 
Name No Names

Written by Jeff Kohll

Copyright Jeff Kohll, 2018

Smashwords Edition

Licence Notes and Legal Disclaimer:

Thank you for downloading this book.

Please remember that it is the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes.

If you enjoy reading it, please consider leaving a review, and take a look at Jeff Kohll's other novels, Limited Liability and The Wiles of Waldo.
Name No Names.

Jeff Kohll.

Chapter 1.

Mrs. Morpeth was old, a small woman with a wispy moustache and cheeky crow-sharp eyes. She smoked Gitanes in the loo (invariably setting off a smoke-alarm somewhere) and sometimes managed a surreptitious puff or two by an open window when the nurses weren't about. But despite her leery scowl, she was basically kindhearted. She was in hospital with a broken leg having slipped on the soap while getting out of the bath. It had been an inconsiderable fall but the head of her femur had snapped like a Grissini. (Was one a Grissino?) Osteoporosis, they'd told her. Who'd have thought she'd make Holey bones? Mrs Morpeth was bright - she'd been a college lecturer in her time and had no intention of being intimidated by medical jargon. Besides, she'd known plenty of quacks and had seen the rise and fall of many a fashionable theory. Peptic ulcers sprang to mind. In the fifties sufferers were forced to subsist on steamed fish, boiled vegetables and milk. Then steak and salad enjoyed a brief vogue. Or hypnosis or palliative drugs or psychotherapy. Her anthropology professor had sworn by gobbets of Vick swallowed between meals. All were wrong. Just lately another doctor had proposed that ulcers were caused by a bacterium. He had infected himself with helicobacter and promptly sprouted ulcers which he just as promptly cured with antibiotics. The medical establishment, of course, promptly shat on him from a great height. Did he seriously imagine that such a simple solution could have been overlooked by generations of the world's finest scientists, many of them working day and night for drug companies desperate (allegedly) to find a cure and steal a march on all their competitors? Yup. Indeedy doody. Mrs. Morpeth couldn't recall a single grovelling public apology when the upstart was eventually proved right. Now there was talk of eliminating the ravages of age. Apparently "free radicals" were to blame. If only they could be prevented from fraying at the edges, the theory went, then osteoporosis, Parkinson's, Altzheimer's could be things of the past. Mrs. Morpeth had seen enough media hysteria about both new killer diseases and new miracle cures, to be sceptical. She reconsidered her own case. The bone was very brittle and the steel pin which had been stuck in to hold it together had shifted. A Thomas splint now held her leg in traction until the bone began to knit. To be on the safe side, they were keeping her under observation. Surgical beds being in short supply, they'd bunged her in the terminal ward to recuperate. Wherever she looked there were old women dying amid an assortment of unlovely noises and smells. At least it was women only. Funnily enough, she usually preferred the company of men but just now she couldn't have coped. It might have been thought that for the women on the ward it meant that they could die without worrying about makeup or suppressing farts or looking at their worst in front of men, but not so. A wrinkled crone on her deathbed still looked forward to her blue rinse and fussed with a frilly pink bedjacket. Mrs. Morpeth remembered with tolerant amusement her childhood scorn at her grandmother's delight in a new hat. Whatever she did she'd look like an old crone. How could her mother so blatantly lie to the old lady and say she looked lovely? Better, the adolescent Hilary Goodbody felt, to be realistic like those old Mediterranean women and drape yourself in black as soon as your attractiveness is spent. Old habits died harder than old patients. Cancer to right of her, cancer to left of her, cancer in front of her frolicked and hungered. At first Mrs. Morpeth had tried to cheer up her new neighbours but had quickly retreated in the face of her companions' drugged apathy and now lived mostly in her own head.

In the next ward an old man screamed in an endless, exhausted whisper: "You fucking cunts can't wait for me to die. Fucking bitches. Whores. Where's my fucking medicine? I'm not scared of you cunts. Black bitches."

It was a considerable relief to his reluctant auditors when the huge Welsh Staff Nurse weighed into him: "I ahm not pre-pared to hahve the nurses on my ward sibjec-ted to this abewse," she thundered. Mrs. Morpeth, sometime anthropologist, phoneticised Staff's words in her head, "An-y more of this behaviour ahnd I'll speak to Doc-tor about strengthening yewer se-datives. We'd probably hahve to put yeow under restraint for ewer awn gooduh."

No, "yeow" was wrong, Mrs. Morpeth reflected - but let's face it no combination of international phonetic symbols was within spitting distance either. Not to mention notating pitch and lilt. You had to hear it to recognise it. It was at best an aide memoir. As Schnabel had remarked when told that the newest piano-rolls were now capable of thirty-two dynamic nuances: "Unfortunately, I have thirty-three."

Anyway, however phoneticised, Staff's broadside did the trick.

"OK, so maybe it's not Tourette's Syndrome," thought Mrs. Morpeth, rejecting a fashionable diagnosis. Mozart, much given to the babbling of obscenities, was allegedly the latest famous victim. The man in the next ward subsided into a snivelling kvetch and eventually fell asleep. Staff probably reminded him of his mother, thought Mrs. Morpeth wryly. Another cliche. The powerful Welsh matriarch ruling her brood with a rod of iron, keeping the feckless menfolk decent and Godfearing. The annoying thing was that there was usually some truth in such stereotypes. But it was by no means only the Welsh. Mrs. Morpeth had known similar women all over the world. Africans, Americans, Jewesses. Though "Jewesses" was non-PC these days. "Jews" had become "Jewish people". It was somehow almost more insulting to have to insist so on one's humanity. No-one talked of "Christian people" or "Muslim people". Anyway, the matriarch was only one stereotype among many more. "Bits and pieces go to pieces" as some seventies pop song had it. Futile to speculate in the absence of data. Oh, well. There was always the radio and - if the window was open - snatches of birdsong against the muted roar of traffic or overheard fragments of conversation from the alley below. "Doped and bored and very sore," thought Mrs. Morpeth, "She drifted in a woozy world of Radios Two and Four."

Radio Three was not available on the hospital's ancient system.

She often found herself thinking in doggerel. The phrases floated up from nowhere and couldn't be dislodged, like those idiotic advertising slogans (a Mars a day helps you work, rest and play!). She relished the subtle rigour of Tolstoy's boyhood club which one could join only by standing in a corner for an hour and not thinking of a white bear. In her present weakness she was even wrung to reluctant tears by the most mawkish Country and Western songs. "What happens if you play a Country and Western record backwards?" she asked herself. "You find your car, your girl comes back, people give you money..." Mrs. Morpeth chuckled, then was annoyed to note that a classic Rock and Roll number had been turned into an advertisement for sanitary pads. "Strange how potent cheap music is," Coward had justly said... She drifted asleep only to awake with a jolt, feeling something of the jangly dislocation of a bad peyote trip. Mrs. Morpeth knew all about those. She'd done some research into local peyote cults in the Native American Church and had got into trouble with her supervisor for actually taking part in the ceremonies. Her retort that one couldn't even begin to understand the cult without sharing in their experiences had run foul of ridiculous departmental guidelines about objectivity and non-interference. The next time she went without telling anyone in the department and had had one of the most horrible experiences of her life. Formerly she had been moved by feelings of great love and peace, sitting in a circle in a teepee all night long among the murmured prayers and perpetually unfolding vistas of the desert beyond the campfire. This time she found herself stricken by a death-cold horror. The Shaman's face, formerly wise and serene, seemed to be liquefying, the putrid flesh slithering off the skull. A noise outside was, she was utterly convinced, her long-dead mother come to witness her shame among what she now saw as dirty savages. She was base, the lowest of the low. Filth oozed from every pore. Her nerves twitching, she shrank into a corner holding up her hands like the claws of a heraldic dragon as if to fend off her demons. The Shaman muttered and blew smoke over her but seeing her saintly former mentor as "really" an ignorant bully failed to reassure her. She had heard that many of the shamans were schizophrenic and one or two had thoroughly frightened her. It was a long night. The horror went on and on but in the morning she'd felt somehow purged. She gave up on the peyote cults and it was some time before she tried mescaline again. She'd moved in a fast crowd in Mexico back in the late thirties. Her friends were actors, film directors, anarchists and two anthropologists. She'd still been Hilary Goodbody then, of course. Arthur Morpeth came along later.

The woman in the next bed had been lent a portable TV by her daughter and had kindly put it where Mrs. Morpeth could also watch. (Her other neighbour was as near vegetative as made no difference.) News, soaps, cop shows, adverts, sport and endless inane game shows flickered by. Tepid hysteria. All vetted for Political Correctness, especially the most daring. Everything was sanitised, hermetically sealed. You could joke about sodomy but not child abuse, consensual Sado-Masochism but not cruelty to animals. Made Mrs. Morpeth want to puke. Consumers were the cat's pyjamas; that was the message. The poor had mainly themselves to blame. Of course, there was always time for a sentimental wallow or two. Cathy Come Home. Now fuck off again. Anyway, bad as things were in Britain, they were continually nudged in the news, they were much worse almost everywhere else. A cynical smugness was quite in order - although one could naturally never have too much insurance. Retirement, redundancy, disease. Boo! We don't want to frighten you, but is your future financially secure? None of the really important questions was ever asked, no answers were allowed the space to develop. Each viewpoint neutered by its opposite. Well, at least her sense of outrage, which had got her into many a previous scrape, was alive and kicking. Mrs. Morpeth found the general standard of the programmes truly appalling, with, admittedly, just enough gems to keep her occasionally engrossed. But in the main it was like living on a diet of candyfloss. Candyfloss. She smiled and was back with Arthur's auntie Zillah in the South Africa of some forty years ago. Zillah had been entranced by a man at Jo'burg zoo twirling a stick in the drum of his sugar spinner and magically drawing pink clouds of sweetness out of a scented haze. She immediately bought some of this newfangled confection for the children and put it in a cupboard for safekeeping. As it happened, a week passed before she saw the boys again. Surprise! She flung open the cupboard only to find that each of the pillows of bouffant fluffiness had shrivelled to a sticky little pink Brillo pad of a thing.

"Oyoyoy vot gives mit de kendefloss?" Zillah's hands flew up. Mrs. Morpeth could again see the tiny old woman, all in black with a black hairnet over her scant white hair. Her dismay was comical. "Lena!" she cried, "Hev ve got it mice?"

The fat servant came waddling through and joined in the tutting and headshaking with her mistress. No Missis, there were no mice and the cupboard was kept locked. The candyfloss had vanished into thin air or rather partially reverted to the couple of teaspoons of sugar of which it was made. The boys had eaten the sticky remains happily enough.

Hilary asked after Lena's Housemaid's Knee. It was bad, the result of years of kneeling to polish the black-and-white tiled checkerboard of Zillah's kitchen floor. Her considerable bulk didn't help either. Zillah often complained that Lena had become cheekier and lazier over the years. She thought she was secure in her job but she was in for a shock. The two women lived in a perpetual state of fret. Sometimes Lena would call Zillah her mother which she knew drove her wild.

"I am not your mother."

"Who I'm can crying to ifi not to my mother? In Jobeg you are my mother."

"It's not an insult." Hilary tried conciliation. "Lena means it as a form of respect."

"A nechtiger tog. A nonsense. I am vell avare vot she is meanink."

Exit Lena grumbling to herself.

The shrivelling candyfloss. There was probably a potent symbol of something there somewhere, thought Mrs. Morpeth, if she could be bothered to tease it out. The trouble was that it was more likely to prick her fingertips and give her fierce itches like poking about in that glassfibre loft insulation which Arthur had had installed in Rose's house. To hell with it. She wanted to go home to Splott but remembered how shifty Henry had been last time she'd mentioned it. Henry. Her second-born. Her heart ached.

"I know how frustrating lying here must be for you, Mum," he'd said, this hulking brute who had once been the limp little baby she'd expelled from her womb, "but Dr. Stern is worried that the bone is still very fragile. You know how clumsy I am. I'd be terrified of hurting you. We couldn't really rely on Jackie's help either. She's out working all the hours God sends at the launderette. And let's face it, it wouldn't help anyone if I put my back out again." Henry wore his hurt, helpless look. "At least here you can be sure of proper attention."

Mrs. Morpeth sighed. She wondered how much of Henry's reluctance was due to an understandable distaste for emptying bedpans and how much to Jackie's malign influence. Her son. The love between them was almost wholly biological. There was little common ground in ideas or in matters of taste. Two of the senile old women in the ward had been simply abandoned in Reception, Granny-dumped as the Americans neatly put it; and she knew that Henry and that hard-faced bitch he'd married weren't exactly overjoyed at the prospect of having an elderly invalid to tend. Couldn't blame them. She wouldn't have fancied the job herself when younger. Now, thankfully, her nursing days were past. But she could well appreciate that she might cause problems and inconvenience. Why, she might spitefully linger on in a bedridden condition for years if her leg refused to heal. True, it was her house but Rhys, her elder son, had advised her to put it in his and brother Henry's names lest the council sieze it to offset the costs, should she ever, Godforbid, have to go into an old people's home. Now Henry and his family were living there too. Henry'd had to leave his police house on prudently resigning from the force just ahead of an investigation into police corruption (fiddling expenses). He was still on the dole. Her son was, she'd been forced to admit, a bigoted bully - but there was also a woundedness there, something broken in him, that tugged at her heartstrings. Rhys had taken after his father insofar as he had gone into the city, but where Rhys was a professional, a competent accountant, Arthur had had flair and a fierce hunger for power. Rhys was a grey man. A sickly sapling in the shade of the Upas tree. As boys, both sons had been embarrassed by their flamboyant and unconventional mother. At the ages of fourteen and sixteen respectively, they'd been more glad than sorry to be shunted off to expensive boarding-schools in leafy Surrey. They'd both picked up London accents: Rhys a plummy Knightsbridge and Henry (who'd had to go to a somewhat less academically demanding school), a cockney (or rather mockney) whine. No-one else's mother turned up on Parents' Days in jeans and a red poncho with masses of cheap and gaudy jewelry. No-one else's mother had a plastercast of a pornograhic frieze from Khajuraho on the mantelpiece of their Hampstead house to greet startled visitors. A procession of smiling painted figures was engaged in every conceivable act of copulation. Someone was even fucking a donkey for Chrissake! Women blushed and began frantically pointing out something else especially if their dear children were in the vicinity. It was a measure of the power of Arthur's spectacular wealth that none of his family or business associates even hinted at impropriety. At least, not to his face. Of course the wife was an Anthropologist or Archeologist or something so if it was Science or Primitive Art, that excused it. Besides, there was the figleaf of an official-looking label tied to one waving leg. Many marriages were in fact somewhat enlivened by surreptitious glances at novel suggestions. Hilary and Arthur had diligently worked their way through some of the more feasible positions themselves before settling into a comfortable routine with occasional variations and flirtation with the forbidden (although donkeys had never figured). But the statues had a value beyond the merely pornographic, one which hinted at the philosophy behind them. Why, Hilary wondered, had such a religion not conquered the world? The rest of the house was also full of her obsessions. The folk-art of five continents hung from wall and ceiling, draped over tables and chairs. Here a mandolin made out of an armadillo shell, there a Benin bronze. A bead curtain made out of crimped-over Coca-Cola caps hung against a wall after a brief, abrasive spell in the kitchen doorway and a handwoven Mexican blanket mocked the grey leather of a detested couch. Most of these artefacts were grubby and many were worn or broken but the overall effect was of bustling exuberance, unEnglish unreserve which somehow throve on the house's sober design. Mrs. Morpeth's treasures had all gone now, sucked into the maelstrom of Arthur's bankruptcy, but she still loved art. Cheap prints stuck up with Blu-Tak had everywhere commenced their stealthy slither down her walls.

The first thing that Jaqueline, Henry's stupid wife, had done on moving in, was to put up net curtains, veiling her view of the park. Mrs. Morpeth felt a surge of impotent anger. People didn't realise that as you got older you felt more, not less. She ached with longing for Arthur. He had loved her - she'd felt safe with him around. But Arthur was long dead. She riffled through her memories to when they'd met, in wartime London. Why had Hilary Goodbody, free spirit, despiser of the bourgeoisie, sacrificed herself to an enemy of the people, a selfconfessed profiteer, a rich businessman? Could her social-climbing tendencies have been hidden from herself? Sure. Consciousness was mere froth on the churning black waters of instinct. We all have intelligence in overplus when it comes to fooling ourselves.

Arthur Morpeth looked, at this time, every inch the distinguished City gent. He had the swept-back salt-and-pepper hair, the cold patrician eye, the hawklike profile. His clothes were immaculate: the perfectly-cut pinstripe suit, the snowy shirt, the classic tie, the discreet platinum Swiss watch. Falling in love with Hilary Goodbody (as was) had been the most surprising thing in Arthur's life, too. Prematurely middleaged, he'd thought himself safely past that sort of thing. Sex he'd hitherto treated as a necessary commercial transaction, a physical need to be met. Otherwise, he seemed the embodiment of Fiscal Probity. Englishman's word is his bond kind of thing. This was, to put it mildly, deceptive. Far from being a model Englishman, Arthur Morpeth was in fact the only child of an exotic couple from Cardiff's Tiger Bay.

Joe Levy, Arthur's father, was a Polish Jew while his mother, Rose, was the daughter of a Chinese sailor and his Welsh wife. Although Tiger Bay was comparatively tolerant and cosmopolitan in the 'American Wales' of Arthur's boyhood (foreigners predominated and it was full of pubs, boardinghouses and brothels) it didn't take Arthur long to see that he was disadvantaged by race, religion and class and that the only way to infiltrate the upper echelons of the British Empire was through money. Money bought respectability and, more importantly, power. No-one would trample on him. He was a bright kid, was Arthur Levy. There was even talk of a scholarship to Eton but Arthur spared Joe the agony of betraying working-class solidarity and opted for Tiger Bay. Not that his education suffered – he left school at the relatively late age of sixteen (having stayed on as a pupil-teacher in science and mathematics until the end of the Great War) to get rich quick.

CHAPTER 2.

Before 1914, Cardiff was the biggest coal-port in the world. South Wales boomed throughout the war, but even at the age of sixteen Arthur's nose had picked up the first hint of decay. Arthur wasn't the type to put all his eggs in one basket. He sought control of the fountainhead of all wealth rather than this or that runoff. The interwar collapse of the Welsh economy, based almost entirely on coal and iron, was to prove him right. Britain lost markets during the Great War which she would never regain and the military uses of iron and coal had largely gone. The Welsh race riots of 1919 were caused by returning soldiers who found haemorrhaging industry and many of the few remaining jobs now in the hands of foreigners. The mob moved towards Tiger Bay which was suddenly bristling with guns and knives. Arthur was part of a multiracial crowd at a street barricade and had joined in the hurling of missiles by throwing a packet of pepper (provided by a Chinese friend of his late grandfather) into the face of a horse whose rider edged too close. The results were gratifying in the extreme as the panicky animal bolted back the way it had come, shaking its head and sneezing. The rider fell off and the mob scattered as the horse charged through them. The jobless reformed but seemed less keen to come on somehow, and a standoff ensued. When the police said that they could not guarantee the safety of anybody entering Tiger Bay, the crowd melted away to the jeers of the women and children. The elation of victory was shortlived as news began to come in of other racial attacks in Merthyr Tydfil and Ebbw Vale. Arthur coldly allowed himself to be swept along in the enthusiasm and enjoyed his moment of fame but saw all too clearly the danger of being tied too closely to the accidental community of his birth. He also saw that once he had left, there could be no going back. His cleverness alone had alienated many. Only his parents could offer him the warmth of unconditional acceptance should he ever feel the need. The shifting community of Tiger Bay would be closed to him by envy at his enormous (projected) wealth. W.C. Fields is reported as saying that when he was poor he'd vowed that if he ever got rich, nothing would give him greater pleasure than to help his former friends and partners in misery but when riches finally came he thought: "To hell with them." Arthur merely omitted the hypocritical protestations. White had it. Fair enough. He could pass for white. He would become an international Englishman on whose empire the sun could never set because his empire would engirdle the world. That was the end of Arthur's attachment to his home although in later years he liked motoring through the scenic Wales which he had only previously known through occasional charabanc excursions arranged by rival do-gooders or by the community itself. Arthur had made a few generous donations to the schools and churches he'd left behind although his charity had been anonymous; so as to spare him further importunity. Old acquaintances were politely stiffarmed although Arthur had arranged jobs for one or two of the more deserving cases while taking care that they were with companies other than his own. Arthur liked travel. He toured the United States, Europe and Africa. He likewise refused to be tied to this or that industry. Arthur's industrial base would be broad with as much fruitful cooperation between its elements as possible. John D. Rockefeller's almost accidental good fortune was not for Arthur although he had no objection per se to nodding donkeys. He wanted the power that money could confer and so made straight for London. A cousin of Joe's was in wholesale clothes and he offered to take the young man into the shmatte trade. Arthur accepted the offer and quickly mastered the business side of buying and selling cheap suits and dresses, but his eye was on the City. He took night-classes in bookkeeping, elocution lessons from an impoverished aristocratic lady and procured (as he had quickly learned to say) the position of clerk with a firm of stockbrokers. He burned his fingers once or twice and lost out to underhand practices but he was resilient and he worked very hard. One cautious gamble paid off and then another. By the age of twenty-one Arthur's rise had begun.

Old Joe Levy, a ship's engineer, had picked up a fierce Marxism in the bowels of the various vessels in which he'd sailed and Arthur's defection to Capitalism hurt, if it by no means surprised him. As an only child whose father was often away at sea, Arthur had always taken his responsibilities seriously. He treated his parents well - bought them a house as soon as he could afford it and motored down five or six times a year to see them; at first in an old Morris Eight but soon in a long succession of ever-more expensive cars. When Hilary met him, it was an Armstrong-Siddely with a gear-driven supercharger fitted by an engineer from the firm's aero-engine plant. The restrained personalised coachwork was by Mulliner. The iron fist in the velvet glove was how Arthur liked to think of it. He enjoyed the look on the faces of drivers of allegedly faster cars as the old lady surged past them. Everything had gone according to the plans which Arthur had laid in 1914 at the age of twelve.

While Joe was playing cards and arguing over politics with his cronies in pub and engineroom and Rose, fat and placid, but with an indomitable will, was attending the chapel of her mother's particular splinter of Methodism for the sake of the singing, Arthur was scheming how to become very rich. He had mixed with the hungry barefoot kids from Rat Island and had conceived a hatred of poverty. But he was not entirely without other interests. They were, for instance, a musical family. Joe played the violin - the syrupy wailing tunes of the Warsaw ghetto as well as airs from popular operettas. "Wilja" from the "Merry Widow" was a particular favourite. Rose sang and could "vamp" at the piano and Arthur took up the trombone and was soon a bulwark of the school band. He also played Rugby and was quite a useful fly-half. But he was not popular. Being Tiger Bay, this was not due to antiSemitism or the taint of his "coolie" grandfather but was purely personal. Arthur was bullied until a tough "jewboy" called Philip Stein taught him how to box. The gouging, biting and kicking he taught himself. He was soon left alone with that mixture of fear and disgust which a dirty fighter inspires. Arthur coolly watched his peers, his shrewd brain hatching moneymaking schemes. His only real friend was the mathematical genius of the school, an Indian Parsi named Tom Bombay. He could beat Arthur at chess two times out of three but Arthur almost always won at cards or dominoes or even games of chance like Snakes and ladders. This infuriated Tom as good luck was supposedly disproved by statistics. Both boys were ambitious. Tom wanted to be a professor of mathematics at Cambridge and Arthur wanted to be the richest man in the world. He would ruin the Bute family and buy Cardiff Castle at a rock-bottom price, for starters. He would become the Napoleon of a vast business empire, knock Cecil Rhodes into a cocked hat. He could see it all. Arthur read the financial pages of the Times and the biographies of the rich and compared their ideas with those of the Marxist pamphlets which Joe pressed on him. Tom came of a mercantile family and had often helped out in his uncle's watch emporium. He and Arthur would discuss business plans for hours. They invented a game which followed the stock market. Each player was allowed a thousand pounds to invest. They accounted for interest rates and brokerage charges and inflation. The account ran from month to month. Here too Arthur seemingly won more than his fair share of the profits but Tom did well too.

On August the fourth 1914 Britain had entered the war and war-fever raced through Arthur's school. But Joe's Communist diatribes had after all profoundly affected his son. Communism at least cut away this rubbish of King and Country and focused on what really mattered. But where Joe saw the war as the last desperate gasp of a sordid commercial squabble between doomed empires, Arthur concentrated on a hoped-for leap in both technological prowess and business opportunities. Anyway, heroics and patriotism meant nothing to him, though you would not have thought so from his behaviour. Although only twelve years old, he was big for his age and had actually tried to enlist (although he had taken the precaution of waiting until one of Joe's friends was on duty to ensure rejection). This escapade earned him some grudging respect. His patriotic credentials thus clearly established, Arthur moved swiftly into the war souvenir business and within six months was doing a brisk trade in militaria. Soldiers and sailors who had lost bits of kit would often find Arthur of help and he paid returning troops well for such things as shell-cases, bits of shrapnel, Boer War medals and the like. The war had knocked coal exports on the head but the docks were still full of ships whose bare rigging looked like thickets of winter larch. Armaments devoured coal and iron and kept South Wales booming but Joe had worked with oilfired boilers and he knew that coal's day was nearly over. " No stokers, no smoke, no ashes," he had enthused. "You turn a tap and there you are - as much steam as you want."

Of course hostilities had stopped development of the merchant fleet as everything was focused on the war effort and optimism was still high. There was no conscription needed - volunteers poured into the services. Joe was not given the opportunity to refuse, being told that his skills were required in the merchant marine service. This was no soft option. He was torpedoed twice in 1917. The first time they got into the lifeboats and were rescued after three days; on the second occasion Joe's engine-room suffered a direct hit and only a gout of water shooting him up through the blow-hole of an open hatch had saved his life.

This was after 1916 had brought its own troubles. In November of that year there was a wary late-night knock at the door which opened onto Abie, Joe's younger brother. He slunk silently into the parlour and made sure the curtains were drawn before letting Rose light the gas. Joe was away at sea, but Arthur appeared at the top of the stairs in his blue-and-white striped pyjamas. Abie looked wild and exhausted. He was yellow-faced and a tic in his neck twitched a string to the corner of his mouth. He had deserted. Abie had been a course bookie in civilian life and had decided that the odds were heavily against his remaining alive in the trenches.

"Ya chust can't believe vot's goink on out zere," he told them hollowly. "Meshuggoyim. Ach, zat chazzersche Somme. Valk, zey're tellink us. Nu, ve valk. Ve valk, ze Chermans shoot. Ve die. Chust don't esk me from pillboxes. Me, I'm shot tru' ze lunks. Zat goodfornodding Haig may he rot in hell. From our whole company is left, in gansen tvelve pipple. I'm only gettink from the hospital out two days und awready zey are vantink to send me back. Mud, machine-guns, gas..."

Rose enfolded Abie maternally as he broke into racking sobs. "Duw, duw bach," she said. "Dawn't yeow wir-ry. Stay by yur with us until we see what to do. Jaw'll be bahck soon now. And Arthur, yeow keep shtum, hear? not a word to an-nybody. Are yeow hungry, Abie? There's Gefilte fish in the larder." Rose, daughter of a Chinese sea-cook (and a Welsh prostitute) had taken to Jewish cooking like a duck to plum sauce.

"Mit chrain?" asked Abie hopefully, showing a renewed interest in life. The mere memory of Rose's handgrated horseradish brought tears to his eyes.

Abie stayed, hidden. A couple of MPs came looking for him, but Rose invited them in and blandly denied all knowledge of Abie's whereabouts. Wasn't this weather awful? Would they like another shot of whisky in their tea? And another couple of welshcakes?

Abie shivered at the back of Rose's wardrobe, among her coats and dresses. At last the MPs went and Abie could remove the hard, dry, pointy nose of Rose's foxfur stole from his ear.

Arthur had, in the meantime, sold Abie's uniform and rifle to a couple of Irish stokers, whom he pretended to believe were avid collectors of militaria. The rifle, its number carefully filed off in Joe's shed in the dark, had fetched ten pounds. Arthur held out for this for two reasons. Firstly he knew full well that selling weapons to an enemy or even neutral person could be readily construed as treason and that he was seriously running the risk of Borstal or even a lynching by an inflamed mob. And secondly, he wanted to show off his moneymaking acumen to Rose. With Joe so often away Arthur enjoyed behaving like the head of the family. The ten pounds was proudly presented to Abie, but Arthur's favourite (indeed only) uncle shrank with horror from touching the money of war and death, so it was quietly subsumed into the housekeeping. Arthur hung on to the guinea which he'd got for the rest of the stuff.

Abie had been a bookie before the war. He'd eked out a living, handicapped by unreliable information from the stables. In the trenches he opened a book on the war, but his odds on the unlikelihood of a speedy victory and enormous probable casualties were held to be almost treasonably accurate by his Captain. (In the event his gloomiest projections proved laughably optimistic). Had Abie not slipped said Captain a couple of winners in the past, he could quite conceivably have been looking at the wrong end of a firing squad for endagering military morale. The Captain, howevah, was prepahd to overlook the boundah's behaviah this time, provided such a thing nevah heppened again. Um. Did Private Levy heppen to "know anything" for the Derby? Abie parted with what he devoutly hoped was a good tip and was shoved by General Haig back into the shambles of trench life. Here Abie contracted trench foot, trench mouth and was well on the way to trench fever when they went over the top. It was the first of July, 1916. A week of heavy bombardment had supposedly taken out the German line so the infantry, each man carrying sixty-six pounds, was ordered to walk over in formation. Unfortunately, the record severity of the bombing had been not quite severe enough. The few machine gun nests left were enough to allow a record cull. Sixty thousand Tommies were mown down. Abie had been knocked straight back into his trench and had come to, spitting blood, in a field hospital. Shipped back to Eastbourne to convalesce, he'd been physically healed but finding himself on a troop train bound for Dover was too much. He slipped away at Victoria station and made for Paddington where he managed to hide in the baggage car of a slow train to Swansea. Near (but not as near as he'd thought) to Cardiff, he jumped out of the moving train and once he'd ascertained that he was only bruised he set off furtively to his only possible sanctuary - brother Joe's house down by the docks.

Abie stayed in Tiger Bay hidden in the small back room. He twitched and blenched by day and moaned and shrieked by night. Rose fed him and emptied his chamberpot. Luckily the old Brigadier next door was stone deaf. A cannon had gone off just above his head in Afghanistan, ripping both eardrums to shreds.

The days stretched out. Joe's ship was long overdue, but turned up at last. They had seen one U-boat but it had unaccountably avoided them and their paltry couple of three-inchers. Now: what to do with Abie? Luckily Joe had sympathetic contacts through the Party and in a mixture of Yiddish, Polish and English, he and Abie talked far into the night. They would try to get Abie an American passport and passage on a cargo-boat to New York.

For the next few days things were tense. Rose's silver tea-service (a wedding-present from Joe's rich Uncle Otto in London) vanished from the display cabinet. Joe knew a mortuary assistant and fellow Communist who saw it as his proletarian duty to redistribute the by-definition stolen wealth of such members of the bourgeoisie as happened to pass through his hands. An American seaman whose appendix had providentially burst, had been hiding his passport in a secret pocket. Abie Levy became Chauncey Couzens of Poughkeepsie, New Jersey. Tiger Bay boasted an excellent passport-altering service. Jehovah's Witness was altered to Jewish and the various physical discrepancies (height, weight, colour of eyes, age) straightened out. Joe was out late three nights in a row, but at last the thing was done. Abie was abjectly grateful. If he could just get to America, Uncle Simmy, who ran a hotel in the Borscht Belt of the Catskills, would be sure to help him find his feet.

But Abie was not destined for the quiet life. En route to New York by devious zigzag, the ship was torpedoed by a U-boat. Abie was fished from the water more dead than alive by the crew of an American destroyer. His one piece of good luck was that he'd had his new passport on him and he was carried through Customs and Immigration on a stretcher with only the most perfunctory formalities and a quick riffle through that still-damp document.

He'd made it. Abie breathed a sigh of relief and headed for the racing fraternity in New York. Uncle Simmy put up some capital and bought Abie a partnership with a struggling bookie and at once the new firm began to show a modest profit. Then America intercepted a telegram from Germany to Mexico offering the Mexicans Texas, New Mexico and Arizona back from a defeated United States if Mexico would become their ally. There was reportedly public outrage at this duplicity and on April the sixth, 1917, America entered the war. On May the eighteenth, conscription began and Abie, determined not to be sent back to the war, hanged himself. In best Jewish Unhandyman style it was a botched job. The electric cable which he'd ineptly selected for a noose stretched just enough to allow his toes to touch the ground. The gouges on his neck and the skin under his fingernails showed that he'd had second thoughts about suicide, but alas, too late. Abie died of slow strangulation. He left Joe some oil shares which he'd won at poker and enough cash for a cheap funeral. A few of the local Jews turned up at the funeral as well as some bookies, both Jew and Gentile. Abie had been a surprisingly regular shulgoer when business permitted and could be generous if he'd had a good day. He took religion seriously (or at any rate superstitiously) and had bullied Joe into having baby Arthur circumcised on supposedly hygienic grounds. Abie was buried and began the long, slow drift from living memory.

Chapter 3.

Back in Cardiff, Joe was neither as shocked nor as griefstricken as might have been expected. Abie's suicide had not been a complete surprise. As a boy he'd been given to long periods of depression; as a man he had thought to break a run of bad luck by the exculpatory trick of enlisting as a volunteer in what promised to be a short and glorious war. He and Joe had never really got on. Abie's cold, scheming mind allied to a profoundly superstitious streak had been in many ways the antithesis of Joe's passionate communism and practical scientific training. Worse was when they agreed and Joe could see Abie's character as a grotesque parody of his own. But both could wax sentimental at times and as soon as Abie's extremely shortlived patriotism for his adoptive country evaporated, they'd been at one in their hatred of the war. Abie had been pathetically grateful for Joe's help in getting him out of the country, so at least they had parted on good terms. Now Abie was no more. Their parents Gottsedanken were dead or this new tsoris would surely have killed them. Abie's death left just Joe and his older sisters Sadie and Zillah who were out in South Africa. Rose kept up a chatty correspondence with both who, while deploring the fact that she was a half-Chinese shikse, admitted that she seemed to have a good heart. She managed at least to keep that wildechaiah Joe under control. The sisters too had taken Abie's death stoically. He'd always had trouble with his nerves. They agreed to put his suicide down to shell-shock, a newly-discovered condition just then commanding some respectability.

Sadie kept a photograph of Abie on her writing-desk. He was in uniform, his naturally sepia face peering glumly from an oval ebony frame. There were also a few letters in hesitant, misspelt English, the wartime ones heavily and capriciously scored by the censor's pen. (Joe's English was much better - he was an avid reader and had been apprenticed to the chief engineer on a British ship at the age of fourteen). Abie's letters were tied with a black ribbon and Sadie kept them in her bedside drawer where they remained undisturbed until one or other of the nieces decided to try and draw up a family tree.

Zillah never spoke of Abie beyond the minimum platitudes.

In fact, the only person genuinely affected by Abie's death was Arthur. He'd always had a soft spot for his uncle and with a childish idealism elsewhere lacking had seen the shifty, scowling, neurotic bookie as a loveable rogue romantically making and losing fortunes but somehow always coming out on top. He remembered Abie once strutting into his room in Whitechapel after a particularly successful day's racing and throwing fistfuls of fivers into the air. Abie's suicide showed Arthur just how quickly a gambler's luck could turn. It was all very well talking about long-term percentages which favoured the bookie over the punter but what was needed was fat to weather the lean times; that and knowing which bets to hedge. One unnecessary hostage to fortune, Arthur decided, would be a criminal record. He'd heard that the police were asking questions about his "souvenir" trade - so he sold off all his stock at cost (he drove a hard bargain) and resolved never again to stray out of the enclosures of the law. This had stood him in good stead. In twenty years the head of Morpeth, Flint and Gundry had never transgressed the letter of the law - while naturally taking full advantage of the rich panoply of loopholes and ambiguities provided. The firm was respected as honest, but it had prospered chiefly through something more instinctive - Arthur's fine nose for imminent disaster. He had steered them safely through the Wall Street crash of nineteen twenty-nine when the firm was in its infancy and through many other dangers since. During the depressed thirties MFG (as it was generally known) continued to grow, snapping up many less prudent or less daring rivals. Arthur's greatest triumph was the way that he had taken over one of the most venerable merchant banks. It was still talked of in the city. Arthur had spent five years quietly buying up his rival's shares and distributing them in a huge range of portfolios and trust funds. Then a last discreet hundred pounds changed hands and he had his fifty-one percent. The next day he walked into a directors' meeting and said: "Good morning gentlemen, I'm your new employer." Old Warburton, the now departing Managing Director, had personally blackballed Arthur's application to join his golf club and was pretty free in his opinion of Jews, dagoes and niggers. The look of horror and outrage on that bristling red face was one of Arthur's fondest memories. The firm had never looked back. In a depressed age MFG went from strength to strength. Their armaments portfolio prospered as did their worldwide mining investments. When war broke out in 1939, Arthur was delighted. Rearmament would stimulate the entire economy and could make him very rich. True, there would be much suffering, but he honestly believed that Hitler had, in any case, to be stopped. Antisemitism stank of stupidity, but what really appalled Arthur was the soulless regimentation of fascism; the other side of Communism's wooden nickel. Arthur was a crusader for free enterprise and genuinely believed that the merchant was the harbinger of progress and prosperity. Of course he was not so naive as to believe that the profit motive alone would lead inevitably to the best of all possible worlds. Government was necessary to give a touch on the reins now and again. Without rules there was no game. Rules were Archimedes' fixed place where he could stand to move the world. But there was ample room for manoeuvre. And blunder. Some of Arthur's business colleagues had helped prop up Nazi Germany until as late as June 1939, showing, besides an irrelevant moral turpitude, appallingly poor business sense.

Arthur's financial interests led him to travel widely. And wherever he was in the world, he made a point of seeking out relations, some ludicrously distant. Since Uncle Abie's death he had acquired the only child's hunger for family, a hunger which survived many surfeits. Besides, family was a ready-made intelligence network - but while commercial interests often meshed and overlapped, our hero was scrupulous in avoiding any hint of nepotism. He knew that nothing else could sour the mood of a workforce so quickly. Arthur's closest relatives on his father's side were his aunts Zillah and Sadie in South Africa. As for Rose, her mother's descent into prostitution and subsequent marriage to a coolie had completely estranged her from her Welsh family. It was pure chance that giving her mother's name, years later in a registry office, had led to the typist pricking up her ears and discovering a cousin. Along with her sister, these were the only two Welsh relatives who were prepared to acknowledge her existence. As for Wang Wei, Arthur's Chinese grandfather, he had died while Arthur was still a baby and the tenuous Chinese connection had snapped.

Auntie Sadie and Uncle Max Goldstein lived in Kimberley where Max, who was a diamond buyer for de Beers, had his base. Arthur had first visited them in the thirties. He remembered the whitewashed walls and the dusty red corrugated-iron roof overhanging the shady "stoep" with its wicker furniture and elephant-foot ashtray. A deep overhang ran right round the house in a vain attempt to moderate the baking heat. Inside, the large rooms were badly lit by small windows and cluttered with heavy, overstuffed furniture. The curtains were of maroon velvet, the paintwork yellowed cream and dark chocolate. Max had been brought up in fin-de-siecle Vienna and his taste dominated Sadie's, formed in the Warsaw ghetto. Belle Epoque versus belly-pork as cousin Morrie was precociously apt to remark. Morrie's room alone reflected some feeling for Africa with its cool cement floor and zebraskin rug. On one wall was an oxhide Zulu shield over a crossed assegai and knobkerrie. Elsewhere were photographs of Orange-groves in Palestine and a reproduction of Botticelli's Mars and Venus. Morrie would end up in Johannesburg as a successful lawyer. Arthur and Max had managed some mutually satisfactory business dealings in the years leading up to World War Two and Arthur relied on Max for information about the economic climate. From his mother Arthur had heard that the Goldsteins were worried by the pro-Nazi Ossewa-Brandwag Afrikaners and the possibility of a German takeover of the colony. This Arthur considered most unlikely. In any case, the war probably wouldn't last long despite the allies' criminal unpreparedness. In this view he was wrong.

He was right, though, that war meant opportunity. From the ebb and flow of international funds, Morpeth, Flint and Gundry skimmed off their percentage and waxed fat. Arthur had again volunteered for the army but had again been rejected on the grounds of age as well as some wellprimed medical objections (a supposititious fluttery heart caused by the carefully calculated dose of digitalis which he'd swallowed just before his inspection). This left him free to exploit the many business opportunities of war. There were plenty of available women too, although Arthur didn't mind paying for sex if necessary. Like Brahms, he had a standing arrangement with a prostitute for Thursday afternoons. Her name was Valerie. He had, before their marriage, scrupulously informed Hilary of this now defunct arrangement and had been disconcerted by her laughter.

"Hilary and Valerie!" she'd squealed. "Talk about ups and downs. Sounds like the Lake District. Hilary and Valerie, the story of my life!"

Pre-Hilary Arthur had had a healthy sexual appetite but was uninterested in attachments - as more than one gold-digger had discovered. He treated whores well and liked it when they babied and pampered him. For the men left behind by conscription it was a good time. Arthur had enjoyed a couple of brief affairs with married women but had, by some obscure scruple, never cuckolded an employee or business associate. Perhaps he thought business too important for the messiness of sexual antagonisms. The wartime shortage of men created problems, but far fewer than might have been anticipated. The call-up had left the firm short-handed, but Arthur discovered that most of the clerical work could be done a good deal cheaper by female typists and that a little discreet string- pulling often achieved far more than going through the increasingly-congested official channels. Bumf proliferated. "Bring out Weight and Measure in a Year of Dearth," Blake had presciently said. The ration book had, for instance, a page saying: "Do nothing with this page until told what to do with it." Women were being drafted into the factories and were making excellent workers, being in any case more docile and conscientious than the men. Everyone was perpetually tired and the Blitz was a blasted nuisance, but life went on. Morale was high. Then, in January 1941, the hitherto cool and collected Arthur Morpeth met Hilary Goodbody and fell in love.

It was in the dark days of the blackout. A stray bomb had blown in the windows of Arthur's office just off the Strand and tipped the contents of a couple of large filing cabinets onto the floor. Files and papers were strewn over most of the carpet. Arthur, fearing damage, had come in by first light and now stood shocked as the freezing wind dashed rain over the already sodden papers. Ink was running and some important documents were fast becoming a sodden mulch. There was broken glass everywhere, tangled up in the sticky tape with which the girls had dutifully crisscrossed the panes. The dim grey light did nothing to cheer things up and when Arthur tried to turn on the feeble wartime lightbulb there was no response, the power having been cut off. Through the open doorway came yells and groans as various other tenants assessed the devastation.

"Crikey, what a mess!"

Arthur turned to see a woman in the doorway, a sympathetic grimace on her face and her head cocked to one side.

"I'm sorry to bother you at a time like this," she said breezily, "but I'm looking for a lawyer named Aaronson. They told me the best time to catch him was first thing in the morning but I'm afraid the name-board's been smashed to smithereens."

Arthur saw bobbed black hair, dark impudent eyes, a cupid's bow of scarlet lipstick. A cigarette hung from one corner of her mouth. Her face was heartshaped and amply saved from mere prettiness by a large blunt nose. She wore a brown burberry over a red silk blouse and round her neck was a cheery necklace of little papier-mache skulls with chips of bright green glass for eyes.

"I believe that Mr. Aaronson's away in Scotland at present," said Arthur. "In any case, his office is unfortunately located on the top floor which has rather borne the brunt of the damage. Part of the roof appears to have been blown out and the partition walls have collapsed. I can't honestly envisage business being conducted there for some little time yet."

Arthur was suddenly aware of something strange. He simply had to keep her talking - he couldn't bear the thought that she might go. His throat tightened and he became aware of a pulse in his temple. He gulped.

"If it's not an impertinent question, may I enquire the nature of your business with Mr. Aaronson? You see, as a financier, I have many contacts in the legal profession. I'm sure I could recommend someone reliable." Arthur cast a distracted eye at the havoc of the bomb blast and found that it concerned him not a whit. "Is it, for instance, an immigration case? I'm aware that that is one of his areas of particular expertise."

"Bullseye," said Hilary briskly. "It is indeed an immigration case." She hesitated.

" I will, of course," Arthur hastened to add, "treat anything you may wish to tell me in the strictest confidence. I personally happen to feel that present policy towards refugees is, to say the least, misguided."

Hilary looked at him sharply for a moment and then nodded. "Alright. My problem, in a nutshell, is that I have a Jewish friend in Paris who must be got out. Do you know that it's not bad enough that the Nazis got places like Buchenwald where they starve people and work them to death but a friend of mine told me that they've actually set up death camps in Poland and that they're coldbloodedly murdering people with poison gas? Mainly Jews of course, but also Gypsies and homosexuals and anyone else they don't like."

"I have heard rumours to that effect from some generally reliable sources. I'm Jewish or at least half-Jewish myself, by the way. Arthur Morpeth." Arthur offered his hand. She shook it firmly.

"Hilary Goodbody. Look this is very kind of you, but I can see you've got your hands full."

"No, wait!" cried Arthur desperately. Goodbiddy? Oh, Goodbody! Can't see much under coat but shapely calves. Small feet in dainty snakeskin boots, Spanish or Mexican. Arthur's commercial eye was busy. "There's nothing that I can usefully do here. I have a chap who does my building work whom I shall telephone and the girls will be in shortly. It's no earthly use my trying to sort out the files. Miss Draycott has her own system. I suggest that I shut up the office and we adjourn to an 'otel nearby where we can discuss your problem over breakfast. I may be able to help. I have one or two useful contacts in the Home Office."

"Well, thank you Mr. Morpeth," said Hilary eying him cautiously, "but I rather think we'd better move those papers out of the rain first." Her eyebrows formed a resolute bar across her sturdy nose as she briskly began lugging boxes and files over to a dry desk in the corner. Arthur followed what he could see of her bouncy buttocks like a lovesick calf its mother. How splendid that women attracted one both coming and going. Why on earth did he find her so appealing? She was almost the exact opposite of Valerie, his aforementioned regular, who was a large placid blonde. Arthur was fond of Valerie as a not particularly doggy person might be fond of the family Labrador. He would give her a handsome parting gift, a gold wristwatch from Cartier... Arthur shook off his reverie, remembered his position and became all business again. The telephone, luckily, was still connected so Arthur called his "little man."

"Hello, Smiffy? Morpeth here. I'm sorry to bother you so early but my office has been somewhat damaged by a bomb-blast. No, nothing too serious, but the windows have been blown in and they need repairing as a matter of some urgency. I expect to pay for inconveniencing you of course... shall we say time and a half? At nine on the dot? Splendid. Goodbye." He turned to Hilary. "Now then Miss, or is it Mrs, Goodbody?"

"Miss," said Hilary shortly, "but I very much prefer Hilary."

"Then Hilary it is. In which case I hope you will feel free to call me Arthur. I hope and trust that this presages a cordial relationship. Now, if you will please excuse me for a moment, I must leave a note for Miss Draycott." He got out an expensive-looking fountain pen and inscribed a few words on a memo pad in, Hilary couldn't help noticing, perfect copperplate, screwed the cap onto his pen and turned ceremoniously to Hilary. "Now then," he breathed her name, "Hilary. Would you permit me to take you to breakfast so that we can discuss your friend's problems in comfort?"

"My, but you're a fast worker, " she said banteringly. She was used to the more or less clumsy approaches of men but this reserved businessman with his ornate, oldfashioned diction was something new, if, she sternly reminded herself, obviously impossible. "Breakfast sounds good, Arthur," she continued, "but this is strictly business. You'd better find somewhere cheap and we'll go Dutch."

"Very well." Arthur was easy. "Cancel the Savoy. I know a little cafe nearby where they still manage an approximation to a slap-up English breakfast at a surprisingly reasonable price. What say," and Arthur waxed ponderously jocular, "that we repair thither?"

"Good idea," responded Hilary frankly, "I'm absolutely starving."

Chapter 4.

Mrs Morpeth lay in bed and looked at the flaking stone wall which, together with a trapezoidal slice of sky, represented the view from her window. The pennant sandstone had, a plaque in the hospital foyer informed her, been quarried in the Foxhole quarries of Lord Vernon at Kilvey. Inside, workmen were putting in a new central heating system and a large iron pipe had been left disconnected just by her bed. It formed a sort of speaking-tube down to the Porters' Mess below. Voices floated up. Mrs. Morpeth listened with interest.

"Saw I said to her, Mawna by name, mawner by nature."

Mourner? Oh, Mona.

"What did she say?"

"The bitch reported me to Mr. Bridger. 'E gimme a proper bollocking. Said I'd 'ave the sahck if I didn't watch myself. 'E 'ahven't got a bliddy clew, mahn."

Swansea, she thought smugly. Not Cehdiff. Oh no! They'd turned on the T.V. Bloody "Neighbours" again. She could see how people became addicted to soaps. She found herself knowing all the characters in "Eastenders" and waiting, loathing her own suspense, for the melodramatic resolution of the previous episode's cliffhanger. But she hadn't yet allowed herself to sink into the treacle swamp of "Neighbours". She clamped on her earphones and turned up the volume. Ah, that was better. Ellington's "Caravan". 1937, the presenter reminded her. The band surged into action, their seamless ensemble turning the latin rhythms, growl trombone and wah-wah trumpet into a miracle of suave ferocity. She'd always adored Jazz, from the rawest blues to at least some of the wilder excesses of Free Jazz taking in Dixieland, Swing, Bebop and Cool along the way. In fact she'd almost never met a type of music she didn't like, (Just gimme that Baroque and Barcarole music...). She liked Stravinsky, Bartok, Mozart, Bach but had lately gone off Beethoven's too-persuasive propaganda. Music was yet another gulf between herself and her resolutely prosaic children.

Jazz had been part of her love affair with Arthur. Pre- Hilary he'd been able to execute a competent foxtrot and had quite liked the brassy triumphalism of Glenn Miller and Paul Whiteman but the combined effects of love, wartime and expert tutelage had opened his ears. Billie Holiday ravished him, Fats Waller tickled him, Coleman Hawkins thrilled him. A side of himself which Arthur had never suspected jumped up and danced in his mind. Tiger Bay came into its own. At long last he began to learn how to have fun.

None of this affected his business acumen. Arthur had long held that pity was a dangerous indulgence in business. Hilary was also no bleeding-heart liberal. She accepted the ruthlessness of the artist, the surgeon's necessary indifference to the infliction of pain.

Mrs. Morpeth could still remember every detail of their first meeting - the red and white checked tablecloth, the thick white crockery with its green and gold border, the tired but cheerful waitress. Her astonishment as this distinguished-looking City gentleman bared his heart to her. His painful sincerity dispelled the notion that this was a new line in seduction technique. Surprise had yielded to alarm and then to a wary sympathy.

"I'm a profiteer in all but name," he flatly informed her. "By which I mean that my firm has done astonishingly well out of the war. Of course, there is a case to be made that rearmament has invigorated the economy and that the science of weapons research will have profound peacetime implications, but that is frankly incidental. My prime motive has always been personal profit. That's not quite as selfish as it sounds, however. That is tosay that I honestly feel that power is better concentrated in my hands than in those of many other people I could name. It is, no doubt, a delusion common among magnates, but what I'm driving at is this: thanks to what some might consider my ill-gotten gains, I am in a position to offer substantial assistance in a good cause - a category which saving a few innocent people from the Nazis certainly includes. I must warn you that it will not be easy but if it is at all possible to get your friend out of France, you may rely on me to do everything in my power to assist him."

"Well, thank you. I believe I do trust you, Arthur. There seems to be more to you than meets the eye. You're not at all the pompous stuffed shirt you pretend, and I must say pretend very convincingly, to be."

Arthur was slightly shocked but thrilled. "I can see that you're a woman of rare discernment, my dear," he said drily. "Now then, you'd better tell me what your friend will need aside from his immigration papers. Money? Passport? Has he a means of livelihood?"

"Well, he's primarily a Jazz clarinettist but a fine classical musician too. The trouble is that he's a conshy - he believes that it's ideas which change things rather than violence." Hilary paused then plunged: "He's also as queer as a three-pound note, which doesn't exactly help."

It helped Arthur. The black, crippling jealousy which he now found himself to have been grimly suppressing, broke free and vanished in a puff of smoke. A pansy. Not the lover he had automatically assumed, but simply and truly a friend. He'd heard that homosexuals could be a woman's best friend being neither rivals nor ravishers. As a financier he was always careful to investigate his clients' personal lives and was well aware that "the sin which dared not speak its name" was far from uncommon and often tacitly acknowledged. Every family had its confirmed bachelor who went in for scouting or the theatre, its tweedy spinster who bred dogs or ran a school. Arthur found the idea of buggery between men revolting but acknowledged that he often lingered over the fantasy of buggering women or running a tongue up their savoury clefts - so he shrugged off his distaste. On a personal level he knew and liked three or four obvious homosexuals - although nothing had ever been said - and in business he had let sexuality play no part. Arthur knew that he would tolerate Hilary's friend. Quite warmed to the chap in fact. Suspended the plan to ship him off to, say, Tristan da Cunha at the first opportunity.

"Hm," Arthur continued thoughtfully. "A pacifistic Jazz musician. Is he what they refer to as an absolutist or would he be willing, for instance, to entertain the troops?"

"I don't see why not." She giggled. "They've always entertained him. I'm sorry, that was in appalling taste. No," she continued earnestly, "I'm sure Marcel would do anything to help, short of butchering strangers, even mad Nazi dogs. I expect he'd be willing to serve in the Ambulance Corps, only he faints at the sight of blood. On the other hand, he'd cheerfully kill someone over a question of music. He's a marvellous person. Truly extraordinary. I think even you would like him although God knows you have little enough in common. The point is that I simply can't stand by and see his life snuffed out by some lumpen stormtrooper." She fished up a toilet roll out of her bag and efficiently blew her nose.

This sudden access of tender concern brought Arthur's dormant sense of chivalry galloping up. He would help her, soothe her, possess her.

"If you wish to avail yourself of my assistance," said Arthur soberly, "you will have to trust me implicitly. There are certain things which I am not at liberty to discuss with you. The fewer people who are implicated, frankly, the better. But I promise to do my very best for you and your friend. What's his name, by the way?"

"Schweitzer. Marcel Schweitzer."

"Does he speak English?"

"Mm... More Jive and Vootoroony with a strong Yiddish accent, but he has no difficulty in making himself understood, worse luck. And his French and German are both first-rate."

"Good. Well, believe me, I shall do my utmost to have your friend brought to safety. Getting him out of France will obviously be the more difficult part, but I have the rudiments of a plan. By the way, Hilary, don't worry about the money. I would genuinely count it an honour if you allowed me to defray any expenses incurred."

"I'm sorry Arthur," sweetly implacable, "but that would be entirely out of the question."

"Fool," thought Mrs Morpeth.

"I couldn't dream of letting you pay." Hilary had principles. And, a la Groucho, if you didn't like those principles, she had others. "Save it for someone who really needs it. If you could just get him out of France that would put me in your debt forever. I have quite a bit of money put by," a thrupenny bit she told herself, "and could almost certainly," (not), "borrow more. He would need a fake passport and papers, I suppose. Or could he be got in legally? Can you organise that sort of thing?"

"I can almost certainly organise whatever is needed. May I top up your tea; or could I tempt you to some more toast and marmalade?"

Mrs Morpeth saw Arthur smiling encouragingly, utterly confident in an unassuming way that he could outfox the Third Reich. And right in hindsight to be so. Arthur was a strategist of genius and an implementer of great talent.

"Now I don't expect you to stick your neck out for me." Hilary took up her part. "I'll do whatever dirty work may be necessary and I absolutely insist on paying whatever it costs." She cocked her head and eyed her unexpected ally shrewdly. " But I must admit I can't help wondering about your motives," she continued. "You don't somehow strike me as simply a philanthropic Jew making with the guilt gelt as Marcel puts it. You don't seem all that anxious to ease the pain of being rich by helping the persecuted. I can't help feeling there is a personal element involved here. I don't want to seduce you into perhaps breaking the law on my behalf. Please don't be offended, but I would prefer to keep things on a business footing. Now then, what passport would be best? British?"

"That depends. Would Mister Schweitzer be interested in getting to Palestine, say?"

"Well, given that he always says that he doesn't know whether the Nazis got their racial ideas from the Zionists or the Zionists got them from the Nazis, it might not be his first choice but if that represents his only chance of escape I'm sure he'd jump at it."

"Oh no. I don't think that's our only option. On second thoughts American papers might prove more useful," Arthur mused. "America is, after all, the home of Jazz. But insofar as my personal interest in this case is concerned, you have, as our transatlantic cousins say, put your finger right on the button. I won't attempt to deny that I do feel very strongly attracted to you. Unprecedentedly so. But I promise that there are no strings attached. Even were you to forbid me to see you ever again, I should do everything in my power to extricate Mr. Schweitzer from his present danger."

"Thank you, Arthur." Simple and heartfelt, then a friendly smile: "I hope an order of banishment won't prove necessary."

"I realise that I'm prematurely middleaged and that you're a lively young woman with a life of her own to lead. All I ask is that we become friends. I will gladly accept a purely Platonic friendship if that is what you want, but I honestly can't help myself. I feel that I simply must see you again."

Every word, every look was supposedly fixed in Mrs. Morpeth's memory, but there was no verifying their accuracy. How much of memory was hindsight, she wondered, how much wishful thinking? And even the most complete memory was no more than a whirligig of garish scraps. She couldn't even bring Arthur's face to mind. Any attempt broke down at once into a shifting series of vignettes: here a glimpse of profile, there a characteristic set of the mouth. But funnily enough, the less detailed the picture, the more vivid it became. Perhaps it was like instrumental music which allowed a freer rein to fancy than songs which were somewhat shackled to their words. She thought of her old young self who'd never seen anyone as deadly serious as Arthur. His bluegrey eyes searched her own anxiously, his thinlipped mouth set in an uneasily beseeching smile.

"Hm, an interesting approach," Hilary hedged. No wonder flattery worked, she thought. It was nice. "Look, Arthur, we can certainly be friends, but I think we're too different for any romantic stuff. I do admire your shall we say refreshing honesty, though, and I can't tell you how grateful I am for your offering to help with Marcel - how soon can we get things moving?"

"Almost at once. A passport may take a few days to arrange. I shall require a photograph of Mr Schweitzer and a list of his physical characteristics, including any peculiarities." Arthur was hurtly polite all business again.

"Yes, of course. I actually have all those things. I took good advice for once." She rootled about in her snakeskin handbag and took out her comb, lipstick and powder compact, a pair of red leather gloves and a crumpled half-pack of Gitanes. "Ah, here we are." She flourished a brown envelope.

Arthur discreetly stowed it, unexamined, in the inner breast pocket of his pinstripe suit.

Why should Mrs. Morpeth, lying in an NHS bed some half a century later find this picture so sexy? That relative surge of testosterone which had grown her a wispy moustache after the menopause now gave her a taste of the predatory sexual obsession of a young man. Lying bored in hospital also helped, of course. One of her lovers, a writer, used to talk of asausaging his lust. If this hint was any indication, where did they find the energy to do anything else? Too old and poor to even consider a toyboy she had yet the sense of humour to laugh at herself. Was she turning into one of those Tennessee Williams crones who smeared the sperm of young gigolos on their faces so that in drying it might tauten the skin and help smooth out the wrinkles? She idly fingered her dry cunt (that ugly, hairy, smelly thing shaped like a candle's dribble, that men found so puzzlingly attractive - her frill and furbelow as one lover had put it) and ached for Arthur.

A mere two days after their first meeting, Arthur had turned up at her basement flat with the news that he had arranged an American passport for Marcel. He also had a pound of sirloin and a bottle of vintage claret. Hilary was impressed. Because of the blackout, everything was dark, it being six o'clock of a bleak winter evening. Arthur rang the bell. Hilary, inside, had just finished smoking a reefer from her fast-diminishing store of Mexican marijuana. She leapt up, heart pounding and took an imprudent sip of neat Dettol to mask her breath. An already unhappy Aspidistra had further cause for disgruntlement. Hilary's relief on opening the door to Arthur was profound.

"Arthur! Thank heavens it's you. I'm so jumpy with all the bombs and whatnot. Come in. You'll have to excuse the mess."

Hilary led him down a flight of stairs into a room vibrant with yellows and reds and cluttered with a profusion of Mexican folk-art. A justlit joss-stick added its sickly lily-of-the-valley to the already pungent atmosphere. Arthur stood in his pinstripes nervously bearing gifts.

"Good news," he told her peremptorily. "I have the work on Mr. Schweitzer's documents well in hand and I have also had a word with Harry Aaronson who will be pleased to deal with any immigration problems which may arise. These," he proffered his bundles awkwardly, "are for you. I took the liberty of bringing some steak and a bottle of rather fine claret. I hope they are acceptable."

"Oh, Arthur you are good," cried Hilary. "What marvellous news about Marcel. And steak! I don't know when I last tasted steak. I'm so sick of snoek and Spam and whalemeat. I'm sure that last potroast I had was horse. Either horse or chewy grey string. Wait! You must stay and help me eat it. If I say so myself, I'm a damn good cook when I try. Do you like chili? I have some dried Jalapeno peppers which I've been saving specially for something like this."

"Well," said Arthur cautiously, "it is a tempting offer but I wouldn't care to compromise your reputation. Why not keep the food and wine and let me take you out to dinner?"

Hilary guffawed. "Compromise my reputation," she scoffed. "That's a good one. Look, my dear, I'm what the more genteel of my acquaintance call a Bohemian. I'm loud and flashy and vulgar. I do the wrong things, know the wrong people. The only knock my reputation is likely to take is from those of my friends who consider consorting with the Capitalist Oppressor to be the sin against the holy ghost - or should that be spectre? No, no. I insist you stay. Gosh, after all your help with Marcel, it's the least I can do. Anyway, I think you're quite a decent cove under that thick layer of pomposity." She smiled to take the sting from her words. "Misguided, of course, but not without redeeming features. That doesn't mean I want to sleep with you, though. Sorry to be so explicit, but I prefer to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings at the outset."

She patted his hand affectionately.

"Naturally," said Arthur stiffly, "I shouldn't dream of presuming to offer you unwelcome attentions, but I must state that the simple fact of being in the same room with you is the finest thing that has ever happened to me."

Hilary, with the sharpened sensitivity of marijuana, felt that this was true. Arthur glowed with all the soulfulness of a religious convert.

"You must have led a very dull life then," said Hilary lightly. "You're wrong about me, you know. I'm a good-time girl, not Joan of Arc. I always say that the only bearable reason for a man to put a woman up on a pedestal is so that he can look up her skirt. Come on, let's have some music. I'll be back in a minute." She darted into the bedroom, kicked off her sheepskin slippers and put on some brown pumps.

She put Ellington's "Caravan" on the turntable (yes, Mrs. Morpeth remembered, that was the first record she'd ever played him) and danced two steps into the tiny kitchen. "Come and talk while I cook, Arthur," she called. "Do you think we're in for more air-raids?"

"It's a distinct possibility I'm afraid, although it is far from cost-effective given the rate at which our Spitfires knock out their planes. Thank heavens for the Merlin V12 is all I can say. And the Germans haven't even succeeded in panicking the civilian population - quite the reverse, in fact."

"Yes, morale is certainly high," mused Hilary. "A nurse I know told me that before the war started they cleared thousands of beds, expecting a terriffic surge in nervous complaints - but in fact the incidence has never been lower."

" Indeed. Who would have thought that chronic fatigue and the distinct possibility of imminent death would have such a tonic effect? Industrial production has soared even in Coventry despite the bombardment and the ridiculously long hours which people are expected to work."

"I thought you capitalists were all for squeezing every last drop of added value out of your workers," said Hilary lightly.

"Oh, we are. It's simply that it's far more efficient to have a capable and reasonably happy worker than a semiconscious bungler, no matter how motivated. Still, there's the feeling that one is doing one's utmost. But the war has given people a sense of purpose and a focus for their many resentments. Hitler and his fascists, don't forget, are evil incarnate."

"Plus I suppose we actually enjoy the small element of adventure in air-raids. The playacting of huddling under the stairs or going down the underground to sleep do offset the boredom and inconvenience, at least for the first few times. But perhaps the biggest morale-booster is that fighting Hitler has made people feel needed, given them something to think of apart from just struggling to make ends meet."

"That's very true. Apropos of shelters, by the way," Arthur earnestly confided, "an Insurance Actuary with whom I'm acquainted says that the chance of being killed by a bomb is pretty much the same whether you stay at home or go to a shelter - apart from surface shelters which are so shoddily built as to constitute a risk even in the absence of bombs."

"Jerry-built and Jerry bombed, eh? Thanks. That's cheered me up no end. So much for everyone doing their utmost and acceding to tyranny in order to protect our precious liberties. If I'm killed in a surface shelter it'll be such a comfort to know that I've died for the most sacred cause of all - a fat profit."

"Oh, the chance of 'copping it' is pretty small, really. By the way, I couldn't help noticing your eyes are rather red. Not bad news, I hope?"

Hilary giggled. "Only if you're a plainclothes policeman. No, I smoked some marijuana just before you arrived. It's an occasional vice of mine. Just viper mad as my old Sidney Bechet record has it. That's why I reek of Dettol."

"Dettol? What's Dettol got to do with it?"

"An unsuccessful attempt to mask my breath, that's all."

Arthur was shocked but mastered his discomposure. "I have come across marijuana before," he admitted. "As a boy growing up in Tiger Bay one heard rumours about the Indian sailors. And while my Chinese grandfather didn't smoke opium himself, some of his friends certainly did."

"Yes. Funnily enough addiction only really took off in China in the seventeenth century when they began smoking American tobacco and mixing in Indian opium, if that means anything. All I can say is that I've never felt much of a craving for other drugs - at least not for cocaine or mescalin: the only other two apart from nicotine and alcohol, which I've tried." Hilary ended mock-piously. Then smiled mischievously. "I'd say alcohol is, generally speaking, the worst of the lot. Speaking of which, would you like to open that lovely claret and let it breathe? There's a corkscrew in the drawer."

Arthur complied. "May I lend a hand with the cooking?" he offered. "I'm actually not completely helpless in the kitchen. We old bachelors are often obliged to fend for ourselves. I was lucky. My grandfather was a Chinese cook who passed on all his skills to my mother - my father introduced her to the elements of Jewish cuisine. She's probably the only woman in Wales who can make sweet-and-sour chicken soup. She taught me everything I know. I can be quite adventurous in the kitchen, if I do say so. Here. Let me chop up that onion for you." He siezed her old kitchen knife, tested the edge on his thumbnail and grimaced before taking what looked like another fountain pen (but was actually a little collapsible steel) from his pocket and sedulously whetting the blade. Hilary was impressed and depressed in equal measure. "Coated with diamond dust," Arthur tersely informed her. "Practically indestructible." When the knife, under its own weight, pared a sliver from his thumbnail, he set about the onion in a businesslike way, first peeling it and then slicing it this way and that, resulting in a neat pile of little cubes.

Hilary looked at him again: his hooked nose, high cheekbones with a hint of epicanthic fold, beetling brows and peaches and, well, custard complexion. Seagrey eyes. His salt-and-pepper hair was receding and there were white tufts at the temples. Interesting. She mentally un- and then re-dressed him. Off went the pinstripe suit and waistcoat, the black bowler, the snow-white shirt, the navyblue, maroon and gold tie. What about Oxford bags and a black turtleneck sweater? A beret? A couple of days' growth of stubble. A Zapata moustache. A Mexican poncho and sombrero? Or just an African penis gourd? She had to laugh. Arthur brightened visibly.

"You're a fraud, Mr. Morpeth," she mused. "You're no more an English gentleman than I'm Florence Nightingale. But what are you really like underneath, I wonder?"

"You wouldn't like me," said Arthur gloomily. "I'm cold and selfish and ruthless - although I do draw the line at certain things. And I've recently discovered a far tenderer side to my nature than I'd previously suspected."

"Ah," mocked Hilary gently. "The Beauty and the Beast syndrome. One kiss and the monster turns into a handsome prince. I've found it's generally the other way round. Anyway, no one's ever accused me of being a beautiful princess. I'm just an ordinary working girl."

"And at what do you work, if you don't mind me asking?" Let it be something awful from which he could effortlessly waft her away.

"Well," Hilary hesitated modestly. "I'm only an assistant librarian by day, but in my spare time I'm a researcher for M - O. I report what people really think about the war. I'm a sort of spy."

She didn't mention her degree in Anthropology for a confusion of reasons. Men didn't like brainy girls and she didn't want to embarrass Arthur by flaunting her education, if only, she told herself, for Marcel's sake.

"Yes, Mass Observation," parried Arthur. "I've seen some of your lots' reports. Most interesting - although I believe the Cabinet didn't like them at all. Politicians generally don't like the truth when it conflicts with their propaganda. Incidentally, these onions are almost ready. I like them slightly burnt myself but I can stop them at the translucent stage if you prefer."

"No, I adore caramelised onions myself." (Strange how their taste in food had run together from the start). "The potatoes need about another five minutes. I think the steak can go on now. Ooh. My mouth's watering. I was going to have a powdered-egg omelette with mixed-fruit jam. Mm. It looks gorgeous."

"Prime Scotch beef," said Arthur smugly. "And it's been properly hung too."

"I won't ask where you got it. I suppose it's like Marcel's passport - you wouldn't tell me. Poor Marcel," she sighed, suddenly anguished, "I do hope he's alright. I keep seeing him shot down by some oafish Nazi. Although I met lots of Germans in Mexico who were gentle poetical creatures, if somewhat earnest."

"My firm had frequent dealings with Germans, many of them decent people. But there's no denying that Hitler is not yet entirely a dictator, not while he enjoys such tremendous public support. I've known some previously sane people turn quite fanatical."

"Oh we had fascists in Mexico. And plenty of the bloated capitalists straight out of Grosz's drawings, who were no worse than their British counterparts (present company excepted), though that was bad enough. But M-O has found that people generally don't hate the Germans although they do think that Hitler is, to put it mildly, a bit of a bad hat."

"My late Uncle Abie fought in the last war until he deserted," (and to how many people would Arthur have vouchsafed that fact?) "but he used to say that the Tommies didn't hate the Germans half as much as they hated the grasping French peasants - the very people on whose supposed behalf they were fighting."

"Someone once said that truth is the first casualty of war," said Hilary soberly. "And not only truth. I lost both my brothers in the last go round, within a month of each other. I was just a baby of course. My mother told me later that they'd thought it such bad luck their being killed just when the Times said the war was going so well. That was in the early stages when they thought it would be over by Christmas. It was only years later that I found out they'd both been part of an almost criminally bungled action. I remember my mother saying how she now envied the mother of that boy she'd given a white feather to. He chopped off his trigger finger and spent the war safely in jail. And Marcel has been more of a brother to me than Rob and Daniel ever were. I couldn't bear it if he were killed. Enough of the people I love have had their lives cut short. Do you think we'll ever learn?"

"History would say probably not. However, as far as Marcel's concerned," Arthur shifted from stoic to reassurer, "I shouldn't worry if I were you. I gather he's in no immediate danger. My sources are very reliable. You would be surprised at the intelligence network which we bankers maintain to keep an eye on our customers. And our Mr. Aaronson's valiantly slashing his way through the red tape,"

"I know it's pointless to worry, but I can't help it." Hilary smiled bravely. "It's just that I'm over-tired and I suppose the Blitz is making me nervous. How's your office by the way?"

"We've restored a semblance of order although the roof still contrives somehow to leak. The water manages to find its way invisibly through the two stories above us then runs along a joist and drips through the ceiling-rose directly onto my desk. I have to keep an old Met Office rain-gauge at the ready and of course we can't use the light. We've had to move many of the records into the basement so I've found that a more efficient use of our time is to leave any investigative work until the sirens start up as we seek shelter down there in any case. And yourself? May I ask what precautions you take in the event of an air-raid?"

"It depends. Sometimes I go to a shelter or down into the Tube to see what people are saying or I just stay here. The sister of one of the girls at the library is a welder and she reinforced that oak table with with an iron frame for me. I usually drag my mattress under it and sleep there or at least lie awake fretting until the all-clear. How do you like your steak, by the way?"

"Underdone, please."

"Thank God for small mercies. I often think this war is divine retribution on the British for their diabolical cooking. I was brought up on convent food - they used to put the one o'clock cabbage on to boil. I think spices were thought of as aphrodisiacs, temptations of the devil. Even the names of the various stodges were unappetising. Toad-in-the-hole. Dog-in-a-blanket. Spotted Dick. I can still feel the cold suet sticking to the roof of my mouth. I'll just rinse away the memory. Mm. Right. We're ready."

Mrs. Morpeth, more than half a century on, could almost taste that steak in her mind, the fiery pepper mollified by sweet onions, the bloody juice mingling with the tender flesh as she chewed. What she got in the real world was cheap grey overcooked hospital food. No wonder people came out of hospital worse-nourished than when they'd gone in. Ironically, her drastically-reduced smoking had sharpened her agedulled taste buds to less than no avail.

The Blitz had been a surprisingly happy time in many ways. She had actually suffered a near miss in Stepney, being literally blown out of bed. She woke up in a corner of the room to find herself covered with broken glass as well as lath and plaster from the collapsed ceiling. Apart from a few cuts and bruises, she was unhurt. At first it seemed quite normal to be lying in the rubble looking matter-of-factly at the faded geometry of the lino and listening to the ack-ack and screams from the neighbours. "I've been bombed," she told herself, wonderingly tasting the words. "I've. Been. Bombed."

There was some excitement in the corridor outside and it struck her that her flannel nightshirt, worn over nothing, was up around her waist. She'd just absentmindedly pulled it down when the door burst open and an ARP warden rushed into the room. Alarums and excursions. Half the roof had been blown off and an incendiary bomb was burning in the street. Hilary, as she stood up and dusted herself off, was astonished to feel a sudden upsurge of intense happiness and ludicrously unwarranted pride. It was as if God had leaned out of a golden cloud and touched her with his finger. She was walking on air all the next day, bubbling over with her story, chattering away to anyone prepared to listen. (One poor woman had even been wearing a badge saying: Please don't tell me your Blitz experience.) It was marvellous. That night she went back to her flat and improvised a bed in the tiny kitchen. She knew she was invulnerable now and she slept soundly through another air-raid warning and the crash of quite nearby bombs.

She awoke to the sober reality of a blear and chilly dawn. Luckily, most of her Mexican artefacts were safe in tea-chests as the flat had been rented ready-furnished in a cheap and nasty style. She'd been due to return to South America but had been stranded in London by the outbreak of war and still felt in transit. She looked at the mess. Nothing had been done about repairing the building but luckily the weather had stayed dry. Hilary began listlessly picking up clothes and books, the euphoria of the day before quite gone. This was the Blitz, she thought. Pointless ugliness, drudgery, exhaustion. Not to mention death and devastation. Even after ten hours' sleep she was dog tired.

There was a knock at her door. The landlady, Mrs. Kemp. Hilary had never cared for Mrs. Kemp but she had to admit that the old dragon had rallied magnificently.

"Come on, Jerry, yer'll 'ave ter do be''er'n tha'," she'd shouted, shaking her fist at the departing bombers before rounding up the other tenants and leading them off to a shelter for the rest of the night. No-one had slept, being too excited. The Blitz had brought them together. Now here was Mrs. Kemp bearing an unheard-of cup of tea.

"Come in, Mrs. Kemp," cried Hilary gaily. "Tea. Just what I need. Please sit down, you look quite done in."

"Ta, dearie. Fink I will."

Dearie? This was indeed a change from the short, sour, sniffy Kemp of yore. The little cockney collapsed cautiously into the rickety easy-chair and shook her head at the devastation. Where the window had been was a ragged hole, the raw brickwork (burnt commons) webbed with black tendrils of dry-rot. Street noises, suddenly very loud, penetrated the room. Hilary looked out. Traffic, obstructed by the bomb-crater in the middle of the road, was grinding slowly past. The sun had come out but the bright September morning was dulled by the yellow mud which the blast had spattered over everything. The terrace across the road had had two teeth knocked out but the only apparent casualty was Mrs. Phipps, an elderly Christian Scientist whose trust in God had proven sadly misplaced. Or perhaps, as an optimistic tombstone next to her parents' grave had it, she had "Passed Into Life."

A couple of council workmen were pottering about doing rudimentary repairs. They tore off a piece of tarpaulin which the old man across the road had spent the previous afternoon painstakingly tacking over the hole in his roof and vanished for the day. An ARP warden was standing guarding the crater in the road. Hilary was surprised that the mere back of a stiff neck could radiate such otiose stupidity. Mrs. Kemp joined Hilary at the blasted window and sniffed disapprovingly. Ah, she was more her old self.

"Scandalous I calls it," she observed venomously. "Where's the bleedin' council when yer needs 'em? I pays me rates like anyone else. Fing is, dearie, it might be weeks 'fore they does the window even; an' as ter when me 'ouse'll be fixed up proper like - well, Gord alone knows - an' 'e won' spli'..."

The long and the short of it was that last-in-and-first-out Hilary would have to find somewhere else to live. Luckily she had an aunt in Hammersmith who was eager to move to her country cottage in Devon and within days Hilary was happily ensconced in her flat.

Mrs. Morpeth couldn't get her mind off that first dinner with Arthur. She'd been as high as a kite, so every word or gesture throbbed with meaning. Arthur was as watchfully eager as a good dog hoping for a walk. The steaks were wonderfully tasty and succulent, the autochanger kept dropping new records on the turntable. She remembered the silken voluptuousness of Una Mae Carlyle singing: "I can't give you anything but love, baby" undercut by Fats Waller's snide mockery. She'd broken down into helpless giggles and even Arthur had chortled. Then the sirens started. Hilary, who'd been through many bombings unperturbed was suddenly panicstricken.

"It's just the marijuana," she told herself. "That's what's making me jumpy." But her heart rattled away in her chest and sudden tears slid down her cheeks. Arthur leapt up and offered her a spotless monogrammed handkerchief. Hilary leant against him, surprised by the firmness of his body and his animal warmth. She dabbed at her eyes and sniffed. The sirens howled. She hated herself for going all weak and gooey just because a man was around.

"Would you like to go to a shelter?" asked Arthur competently.

Hilary shook her head. "No, it's nothing. Just the sudden shock. Gosh, how soppy of me. No, I'm damned if I'll let Hitler spoil the first decent meal I've had in ages. And this wine. I mean I've drunk bucketsful of vin very ordinaire in the past but this is the first time I've really seen what all the fuss is about. It's simply delicious. Come on, let's finish off our dinner under the table."

So, cramped but cosy they finished off the steak and claret. Hilary felt a sense of weakness steal over her. She was suddenly exhausted. She wanted to snuggle up to Arthur and go to sleep. It was only then that she felt the wet between her legs and resigned herself to the inevitable. She felt the fatalism of an acrophobe, drawn despite herself to the brink of a precipice. They dragged the mattress under the table and still partially clothed, huddled under the blankets to warm up. Hilary, stroking Arthur's back felt that the muscles under his shirt were as tense as the engorged penis straining at his trousers, but she felt no physical threat. He was comforting. So comforting. Hilary, overcome by a surfeit of marijuana, wine, food and cigarettes went back to Plan One, closed her eyes and fell asleep. Arthur cradled her tenderly in his arms, gazing at her face in the firelight as it twitched in dreaming anger, fear and once in what he dotingly misinterpreted as a look of childlike delight. In fact she was dreaming of the Mother Superior at her convent being locked in a fridge and left to freeze to death. At last the guns stopped and the all-clear sounded. Arthur took a cue from his left arm and went to sleep. Dawn found them dosi-do, Arthur in shirtsleeves and pinstriped trousers and Hilary in a red lambswool sweater and lovat slacks. She still wore about her neck that necklace of grinning papier-mache skulls, a souvenir of the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Chapter 5.

Hilary was the first to wake. She turned and looked long at Arthur with some trepidation, then slid silently out of bed and put on the kettle. The scratch of a match roused our hero who sat up, bumping his head on the stout oaken underside of the table. He emerged looking tired, rumpled and incredulously happy. Hilary came over and gave him a juicy kiss and was rewarded with a look of intense gratitude. Both tasted lousy and Arthur's stubble rasped her cheek, but it didn't matter.

Hilary fetched in the milk and was relieved to find the street unscathed by bombs. She went downstairs again to find Arthur scowling at a panful of reconstituted scrambled eggs.

"Look, I'm sorry about falling asleep on you last night," she commenced, "I hope you don't think I'm casting nasturtiums on your virility or anything, but I was so tired I just couldn't help myself. Please don't take it as a reflection on your animal charms."

"Good gracious, there's no need to apologise," doted Arthur. "The fact that you trusted me enough to fall asleep in my arms made me proud and happy. Just to lie there watching you sleep was, well, quite honestly, as near as I've ever come to a mystical experience."

"Oy veh, as Marcel would say. A Madonna fixation already. This I'm needing like a lochinkop. Poor Marcel. I hope he's alright. I feel I should warn you, Arthur, that I'm not the motherly type. Just give me what the lower classes call the three effs: food, fags and... fun and I'm happy."

"You call this food?" demanded Arthur politely pretending to misunderstand. "Snoek and Spam and powdered eggs! I could tell by the way you devoured that steak that you hadn't had a proper meal for some time."

"An' then the rich man cime," whined Hilary the Fided Rowse of the music-halls, "an' 'e tempted me wiv gowld; an' 'e tempted me wiv di'monds. Oooo 'ow 'e tempted maey."

Arthur's barked laugh held an underlying yelp of pain, intriguing Hilary. He shook his head and composed himself.

"I seldom laugh," he told her earnestly. "I can manage a snicker if someone I need to flatter tells a dirty joke, but I'm pretty generally considered to lack a sense of humour. Do you think it's too late to develop one? Is there any hope for me?"

"It's whether there's any hope for me that I'm worried about," sighed Hilary. "I have this sickening sense of inevitability. Nietzsche says somewhere that we should learn from businessmen to beware of our first impulses - they are usually too good."

"Nietzsche?" queried Arthur. "Rather an odd chap for an anti-Nazi to quote."

Their first quarrel. Mrs. Morpeth warmed herself at a fifty-year old ire.

"For Christ's sake, Arthur," Hilary confronted him. "If Nietzsche is a Nazi then I'm the Queen of Sheba. I hadn't expected you to swallow government propaganda. You haven't read him, of course."

So much for the dainty dimwit act.

"No, you're quite right. My education is sadly deficient in many respects. Quite honestly I haven't time to read anything much apart from financial papers and balance-sheets. But if Hitler likes the chap that's not a very good advertisement."

"The Nazi propaganda machine has seized on a few of his ideas and distorted them out of all recognition. For a start Nietzsche was no anti-Semite. On the contrary, he greatly admired the Jews. Survival at any price and all that. He also said that he wished to be known as a despiser, par excellence, of the Germans and of their muddy, sentimental ideas awash with beer. The Spider, you said they call you? Presumably that implies patience, cold cunning, a degree of ruthlessness. You really should read Nietzsche. You might find you have quite a few things in common."

"We businessmen don't generally have much time for philosophy or the arts," Arthur apologised meekly, "but I do endeavour to remedy the more glaring of my defects. Where would you suggest I begin?"

"Well, the first thing you could do is lay off the old spaniel eyes. I can't live without a little ironic detachment and" (as the kettle whistled) "the odd cup of tea."

They sat up in bed as well as the stout oak planking would permit (they didn't move the mattress back onto the bed lest the fragile magic be broken) and drank tea. One thing led to another. Arthur started off tentatively like a baby with its first rattle but a few nips and scratches from Hilary soon put him right.. There was surprise, growing confidence, exhilaration. True, he had spurted at Hilary's first caress of his penis, but he quickly recovered for some almost boyish lovemaking, his impetuosity restrained by the finest of lubricated prophylactics which he prudently carried at all times. Hilary's personal best in multiple orgasms (two) had been reached that morning. She yielded to love.

Chapter 6.

Love, thought Hilary, was like a hot summer's day on an English beach. The sea was warm where it lapped the sand, but if one abandoned a languid backstroke and stood up in deeper water, an icy current gripped the ankles. There was also the fanciful fear that unseen monsters lurked, ready to casually chomp off a leg or two. Absurd, really. She knew that barring Arthur's most unlikely descent into drunken rage or homicidal mania, she was as safe as anyone in wartime Britain but she had seen too many disasters to trust anyone blindly. Still it took courage for any woman to throw in her lot with a stranger, one almost certainly her superior in physical strength, earning power and probably (although not in this case) education. She remembered a music hall song which one of the convent servant-girls had liked singing as she scrubbed the stone floors:

"Two lovely black eyes

Oh, what a surprise

Simply for telling a man he was wrong

Two lovely black eyes."

Of course women had their weapons too. The cunning of the weak. Sex-appeal (alas, a wasting asset. That said, fluttering eyelashes had had more effect on history than any number of stamping butterflies). And then they were continuers of the line, brood mares or whelping bitches. But it was nonsense to pretend that logic was involved in love. To a human, a female baboon in oestrus may look as if the huge bubblegum bubble she was blowing out of her arse has messily burst all over her posterior, but what, to another baboon, could be more attractive? Mrs. Morpeth remembered the gentle inquisitive touch of a male baboon on a ripe female bum in Joburg Zoo. And where instinct ended did Stendahl's concept of crystallisation begin? Who knew? At any rate, she and Arthur took to each other like celluloid kissing dolls, mouth to magnetic mouth.

Hilary had learned to take her happiness where she could. She remembered a holiday with her parents in Torquay in 1929. It had been just the three of them in a sweet little caravan. Her brothers, Rob and Daniel, had both been killed in the Great War and she'd been horribly indulged ever since. The hopes of the family were now pinned on her, the only surviving child. What her father perceived as the disaster of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government was at least mitigated for him by the introduction of the country's first woman M.P. He was sure his daughter would go far. Her mother, while encouraging her academic pursuits, still hoped that she would make a brilliant marriage. All that ambition could be heavy to bear at times but the fortnight in the caravan had been idyllic. For the first time in ages life she'd felt able to relax completely. It was a tremendous relief to be away from her detested convent school with the musty-smelling nuns and stupidly spiteful girls (although she missed her best friend, Isadora). She'd stuck it only because she desperately wanted to get to university and the Jesuitical style of tuition at St. Benedict's was first class. The Goodbodys were not even Catholics, but tepid C of E. Their nearest approach to radicalism was that they believed strongly in education for girls. Free for a fortnight! Hilary danced on the beach in the cool twilight beneath a beneficent moon, comfortable, for once, in her sixteen-year-old body.

That holiday had been the end of her childhood. Daddy, a Chartered Accountant, and Mummy, his wife, had been killed early the following year in a motoring accident. They'd skidded on a patch of black ice and crashed head-on into a brewery dray. Daddy's heart had been speared by the steering column while Mummy, in those pre-Triplex days, slashed her throat on the broken windscreen and bled to death. The driver of the lorry was shaken but unhurt. It turned out that Daddy's investments had suffered badly in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash but that enough had been put by to finish her education. Half-blind old Sister Bonaventure had tried to comfort the stricken girl with platitudes about how her parents and brothers were waiting for her in heaven and how in the meantime Christ's love for all we miserable sinners could redeem earthly life and render it truly rewarding. Hilary was touched. The old nun meant well but Hilary's intellectual scorn for this superstitious claptrap had in fact cheered her more than the old girl's fairytale theology. But despite the tragedy which left her unprotected, naked, sensitive as the bright pink skin under a torn blister, the bright, warm feeling of that last holiday had never left Hilary. She sometimes felt it when Arthur was near. Warmth, love, security, that could capriciously change to a panicky feeling of being smothered in eiderdown or to cold fear at the thought of his death. The focus of her own life altered although she did her best to fight it. She, once Hilary the Indomitable, now trembled for Arthur as he slid into the treacherous grey world of high finance where one false step could destroy him. Not to mention the war. The bombers had gone but could return at any time and Arthur had heard disquieting talk of a new German secret weapon. After all, H.G. Wells had written of atomic bombs as far back in 1914. Or there were the opportunities of poisons and disease. On top of that, she had no idea of what had happened to Marcel or any of her other Parisian friends and couldn't help fearing the worst. Arthur kept mum and would only say that she was not to worry, things were in hand. She had offered her latest lover the names of some friends in the resistance but Arthur preferred his own commercial contacts in France, Switzerland and Sweden. This turned out to have been a wise decision as two of Hilary's five nominees were later exposed as collaborators. Harry Aaronson told Arthur that Churchill had been briefed about the death camps in Poland but that he had hushed it up, fearing the political embarrassment of a large influx of Jews. Of course Arthur knew that Churchill was technically a Jew himself as his mother, Jenny Jerome was born to Jewish parents and religious descent was through the maternal line. To be fair, though, Churchill was known to hold the Jews in high regard. As for the refugees, seeing that most Jews were in any case trapped in the countries of their persecution, the possibility of asylum was somewhat academic.

Life went on. Hilary worked in the library and sometimes lectured in elementary anthropology to convalescent soldiers while keeping up her Mass Observation reports at night. She refused to leave her flat and move in with Arthur as her pride baulked at a final admission of her loss of independence, but she spent much of her time thinking about him. For the same reason she stubbornly resisted his occasional offers of marriage.

Late one night in March, her doorbell rang. She struggled dazedly out of bed.

"Yes. Who is it?" she croaked.

"It's Arthur. Let me in. I've got a surprise for you."

"Couldn't it have waited till morning?" she asked, grumpily opening the door. It was a moment before she recognised the stranger in the dark overcoat and souwester with a seaman's bag over one shoulder and a clarinet case under his arm.

"Marcel!" With a cry of joy she flung her arms around him. A sudden squall drove them all indoors. March was coming in like a lion. Once unwrapped, Marcel seemed in astonishingly fine fettle. His quick black eyes sparkled under bushy eyebrows but his face was tired, grimy and unshaven - none of which stopped Hilary from smothering him with kisses. His thick lips under a great hooked nose were smiling broadly but there was a curl of disgust at the corners of his mouth.

"Vell, Hilkeleh. Rill cool to be seeink you again. Ya lookink vell."

"Oh, Marcel. I can't say how marvellous it is to see you. I've been worried sick. How did you get out?"

"Better ya shouldn't esk. Anodder time, perhaps. But vidout help from your friend Artur, I voulda been in Shtoch Street. Mister, I'm owink you mein life."

"Don't mention it," said Arthur gruffly. "Only too pleased to have been of assistance."

Hilary threw him a glance of admiring gratitude which made Arthur swell with more pride than any business coup. Business suddenly seemed childish compared to the warm satisfaction that now filled him. It hadn't been easy to get Marcel out of France. It had required intricate planning, a great deal of bribery, the calling in of some old favours and lots of luck, but it had worked. The temporarily suspended business links which MFG had retained (via Sweden) with Germany, paid off. A chemist at I.G. Farben had a cousin in the records department in Paris who was able to expunge Marcel's name from a list of Jews due for deportation. Two thousand pounds worth of gold, that alone had cost him. Marcel's actual escape had been organised by a communist friend of Joe's in the Resistance and a Swedish trawlerman who was still paying off one of Arthur's banks for his boat. Another thousand.

Marcel had a mug of cocoa and a ham sandwich, curled up on Hilary's couch and fell into a poleaxed sleep. Arthur went back to his new flat which was within easy groping distance. A fierce gust of wind everted his umbrella and besides getting soaked he tripped over a kerb in the dark, skinned his knee and ruined his trousers. He scarcely noticed. He had made Hilary happy. He was walking on air.

Chapter 7.

But all was not well with Marcel. Over a hearty breakfast, courtesy of Arthur, Hilary sensed Marcel's raw distress. Something inside him had died. One of his old lovers had been put on a train to Poland and Marcel had escaped that roundup only by seducing a Nazi officer who was also a keen underground Jazz enthusiast. Worse, he had enjoyed it but at the cost of a traitor's self-loathing. He had been living in the loft of an old friend of his mother's since the raid, alternately freezing and roasting, unable even to practice the clarinet. Arthur's assistance had come just in time. Everything had been flawlessly arranged. Marcel had been smuggled out of Paris in the secret compartment of a lorry full of pigswill followed by a long drive to the coast where they'd met up with a boat. After dark, he'd been rowed out to a Swedish trawler which finally put him ashore at Aberdeen. It went like clockwork. Marcel slipped through customs with the minimum of fuss, aided not a little by Arthur's cast-iron financial guarantees. Arthur personally met him at the docks and whisked him into a first-class sleeping compartment on a waiting train. While nothing could have exceeded Marcel's fulsome gratitude, he couldn't help wondering what was in it for his reserved English host. He had known nothing of Hilary's involvement until they were safely in a private compartment on the train. Why should a heterosexual philistine financier, he'd wondered, be interested in rescuing a homosexual pacifistic musician whom he'd never met? Was it for the glory of music? Marcel of course knew he was a musical genius but doubted that such information had yet set this foggy island ablaze. Or was it some society for saving Jews, in which case why him? Since his barmitzvah Marcel had refused on atheistic principle to set foot in a shul and had turned down musical jobs where any element of religion obtained. As for secular Jewry he had lost no opportunity to revile Zionists before the Nazi occupation had put a stop to that infighting by reclassifying all Jews as vermin. Not Jews then. Hilary's name brought astonished enlightenment, followed by shame that he had never imagined her as his rescuer, had never even heard that she had received his smuggled-out letter.

Well, yes, Hilary explained she'd got the ball rolling but Arthur had done all the rest. He'd been wonderful. The money was irrelevant. Perhaps Arthur, having done very well out of the war, was trying to assuage his guilt. He was, after all, half Jewish himself.

Marcel shook his head. "No, patootie pie, for me it's not. For ze Chews maybe a little bit; for music notatol. No, it's for you 'e 'as done zis tink. I am a bonbon for you n'est ce pas?"

"A poodle, rather. I'll tie a pink ribbon round your neck and take you for walks in the park."

Marcel laughed, then his brow darkened. "You are sleepink mit dis Rosbif?"

"Yes, but don't worry. I want to. I know it's a corny thing to say but we're in love. God knows why. He's not at all my type but there it is. I haven't prostituted myself for you, if that's what you're worried about - although I would cheerfully have done so if necessary. Oh, Marcel, I can't tell you how glad I am that you're safe."

They hugged again. The telephone rang. Arthur inquired after their guest and invited them both out to a nightclub that evening, if Marcel was up to it. They could dine at his flat. He was looking forward to it immensely.

As Hilary hung up she couldn't help contrasting Marcel's continental vivacity with Arthur's carefully-nurtured British phlegm. She felt suddenly defensive about her unlikely lover. He was more than just a capitalistic bloodsucker, the spider of his nickname, although there was, beneath his courtesy and consideration, something ravenous about Arthur. Did he want to devour her? No, no. He would never hurt her. But why then was the idea of sacrificing herself to him so achingly sweet? Eros or Thanatos or a heady mix? Certainly part of the appeal was as a rest from making all one's own decisions all the time. Mrs. Morpeth, in hospital with a broken leg, remembered The Tin Men, a mildly amusing story by Michael Frayne in which a computer had been engineered a conscience and set on a sinking raft with various companions. It threw itself overboard to save first a sheep, then a chicken, then a bag of manure. That was no computer, thought Mrs. Morpeth, that was a woman.

It was a wet and blustery day, half a century ago. Hilary sat with Marcel by a roaring fire of Arthur's coal toasting Arthur's crumpets and drinking Arthur's tea. They talked and listened to records on the swish new radiogram that Arthur had bought her: Satchmo, Bechet, Django Reinhardt as well as the latest Art Tatum and Duke Ellington.

Marcel tried to take a philosophical view of Nazi persecution of the Jews. Suffering had, after all, made the Jews what they were. And however many thousands Hitler might kill, there were plenty more. (The extent of the Holocaust was as yet unimagined). As for this chivalrous nonsense about not harming non-combatants, no-one's hands were clean. This was the first war in history to kill more civilians than soldiers. The British bombing of German cities was in its way as great an obscenity as what was going on in the Warsaw ghetto. The whole war was unutterably stupid. It was only when Marcel came to talk of how Alphonse had been torn from the wine-cellar where he'd been hiding that his self-control deserted him and he wept. Hilary comforted him, laying him on her own bed. Arthur found them sleeping side by side like kittens when he entered with his own key. He cleared his throat and Marcel started awake. Was this guilt or just habitual fear? Arthur felt a whiplash of jealousy, the cold hollowness of betrayal. Had she simply used him to reunite herself with her true lover? True, they were both fully-clothed but it was cold. Then Hilary awoke and smiled so sweetly that he felt like throwing himself at her feet in an orgy of self-abasement. How had he dared mistrust her? What a swine he was! These roller-coaster emotions were new to Arthur and he held on for dear life, although not a flicker crossed his face.

An hour and a half later they were ready, Marcel looking very dapper in full orchestral fig and Hilary like an eastern courtesan in a long Thai-silk dress slashed up one leg to the knee, its colour exactly matching her blatant scarlet lipstick and little pillbox hat. She held a long ivory cigarette-holder. Marcel brought his clarinet along lest a stray bomb put kaput to it.

Arthur drove them to his flat where a sumptuous supper had been laid out. After dessert Marcel produced a little tin of homemade Turkish Delight with a dusty, bitter aftertaste. Only when Arthur had politely eaten his piece did Marcel inform him that it contained the finest Moroccan hashish, which he had smuggled out of France disguised as a cake of violin rosin. Arthur was not amused. Marcel might have jeopardised the entire rescue. Not to mention betraying his trust by tricking him into taking drugs. Arthur liked to be in control. Hilary soothed him.

"Don't blame Marcel," she told her lover, "I put him up to it. I can't stand you looking so censorious whenever I smoke a reefer. I know you think you're being frightfully worldly and tolerant but honestly, you bristle with disapproval. I thought it would do you good to find out what you're talking about. Don't be afraid. We'll look after you. Of course you could always stick your finger down your throat but it would be a shame to waste that delicious game pie."

"Well, I suppose for once..." conceded Arthur, "but please promise me that you will never again try and dose me without my knowledge. I have neither the time nor the desire to become addicted to drugs."

"Pah. C'est ne fait rien," scoffed Marcel. "You are believink the movies. Cool it, Cat. Is heppenink notink yet avhile."

And so it came to pass that Arthur, some time later, found himself sitting at a nightclub table watching Marcel and Hilary doing a sensuous parody of a foxtrot to the music of a mediocre dance-band. He'd had a couple of whiskies on top of the wine at supper and was feeling complacent - bar the nagging jealousy at how much Hilary seemed to be enjoying herself with Marcel. He'd forgotten all about the hashish and was surprised to find himself unusually clear-headed, at once cold, as if looking through plate-glass and at the same time intensely emotional. His heart ached at Hilary's playful grace. People must think it strange seeing himself and her together. He was too old for her, much older than his years. He would never whisk her about the dance-floor with one-hundredth of Marcel's Latin flamboyance. Was it his imagination or were the people at the next table eyeing him suspiciously? Arthur experienced a most uncharacteristic panic attack. Words and phrases with horribly personal applications leapt jeering out of the general hubbub. Everyone was suddenly talking about him, pointing him out. The stock market had crashed, Marcel's forged documents had been traced back to him, a business rival had framed him as a Nazi spy.

The music moved back into the major and Arthur's fears abated. He closed his eyes and found himself inside a vast, dark red cave like the inside of a giant's mouth. The music was unscrolling in multicoloured streamers interweaving against the cave's immensity. It was achingly beautiful.

Arthur's stomach continued absorbing hashish taking him ever higher. He felt his spine snake and stretch as the balloon of his head surged bouyantly into the sky. Tenniel's illustration of a snake-necked Alice filled his mind. He opened his eyes and clung desperately to the table as his sanity and the room around him, reeled.

The music stopped and Arthur's mood changed again. He looked at the heap of cold, wet ashes that was his life and was appalled. What had he achieved? Carved himself a petty fiefdom in the grey margins of high finance. Raked up money from the futile and horrible slaughter of millions. Morpeth. The name he had appropriated was as dowdy and musty as his cramped soul. "Spider" was nearer the mark. Bloodsucker. Usurer. He squirmed in the spotlight which would expose him as a shifty shit.

"Mr. Morpeth."

Arthur looked up. It was "young" Williams, son of the senior partner of a firm of brokers whom Arthur occasionally employed.

"Ah, Williams," Arthur heard his own urbanely elocuted tones with hysterical incredulity. "How are you? Entertaining business clients I suppose."

"Quite so. I must say I hadn't taken you for a Jazz afficianado, old chap, but don't worry, your secret is safe with me."

Arthur caught a quick glance between young Williams and his own secret, sitting pouting at a nearby table.

"I have, as a matter of fact, begun to take a not inconsiderable interest in Jazz lately, but I am primarily here with friends. May I offer you a drink?" Arthur coldly observed himself oozing suavity and had to admit that he did it damned well.

"No thanks, old chap. Better not keep my client waiting, eh? Another time, perhaps." He dropped Arthur a roguish wink and turned to go. Arthur felt an icy hand clutch his stomach. Williams knew all about the hashish which was raging through his system. The wink was a tipoff to a nearby plainclothes policeman. He was ruined. No, no. Williams' rabbit face had radiated nothing but complicitous bonhomie. His offensive familiarity probably meant he was drunk. He obviously thought Arthur was also out whoring. Arthur heaved a sigh of relief, aware of his heart pounding in his chest. Where the hell was Hilary? It seemed like hours since she had left him. Anyway, even if the tipsy stockbroker did know about the hashish, thought Arthur desperately flapping like a fish on dry land, Williams, a married man, was much more vulnerable to blackmail than himself. Arthur, wasn't even with a whore. Only with the woman he loved who was dancing with an old friend of hers, a refugee from persecution. Whom she loved, albeit in a sisterly way. Arthur was utterly miserable.

The music stopped and Hilary clung to Marcel's neck, puffing and laughing before pulling him back to their table where she was siezed with a fit of giggles at Arthur's profoundly sensitive expression. Marcel scowled dismissively at the band who were now ploughing into the final number of their set. When they'd finished, everyone clapped except Marcel who sat with his arms pointedly folded. Arthur, who had found the music intermittently marvellous, was painfully anxious to avoid a scene, but it was not to be. The bandleader, aware of Marcel's mocking dancing and his now open sneer, was making his way over to their table with a truculent expression on his face.

"I'm sorry you don't seem to be enjoying our music, Sir," he said belligerently.

"Uh-oh," said Hilary. "Now, Marcel, you be a good boy and behave yourself."

It was too late. Marcel drew himself up to his full five foot three and faced the beefy fathom of Tubby Horrocks.

"Look, boychick. It don't mean a ting if it ain't got dat sving," said Marcel dismissively. "Technically, your boys are OK, but to call vot you're playink Chezz. Don' mek me leff."

"I suppose you think you could do better?" sneered Tubby (who'd had a snort or two of whisky), "what a pity we'll never find out..."

"Hey! Half a mo, Tubby," interrupted the drummer, coming up to them and laying a restraining hand on the band-leader's shoulder, "that's Marcel Schweitzer. Marcel, mon ami. It's me, Christopher. Remember that gig in Le Coq Bleu when a fight broke out and it was only due to a bullet hitting my cymbal that that girl wasn't killed?"

"Chreestopher! Ah, mais oui. Hi de hi." Marcel beamed and kissed Christopher loudly on each cheek.

Arthur quailed. Discretion was his watchword. Hashish had sensitised him like a safecracker's sanded palps. He'd banked on being able to ship Marcel quietly off to America without too many awkward questions as to how he'd come to be in England in the first place. It could be open to misinterpretation if it came out that Arthur had been bribing Nazis. Let alone dealing in forged papers. To have done the thing legally would have taken far too long. The last thing he wanted was a fuss leading to an investigation by the Home Office. Hilary, meanwhile, was buttering up Tubby who changed direction with the ponderousness of an oil-tanker.

"Don't take Marcel too seriously," she confided, "he's rather a purist. The rest of us think your band's terrific. I really loved that last trombone solo of yours - a touch of the Glenn Millers I fancy."

Arthur, who had played trombone in the school band, knew that this was not so. While admiring Hilary's false blandishments, he suddenly wondered if she had applied the same techniques to himself. The old joke about a man chasing a woman until she caught him came to mind. No, surely not. But she was certainly persuasive when she turned on the charm. He had seen her in brusque librarian mode, arty bohemian cheekiness and sober intellectuality but never yet as a wide-eyed simpering ninny. And the galling thing was that it actually worked. Arthur felt he'd been vouchsafed a profound insight into the techniques of advertising. Tubby was visibly preening himself. Marcel shrugged, sat down and had a sip of champagne.

Christopher drew Tubby off to one side. "Listen, Tubby," he whispered vehemently, "this could be a golden opportunity for us. Marcel's the cat's pyjamas. He's played with the best: Sidney Bechet, Django Reinhardt, you name it. We badly need another horn. Don't let him get away." It took a lot more urging but at last Tubby nodded resignedly and plastered a shit-eating grin on his big red face.

"Um, Mr. Schweitzer," he grovelled, "Christopher here tells me that you're a first-class hot clarinettist and a great arranger to boot. I suppose after you've played with the best in the business, our little dance-band must seem a bit tame. We'd like to have a go at the more adventurous stuff, believe me, but our public just wants straightforward dance-music. Also the army's nabbed a lot of our best players. What I'm driving at is that we'd be honoured to have you sit in on a couple of tunes with us and if you're looking for work, we badly need some new arrangements."

Marcel smiled wickedly and bowed in acknowledgement. "OK, Tubbeleh," he conceded. "I'll play - butonli if you're doink exectel vot I'm tellink you."

"Waiter. Two more bottles of champagne, please." Arthur relaxed somewhat. This was business. He could deal with business even in the detached unreality of hashish intoxication. Besides, he was suddenly parched and ravenous. Hilary smiled and pressed her thigh against him. Memories of her deltoid pubic mat and salt-slimy slit welled up in him. He groaned softly with lust. Part of his mind was lost in an ecstatic swoon while another part looked cynically on at these animal antics.

Tubby had by now capitulated totally to Marcel's force majeur and was gazing at him with a mixture of awe and fear. The rest of the band had clustered around their table where Marcel was busily scribbling chord sequences on a menu and muttering about "Allinkton" and even "Mohnk" and "Sharliepakair". Tubby looked worried. He'd only been chosen leader because he looked fat and jolly and could do a bit of clowning with his trombone. Inside, he was a hysterical wreck. The "dicky ticker" which had kept him out of the forces wasn't helped by chronic anxiety or too much whisky. He reminded Hilary of an academic friend of hers who'd affected to suffer from pantophobia, the fear of everything. He claimed that his notorious touchiness was simply overcompensation, he really desired a quiet life. Tubby too just wanted to fart out a few portly foxtrots and then repair to the goodfellowship of the nearest bar.

"Yagodda trost me," Marcel reassured him. "I know from vot your boys can blowink."

So it proved. Marcel drove the band like a demon. His urgent clarinet was everywhere: soaring in filigree above the choruses, prodding the rhythm with impatient honks, ladling out oodles of honey and cream in the slower sections. He also played a solo for "mein friends who haf been murdered by ze Nazis". It was bleak and harsh and bitter. It jangled. It twittered brokenly like a bird impaled on a thorn. Dogs barked, sirens wailed. It was agonisingly beautiful.

Arthur's face seemed, through Hilary's tears, to have acquired a sort of nobility as Marcel's music seared and wrung him too. Everything was brimming with meaning for Arthur and at the same time completely enigmatic. Eternal truths were half-articulated and then slipped into forgetfulness. Hilary snuggled catlike up to him. Arthur felt a fierce love for this deceptively frail little figure. He wanted to protect her. Who could he kill?

Marcel seemed to be winding up. The nightclub waited with bated breath. The chatter and laughter had died down. The clarinet ended on a high, keening blue note, and Marcel, like an old New Orleans preacher, intoned: "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust: If the women don't get you then the liquor must;" and swung the band attaca into a swing version of Jelly Roll Morton's "Didn't He Ramble?"

The crowd went wild.
Chapter 8.

Arthur (as they were decades later to say) "came down". Marcel played a couple more blistering numbers and went out in a blaze of glory. Tubby Horrocks's Kings of Rhythm wisely took a break and the hideous jollity of a Gracie Fields record was wracking the ambient air when Arthur suddenly realised that the effects of the hashish had worn off and that the world had returned to normal. He was glad to get back to a real nightclub with its dim lighting and simple-minded people rather than that glimpse of a hostile world teeming with blinding revelations, eely ambiguities and strange beauties. Arthur, as we have seen, liked being in control. It had jolted him to see how fine a line separated sanity from howling madness. As a boy, Arthur had found the Bible story of a madman possessed by a legion of unclean spirits deeply horrifying. What kind of lunatic would live among the tombs, crying out and cutting himself with stones? Then Jesus cast out the evil spirits and transferred them to what Arthur had misheard as the "Gaberdine swine" who rushed down into the sea and were drowned. Now he had discovered that such exorcism was far from permanent. Madness could surge back in an instant. Of course, against the frightful horror and desolation had to be set the memory of the inflamed intensity of his love for Hilary and the occasional ecstatic vision of the clarity and beauty of music. Love was madness. Ira furor brevis est \- anger is a brief madness - had been one of his Latin teacher's favourite sayings. It was late. All three of them were tired.

Tubby sat at their table, drunkenly repetitive. Drunkenness was a longer madness. Marcel was a genius. That was the only word for it. A genius. He simply had to take over the band. There was nothing else for it. Arthur, now sane, foresaw looming legal complications but nothing that the judicious spending of money couldn't solve. Hilary loved the idea, but Marcel was in two minds. On the one hand, it meant money, security, a springboard into the musical world and possibly another affair with Christopher \- on the other, it meant enduring the oxymoron that was British Jazz. Another factor was Arthur's prediction that America's oil-embargo of Japan would force that country to declare war on the United States, thus bringing them in on "our" side. And Marcel would possibly be safer from conscription as a supposed American in London than back in the good ol' Yew Ess of Ay. Arthur could more easily get him exempted by his own compliant doctor. Then there was Arthur's largesse, while his infatuation with Hilary lasted, which Marcel had almost persuaded himself that he had no bourgeois scruples about accepting. He thought that Arthur was bad for Hilary, but he couldn't see them staying together for long anyway. Hilary had drifted in and out of relationships before. Marcel quite fancied Arthur himself in a shamefaced way. He felt strongly the passive appeal of playing at being a kept woman. But no. Ambition apart, he and Arthur had too little in common. Arthur was irredeemiably square. A banker. A broker. A cold fish.

Chapter 9.

Power, Mrs. Morpeth decided, had been Arthur's attraction. He'd swept her along with him like a locomotive. The simile hadn't been lightly chosen. Arthur had communicated something of both his own and Joe Levy's love of steam to her. She was a child of steam. She could appreciate the ingenuity of the triple-expansion engine once Arthur had painstakingly explained it to her (although she promptly forgot it) but she was far more enamoured of the aesthetic side - the polished brass pipes, the massive castings, the hissing pistons, the flailing con. rods. Arthur's very second present to her had been the pressure-cooker which still wheezed and snuffled like an asthmatic Peke on Rose's black Aga. Unlike the internal-combustion engine which had to be fussily revved to produce anything worthwhile, a steam engine, he'd explained, delivered maximum torque at standstill and an almost irresistible surge to top speed. Arthur had the same air of controlled strength. As a boy he had sometimes daydreamed of discovering a little axle, turning slowly but with irresistable force and capable of driving an infinity of machines if suitably geared-up.

All at once, Mrs. Morpeth was back in the train from Capetown to Bulawayo. She could smell the sulphurous coalsmoke, see the dark wood and dark green leather of the carriage, hear the dinner-gong. They were off. Chhhwoof, chwoof, chwoof choof-choof-choof-choof... Fwooee! She opened her eyes and was back in the ward. They'd grudgingly given her a shot of morphine to kill the pain which had kept her tossing and moaning all night. Funny how moaning helped. The morphine had been like finding a cool spring in the desert. Agony quenched like a fag in a pisspot. To cease upon the midnight with no pain. Things swam calm and clear again. She wouldn't mind dying now. What had Arthur's love brought her? Two drab ungrateful children whom she helplessly loved. Her grandchildren were bored with her now, too old and streetwise for the cheap treats which were all she could afford although they still clamoured for her walnut fudge. They sometimes repeated their mother's sharp sayings about her within her hearing. Otherwise, who? Ex-students, a now senile pre-Arthur lover, a few old friends, fewer each year. They were all, to a woman, Artistic. There was a dancer crippled by arthritis, a purblind potter who continued, Leachlike, to pot. They met now and then for tea or a trip to a film or art gallery. They might get tipsy or smoke a little of the "weed" which Celia grew on the roof of her flat, but their meetings had become increasingly morbid. Time to go. Hilary Morpeth would never again walk the South Welsh hills. She took this stoically and at the same time felt herself capable of anything, could she be bothered. Or as the horoscope of Beckett's Murphy has it: "Mars having just set in the East denotes a great desire to engage in some pursuit, yet not."

The television had ceased to annoy her. She gazed equably at the breakfast programme presenters, understood all, forgave all. The fat nurse who'd confiscated her last pack of cigarettes was more a prisoner of her own officious stupidity than of conscious malevolence. Perhaps, Mrs. Morpeth thought, she herself was more of a masochist. Was this general among women? She'd listened in on a late-night conversation from the porters' mess.

"Course some women likes you to hit them. I had one bird who liked me to bite her nipples till they was bleeding. Harder, harder, she kept saying - I was scared I'd bite them off. Great shag but she was fucking off her head."

"I only ever hit my missus the once and that was because she kept nagging me to do it. 'Call yourself a man,' she says to me. 'If you was a real man you wouldn't let me talk to you like this.' And she starts effing and blinding. So at last I knocks her down with one punch and she says: 'You dirty bastard, what did you have in your hand?' Well, it was only my fist but at that time I was like a brickie's labourer and humping them buckets of compo all day don't 'alf build you up. Anyway, after that we was all lovey-dovey again."

Mrs. Morpeth remembered the apocryphal wartime story about the Englishman who'd settled in the Ruhr in the thirties and married a local girl. At first everything was lovely but after a while his new bride began to pine and he often caught her weeping. He couldn't understand it - he'd always treated her considerately. They'd seemed meant for each other. At last he wormed out her secret. The other young wives, forever comparing their black eyes and bruises had told her that if your husband didn't beat you it meant that he didn't love you! Well, Mrs. Morpeth supposed, it might be reassuring to test your protector's strength and keep up his fighting spirit. And the pleasure of surrender. The pride of being strong enough to take it. Why else sacrifice herself for Arthur and his (let's face it) stuffy and murderous career? The money had been nice, she had to admit, but it brought with it the straitjacket of convention and the timewaster of infinite choice. She'd never felt mentally comfortable in smart clothes but for the first time in her life, her clothes were fitted. Around Arthur's associates she found she had, willy-nilly, a position to maintain. Of course Arthur had never laid a finger on her in anger (she'd had in fact to urge him to more roughness in their frequent couplings) but her earnestly egalitarian ideas had been comprehensively trampled. But all was not lost. Hilary came to believe Arthur's assertion that business would bring luxury to all, like Heine's demand for perfumes for the masses. No matter how uncomfortable she personally might find it, there was no doubt that that was what everyone wanted. The Morpeths lived in the thick of the establishment for camouflage, but neither of them was really of it. Arthur had been feared and respected both at work and in the community at large although he kept out of the public eye. They had lived a life of restrained opulence on the personal level - didn't eat or drink too much, kept reasonable hours, dressed, in Arthur's case soberly and in Hilary's inexpensively. She had felt almost duty-bound at first to splash out a little, to appease Arthur's insistence that there was no limit on the cheque account in her name, but the furs and jewels felt wrong on her and she soon reverted to her magpie habits. But the confidence of a vast bulwark of money behind her had been very reassuring until the last, terrible years. Arthur had gone down fighting, if that's what being run over by the steamroller of a huge conglomerate could be called. She'd been left, on his death, with Joe and Rose's house in Splott and a pitiful State pension. All her socialism came flooding back. She made a point of getting all her entitlements as she felt she was owed something for the decades of betrayed ideals and the broken promises of politicians, businessmen and priests. Here, the creeping fragmentation and mediocritisation of the arts, there, a stripped and poisoned planet. So what?

How naive she'd been. Arthur had been right about the futility of the idealists from the Forties, through the Fifties and on into the Sixties. It seemed life was not a Hollywood movie. Democracy and Science had by no means led to a better world for all. Never in the history of the world had there been both so many hungry people and so many human pumpkins. The Arts had run into the sands. It was all so foolish. Eternal recurrence my arse.

And talking of arses, the fat Staff Nurse was bending over the next bed. Mrs Morpeth placidly gave way to a mischievous impulse and pinched her, hard. Sixteen stone of Welsh Dragon spun round and towered over her.

"You pinched my fags - I pinched your bum," Mrs. Morpeth blandly informed her.

There were gasps and a titter or two from those denizens of the ward alive enough to care. A porter almost bit off his tongue, trying not to laugh.

"Thawse cigarettes were taken from yeow for yewer awn good, ahs well yeow knaw. I shahll report ewer behaviour to Doctor."

"Is it your period?" asked Mrs. Morpeth amiably. "There's a blood-spot come through."

Staff-Nurse Williams went "peuce". "I knaw thaht's the morphine talking," she said with the remaining scraps of her dignity - and strode briskly away to the nearest lavatory, her clipboard held casually behind her.

Mrs. Morpeth smiled serenely. At last she saw what the Buddhists had been banging on about. She remembered an old waiter in their favourite Chinese restaurant in wartime Soho who had calmly dismissed the record bombardment of May the tenth as a foolish error. He'd been right, as it happened, but not for the reason he'd seen through his pinhole pupils. A last night over Birmingham later that month proved the end of the Blitz. Oh, there had still been doodlebugs later and the odd VII, but for the British at home, the action was effectively over.

Arthur Morpeth, bachelor, married Hilary Goodbody, spinster, on the twenty-first of June 1941 on the very day that Germany invaded Russia and so sealed its own fate at the hands of the "subhuman" Slavs. The wedding was a Registry Office affair. Joe Levy and Hilary both felt strongly about bending the knee to a discredited religion and Arthur was amenable to anything. If Rose missed the spectacle of a church or a shul wedding, she was at least able to have the pleasure of the cream of her chapel choir of racial allsorts singing at the reception. They stuck to Welsh folksongs (learnt by rote with most of the choir having only the sketchiest idea of their meaning) and bits of Handel oratorios and were very good. Marcel was enthralled. It was surprising how well the guests who were, to put it mildly, a mixed lot, meshed. There was a sizeable contingent of Jewish cousins, aunts and uncles from Joe's side of the family. Hilary had invited a dozen or so hungry friends from the artistic and academic communities and Rose, her two defiant cousins and the choir, represented the Welsh.

Rose's Welsh mother had run away from a life of grinding poverty on a small hill farm, to the bright lights of Cardiff. Angharad Rhys was fifteen years old and almost illiterate. The sole benefit of her scant schooling was that she had learned to speak English, had in fact shown considerable aptitude for the language. She had never been forced to wear the placard proclaiming: "I Am An Ignorant Dunce" which was hung around the neck of anyone caught talking Welsh in the playground. The mere ability to speak English was not at a premium in Cardiff so Angharad took to the streets. One thing was certain. She would never return to waking at five of a winter's morning to walk half a mile in the dark in her slippery clogs to fetch back the first of the day's many heavy buckets of water from the spring down the hill. Angharad was a fighter. She moved to Tiger Bay, changed her name to Suzette and was lucky enough to find a lazy pimp who let her keep a bit of money and didn't beat her up too often. Suzette was popular. She was clean and cheerful, if no great beauty and she kept off laudanum and gin. As the oldest daughter she'd had more than her share of mothering the younger children and she found that a bit of mothering mixed with sexual enthusiasm was what many of her sailor-boys wanted. By the age of eighteen she had established a fairly loyal core clientele in the shifting population and had her own room in an easygoing hotel. It was here that she was accidentally impregnated by a Chinese sea- cook. To her pimp's annoyance she refused an abortion and, entrusted with the sacred gift of life, rediscovered religion. A Christian group for rescuing fallen women had found her a job in domestic service which was not much better than life on the farm, but Angharad (as she had reverted to calling herself) stuck it. Of course she hadn't known who the father of her baby was, but the delivery of a halfcaste oriental bastard daughter had settled that question as all of her other customers that month happened to have been either black or white. To everyone's surprise, Angharad declined pointblank to give up the baby, so as a special favour she was allowed to keep her till weaned, provided, of course, that she worked longer and harder in return. Angharad gritted her teeth and went to it.

A few months later, she was surprised to be told by the housekeeper, in her best tones of moral outrage, of a Chinese sailor at the back door of the big house, asking for Suzette. He had found her easily enough - talk of her amusing obstinacy was all over Tiger Bay. He asked to see the baby. Pity it wasn't a boy, but perhaps they'd have better luck next time.

Angharad was indignant. There would be no next time. She was a reformed character. He could see his daughter but then he must go. Rose was produced. She was a lovely baby, fat as butter with slanting black eyes and fulvous skin. The oriental, contrary to national stereotype, was much taken with her. Would Suzette marry him? He had a bit of money put by. They could open a shop, dealing in silks and carpets. He was tired of the sea. He was not a pagan but a Christian like herself, having been taught by Jesuits.

Angharad had been told in chapel that the Pope was the antichrist and that the Chinese were heathen savages, but Suzette had found experience a considerably wiser teacher than Deacon Matthews. She looked at Wang Wei, bland and smiling, and thought of a life of blacking grates and polishing doorknobs, her daughter torn from her never to be seen again, her humiliation perpetually cast in her teeth by the spiteful - and nodded. It had been a happy marriage, but for the fact that they'd had no more children. True, Wang Wei would sometimes gamble away a week's takings at Fan Tan but they survived and even modestly prospered. As Rose grew up, Angharad told her that she, Angharad, was an orphan who had never known her parents. It was only after her mother's death that Rose discovered she had left a few keepsakes to her sisters. The letter informing them of Angharad's passing was never answered. News of their daughter's double shame (going on the streets and then marrying a coolie) had long since trickled back to her family who had been sententiously advised by the local preacher to consider her dead. It was only when two of Rose's cousins came to live in Cardiff, out of the shadow of their Primitive Welsh Methodist upbringing, that vestigial contact with Angharad's family was restored. The Welsh were noisy, the Jews were noisy; it was only the handful of English wedding-guests who were relatively reserved.

Hilary had rounded up some friends from the artistic and academic worlds who privately deplored and somewhat envied her choice of husband but who on the whole wished her well and had been assured of a good booze-up and feed. Hilary had sharp ears and had heard various uncomplimentary phrases like: "no spring chicken," "shikse," "tart" and (of Rose) "chink", but it had been water off a duck's back. She was amused to see Arthur as a family member. He was polite and affable, asked after the full roster of obscure relations and chuckled briefly at old family jokes. But Hilary noticed that the affectionate needling endemic in the Levy clan didn't extend to Arthur. It struck her that they were more than a little afraid of him. Although not (by four decades) the oldest member of the family, Arthur was by far the richest and obviously regarded himself as its head. He was known to be generous in a real crisis, but no soft touch. When Arthur talked about money, everyone listened.

There was no question among the yentas that Hilary was a gold-digger, but on the other hand, she had undeniably had an almost humanising effect on Arthur. Most of the younger generation, finding her disapproved of for her sharp intelligence and breezy disregard of convention, idolised her. She liked them too, largenosed, darkeyed and intense - if somewhat spoiled and precocious. Come to think of it, they had quite a lot in common.

Arthur's business associates clustered around the bar, along with some of Hilary's ever-thirsty friends and a couple of Arthur's relatives - a doctor, a lawyer. Harry Aaronson was there too and he and Marcel swapped atrocity stories and looked forward to the end of the war. Please God it should be true that Hitler was going to declare war on Russia.

As it happened, Mrs Morpeth remembered, Germany had in fact attacked Russia that very day, thus ironically tightening Stalin's grip over the Soviets into a stranglehold. Good old Uncle Joe. Marcel had been right about Stalin all along, where most of her friends had been taken in. Hilary had herself flirted with communism but had been repelled by the Party's iron discipline. Stalin. The man of steel. A Georgian peasant and ex-theology student whose anger at Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had brought the entire critical establishment crashing down on the composer's head. That Stalin had liked the subsequent Fifth Symphony (a Soviet Artist's Reply to Just Criticism) simply proved, said Marcel, that he didn't understand sarcasm and irony either. If the famous march was not a cry against tyranny then you could cut off his ears! In 1979 Shostakovich's disputed "Testimony" had perhaps exploded the myth that he was a loyal Soviet stooge. His son Maxim's denunciation and later acceptance of the book showed, as the composer realistically pointed out, that it is difficult to be a hero while a gun is held to the heads of one's wife and family. Mrs. Morpeth had, in the sixties, seen footage of Shostakovich muttering some laudatory official claptrap from a script at a Party conference and plainly hating every moment. Was the Party too stupid to see that his obviously forced compliance was counterproductive? On the other hand, the western media had swallowed it hook line and sinker. But if Marcel was right that Stalin was a monster, he was sadly wrong about the renaissance of Western arts which peace would bring. After the war (which he had eventually spent in a mediocre touring big band entertaining the US army - Arthur's doctor had found that Marcel was diabetic and he had quite legally been exempted) Marcel had ended up scuffling for work as an anonymous studio musician in Hollywood, after being ironically (or should that be moronically) blacklisted by McCarthy in the communist witch-hunts of the fifties. His crime had been the failure to inform on his friends and fellow musicians. Musically too he was suffering. Playing the schmaltzy accompaniments to movies about heroic war or hymns to the wholesome American Way of Life was torture to him.

"Veeks togezzer of major chords," he'd complained to Hilary, when she and Arthur visited him in Los Angeles. "Ven I'm findink even a leetle A minor I could kiss it."

They were sitting on sunloungers by an enormous pool. Classicalish concrete pillars supported a rambling grapevine with a table in the shade where Arthur was sitting with some paperwork. The house was a Graeco-Roman temple thing which Marcel shared with a pretty blonde boy called Andy. Their parties were famous among the homosexual community. The handpicked Mexican houseboys and gardeners often made quite a bit of money on the side. Andy was a woodenheaded but quite successful movie actor, faithless as a tomcat. Marcel often dreamt of returning to Paris but couldn't leave Andy whose own tastes chimed perfectly with Hollywood kitsch. So Marcel stayed and suffered. Between long grinding sessions of playing or writing arrangements (to pay for his half of the love-nest) he played the music he loved with and to a small group of aficionados. Fellow-musicians appreciated their stuff but as it couldn't be easily classified they went largely unheard. Neither cool jazz nor hard bop attracted him although he had satisfied himself that he could play either. Still, there were many excellent musicians around. The problem was that the clarinet had become unhip and although Marcel was an accomplished multi-instrumentalist, the clarinet was his voice. As the fifties became the sixties another stupidity was that many black musicians adopted the prejudice that jazz was an all-black thing which no white man could play or even understand. The fact that their audiences and record-buyers were overwhelmingly white, bred even greater resentment. Marcel had been denigrated (as it were) by people he could play rings round. At gigs he found that some of the black musicians were standing behind him pulling faces during his solos, including a former lover whom he'd thought a friend. It was true that some exciting things were happening: free jazz, world music, Miles, Mingus, Sonny Rollins. She ran through a litany of the modern classical composers she liked: Cage, Partch, Nono, Crumb... Hm. But their music, like modern jazz, attracted a relatively tiny audience. Elvis was King. Rock was ousting jazz. Lovers of classical music clung smugly to their handful of symphonies, operas and concertos of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Marcel died in 1962, prematurely old and embittered, of a cold which turned into pneumonia. He'd been weakened by diabetes and demoralised by forced years of careful eating. Andy had narcissistically run off with a young man who was the spitting image of himself some twenty years earlier and Marcel had once more been considering a return to Paris when his lungs filled with fluid and he died. Mrs. Morpeth harked back to her wedding reception, to a Marcel still young, optimistic, prodigiously talented, who was explaining to Harry the inevitability of a German defeat:

"Ze Nazis are losink dis var for vy? For leck from imegination. Vot Nietzsche is sayink from ze Chermans: Obedience und lonk legs?"

"Yes, that famed Teutonic efficiency can easily become hidebound," Arthur broke urbanely in. "I remember a German engineer in South-West Africa trying to get his Indian mechanic to see the importance of aligning the screw-heads on a machine-cover so that all the slots were parallel. He met with, I'm happy to say, indifferent success. But the Nazis are suffering a real squeeze on their resources. So are the Japanese. Our best hope is that Japan will be forced, by oil sanctions, to declare war on the Americans who will then, willy-nilly become our allies. Hitler can't possibly take on the whole world and win. Japan will make up Roosevelt's mind even if Winston Churchill can't."

"I wish I were as sanguine as you, Arthur," desponded Harry Aaronson. "It's the prospect of being allies with this Meshuggeneh, this hooligan Stalin, that I don't like. Fascism or Communism - this is a choice? Let's face it - both are simply another name for dictatorships."

This was Joe's cue. "Stalin is a great man," he exploded. "Already there is enormous progress in all directions - the world's biggest hydroelectric dam, the first flight over the North Pole, work for all. It is true that certain liberties have had to be temporarily curtailed but there is a war against the reactionaries to be fought."

Joe loyally toed the Party line but had some private doubts. An old friend of Joe's and passionate communist had taken his family to the promised land of the USSR in the thirties and had not been heard of since. Poor Alick McSporran, that fiery little Scots engineer consumed by a sense of injustice. He had promised to write to his comrades back home with full details of their new earthly paradise - and Alick was not a man to forget a promise. The months went by with no word. Joe's own letters to his friend were returned marked Communication not Permitted. Joe was no fool. From his prewar talks with Russian sailors disquieting rumours had started to emerge. And Trotsky's murder the previous year had not helped.

"But it is not a question of personalities," continued Joe exasperatedly. "Stalin, however great, is only a tool in the historical inevitability of the triumph of Communism. Of course he's been forced into brutality by the Imperialist warmongers and the forces of reaction but Communism is stronger than any one man. Me, I am a communist and we are the ones who will really win this war, no matter what my capitalist son thinks."

"Let 's say that we agree to differ."

"Forget the war, forget politics," smiled Hilary, nuzzling up to her new hubby. "Let's dance."

Marcel obligingly rounded up the band and the fun began. Arthur, having been assiduously coached by Hilary, turned in quite a respectable waltz; but it was only when Marcel left the bandstand to join her in a lascivious Latin strut that several agreeably scandalised people clapped.

Chapter 10.

So Hilary Goodbody, free spirit, became Mrs. Hilary Morpeth, housewife and mother. Old Mrs. Morpeth looked tolerantly on. God, she'd been naive. She'd tried to be the Perfect Young Wife of film and magazine. A Mrs. Miniver. A dainty slip of a thing in gingham check and frilly apron like Charlie Chaplin's comically saccharine vision of wedded bliss. She saw herself flitting around on tippy-toes with a feather-duster, keeping everything spick and span (whatever either of those may be) and effortlessly whipping up gourmet meals in her up-to-the-minute fitted kitchen. The angelic children would doubtless be along soon. It was in vain that her reason insisted that she was an (ahem) experienced woman fast approaching thirty, that Britain was still in the grip of wartime austerity and that she was a sometime professional anthropologist who had always scorned those women whose whole life revolved around family and children. It was unfortunate that the women of the so-called primitive tribes with whom she'd come into contact had almost universally pitied her and contemned her lack of husband and children. Now she found herself besotted with the role of a thousand B-movies and soap-operas: precious little wifelkin seeing hubby off to work each morning; up on tippy-toes for a chaste peck on the cheek and welcoming him back in the evening to a domestic heaven. The war encouraged romantic gestures, but also had a way of rubbing one's nose in the dirt. Hilary kept up with war work of one type and another and Arthur took up firewatching, which gave him the peace and quiet he needed for his predatory business plans. For everyone, there was ample scope for playacting. People played at being soldiers and patriots and bosses and workers. At faithful spouses and gay Lotharios, at rotters, detectives, heroes and villains. In a time of flux, many of the roles which they had seen in the cinema, heard on the radio, or read about, were suddenly available. Arthur had a weakness for American magazines like Time, Life, The Saturday Evening Post and Popular Science. Hilary preferred the comical pomposity and occasional shrewd thrusts of the New Yorker. As for housework, golly-gosh, she needed neither cook nor char, thanks. Of course she could manage. She wanted to and jolly well did. Marriage had saved her from conscription into the army of factory-workers but Hilary insisted on doing her bit. She still worked at the library in Kilburn and kept up her MO reports whenever she could snatch a moment. Hilary's pretended omnicompetence persisted for a few weeks until the novelty wore off. Drudgery, she discovered, once well started, suddenly stretched endless in every direction. The decision, for instance, to handwash all the curtains at once had been a bad one, given a rainy week of damp drapery hanging over furniture wherever one looked and the necessity of creeping around in the dark in all but two blacked-out rooms. Stripping and revarnishing the balustrades, so simple in conception, so unbelievably messy and tedious in truth. When Hilary could take no more her overwhelming need for riot and colour burst the dam. Their spacious Hampstead house was soon awash with her garish if somewhat grubby collection of art and artefacts. It is a mark of Arthur's infatuation that he scarcely minded although he himself had inherited Joe's sailorly obsession with tidiness and his own study was painfully neat. Hilary had a passion for folk art and cheerfully juxtaposed objects from five continents with a good splash of Western decadence. For the first time in her life she could buy things which took her fancy and only her ingrained prudence and wartime rationing let her keep Arthur's doting in check. As chickens (or at least Barotse circumcision masks and pre-columbian pottery) came home to roost on every horizontal surface, so housework lost its ephemeral charm. Mrs. Ings, a cockney charlady, was brought in as a purely temporary expedient. Then there was the old woman from Yugoslavia who needed work and happened to be a fine cook of djuvetch and pita. You could read a paper through her pastry. The idea that servitude necessarily both humiliated the servant and corrupted the mistress was quietly buried along with much other leftwing baggage. Her parents had, after all, employed a cook, maid and gardener and she was horrified to find some of her mother's prejudices creeping wormlike out of the holes in her own mind. She remembered W.C. Fields' remark that when he was poor he'd vowed to come back and help the companions of his misery someday. But once he became rich he thought: to hell with them. Or as Stendahl said, the problem with falling in love with the wife of your best friend is actually no problem at all - when you fall in love with the wife the husband is at once transformed to an enemy. Hilary was sometimes pestered by guilt at the contrast of her newly-comfortable life with the suffering of war-torn millions but she was mostly either too tired or too happy to care. Although Arthur could have got almost anything they wanted through the black market, he found it simpler to be generally law-abiding. They ate out twice a week, usually Italian or Chinese. Hilary insisted on queueing like everyone else. It formed a large part of her social life. People were, on the whole, surprisingly uncomplaining. Perhaps being able to make sacrifices made the poor feel rich, she suggested to Mass Observation.

Chapter 11.

After the Japanese obligingly bombed Pearl Harbor, the US was in the war and the result was, barring some hideous German secret weapon, a foregone conclusion. And so it proved. The tide began to turn but there were still four years of largely futile bloodshed ahead. Arthur's doctor discovered that Marcel was genuinely sufficiently diabetic to be ineligible for the American forces and an American grandfather helped him (along with another financial guarantee by Arthur) to acquire a legal American passport. Marcel, tearfully grateful, headed for Harlem, leaving a gnawing pain in Hilary's heart. Wartime Britain somehow seemed drearier than ever although Rommel was crushed between Hitler's insane refusal to allow a retreat and Monty's carefully built-up superiority of three times as many men and six times as many tanks. And still the war dragged on, but at long last, with the Parthian shots of the V1 and V2, the Nazis were defeated. Glad spring was somewhat blighted by the discovery of Buchenwald, Belsen, Auschwitz and their almost unimaginable horrors but there was a sense of intense optimism. There were still the Japanese to finish off, but the new atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few months later did the trick. A terrible beauty was born which made the IRA look laughable. Nothing, it was widely felt, would ever be the same again. Morpeth, Flint and Gundry had large American investments and were well satisfied as America emerged the true victor of the war. And to the victor the spoils. Things in postwar Britain were not good although the new Labour government had brought in some social advances. Arthur, surprisingly, turned out to be in favour of a National Health Service and of a degree of power for the Trades Union. Economically, however, lend-lease was proving a disaster. The Marshall plan came just in time. And there would be no beggaring of Germany this time round. Oh no. We had learned our lesson. For Morpeth, Flint and Gundry it was back to business as usual. In fact as those American shares (which Arthur had snapped up for next to nothing in the thirties) soared, so did the company's profits.

Despite taking no precautions and frequent dutifully enthusiastic lovemaking, Hilary had failed to "fall pregnant." The finest doctors could find nothing wrong with either herself or Arthur and as both felt fulfilled and in love with the other, they had to be content. Besides, making love in the hope of conception was a million times more swoony than deliberately sterile sex. The first years of postwar austerity passed. No-one knew what did the trick, but Hilary had been left in nervous charge of a neighbour's baby while the mother was in hospital having her haemmerhoids excised. Looking after another woman's baby was, Hilary knew, an old African remedy for barrenness, like that porcelain egg which the nuns would put under tardy chickens to prompt them to lay. Much as Hilary eschewed superstition, it was true that a few weeks later she woke up feeling sick. Her breasts were tender and swollen. Her incubator warmed up, sucking heat from her hands and feet. The doctor merely confirmed what she already knew. Despite cigarettes, wine and the very occasional reefer she found herself in remarkably good health for an "elderly primagravida." She began to plan. Grantly Dick-Read's ideas of natural childbirth chimed with what she had read of childbirth in various primitive societies. Some African tribes got the woman to smoke huge quantities of dagga, which didn't seem either feasible or, frankly, desirable although it would have amused her to see how Arthur would pander to her whim. If it was good enough for Queen Victoria... She'd no doubt he could have done it with cunning and money. Anyway she knew that those tales of native women squatting down among the yams and delivering the child themselves before biting off the cord and placidly going on with their hoeing, were balderdash although they were probably better able to bear the pain stoically, having had more experience of it than in the modern world. The idea of being tied to a stake while a Red Indian brave galloped his horse directly at her, swerving aside at the last moment so as to terrify her into an urgent birth, also seemed a bit extreme. But she certainly wasn't going to be pumped full of drugs to parturiate in a coma, which was Arthur's idea of scientific childbirth. She was astonished to find the smug feeling of fulfilment which pregnancy brought, along with a cowlike patience, occasional fits of laughter or weeping and a discernable falling-off of mental capability. Perhaps stupidity was its own reward. Chemicals in the brain had been the interpretation of the time. Chemicals supposedly explained everything from wanting to eat coal or tinned spaghetti hoops to the emotions of love and hate. Hah! While Hilary had astonishingly felt pregnancy to be quite normal, Arthur had been both frightened and awestruck at the parasite growing inside her, sucking her blood, threatening her life. She'd had to use all her weapons of charm and scorn to stop him treating her like a porcelain doll. Morning sickness with its cream crackers and raspberry-leaf tea was succeeded by a happy bumpy midterm. Trot turned to waddle. She swelled to a near-spherical last phase of turning baby, spreading pelvis, engaging head, contractions, the breaking of the waters (she'd flooded the bed). In 1948 her son Rhys was born to an all-too-conscious mother - although she had consented to a few whiffs of laughing-gas. Pain held out the prospect of its own cessation only if she pushed out that baby now. Ow. Now. And now. Hilary swore never again. But by the next day she had almost forgotten the dislocation of her pelvis and the tearing pain as Rhys' head popped out, blue then flushing pink. The baby was laid on her suddenly empty stomach and swollen breasts and within minutes she was forever bound to the wizened bundle with the giant genitals that was her (and their) son. That same year the State of Israel was created. The Morpeths' second son, Henry, followed in 1950.

Chapter 12.

In what Mrs. Morpeth now thought of as the stifling fifties, Arthur and his little family spent a few years in South Africa. Mrs Morpeth wondered if that had been the cause of Henry's distressing bigotry. Or was it perhaps the sense of his own inadequacy? Neither he nor Rhys would ever be even half the man his father had been. Rhys had Arthur's cold intellect, but none of his audacity while Henry had inherited Arthur's egocentricity and mix of cruelty and sentimentality but neither his lovingness nor his strategic mind. Henry had been named for a favourite uncle of Hilary's (who had survived the Great War only to succumb, in 1918 to Spanish 'flu) but by a happy coincidence Henry Ford was also one of Arthur's business heroes. He was fond of saying that Ford paid his workers well so that they could afford to buy his cars. That the man was personally a repulsive anti-Semite and that he had popularised production methods which deskilled and zombiefied the workers were mere quibbles: the point was that the production line, science and trade could and would provide plenty for all. And that money bred money, enriching as it circulated, a mystical generation which she'd never quite grasped. Why not, she'd wondered, simply give it to the poor to spend in the shops of the rich so that everyone profited? Arthur had explained about inflation and the morale-destroying cancer of money unearned, but she'd been unconvinced. The good old Protestant work-ethic and the concept of the Deadly Sin of Sloth were far from universal. Masai herdsmen, say, seemed perfectly happy doing nothing most of the time, standing on one leg leaning on a spear while the cattle browsed. There was the occasional lion hunt for a bit of excitement. The Masai women did all the little work there was. Arthur liked women workers and employed them where he could. But more importantly he believed in relatively good wages for a job well done. And that a happy ship was a profitable ship. And that one educated worker was worth a dozen illiterates.

Arthur's wisdom had been lost on fifties South Africa as the chasm between black and white standards of living yawned ever wider. What little Arthur did to alleviate the miseries of his black workforce was dismissed by Hilary as paternalism, although he had managed to have one of his "coloured" workers reclassified white and had eventually helped him to emigrate to England. The old boy still sent Mrs. Morpeth a card from Foxearth every Christmas. The Fifties. She reviewed a typical argument of those days.

"What else can I do?" Arthur had asked in that reasonable tone which made her want to kill him. "If I stick my neck out they'll simply expel us from the country. South Africa's only hope is to stay stable and prosperous and well-run companies can help to keep things that way. Business generates wealth and wealth brings, in the long run, more power than votes. It is, for instance, undeniable that in purely material terms South Africa's nonwhites are better off than anywhere else in the continent, however deprived their lives may be in other ways. The first prerequisite for a successful business is realism. Most people don't want all that much freedom. Not to mention those who willingly throw it away. Look at the Germans in the war. They want a full belly and someone to make their decisions for them. I do the best I can within the prevailing climate."

"Oh yes. Raking in the loot and lending a respectable facade to these murdering bastards they call a government." Hilary was often enraged in South Africa. The blatant, institutionalised contempt of white South Africans for their conquered compatriots made her grind her teeth, but it was astonishing how soon she'd come to take it for granted although never to like it. She hated the police-state atmosphere of the country, the smugness, the provincialism and worried that the boys were being spoilt by living in a house full of what local wits were over-fond of calling hot and cold running servants.

Mrs. Morpeth remembered that row up in the hotel-room in Durban. Although officially winter, the air was hot and sticky - as thick as glycerine. She had just come back from a visit to the squatter camp where the cane-cutters used by Arthur's new sugar-refining company lived. She had been taken there by her new friend Solly - a liberal Indian lawyer who wanted her to see the disadvantaged at first hand. The squalor had been a shock although she had often seen poverty in other parts of the world. Dulleyed women shuffled through the dust among potbellied (often half naked - generally the bottom half) children with tracks of dry snot running from nose to mouth. There were flies everywhere. A few half-starved yellow dogs lay about as did most of the men. The huts, made of flattened paraffin tins and odd bits of board and sacking looked unbelievably wretched. One man was strumming a battered guitar with only four strings - k-ching ching k-chong chong, k-ching ching k-chong chong, k-ching ching k-chong chong - the same two chords over and over again. There was rubbish everywhere. The air stank of wet ashes, burnt mealie meal and shit. Hilary gave all her loose change to the suddenly swarming children and joined in a discussion with some of the inhabitants. Then her nostrils twitched at another familiar smell. An old man lying under a banana tree caught her eye. She waited until Solly, who was busy deploring conditions with the foreman of the cane-cutters, had everyone's attention while she wandered idly off in the direction of the banana tree. The old man's rheumy brown irises were smeared at their margins into a web of red. That distinctive reek. He scrambled guiltily to his feet as she approached and transferred his hastily-stubbed butt into a matchbox which he thrust into his pocket. Hilary approached, smiling and sympathetic. "Ntsanga," she ventured quietly, "dagga?" The old man played dumb until a spark from his unextinguished dog-end ignited the matchbox in his pocket which burst into flame and scorched his leg. He gave a yelp and plucked the little firebrand from his trousers, burning his finger and thereby attracting the attention of half the village. When interest waned and a modicum of decorum had been restored, Hilary offered him a Gitane, then impulsively gave him the whole pack. When Solly had, with some difficulty, brought his audience back to the subject of sharecropping, she glanced pointedly at the incinerated matchbox and said: "You can get some for me?" Jim, for that was the old man's name, at last decided she was no threat and showed bleary comprehension. "I'm can getting," he confirmed dubiously then treated Hilary to his crumbled brown smile (white sugar was included in the cutters' pay) and limped off behind the ruins of a mud rondavel, tentatively rubbing his burnt thigh. Hilary returned to a discussion which had moved on to the complete lack of medical facilities provided by the company. There wasn't even an antivenom kit for those workers bitten by snakes (quite a common occurrence - only last week someone had died of a Green Mamba bite before the tractor had got him to hospital). Hilary was inspecting a bag of weevil-infested mealie meal from the company store when she caught a beckoning finger out of the corner of one eye. Disengaging herself deftly she sidled over to a filthy alley between the shacks. Solly was luckily in full spate. An oblong bundle wrapped in a banana leaf and a crisp new five pound note surreptitiously changed hands. Jim, judging by his awestruck expression, had never actually held a fiver in his hand before. "Tank you, Missis, tank you. God bless, Missis, tank you," he mumbled, actually scuffling his bare feet in the dirt.

Later, up on the balcony of their posh hotel overlooking the sea, Hilary had crumbled up half a sticky "stick" of Durban Poison into some tobacco, rolled what the beat generation called a reefer and lit up. She hadn't drawn in more than a couple of lungfuls before the events of the day surged up in her in a welter of anger, disgust and shame. It was evening. Streetlights came on and the jumpy neon signs of nightclubs and bars. A few big American cars cruised up and down, wallowing on their soft springs, perhaps carrying bloated white businessmen or Freestate farmers with sweatmarked hats. Men on the lookout for prostitutes. The hotel residents would soon be called to dinner by a Zulu waiter with a gong to sit in a diningroom full of other well-off "Europeans". White South African English-speakers regarded themselves as top of this heap. Then came Jews, Greeks, Afrikaners and Portuguese, the order depending on one's personal prejudices, followed by Indians, Cape Coloureds and natives. The hotel guests would sit at a starched white tablecloth with fancily-folded table-napkins and too much cutlery and be served bland overcooked English food by smiling black waiters with snow-white tunics and red or green sashes and fezzes. Natal was the province with the fondest links to the mother-country. And meanwhile the cane-cutters were having a meagre supper of mealie-meal and bone-gravy (or cane-rat for a treat) and going cold, hungry and hopeless to bed. Then Arthur had arrived, no later than expected and she had vented her anger and disgust on him.

"This is your company," she'd told him. "MFG floated it and you're on the board of directors. Can't you at least ensure that your employees are treated like human beings rather than cattle? They haven't even the rudiments of health-care or education."

Naive. She'd been so naive. Arthur had promised to do what he could, but not unreasonably pointed out that he was constrained by market forces. As it was, they were paying marginally better wages than their competitors and at this early stage it was important to maximise profits in order to keep up investor confidence. Besides, there was talk of a cane-cutting machine which, if introduced, would eliminate even these miserable jobs. She shouldn't, in any case, judge these people by Western standards.

Hilary laughed scornfully. "You sound just like Dolly Katz." She adopted the flat, shallow, drawling tones of that gross matron: "Nahlisten Hyillary you reelly dahn't unnerstand ahr naytives, I mean they reely don't mind living like they do, because they're not up to ahr level. That new gardenboy we got was so raw he didn't even know what Lifebuoy soap was. He wanted to eat it!"

This from the daughter of an illiterate Rumanian Jew, a village tanner who had never seen the sea or a train or a motor car until the first World War catapulted him into the modern world and dumped him in South Africa. The first time he picked up a telephone and heard a voice from the earpiece he flung the instrument from him in horror. His relatives, embarrassed by this reminder of their lowly and superstitious origins gave him his first banana and maliciously told him it should be eaten skin and all. He ate it uncomplainingly and so became a family byword for provincial stupidity for the rest of his illstarred life. This was unjust as he had more than his fair share of the grasping shrewdness which had made his nephews rich.

"I don't think you can honestly equate my views with Dolly's," soothed Arthur. "I agree that there are many aspects of the system which are truly detestable, but I honestly believe that the creation of a secure industrial base is more important for the future wellbeing of South Africa than antagonising the present odious, but hopefully shortlived, dispensation."

"Why is it always either or?" Hilary oozed bitterness. "According to Solly, white South Africans have the highest standard of living in the world and that of your cane-cutters must be among the lowest. Surely you can do something." Hilary began to weep. Arthur capitulated at once.

"Very well," he conceded. "I'll do my best, but it will be a drop in the ocean. The poor, sadly, are always with us. From the viewpoint of efficacy I would probably do more good with the money to endow another three scholarships for black students. It seems to me that even if one accepts the idea of that chap Bentham of whom you told me, then in striving for the greatest happiness of the greatest number there will be casualties. One must take the long view. Let's face it: to live anywhere in the West at present is to be party to murder and exploitation, if not directly, then at least by proxy."

"So it's fine for we whites to live like the lords of creation," Hilary sneered. "We just have to wait while the hidden hand of the market automatically delivers the best of all possible worlds."

"Now look." Arthur was conciliatory, "I've never claimed that capitalism is perfect, but I am profoundly convinced that communism is far worse. And as you know I never judge anyone by either colour or creed. Growing up in Tiger Bay taught me that that was the least reliable indicator of all. Nevertheless, if you'll give me a list of the cane-cutters' requirements, I'll see what I can do: even if it has to come out of my own pocket. Don't let's quarrel, darling. We can discuss it quietly over dinner. Come along, old thing. The boys will be downstairs already."

Hilary sniffed, dabbed her eyes and yielded to reason or at least to Arthur's conciliatory tone. "Old thing" indeed! What a charming endearment. On a par with "mon petit chou " or "chicken". The Durban Poison was starting to wear off. She was glad. It had made her jittery as hell. She'd shouted at Arthur partly to quash the insistent admission that she actually, despite her best intentions, despised the wretched cringers of the squatter camp almost as much as she pitied them. Although that "boy" strumming his maimed guitar had been very goodlooking... She'd have a couple of gin-and-tonics, that would help. It did.

After dinner she was able to endure the idiocies of a business acquaintance and his wife with only the occasional unnoticed sarcasm. They were nice enough people, she supposed, supporters of the "opposition" United Party and fervent Anglophiles. Of course, Justin Padbury huffed, British companies had a duty to treat their employees in a civilised fashion and set an example, that went without saying, but give these chaps an inch and they took an ell. Firm but fair, that was his motto. Of course things were bound to change eventually. Supposed the indigenous population would eventually run the show but after all, Rome wasn't built in a day."

"If he buys you a Rhinestone," sang Hilary softly, "better think before you squawk. 'Cause a Rhinestone's a fine stone - you got to crawl before you walk."

Justin looked startled and Arthur deftly diverted the talk to cricket. It was a not unpleasant social occasion but somehow the evening ended with agreement on a contract for office equipment which one of Arthur's offshoots would be only too pleased to supply. Hilary soon gave up on politics and she and Agnes politely gossiped about children and films. Around the World in Eighty Days. Surprising that it hadn't been banned in South Africa, thought Hilary, what with Fogg ending up marrying that Indian princess. They chattered about My Fair Lady, An American in Paris, All About Eve. Of course, Agnes maintained stoutly, British actors and directors were the best in the world; one thought of the Lunts, Noel and Gertie, Olivier and Hitchcock. Yes, Hilary had seen the Coronation on the television. Marvellous. When it came to spectacle no-one could touch the British, could they? Oh well, thought Hilary, it was business.

As for the the cane-cutters, the white foreman was given an antivenin kit to keep in the paraffin fridge with his beers, the village got a handpump for water, a long drop latrine and a shack where a semiliterate teacher taught the kids what she could, but Hilary had seen enough to know that any real improvement in their lives was, to say the least, improbable while the Nationalists were in power.

They drove back to Johannesburg in the big black Mercury V8 which Arthur had borrowed from an insistent underling. The car had been discreetly modified with a "souped-up" engine and "beefed-up" suspension and brakes. There was a spinner knob on the steering-wheel with a picture of a bathing beauty encased in clear plastic. The boys, overexcited, squabbled briefly in the back seat, then went to sleep. Arthur had taken a couple of benzedrine tablets which his doctor had given him. Many people took them when they needed to stay alert. Bomber pilots had used them in the war. Hitler, that cleanliving vegetarian, had allegedly been addicted to amphetamines. Hilary smoked a joint or two and many cigarettes. Although she was a good driver, Arthur never relinquished the wheel. He drove fast but safely, the specially fitted headlights (Lucas Flamethrowers - almost twice as powerful as the original equipment) slicing through the night. They began to hurtle up the escarpment to the highveld. The engine throbbed and growled as they swept through hills and koppies. It was beautiful and peaceful in the full moonlight. Zulu villages of thatched round huts looked picturesque with smoke trickling from the tips of their conical thatch like friendly volcanoes. There were still a few wild animals about: jackals, hares, an owl or two. A beautiful country, thought Hilary, with a gigantic toad squatting on its face. Then came the parched Orange Free State: bare stony red ground sprinkled with tufts of spiky grass, aloes, thorn trees. Buff, black, glaucous. Isolated farmhouses with a windmill water-pump, a corrugated iron dam, a clump of bluegums. The dear old Orange Free State where Asians passing through to get to the Cape or Natal where forbidden to spend the night. Don't let the sun set on you in these parts... Then it was the highveld, the miles of barbed-wire fencing, winter-stubbled mealie fields, cheerless little kaffer statte or sprawling "locations". At long last came the string of Reef towns, the dirty white minedumps and home.

Back in Joburg, they fell quickly into the endless round of hospitality which constituted White South African social life. Hilary's moderate liberal opinions soon had her cast as the Whore of Babylon, but as an Englishwoman, an intellectual and above all, the wife of an extremely rich financier, she was allowed her little eccentricities. Sucking up to America, the country was in the grip of anti-communist fervour. Before the war, white South African mineworkers had been staunch communists united by the dubiously communist slogan of "Keep South Africa White." Now the red peril had been ruthlessly suppressed. A pall of suspicious and obstructive Afrikaner officialdom was cast over public life but the braais and dinner parties rattled along with a complacency which couldn't quite hide the underlying fear, the murmurs of, for instance, Mau Mau atrocities in Kenya. Everyone ate, drank and smoked too much (except for Arthur who stuck to an after-dinner brandy and cigar. He also watched his diet and played a good deal of golf). Servants came and went: cooking, serving, cleaning, gardening. Hilary entertained Arthur's sprawl of family, businessmen and friends. Family was OK.

Mrs. Morpeth went back to the war. Of all Hilary's mother's twelve siblings only Aunt Hortense was left and there was no one on her father's side except some Australian cousins with whom she exchanged Christmas cards. Aunt Hortense hadn't felt able to make the wartime journey up to London for Hilary's wedding, but had sent her the old family bible, a pint of clotted cream and a lovely Victorian pendant in silver, lapis lazuli and jet. They were on amicable terms but had met only once since Hilary had taken over the lease of her aunt's flat. Hilary's shocking ideas on female education, free love and atheism had strained relations in the past but in wartime even Aunt Hortense's Victorian propriety was somewhat relaxed. Many women saw it as almost a patriotic duty to "spread it about a bit". Besides, how could one refuse when tonight's lover might be tomorrow's corpse? Not to mention the omnipresent imminence of one's own demise. So the girls drank, smoked, worked and screwed almost like one of the boys. Hilary had never been promiscuous, but had slept with a couple of men out of a mixture of affection and curiosity. That and two abortive love-affairs (with a journalist who was always flying off somewhere in search of copy and then with a Mexican doctor who turned out to be married but didn't believe in divorce) were the sum total of her sexual experiences. Besides, for Aunt Hortense, marriage wiped the slate clean - but her belated approval brought no real meeting of minds. The English didn't go in much for extended families, but Hilary had enough anthropological experience to adapt. She was quickly accepted as a member of what could almost be called Arthur's tribe, entitling her to the bitchy kindness and grudging pride that were stronger than the love of friends. Friends were for when the stuffy intimacy of family threatened to suffocate her. But first in England and later in South Africa, quite a few of the family became friends too.

There was Max and Sadie's boy Morrie, for instance. Morrie had done well for himself. In the family tradition he'd somehow kept out of the war (an old hockey injury had left him with a trick knee). He had, however, volunteered to go and fight in the first Arab-Israeli war and had even got as far as a training camp in Italy when an infected wisdom tooth turned to acute blood-poisoning and invalided him out. Penicillin saved his life. Morrie made his way home, recovered and went on to become a sound mercantile lawyer. He was plump and genial and a reasonably good Jew - not too frum to eat Arthur's non-kosher (but of course non-pork) boerewors and chops but going to shul for the major holy days and some Saturdays when he wasn't too busy. They alternated Friday nights with Morrie's sister's family in Boksburg. It was the traditional Shabbes feast with everyone dressed up. Someone was sure to have forgotten his yamulke and would have to use a serviette to cover his head. The men went off to early evening shul while the women stayed home and cooked. They came back to gefilte fish with chrain and roast chicken and a choice of puddings. Cream with chicken gravy would have been unthinkable but icecream or milk in coffee were tolerated. As well as a practicing Jew, Morrie was also a keen Zionist and an indefatigable fundraiser for Israel. At home he frequently deplored the brutality of Apartheid while guiltily enjoying a very cushy life. Morrie and his wife Leah and their three children were regular guests at Arthur's Sunday get-togethers.

Arthur had rented a huge mansion in the fashionable Northern Suburbs. Hilary found its blatant pomposity almost insufferable, but it greatly enhanced Arthur's standing in the local business community. The walls of the enormous reception room on the ground floor were completely sheathed in writhing green marble. The floor was of polished black granite. A fountain with goldfish stood at each end of the cavern which stretched the full length of the house and was lit by gilt sconces bearing flickering flameshaped lightbulbs, typical, thought Hilary, of the brash taste of rich South Africa. A grand staircase with thick red carpet was flanked at its base by two painted bronze statues of comely Nubian slave-boys, each bearing a large empty pot on his head. Upstairs was all imported oak parquet flooring and heavy velvet curtains, the furniture being a hotchpotch of opulent Biedermeier, English Club and American Art Deco.

The majordomo, Laurence, was a Zulu with gaudy red- and black-sectored wooden discs, three inches across, stuck in his earlobes. He terrified all the other servants whom he dismissed as rubbishy Shonas and Shangaans. For all that, he was an intelligent and somewhat educated man (Standard Two) who claimed to be related to the Zulu royal family. The other Zulu on the staff was John, the night watchman whose ear-discs were neither as large nor as colourful as Laurence's, although each year when he went home to Zululand, slightly larger discs were inserted to stretch the skin. John's badge of office was his knobkerrie which Hilary coveted on account of the intricate beadwork on its shaft. But this weapon, with which he had knocked down many a skellum, was not for sale. Henry also coveted it, if not for purely aesthetic reasons and was an avid audience for John's ferocious tales of famous Zulu battles and city fights. Hilary did buy some of the bowls which John wove from multicoloured telephone wire to while away the long dark hours. She also got him to bring her back some real folk-art from Natal, once she'd made him understand that she didn't want the usual tourist rubbish.

Hilary hated the vast house and escaped whenever she could to her own study - a cluttered little room with all her books, papers and objects. She kept up with current Anthropological ideas with what scant time she could snatch from running the house and eight servants as well as spending hours ferrying the boys to "activities" in the Citroen DS which Arthur had bought for her so that he could drive it when out of the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce which his financial image required. Arthur admired the Citroen's advanced design. The brakes were operated by a pressure-sensitive rubber mushroom on the floor and Arthur had been more amused than annoyed when someone had run into the back of him because the man had explained that although he'd braked as hard as possible, he simply hadn't been able to stop as quickly as the Citroen. "Thirty years ahead of its time," Arthur liked to remark, with its huge inboard disc brakes, radial tyres, front-wheel drive, semi-automatic gearbox. The body was black, with a white fibreglass roof and frameless windows. Hilary grew very fond of the quirky machine with its up-and-down hydropneumatic suspension which floated over the bumps, its single-spoke steeringwheel, its sleek sharklike lines. To come of a family which owned both a Rolls and a Citroen did the boys no harm at all among their schoolmates. And if Hilary found their opulent lifestyle stifling, Rhys and Henry took to it with alacrity. After postwar British austerity, South Africa was a revelation of luxury. There was no stinking brown London fog (the stinking brown coalsmoke of the native locations was far away), no interminable-seeming weeks of cold and rain. Highveld winters were bracing, dry and brief. Highveld summers were not unbearably hot , the habitual slight tension of drought with its flaming sunsets broken every now and then by dramatic thunderstorms, the livid skies cracked by fork lightning followed by pelting rain. Mrs Morpeth remembered one fierce hailstorm which had broken every window along the front of the house. She could still see the perspective of regular drifts, achingly white, all along the long reception room. First time she'd ever liked it. Mrs. Morpeth remembered the art povera of the sixties and seventies with their playful dislocation of categories. Some hailstones had been the size of walnuts. Arthur was out so it fell to Hilary to organise the buckets and wheelbarrows and to terrorise the snootier servants into actually lending a hand. By the time Arthur had finished his urgent business and come home the worst was over. Life went on. New glass went in. The insurers finally, grudgingly, stumped up.

Rhys and Henry were, despite Hilary's best efforts, utterly spoilt. A vast houseful of servants catered to their every whim, the weather was glorious, the food super and superabundant. Five acres of garden ran down to an open stormwater drain which wound through all the neighbouring properties and provided countless opportunities for adventure. Sometimes the boys would sneak out at night and spy on the neighbours. Once a man had staggered out into the garden and vomited copiously into a bush next to the one where the intrepid Indian scouts lay quaking. He had gone in at last but it was a near thing.

The children had been sent to the Jewish King David Junior and High Schools respectively. An orthodox religious education was not the issue. Hilary was an atheistic Christian (with a weakness for the theatricality of Roman Catholicism) and Arthur was a nonpracticing halfJew. In a country with a mediocre state education for whites and a training for servitude for "Bantu", King David enjoyed an excellent academic reputation. Arthur, furthermore, thought it no bad thing that the boys should mix with those future luminaries of the professional and financial worlds which the Jewish community tended to throw up. Anyway, it was either King David or one of the Catholic schools like Marist Brothers or the Christian Brothers' College, CBC. But Hilary, remembering her own convent days, revolted. She didn't like the way the Brothers smelled of what she supposed to be a mixture of mothballs, incense and musty semen (although some women couldn't get enough of it). Furthermore she didn't want her sons frightened by the lies about hell of her own convent upbringing. So King David it was. The boys were at first teased for their accents, their long (by South African standards) hair, their pallid skins. A few pushy parents encouraged their offspring to befriend these children of a fabulously wealthy, cultivated Englishman and a distant cousin kept a distant eye on them. After a few weeks, though, the boys had fitted in. Coming from a country with television boosted their status. Rhys was a bit of a swot, but as he allowed his friends to copy his Maths homework from time to time, he was tolerated. Henry had no pretensions to brilliance but was quite good at sport (rare enough at King David) and soon picked up the local prejudices.

"Why is a Volkswagen like a kaffir-girl?" he had overheard one salesman ask another.

"Dunno."

"You give up?"

"Ja, OK, why?"

"It's because it's got its brains in its backside and round every corner there's one lying on its back in a ditch."

Henry had memorised this gem and tried it out on his brother.

"Very funny. I don't think. Anyway you know Mum doesn't like us calling them kaffirs." Rhys was a bit of a puritan and didn't like the way that the images of filthy black animal lust, which were seared into his memory from one of their nocturnal spying expeditions, were helplessly evoked. A rustling in the hydrangeas turned out to be one of their gardenboys fucking nextdoor's "girl" on a blanket in the chilly winter air. Because of the cold, Pearl (the girl) had simply hiked up the blue skirt of her uniform while Gabriel pulled down his trousers but kept his gumboots on. There were glimpses, in the glaring moonlight, of leg and slit, frizzy pubic hair, donkey-dong and buttocks. Rhys dragged Henry away but hadn't been able to resist a last look as Gabriel's bucking turned to a fierce and noisy orgasm. Within ten minutes the boys had crept back to bed, shocked, thrilled and with Rhys quite hysterically refusing to discuss the incident with his brother.

As for Pearl, she stood up, brushed down her dress and let Gabriel escort her companionably back to the gap in the hibiscus hedge.

Pearl was not allowed men in her room. Her employers had, after all, her moral welfare to consider and besides had no intention of having their backyard "turned into a bleddy shebeen, thenk you viry much." Pearl's room was a little brick-walled box in the backyard, screened from the house by a privet hedge. It had a cement floor, windup gramophone, corrugated iron roof, forty-watt lightbulb and a few shelves and boxes for her meagre possessions. Pearl was a Christian. She had her faith and a single-bar electric heater to keep her warm.

On this occasion she left Gabriel, took the Coca-Cola which he had stolen from the Morpeths' fridge for her, shook it vigorously and, crouching over her squatplate toilet, used its gush as a vaginal douche. After washing the stickiness away with cold water, she had just time to fill the Primus with paraffin, light the little cup of methylated spirits which heated the jet, nip around the corner to the tap and back again before the meths burned out, put on the kettle, pump vigorously and open the valve. Tsk. Blocked jet. She fiddled the wire bristle on its tinny handle into the hole and jiggled it up and down. The meths went out and the jet cooled. Instead of a corona of flame, a stream of paraffin piddled up onto the kettle. No more meths. Perhaps a match? Foom. Whole thing up in flames. Pearl, a country girl, was terrified and ran outside. The Primus, after filling the room with stinking black smuts, somehow contrived to warm its jet and started to work properly. Pearl, hearing a reassuring roaring, peeped in and saw that she was safe. She flung open both door and window to clear the air, wound up her Westclox Baby Ben alarm clock (set for five-thirty) and made herself a tin mug of watery tea. And so to bed on the cheap divan raised up on bricks to prevent tokoloshes getting at her in the night. The mattress puffed out a waft of DDT.

Gabriel went back to one of the line of rooms behind the big house which he shared with Simeon, the other garden-boy. Gabriel was ambitious. Hilary had agreed to teach him to read and write and after only a few months he had made good progress. Had she been single and ten years younger, she would have liked an affair with him just to outrage white society. As it was, she had been disturbed more than once by the urge to suck his cock. Hilary gave Gabriel a dictionary and he began to use big words with relish. There were often "sev-e-ral pe'tinent considerations" to the simplest "horticultural" problems. By the time the Morpeths went home to Britain he had risen from garden-boy to house-boy and Arthur had lent him the money for a course of driving-lessons. Gabriel got his licence on the second try after a friend had advised him to leave a bottle of whisky rolling about on the back seat and to take his time getting into the car. Sure enough, the whisky vanished and Gabriel passed. When Arthur left South Africa, he handed Gabriel on to Morrie who found him a job as a delivery driver. Gabriel eventually married Pearl and their three children were brought up by Pearl's sister back home in Basutoland. When the oldest boy came of age he naturally looked up Leah and was given a job in her garden. Leah had written to Hilary, telling her the news of servant dynasties. Nepotism was rife. White families moving to town would often start a train of old servants and their kin in their wake. Asked whether he preferred Johannesburg to the hills of Basutoland Simeon had no doubt. "Jobeg" was number one! Beerhalls, music, football, girls. What more could anybody want? The only thing he really missed was his Basuto pony. Not only for sentimental reasons but because it was even easier to get about on than a bicycle. In the villages only the old and the young were left: everyone else had gone to try and scratch a living in the foreign country of their birth. Meanwhile the goat-stripped soil got poorer, the dongas got deeper. No, it was like waking from a nightmare to get away from all that! That was how Leah had understood it, at any rate.

Chapter 13.

Back in the fifties Arthur had dreams of his own. South Africa was booming. MFG was among the top fifty merchant banks in the world. Had Arthur realised all his assets, he would have been many times over a millionaire. But it was not the money which drove him. He worked hard and long. Even the weekend gatherings of twenty or thirty people were occasions for financial strategising and information-gathering. The guests were family, honorary family and the occasional VIP. Arthur had let it be known that he expected everyone to be there. It was no laughing matter to miss one of these conclaves and absentees needed pretty convincing excuses. Arthur was scrupulous in playing no favourites. Whenever he returned from a long foreign business trip he brought gifts. The men and older boys got to choose an expensive silk tie from a caseful on Arthur's bed. Who got first choice was of course a matter of complete indifference but nevertheless jealously noted. Everyone denigrated Arthur's taste behind his back but all took good care to wear their ties. Women usually got a choice of perfume or fancy glassware. Over boerewors and chops and Castle Lager, The Spider wove his webs for shitgorged flies. One thing local businessmen were all agreed on was that the biggest hindrance to business was the surly, overweening state machinery clogged with otherwise unemployable Afrikaners. In the thirties as many as one in five Afrikaners had been classed "poor white". One of the first tasks of the postwar Nationalist government was to find jobs for their predominantly Afrikaner supporters. This they had done in spades through job reservation (better jobs were for whites only) and mushrooming bureaucracy. Nothing was now possible without Afrikaner connivance although their actual involvement in high finance was as yet rather thin. Afrikaans capital went mainly into government infrastructure schemes. But they were learning fast. Arthur had found that whereas corporate hospitality and dummy directorships worked best at the higher levels, he had run into deliberate obstructionism lower down. He was hated as an Englishman, a Jew, a millionaire. There was something else, too. One night he had an unwelcome visitor.

Laurence ushered in a typically brawny Afrikaner bulging out of a shiny navyblue suit. Thick neck, thin moustache, round red face. Very short hair. But the bloodshot eyes were shrewd.

"Please sit down," said Arthur urbanely, "Now, what can I do for you Mr...?"

"van Niekerk, Mr. Morpeth. I'm connected to the department of Race Relations.You got a lekker house here, Mr. Morpeth. Lovely family. Your business is doing very well."

"Thank you," said Arthur curtly. "I'm sure you haven't come just to exchange pleasantries. I'm a busy man. Would you like to come to the point?"

"Ja sure. I just come to give you some friendly advice, Mr. Morpeth. You know we got very strict racial laws here in South Africa."

"It had come to my attention." Drily.

"OK. If a person was, say, a coloured, tryna to pass for white, there could be big trouble. Of course, if I was to uncover any evidence of something like that it would be my duty to report it."

Arthur wondered if they had caught up with his false registration of one of his employees, a skilled coloured electrician whom Arthur had had transferred to the white voters' roll.

van Niekerk, thinking that his menacing pause had gone on long enough, resumed: "Even something like say a Chinese grandfather... that might be blerrie embarrassing, hey?"

"Oh, so that's your little game, is it?" Arthur found himself more angry than afraid. He played the outraged colonial governor: "I must inform you that it is a fixed business principle of mine never, in any circumstances, to succumb to blackmail. In any case, Mr. van Niekerk if that is indeed your name," (it was), "if an underling like you knows of my antecedents, of whom incidentally I make no secret, there must be many others who do too. To quote the Duke of Wellington, publish and be damned. I think you'll find that South Africa needs me rather more than I need it. Furthermore, I am on excellent terms with some government ministers. I have only to drop a word in certain influential ears to ensure that you personally will never work again." Arthur watched as van Niekerk warily digested this information. His face gave nothing away but Arthur had a sense of rapid mental calculation. 'n Boer maak 'n plan was no idle maxim of peasant shrewdness and resourcefulness. One learned quickly when there was only oneself to depend on. Arthur remembered riding round a platteland farm with one old boy when his bakkie gave a cough and juddered to a halt. Turned out that the distributor rotor had disintegrated into bakelite gravel. After a long slow look and a chew of biltong, Oupa Venter had pulled out his pocketknife and improvised a new distributor rotor from the remains of an old briar pipe and a bit of bloudraad wire. A few tweaks, whittlings and hammerings later, the engine roared into life. Arthur was impressed, but not so impressed that he was prepared to invest in Oupa Venter's projected ostrich farm.

The head of Morpeth, Flint and Gundry had meanwhile been studying his visitor closely and had arrived at a surprising conclusion: "Look, let's just forget this blackmail nonsense, shall we?" he said brusquely. "I have a rather more worthwhile business proposition to put to you. You have obviously no moral scruples whatever, so I take it that your motivation is primarily financial. I believe I could make you an offer sufficiently attractive to purchase your loyalty. You evidently possess a degree of cunning and audacity and seem capable of acting on your own initiative. I am in need of an intermediary and translator in my business dealings. A native South African. I would pay you well - but only, of course, for a job well-done. Needless to say, any attempt to doublecross me would elicit the utmost severity."

"Who you calling a native, hey?" growled van Niekerk, pouncing on a word he recognised.

"Oh for Heaven's sake! I mean native purely in the sense that you happen to have been born here. Unlike you, I am not obsessed with a person's ancestry. I judge a man by his capabilities and I think you might just meet my requirements. I could give you a good job." Arthur waited, watching the big Afrikaner coolly. Some minutes passed. "Well," he said at last, "have you considered my proposition?"

van Niekerk's eyes narrowed in the familiar South African squint, a mixture of suspicion and the habitual reaction to the glaring light. "Ja, you reckon I'm a real doos, man? Get me to do something illegal so's you've got a hold over me? Aikona. Look, you gimme a thousand pounds and I can change your file. And that's the end of it. It would be OK if the old man was, say, Japanese."

"Oh yes," said Arthur disgustedly, "the Japanese buy South African pig iron, which miraculously transforms them into 'honorary whites'. I suppose their wartime alliance with the Nazis didn't hurt either. But believe it or not, I am actually rather proud of my Chinese ancestry."

"Ja, sure," van Niekerk shrugged. "It's a stupid law. It's not like the old boy was a curry-cruncher or a kaffir. But I could fix it oneshot so's there'd be no trouble. No-one would ever know. Otherwise I can blit the story to the newspapers. Ag, c'mon Mr. Morpeth man, a thousand quid's buggerall to a bigshot like you." Bluster had turned to whine.

"I don't somehow think you would court publicity," mused Arthur, glacial English gentleman outfacing a cad. "It might embarrass the government, some rather prominent members of which are partners in my various enterprises. They might even lose money and that would never do. No, forget blackmail. You have my word that this job I'm offering you involves nothing illegal whatever - your ludicrous fears that I could or would turn the tables on you are entirely baseless. I'm actually making you a considerably better offer than you deserve, but I pride myself that I'm a good judge of men. I think you're wasted as a petty criminal. I advise you to consider my offer, Mr. van Niekerk. Take your time. Here. Help yourself to a drink." And Arthur pushed over the silver tray with its crystal decanter, silver ice-bucket and soda-syphon in its protective silver basket. "I would be prepared to offer you an advance of, say, fifty pounds on your wages."

van Niekerk poured himself a generous splash of Scotch, took a couple of ice-cubes and the merest spritz of soda. He eyed Arthur speculatively. Fifty pounds, while no fortune, was certainly not to be sneezed at. And he could keep the option of blackmail open.

"This job. What is it you want exactly?"

"As I said, nothing illegal. Business information, that's all - and an Afrikaans speaker like yourself to facilitate bureaucratic negotiations. I'm offering you a chance to better yourself, man." (British "man").

"You want me to spy on my own people; 'zadit hey?" van Niekerk caught on fast.

"I'm a businessman," said Arthur patiently. "I'm not concerned with politics except insofar as it impinges upon my commercial interests. It is a sine qua non that a prosperous South Africa requires a prosperous Afrikaner community. Now, I presume that your legitimate profession is that of a civil servant or government official of some description, so you must have experience of dealing with red tape. I want someone who can get things done - and done quickly and efficiently. I promise to make it well worth your while."

Kobie van Niekerk looked around Arthur's plush study. The oak panelling, the shelves of leatherbound volumes, the Chesterfield chairs, even the excellent whisky in cut-glass crystal tumblers suddenly seemed a very good idea indeed. He could get rich on the back of this wealthy Jew. Joodse geluk, the fabled luck of the Jews, had often been bitterly spoken of in his father's house whenever a Jewish neighbour had had a good oes or got a good price for his sheep. van Niekerk came from a poor background, said father being a failed mielieboer from the Western Transvaal. When old Piet van Niekerk shot himself, the bank took everything. The insurance company refused to pay up as suicide (see the fine print) explicitly invalidated the policy. In any case Piet hadn't kept up his last few premiums so the company was entitled to all payments to date. And that was that. Luckily Kobie's big brother Gert had found a job on the railways in Johannesburg so what was left of the family ended up in a reverberant corrugated-iron house next to the shunting-yards. Kobie joined the pro-Nazi Ossewa Brandwag (Oxwagon fire-guard) and was duly interned when the war came. With the Nationalists' victory in 1948, this had stood him in good stead. He'd been given a job in the secret police, keeping an eye on troublemakers. Bribes and blackmail were "perks" to eke out the miserable wages. Why, to extort money from the enemies of the state was practically a duty. The work was miserable too but at least it helped keep white South Africans on top. The trouble with spying was that Kobie had discovered that many blacks were by no means the stupid baboons he had always thought them. And there was growing resistance to the government. White liberals were easy enough to frighten as they had a great deal to lose, but no matter how hard they stamped on the kaffirs, there was too much hatred there to be kept down for ever. Kobie dreamt of buying himself a game reserve in South America when the Swart Gevaar (Black Menacel) swamped the country and civilisation was destroyed.

So van Niekerk (universally known to his English-speaking associates as "Van") partially switched allegiance and came to work for Arthur Morpeth. He proved unexpectedly capable and astute and was not at all the beersodden ox which his appearance suggested. Arthur had indeed a good eye for men. Van soon made himself indispensable with his network of family, church and Broederbond connections. (Die Broederbond was another secret society which had picked up where the Ossewa Brandwag left off). The money rolled in.

Arthur had mentioned van Niekerk's blackmail attempt to Hilary, increasing the repressed paranoia which living in a police state entailed. Let's face it, everyone had something to hide. She had been looking through Henry's collection of comics, which ranged from Battler Brittan (DASHING ENGLISHMAN DUFFS UP FILTHY NAZI SWINE) to Mickey and Donald and the Dell comics: Little Lotta, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Richie Rich, when she came across an excercise book belonging to Vivian Wainer, a second cousin from Boksburg. Vivian was Morrie's sister Jennifer's child - a boy a little older than Rhys. The book contained a collection of schoolboy jokes:

Powder spells red wop backwards.

What's the height of pain?

Sliding down a razor-blade using your balls as a brake.

What's the height of strain?

Toothmarks on the toilet seat.

There was also a long poem which began:

A Chinese couple going wild

Wished to have a pure white child

Took advice what could be done

But found no way of getting one.

How they finally succeeded was told in the last stanza:

Hooley hooley me no fooley

Me put Ajax on my tooley

Wifey also very fussy

Puttum Persil on her pussy.

There was a note that the poem had been written by Selwyn's uncle who worked for Lever Brothers in Boksburg. The rest of the jokes were puerile or sickmaking. One involved a dog rather too conveniently called Titswobble while another concerned a prostitute asking her customers: "Rough or smooth?" Rough is cheaper so the bloke goes for it and has a horribly scratchy, scrapy fuck. The next time he asks for "smooth" and this time it is silken heaven. "How did you do that?" he asks. "Well, for rough I don't do anything, but if you ask for smooth I pick off my scabs and let the pus run down." Harmless enough stuff, Hilary convinced herself, if a little advanced for her six-year-old son. In a few minutes her nausea had abated and she had decided to say nothing about it. The boys spent the occasional weekend with their second cousins in traditional South African pastimes like playing tok tokkie (throwing stones on people's tin roofs and running away), climbing Cason dump to find the blue clay which could be moulded onto a supple switch to make a kleilat with which to flick clay at one's playmates with gratifying accuracy and consequent pain. There was big talk about putting out eyes and blasting out eardrums. The game usually lasted until some of the smaller children cried and threatened to tell. Sometimes they rode over to a gravel dump to slide down the steep sides of fist-sized aggregate on a corrugated-iron sledge. Grazes and bruises were commonplace - that there were no fatalities or broken bones was pure luck. Henry clung wailingly on to the two older boys despite being bullied and ignored. When things got unbearable he played doctors and nurses with Vivian's little sisters.

Many of the jokes in Vivian's book had a strong undercurrent of sadism. Boys liked to show how tough they were by laughing at the weak-stomached. The sixties, Mrs. Morpeth remembered, had been the time of the sick joke. The rest of Vivian's book was filled with either wartime verse of the Hitler Has Only One Big Ball variety or smutty innuendo:

Cocktail ginger-ale sixpence a glass

If you don't like it, stick it up your...

Arse soldiers went to war, arse soldiers won

Arse soldiers stuck their bayonets up Hitler's...

Arse your mother for sixpence to see the new giraffe

With pimples on his whiskers and pimples on his....

More distasteful were the racialistic (as, Mrs. Morpeth remembered, we said back then) jokes about "kaffirs".

What do you call a kaffir with a machinegun?

Sir.

Housewife to houseboy: "If there was a revolution John, would you kill me?"

John (shocked to his loyal core): "Hau no, Missis! How I'm can killing you? You are good like mother to me. Never! No! I kill next-door's Missis, her boy kill you."

What's the definition of a cocoon?

A k-kaffir.

Hilary wondered whether the boys had been bullied for their Chinese eighth. There were days when they seemed more than usually reluctant to go to school. As it happened they had not. Mainly because, a la Leslie Charteris with his half, the subject of mixed race was never raised. Of course they didn't look Chinese. Rhys' hair had a reddish Celtic tinge although a great uncle of Arthur's on Joe's side had had orange hair. Henry was a bit moonfaced and sallow but that didn't distinguish him from lots of Eastern Jews. Of course both boys had been bullied anyway but would sooner have had teeth pulled than betray the schoolboy code and sneak. Anyway, Asians were one step above Natives, almost half-white although Hilary, passing the boys' toilets had overheard the tin-eared rhyme: "Stand at ease, bend your knees, fire at the Japanese."

The South African attitude to the English at this time was summed up in another urinous joke in which a man is trapped on the balcony of the bioscope and desperate for a pee. At last he can hold it in no longer and lets fly over the edge. Silence for a few minutes then there comes a pained English bleat from below: "I say, fair play old chap. Waggle it about a bit."

As for the mother country, the Queen as head of state, pounds shillings and pence, well, there was a bit of that but despite the token tables of obsolete weights and measures, of roods, poles and perches on the back of the childrens' excercise books, useful only to win bets on which was heavier, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers? Feathers, of course. Gold is weighed in troy weight. Then there was South Africa's own unit - the morgen. But the country mostly went her own sweet way within the commonwealth. Or was it, the fatherland, his? Hilary had only once seen unbridled Royalism - a woman who was walking out of a bioscope in Johannesburg while they were playing God Save the Queen had been painfully tripped up by an indignant matron's deftly poked umbrella.

Hilary's social contact with Afrikaners was pretty well limited to Van, whom she despised although he was always excessively polite and in fact secretly lusted after her. She couldn't stand his blatant contempt for "blerrie kaffirs" or his smarmy crawling to the rich and powerful. And his attempted blackmailing of Arthur had left a very nasty taste. On the other hand he was undeniably hospitable and had had them round to a braaivleis at his new house (Arthur had personally stood surety for the mortgage). The guests were, unusually, mixed English and Afrikaners and all on their best behaviour. The party immediately split up into men and women - the men to drink beer, cook Boerewors and talk about Rugby; and the women to flock together on the stoep, look to the salads and watermelon, eat, drink and skinder about knitting and immorality and babies. One of Van's nephews had charge of the record-player and treated the guests to a selection of Jim Reeves and Frankie Laine records.

Morrie had a story of how Frankie Laine, on his South African tour had eventually fetched up in Benoni: "Now you must understand that Frankie Laine was an Afrikaner idol - they worshipped the ground he walked on - so when this little bloke with the big Schnoz walks onto the stage there's a moment of stunned disbelief. Dead silence. Then at last there comes a voice from the back: 'God, maar hy's a lelike Jood!' (That means: God but he's an ugly Jew, Hilary). The audience nearly wet themselves laughing. The real joke, of course, is that Frankie Laine isn't Jewish at all. He's Italian!"

Van's party proved repulsive to Hilary on a number of counts. The usual segregation of the sexes was extremely tedious, she had to use all her selfcontrol not to slap one woman who treated the servants like dirt and the Country and Western music drove her mad; on the other hand, her anthropological bent had a good time. Most of the Afrikaners were provincial: big women in flowery dresses with fat insteps bulging out of their too small shoes, men with brawny sunburnt arms and sweat stains round the headbands of their dark green or brown felt hats. The respectability was initially a bit painful but the gossip soon picked up. A "fillum" at the "bioscope" was described as a "skop, skiet en donner" (kick, shoot and punch); an encapsulation of filmic violence which Mrs. Morpeth had not yet heard bettered although Joyce's "thud and blunder" came close. And there was no denying that these people were very hospitable. And Tant Hettie's melktert (a species of custard tart) was every bit as good as it was cracked up to be. Hilary had eaten Mopani worms and snake and even elephant's trunk but she had never warmed to biltong although Arthur and the boys weren't against the odd chew. One of the guests, a toothless old man, was happily munching a twisted black stick of dried Kudu-leg with his horny gums.

As for Van, his only sympathetic trait was that he loved nature and siezed every opportunity to load up his battered old Volksie with beer and provisions and head for the Kalahari. He became quite lyrical talking of the dry pans sprinkled with semiprecious stones like agates, jaspers, tiger's eye; the clear cold nights of a million stars; the pronking of the now sadly-rare Springbok. Van was often at the house as Arthur insisted on debriefing his agents as soon as anything new turned up, thus keeping one step ahead of his rivals. Once the Afrikaner noticed Hilary's interest in primitive art he started bringing her presents from his contacts with the Bushmen: a decorated ostrich egg, a fringed leather kaross, a bow with poison-tipped arrows. He always took a big bottle of aspirin and some sticking-plasters and tobacco for trading, all of which Hilary had herself found invaluable in the field. The Bushmen, Van told her, would smear themselves with the dung of the animal they were stalking and even dress in its skins to creep up close. If they managed to shoot a buck, the tip of the arrow was designed to come off and stick in the flesh. The Bushmen then had to track the frenzied animal for hours until the poison took effect and it collapsed and died. "Mrs. Morpeth" should be careful with the arrows but he knew that she would have wanted them in their original condition, ready for use. Hilary was, despite herself, touched. She honestly hadn't given it a thought that open contempt could be seductive but Van often had masturbatory fancies of his boss' vengeful wife sjamboking him, pissing in his mouth, driving the high heel of her long black boot into his groin. Hilary, for her part, had found him nauseatingly obsequious of late.

Van had supposedly resigned from his government post, but Hilary was sure he was still a paid informer. Van's heart, Morrie joked, was in the Riot Police. Hilary made no secret of her own political opinions, but she was careful not to compromise any of her would-be revolutionary friends. Of course she knew that it made no difference. There were government spies everywhere. Her car had been ostentatiously followed on three separate occasions and many of her friends were well aware of the fact that their telephones were tapped and their mail opened. The press was nominally free but intimidation and even the breaking up of type and vandalising of newspaper offices was not unknown. In any case the papers had to please their white readers and advertisers who actually quite liked their privileged position. The Nats, like the Nazis before them, went to considerable lengths to give their poisonous doctrines a veneer of legality which fooled no-one. Despite South Africa's loud championing of capitalism, the atmosphere reminded Hilary of nothing so much as the Soviet Union with the dour Calvinism of the Dutch Reformed Church greying the bright blue skies like the corruption and misery of communism.

The secret life of the "natives" in the locations was something else again. She had pressed Arthur into asking Walter to take them to a shebeen in Alexandra township where the best township music was to be heard. Walter Modisane was a black businessman whom Arthur had made a point of discreetly cultivating insofar as the stupidities of Apartheid would permit. After all, there was plenty of money to be made out of even the impoverished blacks. Arthur was fond of the story of the concentration-camp inmate who had taken on the job of dividing up the bread for the workgangs. He took no actual portions of bread himself, but he was allowed to keep the crumbs. He waxed fat (well, he lived) while his comrades shrank to walking skeletons and died. There was a moral there. Walter readily agreed to take them, while regretting that they had been unable to visit Sophiatown in its prime. Sophiatown had been a mixed-race suburb like District Six and was, as such, an affront to the ideal of racial purity of Apartheid. The original inhabitants (black, brown,white and yellow, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew) had been driven out under the Group Areas Act. In 1955 Sophiatown was bulldozed and became the lower-class white suburb of Triomf. Now Alexandra itself was rumoured to be under threat. It was too close to Joburg for comfort. The idea was to keep the "Bantu" workers in easily-policed camps like Soweto out in the middle of the veld. This meant that people had to get up at four in the morning to squeeze onto the crime-ridden buses and trains which delivered them to their work in plush white homes, shops and factories. Walter drove his white friends down potholed dirt roads in his old Ford Fairlaine. The car had been a mixed blessing. It got Walter away from the trains with people hanging on the outside and tsotsis inside who were quite capable of robbing you and sticking a sharpened bicycle spoke in your spine, leaving you permanently paralysed. In the car, on the other hand, he was often stopped by the police for nonexistent traffic violations and after the usual harrassment was let off with a spot fine. Two days ago an allegedly faulty headlight had cost him twenty pounds. The Morpeths sat in the back. In a land where park benches were divided into blankes and nie-blankes, Europeans and non-Europeans, to share a car seat with someone of another race was, to say the least, injudicious. The air was thick with sulphurous coalsmoke. Row upon row of squalid little houses; dirt roads; open sewers. A thin sprinkling of tiny, expensive corner shops (from which Walter drew some income). Not many people were about at this time on a cold highveld-winter night. At last the car wallowed to a queasy halt. Walter took them round the back of a shop selling traditional medicines (another pie in which he had a finger) to a large storeroom which had been converted into the most primitive of nightclubs. Walter spoke earnestly to the man at the door and after a moment's discreet appraisal they were allowed in. It was jam-packed. In the middle of the floor, sharply-dressed blacks jived to Township Music. A table was hastily cleared for the white visitors from England (as Walter had wisely introduced them). There was no trouble, although there were one or two scowls. No sooner were they settled than a couple of young men came over and launched into a long rigmarole of horrifying grievances. Drinks and peanuts were pressed upon sympathetic tourists from overseas. Around them bodies pulsed to the music. It was a relief to be among temporarily wild, abandoned people, free of the stifling corsets of white respectability. Even Arthur had a comforting sense of coming home to Tiger Bay (now also demolished and renamed Butetown) which he had never felt for the real thing. Marcel, Hilary thought, would have loved it. The air was heavy with smoke and sweat and cheap perfume as well as Vaseline, Zambuk and the sour mealie-meal smell of Bantu beer. The men wore zoot suits and two-tone brogues, the women sweaters and berets and clinging, knee-length skirts with their feet either forced into pointy-toed high heels or spreading into what Hilary called plimsolls and South Africans, "tackies". There were a few felicities of South African English, mused Hilary. "Tackie" "Tickey" for thrupenny bit, "robot" for traffic-light, and so on. She had heard a Mayfair ducktail warn off an argumentative young thug with: "Don't chune (tune) me grief, poeslap". A poeslap was a sanitary towel. "Don't check me skeef" (look at me in a wry way) was another piquant phrase she had jotted down. Henry had come out with: "My heart pumps vrot custard for you" as an expression of lack of sympathy.

Arthur and Walter were already in earnest financial conclave so Hilary watched the dancing. They jived superbly. Fooweeeee, went the pennywhistle, wheet tewheedle wheedle whoo.... Skokiaan that tune was called, after the hellbrew served up by the shebeens. Hilary was cautiously sipping a glass of it now. Skok, someone had told her, was Afrikaans for shock although the word more probably came from one of the eighty African languages spoken on the Reef. But skok was what she felt as the mingled toxins seared her system. Walter stuck to an occasional nip from his sterling-silver hip-flask of White Horse whisky while Arthur nursed a tepid Bantu Beer - the low-alcohol drink of fermented maize which was the only alcohol legally available to "Bantu" people. Arthur had brewery shares and liked to keep tabs on the product.

A man in a dark suit and darker glasses at a corner table beckoned to Walter who jumped up, apologised hurriedly to his guests and trotted over. They talked, Walter cravenly respectful, the evident gangster with lordly scorn. In a minute, Walter bustled back to their table with an invitation to join an "uncle" of his, a very important local personage. As they approached the table, two of the three other men got up and withdrew a short distance, in best Hollywood style.

Their host rose to his feet and stuck out his hand. "Joko Mboya ati your sehvice. Welcome to Elexandra. You like-i thees club?"

"Morpeth," said Arthur shaking hands. "Arthur Morpeth. Yes, I must say I have found this visit fascinating."

"Hau, they are liking eeti too much," piped up Walter enthusiastically.

"I love the music and the atmosphere," confirmed Hilary shaking hands in her turn and using the clasp, thumbtwiddle, clasp of the native handshake which Joko found hilarious. "I must say I much prefer this Township music to the pale imitations of American Jazz which you tend to hear everywhere else."

Hilary had been disappointed to find that there was no obvious link between African music and Jazz, although Louis Armstrong had done a version of Skokiaan. Traditional African music was an ongoing thing with little conception of a beginning and end. The servants would happily play the same record (itself repetitive to the point of hypnosis) over and over all Sunday afternoon without a hint of boredom. Such aspects of polyphony and chord-progression as existed had been introduced by missionaries and imported popular music. Which was not to say that indigenous music wasn't wonderful, although like all folk art it was disappearing fast, but that it required a completely different approach to listening.

They sat down. A bottle of fizzy wine and a couple of beautiful girls appeared and the party took off. Between flowery mutual compliments and overloud laughter the visitors from England were fed a further list of nonwhite grievances - pass laws, poor education, job reservation and the thousand and one insulting and terrifying daily trials of Apartheid. It didn't take much to wind Hilary up to a fierce indignation. She had often seen the patrolling police wagons, heralded by a bow wave of "illegal" immigrants running down alleys and jumping over walls, shouting warnings as they fled. A black policeman stood on the running-board of the van ready to leap off in pursuit of anyone caught in the open without a pass. And when one of the women described having to send her child home to the Transkei as she was forbidden by both law and her employers to keep him with her, Hilary suddenly broke down crying. Arthur comforted her as best he could. After a minute, she shook her head, blew her nose and siezing a young man who had been staring hostilely at them the whole time, led him onto the dancefloor and threw herself with what John Lennon would later call "wild abdomen" into the jiving. Ernest was completely won over. Afterwards, he told her that he was a radical who had been thrown out of his job in a factory in Port Elizabeth for trying to organise a strike. He was now working for Joko who was a tsotsi who extorted money from his own people but who was at least prepared to use it in the struggle against apartheid. After that, Mrs. Morpeth's memories were a jumble of fragments.

The hangover next morning had been ferocious. Perhaps the rumours that skokiaan included among its ingredients carbide and dead babies were not as fanciful as she'd imagined.

Arthur was up bright and early, the swine. He liked to get some work done on a Sunday before the family arrived for lunch and his long talks with Joko and later Walter, had given him a lot to ponder. Joko was, of course, a murderous thug but Walter had told him that he ran a big organisation with some efficiency. Gangsterism, as communist propaganda lost no opportunity to point out, seemed endemic to capitalism. On the other hand, Arthur knew many villains who had used their ill-gotten gains as stepping-stones to legitimate business. Some had done very well indeed. Joseph Kennedy, for instance, sometime American Ambassador to Britain, had made the family fortune by bootlegging and liquor-smuggling during Prohibition. That money later bought his son the presidency of the United States. And Gangsterism imposed a limited control on anarchy. After all, successful crime involved business skills like ruthlessness, salesmanship, bookkeeping and punctuality. Arthur recognised that South Africa's cheap, abundant and unorganised labour was a major magnet for investment but he also saw that with the advance of technology an increasingly educated workforce would be needed. And education sowed the dragon's teeth.

Chapter 14.

"Pity," thought Mrs. Morpeth coldly, "perhaps Nietzsche was right about pity."

The old woman in the bed opposite had finally died and her daughter, herself quite long in the tooth (Mrs. Morpeth was amused at a metaphor made flesh) was agonising to Dr. Chatterjee.

"I still feel awful about putting her in here," she sniffled, "but she'd gone completely senile. It got so that she didn't recognise me, her own daughter. She wouldn't even let me feed her - just backed into a corner and snarled at me like an animal."

She broke down whimpering. Dr. Chatterjee cautiously patted her shoulder and murmured some soothing nothings.

It would be so easy to get sucked into a weepy weltschmertz. At least the old woman's daughter had visited her every day; but then perhaps a heavily sedated dripfed zombie was easier to cope with than one with all her marbles and a problematically nonfatal injury. No, dammit. She couldn't take even selfpity seriously. Mrs. Morpeth had flirted with the boiling black clouds of apocalyptic despair several times in her life but her spirit was less Titanic nosediving into an icy sea than sucked-down champagne corks bobbing up again. Doom-mongering ran through the twentieth century, adding its salt and vinegar to the greasy chips of complacency. Even the great tragedies of her life, the deaths of her brothers, her parents and worst of all Arthur, had proved surmountable, had in fact widened and deepened her sympathies with other people and her enjoyment of the arts. The black ink woodcut clouds became black velvet. The long, soothing dark eventually brought a new dawn. But there was something missing; her still-open wounds tired her.

A porter wheeled in the breakfast trolley to general apathy. They all knew what to expect: The soggy cornflakes, with sugar and milk already added; the tepid tinned tomatoes (which Mrs. Morpeth had overheard the porters call "haemorrhoids"); congealing baked beans; leathery white toast and dry yet somehow still watery squares of omelette. The terminal ward didn't eat much and Dai, the big, redfaced porter soon wheeled away the ample remains to the Porters' Mess. (This was a perk enjoyed by the porters ever since the government had banned the use of waste food for pigswill).

Mrs. Morpeth had got to know most of the porters in the few weeks she'd been in hospital. All had their weaknesses (some were heavy drinkers and there were a couple of potential alcoholics) but all were good with the patients with just the right mixture of compassion and cheerfulness - something the doctors often bungled.

Dai would have reached the Porters' Mess by now. Mrs. Morpeth, her curiosity stronger than her sense of propriety, unplugged the pipe.

"...ol' shitty we calls 'er. Went to lift her out of bed the other day an' she shit in my 'and. I said to Jonesy we ought to be paid time and a turd."

Mr. Lloyd that was. The dapper old porter with the deerstalker hat who had reportedly got drunk at Christmas and chased the nurses round the ward. On Monday she'd heard him unsuccessfully trying to borrow a fiver from someone till the end of the week.

"We earn the poxy wages they pay for this poxy fucking job, that's for sure." Robbo. Ex-signwriter and resident sex-maniac.

"OK, there's a lot of sitting around, but when we do work it's fucking hard graft," he continued. "Not like those lazy fucking Ambulance drivers."

Being a mainly Geriatric hospital, the ambulances were what management called an under-utilised resource.

"Whose turn is it to get the biscuits?" another voice boomed. "Must have a biscuit. This tea's too wet without it." Mrs. Morpeth smiled. Something about the pipe nagged at her. Was it like the quaint speaking-tube that Phileas Fogg had used for talking to Passepartout in the film of Around the World in Eighty Days? No. Perhaps more like the hole that Dionysios, tyrant of Syracuse had had bored from his bedhead down to the quarry prison below so that the groans of his enemies could lull him to sleep. They did say that eavesdroppers heard only ill of themselves. The narrator in Remembrance of Things Past had overheard his old nurse, whose utter devotion and unquestioning love had been one of the mainstays of his life, as taken for granted as the daily sunrise, say that he wasn't worth the price of a rope to hang him. Mrs. Morpeth remembered a lecture which a writer friend (and onetime lover) had given on problems in writing. One, for instance, was how to let characters discover things, another was letting them tell the truth. Learning things was easy. One could deploy overhearing or erudition or inspiration or betrayal or coincidence, but to make a credible character speak the truth was much more difficult. Comedy was one way of doing it, or interior monologue or the Holy Fool like Candide or Dostoievsky's Idiot. The important thing was to remember that no-one ever spoke the truth in the normal course of events. It had to be disguised, hinted at, hidden, denied.

Oh no! Someone had turned on the porters' TV. The radio, at (she surmised) the other end of the room was tolerable - but the "box" was right by the pipe. Mrs. Morpeth regretfully replaced her newspaper bung.

The morning post had brought her a letter from Morrie's widow, Leah, condoling on her fall and imploring her to come out to South Africa, all expenses paid, to recuperate. She was, of course, welcome to stay for as long as she liked. Leah would love to see her again. Back in the old Joburg days, Hilary had hit it off with Leah who was a tough little Israeli. She and Morrie had met at a kibbutz outing to the Dead Sea on Morrie's first trip to Israel. Morrie had been seriously considering immigration. Leah, on the other hand, was fed up with idealism and back-breaking physical work. It was fine for Morrie to play at Kibbutz life, but Leah was a trained bookkeeper and felt herself wasted on menial jobs which any village Arab could have done better. And she was tired of the perpetual militarism of Israeli society. She had lived through the second world war in Odessa (where some of her family had been wiped out by the tsarist Black Hundreds in 1906) and then she and her parents had grabbed at a lucky chance to emigrate to the new state of Israel. Like Hilary, both Leah's brothers had been killed in a World War - the Second rather than the First, as it happened. Moishe Aaronson, Leah's father, was a fanatical Zionist and for this reason and because there was a limited demand for furriers in Israel, they had ended up on a kibbutz growing oranges and mucking out battery chickens. Leah was thirteen when they landed at Haifa, a dreamy and emotional Russian adolescent but already aware of many shortcomings in the socialist view. Her years in Israel had transformed her into a tough little realist. Although not born there, Leah soon passed for a typical Sabra (cactus). In Leah's case it was the barrel cactus which sprang to mind. Leah was brisk, decisive, efficient. Next to her most white South African women seemed slack and lazy and slow-witted. Even Morrie was a little in awe of her as despite his mordant wit he was fundamentally cautious and easygoing. Leah had soon talked him out of moving to Israel. Instead, he had taken her back to South Africa with him. After all, if the balloon went up there, he had a good sum squirreled away in a Swiss bank and life in South Africa was meanwhile, despite (or perhaps because of) the atrocities of the Nationalist government, exceedingly pleasant.

Asked why such a passionate Zionist didn't go and live in Israel, Morrie was flippantly wont to reply that he couldn't stand falaffel. No, but seriously, it was a marvellous country. They had literally made the desert bloom. The latest scheme for irrigating the Negev would not only feed the whole country but provide huge surpluses for export. As for himself, Israel already had a surfeit of lawyers and he felt he could do more for Eretz Yisroel by staying put and raising money and support. All the same, Morrie had been gravely troubled by the Israeli missile expert whom he'd met in Wolmarans Street shul one Yom Kippur. The man had let slip that he'd been seconded to the South African Army. Morrie of course quite understood that Israel was surrounded by enemies and had to take her friends where she could find them. As the South African government had allowed a considerable outflow of Jewish monies to Israel, it was naive to suppose that they would expect nothing in return. Anyway, it was sad but true that if South Africa didn't purchase Israeli weapons and expertise, then the French, Americans and British were only too ready to supply same. Anything, Morrie protested too much, for Israel's survival. It was Morrie who had helped convince Arthur to underwrite some secret Czech weapons purchases during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. This was in spite of the supposed British embargo. The Israelis were outnumbered a biblical forty to one and the Arabs were assumed to enjoy a clear superiority of weapons. Arthur had heard otherwise but would nevertheless have refused Morrie's surreptitious request had he not, in the teeth of general opinion, considered an Israeli victory likely.

Hilary liked Morrie. He was a tolerant and humane man (except in matters Israeli) who was always prepared to offer free advice and often practical help to his own servants, the friends of his servants and the servants of his friends in many of their multitudinous legal troubles. He was a founder member of the Progressive Party in 1959 and a friend and supporter of Helen Suzman. Mrs. Morpeth could remember the last time she had seen him. Fifty-six, was it? Shortly after one of the Israeli wars anyway. Morrie was lying in a steamer chair by the poolside with his thinning frizzy hair and wobbly pink paunch (or "corporation" as Arthur's business associates were jocularly wont to refer to it. More dignified than the demotic Beer-Boep.)

"Don't talk to me from the Civil Service," she remembered him saying with ironic Yiddish syntax, "it's more like the uncivil lack-of-service."

Morrie had what was called "an excellent command of the English language" and he liked wordplay. He talked of g-knives and k-forks and could always be relied on to amuse the kids with Spoonerisms, puns or palindromes. (A man, a plan, a canal: Panama. Or, able was I ere I saw Elba.) He spoke of the Much Deformed (Dutch Reformed) Church and of the quaint old Japanese custom of hurry-scurry. Morrie was well versed in the wit of both the old and new worlds. His bookshelves housed cartoon albums from the New Yorker, Esquire, Punch as well as writings by S.J. Perelman, Stephen Leacock and Bennett Cerf. There were anthologies of humour and collections of the witty sayings of Wilde and Twain and Shaw. Morrie was also a great teller of Jewish jokes. One swam now into Mrs. Morpeth's ken:

"Issy and Abie decide to go to America to seek their fortune. Nu, they're in the middle of the ocean when a storm blows up and the ship goes down. Issy clings to a bit of wreckage and is eventually rescued, but his friend Abie has meanwhile vanished gorengansen \- not a trace. Issy gets to New York and goes into the shmatter trade where he does very well. Twenty years pass. By now Issy is a wealthy man. He decides to take a world cruise. Once again, he's in the middle of the ocean; once again a freak storm blows up; once again he is washed overboard. But this time Issy wakes up to find himself on a desert island - and there looking down at him is his old friend Abie! Although he is dressed in goatskins with long payess and a beard, Issy recognises him at once. Well, Abie carries Issy back to his hut and puts him in his own bed and nurses him back to health. As soon as Issy is fit, Abie takes him for a guided tour of the island. He points out his vegetable plot, his goats, his water supply. 'And as you know, Issy - because there is more to life than material needs,' he says, 'over there I've built myself a shul where I can worship my God.'

'Very nice,' says Issy, 'and what's that building over there behind it?'

'Oh, that,' Abie shrugs dismissively. "That's nothing. It's only the old shul.' "

Mrs. Morpeth chuckled. Arthur had over the years considered it politic to contribute to the building of at least four new shuls. She hadn't understood the joke at first but it had become better over the years. She missed Morrie although he'd been well on the road to intolerable smugness when cancer tapped him on the shoulder. As for Leah, one of the images that had inexplicably stayed with Mrs. Morpeth was that of her friend trying to teach a dozen children the Hora. It was a hot day. The poolside speakers assaulted the air with the strains (and strain) of a truly appalling Israeli record. Arthur winced at the distortion. He had gone to a lot of trouble and expense to have a HiFi system fitted and he hated to have its Leak and Pye and Tannoy and Ortofon components insulted by poor recordings. In the fierce sunshine the circle of dancers raggedly kicked and twisted. It couldn't honestly be said that white South Africans had rhythm. Leah drove the children with vigour until the record mercifully ended. The group broke up and Leah came and flopped next to Hilary in the shade of a dusty oak.

They lit up a couple of Hilary's Gitanes.

"The Hora," Hilary asked with interest, "is it a traditional Jewish dance?"

"No. Fake. From Romania already. One of the most antisemitic countries in the world. The trouble is," Leah flapped a dismissive hand, "that in Israel you have Jews from Europe, Asia, America, Africa so the state has to manufacture a common culture. To bring Sephardis and Ashkenazis together is hard enough, let alone either one with Yemeni and Ethiopian Jews. I fostered a little Yemeni girl once. When she arrived she was dressed in filthy rags and literally, and I mean literally, crawling with vermin. I bathed her, I combed her hair, I rubbed in paraffin. I dressed her in pretty new clothes. I left her alone while I went to find clean pillowcases. I couldn't have been gone for more than five minutes but when I returned I found she'd climbed straight back into her old rags! To use the same word Jew to cover these medieval people and, say, a New York businessman is stretching it more than somewhat as Morrie would say. Polish Jews hate Litvaks, German Jews despise Russian Jews and why? Because they're Germans and Russians as well as Jews. But the next generation's already different. As for the hora, the Romanian dance has far greater social significance in its home country. Israelis just dance the Hora because it's easy and fun. Anyone can do it."

"Except perhaps white South Africans," sidemouthed Hilary.

Leah laughed. "Some more so than others. I name no names. Anyway too much is aimed at the lowest common denominator. On the other hand it's good that classical concertgoing is much more informal. Israel has some of the best musicians in the world. Anyone can go to the concerts - and they do. People come in off the street in sandals and shorts. There's none of the stuffed-shirt atmosphere you get over here where you feel like you're in shul."

"Indeed." Hilary thought of the timid, conventional world of the white South African arts. Trechikoff had found his spiritual home here all right. "Yes I think you're on to something there, Leah. You look around at concerts and see businessmen entertaining their clients, both parties bored out of their minds but pretending to be sophisticated. Or the men brought along by their pushy wives sitting there looking as miserable as a well-trained bloodhound told to wait outside the butcher shop. Not to mention the dreary repertoire. I must say that for me the wartime concerts in London were the best I ever attended. It wasn't simply that the music was superb, it was that it mattered. It focused all the passions of the war. Perhaps that's why it's so good in Israel."

"There are lots of good things about Israel but lots of stupidity as well. I tell Morrie but he doesn't listen. You're a good listener."

"That's the first thing you learn as an anthropologist. The second is that your work will be stolen and used to oppress the very people you have been studying. So, what are the bad things about Israel?"

"Well, for instance, that the Zionists couldn't Godforbid use Yiddish which was already an established literary language spoken by the majority of westernised Jews. Oh no. We had to have Hebrew - a language which hasn't been spoken as a vernacular for over two thousand years but is revived to unite people who all come from different linguistic and cultural traditions. We should have gone for Esperanto. If you ask me, the thing that makes Israel really Jewish is the hatred of all our neighbours. A history of persecution - now that really is the one thing we all have in common. Peace with the Arab world would be the end. Oh, Israel would survive but it would have less and less to do with being a Jewish state and more and more to do with being another little middle-eastern country, albeit much more highly developed than most of its neighbours." Leah was an intelligent woman. She spoke five languages: Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, English, French as well as a passable Kitchen Kaffir. She had picked up a smattering of legalese from Morrie and tended to stud her conversation with "whereases" and "notwithstandings". She had come a long way since first captivating Morrie by referring to a kitten as a puppy cat.

Morrie had died relatively young, devoured by lung cancer which had spread undetected through his body like an underground peat fire. The fact that he had long since given up smoking added an ironic tinge to the tragedy. Perhaps the Joburg air, gritty with the dust of many minedumps, was to blame (during the last war unsuccessful attempts had been made to grass over the glaring dumps but the cyanide left after gold-extraction had killed off the plants. That also explained why there were no fish in Cinderella dam.) Morrie's state of mind hadn't helped. He had been deeply depressed since going out to Israel in the wake of Sharpeville and finding that he couldn't adapt to the change in standard of living which aliyah would have entailed. Leah once more persuaded him to return to South Africa where he soon sickened and died, fortunately leaving his family well provided for. Arthur's immediately proffered financial assistance had been gratefully declined. Leah now lived in a flat in Sandton where, she said, she need never look at another plant or animal ever again. Kibbutz life had left an ineradicable brand on her. Leah had found even their suburban garden and the children's pets a trial and had lived for the flourishing secretarial agency which she had run for years. Now she had retired, tired. Leah's Hora-dancing days were done, thought Mrs. Morpeth sadly. And what of the rest of the mishpochah as Morrie called the extended family? Hilary must have met a hundred relations and relations of relations and people whose uncle had come from the same Polish village as someone else's grandfather. Many of the younger generation had left South Africa for America, the UK or Israel in that order of preference. Morrie and Leah's younger daughter Judith had gone off to Israel, married a very frum boy and begun to breed. She had five children so far. She had brought them up strictly kosher. When they came with their mother to visit Leah they brought their own food, plates, utensils. Kosher scouring-powder (called, with onomatopoeic aptness, Frum). Segal's kosher sausages weren't kosher enough for them. The eldest boy showed disturbing signs of racism. He had, Leah wrote, a teeshirt with "Death to Arabs" written on it in Hebrew. Still, to bring up a child eating only kosher Israeli chocolate - no wonder he'd turned out a little Nazi. No, no. She was joking. He was a lovely boy really. She only hoped he would outgrow his ugly bigotry.

Mrs. Morpeth thought that despite the occasional hateful upsurge of racism things were generally getting better although it was salutary to see how, say, Serbs and Muslims who had rubbed along as neighbours for years could be transformed into genocidal fiends overnight. Still, children born of interracial and intercultural parents were on the ascendant and most people probably thought that they should feel less racist than they in fact did. Was this because of consumerism, easy travel, universal education? Or rather that homogenisation had crushed true culture and replaced it with pastiche Heritage? The difference between, say, a West African fertility bracelet and the chunky knitwear and whimsical pottery of the average Welsh Craft Shop. "I know they say the Welsh are crafty," she had told the (English) owner of one of these establishments, " but this is ridiculous." The porters, from snatches of overheard conversation, seemed refreshingly free of racial prejudice.

"Naw. I got noth-in' gainst black boys. When I was in the Ford factory in Bridgend, the sweatbox we used to call it, I'd just ahs soon ahve a bevvy with a blackie as with anyone else."

"Remember Kirby, thaht Jamaican porter?" another voice broke in. "He wouldn't stand for no shit. Remember how he pitched into Hughie when he said something about niggers? Not thaht the boy's nasty, mind, just twp."

"Aye. There's dull thaht boy is. Thick ahs two short plahnks, poor dab. He asked me where soil came from ahnd I tawld him thaht when the dinosaurs were around they were so heavy thaht they crushed the rocks when they walked on them. Ahnd 'e ahctually believed me. Went an' told Phil after. Now, who's comin' up the pub for a pint?"

That left the more responsible few porters to tut-tut about the jailbird who'd been hired to clean out the constipated hospital sewers. He had proudly told them about his seven-year-old son. A plumber had come round to fix some leaking pipes and whenever he put down any fittings for a moment, they seemed to disappear. He couldn't understand it. After the man had gone, the boy showed his father the cache of tees and elbows in his bed. Big joke. Disgraceful it was to bring up a kiddy like that.

On went the TV. Mrs. Morpeth sighed and plugged in her crumpled bung. The gnawing pain in her hip was back. Distraction, distraction. How would she describe, say, the colour-scheme of the ward. Well, green and green. Ersatz avocado and dyspeptic lime. Mm. Avocado and lime. How long since she and Arthur had eaten sunwarmed avocadoes scooped out of their hard, warty, greenblack shells? Sitting in the shade of the tree from which they'd just been picked. Salt and pepper and a drizzle of lime-juice. That time in Salisbury (now Harare) in Harry Newman's garden. Arthur had been enthusiastic about Rhodesia before UDI, considering it a possible model for Africa. There were even government regulations about the minimum rations for staff - absurd mollycoddling from a South African point of view. A joke, which Harry swore was a true story, concerned an educated African who walks into a butchery. "Well, the chap behind the counter says: 'Yes, my boy.' Perfectly politely you know, meant nothing by it. Anyway this Af explodes: 'I am not your boy or anybody's boy. I am a full-grown man.' 'I'm sorry, sir. I assure you that I meant nothing by it. Now then, what can I get you?' 'Give me two pounds of boys' meat.'"

Collapse of stout party.

It was God's own country, Rhodesians often told her, and pointed out the friendliness of "our Africans" compared to the sullen staff "down South". Harry's garden would have been a contender for Eden. As well as avocadoes and limes, Harry grew pawpaws, oranges, grenadillas and no end of flowers and vegetables. Although employing two gardenboys, Harry was most unusual in doing much of the work himself. Gardening was not the strong point of most white Africans - it being decidedly infra to dig. Getting one's hands dirty was reserved for Our Black Bretheren. Hilary, who loved plants, had tried to improve the garden of their house in Joburg as far as possible within the restrictive terms of the lease. After all, the owners having spent a fortune on plants from all over the world weren't going to have their tasteless juxtapositions of palm and pine, cactus and fern interfered with. Mrs. Morpeth remembered the red earth, the beds of Cannas, the hanging datura trumpets (were they called moonflowers?) fragrant at dusk. She had grown irises from skyblue to black. And French and African Marigolds, both, it had amused her to discover, from Mexico. There were Australian Eucalyptus, Japanese maples, a single gingko. And English roses and Hydrangeas. Underfoot was the coarse Kikuyu grass which had been introduced to South Africa by the statesman and botanist, General Smuts. In the winter the lawns shed little papery husks which were hell to pick off woolly skirts and jumpers. Mrs. Morpeth's mind jumped to Arthur's ruined picnic. It was a Thursday afternoon in the school holidays. Arthur had given all the servants the day off and Van had offered to take the boys fishing on the Vaal dam. They were, for the first time in five years, alone together in the afternoon. Arthur had organised champagne, garlic polony, watermelon and some of Tant Hettie's famous koeksusters. The rest came from Fatti and Moni's delicatessen. There was enough food for ten. They'd gone to a hedged-in bit of garden, pretentiously called the croquet lawn, to play at being young and foolish again (or, in Arthur's case, for the first time). Hilary smoked some dagga which Laurence had sanctimoniously confiscated from John, the nightwatchman. Arthur had severely reprimanded John for the look of the thing, while Hilary kept the evidence. It was Durban Poison again so Hilary was cautious, but the effect of even a quarter of a stick was violently disorientating. The rumble of traffic on nearby Louis Botha Avenue seemed suddenly ominous. Doves cooed hoarsely in the clump of dusty pines. In the fifties the anti-drug hysteria of the sixties and seventies was unthought of but smoking dagga was nevertheless a criminal activity. Dagga, Van had once casually remarked, was mainly smoked by "kaffers" although it was also, funnily enough, an old Boere remedy for asthma. That bastard. He must know she still enjoyed the odd smoke. He would be quite capable of tipping off the police "druk squat" if it was to his advantage. The lantana bushes might be crawling with them at this very moment. No, no. Arthur, her sheet anchor, was there. The panic ebbed and she began to enjoy herself. She was ravenous. After a splendid lunch they had ended up rolling partially clothed on the grass (being winter, the bright sun had not altogether burned the chill out of the air and the earth was cold). Hilary was on all fours while Arthur playfully butted her arsehole with the tip of his cock, pretending he had lost her pussy. Hilary wanted him inside her, filling her up to the cervix with a hunger that verged on nausea. Suddenly there was an earsplitting bark and Vinston, the dog who had come with the house, was upon them. He had somehow got out of the back yard again (by in fact wedging his huge head under the gate and lifting it far enough off its hinges to scramble through underneath). Vinston was a white British Bulldog whose looks terrified all the local servants while concealing a heart of marshmallow.

"I've got a soft spot for that dog," Morrie would tease the children, "it just hasn't been dug yet."

Vinston had been named by his former owner, a Dutch Coffee Magnate and fervent admirer of Churchill. Half as a joke, the mispronunciation had stuck and even Morrie would eventually admit, given Vinston's predilection for kichlech and chopped liver, that he was at heart a Yiddishe hund.

"Ugh! Yuk!" cried Hilary, wiping slobber from her ear. She jumped up while Vinston raked Arthur's naked thigh with his eager scrabbling.

"Down Sir," commanded Arthur, trying simultaneously to dislodge the too too solid dog and to pull up his underpants and trousers over a rapidly-shrivelling erection. Arthur was not a dog lover in general and certainly not a lover of the kind of dog which was apt to come and lay its slobbery chops in one's immaculately trousered lap and gaze soulfully up into one's eyes, certain, despite innumerable rejections, of a return of love. But it was impossible to stay angry with the grotesque albino beast. Vinston combined a simple, confiding nature with an almost total lack of intellect. He capered around them clownishly on his bandy legs. "Wubbah," he barked. "Wubbah, wubbah, wubbah." And the wild foam flew. Hilary collapsed laughing onto Arthur's grey-haired chest and wrung from him a thwarted chuckle. They gave up. There was nothing to be done but get dressed and try to brush off the husks of grass. Mrs. Morpeth, lying in her stale hospital bed some forty years on, felt an almost unbearable poignancy. Wintry sunshine, the husks with their sweet smell of hay or of the windswept piles of stronke on the highveld farms after the mealies had been threshed. They'd gone up to the bedroom later, locking Vinston out, but it hadn't been one of their better couplings. Vinston spent ages scratching at the door and whining before giving a deep sigh and falling into a wheezy, snoring version of canine sleep apnoea which quite put Arthur off his stroke. He was pretty good for a man in his fifties. He didn't tell Hilary how tired he felt the next day.

Poor Vinston. The boys, particularly Henry, had been heartbroken when he was run over. It was an American banking acquaintance of Arthur's, Mrs. Morpeth remembered, the unfortunately-named Habukkuk ("No thanks," she'd wanted to reply on introduction, "I had one first thing this morning") MacDonald. Vinston, who could not be cured of chasing cars, broke his collar and raced after the black Lincoln Continental with a tearful Henry in his wake. To the animal's everlasting credit, his teeth had actually punctured the whitewall tyre before the wheel rolled over his head. Vinston, thrown clear, had twitched a little then was still, his broken jaw set in a leer, the eyes sunk in their pouchy sockets already dulling over. Buck, as Mr. McDonald liked to be known, had been very upset and had offered to buy them a new dog when they had recovered from their loss, but the Morpeths insisted it was simply an accident and no-one was to blame although Arthur hadn't hesitated to subtly abuse Buck's sense of guilt in their subsequent business dealings.

Henry had at that time been going through a religious phase and had turned tiresomely orthodox. He insisted on giving Vinston a proper Jewish burial. Hilary had been a little worried, but realised that it was due to insecurity and to a wish to belong. Perhaps sending them to a Jewish school had been a bad idea but King David was supposed to be one of the best schools in the country. Henry's religiosity had persisted until his barmitzvah, five years after their return to the UK. Luckily he'd been circumcised as a baby (by a doctor, for what Arthur considered hygienic reasons. Arthur had only once attended a briss and had sworn never again, being appalled at its barbarism) so Henry's formal adoption into the Jewish faith was accompanied by nothing more than a token nick on the penis. Rhys had shown no interest whatever in religion and had been allowed (at the expense of some hushed family scandal) to go his own way. Henry's barmitzvah had been a nightmare. The boy had desperately wanted her to convert to Judaism and so doubly legitimise him and she had at last agreed. The Rabbi had, as was customary, tried three times to dissuade her, but eventually she had undergone a perfunctory course of instruction and had cynically become a fully paid-up Jewess - although she always called herself an atheist unless there was a nearby anti-Semite to irk. Here, in a Welsh hospital, religion was rife. Mrs. Morpeth had casually mentioned to Dr. Stern that her late husband had been half-Jewish. One of the nurses later returned to inform her, with the utmost earnestness, that there would never be peace on earth until all the Jews were converted. She proffered some revealed literature but was jocularly rebuffed. Mrs. Morpeth supposed that in a backwater like Wales there must still be pockets of the crippling superstition excoriated by Caradoc Evans, (black-coated deacons referring to themselves as photographs of God and so on). Not unlike the South African branch of the Dutch Reform Church's convenient conviction that the sons of Ham were indeed the foreordained hewers of wood and drawers of water mentioned in the Bible (although, to be fair, the Dominees had eventually recanted).

At the end of 1958 the Morpeths returned to England. After Henry's barmitzvah he went off to a new secular school in Surrey and lost, thank God, interest in religion. The barmitzvah had cost a fortune. Arthur had made a substantial donation to the shul in which he'd never previously set foot, then there had been the hall, the caterers, theBeth Din (or kosher police) and the band. The ceremony followed precedent. Hilary had been to a few barmitzvahs in South Africa and they'd been pretty ghastly, stuck up with the overdressed gals in the gallery while the kid tunelessly sang his bit in the torah in a language which neither he nor most of the congregation understood. Then the reception and the speeches.

The Rabbi: "My dear, um," (consults card) "Moshe," (or whatever Hebrew name was thought to correspond more or less closely to the boy's real name: Michael or Anthony, "I am reminded of the words of the great Maimonides... Today I am a man... enter into responsibilities... "

The Barmitzvah boy: "I would like to thank... especially... particularly... unfortunately not able to be here with us today... Last but not least....

The joke: "Today I am a fountain pen."

The ill-at-ease fathers and uncles being prompted through some long-forgotten (or, in Arthur's case, never learnt) ceremonies. But they had scrambled through. As for Henry, by the time he came to join the police he had taking to describing himself, if the subject was unavoidable, as lapsed C-of-E; a label shrugged off by his mother. The occasional antisemitism of his brother officers provoked no comment ("There's another one of those slimy bastards" his Sergeant invariably piped up whenever a prominent Jew appeared on the telly) although his secret was far more generally guessed than he might have imagined. He voted Tory. Arthur had usually voted Liberal and Morpeth, Flint and Gundry had no qualms about managing share portfolios for two of the bigger unions. Arthur considered the grammar of business far more important than the mere vocabulary. He had always been openminded. That, thought Mrs. Morpeth was the difference between him and his younger son, now a middleaged and muddleheaded man. Arthur was always prepared to change his mind if proved wrong: Henry just buried his head further in the sand of his current justification. Unemployment hadn't changed his politics but behind the iron shutters of prejudice Henry was in danger of being devoured by self-pity. No-one wanted a fortyfive year old ex-copper, it seemed - particularly one with a dicky back.

Policemen, Mrs. Morpeth had discovered, had only other policemen as friends. And ex-policemen were even worse. Henry sometimes hung about with a couple of louts who whinged that they'd been made scapegoats for the racism that was endemic in the force. Everyone knew that ninety percent of serious crime was committed by the blacks and Irish. They'd been sacked for simply telling the truth. (And for rather too obviously beating up suspects in custody). Funny that the media, thought Mrs. Morpeth, which were supposed to have opened a window on the world, had ended by making so many people so ignorant. Would the Internet bring more light than cloud? South Africa had held out against the introduction of television until the late seventies, but needn't have bothered. Films, books, travel and a relatively free press had already breached the laager, branded the government international pariahs. The boys had missed television (that Greek-Latin bastard of a word as T.S. Eliot prissily grumped) in South Africa but having actually seen the wonder gave them a certain cachet among their friends. Mrs. Morpeth cast her mind back to the anodyne radio of fifties South Africa.

Brylcreem! A little dab'll do ya

Brylcreem! You look so debonair

Brylcreem! The gals'll all pursue ya

They love to run their fingers through your hair!

The boys had liked Mark Saxon and his friend Sergei Gromulko in their serial thriller: No Place to Hide. Gromulko had a pet pistol called Petrouchka. Presumably Gromulko was a White Russian. Then there was Superman with his catch-phrase "Up, up and away..." and she had sometimes happened across a saccharine soap opera called Life Can be Beautiful. Not to mention British comedy. Take it From Here, Round the Horne and so on. The music was American and British Popular along with the odd easy classic. There was no African music whatever on the English programmes and very little Jazz. Politically, the SABC toed the government line. And each Bantu group had its own radio programmes, stressing the uniqueness of one's own tribe. Many valuable recorcings were made but only those judged politically inoffensive were ever played. Some of the records daring to criticise or complain were destroyed or scored across with the points of a pair of dividers.

The tone was blandly moral. A certain Eric Egan, Mrs. Morpeth remembered, had been suspended for telling a joke about a bear-trap being a hole in the ground surrounded with peas. "When the bear comes for a pea... " was the suggestive line that had outraged the moral guardians. Nowadays information technology was IT. More facts might mean less force. Who wanted to be behind the gate a bull was going at? Everyone assumed that more knowledge was a good thing, but how much was achieved by brute force and ignorance? In the morass of so-called facts anyone could prove anything to their and their followers' complete satisfaction. The corollary to believing nothing seemed to be that people would believe anything. At the same time, increasing specialisation and impenetrable jargon meant that more and more had to be taken on trust - but near-universal corruption and special pleading made that increasingly impossible. Science for sale. Arthur had believed in the beneficent potential of technology. Much of MFG's profit had accrued from Arthur's ability to read coming consumer trends. He had lent money to makers of wireless sets, gramophones, electric cookers, refrigerators, cars and aeroplanes and often preferred to take part of his profits in shares. Arthur had been among the first hundred in Britain to buy a television set and he was ready for the first high-definition broadcast from Alexandra Palace in 1936 although it was only postwar (after being suspended for the duration) that TV really took off. Arthur himself seldom watched except for those sporting events which provided useful grease in commercial conversations. Hilary preferred live entertainment and Arthur, feeling that it was good for him, went as often as possible and even enjoyed the odd thing.
Chapter 15.

"And the evening and the morning were a fourth day," read Mrs. Morpeth. Odd order to put them. No, she remembered from her crash (or was that crass?) course in Judaism, Jews measured days dusk to dusk. No sillier than midnight to midnight she supposed. It was their years that had really got out of kilter. It was apt that the days of creation ran backwards, from darkness to light. She'd borrowed a Authorised King James Bible from one of the smarmy priests who oozed round the ward. He'd tried to foist a modern translation of the New Testament on her which she'd bluntly rejected. "Forget the death-bed conversions," she advised him. "I've been an atheist ever since I could think. It's just that I feel a thirst for something a bit more literary than Agatha Christie or Wilbur Smith. If you ask me, these modern Bible translations are sheer cultural vandalism. How can you improve on 'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters...' No-one can improve on that. Call me oldfashioned but something along the lines of: 'The Boss is my social worker, years of drudgery have entitled me to a pee forty-five' doesn't have quite the same ring to it."

Father Dymock smiled. "I must confess that I occasionally find some translations a bit much. The National Council of Churches in America have changed 'God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying: Abba! Father!' into 'God has sent the Spirit of the Child into our hearts crying: God! My Mother and Father!' But seriously," the priest came over all sensitive,"while I do agree that some of the poetry of the older versions has been lost, we in the church feel that it is important for the scriptures to be accessible and for the language to be easily understood."

"A mistake, young man." Flattery. "Keep 'em pig ignorant. People love a bit of gobbledygook. I really enjoyed the Latin mass at my Catholic school until I learnt what the words meant. Translating the Bible was Luther's biggest blunder."

"Now don't be naughty, Mrs. Morpeth." Father Dymock was arch. "While I will concede that differing interpretations have led to a most unfortunate fracturing of the protestant churches, I also know of many cases where an English Bible has been a mainstay and comfort to the afflicted."

"Hm. Wasn't it Evelyn Waugh," Mrs. Morpeth mused lightly, "who said he hadn't realised what a bastard God was, until he read the whole Bible for a bet? No wonder your lot push the New Testament. That shows him in a better light. Unfortunately, it's also unutterably boring to have the same story four times over. No, give me the King James Old Testament for something to get your teeth into. I may disagree with what they say but I'll defend to the death the style in which they say it. What's that marvellous bit in Isiah 37 where the angel of the Lord smites the Assyrians?"

"Then the angel of the Lord went forth," Jeremy recited patly, "and smote in the camp of the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand:"

"...and when they arose early in the morning," Mrs. Morpeth chimed in, "behold, they were all dead corpses."

Both laughed, children sharing a naughty Sundayschool secret.

The priest who was, truth to tell, no longer young but who had something of Sir Michael Tippet's boyish good looks, glowed. It was rare to meet with a show of spirit in the Terminal Ward. Most of the old dears were only too glad to shuffle off the mortal coil. Many fell into a simulated sleep as he arrived, others found an old magazine suddenly too riveting for words. Mrs. Morpeth imagined cartoon cogs whirring in the other's head as she was classified "a real old character." Father Jeremy Dymock liked old ladies (and young men). Her blasphemy didn't bother him, he could dine out on it. He'd heard far worse at the club for disadvantaged boys run by the the church. Of course he would do his sworn utmost to bring her to the true faith but he recognised that it would have to be through the heart rather than by logic-chopping. He must pray that grace would be vouchsafed her. Jeremy knew that logic and reason could go only so far: his own final leap of faith was based upon the two precious times when he had felt himself in the presence of an all-loving all-merciful God. Once he had been kneeling in somewhat perfunctory prayer, when an irresistible force had bowed his head down upon his breast. It was a sign, an epiphany. Jeremy humbled himself and a great peace washed over him. The other was as a schoolboy of ten, when he had stolen another boy's pencil-box and had been found out. Given time to sweat it out, Jeremy had prayed with a fervour he hadn't known existed that if God would prevent his father (Canon Dymock) ever learning of his son's wretched sin, he would do anything. And lo the Lord put stammering words into Jeremy's mouth and tears into his eyes and the awful prospect of expulsion which had been dangled before him like a noose by the headmaster was mercifully commuted to six of the best. Thus was the puissance of God proven and Jeremy knew himself loved. Logic didn't come into it. Like the White Queen, he could believe half a dozen impossibilities before breakfast. Prayer for Jeremy sometimes approached a height of adoration which he was intelligent enough to see as close to orgasm. Father Dymock could be bitchy, but he was also compassionate and tortured by conscience. He had got that from his mother of sainted memory. He played the gamba in an aptly-named viol consort and sang madrigals in a little group of Early Music enthusiasts. A nice boy once, thought Mrs. Morpeth, but swaddled in a middleclass cocoon from which no butterfly would ever emerge.

Had Henry persisted in his religiosity he would probably have turned out more like the other clergyman who sometimes came round: pimply, dogged and grumpy. Life had taught her that religious leaders of any denomination fell into two main types - the harmlessly cheerful and the grimly disapproving. Who would have suspected that the end of the twentieth century would find so many still clinging to the old, mad superstitions; let alone the plethora of new abominations? Ronald Reagan, at one time the most powerful man in the world, had relied on his wife's astrologer for advice. Raygun. The Acting President as Gore Vidal was not slow to dub him. To the disgrace of Mrs. Morpeth's sex, most Christian congregations consisted largely of old women. Fearful, conservative, ignorant, credulous. Raised to submit. She remembered her own mother eating mince so that her father could have his daily steak or chops, jumping to her feet to obey his slightest whim. But she had had her own power, had proved a reliable rock. Mrs. Morpeth's broken leg had taught her how easy a habit dependence could become. As a wife she'd had to fight against letting Arthur take control of her life and had only partly succeeded. For each man maims the thing he loves... She had sometimes yielded to the parasite's innocent joy. Weak, tired, old, in pain, she couldn't help thinking of Voltaire's Doctor Pangloss staunchly maintaining, even as the pox gnawed off his nose, that this was the best of all possible worlds. She laughed. It had been a groggy awakening from the nightmare of faith. She thought of Mark Twain's description of the crossing of the famous river Jordan in The Innocents Abroad. His party of pilgrims had vowed, before setting off from America, to cross this sacred watercourse like the Israelites crossing into Canaan, the promised land.

"With the first suspicion of dawn," wrote Twain, "every pilgrim took off his clothes and waded into the dark torrent singing:

" 'On Jordan's stormy banks I stand

And cast a wistful eye

To Canaan's fair and happy land

Where my possessions lie.'

"But they did not sing long. The water was so fearfully cold that they were obliged to stop singing and scamper out again."

They were at last shamed into crossing by the "lad" of the party who went in first. The legendary river turned out to be only breast-high but with a strong, icy current. Twain had seen American streets twice as wide. The "lad" had earlier been found throwing stones at a turtle, bitter that in a land where the "voice of the turtle" was heard, the reptile wouldn't sing.

Disillusionment was the name of the game thought Mrs. Morpeth. Or at least a new layer of illusion. Peer Gynt and the onion.

So much for the consolations of religion and philosophy. That left Science, which left Mrs. Morpeth cold. Women, with all their insatiable appetite for gossip were generally content to take technical things on trust. Arthur had enjoyed the story of a woman who had worked for forty years in a factory making magic boxes and had never once wondered how the trick was done. Mrs. Morpeth herself could thrill to the beauty of say a Ferrari Testarossa or the applewood sprockets of a water-mill but felt no urge to penetrate below their beautiful surface. She remembered her disappointment on first seeing the inside of a transistor radio. What connection had this mess of wires with the beautiful music coming out of the speaker? You could keep science. True, Anthropology called itself a science, but that was, as the great Nero Wolfe might have put it, mere flummery. You needed much more than an understanding of complicated kinship tables to understand another culture. Without empathy, without the leap of imagination, the rest was meaningless. You could tell you had a grip on a language when you began to laugh at the jokes. Miss Hilary Goodbody, student of Anthropology, had soon twigged that and carried on reading folktales and sagas until such time as she could actually encounter a primitive culture at first hand. Not that Anthropological constructs weren't handy frameworks. Mrs. Morpeth remembered a spider-monkey in the zoo swooping with contemptuous grace around the scaffolding bars of its enclosure. Leap, swing, twiddle, swoop, fly. That was how she had wistfully imagined her own mental acrobatics in anthropological theory which had sadly lost much of their fire when translated into professional jargon. Still, she'd ruffled a few feathers in her time. The suggestion that governments the world over relied on anthropologists for the sole purpose of destroying, or more euphemistically, assimilating the very "primitive tribes" which they were studying hadn't gone down well, being true. She'd been "advised" to delete certain things from her dissertation and to generally tone things down. Professor Curtis had heard a hint of his inclusion in the new year's honours list and such recognition would almost certainly be reflected in increased departmental funding. So for her own sake (and theirs) she had succumbed. Disinterested science, my foot! Learn the language to take it away from its inventors. Take the pearls and eat the oysters. Turn people into workers. As for the technological marvels of the Twentieth Century, she could take them or leave them. The stainless-steel pin in her leg might give her a couple more years to do futile things: was that so bad? Or had it simply condemned her to a long painful decline as one faculty after another packed up? As people lived longer so were they were sick much more of the time. Newly-married Arthur had of course filled the house with all the very latest labour-saving devices, the finest that money could buy. The chrome dome of her American kettle housed an element which was still going strong after half a century. Some gadgets she was happy to use as tools (without the least curiosity as to how they worked) but most were tried once and relegated to the cupboard. From time to time as the years passed, Arthur, or one of the boys would somewhat reproachfully dig out a waffle iron or juice extractor from the back of a cupboard and set to work. What a treat. Everyone agreed that a waffleless or juicefree life was henceforth unthinkable but once Hilary had cleaned up the mess and put the machines away again they were quietly forgotten. After Arthur's death, when things wore out, she made no effort to replace them. She simply made the best of what was left. Who needed excercise machines when you could, say, walk to the shops or cream butter by hand?

Arthur, son of a ship's engineer, was well up on practical science. As a boy he'd built crystal wireless sets and what the Children's Encyclopedia called "flying machines" which were skeletal constructions of balsa and gutta-percha and oiled silk; and an impressive layout for his model train set (Joe had a friend who worked in the factory). Had Arthur been unambitious, he could easily have become a first-class mechanic of some sort. As it was, he made a point of keeping up with all the latest developments. This knowledge stood him in good stead in his relations with the shop floor. He respected good workmen and could talk knowledgeably about many trades, which was a factor in the generally harmonious labour relations which MFG companies enjoyed. He also knew when people were idling and kept them up to the mark. Arthur had no time for a manager who despised his workforce - as many an ex-employee had belatedly discovered.

Not that Arthur was a democrat. He believed that science could and should promote the greatest good of the greatest number, but that the needs of the ruling elite had to take precedence over everything else. He accepted the ruthlessness that being in control entailed. He would, of course, intone his belief in the free market, but he knew how far a system of effective monopolies and blanket advertising was from any notion of pure competition. As Galbraith mocked, ten years after Arthur's death: "As a rough guess, around half of all economics lectures begin with the statement, 'let's assume competition.' "

Arthur would have snorted along. He lived in the world of tariffs and taxes in the wake of the Wall Street Crash. But the laws which bedeviled free trade could also be used as levers of profit. Economics might, he supposed, one day approach the precision of a science, but not in his lifetime. Arthur always took the best financial advice but trusted his business sense more. He was at pains to include first-rate scientists among his advisers and one or two had become family friends.

Hugh Caldwell was a case in point. A beached Englishman had fetched up in 'fifties South Africa. Hugh was diffident and idealistic and had married a South African girl and settled down in Benoni on the East Rand. Unfortunately Denise turned out to be an alcoholic. She would generally sit sipping her brandy and ginger-ale while Hugh (a biologist who was involved in medical research) discussed the latest developments with Arthur. Hugh was one of the few of Arthur's employees to call him by his first name and was one of the very few people anywhere to be completely unintimidated by Arthur's huge wealth. Hugh lived only for science. Hilary was quickly bored by technical talk and Denise, though polite, had very little to say for herself. She would sit with her white-powdered face and catlike smile. Sometimes she would drink much too much and was then prone to fits of weeping or maudlin sentiment. Or she simply threw back her head and screamed. Hugh would lay down his Dr. Plumb pipe and put a tweedy leather-patched arm around her shoulders. "There, there, old girl," he would say, "it's all right. I'm here." Denise would usually subside sobbing onto his shoulder. Hugh handled her like bone china and never showed that her behaviour embarrassed him. He was the epitome of the prewar English gentleman, his expressions and mannerisms frozen in the year he'd left home. Hugh had had a good war in Northern Rhodesia. Stuck at a tiny camp in the bush, he'd spent most of his time watching birds and animals and doing medical experiments. Afterwards he'd been drawn south by a good job with a cosmetics company in Johannesburg. He'd only intended to make enough money to set up his own little lab but Denise and promotion intervened and he'd stayed.

Denise, in a rare mood of confidentiality, once told Hilary that the reason Hugh loved her was that he simply didn't know her - he never saw enough of her to become disillusioned. He was in love with a figment of his own imagination. The man not only worked absurdly long hours, but when he finally did come home it was only to bolt some food and disappear into the little lab he'd built in the back yard. And if it wasn't experiments, he was up till God knows when playing with his ham radio equipment. CQ, CQ,CQ! He spent hours talking to strangers around the world and meanwhile exchanged scarcely two words with his own wife!

Denise had in fact her own full (if not fulfilling) life. She taught Afrikaans at the Catholic school down the road to a bunch of spoilt white English-speaking pupils who had nothing but contempt for the odious language of their rulers; and running a home and keeping the servants up to the mark was, as Hilary had discovered, no sinecure. Hugh and Denise had no children of their own and Denise found Hugh's work frankly revolting. "Do you know," she'd once told Hilary, "that on our honeymoon night I found him wading in the river collecting leeches on his legs. Ag sis man. I mean, what can you do with someone like that? So I sit at home alone. Sometimes I listen to Springbok Radio or the record-player or read a magazine - and I drink. I used to have the girls round sometimes for coffee and cards, but I found I couldn't wait for them to go so I could have nog 'n little dop. Sad really. I had quite a good brain once."

Hilary had toyed with the idea of introducing Denise to dagga but decided that her discretion could not be relied upon. She would have been shocked. Dagga was a drug for natives or the lower grade of white. One or two of Hilary's artistic friends took the odd puff, but nicotine and alcohol were the drugs of the fifties. Besides, Denise seemed resigned to her lot. Hugh, with the scientific detachment which characterised him, once informed Hilary that alcoholics generally either died young or they outlived their peers. The unworthy suspicion that Hugh regarded Denise as just another experiment flashed through Hilary's mind. No, although they had little in common, there was some sort of love there. Denise was well worth tolerating for Hugh's sake. She and Arthur and the boys had been out to the Caldwells' place in Benoni for a braai. It was, Mrs. Morpeth remembered, Dingaan's Day, a public holiday. The house was a fairly typical middleclass dwelling with a red corrugated-iron roof shading a long stoep or verandah. The smoothfaced concrete floor was dark green, polished daily with Cobra polish to a deep gloss. The stoep was dangerously slippery when rain splashed onto it, but that wasn't often a problem. As well as the Morpeths there were Denise's sister's family, a sprinkling of neighbours and another couple from Hugh's institute. They sat in the shade of the huge Kafferboom while smoke billowed around them and Hugh (who had never quite come to terms with braai-ing) rendered a couple of chops simultaneously scorched and raw before leaving the whole thing in the hands of selfconfessed experts (of various persuasions). Denise had managed to talk him into getting a huge cake of ice from the Greek Cafe which swam in a tin bath to keep the beer and "cooldrinks" cold - but those who preferred his own thin, flat, tepid homemade bitter were more than welcome to drink their fill. "Twopence a pint is what it costs me," he'd mildly boasted. Pity Denise preferred cheap brandy. Hilary gamely accepted a "taste of the old country" but Arthur stuck to a long gin and tonic. Servants came and went. Denise's sister had brought her "girl" along to help wash up.

Hilary asked why it was called Dingaan's Day. No-one was really sure. Hilary later found that Dingaan was the Zulu chief who had taken over after arranging the murder of his half-mad half-brother Chaka. Chaka, whose military genius who had forged the Zulu nation out of those clans which he hadn't exterminated had introduced the stabbing spear and crescent formation, both much more lethal than the oldfashioned stand-and-chuck-spears-at-each-other battles. Denise thought that the holiday commemorated the Battle of Blood River, so called, Hilary later discovered, because the blood of some 3,000 Zulus had stained the water red. Four Boers were wounded. A triumph of technology as the Boers' cannons, loaded with scrap metal, cut down the trapped Zulus, guilty for once of poor tactics. This was the end of Dingaan's power in Natal.

"We're not supposed to call it Dingaan's Day anymore," pedanted one of Hugh's scientific friends. "Officially it's now The Day of the Covenant: it's supposed to commemorate the day of the Boere nation's dedication to God." There were cynical snickers from some of the guests. Brother Boer was nowadays far more devoted to Mammon than to God and had infiltrated every cranny of Government and civil service. The only person there who had actually mixed socially with Afrikaners was Denise, who had been brought up in the little platteland dorp of Schweitzer-Reneke and so spoke the language as a matter of course. But Denise kept her own counsel. If she didn't join in the spiteful tittle-tattle about Afrikaners, she never defended them either. That would have been to fly in the face of custom and Denise was deeply conventional. In all her South African years Hilary had only once heard an English-speaker, a rep. called Wolfie Goldberg, turn on a group of fellow-salesmen who were sneering at the "volk". Wolfie ripped into them, saying that he had travelled the length and breadth of South Africa for twenty years; that his own father had been a smous or Jewish pedlar and that there was no nation on earth more hospitable than the Afrikaner. He wouldn't hear a word against them. More than one of his dad's old customers had said that if not for the credit he had extended them in bad years, they would not have survived. People began remembering individual Afrikaners who had behaved like white men, but Wolfie had gone beyond the pale. Denise, now, would never have dreamed of affronting public opinion in this way, besides having seen overplus of small-town nastiness to counter Wolfie's rosy view. Denise knew that Afrikaners could be as pettily vindictive as anyone else. She remembered a schoolfriend saying as some rich blonde Lebanese girls approached the tennis club: "Hier kom die Syrians, apies en kaffers." (Here come the Syrians, monkeys and kaffirs) and English-speakers were scarcely more highly regarded. To be fair, though, poor white Afrikaners were also despised and feared.

Hilary had arranged for Rhys to have extra Afrikaans lessons with Denise in order to bring him up to the low standard of their classmates. Henry sat in for a bit of a headstart. She herself had picked up quite a bit of the language. It was a fair old drive out to Benoni but she and the boys could drop in on Manny and Jennifer in Boksburg. Denise turned out to be a surprisingly good teacher. She used a lot of poetry and song. Wouter Snouter, die kabouter... Afrikaans songs from Sarie Marais to Boegoeberg se Dam. Mrs. Morpeth could still hear Denise's selftaught piano accompaniment.

O Boegoeberg se dam is 'n dood lekker dam

Daar kom die kerels hulle rumpty tumty tum...

Hilary had toyed with the idea of doing an anthropological project on the Afrikaner, but it had come to nothing. She dragged herself back to the conversation of her fellow revellers. English-speaking South Africans had, she sternly reminded herself, their own grisly fascination. The anthropological outlook. Levi-Strauss put it rather well in Tristes Tropique:

"In normal conditions, fieldwork is already enough of a strain: You have to be up at daybreak, and then remain awake until the last native has gone to sleep, and even sometimes watch over him as he sleeps; you have to try to make yourself inconspicuous, while being constantly present; see everything, remember everything, note everything; display an embarrassing degree of indiscretion, coax information out of a snotty-nosed urchin and be ready to make the most of a moment's obligingness or carelessness; or alternatively, for days on end you have to repress all curiosity and withdraw into an attitude of research because of some sudden change of mood on the part of the tribe.

"As he practises his profession, the anthropologist is consumed by doubts: has he really abandoned his native setting, his friends, and his way of life, spent such considerable amounts of money and energy, and endangered his health, for the sole purpose of making his presence acceptable to a score or two of miserable creatures doomed to early extinction, whose chief occupations meanwhile are delousing themselves and sleeping, and on whose whims the success or failure of his mission depends?"

Hilary, in the sixties, often read that passage to her classes of starry-eyed first-year students, generally provoking a mixture of outrage and shocked laughter. Fifties white South Africans would simply have found their prejudices against both primitive tribes and anthropologists amply confirmed.

The conversation at the Dingaan's Day braai had stalled. Hilary could see there was nothing more to be got out of Denise. Her glazed look was coming on. There was a four-second silence before other women manfully surged into the breach and the general chatter of children and servant-problems and work was switched on again. Hilary still found the way that most people treated their servants abominable but had given up saying so as she was tired of the stale old rebuttals. Servants were lazy, they lied and stole. (True. Wouldn't you?) She didn't understand the natives like they did. (True enough.) Of course apartheid was unjust but it would take time for the natives to come up to our level. (Up?) Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera as Yul Brynner had got people saying. Who'd have thought, mused Mrs. Morpeth wryly, that he would etcetera himself, playing the King of Siam on Broadway till he died? Who remembered his record on Gypsy rights now? Hilary Goodbody had fallen in love with George Borrow at the age of sixteen after reading The Romany Rye and had since then found very few people with a good word to say for Gypsies. Even Borrow had wanted to convert them to Christianity and so save them from a life of thievery. Mrs. Morpeth drifted back to the Caldwells' garden, where Hilary had now wandered over to the male territory around the braai. She often preferred male company to that of her own sex. Hugh was telling Arthur that disquieting findings had been coming out of Medical Research lately, directly linking smoking to lung-cancer (this some ten years after American doctors had idly wondered why men had six times the lung cancer rate of women). Arthur had heard that Hitler's scientists had discovered such evidence during the war but unlike rocket experts, their research wasn't much in demand. Of course, concurred Hugh, a direct causal relationship was very difficult to establish and it was believed that the tobacco companies had quashed several potentially embarrassing studies, but the link was pretty well inescapably proven. Not that it was altogether news. People had, after all, called cigarettes "coffin-nails" since the turn of the century, but a vague suspicion that they probably weren't doing one much good was a far cry from a scientifically accepted link with the most dreaded of all diseases.

Arthur, mindful of his extensive tobacco holdings, saw the skies darkening as lawsuits flocked like crows to a carcase. But there was still plenty to be squeezed out of the industry. It was too soon to consider disinvestment. That came, Mrs. Morpeth remembered, ten years later.

Chapter 16.

That was in 1966. Arthur had been disentangling Morpeth, Flint and Gundry from their discreet Rhodesian tobacco interests, correctly foreseeing that Ian Smith was on a dead-end road. In China Mao Tse-Tung had started the Cultural Revolution to root out what he called selfishness, bureaucracy and the enslavement of man to machine. Another cul-de-sac. Straat loop dood. "Street walks dead" as Denise had literally translated it, to the boys' disproportionate amusement. Hilary hadn't seen Denise on this visit although she would have liked to ask her the exact meaning of verkrampt which she'd lately heard on the lips of her more liberal friends. It was nice - if a little depressing- to meet up with what was left of the small circle of academics, artists and other social misfits which she had known in the fifties, but she had come along mainly to keep Arthur company. The boys were at boardingschool and seemed not to mind being left out. Hilary had found that marriage to Arthur involved frequent absences of weeks or sometimes months. He had just returned from a six week business trip to New York. Even on their nominal holidays, she accepted, it was absurd for Arthur to ignore such business opportunities as happened to occur. And no matter how ably he had delegated responsibility, there were always documents to sign and hour-long phone calls at any time of day or night. But Hilary was determined that they would relax, look up friends and family, fly down to Capetown, revisit the Kruger Park. They were currently in Johannesburg. It was good to see some people again but the prevalent atmosphere, at once brutal and puritanical, made her seethe. She'd been unable to sleep the first night, lying rigid with indignation at the ubiquitous smugness (most beautiful country in the world, best climate etc.) combined with persistent white whining in the face of the most pampered lifestyle on the planet. Fragments spun through her tired brain: "When you land at Jan Smuts you must remember to set your watch back fifty years," Leah had greeted her. The manager of one of the mine consortia floated by MFG had casually tossed into the conversation: "They've never yet made a machine that a kaffir can't break." Coming in to land, the smoke pall over Soweto, the broken chips of sky that were the swimming-pools of the Northern Suburbs. Then the tedious formalities, the gratuitously disagreeable customs inpector. Hilary ground her teeth. The night seemed interminable as Arthur snored peacefully beside her.

The next day she was at the dressing-table blearily disguising the damage and was actually doing her lipstick when there was a banging on the hotel-room door and Hugh Caldwell, whom they were to have met in the lobby, burst in. He was pale and dishevelled.

"Have you heard the news?" he asked a disconcerted Hilary. "Verwoerd's been assassinated."

"Is that such a bad thing? Who did it? An African terrorist?"

"No, thank heavens it was a European. Some Greek chappie. A Parliamentary Messenger. Oh my God. This could lead to a bloodbath. Is Arthur here?"

"No, he's at a business meeting. But he'll be back soon. Sit down, Hugh. You look terrible. Can I get you a drink?"

"No thanks. Although a cup of tea would be most welcome. He was stabbed, you know, while Parliament was in session. I wonder who'll take over. I mean, Verwoerd was bad enough but the next chap might be even worse. It could even spark off a revolution of some sort. I mean, what if the Russians or Chinese use this as an excuse to become involved?"

"Oh, I think they have troubles enough of their own," Hilary airily opined. "What with the Cultural Revolution and Vietnam and all that. I would think the biggest danger is of an army coup, they'd replace a police state with a military dictatorship, but that honestly seems rather unlikely."

Hugh siezed on her words hungrily. "You're right, of course. The government values our pretentions to being a capitalist democracy and a beacon of civilisation far too much to throw it all away. And I don't suppose the UK or the Americans would let us go to the wall, but I don't mind telling you I'm in a blue funk. You don't know how easily that Mau Mau business could happen here. It's one thing to control the towns and cities but guerilla war and terrorism could ruin the country. I must telephone Denise and tell her to stay indoors." To see the usually sane, sober and generally apolitical Hugh reduced to near panic was a revelation to Hilary of just how much terror lurked under white South Africa's wellfed facade.

Later, down in the lobby, there were anxious knots of people whose jittery conversation died away as the woodenfaced Native staff passed to and fro.

In the event, the crisis was contained. A mere week later, the mantle of infamy floated smoothly down onto the shoulders of Johannes Balthazar Vorster, the former Minister of Justice, Police and Prisons. Vorster had been a general in the pro-Nazi Ossewa Brandwag and had been arrested and incarcerated at Daggafontein in 1942 for undermining the war effort. The grimfaced Vorster had, political journalists muttered among themselves, been pushed into office by the combined strength of the Nationalists' right wing, the Dutch Reformed Church and the Broederbond.

Tsafendas, Verwoerd's murderer, was rapidly found insane and vanished from public view. As Morrie's son David (who had taken over as family wit) said: to imagine that anyone might have had a rational motive for killing such a saintly man frankly beggared belief.

The real joke was that Tsafendas had murdered Verwoerd because he thought he was doing too much for the Natives.

Verwoerd, Hilary was surprised to hear, had been a brilliant scholar and was appointed Professor of Applied Psychology at Stellenbosch University while still in his twenties. Later the man who would tear families apart and make people foreigners in the land of their birth had taken up the chair of Sociology and Social Work. If there was a God, thought Hilary, he must have a very wry sense of humour indeed.

So, back to business as usual. Mao's Red Guards crushed the intelligentsia, GIs occasionally bombed the wrong Vietnamese and were themselves killed by Viet Cong and "friendly fire", South Africa withdrew further into Apartheid's laager, peering out suspiciously through gaps between the oxwagons and Arthur carried on making money from both disease and cure. He had cut his recent Rhodesian losses and transferred his tobacco interests to America. Armaments had never been more profitable and MFG were in on the start of the Japanese electronics boom. Hugh was promoted by his cosmetics company and decided to stay until "the balloon went up."

When Hilary met Hugh in London in the seventies, she was amused to see that he was still staunchly smoking his old Dr. Plumb pipe and wearing his old Harris tweed jacket with the leather elbow-patches. He was on a brief company sabbatical to brush up on the latest research. There had been talk of adding something to tobacco to counteract its carcinogenic qualities; the only trouble was: what? As for himself, well, firstly, pipes were much less dangerous than cigarettes, and secondly, much of the evidence from the anti-smoking lobby was now definitely slanted. They never mentioned that smokers were, for instance, significantly more likely to contract Crohn's disease if they gave up. Or that Proust had smoked cigarettes to relieve his asthma. Or that there was anecdotal evidence that it delayed the onset of Parkinson's and Altzheimer's. Not to mention the dangers of obesity as ex-smokers binged in a vain search to replace their lost satisfaction. And their statistical methodology was distinctly suspect too - it was complete nonsense to assume that what was true in one country necessarily applied in another. Of course that didn't mean he condoned, say, the dumping of high-tar cigarettes on the third world; but nothing was as cut-and-dried as everyone pretended. Most third-world customers actually preferred high-tar cigarettes, as it happened. More smoke for their money. Anyway, he had discovered, if you gave people milder cigarettes they simply tended to smoke more of them. Not that this fact had been bruited abroad, mind you.

Given that Hugh nowadays worked for one of the tobacco giants it might have been thought that he was parrotting company propaganda, but Hilary knew that he "spoke as he found." Mrs Morpeth remembered that meeting in a pub near the Bank of England or "The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street" as Hugh typically called it. Low lights, ground-glass screens, Muzak, Formica. Tepid bitter. Arthur was not all that long dead but she was surviving. Hugh, on the other hand, despite his meek, affable smile seemed to be going to pieces. He told her all about his progressive disillusionment with Atomic Physics.

"It's funny," said Hugh ruefully, "I remember as a boy falling in love with science. It seemed so cool and neat and perfect somehow. Odd that I should have ended up going into the much messier field of biology. Back at school we were told that everything could be boiled down to protons, neutrons and electrons spinning around in a vacuum. Beautiful. Then relativity and quantum theory got stuck in and whenever the physicists came across something they couldn't explain, they invented another subatomic particle. So much for Einstein's: 'Simplify, simplify.' Mind you, ee equals em cee squared is one of the most beautiful equations known to man. It seems almost too good to be true. But it led straight into a forest of contradictions. Certainty vanished and not only for Heisenberg."

"I'm uncertain what Heisenberg's Principle is," deadpanned Hilary, "although I have known two professors of physics, each of whom independently called his cat Schrodinger. But tell me about Heisenberg."

"Well, the Uncertainty Principle merely states that one can't know both the speed and the position of a subatomic particle simultaneously. That's one paradox. Another is that sometimes photons behave like particles, spinning the vanes in a Crooke's tube for instance; and at others like waves. Did you know that when an electron jumps a shell there is theoretically a zero percentage chance that it can be found in between energy levels - so it must disappear and reappear somewhere else? Witchcraft. The exact opposite of everything that experience has taught us. And all elegantly described in terms of a mathematics derived from the macroscopic world!"

"Spinning the vanes in a Crooke's tube, eh? I like it." Hilary was enjoying this talk with Hugh and trying to show the intelligent interest in science she felt Hugh would expect of Arthur's widow. "But if everything can be described mathematically, where does the uncertainty come in?"

"Oh, mathematics has plenty of fuzziness around the edges. Pi, for instance is an irrational number. Drove the Greeks mad. Nowadays more and more phenomena are treated in terms of statistical probability and approximation. Not that approximation can't be precise enough. They can make astronomical predictions which are accurate to a dozen decimal places but theory is in a mess. Now everything's supposedly made up of quarks but no-one's managed to find one yet. There are simply too many logical incompatibilities for me. I mean, what kind of theory works just as well if time goes backwards? I honestly don't believe they'll ever find a simple unifying theory which explains everything from quarks to gravity."

"Good," said Hilary. "If history teaches us anything it is that yesterday's eternal truths are tomorrow's old-wives tales. Nietzsche thought that 'eternal truths' owed perhaps more to grammar than to objectivity." She laughed. "I remember how upset Arthur was when you poked a few holes in Darwinism. I hadn't realised quite what an article of faith that was with him. Survival of the fittest and all that guff. As Nietzsche pointed out, Darwin forgot the brain. Typically English, he said."

"Whatever typical Englishness may now be," smiled Hugh glumly. "This is my first time home since the war, you know, and I must say it's come as a bit of a shock to me."

"Swinging London and all that," smiled Hilary. "It's a pity Denise couldn't have come."

"Well, yes. But an aunt of hers died in Delareyville and she had to go to the funeral. She would have enjoyed the shops and theatres," Hugh said loyally.

"And the pubs," thought Hilary drily.

"I hate to whinge," Hugh pursed his lips, "but there seems to be a don't care attitude which I must say I find rather distasteful. The local sport seems to be muckraking. And the traffic! I thought I'd motor down to Brighton for the weekend and it was like one long traffic jam the whole way. By the time I got there it was almost time to return. Of course, there are plenty of good things too. Materially people are much better off; and things like the NHS are marvellous. Scientifically too, despite the brain drain and the ructions of the unions, things are miles ahead of South Africa. It's quite exciting in some ways but I feel like an old fuddy-duddy somehow."

"Oh, I don't know." Hilary gently teased. "I think a flowery shirt and some pink flares would quite suit you. You could let your hair and sideboards grow. Pick up a few chicks. Surely you like miniskirts?"

Hugh actually blushed. "As a matter of fact you're quite wrong. I don't like them. They give the girls a gawky walk as if they've got an extras set of knees somewhere. Not only that - but to guard against the cold, the thighs put on a layer of fat. But I can put up with gaudy clothes and not being able to tell boys from girls. What I really dislike is being taken for a South African. I wasn't even aware that I had picked up an accent. South Africans are always telling me how typically English I sound. But here people either want to buy me a drink and say what a marvellous job we're doing keeping the wogs down or they practically spit in my face. Both viewpoints fundamentally unfair, as you know. What really gets my goat, though, is when the old colonial brigade start applying halfbaked Darwinism to politics. All this master race twaddle. I mean that's why we fought Hitler. And if the shower of politicians and bureacrats who are ruining South Africa are there through survival of the fittest, I'll eat my hat."

"My problem with evolution," Hilary pulled a puzzled face, "was the idea of something turning into something else - say a frog turning into a bird. The intermediate forms must have been so dreadfully handicapped. The idea of a semifledged frog launching itself into space off a cliff frantically flapping its stumpy little wings as it plummets to the ground would be funny if it weren't so sad."

"We think of evolution more as a series of little jumps rather than a continuous flow these days. More quanta." Hugh smiled ruefully. "But you're right. As the creationists lose no opportunity to point out, practically no intermediate forms exist. On the contrary, what is striking about the fossil record is the near-immutability of existing species." Hugh sipped his bitter with disappointment. He found that either he had come to prefer ice-cold Castle lager to this long-dreamed of pint of Worthington's, or the beer itself had deteriorated. He didn't know which was worse. He continued his lecture: "The fact that, say, the woodlouse and coelacanth have remained substantially unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. Have there really been no significant changes in environment over all that time? Is the woodlouse unimprovable? What advantage does seven pairs of legs confer over say six or eight? Not to mention the staggering statistical improbability of the old primordial soup spontaneously bursting into life. Fred Hoyle says the chances of that happening are like imagining a whirlwind hitting a scrapyard and assembling a pile of random pieces into a working car."

"Another problem for me is that of motivation," replied Hilary. "Even granting the spontaneous chemical generation of life, what is it that makes life so worthwhile that the lowest organisms will fight with all their might to preserve and continue it? Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary defines 'Once' as 'Enough'. What made the coelacanth stick it out for so long? Think how many suicidal or merely indifferent tries were needed before there were sufficient like-minded bacteria to make the effort of survival and propagation worthwhile."

Mrs. Morpeth thought back to a film-clip of said reclusive coelacanth. Far from wanting to scamper up the beach on the lobelike fins which had so exercised icthyologists that they had given it the nickname of Old Fourlegs, the fish seemed to have no special use for them at all. It spent most of its time hanging head-down in the water and rootling around in the gravel on the sea-floor. Poor old scientists. Poor old Hugh.

"And astrophysics is no better," he'd continued. "The public doesn't know just how tenuous all this stuff about the Big Bang and dark matter and so on is. Not to mention the so-called Second law of Thermodynamics, which is rule of thumb and a couple of axioms cobbled together. Look, it's a jolly useful tool but to conclude that simply because we've never observed heat to flow from a cooler to a hotter temperature that the entropy of the entire universe must tend to a maximum smacks somewhat of hubris. Anyway, what is life if not the creation of order out of disorder?"

Mrs Morpeth remembered that Hugh had been chattering away like an adolescent able to get something off his chest at last. Perhaps it was being out of South Africa or away from Denise. Or the first symptoms.

"I've always thought so," said Hilary mock-serious. "Did you ever meet my friend Giddy back in Jo'burg? The poet Gideon Smith? No? He was always going on about what he called social entropy and the doom and destruction awaiting us all. There was a craze for Spengler's Decline of the West at that time. Have you ever read him, Hugh? Very persuasive in a heavy-handed way, bit of a loony in others. Believes cultures are living organisms."

"What, like penicillin?" Hugh made a little biologist's joke, then went serious. "No. I'm afraid I just don't have the time for anything but my work these days," sighed Hugh. "I try to keep up with science generally, not just my own field, which is incredibly extensive in itself. As for the work, well it's jolly frustrating to see one's results suppressed and misrepresented but at least I'm given a pretty free hand as far as the direction my research takes. And I'm keeping my own reports and conclusions for when I retire."

Poor old Hugh. Most of Mrs. Morpeth's shrinking circle of acquaintances now merited both adjectives, the first relative and the second absolute. Hugh had had no chance to vindicate his work. He had died a year after that meeting, of an inoperable tumour on the stem of his brain. Denise had nursed him devotedly through months of splitting headaches and encroaching blindness. His last weeks passed in total darkness. After his death Denise, who had given up teaching to nurse him, withdrew into her own little boozy world and lived on to become a sweet whitehaired old lady with a Mona Lisa smile: an alcoholic of the second class.

Chapter 17.

One day it was spring. Those patients who could be moved were bundled out onto the lawn for some fresh air. For Mrs. Morpeth it was almost a Blakean revelation. The previous night's rain had washed the soot from the hospital's coalfired boiler off the plants. The flowering-currant hedge looked new-minted with an exquisiteness of crisp detail in leaf and trailing flower. The grass was electric green. The dome of the sky was enamelled in flawless lapis lazuli across which a few chubby white clouds serenely sailed. She had only been in hospital for a few weeks and would have been out in days had the steel pin in her leg not shifted, but it felt like half a lifetime. She greedily drank in nature's beauty, thinking of Herman Charles Bosman's description of being let out of prison as one of a workgang and of his wonder at the everyday world. The dusty street with an ordinary woman walking down it had seemed like a vision of paradise. Perhaps he'd been smoking dagga with the other prisoners. They used to sit on a heap of rotting bones, the stench of which both masked the drug's dead-giveaway smell and very effectively discouraged the warders from approaching. Little Hilary Goodbody had briefly attended a school which was sensitively sited next to a tripe factory. At playtime, the factory boys used to throw stinking bones through the wire-mesh fence at them. Mrs. Morpeth smiled at a long-vanished threat and revelled in nature. Perhaps the stingy shot of morphine (which they allowed to dull her pain) had cheered her up. No, Bosman would have needed no dagga; newfound freedom after long confinement was intoxication enough.

A blackbird tossed off the virtuoso flourishes of his song in a sort of counterpoint to the feathery leaves and "golden chains" of the laburnum in which he sat. Even the traffic noise was no more than a faint, uneasy perturbation. The air didn't smell of hospital disinfectant and leaky (doubly incontinent) old bodies. A Mexican Indian had once told her that to him the smell of civilization was that of dust roasting on electric lightbulbs. Mrs. Morpeth lay back and turned her face to the sun. She closed her eyes and let the red mist pervade her vision. She felt small and shrivelled, weak and wan although the physiotherapist had been surprised at the strength of her muscles. She wasn't dead yet. Not by a long chalk. Just convalescent. The long, slow word slithered by like a slug or (what were those enormous Zimbabwean millipedes called?) a shangalolo. But the morphine must be wearing off, her nerves were jumping. She needed a smoke. She opened one eye just as Robbo rolled by with his sailor's walk.

"Robbo!" She beckoned him close. "Listen, luv, I'm dying for a fag. Could I ask an enormous favour of you?"

"You know Sister won't allow smoking on the wards, Mrs. Em," said Robbo loudly as a couple of nurses walked by but he winked as he palmed the stealthily-proffered fiver. "What brand would you like?" he muttered ventriloqually.

"Gitanes if they've got them; otherwise something strong. Thanks very much, son. Keep the change."

Robbo raised a deprecating palm. "Naw thanks. We don't take money from patients."

Nor did he. Ten minutes later he dropped a packet of Gauloise (as near as he could get), a matchbox and the correct change in her lap. He accepted a cigarette after a cautious look around.

"Why are there no tablets in the jungle?" he jocularly challenged her. Mrs. Morpeth shook her head.

"Paracetomol."

Parrots. The penny dropped. She chuckled and Robbo looked proprietorially gratified. They lit up.

Leah's last letter had told of a friend of hers in a nursing-home in Edenvale where the patients were systematically robbed by the barefaced black staff. Money, jewellery, watches vanished. The very sheets were stolen off the beds. When the old man complained the nurse insisted that he was suffering from senile dementia. This to a man who had been a legal colleague of Morrie's and whose mind was still as sharp as a new pin. And the hospitals were apparently even worse. Corruption and crime were spiralling too. Most blacks were actually worse off than under Apartheid but, wrote Leah, there was a genuine spirit of reconciliation and there was still hope.

Good old NHS. The first puff of scented smoke made Mrs. Morpeth's head spin and an incipient nausea tugged at her stomach. But soon the hammering of her heart slowed down and she began to feel normal again. Robbo strutted off to the Porters' Mess for a cup of tea. Mrs. Morpeth greedily sucked in another scented lungful and even enjoyed the subsequent cough. Her back ached. She was sick of being incapacitated. Hilary Morpeth had been a great walker in her time, her relentless pace on family outings earnings moans from the children and the occasional insistence on a halt from Arthur. "Peripatete I too" floated up from Finnegans Wake. She itched under her bandages. She'd found herself actually looking forward to the sharp sting of antiseptic on bedsores as a grateful variation on the grumbling persistence of chronic pain. It also proved that at least her dermal pain-receptors were in perfect working order. Sight, hearing, taste and smell might fail or falter but pain (lucky old masochists!) kept marching on.

"Mum!" A dark-suited figure was approaching along the tarred path, selfconsciously waving a furled umbrella. "They told me I'd find you out here. Isn't it a glorious day?"

Mrs. Morpeth's heart leaped up like a helium balloon but only to the limit of its string. Her delight was curbed by a vague apprehension that only trouble would have brought him to see her. Rhys' bonhomie seemed a little forced, if no more so than usual. He stooped to peck at his mother's wrinkled cheek.

"Rhys. What a lovely surprise." This was true, but she was a little irked that he had robbed her of the pleasure of anticipation. "How're things? What brings you to Wales \- apart from wanting to see your dear old mother, of course?"

"Well actually you are the main reason, believe it or not." Rhys sounded a little hurt. "I brought some flowers but the nurse took them to put in water. I've been meaning to come for ages, but we've been dreadfully short-staffed at the office and I simply couldn't get away. Luckily we have landed some work up in Cardiff so I'm able, as it were, to combine business with pleasure."

"What work is this?" asked Mrs. Morpeth, showing a motherly interest and repressing a desire to tell him to try not to use quite so many cliches, darling.

"Oh, certain financial irregularities have cropped up in the audits for the Welsh Development Agency."

"The usual graft and corruption, I expect. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing a few smug Tory heads roll. Any likelihood of that?"

"One or two, perhaps," said Rhys uncomfortably, "although it's by no means confined to one party."

"No, there's the dear old Taffia, of course. Jobs for the boyos."

Rhys laughed, almost as if he hadn't heard that one, then waxed serious. "How's the leg healing up, Mum? Are you comfortable? Is there anything you'd like me to do for you?"

"Yes, please. As Diogenes is said to have replied to the same question by Alexander: get out of my sun."

"Of course." Rhys moved to crouch gingerly on his haunches by her side. "But seriously, Mum, there must be something I can get you. I mean, what's the food like, for instance?"

"Edible. You don't feel much like eating when you're cooped up in a stuffy ward all day. This is the first time that I've been outside since I fell." She smiled. "Look at those sparrows fighting over there."

A furious cheeping and fluttering shook the dead hydrangea heads, brown and brittle as antique lace. Below them new leaves unfurled - so sharply delineated, so freshly green, so heartstoppingly brave.

"Have they said when you're likely to be able to go home?"

"A.S.A.P. I hope. They'd like to boot me out now, with all the pressure on beds, but they want to stress the joint as little as possible until the bones have knitted properly. A couple of weeks is the time- scale being bandied about. Whether I'll ever walk normally again is a moot point. I may need a stick or even a Zimmer frame. I came first in the Women's finals of the eight-yard Zimmer frame Dash yesterday. The physiotherapist was very encouraging, but I have my doubts."

Rhys gave a curt snort of laughter, but a wary anxiety was in his eyes. "Nonsense," he said too heartily, "I'm sure you'll be up and about in no time. You're looking well, at any rate."

"Yes, my general health is good, apart from a few bedsores, but hospital's the best place for me at present. I need people to turn me and empty bedpans and pump me full of painkillers."

"Fair enough, Mum. But I honestly wish you'd at least let me get you a private room. It must be unutterably depressing in the Terminal Ward. I shouldn't be surprised if you could bring a strong case against the hospital for medical negligence. Would you like me to have a word with someone about it? It's not that I don't respect your principles about the NHS, but it is unfortunately the case that a significantly enhanced level of care is available for a very moderate sum. Please, Mum, let me provide it for you. Go on. Humour me. Make me happy." This last sentence a little pro forma.

"Certainly not. It's sweet of you to offer, but I always hated being fawned on when we were rich. Besides, they asked me nicely and I said I didn't mind being put in the Terminal Ward. In fact I find it quite soothing. The days slip by like junket, leaving no taste on the tongue. Do you remember Betty MacDonald. The Egg and I?"

"Yes, I do actually," Rhys mused. "Life among the Hillbillies. I used to love that book when I was ten or so. What was junket, though?"

"Oh, junket. It's a sort of curdled cream. I made it for you boys once or twice. You quite liked it. No junketing on the ward. The patients are mostly resigned, even grateful. Only the blubbing relatives are a drag. At least I don't have that problem, do I? A bittere gelechte as Leah always says. On second thoughts, Darling, there is something you can do for me. I would greatly appreciate it if you could smuggle me in a few packs of Gitanes. I've got a hidey-hole where Staff'll never find them."

"Now, Mum, you know you'll only get into trouble again. This spell in hospital would be a golden opportunity to give up smoking once and for all." Rhys gave her the unflinching eye contact which the office course in Interpersonal Skills claimed conveyed sincerity. "You know smoking's no good for you. Dr. Stern even says it may worsen your osteoporosis. Apparently nicotine leaches calcium out of the bone."

"No, I think it's mainly pregnancy and the menopause which are responsible. You and Henry are to blame, but I don't hold it against you. The bible says that when you know how bones form in the womb, then you can argue about God. Well, now we know. And God's not worth arguing about. Leah had a good joke in her last letter. How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a lightbulb?"

"I don't know."

"None at all. Don't worry about me," she feebly kvetched. "What do I matter? I'll just sit here alone in the dark."

Rhys laughed with relief. One never knew what outrageous opinions Mrs. Morpeth might come out with. Thank God there were no Jews on hand, to be offended. Hilary had, in the past, turned her anthropological eye on the Jewish community and it was fair to say that her candid observations had not excited universal gratitude. "I'm a shikse," she was fond of saying as she sneaked up on backbiting gossips, "if you've got anything to say about shikses say it to me."

"Anyway, I'm not going to give up smoking." Mrs. Morpeth came back to the present. "You can send my cigarettes with Henry. Gitanes Brun I want. Give him a fiver for the busfare. Have you seen your brother and his family yet?" The casual question held a hidden barb. It was no secret that the brothers didn't really get on. The prig in Rhys despised the oaf in Henry but was sufficiently attached to him to be pained by his misery. The Bloodknot, as Athol Fugard called it. Still, at least Henry'd bred; kept the bogus family name alive. Removed some of the pressure from his own shoulders. Henry, for his part, feared and envied Rhys but was gruffly glad of his none-too-frequent generosity.

"Of course I've seen them." (How could she possibly have thought otherwise). "I took them out to dinner last night as a matter of fact."

"Where did you go?"

"Some place called the Taj Mahal. Everyone turned out to like Indian. It was a surprisingly pleasant evening. What can I tell you? They're all keeping well, but Henry's very despondent at still not having a job. Jackie's still working part-time at the launderette."

"And the children?"

"I think they'll be alright. Kevin's mad keen on Boy Scouts at the moment but he seems to be underachieving at school. I had a serious talk with him about the importance of education and I think I made some impression. If he were to apply some of the concentration he employs in computer games to his studies, he could be well above average. At least Leanne's got her career prospects all sorted out. She wants to be a nurse. She's got all her dolls painted and bandaged to show off the different types of wound. Quite impressive in a rather macabre way."

"Yes, she wanted to see the Thomas splint that was on my leg for a while. Quite a museum piece, apparently. She took up First Aid when Jackie ran off with that Vice Squad Detective for a fortnight. I don't altogether blame Jackie. Henry can be pretty foul when things are going badly. Still, she did come crawling back when loverboy dumped her in St. Ives. Of course Henry had a job and prospects then. Let's hope she sticks to him. She's a tough cookie and Henry could do with a bit of bracing."

"They seem pretty committed to each other," Rhys ventured cautiously. "Jackie does tend to snap at him and then Henry gets all hurt and sulky, but I'm sure they'll be alright when he finds work."

"When? Don't you mean if?"

"Oh I'm sure something will turn up. Meanwhile, he's painted out the house. He's made a surprisingly good job of it actually - though he seems to have put his back out again. Don't mention it to him, by the way. It's supposed to be a homecoming surprise for you."

Mrs. Morpeth shuddered inwardly. She was sure Jackie had gone for beauty-parlour pinks and mauves. It would be like living in a box of tissues. Even the frank vulgarity of orange and turquoise would be better than that. Or no; one of Henry's friends had dumped a stolen consignment of contract paint on them and she'd go back to a khaki barracks. If they'd spoiled her bedroom there'd be trouble. Surprise be buggered, it was a fell plot to stop her knowing about it until the deed was done. On the other hand it was a characteristically mawkish gesture, clumsily touching. She was touched. And Joe Levy's fastidious forty-year old cream paintwork had gone very yellow. Bad news about Henry's back though.

"Can't you do something about getting Henry a job, darling?" she asked earnestly. "You must have contacts with security firms and suchlike. Get him some capital to start up a private prison - that seems to be the coming thing; what they call a growth industry. No, I'm joking. But surely there must be some clerical work he could do. You wouldn't have to tell people he was your brother."

"Mum! How can you say such a thing." Raw reproof. "I am keeping my ear to the ground, but times are bad. There's a lot of retrenchment and redundancy at the moment. Firms are shedding staff left, right and centre. Since the merger with that Japanese firm, even my own department's slimming down, but so far only by natural wastage."

"Redundancy. Natural Wastage," snorted Mrs. Morpeth. "Euphemisms for chucking people on the scrapheap. Japanese up Mother Brown, eh? That was something else Hugh Caldwell was right about. Machines can wipe out worthwhile jobs much faster than new ones can be created."

"Oh, I don't know," Rhys said thoughtfully, "there are plenty of new opportunities in the service sector and high-tech industries. And I remember talking to a redundant miner in the waiting-room when you were first brought in. He told me that the best thing Mrs. Thatcher had ever done was to close down the mines. He had watched his father die of what he called 'pancake chest' and his own back had been injured in a rockfall. He made damn sure that his children got themselves white-collar jobs."

" Yes, I suppose it's better to live with ulcers than to die in a rockfall or to see daylight only at weekends. But at least miners produced something. How many of these white-collar jobs are really worth a damn? That's one problem. Is unemployment a price well worth paying to keep down inflation? Another problem. Millions of people eaten away with the hopelessness of empty days and millions more crushed by debt and overwork. And for what? Hunter-gatherers spend only a couple of hours a day on average providing for their needs. But Cain the farmer killed Abel the hunter. Nowadays, at least here in the west, overproduction's the problem but still people work around the clock so that those precious machines don't depreciate while standing idle. I did shift work in the war and it was the worst thing I had to put up with. You've no idea how horrible it is to have your sleeping patterns wrenched about."

"Well, I remember trying to keep awake on sentry duty in the middle of Salisbury Plain. I ended up pulling out hairs, one at a time. Just as well there were only a couple of weeks of excercises or I'd be even balder than I am now."

"You're not that bad. A bit thin on top, perhaps." Motherly critical. "Cut short it would look thicker. Besides bald men are supposed to be more virile. More virile than those without balls, if you'll forgive the pun."

Rhys smiled wintrily. "But seriously, Mum, it's true I personally hated sentry duty, but some of the chaps didn't mind it at all. And, like it or not, we are becoming a twentyfour hour society."

"I don't like it. Just as I don't like people living miles from their work, spending hours each day in noisy, polluting vehicles, just to get to their insecure, unnecessary jobs. I mean, tourism's the biggest industry in the world today, not to mention advertising or litigation. Soap bubbles. What good have any of them done mankind?"

"I can see you're getting back to your old self, Mum," Rhys smiled fondly. He was pleased for her sake and his own. "And where would you place accountancy in this catalogue of evils?"

"Oh, it's a two-edged sword I suppose." Mrs. Morpeth glanced up at him shrewdly. "Good when it roots out corruption, bad when it lets Rupert Murdoch pay no tax. Dad always used to say that you couldn't argue with the figures - but finding out what they indicated was rather more parlous."

"Yes, that's very true." Rhys nodded sagely. "I generally try and leave interpretation to others. My job is to give the boardroom the facts and to advise on exemptions and allowances, though there are plenty of grey areas there too." Rhys subsided into silence.

"You mentioned the possibility of a promotion when we last spoke." Mrs. Morpeth bump-started the conversation. "Any news on that front?"

"Well, I've had hints but nothing definite. There are rumours that one of our area managers is about to be headhunted for a government advisory agency and I've been advised to apply for his job if he goes. The trouble is that it would mean giving up accountancy which I quite enjoy, for management, which I don't. Even in my present job there's quite a lot of negotiation. I sometimes dread the thought of days spent haggling with the Inland Revenue over every dot and comma. And commercial law is unbelievably complex. Two experts can come up with three interpretations of the same piece of legislation which are completely at variance with each other."

"Yes." Mrs. Morpeth chuckled. "Funny that the more precise-sounding the legal jargon, the murkier the meaning. Belinda of the Dorans scratching through her midden-heap. Anthropology is the same. Try and come up with a universal definition of , say, 'civilisation'. You end up with something so hedged about with qualifications as to be practically useless. Especially now that ranking of any sort is frowned upon. A cynic might even think this muddying of the waters deliberate, but I incline to cock-up rather than conspiracy. So, will you go for this job?"

"Yes, on balance, I think I will. It would mean more money and an enhanced pension. Also one has to look keen. If I passed up an opportunity like this I wouldn't fancy my chances in the next round of cuts. And if I really didn't like it I could probably wangle early retirement."

Mrs. Morpeth thought with a pang that Rhys looked, if not unhappy, then at least resigned to a life of little fun. He'd always been earnest and calculating. It was still not too late for a bolt of lightning, a grand passion or even succumbing to a colourful vice, but the likelihood, never great, had diminished with the years. The ambition to surpass Arthur and restore the family fortunes had long gone, rightly perceived as a childish dream. Marriage and children might have helped.

"I'd be tempted to stick to what you like, Rhys. There'll always be a demand for first-class accountants. Why get ulcers? What does Maureen think?"

"She thinks I'd be silly not to jump at it, but recognises that it's entirely my decision. Anyway, it may never happen. It largely depends on whether old Lipton finally decides to set up as a private consultant. They'd never promote me over his head. The thing is that he's been talking about it for years. The office nickname for him is Limpet."

"Oh, you'll get your chance. After all there must be more to life than getting and spending. What happened to fun? Have you seen any good films lately?" Rhys had a penchant for fifties westerns and had joined a film club which arranged showings.

"Not for a couple of months now. We've been working overtime lately, so by the time I get home I tend to just pop something in the microwave and collapse in front of the box. Still, the end is in sight and I should pick up a nice bonus."

"And to think that my generation thought that technology would bring leisure to cultivate the finer things in life. I know that apart from the starving millions, everyone's rich beyond our immediate ancestors' wildest dreams but is it worth all the social breakdown and neurosis? I knew a poet once who wanted to publish a slim volume called New Roses. To be followed by Moroses and Neck Roses. But seriously, there must be a better way to run the world. Oh, we pay lip-service to democracy and the greatest good of the greatest number but it's all lies. And meanwhile we choke on traffic fumes and the sperm-count nosedives. No one's even begun to get to grips with the problem yet. If only the Greens weren't such spineless twerps."

Arthur would have vigorously rebutted each point but Rhys, knowing his mother's superior dialectical skills, felt that argument was futile. They came from different worlds. He shrugged ambivalently. One of the company's don'ts in its customer-relations policy was: Don't discuss religion or politics and Rhys had found this sound advice over the years. Mrs. Morpeth, suddenly tired, lay back to bask in the sun, eyes closed. That red mist again. At least her blood was still red. Not yet for her the bluenosed cyanosis of the Terminal Ward.

Rhys waited, shifting uncomfortably on his hams. He felt guilty at already wanting to go. Thank heavens he had only a single-bedroomed flat on the edge of Mayfair. There could be no possibility of having her stay with him. No, Henry and Jackie would have to have her. He would contribute towards the expenses, naturally. It was her house, after all. She would feel at home there. While Henry was unemployed, he could take care of her. The trouble was that his brother couldn't even take care of himself. He had that infuriating helplessness which made people do things for him out of sheer exasperation at his hopeless fumbling. Still, surely even Henry could learn to empty a bedpan or open a tin of beans? The doctor had hinted that although Mrs. Morpeth might be discharged soon, she was likely to need at least some assistance for perhaps the next six months.

"It's not so long ago that the prognosis for a femoral fracture in an elderly patient was poor," Dr. Stern had said, with not unkind pomposity. "This was not so much to do with the fracture itself as of the longterm consequences of being bedridden. The lungs tended to fill with fluid and there was consequently a high incidence of pneumonia. The nurses used to call pneumonia the old people's friend as it was such a peaceful death. Of course nowadays with antibiotics and so on, such deaths are extremely rare. At present the prognosis tends to depend far more upon the patient's pre-existing condition and general state of health. For a confused or sickly patient a fall can be the last straw. Happily, in your mother's case, there is every likelihood of a positive outcome."

"Good. I'm very relieved to hear it," Rhys man to man.

"But," continued Dr. Stern sternly, "it will take time. The fracture has shifted once already and had to be reset and the problem is that there is a real possibility of further damage until the bone has healed thoroughly. At the same time, she needs excercise to keep up her muscle tone. She's rather too keen to be up and about, if anything. Still, a positive attitude is very encouraging. She has, I must say, a marvellous spirit."

The doctor's enthusiasm was less than wholehearted. He found Mrs. Morpeth's sardonic eye more than somewhat unsettling. "Arnie Stern," it seemed to be saying, "you're full of shit." Doctor Stern found the responsibilities of his job very wearing. Although he was, by and large, a competent doctor, he had made a few bad mistakes which gnawed at the root of his self-esteem. On each occasion his colleagues, well aware of blunders and misjudgement of their own, had closed ranks and no action had been taken. On balance he had probably done far more good than harm but Dr. Stern lived in continual fear of a suit for malpractice. That was what had kept him in the UK rather than grazing the much greener pastures in the States. The worst part of his medical training had been a spell in a psychiatric hospital. Some of the inmates had been almost mind-readers. Or perhaps it was only that they simply said what everyone else was thinking. There had been one schizophrenic young man in particular, who spent all day lolling on his bed twisting his hair until his scalp was raw.

"Hey, Jewboy," he tonelessly greeted the young intern, "you needn't be so scared of dear old Doctor Purdey. He likes you. You should see him when you bend over the beds. He wants to shove his cock up your bumhole. And it's no use looking at Nurse Reynolds. She hates Junior Doctors. It's Doctor Edwards she's after."

These devastating truths were muttered in an indifferent monotone. The staff tacitly dismissed them as the meaningless ravings of the mentally ill although Nurse Reynolds blushed angrily and Dr. Purdey busied himself with case reports.

Arnie opted for the more comprehensible world of surgery. From his father the tailor he had inherited a sure cutting hand and neat stitchwork. It still gave him an almost mouthwatering thrill to excise, say, a cancerous growth or an inflamed appendix. It was the casting out of peril and pollution far more concretely than trying to rid people of their demons. It gave him a feeling of purification, catharsis. He repressed the pleasure which causing pain to his more obnoxious patients gave him, with the self-laceration of guilt. Of course surgery was no stranger to complications. Stitches burst, cancers bubbled up somewhere else, the wrong bits stuck together, infection spread and a percentage of patients died. But the work was mostly routinely mechanical and of considerable utility. He was able to reassure his patients without too many lies. He was reasonably sanguine that Mrs. Morpeth would make a complete recovery. Until, of course, the next blow from a worn-out body. There was always a next blow, until they stopped.

Relatives, Doctor Stern had found, could be tricky. Mrs. Morpeth's older son was fine - they were both professional men, after all, but the younger could be awkward. Unemployed, of course. Dr. Stern had become expert at reading the scuffed leather jacket, the tootight jeans, the white socks and black loafers, the odd visiting times. He seemed to have a chip on his shoulder and had made it clear that he expected the NHS to assume full responsibility for his mother until she was mobile again. He was a weakly blustering man, easily cowed by Doctor Stern's expertise. That schizophrenic boy in his junior doctor days had had an unerring nose for bullshit. "Go on, blind them with science," he would throw out if a consultant retreated from a student's question behind a screen of verbiage. It was easily done, thought Dr. Stern, striding briskly along the tarmac path between the wards. He had often enough done it himself, but always felt bad afterwards. Well, onwards! He had a rather tricky operation scheduled for three and he needed to mug it up. He had also to call his stockbroker and instruct him to buy some shares recommended by the Financial Times' tipster. He was particularly interested in Maltravers at the moment - the huge banking conglomerate which had swallowed up Morpeth, Flint and Gundry. Having no idea that Mrs. Morpeth was the widow of a once-influential financier, he passed by with a jaunty remark about the fine weather.

On cue, the breeze freshened, detaching a few pink petals from the flowering cherry. They fluttered down on Mrs. Morpeth and the path. The porter on hated sweeping-up duty swore. The sun was blotted out by a grumpy little cloud.

Lunchtime. The porters began wheeling patients back to the wards. Mrs. Morpeth finished off her second cigarette and tossed the stub under the flowering currant hedge to join the drink tins and crumpled crisp packets which had been blown there by the recent gales.

"It seems visiting time is over," she casually informed Rhys as Robbo's nautical saunter hove into view. "Don't forget my ciggies, will you? Thanks for coming to see me, darling. I do appreciate it. I know how busy you are."

"Not at all," shuffled Rhys. "I always look forward to these visits. I'll try and come again before I have to get back to London. And I'll get Henry onto your other request. He's promised to pop in before the weekend. The important thing for now though is for you to get well. Promise me you'll follow the doctor's advice and not try to do too much too soon."

"Festina lente as we used to say at St. Benedict's. I might pop up to London when I'm mobile again but I hope I'll see you before then."

"Of course. This audit means I'll be shuttling back and forth quite a lot, I expect. Well, I'd better go. Goodbye, Mum. Take care."

They exchanged a dry peck on the cheek and Rhys went off to another working lunch over grilled fish and Perrier. Accountants couldn't afford to be drunk and even the clients these days were mostly moderately abstemious. The old three-hour business lunches where projects were launched on a sea of alcohol had vanished. Booze had never been a family failing. Joe, Abie and Arthur had liked a drink or two, Wang Wei never touched the stuff and Henry, after a spell of heavy drinking which had got him into too many illjudged fights, now limited himself to four or five pints when out with the boys.

Mrs. Morpeth watched her elder son's stiff, selfconscious walk with compassion. Rhys meant "rashness" she had been amused to learn although it was also Arthur's grandmother's maiden name. Rhys' tension was not the creative Nietzschean urge that bursts out in thunder and lightning, but the disabling cramp of inhibition. He was a conscientious but not brilliant accountant, honest from a mixture of timidity and a feeling that cheating somehow dishonoured the clean and elegant science of mathematics. Nevertheless he drew a good salary and had a tidy bit put by in blue chips and gilts. His job could and probably would soon mostly be done by a computer. Rhys would then be willy-nilly shunted into mangement. What had happened to The Peter Principle that people were promoted to the level of their incompetence? But he would adapt. She wasn't worried that he would starve but was sure that if he could only find a good woman, he would be much happier. She had met Maureen and had found her so strikingly dull that she almost radiated dullness. A semolina pudding of a girl who collected old typefaces in a dully fanatical way. Her bedroom was lined with shallow drawers containing thousands of little reversed letters made of lead. She had a press in the tiny second bedroom of her flat and had printed out alphabets and specimen lines in homemade ink on reproduction paper. She made her own Christmas cards which were, Mrs. Morpeth was forced to admit, soberly attractive.

Deposited back in the ward there was the prospect of Monday's shepherd's pie to look forward to. Mrs. Morpeth saw rubbery grey mince in orange grease, topped by mashed potato at once floury and glassy, flanked by minted mushy peas. Oh well. She could probably force down some chemical jelly and watery custard afterwards. Anyway, the cigarettes had taken the edge off the appetite brought on by fresh air.

Chapter 18.

Over the next few days they weaned Mrs. Morpeth off morphine and put her back on Paracetomol. To take her mind off the gnawing, insistent pain, she started a diary, which not only amused her but visibly alarmed Staff Nurse Williams who had an almost preliterate horror of the power of the written word. It was just like the old Mass Observation days during the war. There had been some ugly moments back then when she'd been spotted jotting things down. Someone had even secretly denounced her as a Nazi spy. An embarrassed constable had come knocking at the studded oak door of their spacious Hampstead home. Respectable wife of prominent banker. The policeman was sorry to bother her... obliged to follow up... his not to reason why... a cup of tea would be most welcome thank you madam... the powers that be...still, one couldn't be too careful in wartime... no question, of course... purely a matter of form... no, no, quite all right. Mass Observation, eh? Well, of course, that explained everything. Thank you for co-operation, madam. She couldn't help being amused at the thought of the difference in attitude had she still been Miss Hilary Goodbody living in Stepney with Mrs. Kemp amid gimcrack furniture and tea-chests full of impenetrable anthropological notes and primitive objets d'art from a dozen countries. The trouble was that she wouldn't take injustice lying down. Miss Hiss, full of piss the Anthropology departmental Casanova had reportedly called her. "If a spinster is miss, should a wife be hit?" she'd once meaningfully asked him after his spouse appeared in public with a split lip. The wartime Miss Goodbody also had a compromising scattering of German and Italian and Spanish books. Hilary's relations with the police of all nations had pinballed from wary indifference (flubberflick) to outrage (ping) to stark terror (pingchatterlingalingaling). Lights flash balls whirlpool to their doom. Despite Arthur's ramparts she was still not entirely safe. A country which could intern German Jews who had lived in Britain most of their lives could also find it expedient to clamp down on those who knew something of the lies necessary to prosecute a war. Innocence and guilt were utterly irrelevant. Kafka was the twentieth-century Book of Job. Apart from the happy ending. Her own attitude to the law had always been pragmatic: she obeyed laws with which she agreed and ignored those with which she did not. She had always taken notes.

If there's a hole in a' your coats,

I rede you tent it:

A chield's amang you taking notes,

And, faith, he'll prent it.

She had suggested that Maureen might like to print some Burns with her lovely typefaces but it transpired that the dreary girl didn't like poetry. As for notes, the hospital diary was simply the latest set. Not that Mrs. Morpeth wanted to "prent" it. A wade through the humourless turgidity of the diaries of "Ananias Ninny" had persuaded her that the world did not deserve unedited selfindulgence, however fascinating to its perpetrator. Much of Mrs. Morpeth's material came from the pipe leading to the Porters' Mess.

"When we was kids, growing up in the country," she had transcribed, "we used to shag the gawts. Well, you can laugh but we all used to do it, but I tell you one thing boyo, you wouldn't catch me kissing my wife's fanny like that Robbo says he does. Filthy that is."

"Don't knock it till you've tried it," retorted Robbo. "Here's a riddle: If women are made of sugar and spice why do they taste like tuna-fish? Good thing I loves fish, eh?"

A lot of the talk was of sex and booze. Mrs. Morpeth's ears pricked up when Robbo mentioned that a mate of his had given him a bit of hash, but she decided that she could live without enhanced sensitivity for the time being. The younger porters talked glibly of uppers and downers, speed and charlie and E. Drugs were evidently here to stay but that experimental rat with an electrode planted in the pleasure centre of its brain which would lie there pressing its switch until it died of starvation, had not yet prevailed. One of the churchy Welsh-speaking porters told the story of a retarded little boy ("poor dab") who had been induced by another kiddie to swap a handful of shiny pennies for the three fiftypees an uncle had given him. There was much wholesome tabloidal indignation expressed. She had also noted down jokes and amusing turns of phrase. One woman was described as too short to kick a duck up the arse. Of a scrawny nurse that there was more meat on a bicycle. Talk of hard times led to the joke: "Down our way there was so much rickets and knock knees that when you got three kids walking down the street together they spelt OXO."

The week following Rhys' visit was overcast and drizzly. Rhys hadn't been able to come in again (a meeting had overrun) but he had phoned to apologise and then again when he got back to London. Henry came on Friday afternoon but failed to cheer her. He had got her some cigarettes, but the wrong brand (Craven A). Her son's listlessness reminded her too much of Arthur's anomie before his final heart attack. The first coronary had occurred in the office of a former client of Morpeth Flint and Gundry, while Arthur was in the middle of rescheduling debts so as to stave off the ignominy of having to be declared bankrupt and paying his creditors so much in the pound. He was under a lot of strain. It didn't come easily to Arthur to beg. Still, the hand tearing at the ganglia in his chest was unexpected. He watched his weight and kept reasonably fit by means of golf and weekly sex. He smoked little, drank less and was only sixty-six years old. Reason rebelled at the thought that business worries could have caused the blockage in his coronary artery. It was like ascribing grit in a carburettor to a vengeful nemesis. With Arthur out of the way, the wolves fell on Morpeth, Flint and Gundry. Arthur resigned on condition that the huge conglomerate which swallowed the company paid off all its debts - which it promised (lying in its teeth, it later transpired) to do.

Hilary had been re-reading The Golden Bough by Frazer but the image of the King of the Grove pacing about waiting day and night for the challenger who would one day kill him, cut too close to the bone.

Mrs. Morpeth remembered Arthur's rage at his enforced passivity. He didn't need peace and quiet. He needed action. But the memory of the pain shooting from his chest and down his left arm along with the abysmal feeling of imminent death soon ruled that out. He was at first forbidden newspapers, radio and television, but not knowing the worst only agitated him more. Once he was allowed what he wanted, his anguish was soon succeeded by a deepening passivity. He had to watch, helpless, as his life's work was torn to shreds.

Hilary had come to see him on the day of the takeover and was frightened at his apathy. He lay watching television footage of the recent student riots in Paris, completely impassive. Of course he had been pumped full of sedatives, but there was a look in his eye that found life or death a matter of indifference. Hilary smiled lovingly and held his hand. Arthur's expression deepened to misery.

"I'm sorry to have landed you in such a mess, darling," he muttered. "The Maltravers bid has been nodded through. There's still my personal liability, but if we liquidate all our assets we should be able to cover that. Of course that will leave us practically destitute."

"I don't care," she said truthfully. "You know I've never really cared about money. We'll manage fine. I'm sure that crafty old brain of yours will come up with something. I have limitless faith in your capabilities."

"It's misplaced, I assure you. The trouble is that I'm not an old school tie sort. Not that that matters quite as much nowadays as formerly - not now that the Americans run the world. But I'm not really a corporation man either. Maltravers offered me a non-executive directorship. Give the dog a bone. I refused, needless to say. Gundry will take it. He's been a figurehead for years anyway. No, my only real regret is that I neglected to take out life-insurance. Unwarranted arrogance on my part."

"Come on, Arthur," scoffed Hilary. "You're not going to die. You don't get away from me that easily."

"We must face facts, Hilary. I finally extricated from Dr. Sawyer the admission that another heart-attack could finish me off."

"Well he told me that if you took it easy you could live to a hundred. It's time to relax and enjoy all the things you've never had time for."

"You mean retire," shrugged Arthur. "A little gentle golf, pottering round the vegetable garden and so on. No, that's not for me. My first priority must be to do what I can to provide for you and the boys. But I'm afraid my touch has gone. Finance is like juggling eggs, you know. One slip and the whole lot are smashed. I remember my late Uncle Abie saying that only a meshuggener tries to buck a losing streak. Poor old Abie. He said he'd had a heart-attack in the trenches once but the doctors dismissed it as 'soldiers' heart' and said he was malingering. Dad died of a stroke, too. Perhaps a weak heart runs in the family."

The television had switched to an American sitcom and the rasping screech of female voices filled the room. The volume was up high, because Arthur had become a little deaf. Hilary switched it off, surprised that her husband, who was normally a stickler for decorum, didn't seem to care about disturbing nearby patients. Hilary felt that if she could only rouse Arthur from his lethargy all would be well. There was always sex, she supposed, with her menopausally shrunken outer parts. Or she could let Arthur bugger her as he'd once or twice wistfully hinted. But too much excitement could well bring on another heart attack. In the event, it was David and Abishag all over again. The old king "gat no heat".

When Arthur was discharged from hospital, they went back to Rose's house in Splott, empty since her recent death. As Joe's widow, Rose had loyally asked for a nonreligious burial. In the event a humanist with a weedy beard trotted out a few platitudes and the remnants of her church choir sang a couple of her favourite hymns before she was consigned to the flames. Arthur, who had not enjoyed a particularly close relationship with his mother, was greatly affected. Hilary had always got on well with Rose and found it impossible to hold back her tears. As for Arthur, his own sufferings had tenderised his heart like a steak hammer tenderises steak. His business empire had collapsed. The house in Hampstead had been sold along with the half-dozen flats which Arthur owned in the chief commercial centres of the world. The London Levys had clubbed together to keep Arthur's enormous collection of tin soldiers in the family, a gesture which had reduced the deposed head of the family to most uncharacteristic tears.

There were a few more offers of ornamental directorships, but Arthur disdained charity. He took to mooching around the house while Hilary landed a secretarial job at a nearby polytech to bring in some money.

Mut verloren, alles verloren... as Goethe put it. Arthur was a broken man but there was nothing wrong with his brain. He saw that the time of his kind of businessman was over. Arthur had always kept strict personal control of all aspects of Morpeth, Flint and Gundry. He had been connected to the firm like a spider to its web, sensitive to the least vibration. That personal touch, that sense of family or tribe had vanished. He had lost, it seemed, his ability to read the market. His fingers had gone numb. His penis disdained to obey his erotic commands and lay stubbornly limp. The sons whom he had hoped would succeed him and rule over his business empire had, he'd been forced to concede, turned out inadequate. Big multinational businesses were nowadays run like socialist states in their setting of prices, the control of their workers, the obfuscation of their red tape. Unlike socialist states however, they provided the consumer goods which people had been conditioned to want, in overplus. And at a pinch, there was always the military-industrial complex of the free world to enforce their demands. Oh, there would always be plenty of very rich men but personal power was increasingly circumscribed. Jittery cabals ruled the world in the name of short-term profit. Decisions were made on the incomprehensible and often incompetent advice of squabbling specialists from economists to astrologers. War, famine, misery had never done so well. Mankind, apart from the poor majority, had never been richer. Arthur's deepest regret was that he had failed his family, but he was also sorry that many of the workers in the British factories which had constituted a large part of MFGs bad debts would never work again. Mrs. Morpeth often thought that Arthur would not have been surprised at the millions out of work in the eighties and nineties. He had tried hard to keep his manufacturing interests viable. He believed in secure workers producing useful and wellmade objects of which they could be proud, be they landmines or toasters. He had been dragged down by the uncompetitiveness of the rest of British Industry, by incompetent management and by the fractiousness and hairsplitting of the unions. The cleaners in Arthur's London office, for instance, had such detailed job demarcation that while one cleaner was responsible for floors and ashtrays and another had curtains and desks, neither was prepared to dust windowsills. After a number of unfruitful discussions with shop stewards Arthur eventually brought in a featherduster and surreptitiously did it himself. It was galling to have the pettifogging legalese which he had so often turned to his own advantage flung back in his teeth. A degree of goodwill and flexibility vanished to be replaced by a grudging refusal to do any more than the statutory minimum, an attitude which ironically left the workers grumpy, bored and more exhausted than if they had been working hard. A scheme which would have given the workers shares in their own companies was rejected by the unions as exploitative. How shortsighted could you get? Arthur knew that there was nothing like self-interest to motivate people. He also knew that he had himself now joined the vast majority of the human race - the superfluous.

Nineteen sixty-eight was an eventful year. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated, Nigerians starved Biafrans in the full glare of the media, Americans and communists raped Vietnam. Students erupted everywhere. Hilary Morpeth happened to be in Paris that spring when students led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit occupied the Sorbonne demanding more control of the university and, oh yes, the overthrow of the capitalist establishment. She'd been staying with friends in their flat in the Latin Quarter. A barricade had gone up at the bottom of the street and there was a great feeling of solidarity. Someone described it pretty accurately as "street theatre." She remembered the indignation when de Gaulle sent in the riot police. There had been the brief illusion that youth and idealism could, for once, triumph. In Prague Dubcek was trying "communism with a human face". Arthur, agonising in London, had wanted her to fly back immediately but she was having far too much fun. Sartre made a brilliant speech and everyone was alive with defiance. A general strike followed, paralysing France, but in the end the unions were bought off with a hike in the minimum wage, the Communists backed down from armed confrontation and de Gaulle called an election which he won handsomely, although his days were numbered. And that was that.

The "Prague Spring" crumbled into dust. In August, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia from all sides. The world watched and did nothing..

Mrs. Morpeth remembered the anguish of seeing the invasion on television.

"Can't anyone do anything?" Hilary agonised. "Surely we're not just going to stand by and see this spark of hope crushed. It's like the Polish cavalry taking on Nazi tanks. Why don't the Americans intervene?"

Arthur shrugged. "The Americans have quite enough on their plate with Vietnam. I can hardly see them wanting to start World War Three. And we in Europe could scarcely take on the Soviets: although I do think their military capability has been ludicrously overestimated. On the other hand it would take only one atomic bomb on London to knock us out. No, I'm afraid there's nothing to be done but wait for the inevitable economic collapse. You must at least admit that their artists have plenty of material to hand. You're always going on about the benefits of suffering. Our poets would give their eye teeth to be thought dangerous and have huge underground followings."

"Instead they're allowed to starve as uncommercial or they're gelded by what Marcuse calls repressive tolerance," she smartly countered. "Meanwhile their poets all want, for some unknown reason, to be Bob Dylan."

Arthur had often teased Hilary with these views, but now his leaden voice betrayed mere politeness. He obviously didn't care any more.

Hilary tried valiantly to rouse him. "There's suffering and suffering," she said. "Some (for want of a better word) ennobles, some degrades. I can't think that, say, starving Biafran children provides them with a worthwhile experience or keeping people working on an assembly-line for forty years. There's just so much misery and ugliness everywhere while the state grinds and splinters on."

"M. Well I've discovered, rather late in the day, that there is nothing much one can do about it."

And Arthur went back to his gloomy perusal of the Financial Times.

Hilary, with anguish tearing her heart, went off to prepare her husband's favourite dish of steamed gurnard with ginger and coriander which Rose had taught her to make. Poor Rose. Who would have thought that her daughter-in-law would end up in the same old kitchen with its oilfired Aga (Joe had converted it from coal himself) and porcelain sink with one cold-water tap. Hilary noticed that her best knife was getting blunt. Arthur had always kept it razor-sharp. His electric knife-grinder was the only kitchen gadget that he'd saved from the auction but it was worn out now. No new grinding-wheel was to be had. Hilary had insisted that most of her folk art and artefacts be sold. Properly arranged and catalogued (for the first time) they'd fetched a surprisingly good price. Arthur insisted that she keep the money for herself. She had reluctantly agreed - only to invest it, against Arthur's strenuous advice, in a friend's surefire theatrical production which promptly sank like a stone. C'est la vie.

Slowly, chopping garlic and ginger, she relaxed. The red gurnard was as beautifully ugly as ever with its blockhead and winged fins and poison spines. It was charmingly described as a bottom-feeder. The flesh was firm, rubbery, almost lobsterlike. Arthur's stressfully stertorous snores came from the sitting-room. It could have been worse. At least the boys were launched into the world. Rhys had obtained a good second in Accountancy and had just started working for a first-class firm (run by one of Arthur's erstwhile golfing acquaintances) while Henry, having left school at sixteen and drifted through a few dead-end jobs had eventually joined the police. Neither had had anything to do with Hippies or drugs or revolutionary politics. Henry liked the more vapid songs on Top of the Pops but his favourites were Elvis and Country and Western. The Beatles passed him by. Rhys had developed a taste for the slow movements (exclusively) of popular classics. He had made a few compilation tapes which he played when entertaining Maureen from Accounts in the room of the house which he shared with some fellow professional men. Maureen was a cynical woman a couple of years older than himself of whom he was quite fond. He had once conventionally offered to marry her and had been not unkindly rebuffed. They met for the occasional meal and mating and were comfortable not talking much. Rhys knew that his matrimonial prospects would be considerably enhanced by the inheritance of a great deal of money and did not altogether like the idea. At the age of twenty-one he still envisaged a glittering career although he had already started a pension plan. Arthur's bankruptcy dented his confidence badly but that was nothing to its effect on Henry. Henry had naturally anticipated a huge windfall in the not too distant future and, unlike Rhys, enjoyed boasting about his family's wealth. The disadvantage was that identifying Arthur also identified himself as a Jew or worse. "Another one of those slimy bastards" as his Sergeant invariably said whenever a prominent Jew popped up on the telly. Henry kept very quiet. The perception among his colleagues that he was only sticking to policing until his ship came in had caused some resentment but a small outlay of his generous allowance had always bought Henry a contemptuous popularity. After the disaster, however, everyone was suddenly a lot nicer. To his face, anyway. There was plenty of snickering schadenfreude behind his back. Henry found that people liked failure, liked having someone to pity. It was success that stuck in their craw.

Arthur's decline continued. He was tired, he said, of fighting stupidity and bad faith and greed and spite. People came and went - what had been a business culture had become a bureaucracy. The responsive ensemble of a long-established orchestra gave way to scrappiness of a pickup band. An executive was only as good as his agents and too many of Arthur's props were unsound. And the younger generation was no better. Hippies and halfbaked revolutionaries wanted to throw away all postwar achievement in the fatuous name of love and universal brotherhood - while simultaneously relying on that same business, science and warfare for the prosperity which allowed them to to lie around drugged and idle. Had his life mattered? Not that he could tell. He'd done many so-called good works - endowed scholarships, given to charities, but much of the money that had made his philanthropy possible had come from mass murder and human misery. He had, he supposed, helped to bring the by no means unequivocal benefits of technology and capitalism to Africa, but if not him, there were plenty who thought themselves another Beit or Rhodes. Arthur now thought that individual power was a myth - everyone was simply a bigger or smaller cog in an out-of-control Heath-Robinson contraption. This from the man who had floated great corporations, who had bought significant influence at home and abroad, who had harmonised the disparate to their mutual benefit. Now politicians relied on cliques or on fickle voters, newspapers relied on advertising, everyone was forced to rely on lawyers and increasingly-specialised specialists. An intelligent overview was becoming impossible. As the Morpeths watched television footage of Soviet tanks in Prague or of France setting off its first Hydrogen bomb in the Pacific it began to seem that Arthur's gloomy outlook might be right.

Chapter 19.

The spring of 1995 continued cold and showery. Mrs. Morpeth, beginning to feel that she'd never get out of hospital, was struck down by flu. No hobbling off to the lav for a quick fag now. She was poleaxed, sweating and shivering by turns. At least the muzziness took the edge off her pain. Eight weeks was the conventional wisdom as to the length of discomfort from a femoral fracture, but six weeks on it felt as sore as ever. The pain was like that damned rat everlastingly gnawing Yggdrasil's roots. It exhausted her. Becoming a flu-zombie was almost a relief. Daze slumped into doze. Mrs. Morpeth dreamed of housework. She found that she missed the little routines of daily life: making tea, washing up, even ironing. There was a sort of artistry in reducing these mundane chores to a spare and elegant ritual incorporating the minimum of effort and the maximum of grace. Living alone was easy. One plate, cup, knife and fork. Nietzsche said everyone was perforce a poet. We knew so little, had to invent so much. Mrs. Morpeth imagined an infinite darkness of ignorance in every direction fitfully lit with lightning-flashes of insight which were then incorporated into a set of crazy beliefs. So much for reason. At least there was usually rock-hard taste to rely on but with her clogged nose everything stank and tasted even fouler than usual. Of course life with others could never be that simple. At the time of their marriage, Arthur had been very keen on time and motion studies but Hilary's notions of housework grew organically. The kitchen of their house in Hampstead had been scientifically designed by an expert in Detroit for maximum efficiency and it irked Arthur that Hilary promptly found ways of working which thwarted its whole ethos. The vast work-surfaces filled up with clutter, the garbage-disposal system (brought proudly back by Arthur from New York) was spurned for the wartime compost-bin. Hilary was happy to find a corner in the mess to peel potatoes and carrots while Arthur needed a clear deck before he could do anything. The two sinks, as often as not, were full of cold, greasy water and soaking crockery, cutlery and cookware. That was how Mrs. Ings liked it when she came to clean. But Hilary had done most of the cooking as their refugee cook had gone back to Yugoslavia after the war and had spent the rest of her mercifully short life trying vainly to return to the West. Later, while the boys were away at school, Hilary had been able to indulge her own and Arthur's more exotic tastes. She had learnt about chillies and chocolate in Mexico and Arthur was forever bringing back delicacies and interesting ingredients from business trips around the world. Hilary loved cooking and could happily find herself a corner in the chaos to peel potatoes or chop carrots. She never weighed or measured anything which led on the whole to delicious meals, spiced with the occasional disaster. Arthur also cooked sometimes, but strictly by the book. Mrs. Beeton was an old standby, Florence White's Good Things in England was full of treasures (although instructions of the bake in a good oven till done variety infuriated Arthur by their vagueness), Rose had passed on a notebook of Chinese and Jewish recipes and Arthur, growing up in Tiger Bay had enjoyed Jamaican, Indian and even Welsh cookery. Elizabeth David came along later.

Mrs. Morpeth dreamed on. Now she was back in what she still thought of as Rose's kitchen in Splott. But something was wrong. Someone else was there. She looked down. The floor was running with piss and shit. Now she was in a broken-backed bed, sliding down towards a pool of the mucilaginous body-fluids of strangers. Yuck.

She half-woke, revolted and confused. Henry and his family. Could that be the meaning? Was there a meaning? Maybe Freud's work on dreams was based on a surfeit of coffee and Sachertorte among his patients. But surely not her own family. She loved them, didn't she? Did Henry love her? Her eyes slid closed again. She thought of Camus' bored, embarrassed hero watching over his mother's corpse and wondering whether it would be permissible to smoke. No, that might be Rhys' attitude. Henry was more emotional. He would blub and feel sorry for the poor orphan that was himself. But both he and Rhys would probably, on the whole, after a while, be relieved. That was good. She didn't want them to suffer. Mrs. Morpeth opened her eyes. The pillowslip was drenched in sweat and the hard pneumatic pillow had painfully crushed her ear against her head. She lay for an hour supposing she really should turn over but couldn't be bothered. The flu had carried off next bed but one. Mrs. Morpeth wallowed in woozy misery.

"Good morning, Mrs. Em," said Dr. Chatterjee with slightly forced cheeriness. Doctor Stern had gone off to a pugwash in Florida. "And how are we feeling this morning?"

"Bloody awful, thanks. Go away and let me die."

"Ah, no, no. We can't have that sort of talk can we?" He wagged a roguishly admonishing finger. "We'll have you up and about again before you can say Jack Robinson."

Doctor Chatterjee had only the faintest of Indian accents. Mrs. Morpeth found herself wryly noting his quaint turns of phrase. Fifties British films, she supposed. Maybe a public school and Raffles, Biggles, the Saint. All in what was very like but not quite the Received English tones of the BBC of his youth, some forty years ago. Or maybe he'd taken some oldfashioned elocution lessons. She could still hear the plummy tones of Sister Agnes: "Tords, my dear gels, not to-wards". Mrs. Morpeth could also still do a fair imitation of Sister Bridget's brougue. Or maybe Chatterjee went in for postmodern irony - he'd actually been brought up in Surrey and had learned his accent from Peter Sellers records.

Dr. Chatterjee glanced at her chart. "Hm. Temperature has come down significantly. Would you be up to a little trip to X-ray if we wrap you up warm? See how the jolly old femur's coming on, eh? Otherwise it might be next week before they could take you."

The X-ray. If this one showed no movement and a satisfactory knitting of the bones, they might let her go home.

"Yes, alright Dr. Cee." Ha, he didn't like that. Perhaps he still had a sense of caste. She supposed that Chatterjee was a Hindu name although most of her knowledge of India had come through the Inpector Ghote novels of H.R.F. Keating, whose utterly convincing backgrounds owed nothing at all to personal experience. It was true that the lower orders like domestics and porters resented Dr. Chatterjee's highhanded manner. She suspected that a poor old Englishwoman came pretty low on his social scale. Pity she couldn't needle him without feeling like a racist.

"Splendid. I'll arrange to have you fetched." He nodded a curt dismissal and moved on.

An hour later Robbo turned up with a wheelchair. Mrs. Morpeth's strength had vanished. She remembered, as a young girl, trying to write her name in the air by holding her father's fishing rod by its tip and waggling the butt end. The same feeble lack of control, the feeling that the slightest twitch would be helplessly amplified into wobbly lurchings, made itself felt in her limbs. Robbo lifted her easily out of bed and into the wheelchair. She was swaddled in blankets and wheeled away. Later she was laid on a trolley, the cold glass was pressed against her, the radiographer ducked back into her little leadlined cubicle and a burst of radiation allegedly pulsed through her hip. Radiation. The Aqua Tofana de nos jours. She thought of the cancers of the clock-factory workers who were taught to point their brushes with their lips when painting luminous numbers on dials. Hugh had once told her of an unfortunate electrician who'd been cooked with microwaves when an FM transmitter had been accidentally switched on as he was fixing the dish. With all the poisons around it was amazing that no-one had yet succeeded in wiping out a city or had even succumbed to the old hippie dream of lacing the reservoirs with LSD. As for defences like Reagan's Star Wars fantasies, it was difficult to believe that any one of a hundred terrorist groups didn't even now have pantechnicons full of atom bombs or nerve-gas or deadly bacteria dotted about world capitals just waiting for the word.

Back to bed. She forced herself to drink some water, then slept.

The next day she felt much better, but still otherworldly and frail. At least her head and nose were clear. She'd spent a restless night as snot percolated from the upper to the lower nostril and thence down her cheek. The hours dragged by in an endless tossing and turning in search of that brief ebb tide when both nostrils were clear. She felt light and birdy and found herself thinking of Rhys' boyhood interest in model planes. He'd spent hours in the holidays making up kits of balsa and doped tissue-paper and hanging them from his ceiling. They were all fully operational but only one had ever flown. It was a smoky winter's afternoon in Johannesburg. A patch of burned veld in Orange Grove, the tufts of grass reduced to spiky black crowns, the red earth black with soot. After both boys had had their fingers hacked by the prop and the cuts divertingly cauterised by fuel, it was Arthur who finally twiddled the needle valve which got the Babe Bee engine screaming - and launched the plane. Rhys gripped the control-lines and actually managed a couple of erratic circles until the little engine cut out and his pride and joy crashed into the airfield's one small rock. Rhys gloomily gathered up the splintered wreckage and walked to the car without a word. After that, the planes stayed unflown, tied to Rhys' ceiling with string. Henry had once, in a tantrum, smashed up Rhys' beloved Sopwith Camel with a tennis racquet. That was the only time that Arthur had ever smacked him. Of course they had been caned at school, but by and large the Morpeths had gone for Spock rather than smack. The wallop had shocked Henry. For a few days he'd been polite and considerate - quite unlike his usual rather whiny self. Mrs. Morpeth doubted that the odd parental chastisement was mainly responsible for violence. Human nature encouraged violence. The thrill of asserting oneself over the weak encouraged violence. Who has not seen a hen at the bottom of the pecking-order with a plucked and bleeding rump? Humans shared all these animal urges to eat, sleep, fight, fuck and breed. Winners and losers. Montaigne called cowardice the mother of cruelty, but did it make sense to pity the things you must kill to live? Surely it was more successful for a hunting animal to catlike enjoy inflicting pain. Was sadism the secret of Roman success? Had the sick masochism of Christianity rotted Rome from the inside? She had been to a few bullfights in Mexico and had allowed herself to be swept up in the thrill of danger and death. On the other hand, there was the herd instinct with all the pluses and minuses of brotherly love. People \- people who need people... Mrs. Morpeth had come to the conclusion that genes had more to do with character than upbringing. Rhys inclined more to Arthur's side of the family, Henry to hers. Uncle Cecil, her late mother's late brother, was a humourless, hard-done-by bigot who had popped up in Henry's eyes and character. It was quite frightening how both families had got in on the act, dishing out noses, ears, idiosyncracies. Character was a given although its manifestations could be influenced. She wasn't sure that she agreed with Margaret Mead that humans were almost infinitely malleable. Perhaps en masse but not with individuals. You could, for instance, have set a clock by Rhys' kicking in the womb, while Henry's was feeble and fretful. As babies, it was the same. Rhys fed and slept regularly while Henry had been trouble from the start, despite his mother's by now considerable expertise. Of course his being a second child may have had something to do with it. Most of the second children she'd known had been attention-grabbing in one way or another. Children had completely altered the course of her life. Motherhood had crumpled her selfishness like an aluminium toothpaste tube - it would never be plump and glossy again, not even now when there was no-one but herself to live for. Well, she had done her best. Or had she? She'd done what had seemed right at the time but she'd been unable to give up smoking during pregnancy and her placentas had both come out yellow and stinking. She could honestly say that she'd felt not the slightest desire to eat them. Perhaps nicotine-poisoning had disadvantaged her sons from the start? Who knew? The thought that someone was responsible, that someone had all the answers was a long time dying. Religion, science, Daddy, Arthur - all had proven fallible. That left love and hate and inscrutable instinct. Instinct, the mover and shaker, most powerful of all. She smiled, remembering her utterly sincere newlywed protestations that she was completely unmaternal and didn't even like babies. Well, that little conceit had been shredded like palm thatch in a hurricane. She felt completely new feelings. An infant smile melted her heart even though her stern intellect and Rose both joined in telling her it was just wind. The smell of her baby's scalp was irresistible. She could sniff it for hours. Far from being boring, noisy red blobs, babies were suddenly the most fascinating things in the world. She had breastfed both her sons despite a nurse's urging her to "keep her shape" and bind up her breasts and bottlefeed. Only doctor's wives and tinkers, it was said, breastfed. The disgust at another tiresome natural function sent to vex women was scarcely disguised. This only made Hilary more determined. Arthur owned shares in a formula milk company but he took the advice of Hilary's gynaecologist and encouraged her. Milk leaked when she merely thought of babies and even the sight of puppies and kittens suddenly made her want to give suck. Pain as the milk came down, cracked nipples, occasional bites from infant teeth, nothing dimmed her urge to nourish. Arthur, too, swelled with all the naive pride of fatherhood. Hilary had even seen him peeping discreetly into other people's prams. And although the daily care was her domain, Arthur had never shirked getting up at night to see to the babies although he was often away on business in New York, Johannesburg, Berlin, Moscow, Rome. He had been a more attentive father than most. Of course the fact that he despised drunkenness and spent no more time in pubs than forced to by business commitments had helped, although much of his time at home was spent in his study, working. Still, he'd been a surprisingly good father, not quite succeeding in hiding his love under a carapace of adopted English phlegm. Now Arthur was dead and the babies were middleaged men with little enough in common with herself, for all that she loved and worried about them. She longed to be home, but was forced to admit to herself that she didn't altogether relish the prospect of life with Henry and his family - although she quite enjoyed babysitting when Henry and Jackie went off to a film or for a few pints at the Conservative Club. It wasn't intolerable. But their tastes clashed. She unplugged the pipe to the Porters' Mess to take her mind off things.

"...'e was so pissed, 'e couldn't say bread. We sat 'im down in that chair by there and fished out 'is cock and just left it hanging there. 'E didn't even notice. Me 'n Jonesy covered for him. I reckon 'e's well on 'is way to being an alky."

That was Robbo. Now one of the respectable ones (a shop steward) butted in.

"The head porter should be told. Drunkenness on duty's just not on. The Union won't help in a case like that - not if there's a danger to patients."

"Oh, Merv knows all right. 'E told Jake that 'e wouldn't shop 'im - 'e 'd shop 'eself."

Jake? Oh yes, the harmless-looking one. Jacob Jacobs it said on his name-tag. Red, badly-shaven face, grubby clothes, unkempt hair. Gentle with patients. Mrs. Morpeth had overheard him telling his workmates that he had once been a driver on a colliery van. Going downhill, a popular trick was to switch off the ignition and pull up at the lights on engine braking. Then you turned the switch. Bang! All the built-up petrol-vapour exploded, scaring the shit out of passing pedestrians. Mind you, as often as not, you blew the cylinder-head gasket as well. Jake hadn't said why he was no longer a van driver but Mrs. Morpeth wouldn't have been surprised to find that booze was involved. Or simply that the colliery had been closed.

A little flurry at the end of the ward showed that Dr. Chatterjee had started his round. Mrs. Morpeth plugged the pipe. The bustling doctor approached, beaming.

"I bring good tidings, Mrs. Morpeth. Your pin has moved not one iota and the bone seems to be knitting nicely. I think it would be safe for you to return home very soon. I will arrange for back-up visits. Now there is only that naughty influenza to be brought under control and you can be discharged. I understand your frustration at being stuck here all this time - but better safe than sorry, eh? As for the leg, if you adhere closely to the physiotherapist's regime there is no reason why it should not, in time, be as good as new - stronger, even. The important thing is not to attempt too much too soon."

"That is good news. I suppose you'll be glad to see the back of me," said Mrs. Morpeth frankly, "but I am actually grateful for all your hard work. The flu seems a lot better. It must be. My leg's hurting like buggery again. Any chance of another shot of Morphine? I promise not to tease Staff Nurse Williams."

"We'll see the effect of increasing your dosage of paracetomol first," said Doctor Chatterjee, trying not to smile under his neat moustache. He had heard all about her last encounter with Staff. Anyone who could take that old battleaxe down a peg or two would be missed, he thought, although she had undeniably caused ructions from time to time. Her point that smoking by an open window in the terminal ward was unlikely to cause longterm harm to the other patients had undoubtedly a certain validity. Besides, some of the old ladies positively liked the smell. It brought back of happier times.

He moved on to the next bed where a middleaged woman was almost eaten up by cancer. She was resigned now, wanted only to die. Her husband had been in yesterday and she had told him not to bring the children again, but to let them try and remember her as she had been, not as a balding bag of skin and bones. Both had broken down crying. Later, the pimply priest had come with his stock of tawdry consolations, but his pat evocation of the bliss in store had not carried conviction.

"I'm glad to see him come," the woman confided in Mrs. Morpeth, "but I must say I'm glad to see him go again."

Sad, ugly, pointless, stupid, Mrs. Morpeth mused. They no longer taught that death could be dignified, even stylish. Montaigne's essay on a custom of the island of Cos where people would reach a good age in possession of all their faculties, call their friends together for a party and at the end cheerfully slit their wrists and slip away. And yet we clung. The preposterous notion that each life was unique, infinitely precious was promoted by religion of the rabble and mass consumerism. "You're not the only wrinkle in the prune," sang Fats Waller. There was nothing left to die for, that was the trouble. The Tower of Babel with which the arts tried to reach heaven would fail for the same reason as its biblical original - a multitude of mutually incomprehensible languages. Too esoteric to be understood or too common to be worth the bother. Where had all the promise of Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky, Ellington led?

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Steve Reich.

Who cared about the arts any more? Who should she support or inspire in the death throes of Western civilisation? Or were they birthpangs? Where was beauty to be found? We must, said Candide, cultivate our gardens. She thought of the area of rough grass and a couple of apple trees which Joe Levy had transformed into a neat little vegetable patch and the front yard where some of his old roses still stood. She had always kept up the garden as well as she could - must remind Henry to mow the grass. She hoped that Jaqueline wouldn't try and prettify it. Mrs. Morpeth had visions of multicoloured concrete patios with plastic tubs of purple or candystriped petunias and flouncy orange Zinnias. The Leylandii hedge, alternating gold and green. The scarlet geraniums behind white plastic chains. Jaqueline was obsessed with appearances. She also kept Radio One on nonstop. Mrs. Morpeth suddenly didn't feel like going home. Perhaps Rhys could be persuaded to stump up to convert the garage into a granny-flat. It would be an investment, really. He could recoup it when she died.

She was so absorbed in domestic fantasy that Henry's appearance seemed quite natural, as if she were at home and he'd just walked in from the next room. A moment's reflection reminded her that she was still in hospital and that Henry hadn't dropped in for almost a week. She forgave him instantly. He was smiling and looked unusually buoyant.

"Hello, Mum," he greeted her, kissing her withered cheek. "How are you?" Without waiting for an answer, Henry ploughed on: "There's good news and there's bad news. What do you want first?"

"Good, I think."

"OK. The good news is that I've got a job. Rhys finally got around to having a word with Uncle Harry and it turns out that he needs a storekeeper for his warehouse in Milton Keynes."

"Mazeltov, darling." She couldn't resist. Yiddish ruffled Henry. Gave him, as Morrie might have said, the stone zig. She was instantly contrite. "And not before time, too. And what's the bad news?"

"Well, I mean, er, obviously the bad news is that it's too far from Cardiff to commute, so we won't be around to help look after you. It might mean your staying on here in hospital just a little while longer until you're properly mobile. Jackie's found us a house to rent in Oxford with immediate possession. It's pretty grotty really: three tiny bedrooms, a kitchenette, a bathroom and a poky little sittingroom, but it'll have to do till we find our feet."

It was as if the lead apron they used in X-ray had been lifted off Mrs. Morpeth's chest. Although pleasure at Henry's good luck was mixed with the sick foreboding that he would mess up this opportunity as he had all his others, her main feeling was the selfish relief that her home would be her own again. No more sneaking into the garden shed if she felt like a joint. Jackie had a tabloid reader's horror of drugs and although Henry wouldn't have handed his own mother over to the police, she knew that she could expect all the shocked sententiousness of the dubiuosly scrupulous man finding himself for once in the right. (And if he had discovered that her 'pusher' was Judah, a young Rastafarian from next door but one, her life wouldn't have been worth living). Peace. No more being driven mad by the incessant radio and television, no more trying not to be drawn into the endless bickering and occasional gooey reconciliation which constituted Henry and Jackie's married life. But there had been good times too. She would miss the grandchildren, miss cooking an occasional feast. But she could get a cat again once Jackie's allergy was out of the way. She had given old Toby to Cynthia rather than have him suffer the indignity of being continually chased out of the house. Luckily he had found Cynthia's rooftop greenhouse and expensive catfood entirely to his taste and divided his time between basking in the sun (or lying on the heated plant propagator if the weather was inclement) and catching the occasional starling or sparrow. She would get a kitten, that would be fun. She brought herself back to Henry.

"I've also got some good news - as soon as I've shaken off the last of this flu they're letting me out. No, no." she held up an implacable hand. "You're not to worry about me. I'll manage fine on my own. Honestly. I daresay I'm entitled to a home help and the physiotherapist has said one of her colleagues will pop in once a week. I'm quite mobile with the old Zimmer frame, now."

"Are you sure?" Henry's voice held relief. "We're only moving on Saturday - one of my mates can get hold of a van - so if you're back before then we can at least see you comfortably settled in. I hate having to run off and leave you stranded. Of course you know we'd love to have you come and live with us in Oxford, but quite honestly at the moment it's simply a question of space. When we find a decent house you can come and stay as long as you like."

"Thank you, darling. I understand. No, of course you must go. I'll be fine."

"Well, you must at least make sure that you get all the help you're entitled to. How will you manage the stairs? Perhaps we could get the stinking council to install a stairlift."

"Oh I could manage on my bottom, if need be, but I'll probably move downstairs for now. I can use the old outside toilet at the end of the garden. Now then, today's Tuesday. If I carry on mending at this rate I could be out by Thursday. How would that suit you?"

"Yeh, great. Terrific. Any time at all," said Henry less than wholeheartedly, already planning the most tactful way to break the news to Jackie, who would hardly welcome the additional work of running after her mother-in-law while she was busy packing to move house. Still, it was only for a couple of days. She could like it or lump it. Henry the breadwinner held the whip hand again.

"Isn't it May Bank Holiday coming up?" asked Mrs. Morpeth. "That'll give you an extra day to settle in, but of course the roads will be hellish." And, she mentally added, Henry's "mate" won't turn up or the van will break down or Jackie's one and only Crown Derby tureen will be smashed. Some not insuperable disaster could be safely relied on to mar the new dawn.

"We'll manage somehow. Oh, by the way," Henry pretended to remember, "I've got you a little present." He rummaged in the inner pocket of his black leather jacket and furtively passed her a couple of packets of Gitanes. "I'm sorry it's only the two - they were the last he had in stock. I tried four other tobacconists, with no luck. Nobody seems to stock them anymore. Still, that should do you if you'll be out in a couple of days. I'll get you some more as soon as I can."

"Don't bother, darling. Two packs'll be plenty. If I manage two or three ciggies a day, that's a lot. Dipak down at the newsagent usually keeps a couple of cartons for me. And this damned flu's put the kibosh on wanting anything at all. You just want to lie and do nothing."

"Flu? What flu?" Henry sounded alarmed. "I'm sorry Mum. Why did you let me rattle on about myself? I didn't realise. Why didn't you tell me? Is it bad?"

"I did feel rather ropey, but I'm much better today. The best medicine has been hearing that you've had a bit of luck at last, darling. And thanks for the ciggies. Oh, put it away," (as Henry halfheartedly jingled the change from the tenner Rhys had given him.) "Buy the children some sweets from their old Gran. How've they taken to the prospect of the move?"

"Fine. I think they like the idea of getting back to England. Some of the Welsh kids gave Kevin a bit of a hard time at first and they've never had as many friends here as when they were in London. Leanne is pretty easygoing." Henry didn't mention that Jackie was relieved to be breaking up Leanne's best-friendship with the little Pakistani girl over the road.

"And Jackie?"

"Oh she's all for the move. She said I mustn't forget to tell you that she sends her love. I just wish I could help her more with the packing, but my back's been giving me a few twinges lately and I don't want to start this new job half crippled. Your leg's almost better, you say?"

"Yes. It's still painful, of course, but at least the pin hasn't shifted and the various fragments seem to be knitting together. I can't tell you how keen I am to be back. How's the garden looking?"

"Fine. I got Kevin to cut the grass and I must say he made a good job of it."

"I hope he didn't mow down the bluebells under the laburnum," said Mrs. Morpeth, knowing as the words left her mouth that of course he would have done just that. Henry looked like a resentful rhinoceros: furious, myopic, baffled. How the hell could he be expected to know anything about bluebells or fucking laburnums? It wasn't his fault. Why had nobody warned him?

Mrs. Morpeth shrugged. "Never mind, they'll be back next year." She thought of the thick layer of closepacked bulbs under the lawn, crisp to the slicing spade, a crunchy foam of white globes. "It's my fault. I should have mentioned it. So, darling, tell me about your new job, already."

Henry rambled through his duties and responsibilities, the number of men under him (five), the prospects for promotion (effectively nil). He rather pathetically puffed up his importance, but it was obvious that it was a dead-end job, one step up from Store Detective. He had to chase up fiddling and pilfering among the staff and oversee security. She hoped he'd have the sense to keep his hands clean or at least to obey what businessmen called the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not be found out. Although Harry owed Arthur a few favours. The powerful financier had more than once refloated Harry's sinking ship. Liquidation. Going down the plughole. Britannia waives the rules, ha ha. Watery metaphor. Met afore. She felt suddenly parched and feverish. Henry was dispatched to fetch her a drink. No, not Coke, thanks. Just water.

She remembered the Coca-Cola coloured water in those little rivers in the Cape. The deep tint came, someone had told her, from the roots of the trees through which the water washed, or was it rotting leaves? Darksome burn horseback brown. Hopkins had his moments. Though that grisly Catholic propaganda of The Wreck of the Deutschland was plain embarrassing. On her mental river thick cream froth spiralled. That family picnic near the Storm river. Henry was eight years old. He had been exploring the campsite (chucking stones) and had startled a Cape cobra. It reared up, hood spread, in front of him. Hilary's scream choked in her throat and she found herself, for the first time in her life, literally paralysed with fear. Arthur acted.

"Henry, old chap," he spoke with quiet authority, "listen to me. Don't make any sudden movements. Try not to startle him - he's as scared of you as you are of him."

Henry froze. So did the butteryellow cobra.

"Well done," continued Arthur calmly. "Now take a couple of slow steps backwards. Don't look round - there's nothing behind you."

Henry backed slowly away and the snake, after regarding him (perforce) unblinkingly for a moment, lowered its head and with a shrug of its many shoulders, vanished like slurped spaghetti into a hole in the grass.

Hugging her sobbing and stinking child, Hilary, for all her relief, couldn't help thinking that perhaps the snake had not after all been quite as scared as Henry - it hadn't, after all, crapped its pants. She took him off to wash in the cold, clear brown water. Henry had been more upset and humiliated by dirtying his pants than by his fear of the snake. He had been secretly terrified by a recurring nightmare about a snake rearing up and striking at him with dripping fangs - although it looked more like a giant white tapeworm (flat and segmental) than a cobra. A real snake was almost reassuring, especially one with a scruffy old skin and agedulled films over its eyes. Joyce talked of a brown snake emerging from his wife's arsehole.

What was this faecal obsession of Western civilisation, wondered Mrs. Morpeth, not for the first time? Was it the last rock in the shifting sands, the one thing that everyone felt strongly about? Rimbaud leaving a farewell turd in Verlaine's milkjug for instance, that chap in the Miller's tale kissing the woman's arse and then scrubbing out his mouth with sand, one of the Old Testament prophets eating dung when he was upset about something or other. There was some deep instinctual current running somewhere there but feelings about the stinking, squashy brown stuff were, to say the least, ambiguous. She remembered a class at school where the nun had been asking the little girls what they liked. One cherub had announced that her favourite thing was the smell of her own farts. And what a felicitous touch to name the hero of Ulysses "Bloom". Blooms throve on dung. One man's waste is another man's portion. "Waste not, Want..." the ornate drypoint Victorian motto on the wall of Arthur's London office had announced, its last "not" hidden by the corner of the telephone switchboard. Where would big business be without waste? Pollution. Smothered in their own shit. Life, Morrie had been despondently fond of saying, was a shit sandwich - the more bread you had, the less shit. But much reaction to shit was learned. Babies will happily play in it, for instance. Their cocker spaniel bitch had got into the cot once when Rhys was being changed and had started eating his droppings. On the other hand punk-coiffed Hoopoes fouled their own nests so that chicks could eat the maggots. Who pooed in my nest? It was a cultural thing, too. She had read a horrified account of life in a Red Indian long-house by one of the European invaders. There were no toilets. People just shat beneath their beds. The stench was indescribable and because of the swarms of flies, eye disease was endemic. And yet returning warriors presumably sniffed appreciatively and thought: "Ah. Home". Shitty metaphors were ubiquitous. Up shit creek without a paddle, when the shit hits the fan, to shit on one from a great height. Not to mention Dante's Divine Comedy or the Marquis de Sade eating his own shit. Her stomach rumbled. Never mind shit, she was hungry. One thing about cutting down on fags was that it sharpened the taste buds.Ugh. she could still taste the tinny acidity of her breakfast tomatoes.

Oh, to be home. To be able to have a slice of decent wholemeal toast with butter (a pox on hospital margarine!) under a delicately-poached free-range egg. She loved to watch the albumen materialising in the simmering water like ectoplasm being spun out of thin air. At last it was just set, solid white all through, leaving the sunny, runny yolk. A pot of Gunpowder tea would be brewing on the Aga, everything reaching perfection at the same moment. The little ceremonies were important. Minute particulars were indeed doorways to infinity. The Zen masters who put their pupils to sweeping up leaves for twenty years may have been on to something.

It was raining again. Mrs. Morpeth could see drops trickling down the window. They joined, blip, blippity blip until they were heavy enough to skitter down an erratic track to the sill.

The ward was, as always, much too hot. Mrs. Morpeth longed for a breath of fresh air but knew that the rain-bearing sou-wester would blow in the smoke from the hospital incinerator. Where was Henry with her water? Oh no. He'd got hold of Dr. Chatterjee and was being unnecessarily obnoxious. Landing a job had changed him from victim to bully in one swell foop. She seemed to be slipping into Spoonerisms more often lately. Dave Granger was in grave danger. Was Terry Venables very tenable? Had Shirley Bassey a burly chassis? Or Spooner's own: the Lord is a shoving leopard. Her favourite was probably Saki's: Life passed like a dutiful bream.

Henry, go and fetch some water. There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. The boys had loved that Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne record. She had once overheard the eleven-year-old Henry singing: There's a hole near your backside, dear Liza, dear Liza. So much for expensive schooling. Ah. The doctor had managed to extricate himself. Henry swaggered over.

"Sorry I was so long, Mum." Henry was aggrieved. "The water- cooler was empty and it took ages to find another one. Anyway, here you are."

Mrs. Morpeth took a long drink and felt the slug of water spread its coldness across the insides of her ribs. Water. She wasn't dead yet. There were seeds to sprout. A gnarled old tree could still unfurl the newest, tenderest leaves. It was the West of times, it was the burst of times. Perhaps Western civilisation was self-destructing, but did that mean that there would never again be beauty, music, philosophy? New, of course. Finnegan begin again. Who had called law crystallised prejudice?

"Time please, ladies and gentlemen."

Visiting was over.

"I have to go," mumbled Henry. "The doctor says you should be able to come home on Thursday. We'll make you up a bed downstairs. I've made sure they'll bring you back in an ambulance. We can at least have a couple of days together. Rhys has got you a radio alarm to carry around with you in case you need to call for help. I don't like leaving you alone, you know. Are you sure you'll be able to manage on your own? Maybe one of your friends could come and stay?"

"No. I'll be fine on my own. There are always the Patels next door. Don't worry, darling. Love to Jackie and the kids. See you on Thursday."

Henry smiled his relief. He had a nice smile, thought Mrs. Morpeth. Pity one so seldom saw it. He gave her an awkward hug and a kiss on the cheek, wincing as he bent.

"Till Thursday, then. Take care."

"You too."

Henry went, walking gingerly so as not to jolt his umbrageous back.

Avocado and lime. The smell of hospital disinfectant. Noises. Mrs. Morpeth had, by patient application, developed the dope-smoker's sensitivity to sounds. The thrum of the central-heating pump, the buzz of the fluorescent lights, the beep beep beep of the heart monitor. That cliche of a thousand films where the sound changed to beee... and doctors and nurses came running, turned out to be true. Byeee... Goodbyee, goodbyee, wipe the tear, baby dear from your eyee... Mrs. Morpeth had seen two go like that and nothing the doctor could do behind the curtains (presumably going through the motions with artificial respiration and heart defibrillators) had saved them.

There was always a way out. You could go where no-one could follow. An escape from pain and frustration, from the debris of smashed ideals. A part of her had died with Arthur in 1968 and world history since then had done nothing to revive it. The Soviet Empire had crumbled leaving Capitalism to vaunt its brash stupidity in the void. Science had turned out to be a two-edged sword. True, the world had never been richer, but was it worth the neurosis, the breaking up of tribe and family, the increase in asthma and diabetes and the decline in sperm-count? Computers threatened to smother creative thought in an avalanche of dubious information. Students who had questioned everything in 1968 now taught a generation who asked only if their training would prove cost-effective in the grasshopper jumps of their brittle careers. She was of the last generation to be schooled in the Classics. Creako-Rheuman. Ha. She would reread Finnegans Wake. Meanwhile the ravenous first and second worlds were destroying the third, starving the mother whose tits they had so greedily sucked. Or were they? Who to believe? Fukuyama foretold the happy end of history with everyone saved by democracy and consumerism. Some scientists warned of an incipient ice-age or planetary immolation through the greenhouse effect while others pooh-poohed them, said that things had never been better and carried on researching weapons of mass destruction to safeguard their safe, clean, pretty utopia. Anything but that. Mrs. Morpeth knew that risk, playing for high stakes, was what mattered. Most people had never been half as alive as during the war. A world of contented cows was too horrible to contemplate.

Well, she had done her best as muse, midwife, mother. She had strewn the thistledown of thought on the wind. Perhaps here and there her spiky, actinic flowers might spring up, mocking the uniform fields of corn - the wild not yet quite overcome by the tame. All Adam's naming of plants and animals had by no means given him complete dominion over them. There was still hope. Nature had remarkable recuperative powers.

The rain stopped. The sun threw a dazzling patch on the opposite wall. Mrs. Morpeth smiled and shut her eyes. She slept.
