everyone these days. They ought to be able to find China, with all the information they’ve got. Everything’s on computer files nowadays—who’s got a conviction for looking at dirty pictures of children, who’s changed their name, who’s not paid for their television licence, who buys what from the supermarket. What do you think loyalty cards are for? To keep an eye on you, and the police can use that information. If they’ve committed a crime, the police have got their DNA. If they’ve been taken in on suspicion, the police will have their DNA. If I had my way, everyone in the country would have their DNA on file. Then we’d know straight away who had committed a crime if they’d left just one hair at the scene. You can really leave the police in charge these days, Heidi.’
‘Police,’ Heidi said. ‘What have they done for us?’
‘I’m as impatient as you are,’ Calvin said. ‘But sometimes you’ve got to leave it to the professionals. And here we are.’
The car slowed as it turned into Heidi’s street. A bundle of photographers, television crews, idle observers and small boys, curious on bicycles, were waiting as if for visiting royalty. They all turned expectantly, made way for the car. Mr Calvin, with his lovely blond attaché case, and the policewoman got out. They shielded Heidi and Micky all the way to the front door. Through the front window, a BBC camera crew could be seen setting up. A short brilliant burst of floodlight illuminated the street from within. The two policewomen—the one at the door, the other from the car—nodded at each other. The door shut on the observers. Heidi went through to face her close-up.
‘That’s me done for the day,’ the policewoman said, sitting back in the front seat of the car. ‘Are we going back to the station now, then? I was hoping to get to Marks and Sparks before they close.’
‘There’s posh.’
‘I thought I could stretch to their fish bake, once in a while.’
‘I’ll take you back,’ the driver said placidly. ‘I’ve got better things to do than hang around here. “I like your bag,” ’ he quoted.
‘You never know what people are going to say,’ the policewoman said reproachfully. ‘In these situations.’
‘You know what people aren’t going to say,’ the driver said. ‘Or shouldn’t. Lovely bag. What a thing to say. I think she thought he might give it to her if she said she liked it.’
‘Tragic Heidi,’ the policewoman said. ‘It was a nice bag, though.’
‘Glad I’ve got something else to do now,’ the driver said. ‘I don’t think I could have stood much more of those two. And what’s his name—why are we driving him about?’
‘John Calvin,’ the policewoman said. ‘You don’t have to like any of them.’
‘Just as well,’ the driver said, slowing down for the Ruskin roundabout. ‘If I were Micky—’
‘I know what you’re going to say.’
‘If I were Micky,’ the driver continued regardless, ‘I wouldn’t go on about how the police ought to open up the sex-offenders register quite so much.’
‘Do you think she knows?’
‘About Micky? I wouldn’t have thought so. Micky doesn’t seem very clear about it himself.’
‘What was it again?’
‘Indecent exposure. Two twelve-year-old girls. Not very nice at all. Not for the first time, either. Four years ago.’
‘Well, we don’t have to like them,’ the policewoman said.
‘Just as well,’ the driver said, turning into the station car park.
Kenyon came in and excused himself quickly, saying that he would come and say hello properly once he was more presentable; Billa and Kitty helped out by saying how exhausting and overcrowded that London train always was. ‘The most extraordinary thing…’ Kenyon began, then seemed to change his mind, and went upstairs rapidly. He might come down or he might not, they knew. On the rare occasions when a book club meeting took place and Kenyon was there, he generally said hello, then went upstairs for the rest of the evening, exactly like that. In his wake followed Caroline, who had walked down from the station, she said, with Kenyon, only popping in at her house to drop off some shopping from Barnstaple; she’d had quite a day of it, and what about all those awful people in the Fore street?
The next to arrive at Miranda’s was Sukie, Miranda’s American colleague. The university operated an exchange programme every year. A small liberal-arts college in Kansas had once funded a literature professor to examine the letters of Bryher, now in the basement of the Old Library at Barnstaple University. No one had ever looked at the leavings of the lesbian poet before. The Kansas professor proposed to do so, not because of any great interest in Bryher but because it seemed to be an untouched archive a hell of a long way from Kansas, with someone aching to fund it.
In practice, the archive proved too inextensive to justify a programme on the scale envisaged by the Kansas institute, and the professor grew bored. The small Barnstaple faculty took to inviting him out to lunch and dinner and, after a dropped suggestion or two, including him on the teaching programme. (This was in 1973, when things could be done in this informal way.) After a few months, he and the department’s Chaucer expert—but it could have been almost anyone—started to have an affair. One thing led to another, and the visiting professor went back to Kansas with the sad information that the Bryher archives were more substantial and potentially much more important than anyone knew. He conveyed an image of grey stacks, receding into the middle distance of a dusty basement interior, lit by flickering fluorescents. It was a great stroke of luck for a small and unnoticed college like Quincunx, Kansas. They congratulated themselves on forging links with so ancient and distinguished a foundation as Barnstaple University. The Quincunctians, who on the whole were well-read and inquisitive people, piqued themselves on the connection. For them, having a link with a place not far from the place that the man came from who interrupted Coleridge while he was composing Kubla Khan was as good a connection as any. Bryher, whoever she was, was an added bonus.
Small and unnoticed Quincunx might be, but it was very well funded. In two years, a proper exchange programme was up and running. The English found it a useful way to pack off the younger and more Yank-struck members of the faculty for a year. The Americans liked to come, to soak up, they said, the theatre and the Sights. They didn’t mean the Hanmouth Players or the abject university theatre, struggling through Hay Fever or Oedipus Tyrannus. Nor did they mean, evidently, the statue of the Crapping Juvenile in Hanmouth or the Romanesque parish church with twelve neo-classical marble placards of alto-rilievo nymphs weeping among bulrushes and the like, all memorials to Regency slave-owners. They meant the Shaftesbury Avenue and a girl out of Friends starring in John Gabriel Borkman and the usual doomy Holocaust-installation stuff out of Tate Modern, which they could have found in Kansas anyway.
There had never been an American exchange professor who hadn’t gone through his entire year behaving as if Devon were a suburb of London. You had to travel three solid hours from Quincunx College to the next theatrical offering or one of those scraps of Corot that so pepper the North American continent, and three hours by plane to glimpse a soprano singing a single note in the German language on an
