooms – did they mean the scullery and pantry? Verity’s mother had always described Knighton as an overgrown cottage. Evelyn had had a careless, dismissive tone about most things, but certainly when the house was built in the 1880s the impression aimed for was one of rustic simplicity. Everything made by craftsmen out of solid materials; and, yes, thought Verity, it has stood the test of time.

Would she be tempted by this brochure, if she were a buyer? She often ran this kind of conversation in her head, in the absence of anyone else with whom to have it. She leafed through the brochure again, and thought not. The estate agent’s vulgarization had a deadening effect for her, but other people wouldn’t notice that. Other people liked deadening, because it sanitized things. In this neighbourhood, down every lane, round every corner, there were rural retreats worth the best part of a million, double-fronted, double-glazed, double-garaged, all perfect for families with commuting husbands and more than double their share of this world’s goods. And double lives for some of those husbands too, thought Verity. So many marriages were a kind of pact – the wife gets her tennis lessons and her four-wheel drive and her Caribbean holidays in exchange for turning a blind eye. It wouldn’t take much tweaking to turn Knighton into just such another warm easy-to-clean playpen. A buyer wouldn’t be long in coming.

She noticed that Mortlock Bell had concentrated on exterior shots. They had used only two pictures taken inside: one of the front hall, where the heavy oak staircase and glass boxes of stuffed birds shot by Verity’s father created a misleading baronial gloom, the other of the largest bedroom, the one she and Simeon had used until his death, and even then the picture concentrated on the view of the garden and beyond. Mortlock Bell had cleverly avoided the 1970s wallpapers, the ill-fitted kitchen units, the forlorn emptiness of the underused bedrooms. Not that the house was in bad condition. Simeon would never have allowed that to happen. And of course they’d always had help, in the very solid form of Mrs Davidge, and they’d always had enough money. There would have been no excuse not to keep things in reasonable order.

Verity picked up a tray of vases filled with flowers – early pink rosebuds, mainly, their sweetness offset by the limey froth of lady’s mantle. She took the tray from one room to another, placing a vase on a dressing table or windowsill in each of them. The rooms reminded her of old dogs. They looked at her with pleading eyes, saying love me, tend to me, even though we both know I’m not truly lovable any more. But, thought Verity, the task of loving is beyond me.

Once it had been her business to nurture the spirit of this place, but events had conspired against her, and she had failed. Now it was time for someone else to try, a new family, a family with a future. They would look at this brochure, glossy as an inflight magazine, and they would say, we could put in a swimming pool here, we could build a pool house where this old shed is, maybe a sauna, too, and they wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care that the old shed was where Verity’s grandmother had housed her pony trap, and where old Apps had stored the apples in untouching rows on slatted shelves, to last the winter through. They would look at the orchard and say, it’s an awful lot of upkeep, maybe we could get planning permission to turn it into a building plot and sell it off, and down would come the damsons, the medlars, the mulberries and the greengages; down would come the giant bergamot in the middle that in autumn drops its unusable fruit like rusty teardrops, and in spring sends up a fountain of blossom, foaming, greenish white. Oh well, thought Verity. These things have to happen. Life must go on, and I will resolve not to mind.

Verity had been born at Knighton. She had spent her childhood here, until she was sent to boarding school. In 1970 her mother had moved out, to the cottage in Ewes Green where she had spent the last decade of her life, and Verity had moved back in with Simeon and Hester. That was when they had put up these extraordinary wallpapers – the downstairs lavatory, for instance, was covered in turquoise-and-purple peacock-feather shapes. The wallpapers had been Simeon’s choice. He’d grumbled about them, in later years, but somehow the impetus to replace them had never amounted to anything.

Verity had set out all her vases now but one. The last, and prettiest, she saved for Hester’s room. Hester was her only child, forty, divorced, and childless. She hadn’t consulted her about the sale, hadn’t even told her yet. Verity had always shied away from anything revelatory or momentous. She tried to envisage Hester in her smart London flat: one bedroom, one living room, one balcony, and, significantly, no garden. Hester had an extremely good job in radio; Verity could listen to her on air most days of the week, if she wanted to. She had listened to her earlier that day, and had been struck, as so often, by her daughter’s quality of intelligent detachment. Her voice was smooth, forceful, yet understated; listening to her was scarcely different from listening to the voice of a stranger. Verity couldn’t guess what effect the sale of the house would have on Hester. If she were a different kind of woman – married to a worthy commuting husband and with a brood of happy children – then perhaps the house would have made sense to her. But even then – well, one can have too much of the past.

Years ago, when Simeon had been a commuting husband, though hardly a worthy one, he had struck up an acquaintance with a man on the train. His name was Charles Prosser; he was a wine merchant, and he and his pleasant wife, Gail, had recently bought a cottage on the other side of the valley, where they lived with the Old English Sheepdogs they kept instead of children. The first time Simeon invited them in for drinks was on a summer’s evening. They had sat on the terrace and watched the sun dip behind the great bank of lime trees, which were pouring their scent, like clearest honey, into the still air.

Hester sat on the parapet wall, her long brown legs pulled up so that her chin rested on her knees. She was wearing shorts that she’d made by cutting off the legs of jeans that she had outgrown. She had on a cream-coloured cheesecloth shirt, which she had knotted under her small new breasts. Her midriff and her long bony feet were bare.

‘It’s marvellous up here,’ said Charles Prosser, rattling his ice. ‘The House with the Golden Windows. That’s what Gail and I call this house, because when you look across the valley from our place at this time of the evening it looks as if your windows are on fire.’

‘Isn’t that a fairy story?’ asked Verity. ‘“The House with the Golden Windows”?’

Hester raised her chin from her knees. ‘Yes,’ she said in her clear voice, cool and unexpected, ‘they thought the windows were made of real gold, but when they reached the house, they were disappointed.’

There was a tiny silence. ‘The grass is always greener,’ said Simeon, lighting one of his unwelcome cigars. ‘That kind of story.’

‘Well, we’re far from disappointed,’ put in kindly Gail Prosser. ‘It’s absolutely beautiful. I’d love to live here.’

Hester buried her chin again. Her straight fair hair fell in stripes over her face. ‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ she said. Or at least, that’s what it sounded like. But it was a mutter, and a muffled mutter at that.

Verity set down the vase of flowers and retreated, closing the door of Hester’s room. The house with the golden windows, she thought, remembering. Well, we all make mistakes.

1

1st January 1980

I’ve never been good at keeping New Year’s resolutions. As a child, and a pious child, too, I drew up lists with enthusiasm, but I should think most of the projects had withered up and died by the end of the first week of January. I have no reason to suppose I will do much better now, but today is the first day of a new decade, and I am an old woman. I still have my health, and my mental powers are only a little moth-eaten in places, but I am beginning to feel like a wasp in autumn; the circles I make are shrinking, and I make them more slowly. I feel the need to set my thoughts in order, and there are some things that need to be told. I intend to keep a diary this year, and to use it as a fishing net to trawl the past for whatever still lurks, whether marvellous or monstrous.

Just as I’ve never kept resolutions, I’ve never kept to diary writing, beyond scribbled notes to remind me of times of appointments. Every so often I’ve attempted something more interesting, something that would preserve a moment in time for future contemplation, something that would exercise my writer’s craft and explore the thoughts that flicker, flare and die in my mind every moment of every day, but somehow everything I wrote seemed false. Why had I selected that detail and not another? Why was I endeavouring to present myself in a good light to a non-existent reader? Was the reader, after all, non-existent, or was there a danger that my husband, my daughter, my servant, would break in and read things which could not then be gainsaid? And would I even know that such things had indeed been read, if the intruder did not choose to tell me? Their changed opinion of me could be leading them away from me down a path the very existence of which was unknown to me. Keeping a diary, which at first represented a kind of control, an ordering of experience, soon came to seem the very opposite.

My husband, Lionel Conway, kept a diary every day of his life. This record was impersonal to the point of eccentricity. Weather and wind directions were recorded daily, as were important political events, whether they interested him or not. His reaction to such events would be unguessable to the casual reader. He noted his own activities: ‘A.M. Caught up with correspondence. P.M. To the Scott Polar Institute. Freckleton gave a talk on the navigation of the Bering Straits. Dined with McVeagh.’ There was rarely more than that. The entry for 6th April 1930 reads: ‘Evelyn walked with me to Firle Beacon, where she agreed to become my wife. Deo Gratias.’ That ‘Deo Gratias’, the one glowing coal in all that ashy grey, could still have the power to move me to tears, were I to allow it.

It would be rational to assume that such diaries were evidence of a passionless man, a man obsessed with detail, a dry, reductive man who, in modern parlance, couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Such assumptions would be quite wrong. Lionel had, at times, been so consumed by passions that he developed strategies for reining them in, or giving vent to them in indirect ways. He was a geologist, but since boyhood he had had a great love of things nautical, and he had had the good fortune to combine these interests in Polar exploration. He was thirty years my senior, and when I met him his career as an explorer was over, though he was still advising younger teams and giving lectures about his experiences. He was a man of extremes, an elemental man, and his diaries reflect none of this. To an outsider the diaries would seem like an exercise in pointlessness, but to me, as to anyone who knew him well, the point of them is easily apparent. They are a system of self-restraint; self-restraint was all that stood between Lionel and mental collapse.

When I agreed to marry Lionel Conway, the Great Man, the hero of the frozen wastes, I took myself by surprise; I, who was thirty-five years old, I, who had made a vow after Jack’s death – to myself, not to the God in whom I found I no longer believed – that I would never consider marrying anybody else. Lionel was a widower, and had been for ten years. His marriage had been childless and, I gathered from friends, fraught with difficulty. The great love of his young life had refused to marry him because of religious differences; he had turned to her cousin, who was, I learned, physically similar and spiritually more flexible. This turned out to be a mistake. Isabella Conway was faithless, and one of the lovers she took was a close family friend. Lionel’s long absences, his difficult temperament, the lack of children, and the overarching memory of her cousin, Sylvia, the best-beloved, who died of typhoid soon after her final rejection of Lionel, go some way towards explaining Isabella’s behaviour, but her choice of lover was unfortunate, exposing Lionel to humiliating gossip and the loss of one of his oldest friends. I hope I was not so tactless.

Lionel never spoke to me directly about any of this. He feared confession of any kind; he saw it as a letting-go. Letting go was dangerous. Metaphorically as well as literally, he ran a tight ship.

When I first met my husband I was, most untypically, having an affair with a married man. He was a theatre manager with a dazzling wit and an even more dazzling smile. His name was Harry Bramante. I found him spellbinding, and I was not accustomed to being spellbound. Harry could dominate a room without crowding out anybody else. Never, before or since, have I met a man so at ease with his own body. Perhaps that was his Italian blood; certainly I’ve never come across a comparable quality in an Englishman. His long limbs seemed to glide under his clothes, his hooded eyes offered a world of possibilities. I jumped. His wife and four children hardly entered into it. I never saw them. It was an effort for me even to remember that they existed. This is not a chapter of my emotional history of which I am proud, and neither was it a short chapter. I was nearly thirty when I met Harry Bramante. My first volume of short stories had been published to modest but distinct critical acclaim, and I had nearly completed a novel, which made me feel that I was rather marvellous. I was feeling bold, and restless, and the social life I had established for myself in my twenties had begun to seem stale and tiresome. I was stout-hearted in my resolution never to marry, but I suppose it was unsurprising that, at that age, and in those days when one’s chances of marrying would theoretically have been dwindling fast, I should reward myself for my resolve by indulging in an affair like that. The shameful thing is that I gave so little thought to his wife. I don’t know if she knew of my existence. I just didn’t use my imagination at all, and that’s a crime. If Harry and I had been in love with one another… well, of course it would still have been wrong. But I wasn’t interested in falling in love. I continued the affair for several years, because he charmed and excited me. He never knew me, nor I him.

No man could have borne less resemblance to Harry than Lionel Conway. Harry was an urban creature, a lover of artifice; in his element among brittle theatrical people. I shouldn’t be surprised if Lionel never set foot in a theatre in his life. He disliked large social gatherings, though he enjoyed the company of trusted friends; London he regarded as a necessary evil. He never met Harry, nor knew of his existence except in the vaguest possible terms. Lionel and I met at a dinner given by my publisher, who was one of Lionel’s oldest friends and who was bringing out a book of his Polar reminiscences. I remember the sinking feeling I had when I found myself seated next to this mountainous man with his stiff white beard and fierce bright eyes. He was the guest of honour. It was a privilege to be placed beside him, but his dinner jacket was old and not especially clean, he ate his food in unnoticing snatches, and I dreaded that such a man would try to flirt with me. He did no such thing. Despite my sex and relative youth he talked to me on terms of the utmost equality, which I may say in the late 1920s was unusual. When the time came for the women to withdraw, I realized that he had not uttered one polite platitude, nor made one remark that was not direct and challenging and interesting. It intrigued me, too, that a man of his age should seem so uncomfortable with himself. I had not thought much about old age – and sixty and more seemed most certainly old, which is an opinion I no longer hold – but I had, I suppose, assumed that with age would come peace, and stability, and a rather dull kind of inner resolution. In Lionel Conway I saw none of these things. I found passionate intensity, perhaps even ferocity, and a questing spirit still looking for a place to cast anchor.

It seems that Lionel decided immediately that I could provide that place. He pursued me with all the impulsiveness of a boy of twenty, but none of the bashfulness. He had no sense of the proprieties of those times, so he invited me to dine with him or walk with him, to attend lectures, visit museums, go sailing with him on the Thames at Marlow. It was his single-mindedness that won me over. The energy of his pursuit made Harry Bramante seem frivolous, insubstantial. After six months of this courtship I felt I had no right to refuse. I didn’t love him, not as I had once loved Jack, but my feelings were warm enough to allow me to say ‘I love you’ to him, though not as often as he said it to me. I was moved by him, and no man had moved me for a very long time. I wanted to protect him, to be the solace of his old age. I valued his opinion of me, and I worked hard at converting the feeling I had when I was with him in public, which was akin to embarrassment, into insouciant pride. As for my vow that I would never marry, I explained it away to myself. This was different. This was no ordinary marriage – my life with Lionel could in no way parallel, and therefore betray, the life I would have had with Jack. Lionel and I were offering each other a mutually beneficial bargain; for me, the freedom to write, the nurturing admiration of a great man, and – yes, certainly – money, which I could use to expand my world. For him there was honour and respect, intelligent companionship and – I believed – a haven in which to rest. I hardly know why, but I never considered children as a possibility. The subject was not mentioned during our courtship.

6th January 1980

The colour of autumn crocuses. That is the first colour in my mind when I think of Knighton, because the autumn crocuses were in flower when I first came there as a bride. Three great spreads of them by the kitchen-garden wall, some bending over on their milky stalks like weary Degas dancers, some fanning their eager cups to the slanting sun. Pinky-purple, thin-veined, translucent. The most delicately genital of colours. Naked ladies. Meadow saffron. Autumn crocus. Lovely names, all of them.

I’d made several visits to Knighton before our marriage, but I’d always felt like an outsider. The house had been half shut up since Isabella’s death. A housekeeper lived there, and she kept a couple of rooms ready for Lionel, who used it perhaps one week in four. His study was on the ground floor. It was the least welcoming room in the house, cold, north-facing, with a gloomy outlook over dark laurels and rhododendrons, a very Victorian patch of planting which I was often tempted to get rid of but somehow never did. The study was crammed from floor to ceiling, every shelf crowded with Lionel’s diaries, notebooks, bound copies of lectures on nautical and Polar subjects. On the mantelshelf lay dusty treasures – a portion of a narwhal’s tusk, a piece of scrimshaw, a pair of sealskin slippers made for a faraway Eskimo child. And in the middle of the desk was the skull of the polar bear Lionel and his crew had shot and eaten during that famous winter they spent ice-bound at the North Pole. The skull reared up, sinister as an iceberg, its malevolent majesty undiminished by Lionel’s habit of filling the eye sockets with pencils, rubbers, and the feathers he collected on his walks.

On his own at Knighton, Lionel hardly moved out of the study, except for these enormous daily walks. Mrs Apps carried in meals on a tray, brought him the post and The Times, answered the rare telephone calls on the single receiver in the front hall. He slept in his dressing room on a put-you-up bed. I don’t think the marital half-tester had been slept in by anyone since Isabella died in it. I didn’t ask, but I gathered the dressing room had been Lionel’s sleeping place for quite a lot of their married life, too.

Most of the other rooms were shut up, the furniture veiled in dust sheets, the shutters barred. So when I came there as a bride in September 1930 and saw the autumn crocuses shining against the garden wall, it was as if I was seeing it all for the first time. Lionel had been energetic in setting things to rights for me. Apps was the gardener and handyman; for ten or twelve years he had done little more than keep the place orderly, but throughout that summer he and his boy Fred had laboured to perfect the garden, and when I arrived I found, rather to my private dismay, that there was hardly a blade of grass out of place. But I loved the sight of the fruit-pickers’ ladders leaning against the orchard trees, the baskets at the foot of each tree lined with green leaves and piled with damsons, greengages, yellow plums and whiskery cobnuts; the September spiders had cast glinting silver lines with quick gaiety from one basket handle to the next. And in the house the dust sheets were gone, the shutters folded back, the windows clean and open. For the first time I could look properly at the furniture and pictures. Mrs Apps had set vases of throbbing, sombre asters on the tables; from the kitchen seeped the purple smell of her jam-making. Lionel wanted to fill the place with love for me; it was all there for me to take. I hope I was gracious in my acceptance.

Let me remember that time as the best of my marriage. That was the time I came closest to giving Lionel what he wanted, to keeping my side of the bargain. He opened up his beloved house for me, invested in me the power to regenerate, to dispel old ghosts. He offered me respect and love and trust. I knew it, and if I didn’t repay in kind, I believe I came close.

I prefer to think of those rich autumn weeks at Knighton, rather than the wedding itself. I have no photographs of my wedding, which may be one reason why my memories of it are so patchy. In old age distant memory is said to grow clearer, but I can now recall no more of this day, which should have been so important, than I ever have. Both of us wanted the quietest of ceremonies. Lionel wanted a church, and I went along with that because it didn’t much matter to me. The church was near his Kensington flat – ugly, Victorian, and almost empty. No guests, no family; just us and my great friend Peggy Coombs for me, and on his side Alfred Winterson, the publisher who had introduced us. Alfred was jovial, back-slapping. Peggy was matter-of-fact. I could tell she wasn’t convinced about the wedding, though she had been pleased when Lionel, or the fact of Lionel, saw off Harry Bramante. Harry was a thoroughly bad idea in Peggy’s opinion, and as usual she was absolutely right.

I wore brown; a golden-brown suit with a high-necked bouclé jacket and a softly pleated skirt. It was made for me, as were most of my clothes at that time, and I remember it more clearly than anything else about the wedding. It was an excellent suit, with beautiful whorled buttons. Lionel was perhaps disappointed that I had chosen something so unbridal. Well, I softened it with a bouquet, an unusual mixture of ferns and tight creamy rosebuds, and Turk’s cap lilies. I can still see their rusty curls. After the ceremony I handed the bouquet to Peggy, rather awkwardly. She took it without enthusiasm.

What else? Nothing of the ceremony, no words, no vows – only the pools of coloured light like molten jewels on the stones of the church floor where September sun struck through the stained-glass windows. The wedding breakfast, afterwards, at an hotel, and I can’t even be sure which one. A couple of dozen of our closest friends, an uneasy mixture of seafaring men and Lionel’s scholarly scientists, and my political, Bohemian types. Alfred Winterson made a speech, of which I recall not a sentence, and Lionel made a brief reply, and I was horrified to see that he was choked with tears. I believe we cut a cake. I can see the sudden unfamiliarity of the ring on my finger as I lifted my glass of champagne, but the moment of putting on the ring – that’s gone. Just a sense of Lionel, black and bulky, by my side.

The honeymoon was a week in Paris. Poor Lionel! Fifty years of wrestling with the moods and mysteries of the high seas, and he’d married a woman who was sick crossing the Channel. Why Paris? Lionel was not interested in cities. London he tolerated, because he knew it, and because it contained people and institutions which were useful to him, but the great capitals of Europe meant little. I suppose he chose Paris in clumsy homage to what he saw as my cultural sophistication, but it wasn’t a good idea. He was baffled by my admiration of Monet’s sheets of water lilies, irritated by Manet’s bold Olympian stare. I remember him in a quayside restaurant, hungry, chafed with boredom, hauling reluctant oysters out of their shells. ‘Barely a mouthful,’ he grumbled. ‘Give me a nice juicy polar bear any day,’ I added, to tease, and he laughed, but only just. Paris frustrated him. Only in the shadowy spaces of Notre Dame did he seem at ease; a cathedral is, after all, something like a great ship.

So it was with relief that we returned to Knighton, where Lionel was sufficiently securely based to extend his very considerable generosity to me. What a sentence that is! Pompous and ugly. Why am I unable to write about Lionel without condescension? As a defence against guilt, a kind of padding to muffle the facts? He was the Great Man, I was the one who did him wrong. Let me state what Lionel was in single, simple words. He was brave, strong, just, pure, and kind. Huge passions surged through his life – anger, love, and grief. To these he never became accustomed. They crashed over him night and day, but they never eroded him; there was no crumbling into comfortableness. He sought repose in me, and I failed him. Perhaps for those first few months… well, that’s how I choose to remember. Autumn at Knighton, golden, blooming. Clots of mulberries, the red juice running down my wrist. Lionel behind me holding the basket, laughing as I crammed my mouth. ‘Hey, hey, my girl! How will we face Mrs Apps with an empty basket?’ I chose the best, the blackest, the sweetest, and held it out to him on the palm of my hand; the brush of his lips against my palm was – well, I could bear it. He held me, and my hands left ruby trails on his shirt front. Mulberries are only perfect when they’re just touched with decay.

And now I’m old, far older than Lionel was then, or than he lived to be. Lionel didn’t quite see out the Second World War, which was a pity. It’s always a pity not to know how things turn out. He died in 1944, just before Christmas. We’d made the parlour into a bedroom for him because the stairs had become too difficult. He suffered terribly from gout, which seemed most unfair, because he’d always been an abstemious man. What with gout and petrol rationing the last few years of Lionel’s life were limited, and he felt it. His spirit was restless. What I wanted most for him was to get him back on the sea in some form or another, but the war prevented it. I did, once, get him to Beachy Head, about a year before he died. I can’t remember how we managed that. A train to Eastbourne – then what? Could there have been a taxi? A bus perhaps… my memory is full of holes. But I do remember Lionel standing on the clifftop, leaning on his sticks, shaking in the cold wind but gulping down, sucking in great lungfuls of the salty air. His eyes glittered, brimful of fierce memories.

The stairs will be too much for me before long, even in this tiny cottage. I’ll be eighty-five this year, and I’ve no ambition to grow any older. I have my home help twice a week, and a young man in the garden; he’s the greatgrandson of old Apps and Mrs Apps, which is reassuring, or would be if I needed reassurance. I’m weary now, and I need to stop. I’ll sit by the fire and drink tea, and doze. But one thing has become clear to me, and I’ll write it down now, in case I lose it again. I know why I’m writing this. I’m writing it for Hester.

2

Though Hester Oakes had now lived alone for almost five years, every day she still experienced a little rise of pleasure when she returned to her flat and found it exactly as she had left it.

Hester had always been tidy, and she was getting tidier. Her flat, her hair, her briefcase – even her morning routine had been honed, streamlined. She woke at seven, drank grapefruit juice, puréed exotic fruits and ate them mixed with yoghurt rich in probiotics. She did her exercises, took a shower, applied minimal but expensive make-up. She erased recorded messages as soon as she had absorbed their purport. Hester liked to rub away the tracks as they formed behind her.

At half past eight she left for work. She took a bus; she’d always liked London buses, and besides, in her job she needed to keep a finger on the pulse of ordinary life. On the bus she pretended to be deep in a book, but although she didn’t want to talk to anybody, she did want to listen. The radio programme she presented prided itself on covering issues that affected the man or woman in the street in an intelligent and thought-provoking way. Hester was widely admired, and cited as a rare example of a broadcaster who had refused to ‘dumb down’. She was happy to be, in a minor way, a household name, but she refused all requests for interviews from magazines and television. Her voice she didn’t mind sharing; her face she regarded as her own.

Hester shared a workspace with two researchers, Jean and Penny. Jean, whose considerable intelligence was never softened by tact, had swollen ankles that lapped at the tops of her navy court shoes and steel-coloured hair cut like a Norman helmet. Hester knew nothing whatsoever about her private life. Penny, less rigorous, was more open-minded – younger, fresher, and without Jean’s flavour of spinsterish bitterness. The two of them discussed all manner of things; today, Hester had not been long at her desk when she realized they were discussing her grandmother.

‘Another bundle from Caraway Press,’ said Jean. ‘They seem to have it in for us.’

Penny reached across. ‘Oh, I like Caraway Press. Let’s have a look.’ She shook three slim volumes out of the Jiffy bag – elegant paperbacks, aquamarine with a subtle pearly shimmer. Books that would look fetching on a thinking-woman’s bedside table. Penny held one against her cheek. ‘They are such lovely things. Sort of silky.’

Jean snorted. ‘Silky’s not much use on radio, is it? Are they any good?’

‘Um… I don’t know. Novels. By E. M. Albery. Never heard of him. Look, nice wide margins. And I really like the way they’ve done the chapter headings.’

Hester looked round from her computer screen. ‘Her,’

she said.

‘Sorry, Hester?’

‘Her. E. M. Albery is female.’

‘Of course,’ said Jean. ‘Caraway are only interested in females. Only dead females, at that.’

‘Sorry,’ said Penny, whose outbursts of enthusiasm were often checked by apology, ‘I knew that, really. It’s just that two initials like that, E. M., feel masculine to me. Was she one of those women who had to pretend to be a man? Oh, hang about. This one’s not a novel – it’s poetry.’

‘Do you know anything about her?’ Jean asked Hester.

‘Well, yes, I do. She’s my grandmother.’

Both women shrieked. ‘Hester, you’re a dark horse,’ said Jean. ‘But’ – and she winked – ‘is she any good?’

‘Jean!’

Hester laughed. ‘I read it all in my teens, and I thought it was pretty good. But she was still alive then, which made me feel as if she was peering over my shoulder. But, yes, I should think she is quite good. They’re real period pieces, at any rate.’

Penny flicked through The Shadow on the Lawn, reading bits of the poems out loud. It annoyed Hester when people did that. ‘What’s “hyaline”?’ Penny asked. ‘What’s “fantoche”?’

‘I can’t remember. I looked them up once. I looked up all the difficult words.’

‘She seems to have liked difficult words, your grandma.’

‘She did.’

‘“Hepatica”? “Hierophant”?’

‘Try the novels,’ suggested Jean.

Penny opened Dumb Woman’s Lane. Hester turned back to her screen. She needed to check the facts about the latest rail dispute, because she was to interview a captain of industry for a programme later that week. But she couldn’t concentrate. Grandma Evelyn rose up between herself and the screen, and Hester could almost taste her own youth. She was fifteen, reading Dumb Woman’s Lane curled in the parlour window seat behind the half-closed curtains. She didn’t want her mother to know where she was or what she was doing. Her instinct for secrecy had always been strong.

‘This looks rather fascinating,’ pronounced Penny. ‘It’s a kind of ghost story. This woman stops speaking after some kind of trauma – a rape, I expect, it usually is. And then she’s kind of directing the lives of the people who come to live in her cottage after she’s dead. Something like that.’

‘Yes, it was a rape,’ said Hester, remembering. She didn’t like Penny referring to Margery in Dumb Woman’s Lane as ‘this woman’. Sensitive, tormented Margery had been behind the curtains with her as she read. The curtains were still there – original William Morris, hung by Isabella Conway, Hester’s grandfather’s first wife. The afternoon sun released their dusty vegetable smell; the knobbliness of the weave grazed her bare shoulders.

‘And this one,’ said Penny, ‘The Word Girl. I like the title. Is it autobiographical?’

‘It may be,’ Hester said. ‘I can’t remember.’ But she could remember – and she remembered asking the same question herself, squeezing up the courage to ask Grandma in the overflowing garden behind the cottage. A hot day. Her cheesecloth blouse, the green dye dark at the bottom, fading as it rose up through the fabric. Ombré; that’s what that technique was called. Hester had been so privately pleased when the sophisticated mother of a school friend had noticed it. ‘Oh, Hester,’ she’d said, ‘I do like your ombré top.’

The blouse had little wooden buttons, miniature toggles. Hester’s skirt, long, patchwork, fanned out at the bottom like a mermaid’s tail. Her feet and stomach were brown and bare. She broke a stem off the yellow-flowered plant that spurted from the brick wall of the outside lavatory. The stalk oozed beads of juice the colour of saffron. ‘Greater celandine,’ said her grandmother. ‘No relation of the other celandine, the one everybody knows.’ Hester squatted on the worn step, traced patterns along the ridges of her feet, using the celandine juice like henna. ‘Poisonous,’ said Grandma. ‘But don’t let it worry you.’

Hester carried on tracing. ‘You know The Word Girl,’ she said, her eyes on her feet, ‘is it about – you?’

Grandma Evelyn had a short, barking laugh. Her lap was full of brown envelopes, containing seeds saved from last year’s flowers. ‘No more than any of the others,’ she replied. ‘They’re all about me – and they’re not. Fiction is an oblique art.’ She tugged a tuft of groundsel from between the paving stones. ‘But if you’re asking, did I do what Helen did in The Word Girl, did I use story writing as a way of telling the secrets that I knew – well, no. I haven’t done that yet.’

Hester stole a look at her. Strands of grey hair were escaping from her careless bun; her hanging cheeks were mottled from even the smallest exertion on this warm day.

‘There’s still time,’ she continued, over Hester’s head. ‘It may be that I’ll write it all down, one day. One ought to tell the truth one knows. Though it can be hard to sort out which part is the most truthful. “Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?”’

Hester thought about truth. She thought about Paul Castle, pressing up against her in the station car park on Saturday night, his cigarette ground under foot, rough granite against her back. Her mother thought she was watching television with her friend Jennifer.

‘The bole’s the trunk, isn’t it?’ she replied to the question she thought she’d been asked. ‘I’d like to be the bole. But I suppose I have to be the blossom, because you’re the bole, and Mum’s the leaf.’

Evelyn laughed again, with bottomless affection. ‘What a lovely answer. It’s Yeats, Hester dear. “Among School Children”. His best poem. Yeats was a terrible old fraud in some ways, but he had marvellous moments. ‘“What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap/Honey of generation had betrayed…”’

Hester was lost. The only Yeats she knew was ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, which her father had once made her learn as a punishment. Just like him, thought her adult self, to turn poetry into a punishment.

‘It’s very good,’ she said. ‘The Word Girl, I mean. I think it’s your best.’

‘Oh, darling,’ said Grandma, ‘bless you for using the present tense. Here, take these poppy seeds to your mother. I meant to give them to her ages ago. Rather late for planting now, but worth a try. One never knows what may come up.’

‘I’d love to take these home,’ said Penny. ‘They do look interesting. How would you feel if we did something with them, Hester? Perhaps your grandmother’s due for a revival.’

Hester thought for a moment. The memory of Paul Castle’s cigarette still rasped her tongue.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’d be happy with that. But – do you mind if I do the research? It’s just that it’s something I’ve always meant to do. And now I must get back to the shortcomings of Railtrack.’

The others fell silent. Penny wandered off to make coffee. Hester knew she had a way of closing subjects. She didn’t particularly mean to. It just happened.

She usually returned home at half past six. She would take off her shoes, flex her long toes, and roam the flat, touching things with her fingertips, sniffing the stillness, even now, five years on, revelling in the absence of Guy. On this particular evening she drifted home on the warm June air. Her palate was already preparing for the glass of cold Chablis she had promised herself. Her solitude felt like a present, sumptuously wrapped.

She checked her emails. There was a long one from her friend Rosie, trying to persuade her to come to a college-reunion dinner. Devoted though Hester was to Rosie, not the wildest of horses would drag her to an event where the entertainment would principally consist of forty-year-old women showing each other photographs of their offspring and swapping details about violin lessons, grommets or amniocentesis, depending on which stage they’d got to. She fired off a quick reply. ‘You’ll go anyway. You don’t need me. How about lunch, Sunday week?’

The reply flew back. ‘I knew you’d say no, but it was worth a try. Yes, lunch. Come here, please. Your goddaughter needs some spiritual guidance.’ Hester smiled. Contact with Rosie always made her smile. Nothing Rosie ever did or said could irritate Hester, which probably made her unique in her acquaintance.

There was one message on the answerphone, from Solly. He could see Hester tonight, if she wanted. That was all. Solly wasn’t given to elaboration. She thought about him as she wandered through the flat, tidying things that were already tidy, putting others in a suitcase for her visit to her mother the next day. The more she thought about him, the more certain she was that she should see him that night. As she grew older she saw less and less point in deferring gratification. She had intended to spend the evening alone, composing herself for the ordeal of helping her mother sort through her late father’s papers with the aid of some Chablis, some Brahms, and a small perfect salad – some grilled artichoke hearts, haloumi, and perhaps some toasted almonds. But the summer air drifted in through her open windows and stirred her, and she could find no reason not to succumb. It was the kind of balmy evening air, so rare and therefore so precious in England, that lifts you and floats the years off you, and allows you to become whoever you want to be. ‘I shall have both,’ Hester said aloud, which had rather been her motto ever since her divorce, and she rang Solly on his mobile, admiring as she did so her long forefinger and its pearly oval nail. Solly was still at work. Hester could hear the clang and roar of the garage behind his quick answering ‘Yup?’ It didn’t matter that he was busy. She hadn’t rung for a chat.

‘Sol? It’s me. Ten o’clock. All right?’

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Your place?’

‘No, yours.’ Hester didn’t want to discompose her flat.

‘My place, then. Got to go.’

Hester put down the telephone and checked the time. Just gone seven. Three hours to go. Three hours before Hester put aside the kind of orderly, civilized behaviour with which all her friends and listeners would have associated her, and replaced it with abandonment of a kind that not a living soul would expect. The thought pleased her immensely.

She finished packing – such a well-ordered suitcase, such sensible choices of clothes that would harmonize with each other and cater for her comfort whatever the changing weather or social circumstance. Then she poured some more wine and with the glass in one hand and a little green china bowl of black olives in the other she stepped out on to her balcony. The flat was on the third floor of a purpose-built block, very central, not far from the river. One large bedroom, one L-shaped living room, a small compact kitchen, and an even smaller bathroom – that was all. No garden – only a balcony just wide enough for a folding chair and table, and two tubs, which Hester had planted with herbs. Hester, in revolt against her mother and grandmother’s mania for gardening, had deliberately chosen a flat without a garden, but she found she couldn’t do without plants altogether. She liked to pinch the herbs and roll them between her fingers as she sipped her early-evening drink. Now, she snipped off a piece of rue with her long, hard fingernails. It entranced her; the fretted precision of its grey leaves, the deep and bitter smell, so subtle and so uncompromising.

Children’s voices drifted up from the paved triangle of space that separated Hester’s block from its almost identical neighbours. They were playing football round the base of the plane tree whose solid, speckled presence had become such a constant in Hester’s life that she had come to think of it almost as a benign and uncomprehending landlord. Its top branches filled the windows now they were in the full rustle of their June dress. Hester had spent her later childhood surrounded by trees, flocks of trees, murmuring and sighing all about her, bare-twigged and evergreen, blossoming and fruit-bearing. Now she made do with one, but that was enough; even with one, its detail could almost overwhelm her.

On the plane-dappled balcony, the air was still warm, as warm as English evening air ever can be. Hester stretched out her legs and flexed her bare feet. People had often commented that Hester’s excellent legs were wasted on radio. She admired their smooth muscularity as she sipped her Chablis and relished its cool flintiness, relished the way it chimed with her solitude. She hadn’t always been alone. She’d been married to Guy for eight years, though now she could hardly believe it. Everything she now had – her job, her flat, her privacy, her freedom – had come in the last five years, since the divorce. She had everything, now. Except children.

Hester was quite good at choosing what she wanted to think about, and she decided not to think about children. Instead, she pressed her toes against the sun-warmed railings of the balcony and concentrated on the hours of pure pleasure that lay ahead. Tomorrow would not be good. Tomorrow there would be the slow, hot journey through summer Saturday traffic to Knighton, where she would have to spend several days helping her mother prepare the house for sale. Hester had known Knighton all her life, first as her Grandma Evelyn’s house, then as her own home. Now that it was to go, was she prepared to ask herself how much she would mind? Not tonight. Some disturbing processes might begin tomorrow, but tonight she was untouchable.