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The man by the window nodded and retuned to looking at the view, sipping from a glass.

‘Probably best if Sweetie comes to play at our house. I'm very happy to supervise. If she tells you first, of course.' Looking round to locate Sarah.

Sweetie was back, winding herself round her mother's waist like a cat. ‘Can I go? Can I? Sarah says I can go and play.'

Sweetie's mother gave Patricia a shy glance.

‘Tomorrow? Can I?'

A pause.

‘Hey. Don't pester Sarah's ma.' Sweetie's mother rubbed a hand over the child's hair, springy as moss.

‘Of course, tomorrow,' said Patricia.

Then Sarah slid into the room, humming, and the two girls put their arms along each other's shoulders, cheeks side by side.

Patricia had questions on the way home. Sarah said no, the man wasn't Sweetie's dad. She didn't know. He was an uncle?

As soon as Patricia had tugged the child in the front door she delivered a firm, instructive slap through the back of Sarah's dress.
Straight home. She was not allowed to go visiting people unless she had permission. Did she hear?

Yes.

Louder.

Yes, Mummy.

Saturday morning came in hot for September. Patricia looked down on the garden at the back of the house, a tired-out lawn with a curving border of ashy city soil. There was an overgrown sycamore tree, its oily leaves gritty with dirt, shading the light away from the window, and along the brick wall a row of pollarded ash trees whose sawn-off branches had regrown straight up like broomsticks.

At the bottom was a rickety fence bordering the garden of another large Victorian house, rented out to men who had come from the Punjab to supply the night shifts at the iron and steel works. It was a neglected, parcelled-out place; the landlord had painted the map of pipes running down the back of the house in odds and ends of paint – grey, purple, lime green and blue. In the middle of the worn-away lawn was a blackened spot where someone had lit a fire at some point. French windows stood open onto the garden, a greying net curtain floating in and out. Someone moved the curtain aside and a woman in a green sari came out in bare feet. Behind her Patricia caught a glimpse of unvarnished floorboards.

She turned back to the room and swooped on the bed, shaking the sheets, folding them smooth, tucking the blankets in tight. She gathered up clothes, put them away or separated out washing and headed downstairs. A wail went up from the crib and she was back at square one, weighed down on the edge of the bed with a hungry baby, the damp nappy creeping out from the elasticated plastic pants and smelling of ammonia, the answering crackle of electricity in her breast
while the baby latched on and closed its eyes. And where was Sarah? She listened out for the hum of a song sung under the child's breath. She thought she heard a bump and clatter of something dropped, or feet running across the floor upstairs. Sarah playing.

Charlie clean and settled back in his crib, she glanced out of the window and noticed that a flame had now sprung up in the middle of the lawn. She moved closer to the window. The woman was squatting down in her flimsy sari, her thin limbs arranged to accommodate a life without chairs. She was fanning sticks into a neat blaze. By her side was a shallow bowl. She dusted her hands together and then picked out something that she began to pat deftly, moving it from hand to hand in a clapping motion, patting the dough into a growing disc shape. She put the delicate round on a plate and then began the next one. A child came out and sat next to the woman and began to help her cook the bread on a pan over the flames. Patricia straightened the bed covers, picked up the washing, but was drawn to the window again to watch this romance of a woman cooking on a fire in the garden, the bangles on her arms glinting in the light. Another girl had joined them, sitting cross-legged on their dirt lawn, chatting away, a firmly built child with a neat, pale brown haircut.

Sarah!

Patricia clattered downstairs, ran out into the garden. At the end of the fence was a broken plank, pushed to one side, which explained how Sarah had got through. She could hear Sarah's voice, loud and innocent and instructive. She peered through the gap and called Sarah's name until she turned.

‘Come in now, Sarah,' she called pleasantly.

Sarah looked back at the fire, at her friend, reluctant.

‘Can't I stay?'

‘No,' Patricia shouted, much louder than she intended.

Sarah stared at the house as they walked up to the back, her face mutinous and clouded.

‘You don't go wandering into a stranger's garden.'

‘But it's Tara. She's in my class.'

‘You play in the house, or you play in our garden, where it's safe. Honestly, Sarah, I despair. Go up to your room and stay there till I say you can come down.'

She had to talk to Peter. He was in the study, but there was no sound of the typewriter clacking like a conscientious prayer. She envied the sense of purpose that surrounded Peter, and wanted, just for a while, to sit quietly with him and recall the smell of opened books, gaze at the neat piles of notes and papers and magazines on an oak desk; to recall peaceful, monastic days in the university library, the sense of achieving and completing things. She wanted to sit where an inky smell sharpened the room's air; the Gestetner printer could turn out a hundred copies or more of Peter's thoughts in the parish newsletter.

Her own thoughts were vague and tended to run dry in the sands of the arid afternoon. The early Church fathers had named, from their monastic, desert cells, the nine deadly thoughts; and the most feared of all was Accidie, the noonday demon of apathy that could descend and bleach away all faith and hope. She had never been big on belief in the first place. Sometimes she needed to sit near the warm solidity of Peter's purpose so that she could keep on believing that there was a point to her day's circular, repetitious tasks. She opened the door a little way.

Cyril was enthroned in the armchair and Peter was leaning forward listening and nodding. Cyril had that pinched look that he had when going through another crisis. With his pale blond hair and startled blue eyes he tended to look even younger than he was, which was what, twenty-something? Shortly after they arrived, just
before Christmas, Peter had been forced to talk him down from the side of the railway bridge at midnight, Cyril ready to jump as trains sliced by underneath.

She closed the door quietly again and retreated. She felt a twinge of guilt. It was hard to know how poor Cyril was going to cope really when he could no longer live with them, once they moved into the new house.

She had cold lamb in the larder. It would be shepherd's pie then. She took the mincing grinder from the cupboard and clamped it to the edge of the table with its screw attachment and began to feed the lamb through. She added a Bisto cube and mashed the boiled potatoes on the stove, straining the cloudy water into the sink, the steam frizzing her hair and making her face damp. Meat and two veg, and a proper pudding. She would bake a rice pudding in the cooker under the shepherd's pie. As a girl she had watched her mother wrap bundles of breadcrumbs and minced offal inside webs of some animal membrane that hung between her hands like glutinous lace, working it snugly round the faggots. Endless odd substitutions for food.

Always the sense of well-being when Patricia knew the oven was filled with good things, cooking steadily; a sense of living in a better world, a place of plenty for her children. Feeling almost peaceful she climbed upstairs to check on the baby. She felt heavy and itchy and ready for him to feed.

She had left the bedroom in order, but she walked back in to find the bed quilt strewn with her underwear and odd garments rifled from her drawers. The rubber girdle had escaped its cardboard tube and lay like some internal organ dissected and drained of blood. The smiling lady on the tube looked manically happy, flaunting her tiny, nipped-in waist – lying of course about just how much the thing hurt. Suspender belts lay tangled with a couple of bras. Nylon stockings sprawled across the quilt like the demarcation of a body in a crime
scene. A tipped-up box of buttons and hooks and eyes and elastic were sprinkled over a flesh-coloured corset and yellowing underskirt. On the dressing table her lipstick and powder compact had been left open, balls of blush-stained cotton wool trailing across the glass top like small clouds at sunset. Patricia felt a rising outrage; wanted to find Sarah and say something about her trespasses, but looking down at the sad audit of womanly trials jumbled across the quilt, the anger drained away. All this would come soon enough.

From the bottom of the wardrobe Sarah had sprung what she was looking for – pretty, dressing-up clothes. The stiff net of a wedding veil rose up from the open wardrobe door in a cloud. The silver slingbacks had been walked across to the window and abandoned.

Round the dressing-table mirror were pinned postcards from Queenie who travelled the world as a holiday rep. A snapshot of a tanned Queenie in capri pants and a sleeveless top on a glorious beach dotted with straw parasols. Patricia unpinned the latest postcard, from Malta. As usual she studied the short and cheerful message for signs that Queenie was doing well, for any hint of problems. Care of the travel firm Patricia sent back long instructive letters on health and men and rainwear and eating properly. Recently the firm's manager had proposed to Queenie. He seemed ideal, it was true, but you could never be too careful. Patricia wanted to meet him and check him out thoroughly before she gave Queenie her full blessing.

Turning back to the chaos in the room Patricia began gathering things up from the bed, and then she thought: a moment, just for a moment. She pushed the tangle of underwear to one side and curled up on the bed. She closed her eyes. In seconds Patricia was fast asleep.

She was woken by a loud rapping on the front door. Masculine voices that she couldn't place. The baby crying. Sarah's feet pounding up the stairs. ‘Mummy, there's some policemen want to see you.'

She could hear Peter talking to them down in the hall. She put a hand to her hair to check for signs of her afternoon nap as she came down the stairs carrying Charlie on one hip, flushed and feeling guilty, the two policemen staring up at her.

Later she asked poor Cyril, who always needed cheering up, if he wouldn't like to join them and share the shepherd's pie. And by the time they sat down to eat it had become a funny story, with Cyril the audience; how Mrs Stewart had been charging double for the rent of the church hall, pocketing the difference. She'd also been selling cannabis. Christening parties were a general euphemism for an evening with beer and dope and other things – all hosted by the church. The police had cautioned Peter to take more care next time, not be so easily taken in.

The food on the table, they folded their hands and Peter said grace. She watched him, his eyes closed, and thought again how she had married a good man. And as he opened his eyes and she handed a plate to dear old Cyril to pass down to Sarah, she thought that sometimes it was a good thing that she was a little less ready to trust than Peter, because, really, when you had children you could never be too vigilant.

It was a story they were still telling three years later in the new house, in the fitted kitchen with its runs of shiny melamine units and the plate glass windows, Cyril still part of the family, since there was plenty of room really. They had sat in front of the black and white TV set, Sarah and Charlie cross-legged on the carpet, and watched a startling transmission of men in space suits, placing their feet on the surface of the moon, brilliant white figures against a night sky making giant, leaping steps; the vision become reality.

The world had been rebuilt, and it was good.

CHAPTER 26

Leeds, 1976

Sarah spotted Sally through the afternoon fug of the student union bar and waved at her. Sally came over and kissed Sarah and Laura on both cheeks, full of apologies for being late, trembling and wired as if she was on something. Which of course she was: Professor Cartwright from the French department.