He did not look like someone who could have a crude, simple or mistaken thought. But Stella was ten years older than when she had last seen him, and the difficulty of those years had made her more careful. His face was burnt and lined, and his black curly hair, grey, cropped and coarse. Stella saw how his elegant fingers (‘Musician’s fingers!’ his mother Iris had called them) waved constantly and pointlessly in the air, that his hands could no longer hold or control anything, that his eyes were screwed up with the effort of keeping in focus. She remembered. He was a force, a hurricane, sweeping things up, breaking down doors, sucking people in and under. Stella knew right away what he wanted.
‘Tom, my child does not remember you.’
‘Your child?’ Tom’s fingers scrabbled and danced as if he were solving an elaborate equation. His voice grew quieter as his mind calmed, able at last to make connections. ‘I forgave … I could come back … She showed me!’ Tom, who had been staring into the sky all the time he spoke, brought his head slowly down and fixed his gaze on Stella. His voice swelled again, ‘She walked out on the water! Because I was there! To show me!’
‘The house?’ It took a moment for Stella to admit to herself that she knew what he was talking about. Then that ten-year-old winter sprang up around her like buildings cutting out the light. She remained silent, as did Tom, whom the past had never ceased to assail and confine in this way.
‘Mrs George!’ An exasperated voice was calling to Stella from the bus stop. There was a sound of old brakes being applied too fast, followed by a tentative rumble and then another long screech. A bus was juddering along the High Street, stopping every few yards.
Violet Eley emerged from the shelter. The light found nothing to play on in her pastel clothes, hard white hair and thickly powdered face. She had seen the mad Hepple brother come stumbling into the village to stop at Stella George’s garden gate. To her relief, the bus had appeared on time and she could get away from whatever scene was unfolding. But the bus had begun stopping and starting and, sure enough, there was Stella George’s dog, Mim, sitting in front of it in the road. Violet Eley’s impatience overcame her distaste. ‘Mrs George! This is really too much! I have a train to meet!’
The bus started up quickly, crept forward and Mim gave chase, barking furiously, darting in front and snapping at the tyres. The bus stopped again and the dog sidled onto the pavement. The driver climbed out of his cab and got as far as putting his hand on Mim’s collar. She did not snap or growl but set up such a grating, unbearable howl that the driver let go immediately. Seeing Stella by her gate, he approached, shaking his head.
‘Your dog … please … should be tied up …’
Stella kept her eyes on Tom Hepple who was staring past her now. ‘Bring the dog here,’ she said, knowing he couldn’t. The bus driver had noticed Tom by now and was full of confusion. ‘You know how she cries …’
‘Mrs George?’ Violet Eley pleaded.
People on the bus who were to get off in the village had wandered into the road. One or two tried to move Mim, who yelped as if she had been run over and cut in half. They recoiled, terrified in case anyone had seen them and would think they had inflicted pain on the animal. Those who knew Mim ignored her. Strangers or not, they all came across the Green to where Stella George willed Tom Hepple away from her daughter, and Tom Hepple stared through her walls and windows, and the bus driver and Violet Eley stood as if caught in their spell and miserably rooted to the spot.
‘Someone get Christie,’ Stella managed at last, and the spell was broken. The driver returned to his bus and helped Violet Eley on board. The others faded away. Then Christie Hepple was there. He was as tall as his twin brother but bearded, full-faced, not yet grey and far more solid. He stood to one side of Tom, as if he were his shadow – one that had more substance than the person who cast it. Christie put his arm round his brother, talking softly and constantly in his ear until Tom loosened and leant into him, turned and was taken away. Christie had not even glanced at Stella, who watched them out of sight. Then she walked over to Mim, picked her up in her arms and carried her home.
Tom had not been staring up at Mary’s window as he thought. Her room was at the back of the cottage, overlooking a small garden and endless fields. The old plaster walls bulged between the laths; the wooden floor tilted and creaked, its unpolished grain worn to a shine. There were no shelves, so Mary’s books were stacked in precarious towers that she frequently upset or that grew too tall and toppled over. They were mostly her father’s. Reading her way through them felt like climbing to his door.
This had been Mary’s room all her life and something remained of each of its incarnations. Her only methodical change had been to replace each panel of an alphabet frieze with a face cut from a newspaper or magazine. These were black-and-white pictures of singers, film stars, artists and writers – anyone Mary liked the look of, so long as their names matched a letter she hadn’t covered yet, and they were foreign and dead. The panel Mary had painted black ended just below the flowers her father had stencilled, rows of daisies she had insisted upon when, at four, she first went to nursery and saw other girls, and tried being like them for a while.
The sun passed easily through the orange curtains Mary had drawn across the open window, and coloured everything in the room that was so black and white. She held up her arms and examined them with pleasure, seeing her pale skin suddenly gold. She drew her hands to her mouth and breathed hard, to remember what it had felt like when she had reached out to the sleeping boy. Mary stretched and curled, feeling ease and pleasure and a lazy excitement, sensations that were all more or less new to her.
That summer, the exchanges and balances of the oil export market went awry. The countries of the Middle East, having been bent to whatever shape the West demanded, consolidated. The price of a barrel of oil changed by the hour, doubling and tripling. At one point the figures on the Stock Market board trailed a string of numbers like the tail of an ominous comet. Petrol refineries searched the world over for other sources but were still dependent on the rich fields of the Emirates. There were queues at garages, even battles. People walked sanctimoniously or furiously.
Fred Spence’s brother, Charlie, had to get up earlier each day. Once a week, the man from the company came to fill the well beneath his two petrol pumps. He received a fifth less fuel than usual and was given a price to which he painstakingly altered the plastic push-on numbers on the board on his forecourt. The company sent a letter that explained what the government said. Petrol was to be rationed.
Charlie’s bungalow sat behind the garage and he could hear the cars pulling up in a queue before he had got out of bed. As impervious to the heat as he was to the revving engines and tentative then impatient horns, he fried his year-round breakfast. Charlie took his time, stopping to clean his heavy black-framed glasses and to grease back his hair. He was fifty now and while his florid face had settled in folds and pouches, he persisted in the look he had established during a brief period of interest in such things, twenty years before. He sent off for small bottles of unlabelled black liquid by mail order, to dull the grey in his quiff. He wore indestructible synthetic shirts in garish geometric prints that stretched over his sagging breasts and belly. Charlie didn’t worry about the petrol crisis but went by the figures and instructions he was given. He felt no joy in his newfound authority either, simply telling angry customers that ‘The government says …’
When the clock reached seven thirty, he opened his front door. The fetid air of the bungalow, its trapped smells of fried food, cigarettes, sweat and aftershave, lingered on the forecourt most of the day. Charlie blinked, his only response to the sun. It was a Monday morning and the commuters were there, wanting to be gone in time for the city train. Once Charlie had filled their tanks, they relaxed and said good morning as they turned the key in their ignition. It would occur to those who worked in international banking or on the trading floor that Charlie was, of course, in the same game. They made fraternal, esoteric remarks about indices and monopolies. Charlie was polite: ‘The government says …’ He nodded as they accelerated away.
Allnorthover had two bus stops. A brick shelter with wooden seats and a tiled roof sat in a paved square on the edge of the green near Mary’s cottage. There were rarely many people in it as this was the