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  ‘Can Fergus come?’ said Thomas again. ‘Please, Mum, I do implore you.’

  Flora, who was sitting to one side of him, and Nell, on the other, began to tickle him. ‘No, you silly sausage,’ Flora said. ‘He can’t. Fergus is going to Italy, so there!’ Fergus Carrington! That was all they needed.

  ‘Can we go to Italy?’ asked Thomas.

  This time everyone spoke with one voice. ‘No,’ they cried. ‘We’re going to France!’

  9

  ‘If she’d got herself a bloke,’ said Simon, ‘the problem wouldn’t arise.’

  ‘Oh, Mother of God,’ said Flora, taking off her make-up. ‘If.’

  ‘What’s all this Mother of God racket we’ve been hearing lately?’ said Simon. He was lying in bed looking at a script.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said Flora.

  ‘Then I wish you’d knock it off,’ said Simon. ‘It’s making me nervous.’

  ‘Why should it do that?’

  ‘Well, since there’s no such being as God, it’s a bit too spooky by half to be hearing about the Mother of. Be reasonable.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Flora. ‘Reasonable. Raisonnable. Well, who are we to know what’s reasonable? Let alone raisonnable.

  ’ ‘The very people,’ said Simon. ‘That’s who.’

  ‘Us sinners,’ said Flora. ‘We sinners.’

  ‘Yes, that’s one of many possible appellations.’

  ‘It’s the most raisonnable.

  ’ ‘Listen, Flora,’ said Simon. ‘I married you for your looks, not your brains.’

  ‘I’m one seamless whole,’ said Flora. ‘Take it or leave it.’ She got into bed.

  ‘It’s too late even to talk about leaving it,’ said Simon. He turned off the lamp and held her in his arms, still lying on his back, and kissed the top of her head. ‘I’m stuck with it,’ he said.

  ‘Brains and all.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m doomed.’ Flora said a few Hail Marys to herself, and fell asleep. Simon disengaged his arms, and turned over, and, after a while, fell asleep too.

  10

  Flora was thinking about the vast existential difference—it was, wasn’t it?—between being right, and having, as the French say, right, or right-ness: raison: reason. There, rightness, or even righteousness, was reasonableness; and wrongness was therefore the consequence—or was it the condition?—of a logical error, a mistake. In French, to be right, d’avoir raison, was to have worked out a sum correctly, whereas in English there was no necessary suggestion of the reasonable: to be right in English was more like a piece of luck. Or a gift of God. Or a doom.

  Flora was thinking about all this because she wanted to be right; the desire had arisen and was growing in her, she knew not why. The necessity was becoming almost urgent, whether to be right, or d’avoir raison, whichever it might more accurately be; and if it were a question after all of working out a sum correctly, then that would be existentially a rather different or even an entirely different affair from succumbing to a doom.

  In any event, in so far as she could do the sum at all, or in so far as she could embrace her doom, Flora concluded that it would only be right to ask Lydia to come to France with them.

  ‘Floating World, hello.’

  ‘Oh Lydia is that you? Flora here.’

  ‘Oh Flora, hello, how nice.’

  ‘I know I mustn’t keep you during working hours, you must be so busy—’

  ‘So must you—’

  ‘Yes, thank God, I suppose, it’s just, I was wondering, are you going away this summer, have you anything planned?’

  ‘Yes, I’m going down to Italy for ten days; I’m sharing that villa in Sardinia for a bit that the Carringtons have taken with Robert’s sister, but she can’t go down until after—anyway—so that’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘Ah. Yes, well—I’d been wondering whether you might like to come to France with us—Simon can’t get away after all, you see, so we’ve some space—’

  ‘Oh, so sorry, I would’ve loved to, but it’s all settled now. You were sweet to think of me.’

  ‘Couldn’t you come on?’

  ‘Now that would be flashy; how I wish; but I can’t really leave the Floating World for that long, you see—not at this time of the year. It’s really my busiest; it’s like Christmas for Hamleys—’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course, yes, obviously. Well—’

  ‘Thank you anyway. It would have been lovely.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing. Sardinia will be lovely too.’

  ‘I hope so. I’ve just been and bought a new cozzie.’

  ‘You are brave!’

  ‘Yes. I had a brandy first.’

  ‘Did you really?’

  ‘Yes, truly. And then I just marched into Horrids and got it.’

  ‘Horrids, gosh.’

  ‘They have such a huge selection.’

  ‘That’s a point.’

  ‘And I couldn’t face going from shop to shop to shop.’

  ‘You are clever.’

  ‘I could do with being thinner.’

  ‘The swimming will see to that.’

  ‘So I do hope. Darling, I must go now, I have to telephone the printer.’

  ‘Yes, right, I should be getting on with it myself, I’m doing the VA T returns. Have a lovely time in Sardinia if we don’t speak again beforehand—’

  ‘And you in—where, exactly?’

  ‘The Périgord.’

  ‘Oh how lovely.’

  ‘We’ll be in touch afterwards anyway, won’t we?’

  ‘Yes of course.’

  They said their goodbyes and Flora hung up. Well, so—she felt an odd sense of anti-climax. Honour on the one hand and selfish inclination on the other had both been satisfied: as so rarely can they be. Why then this odd sense of dissatisfaction?

  She shrugged it off and went on with the VA T returns, but she could not quite divest herself of the feeling that God had been watching the whole affair from its inception, and was now laughing quietly to Himself: which, if there were no such person, was ridiculous, and, if there were such a person, was—what, exactly? She put down her pen and sat, speculating, for a moment. What, exactly, might one fairly expect the consequences of the Virgin’s mediations to be—supposing, that is, that God existed? Had she been given a sign? She saw that this would not do: any further down that road, she thought, and I’ll be back in the Middle Ages before I know it.

  But then, she had in fairness to ask, is that, considering where we all now are, such a very dreadful destination? Flora felt suddenly a sense of the unmitigated grossness of the superstitions of the modern age. You could be crushed to death, if you weren’t lucky. If you got the sum wrong. Hail Mary, she said, full of grace; etcetera. You could just conceivably get to a point, she thought, where it didn’t matter whether or not God existed: where the possibility that He did, and might even listen to you, was absolutely all there was between you and hell. Because we do now know, at any rate, that hell exists.

  11

  It was the night before Flora and the children were to leave for France.

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘You will eat properly, won’t you, I mean proper food, not canteen rubbish—’

  ‘It isn’t rubbish at all, it’s jolly good nosh.’

  ‘It isn’t fresh. There’s nothing raw.’

  ‘There’s salads.’

  ‘Well, do make sure you eat them then, not just that overcooked junk.’

  ‘It’s good, that canteen stuff.’

  ‘Sure, sure. And please don’t forget Mrs Brick’s wages, will you—I’ve left you a reminder on the bathroom mirror.’

  ‘Right, right.’

  ‘I think that’s all.’

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Telephone me as soon as you get to Tours.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘And then when you get to the gîte. ’
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  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘You’re taking all this far too calmly for my liking. After all, we’ve never done this before, you going off alone with the car and the kids.’

  ‘Claire does it every year.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, she and Alex don’t—you know—’

  ‘Whereas we do?’

  ‘Don’t we?’

  ‘Of course. Of course. ’

  ‘Come here.’

  Simon took Flora in his arms, sitting on the sofa, the television set still on but with the sound turned off. Flora leaned against him, her head on his shoulder, one arm loosely around his neck. After a while, ‘Isn’t life—but I can’t find the word,’ she said.

  ‘I think I know what you mean.’

  Flora tilted her head and looked up at him. ‘What do I mean?’ she asked.

  Simon pondered for a moment. ‘Transitory,’ he said. ‘You mean transitory. ’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  Flora considered the question. ‘Ye-e-es,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s what I mean.’ But there was something other, something more, or something, even, less, that she meant—in that strange and tiny space in the mind where it is just possible to mean without having the word which conveys that meaning. And one could not have said whether it were fatigue or fear which prevented her from searching for, and finding, the right word. The reasonable word. The mot juste, as English-speakers say.

  12

  Simon might not believe in the existence of God—indeed, he categorically did not—but he knew he was on the way to the great cutting-room in the sky nevertheless. He might not believe that a person called God was going to put him through the viewing machine and decide whether or not to save him or let him fall to the floor, but he had some sense nevertheless of there being some ineradicable rule by which this decision might—however purely theoretically—be made. He was on his way to a time, a place, where—when—this awful accounting would have occurred if there had been a person called God; that there was no such person did not alter the inexorability of the journey or of its theoretical destination. Simon had not idly given Flora the word she apparently sought: life was above all else transitory—oh, how tragically, yet fortunately, transitory! As the Wanderer (or was it the Seafarer? who could remember which was which!) had insisted: Just as that sorrow passed, so shall this.

  In any event, you could hardly live in Hammersmith without being all but overwhelmed with the realisation of life’s essential transience; the place was a monument to transience; and if that was a paradox, so much the better. Simon, in the family’s absence, had taken to walking in the long summer evenings: one walked for a few miles, and then one came to a pub; one had a few pints and walked home again, and went to bed. One walked down impossible blighted streets, past lovely, blighted houses, the motorway roaring overhead, the river coming into view, every transient item supporting a stream of transient life: their only absolute reality was their passing.

  Simon was looking out, tentatively, for locations for his script: he meant—tentatively—to tell the story which would reveal this tragic yet fortunate transience. It was the only story there now was; it was the only story that remained. He began to believe that he would stumble across the detail of the story as long as he just kept on walking. There would be—say—a house, in a row of others like it, in which the door would open: a woman would come out, and stand there for a moment at the top of the steps, uncertain—

  directed by

  SIMON BEAUFORT

  and he might have found the house, the row of houses, seen the door open and the woman who came out and stood at the top of the steps—stunned by the sudden magnitude of the motorway traffic’s roar—for a moment, uncertain, so soon as the end, say, of the first week of his solitude; might have begun to see the details of that story coming, slowly, then faster, into focus, might even have sat down and begun actually to write something (it was a long time since he’d actually written something: he could remember, just, what it felt like to write). He might have done all this were it not that, tragically, or perhaps fortunately—he couldn’t, one couldn’t, say which—the dinner invitations started to come in.

  ‘Oh Simon you poor old thing. A whole month! Come round for a meal one night—let’s see, what about Thursday?’

  ‘Oh Simon I hear you’re a grass widower—poor Simon! Why don’t you pop round here for a square meal one night—are you doing anything on Tuesday?’

  For as everyone knows, men can, but don’t, look after themselves when their wives are away, and it is one’s duty—and, it must be admitted, one’s pleasure—to give them a dinner or two. Poor Simon! He even found himself sharing the honours one evening with poor Alex—poor Alex Maclise, Claire being away—at the compassionate dinner table of the Ainsworths. ‘I thought I might as well kill two birds,’ said Lizzie to Alf. ‘Poor old things.’

  And it was at one such dinner table—this one, as it happened, in Camden Town—that Simon met a woman called Gillian Selkirk. The name alone ought to have been enough to warn him off: as Louisa Carrington was, much later, to observe to Robert of that ilk, ‘It writhes. And so I dare say does she.’

  13

  Flora opened the shutters and looked down beyond the terrace, where Thomas was playing with some Lego, to the pool. Nell was sitting on the edge, dangling her feet in the water; Janey in a bikini was lying in the sun on a chaise longue. I should shout down and warn her not to stay in the sun too long, thought Flora.

  She wondered vaguely where the Hunters could be, and then remembered that they had all—William and Denzil having found at the last minute urgent reasons of their own for doing so—gone into the village.

  Flora had already had words with Janey on the subject of William Hunter, who was a year older than Janey and ought therefore to have been treated with the respect due to equals; but Janey would have none of it. ‘He’s a dork,’ she told Flora, when upbraided for acting too much the little madam.

  ‘He’s nothing of the kind!’ exclaimed Flora. ‘He’s a very nice, and I may say very intelligent young man. And if his manners weren’t so good he wouldn’t put up with your airs for five seconds flat.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Janey. ‘He’s a dork. I’m not saying he can help it. All the boys at that school are.’

  ‘What could you possibly know about all the boys at that school?’ said Flora. ‘You, at your age?’

  ‘Everyone knows about that school,’ said Janey. ‘It’s absolutely famous for dorks; it always has been.’

  ‘That school, miss,’ said Flora, ‘is one of the very best and most ancient not only in this country but in the world.’

  ‘There you are then,’ said Janey. ‘Dork City.’

  ‘If none of them will ever want to have anything at all to do with you, ever,’ said Flora, ‘it will serve you right.’

  ‘Suits me,’ said Janey.

  ‘I’ll remember you said that,’ said Flora. ‘Now go away, and be nice to William. Just to prove how superior you truly are. We all know now how superior you can make yourself look; the point has been made more than adequately. Let’s see how genuinely superior you are.’ Her request was granted, but she came soon enough to wish that it had not been; that she had never made it; that Janey might not be so truly, one way or another, superior.

  ‘Of course,’ Janey said, accommodatingly, to her mother, ‘they’re probably all utterly dorky at that age. From what I’ve seen so far.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Flora. ‘If you insist on seeing them in that light. To me they just seem nice, if slightly awkward, well-meaning young men.’

  Janey shrieked. ‘Men!’ she cried. ‘I wouldn’t call them men!’

  Flora had to laugh. ‘Well, whatever,’ she said. ‘I mean, you can’t call them boys, it’s too infantile.’

  ‘No, they’re not boys, and they’re not men, they’re dorks,’ said Janey.

 
Flora was just about to shout out and warn Janey out of the sun when she saw two people whom Janey would unhesitatingly have termed dorks bicycling up the road. Dorks as they might be, they were now turning in at the driveway, and cycling towards the house. Flora stood watching, fascinated. Dorks they might in Janey’s estimation be, dorks they might truly be: but brave new world, that had such dorks in’t!

  They were, as far as she could see from here, identical twins, and they were surpassingly beautiful: tall—albeit still evidently adolescent—slender, fair-haired and graceful. Having arrived at the piscine and sighted Janey on her chaise longue, they stopped cycling and stood lankily astride their machines. They looked at each other and shrugged interrogatively and one of them then spoke. ‘Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît!

  ’ Janey, aware for the first time of the intrusion, opened her eyes and sat up, staring, in a passable representation of the startled faun. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?’ she said.

  ‘Ah!’ exclaimed her interlocutor; ‘you’re English!’

  His companion smiled pleasantly. ‘Do forgive us,’ said he, ‘for disturbing you, but we’re looking for one William Hunter, whom we believe to be staying somewhere hereabouts. We thought this might be the house, but it seems we’re mistaken. We’ll leave you in peace. So sorry for the intrusion. As you were.’

  They were on the point of pedalling away again when the astonished Janey found her voice. ‘No, wait,’ she said. ‘This is the right house. William’s just gone to the village. He’ll probably be back soon. You could wait, if you like.’

  14

  Flora continued to stand just inside the window, where she could not easily be seen from below, and went on watching, enthralled.

  ‘Shall we do that?’ said one of the youths to the other.

  ‘Or shall we go into the village and try to find him there?’ that other replied. They turned their identical blue-eyed gazes full upon the still-overwhelmed Janey, who remained seated on the chaise longue, her legs now folded up beneath her, staring at them in dumb entrancement. They were indeed—it could now quite clearly be seen—identical twins; their wonderful beauty made this phenomenon even more than usually startling.