'Look at you,' she said, and her voice was as thick as honey, 'look at you. You're like all bloody women. You thought, didn't you, that when two women fall in love, one at least has to have the same sex experience as a man. And that there has to be a woman one, one that behaves as a woman does, with a man. Are you beginning to see? Are you beginning to see that it's so great for us because we know what the other wants because we want it ourselves?' She took her face away and looked up. Alice was in a kind of trance. Clodagh stood up and then bent to take Alice's hands.

'Alice,' she said, 'Alice. Come with me.'

CHAPTER NINE

In June, Anthony Jordan completed the sale of his luxurious, impersonal flat on Tregunter Path, Hong Kong, cleared his office desk, told the girl who had optimistically hoped for four years that he might marry her that he never would, and took a taxi out to Kai Tak airport with ten years' worth of Far Eastern living packed economically into only three suitcases. He told friends that he was exhausted by the climate and the claustrophobia of Hong Kong and that he wanted to try his hand at something other than corporate finance. He did not say that he would otherwise become lumbered with a largely unwanted wife but everyone knew that that was the case, and took sides in the affair, sides that were very largely weighted against Anthony. Enough people had endured his combination of exploitation and exhibitionism to feel nothing but gratitude towards Cathay Pacific for carrying him firmly homewards. When he had gone, Diana McPherson, who had loved him very much despite her better self, found herself asked out a good deal so that people could tell her that it was better to be an old maid for ever than to be married for five minutes to someone like Anthony Jordan.

His father met him at Heathrow. They had met on Richard's travels about once a year, and Anthony had come on infrequent leave, infrequent because he preferred to go to California than to come home. Anthony thought his father was looking well and fit and distinguished and Richard thought Anthony, despite his expensive clothes, was looking slightly dissolute. They took a taxi into Central London to Richard's tiny flat in Bryanston Street, and then went to the Savoy Grill for dinner. Anthony talked a great deal about why he had left Hong Kong and even more about the extraordinary number of alternatives he now had for a job in the City. He said he thought he would like to work for one of the big accepting houses. Richard listened, noticed that Anthony drank too much and ate not enough and then said, gently, that the City was of course a changed place. Anthony said rudely that his father didn't know a thing about the City and Richard sighed because, even if the City had changed, Anthony plainly hadn't.

Only when they were on the way back to Bryanston Street did Anthony ask about his family.

'You must go and see for yourself.'

'Old Martin,' Anthony said, staring out of the taxi window at the seedy muddle of Piccadilly Circus, 'old Martin seems to have done all right.'

'Certainly.'

'More up your and Mother's street, really, what Martin has done-'

'I can only speak for myself and I wouldn't agree with you. As long as you both do what suits you best in life, insofar as that is ever possible, then that's what I want for you, and I should think what your mother wants, too.'

'Very diplomatic.'

Richard said nothing.

'Nice house,' Anthony said and his voice was faintly sneering. 'Lovely wife. Three children. Solid job. Getting on nicely. Pillar of the community. Good old Martin.'

'Yes,' Richard said, 'all true.'

'And what you wish I'd done-'

'Not at all,' Richard said in the level, patient voice he used a great deal of the time now, to Cecily, 'unless you wish it yourself.'

Anthony gave a little yelp.

'Bloody hell-'

The taxi crossed Oxford Circus and turned left.

'Go and see them,' Richard said again. 'You will really like the children.'

Anthony turned in his seat.

'How would you know? Mother said you hardly ever see them.'

How many middle-class fathers, Richard wondered in a burst of fury, longed passionately sometimes to hit their sons, and envied working-class ones who sensibly just did, and thus avoided sleepless nights of emotional torment and pointless days of fruitless negotiations. He took a deep breath.

'I am lucky,' he said, 'in that I have in my life a few people who recognize that I am a human being. I am unlucky in that my family are on the whole not in that number.'

Anthony burst into an exaggerated, cackling laugh.

'Oh it's good to be back! Oh it is! Some things don't change and paternal pomposity is one-'

The taxi stopped. Richard turned to look at Anthony.

'Are you thirty-six?'

'Yes-'

'Thirty-six.' Richard opened the taxi door and climbed out. Anthony heard him sigh and then say to the cab driver, 'Give me forty pence change, would you?'

On the pavement together, when the cab had driven off, Anthony said, 'Why did you ask?'

'I am not,' Richard said, 'going to give you the satisfaction of an honest answer. Nor of a row your first night home. Come on. Bed.'

In the lift, Anthony said, 'I could do with a nightcap-'

'Help yourself.'

'Join me?'

'No thank you. I have to be up at six.'

Grinning, Anthony began to hum, his eyes on his father, and Richard tried to smile back as if they were sharing a joke rather than a mutual animosity.

After a few days in London, Anthony went down to Dummeridge. It was a rare and perfect June afternoon, with a clear and brilliant light, and Anthony congratulated himself on leaving the breathless mists of Hong Kong for weather which behaved as weather was meant to. He had a lot of presents for Cecily, a length of silk, a magnum of pink champagne, an imitation Gucci handbag and a miniature nineteenth century Korean medicine chest. They had talked every day on the telephone since he had come home, long frivolous conversations that had done much to soothe the soreness in Anthony's heart, a soreness exacerbated by three days in his father's aloof company. Why Richard couldn't unbend was beyond Anthony. He was only an engineer after all, however successful. What gave him the right to judge all the time, as he undoubtedly did, and then make it very plain indeed if and when he found things wanting. The last three evenings in London, they had, by mutual agreement, gone their separate ways, and Anthony had no idea where his father had been. The flat was as tidy as a ship's cabin. Anthony had a good look round it, a good look, in all the cupboards and drawers, and was surprised to find a photograph of Natasha and James and Charlie on Richard's chest of drawers, and one of himself - quite a recent one, taken on a trip to Manila - and a paperback of Sylvia Plath's poetry beside his bed. Otherwise it was a man's functional flat: clothes, coffee, whisky and aspirin. Anthony could see why his mother never came near it. She called it Father's other filing cabinet. She was right. The lane to Dummeridge was lined with May blossom, thickly pink and white. The grass, Anthony noticed, was not only bright green, but shiny, with the deep gloss of health. He drove the last half-mile slowly, looking at the wooded hills on either side, sniffing for a whiff of the sea and feeling an excited curiosity to discover how he would seem to things at home after all these years and, to a lesser extent, how they would seem to him. The hall door was open as he pulled up, and almost at once Dorothy came hurrying out in a flurry of fond pleasure at seeing him again, and told him that Cecily was out in the garden with Mrs Dunne and the children. He gave Dorothy a kiss and held her away from him so that he could look at her.

Totally unchanged.'

She gave a little squeal.

'Rubbish,' she said. 'Nonsense. Cheeky as ever. Go on through, quick. Your mother's panting for a sight of you-'

He went through the hall and caught the familiar scent of polish and flowers and age. The garden door was open and through it he could see a strip of bright green lawn on which a small boy was standing, bent double, and watching Anthony through his legs. Anthony did not much like children. They were, he found, too honest on the whole.

'He's here!' the little boy shrieked, his voice strangled by being upside down. 'He's coming! He's coming!'

He stepped out into the sunlight. Cecily came almost running across the grass and flung herself into his arms. He thought she might be crying. She held him in a tremendous embrace, her face pressed fiercely to his.

'Darling. Darling Ant. Oh, how lovely. You can't think, you simply can't-'

A small, plump young woman with red curls held back by a band was watching them from a group of chairs under the willow tree. The little boy who had called out ran over to her and said with piercing distinctness, 'But you said he was a boy. You said he was Mrs Jordan's boy. And look, he's only a man.'

'Just what I feel,' Juliet Dunne said, laughing and getting up, 'every time Daddy comes home.' She came over to Anthony and Cecily, holding out her hand. 'I'm Juliet. And you are awful Anthony who wouldn't come home and now you have. I've been sort of adopted here, for the summer. Suchluck!'

Cecily put out one arm to encircle Juliet so that they were all three linked.

'Anthony, you must take no notice of her. She has a wicked tongue but I put up with her because she makes me laugh.' There was a tiny pause. 'She is a great friend of Alice's.'

'Alice?'

Juliet sighed. She was extremely pretty, like a kitten, with little features grouped close together in a creamy freckled face.

'So boring. Allie's got a new friend and won't play with any of her old ones just now.'

Cecily drew them away across the lawn to the willow.

'I'm not awful really,' Anthony said, 'I'm just lonely and misunderstood.'

'I expect,' Juliet said, looking straight at Cecily, 'you had a simply horrible childhood.'

Cecily nodded, laughing.

'Horrible.'

'It was,' Anthony insisted. 'Martin was the goodie who could do no wrong. I was the baddie.'

The small boy was trotting beside him. He looked up at disappointing Anthony.

'Mummy likes the baddies on television best.'

'Mummy sounds very promising.'

They sat down in the cane chairs in the speckled, drifting shade.

'Let me look at you,' Cecily said to Anthony.

'I shouldn't. Father didn't like what he saw.'

Juliet said, 'You have bags under your eyes.'

Anthony turned to his mother.

'Is she always like this?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'I feel I've stumbled into a dormitory party-'

'Not quite,' Juliet said. 'It's more like a coven. We're plotting.'

'What?'

'How to get Alice back.'

Cecily said warningly, 'Juliet-'

'Oops. Did I say something I shouldn't have?'

'You might be making too much of too little.'

Anthony scented intrigue.

'What's going on? What is Alice up to?'

'She has thrown herself into village life,' Cecily said. 'That's all. So she hasn't much time for any of us, and we miss her.'

'She used to ring all the time,' Juliet said. 'She was the one person I could have a really good complain about Henry to. Your mother's no good at all because she thinks Henry is a dear. I suppose he is really, in rather the same category as a dear old armchair. Or pair of bedsocks.' She began to squeal with laughter. 'You know what's really the matter. Allie thinks I'm so funny and I've got no audience just now. Cecily thinks I'm quite funny but not nearly as much as she ought to. Oh dear. I suppose I ought to be going.' She looked about her. 'Do you think my luck has turned and I've actually lost two children out of three for good and all?'

Her son, who was clearly used to this kind of thing, said his brothers were in the stableyard.

'Do go and get them, there's a little treasure. Isn't it sad,' turning to Cecily, 'how exactly like his father he looks?'

'She worships Henry,' Cecily said to Anthony.

'I want to know more about Alice.'

'Why do you?'

'I used to fancy Alice-'

Cecily gave a little sigh.

'I know. I used to worry that you were going to make trouble. To spite Martin.'

'I did try-'

'What happened?'