such work, but somebody must have done, and it must have been either him or the person that used to live inside him. Alix sometimes peers at him to see if she can see any sign of that delicate, shy and vanishing spirit, but Howard Beaver, in his robust eighties, glares defiantly back, his red-rimmed bloodshot eyes mocking her curiosity, her disbelief.
Alix types on. ‘We would very much appreciate any help you can give us,’ she continues.
Beaver wants to edit his own past, to make sure that an authorized version survives him. Alix is slightly surprised that he should care about his posthumous reputation. It depresses her, to find vanity lurking in such a hulk. But she collaborates, because she is paid to do so. And because she is curious. And because she is, by now, involved. Beaver needs her, although he would never admit it. His rudeness, as she occasionally admits to herself, is in part an admission of that need.
Susie Enderby is appalled to find herself sitting in Fanny Kettle’s drawing-room. She cannot think how it has happened. She has been drawn here like an innocent bird by a hypnotic snake. Fanny Kettle’s protuberant, lascivious eyes stare at Susie Enderby.
Fanny is wearing green, dark green, in a shade traditionally favoured by those of her colouring, and she looks at once archaic and avant-garde. Her shoulders are padded, huge, soaring, as they had been at the evening of the Chamber of Commerce ball: her waist appears tiny, her legs are long and her long clinging skirt is carefully arranged to reveal a stretch of hard brown nylon shin. Susie, who takes a pride in her appearance and considers herself one of the best-dressed young professional wives of the region, suddenly feels herself to be a little dull, a little stocky. Fanny pours herself another cup of tea, her long fingers and crimson nails hovering over silver pot, china cup and saucer, sugar tongs. After all, it is only tea time, says Susie to herself, bracingly: nothing awful ever happens at tea time.
Fanny has been describing the reasons for her reappearance in Northam, after years of exile in the flat fens of the East Riding. She shudders with horror as she recalls the desolation. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she says, ‘how lonely it was, how isolated, how cut off from all social life of any sort . . . if you didn’t make an effort, you could speak to nobody, nobody at all, for weeks on end. Well, days on end. If it hadn’t been for my little trips abroad, my little trips to London, I’d have gone mad, quite mad.’
Susie wants to ask why on earth Fanny and her husband Ian had spent so long in such an out-of-the-way region, but she does not want to betray her ignorance. Fanny seems to expect Susie to know all about Ian Kettle’s work. She talks about him as though he were famous. As Susie has never heard of Ian Kettle, she has to tread warily, Gradually she pieces together the information that he has been on television, but is not a television personality: that he was vaguely connected with York University, and is now vaguely connected with the University of Northam: that he is, perhaps . . . yes, this must be it, and now it somehow begins to come back to Susie, as though she had known it all along, that’s right, he is some kind of archaeologist, who has spent years excavating burials in the wet dull flat eastern bits of the county . . .
‘Of course, our house was rather grand, and that was a consolation,’ says Fanny. ‘We had house parties. Quite famous parties.’
Susie does not know whether to believe this or not, and slightly hopes it is not true. How could one have famous house parties in that damp wilderness?
‘Ian’s people are called the Parisi. I always thought that was a hint,’ said Fanny. ‘Parisian parties. You know.’ She insinuates.
Susie does not know. She has no idea what Fanny is talking about. Ian’s people? Parisian parties?
‘Yes, the house was good, but it was too far out . . .’ Fanny sighs, looks round her new residence, which is a detached Victorian granite building high on the ridge by the university, in a suburb once fashionable, now slightly ‘mixed’. It is an area dominated by the great architectural fantasies of the fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century iron masters and by houses like this, the solid comfortable spacious houses of the solidly prosperous. ‘Now this house,’ says Fanny, ‘has some party potential, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?’
Susie nods, smiles. She is out of her depth. She herself sometimes gives little dinner parties for six or eight, and a cocktail party once or twice a year. She considers herself, by Northam standards, a successful hostess. But is she? What new scale has Fanny Kettle introduced?
Fanny Kettle has a son of nearly seventeen. Susie expresses disbelief. ‘Yes, I can hardly believe it myself, such a big boy now . . . of course I married very young, with all the usual consequences . . . only twenty, I was.’ Fanny Kettle laughs. ‘I’m afraid poor Ian has found me rather a handful,’ she says, and laughs again, with display of teeth and rather gaunt neck.
Susie feels sorry for Ian Kettle. She thinks she has no recollection of him, from their one meeting – or was he perhaps that shadowy figure lurking at Fanny’s elbow?
Fanny inquires, formally, after Susie’s own children, without displaying much interest: Susie says she has two, William, aged eight, and Vicky, aged six. ‘How sensible you have been,’ says Fanny, as though sense were a commodity she mildly despised. To wait, to have them a little later, when one can afford more help . . .’
‘Yes,’ says Susie, conscious that she has been emerging dully, uncompetitivety from this interchange. ‘Yes, we are very fortunate, we’re very well placed now, and I have this excellent’ – she hesitates over terminology – ‘this excellent girl . . . a trained girl, you know – who lives in. So life is very agreeable.’
‘And you’re quite free, then? To do what you want?’
Fanny stares at Susie with her shockingly personal, investigative, unmannerly stare. Susie feels herself blushing, hopes her make-up will conceal the colour in her cheeks.
‘Yes,’ says Susie, firmly, primly (why does Fanny make her sound so smug, so prim, so suburban?), ‘yes, I do speech therapy at the clinic where I used to work, two half-days a week . . . and apart from that, yes, I am quite free.’
Free. The word hovers in the room, over the very slightly tarnished silver teapot, over the three-piece suite, over the coffee-table and the occasional tables, over the silk-fringed shades of the standard lamps. Free. An uneasy word, an uneasy concept, a confession, a concession. What has Susie surrendered? Something, she knows. Fanny has noted, has recorded, will exploit. Despite herself, Susie feels a faint tremor of excitement, a physical thrill, a stirring of the flesh. Fanny continues to chatter on, about her parties at Eastwold Grange, about her weekends in Paris, about her plans for future parties, about the complaisance of poor Ian . . . Susie does not know what to believe, does not know what is fact and what is fantasy, succumbs to a mild gin and tonic, refuses a second (‘I have to drive back’; ‘Ah, next time you must have a proper drink and go home in a taxi!’), and as she drives back through the waste land that links Northam and Hansborough, images of a strange, sinister, isolated Grange float into her mind, a Grange with brightly lit windows moated in mist. Laughter echoes into the surrounding emptiness, laughter on stairs and in bedrooms. Carnival, abandon, licence. Susie is outside, out on the flat grey mist-spangled lawn, looking in. Fanny, within, lies back on a brocaded settee, in a silken dress that parts to show the lace of her underskirt. Her head is thrown back. It is cold outside. Susie shivers and turns up the fan on her car heater, as she drives home to a solitary supper. Clive is out at a meeting, and the girl will have fed the children, will be waiting to go out with her boyfriend. Susie will eat eggs on toast in front of the television. Fanny’s ringed hand with its crimson nails reaches for a glass, and a high-heeled shoe drops from her thin hard ankle. A hand – an unattached, disembodied hand – reaches for Fanny’s lean thigh, beneath the silk.
Tony Kettle returns from an evening at the Bowens to find his mother lying snoring on the living-room settee. Her head is thrown back, and she snores, deeply, evenly, rhythmically. The television is still on, but it is soundless. The remote-control gadget has dropped from Fanny’s fingers and lies on the Persian rug by an empty bottle of Bulgarian Mountain Cabernet, an empty wineglass, an empty packet of cigarettes, an orange plastic cigarette