in, surrounded by a lawn and a garden wall, like a rockery. The patchy lawn, the spindles of trees on the streets, rooted in squares of earth like tea-bags: those told the age of the development more clearly.
You could nest in the roots of the old holly tree where you were invisible from the house. For Jane’s less secret withdrawals, she went to read somewhere she could be discovered. You could sometimes hear a human noise beyond the garden and, in a series of corrections, understand that it was not, after all, one of the neighbours on either side at their pleasure, or a walker hugging the shore of the development before heading off into the wild heather of the country but the child’s-dismay-call made by a sheep, sheltering from the wind beyond the dry-stone wall.
But there was another better gift from the moor, which no one, Jane believed, knew about: three thick gorse bushes, brilliant banana-yellow blossom and always quick to slash at your arms. From the open lawn, it looked as if they went right up to the wall, but if you got down on your belly and wriggled through, a little space of secret untended grass opened up. You could sit there and watch, unnoticed. Her father was always talking about clearing the gorse bushes but he wouldn’t get round to it. Perhaps he was fond of them too. Here she had pressed down a space, clearing it of holly leaves and gorse twigs.
Another hiding-place had been the garden of the house opposite, empty for four months now. All summer it had been the province of her brother after nightfall; there he prowled and roamed, his girls coming to him eagerly. In the daytime, it had been hers. After four months of neglect, it had developed in unexpected, luxuriant ways. At first it was like a room enclosed, left tidy by the owners to await their return, and Jane ventured into it with a sense of intrusion. But quickly it began to grow and dissolve. An inoffensive small plant, a few shoots above the ground, had exploded, leaping through the trellised fence, a few more inches and a few more shoots every day. One day, all at once, a single slap of colour was there: a poppy had burst open, and then, for weeks, there was a relay of flowers, each lasting a day or two. Of course, her mother worked in a shop full of flowers, so they were not strange to Jane; but to watch them work their own stubborn magic, budding and bursting, fading and moulting on the stem, rather than dying, yellow and sour, in someone’s vase was new to her.
For weeks, the garden expanded along its permitted limits, and only the plants that Mr Watson, a gardener as draconian as Jane’s father, had admitted to his garden developed, stretching in their new freedom. But then the weeds started: the perfect lawn was scattered with constellations of daisies and, quite soon, dandelions. There were butterflies now and when, once, it rained overnight in torrents, the garden was filled with snails, come out to drink and feed. Best of all was a marvellous new plant, embracing and winding itself round anything, a fence, a post, running itself through other plants, with the most beautiful flowers like trumpets, like lilies, like the flowers of heaven. Jane had never had a favourite flower before, and whenever the craze for quizzes had arisen among the girls, she’d always replied, ‘Roses,’ when asked, a choice she knew was limp and conventional, as well as probably untrue. But now she really did have a favourite flower.
It was a shock to discover, when she asked her father, discreetly, that it was a garden pest called bindweed. Then he explained the complex and violent steps needed to eradicate it. Jane listened, but it seemed a little sad to her to remove a plant so beautiful, to prefer, as her father did, a border of squat green-tongued plants that would never flower or get anywhere much in life. Jane promised herself, when she grew up, a garden with nothing but bindweed, a dense bower of strangling vines and trumpeting innocent flowers.
Her garden visits were over now. A couple of days ago one of those neighbours had rapped at the window as she had been going in – slipping in, she had thought, unobserved as a mouse in the middle of the day. It had been embarrassing enough to see the neighbour at her mother’s party; that hiding-place was now closed to her, and the garden went its way in peace.
She smoothed the paper: she started to write again. Something caught her eye. From here, she could not be seen from the house, if she kept low, but she could see anyone standing near the windows. There was a movement in Daniel’s bedroom. Daniel was supposed to have gone swimming in the open-air pool at Hathersage; he couldn’t have got there and back so quickly. The figure moved again, and it wasn’t Daniel. The day was bright, and in the dimness of the house, Jane could see only the outline of a figure, its shape and gestures. It moved again: a hand travelled towards the face, then paused in mid-air, shifted, went downwards, as if it was going through something on Daniel’s ‘desk’.
It was Jane’s father. She hadn’t realized how absolutely she knew his shape and movements, the way he had of letting his hands start to do one vague thing before abandoning it nervously for something else. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ she remembered Daniel saying to her once, watching her with an amused horrid gleam, ‘I bet they don’t do it any more.’ ‘Do what?’ Jane had said. ‘What do you think?’ Daniel said. ‘And I bet Dad’s relieved more than anything.’
Lying there, undiscoverable, in the middle of the day, Jane might have preferred a burglar. She allowed herself a minute of speculative romance, but it was no good, it was her father; surprisingly here in the middle of the day, surprisingly in Daniel’s bedroom, but that was all.
Twenty minutes later, she heard the front door shut. She hadn’t heard it open, she reflected, though it usually made a solid clunk. He’d opened it quietly, she guessed, as if he had sneaked in; he’d thought there was no one in the house so he’d shut it as he normally did. It wasn’t much of an adventure, really. She got up, picked up her notebook and went into the house for a drink, brushing down her print dress as she went. She should have gone with Daniel to Hathersage for a swim. She’d said she probably would, that morning over breakfast, just before her dad went off to work.
‘We said we’d stop at the next service station,’ Alice said, noticing a sign.
‘Yeah?’ Bernie said, not concentrating on what she was saying. ‘Sorry—’
‘I said, we told the removers we’d be stopping at Leicester Forest East,’ Alice said. ‘The service station. It’s the next one – I think it said seven miles.’
Bernie was gritting his teeth: he was stuck between lorries, thundering along at a frustrating ten miles an hour below the speed limit, boxed in by faster lines of traffic solidly flowing to the right. He felt like a box on a conveyor belt. ‘Not a bad idea,’ he said. ‘They won’t worry if we don’t, though.’
‘It might be as well,’ Alice said. ‘Sandra.’
‘What about Sandra?’ Francis said, his chin resting on the back of his mother’s seat, his face almost in her hair.
‘Oh, nothing,’ Alice said.
‘Your mum means,’ Bernie said, ‘that she might be fed up of riding in the lorry by now. The excitement might have worn off.’
‘I didn’t mean that exactly,’ Alice said.
‘Or on the other hand they might—’ Bernie broke off. ‘We ought to get a radio in the car,’ he said, after a while. ‘Aren’t you hungry, Frank? I’m hungry. That wasn’t much of a lunch.’
‘It couldn’t be helped,’ Alice said. ‘Everything was packed away.’
‘I know, love,’ Bernie said.
New experiences filled Francis with automatic dread. He had disappeared when the removers had arrived, feeling that demands would be placed on him, but dreading most the presence of rough men in their emptying house. He had never eaten in a motorway service station before; whenever they had travelled, picnics had been packed to be eaten in fields or off the dashboard, according
